Prioritizing Customer Outcomes

Jenny McNeice is passionate about web security and customer success. Her career in security began almost 10 years ago at OpenDNS, evolved under Cisco Umbrella, and continues now with the incredibly talented and driven team at Abnormal Security. When not educating herself on the latest in email security, Jenny can be found skiing, backpacking, singing karaoke, chasing a small toddler around, or some combination of all four.

Jenny McNeice: Hello, and welcome to lesson three of the Enterprise Software Sales Process with Abnormal Business School. I'm Jenny McNiece and I'm here to talk to you about lesson three: Prioritizing Customer Outcomes. I am an Enterprise Customer Success Manager with Abnormal Security and I'm looking forward to talking to you about what it is that I do.

Here's the agenda for what we're gonna be talking about. Number one, customer success is… what exactly? Number two, talking about the customer journey. Number three, putting the customer first. Number four, partnering internally. And number five, business outcomes.

Where you left off… So lesson two, just to recap, you were talking about enterprise selling. Number one, the first meeting excellence and follow up. Number two, running a proof of concept. Number three, handling objections and competition. Number four, negotiating price. Finally, closing the deal.

So let's talk briefly about customer success. It is what, exactly.? I've included an image here of a tightrope walker. And the reason I did is because it exemplifies one of the best analogies for customer success that I've seen recently. And that is that if the customer is the tightrope walker, then the support team, the folks who are a part of our technical support, that's sort of the net underneath the tightrope walker that catches in case something goes wrong. But customer success, it's more like the balancing bar that they're carrying that keeps them on the wire in the first place. We're not sales people, you know, there's a certain separation of sales and success that ensures customer trust. We want them to know that my job is not driven by achieving quota. What I am is someone who is gonna help them identify opportunities to expand their footprint with us, as needed, as helps them. So that's an important distinction to make. We're also not Support.

Support is a team that reacts to customers' tickets and they solve complex problems and issues. So Customer Success is more of a proactive motion. While we do work closely with our folks in Technical Support, we're more of a proactive motion that helps to further the customer relationship outside of just the issues that they're having day in, day out, with the product itself.

We own contributions such as executive business reviews. This is our way of checking in with the customer to say, here's how you're performing. Here's how well you're using the product. Here's how well the product is stacking up to your original success criteria. And we delivered those on a quarterly basis.

Standing check-ins, this is another opportunity to maintain a finger on the pulse of the customer's health. Making sure that we are proactively addressing any long term requests that are outstanding or making sure that we're helping to project manage different deployments and projects that the customer has ongoing. And finally proactive outreach. Making sure that we're letting them know about feature upgrades coming down the pike, as well as roadmap issues.

So we talked a little bit about where customer success fits in with this sales process. But I wanna talk about the LAER customer engagement model. LAER stands for Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew. These are the basic fundamental phases of the customer journey in which we can have an opportunity to impact the customer's experience. So this was originally coined by the Technology Services Industry Association. But it's one framework for thinking about the customer journey. So landing the deal, obviously that is what we've discussed already previously in this series. And at the end of that, there's a sales handoff. So at the top, you'll see transition points that are sort of inflection points that are opportunities for us as a company to strategize over how to help the customer along. So the sales handoff is a really important one. You've just closed the deal. And the most important thing is that you want to pass off all the knowledge that you gained. All of the insider information about who were the champions, who were the detractors, who challenged the deal and who really supported the deal. Who are gonna be the people that the customer success team are gonna be working with most closely on the ground? You want as a salesperson to do a proper handoff so that the success team has all of that information that you just spent so much time collecting so that they can be successful in their job ahead.

Now the adoption phase, this is where the customer success manager, and depending on the company, also a deployment manager are gonna take over and they're going to ensure the timely and complete adoption of the product that this customer just purchased. And then you go into the expansion phase and this can be a long and repeating even process in which the customer success side of the house might say, “Oh, hey, I've just identified that this customer has been asking for this feature for a long time and we're actually creating a product that's going to include it.”. So then what I'll do as a Customer Success Manager is get back in touch with the account executive and say “You know, X customer has identified that this is something that they really would like. And I think that it's a good alignment to avoid them having to go after a competitor's product.” and so we go back to the adoption phase and the customer success manager, as well as deployment engineers, will help them to turn on this new feature that they purchase. It doesn't happen with every customer, but that's one way that we build value out of our existing customer base. 

