What makes your job so insanely hard

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 get the recognition and rewards you deserve? Check out these resources 👇️ 

• The Customer Retention Blueprint *NEW*

• Raising the Bar - Enterprise CSM Guide *NEW*

• Plugging the Hole - Churn Guide *RENEWED*

• Peeling the Onion - Customer Problem Discovery Guide *RENEWED*

• The CSM Operating System for Customer-Value Led Growth

It has never been easy to work in Customer Success Management. But in the past few years, your job has become hard. Super hard.

Have you ever asked yourself why? Have you ever asked yourself why you

• have to put out fire after fire

• work long hours all year long

• face so much pressure

• get bombarded with foreign tasks

• can’t complete your open tasks even for a day

and yet don’t reap the rewards of your hard work. Your customers still churn. You are ridiculed as glorified support. Your leadership sees you as a cost center.

And your income is half of what your colleagues in sales pay in taxes. The only top ranking you’ve accomplished is on the redundancy list.

What if I told you that it all happens for the same reason?

Fast Forward

Let’s not wait until the end of the post for the big reveal. The reason why CSM is in such a poor state is that 95% of teams are following fundamentally flawed practices.

💥 Practices that have not been built to serve customer needs in the best possible way, but to sell underlying CSP software 💥 

Software that is built on oversimplifications and wishful thinking. Software that does not capture how customers feel, think, and behave. As long as these prevail, CSM will remain in this poor vegetative stage.

Here are 3 prime examples of what I’m talking about to make it crystal clear:

1. Product Adoption and Usage

The more product features customers are using, the more successful they become. It’s perfectly logical, isn’t it? Who needs to understand the customer use case to conclude what features they actually need?

Qualitative data that you likely have to collect in a non-scalable way, no thanks. Better simplify this by splitting them into black and white. The same is true for product usage.

The more often customers log into the product and the more hours they spend there, the more successful they are. If they are using it only one day a week, they are a definite churn risk.

But what if customers spend all week using your product because they keep trying and trying with no success? What if they use the product once a weekday because they see big results with little effort due to their advanced skills and knowledge?

Considerations that have no place in this particular universe. The potential damage ranges from severe to life-threatening as you are

• Wasting your successful customers’ time with pointless check-ins because they are not checking all boxes, while at the same time

• Considering customers with wide adoption and/or high usage as a safe bet for renewal, and miss the actual churn risks

Is that how it’s meant to be?

2. NPS and CSAT

Ok, but what if we add more data points? Coming right from the customer? That should dissolve all the doubts over adoption and usage. So let’s pretend that customers are willing to take your NPS and/or CSAT survey in larger numbers.

What does the score actually say? Customers have no obligation to answer correctly. And what does that even mean? Is there a manual on how to give an accurate score? What gives or takes points?

Customers also have no obligation to act accordingly. They can give you high scores to lull you into a false sense of security. To avoid becoming the target of your low-score-response playbook while they are already talking to your competitors.

What if customers have a very bad day? Where nothing works out as planned. Does that affect the score, and does it not reflect the objective reality?

And last but not least comes the elephant in the room. These surveys are usually taken by the users at the frontline. Do VPs and Chiefs care about how they rate your product? Or do they have other decision-making criteria?

3. Quarterly Business Reviews

The notorious QBR. Pronounced dead on LinkedIn at least once a week. A QBR is a strategic conversation about the success of your collaboration with the customer. Its purpose is to

• Evaluate past results based on your customers’ success metrics

• Discussing what worked, what did not, and why

• Deriving the next steps based on the learnings (keeping or changing course)

But what do customers get in reality? They have to sit through a presentation featuring 53 slides that contain every speck of data you have on that customer. What could possibly go wrong?

Customers don’t care about any of it. They consider the QBR a waste of time. They decline your future invitations and become distant. Who would have thought?

Why does that happen? It’s much more convenient to pull the data from the software - on autopilot.

Talking about customer progress and results? It requires to discover customer goals and find a way to get your hands on actual results. Likely through dirty non-scalable efforts.

Following these practices is what’s starting the fires in the first place. You are working long hours to essentially fix your own mistakes. The pressure mounts as customers have infinite choices and can drop your product anytime.

You get bombarded with foreign tasks because none values your time. They don’t consider the work you are doing as important and consequently your list never ends.

It can all be fixed but it requires a 180° change. A hard reset where Customer Success Management becomes customer-centric (again) and everything falls into place.

PS: Next week I’ll write about the necessary changes.

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