The Path to Success in Customer Success Management

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Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM, deliver more value for your customers, and turn it into revenue for your company every week.

Want to show your true potential to your leadership? Check out these resources 👇️ 

• The CSM Operating System for High-Performers

• The Customer Retention Blueprint

• Raising the Bar - Enterprise CSM Guide 

• Plugging the Hole - Churn Guide 

• Peeling the Onion - Customer Problem Discovery Guide 

You have identified your customers’ goals or helped them define them. Check. You have identified the problems they have to deal with. Check.

Now you have to determine the gap between your customers’ status quo and their desired outcomes. You need to understand which skills and knowledge they need to build to solve their problems and accomplish their goals.

Therefore, you need to learn what abilities and capabilities your customers already possess. In today’s post, I’ll show you how.

3. Customer Competence Assessment

Product Experience

Let’s get this straight. In today’s technology landscape, there are no unique products anymore. Everybody is copying from everybody. And AI has sped up the process from weeks and months to hours and days.

Thus, there’s a good chance that customers have prior experience with a product like yours. They don’t need extensive product tours anymore. This information should already be covered in the sales hand-off

However, there’s still a chance that your product is your customers’ first experience, as spreadsheets are alive and well. Which means you need the exact opposite as well, whether it’s automated or needs to be done manually.

If it’s automated, you should give experienced customers the option to skip steps or opt out of the product walkthrough.

If you are doing it in person, recommend it to the customers with no prior experience and verify whether those with experience want to opt in.

Subject Expertise

Your customers can become true masters of your product without getting any value at all. Your product does not have magic abilities. It can’t turn poor inputs into valuable outcomes.

This is why measuring only product adoption and usage can be grossly deceiving. Your customers’ success is ultimately defined by their skills and knowledge.

That’s why educating customers only in how to use your product is falling short. Of course, you could say that they need to bring the mandatory skills and knowledge, but what if they are not?

They can’t blame you for it, but if they fail, they will stop paying for your product. Modern CSM needs to enlarge customer enablement to help customers build expertise on the job they need your product for.

Therefore, you need to understand the scope, the depth, and the type of inputs your customers need. It makes a whole lot of difference whether your customers are

They all start from different places and need different education and training programs. Throwing your 101 webinars at the agency employees will leave a bad taste. It either says you don’t know me or you don’t care.

If you are engaging in consulting calls with the startup founder, you will leave them with more questions than answers. They lack the basic skills and knowledge to understand what you are suggesting, why, and how to implement it.

Assessing your customers’ abilities and capabilities is not an exact science. But that does not matter. What matters is that you have a good understanding of where your customers are starting from and the gaps they have to close.

You will learn more during the customer journey that helps you to refine your customer success plans and their items. Ok, so how can you actually assess your customers’ competencies?

A strong indicator is the problems they need to solve themselves. Are they more of an “entry-level” nature or rather advanced and highly complex?

So here’s what you need to do: Ask your customers to walk you through their processes. Let them explain in detail how they are working. It will tell you a lot about their competencies.

There could be a lot of thought going into it, but a single unrecognized flaw kills their performance. It could also be the opposite. A deeply flawed process that has to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Tired of seeing your true potential remaining untapped?