Finally, about 120 days out before renewal, that's when the Customer Success Manager and the Account Manager will get together with the Renewal Specialist. Not every company has Renewal Specialists. Sometimes this is the responsibility of the Account Executive. Sometimes it even falls on the Customer Success Manager. But ideally there's a separate individual whose sole responsibility is to look after the renewal. To create a package that's enticing to the customer and in everyone's best interest to get that on their plate for procurement, for consideration, well in time for an on time renewal.

So that LAER model is looking at sort of our business objectives, the phases of the customer journey. But we want to shift the focus now to think of this from the customer perspective. So let's map the customer journey from what they're going through, think about it in their footsteps. So we start with the proof of value up at the top, the initial deployment, the testing procurement, you're working with your account executive to make sure that, you know, maybe you’re analyzing our product against several different competitors. It can take a lot of energy just to launch a proof of value. So we wanna respect that going into the purchase. And as you do that handoff from the sales to the customer success side of the house, they've just gone through a huge project. It took up a lot of time. It took up a lot of hours. It took up a lot of their energy. So you want to honor that and say, “hey, I'm here to help make this as seamless as possible.”. Adoption is a really important aspect of any customer's journey, making sure there's a full deployment, helpful training for your users, your folks that are gonna be using the product day to day out, as well as accurate testing. 

And then you enter into the use and evaluate phase. Tailor the use case for the product to your own company. Justify the ROI and make sure that it's working as you thought it would. So this is where your Customer Success Manager is going to come in and with an executive business review, identify your initial success criteria, and try to make sure that those things are matching up. Hey, here's what you thought you were gonna get out of the product. Here's what, you know, we've been delivering over the last, you know, several months. Do these things align? Help me understand where we can build better value for you. And then as a customer, you're thinking about providing feedback. You've got feature enhancements that you'd like to see. You'd like to see the product work slightly differently. Maybe you think that the user interface should operate slightly differently.

So that's where ideally you start to build a relationship with your vendor and you start to say, “Hey, CSM, Jenny. I'd like to set up a call with product to go over this, you know, potential feature request.” and my job - and this is where the fun stuff really hits as a customer success manager - is that you get to facilitate those calls. You get to make sure that our product teams are learning as much from our customers as our customers learn from us. If not more. 

Finally, you're receiving reports. You're getting quarterly reviews from your CSM, weekly summaries as well. And having those regular check-ins to manage ongoing projects with product. And then you go into validation again as you approach the renewal, you know, as you go into your department's procurement phase, you are responsible for justifying the budget. Again, you're responsible for presenting results so we aim for all the work that we've done over the course of the customer journey to lead up to an easy win here. An easy validation process that says this is working as it should we wanna sign up for another two years or three years or whatever it is. But as a customer, this can be a tricky time because even if you believe in a product, there could be low budget. So we as CSMs want to deliver as much information, as much assistance and, and feedback to the customer as possible for this phase of the journey so that they have everything they need to validate this internally. And finally they go into the renewal. They'll re-engage with the sales team from your company, and the renewals manager, and create a package that makes sense for everybody.

And then when that goes well, ideally we go back to just the ongoing maintenance of the customer relationship. Maybe it's back to use and evaluate phase, back to providing feedback. And the cycle goes on and on.

I've got a quote for you. “The daily job of the CSM and a SaaS company has to do with setting and resetting customer expectations.” That's from Nick Mehta. 

