3 Core Motions for Customer Success

Building a well-run Customer Success business isn’t easy. There’s a lot to think through, a lot of dynamics at play and so many different types of CS motion that you can run. 

For me, I like to build proactive, value-centric Customer Success motions that really focus on what a customer is trying to achieve and how we help them achieve it. Then, I’m focused on how that translates into the revenue targets that I need to hit. 

There are 3 types of CS motion that I think about building and instilling when I'm running a CS business:

Proactive

Let's imagine a perfect world scenario where things don't go wrong ( ha! ). From a customer signing to renewal, what's the "motion" you want your CS team to run on their customers, across every segment/tier... and why?

For me this is usually driven by 2 things:

1. The type of CS I want to be running - as I said earlier, for me, this is value-driven CS so my motion is going to include things like understanding what that customer considers valuable, building a success plan around it, and presenting a value story back to them.

2. Data - what does the data tell me about correlations between types of CS activities and retention, upsell or churn?

This proactive motion usually turns into monthly/quarterly KPIs for my team around Success Plans, Business Reviews, Executive Engagement - so we're driving those consistent proactive behaviours.

Now this proactive motion might look different across different tiers and that’s okay. The point here is to think through the type of experience you want every customer to get in which tier and then how do I create some accountability for the CSMs to run it that way.

Reactive

This is the acknowledgement that not everything goes perfectly. So I’m creating processes for things like:

1. Spotting risk as far out as possible (ideally 180 days) through both a data-driven health score and CSM sentiment. Plus leaders digging into books of business with their team in 1:1s.

2. Managing that risk once we've spotted it and holding the team accountable to mitigating it. Also, factoring in how do we ensure that the team gets the help they need to turn this risk around through risk calls and escalations.

3. Ensuring my risk is accounted for in my forecasting process and my plan for the year.

Commercial

This piece is essentially “how do I link all of that back to revenue and hitting my GRR/NRR target?” So what's my:

1. Renewals process and motion - everything from how far out from renewal are we contacting customers right to how do we check in on renewals and how that links to our forecast at a team, segment and global level?

2. Forecasting process - both at an account level and for the quarter and the year ahead (yes I am forecasting for a full year!)

3. Motion for aligning with sales - who owns what and how will we hit this number together?

4. Data-backed plan to hit my revenue target for the year and what are the plays I want to encourage the team to run to get there

These 3 processes give me a combination of targets/incentives I want to give the team, internal processes I want to build and plans I need to create to make sure my team is hitting the right business targets.