This is my first post for a while, so forgive my absence. I have changed roles, moving away from previous technical positions to which I posted frequently. I will try to start blogging on my newest career field, to which honestly, I am a relative noob for all intensive purposes when it comes to customer success. Nonetheless each day I’m learning and want to start posting my journey, to share my thoughts and experiences. And my manager thought this would be a good idea too!
In this post, I will discuss some of the key questions that will help understand and build an effective success plan for customers.
Each customer desired outcome for their purchase is going to differ, so success will mean different things to separate customers. A Success Plan remains a vital piece in the customer journey, as it helps create a map to the desired outcome.
A success plan should provide a statement of Why did the customer buy? What can it do? How will they use? What does success look to the customer and when will they see it? How will the client measure success, what does ROI look like? I will explain later why I have highlighted the last two items.
Let’s take a fictitious example of Acme Insurance, their desired outcomes are to pursue a cloud-first strategy, have paperless offices and to embrace digital signatures as a means to signing documents. They choose Citrix ShareFile + RightSignature a seamless file-sharing and e-signature solution to meet their needs ;-). I will map the questions and answers in the below table.
So let’s go back to points I highlighted early “How will the client measure success, what does ROI look like?”. Why are these so important?
When it comes to renewal, upselling, adding new product or services, these decisions are usually made by business leaders. If they cannot see value or success in your solution, you may lose them as customers.
“It happens because decision-makers and key stakeholders are unable to see the benefits of using the products or services in which they’ve invested. When they can’t see the value, they can’t justify spending money on it.”
Vikki Pope VP of Client Success, MapAnything
The most common argument against developing and documenting a success plan is not enough time available or customer don’t have the resources, or you cannot connect with right people to ask those questions. Nevertheless, customers who embrace a success plan have better outcomes as they can see the value and return on investment making the renewal/upsell a non-event.
As your customers travel their journeys, their needs and wants will evolve as the nature of businesses. As success plan should be considered as a living document that will change, grow and evolve with their customer’s overtime with multiple iterations.
In future posts, I will try to delve into success plans more by exploring their anatomy and reviewing the responsibilities of the stakeholders.
Thanks for reading and feel free to discuss….
Nick
Nicholas Connolly 