So putting the customer first. It's really important that their expectations are not only understood, but they're addressed and managed by the Customer Success Manager who's working with them. Put yourself in their shoes so that everything, all the efforts that you are doing as a customer success manager, align with what the customer's needs are. So, first of all, understand where you sit in with the customers. Make sure that if you're asking for an hour or even a half hour of their team's time, that it's going to be worth it to them, that you're building value, that you're bringing them something with every interaction that you. Think about how to deal with customer issues and escalations. It's important to remain customer focused. It's important to think about the issue from their experience. So remember that if they're coming to you and saying, it's a problem - honor that and treat it as a problem so that you can, you can then go into engineering or go into support and say, “Hey, here's what the customer's feeling about this.”, but also engage your colleagues compassionately. It's important that you take what the customer's saying, filter it professionally, and make sure that we have a severity assigned to it, you know, accordingly, so that it gets the attention that it needs but also your colleagues don't feel badgered in saying, “oh my God, this customer's got a problem and I need your help right now!”. Try to do that with the utmost compassion and the utmost professionalism. Track support tickets and their results. There may be common things that happen, as with any product, but you wanna track that so that if in the back of your mind, you know, that there have been an uptick, a recent increase in how frequently they're interacting with support, that's something that may be weighing on the back of their mind as you go into your next quarterly business review with them.

How to run a QBR. So this is really, I mean, we could run a whole other section on how to do this successfully. But just bullet point, my personal take: use all the data that you can when you've got a presentation that you're building for this customer. Throw in every piece of information that shows how the product is working for them, what their particular experience has been with it and make it a conversation. So particularly when you've got a new customer and it's the first quarterly business review, stop talking. Stop talking and ask them “does this make sense? Is this something that's useful to you? I just showed you six graphs. Which of them is something that you would wanna show to your Chief Information Security Officer?”. Ask these questions throughout the presentation and implement that feedback on the next time that you do a QBR with them. And show that you've been listening. Show that you are tracking their feature requests.That you are tracking their support tickets. Even just seeing that can be very reassuring from the customer side of the house. That okay, this person, this Customer Success Manager, is watching my account for me and is an advocate inside of the company. 

Here we have another quote for you. “You can focus on adoption retention, expansion, or advocacy; or you can focus on the customer's desired outcomes and get all of those things.” That's a quote from Lincoln Murphy. 

So we talked a little bit about the customer journey, about how to put the customer first, but I also wanna talk about partnering internally because really, I think another analogy for the customer success role is almost like a concierge for the customer. You can take them to level one where they can go talk to Support. You can take them to level two where they can go talk to Sales. You can take them to level three where they can go talk to Product and Engineering. But it's your job to be that frontline “How can I help you person?”. And that role with the customer, building that trust and building that relationship with them is no good If you don't have the internal relationships to also back that up. So that means you have to be on good standing with your colleagues in Sales, and in Product, and in Support. 

So when we talk about this, when we talk about, you know, for example, the Account Executive who just sold the deal, you've got to build their trust as well. They're not gonna just let the deal go and no longer talk to their main champion. They're gonna keep that person. They're gonna keep that relationship going because this, you know, Account Executive has just worked so hard to gain that trusted advisor role. And they're gonna need that again when the renewal comes around so never feel like you are taking the relationship from them. You are adding information that the customer needs but you're not gonna be replacing their relationship with the Sales people. So work together with sales and understand what sales motions are ongoing with the customers so that you can be sensitive to that. 

Next, when it comes to Product and Engineering, these are the folks that you wanna partner with who can really make the customer feel like a valued partner of ours. And that's a really great place to be once you've gotten through the adoption and the deployment and you're in sort of the fine tuning and the increasing usage and adoption phase. This is so fun when as a Customer Success Manager, your internal product team comes to you and says, “Hey, I'm looking for teams or for customers that want to test this feature that we're considering building.”. Maybe we're in research. Maybe it's already in Beta. But if you're doing your job right, as a Customer Success Manager, you can go through your list and say, “oh, I know this customer and this customer would be incredible people to talk to because they're smart, they know our product, and they really know this issue. They'd really, I think, have a lot to contribute to our product teams in terms of customer feedback!”. So you wanna earn that right as a trusted advisor, not only to your customer, but to Product so that they know they can come to you and they know that you have good relationships where you can point them in the right direction. Take really good notes so that, you know, for sure oh, you're looking for customers who have X, Y, and Z solutions in their stack and are looking to evaluate this kind of feature? Okay, I can run a quick search and I can find all that information ‘cause I've taken good notes and I know my customers really well. Customers feel connected with vendors when they feel they have influence over the shape of the product and product teams love accessed, thoughtful and collaborative customers. 

Finally, Support. Cannot say enough good things about Support teams. They are working day in, day out, making sure that they're responding to customers. So as you're working to keep the voice of the customer paramount in everything that you do, you wanna track support tickets. You wanna escalate them as needed, but never interfere. Never get in the way of Support teams doing their job because this is a high stress environment. Let's be honest, they have people calling them or emailing them and Sometimes not holding back with their language and saying like, “I need you to fix this right now!”. So you need to show your Support teams respect at all times and make sure that if nothing else, all you're doing is just sort of monitoring and reporting back to the customer. But you never wanna get in the way.  So make sure that you are working with those folks who are on the front lines, answering those calls.

Finally, we're gonna talk about business outcomes. So we talked a little bit about how there are no activities that matter, except for the ones that matter to customers. So translate your internal goals into customer interactions. So when you're talking about retention, you gotta think. Did you maintain regular communications with the customer? Did you measure success criteria from the outset and measure your progress against those criteria on an ongoing basis? Did you ask the tough questions? Like I said, sometimes after an escalation or when things are going badly and you really don't wanna rock the boat, sometimes you have to, you have to say, “can I level set with you? Will you tell me about how this previous interaction has impacted your thoughts and feelings about our product going forward?” You really wanna make sure that you're tracking how customer sentiment is going in order to track toward retention. Finally, follow through on business reviews when you've got a QBR and they've had a bunch of questions, follow through is one of the most important things. Just achieving giving someone a good QBR is not the end of that process. You really need to make sure that you're setting yourself tasks that you are following through. You're following up on requests or questions that came up on those calls. Growth, you know, in order to facilitate the growth of, you know, a customer's ARR, you need to make sure that you understood and documented the customer's unique use-case. Make sure that you're understanding their use-case, make sure that you're aligning those needs when new features are released. And finally partner with your counterpart in Sales to smooth the transition. Make sure that you have a good relationship with that salesperson so that when it is time for, you know, the conversation to turn to another proof of value, another set of contracts, another procurement process,  that your sales counterpart knows, oh, Jenny's bringing you this opportunity. This is actually, this is gonna be something that I trust the customer needs and I'm gonna, it's gonna be worth my time to invest, you know, my cycles into helping this customer.

We talk about customer satisfaction. You can send out a survey, you can ask for their CSAT scores, you can ask for net promoter scores. But, you know, those things are good indicators, maybe a lagging indicator, but indicator nonetheless, of how your customers overall feel about the product. But ask yourself, did you engage with executive backup when escalations flared up? When you know, a major customer had, you know, six issues show up in one day - Did you go to your leadership and say, “Hey, I really could use some backup here so that the customer feels seen and heard.”? Give some piece of value with every interaction that you've got with the customer. Again, ask the tough questions. Sometimes people don't wanna rock the boat. People are very polite sometimes. If you're not asking them the tough questions, you may think that they're satisfied when in reality they're just waiting for this, you know, contract to expire so that they can pursue an evaluation of another competitor. So ask those questions. 

Finally advocacy. We could do a whole other presentation on advocacy, but basically it's a portion of customer success that says how many customers who are incredibly happy with our product can we make into megaphones? Can we make into folks who will go out into the community and talk about our product, talk about what a great, you know, experience they've had with us? Did you identify those highly satisfied customers? And did you roll that information back up to your team so that everybody internally looking for those advocates, whether they're in Sales or Marketing were able to find your customers and loop them in as needed. 

So let's give a brief lesson recap. Lesson three is all about nurturing the customer relationship. We talked about what exactly we are, where do we sit between Sales and Support. The customer journey from the customer's perspective. Putting the customer first with all the activities that you're doing. Partnering internally so that you have those trusted relationships, not only with the customer, but with your colleagues that help to facilitate those customer outcomes. And finally business outcomes such as retention, growth, customer satisfaction, and advocacy.

The final quote that I'll end on here is “The customer's perception is your reality.” Make sure that you are setting and resetting their expectations, checking against their original success criteria, and reporting back to your internal teams on the customer's perception because that is your reality. If they're happy then that's the reality of your product and you want to make sure you never lose sight that the customer has the ultimate control over that. 

So with that, thank you very much for coming to my session. I'm Jenny McNeice and I'm very happy to have this opportunity to talk to you today.