A fun back and forth with Dave Duke of MetaCX around the Idea of 'Success Planning' for customer success teams...Success planning looks very similar to account planning that's been around for a number of yearsSuccess planning starts within the sales cycle and gets pulled through the customer success team as the customer enters the customer journeyThe 'Success Plan' changes over time as the relationship with the customer changes'Success Plans' should be thought about differently as you overlay them over your customer segmentation --This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach

What % of churn happens because of over-selling or poor client onboarding, and what process/tools are used to solve this?Organizations need to incentivize looking for long term goals instead of short term revenuePotential ideas to help when working with sales:For the good customer (within ICP), Pay more incentives; while for customers who are not within ICP, the Sales team gets fewer commissions.Align compensation to milestones of the customer journeyCommission variable according to Customer adoption and LTVCommission linked to the payments received from customers (cash in the bank account)Focus on business cases during the sales-to-success transitionAre you really getting to the root cause of the churn? Find out and document the churn reasons within the CRMTake it to the leadership level: All the departments, Be it marketing or sales should make their effort into the right direction.Do a Success Analysis: Find out which of the existing customers are churning and which ones are successful. What are those key differentiators between churn and success? That is where we need to focus time and energy.Aaron Thompson's presentation from Customer Success Network titled "Customer Success Sells"What tools are used for collaboration between CS & Product to prioritize new feature requests during onboarding, renewal, and expansion?Aligning teams along with customers on the 'Path to Green' for adoptionTacking the feature requests. CSMs can sit together with relevant product managers to tell how many customers are looking for a particular feature.Sometimes customers don’t know what actually they need. CSMs and Product Managers can truly look at the use-case and find out the best way to do it.We need to be training CSMs to be asking the right inquisitive questions so that they can uncover the Jobs-To-Be-Done frameworkIdeation Platform where customers can come and upvote, downvote for features. This platform is connected with a project management platform that dev can see.Jo Massie from Slido shared a presentation on how they collaborate around the product roadmap--This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach

There's an opportunity to build and cultivate a community within your B2B SaaS Industry. The COVID Pandemic could be the catalyst needed to spin up a community that can become an aspect of your customer success strategy. Communities can be a way to support the long-tail of your customer-base but It needs to be broader than just your productThis needs to be a full-time dedicated job to build, cultivate and engage with the communityMake communities valuable -- what Is the hard-hitting, actionable content that can drive valueHow do you build listening channels to help translate challenges Into content--This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach

Jay and Jeff bring on Carl Yost of Black Diamond Advisory to talk about the Importance of customer success and finance building a relationship. Forecasting models have become daily exercises that help finance teams operate the businessCustomer success should be creating a 'pacing-model' that can layout assumptions and adjust as time goes - this can be beneficial to finance teamsRevenue operations Is becoming a larger-trend In organizations -- retail operations has taken a similar approach to coordinate data and action within one organizationFinance organizations have transitioned from an abundance model Into an operational model--This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach

Jay and Jeff take some time to hit on Internal Team Communication and Board Reporting: Internal CommunicationFind ways to share the hypothesis and tactics that have been Implemented - possibly release this company-wide and Mondays/Fridays so everybody knows whats happeningFind Intimate 1v1 ways to record a video and share It with an Individual, a team or customers when trying to give updatesBoard ReportingFocus on the retention forecastFocus on the upcoming renewalsLeverage the board members to gather their Insight from the market (I.e. what're they seeing In other companies)--If you'd like to join CS Leadership Office Hours, sign up here:https://tiny.cc/csofficehours--This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach

Jay joins Mark Stoddard and Dave Blake of ClientSuccess as part of their CS Leadership Webinar Series. Jay shares a few Insights we've picked up from the market on how to engage with customers during this crisis. Then after about 20 minutes there Is a Q&A with the audience to hit on relevant topics to CS leaders. --This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach

--If you'd like to join CS Leadership Office Hours, sign up here:https://tiny.cc/csofficehours--Customer Engagement Modification:More human touch has been inserted into most companies tech-touch segments.Further segmentation by industry, region, etc has been deployed to support customers that are experiencing business disruptionFor booming industries, the lessons learned from tech touch have been applied up market to address the influx of new customers.Messaging to customers should be owned jointly by the marketing team and Customer Success, as CS has a pulse on what their customers need at the moment. Salespeople that normally focus on new logo acquisition can support the CS efforts if their pipeline is freezing, but a consideration for CS and Sales comp plans should be taken into account.Changing Metrics and Strategies:Decreasing time to value during the onboarding phase has become necessary for companies that are experiencing higher volumes.We heard examples of decreasing TTV by 75% and by 90%!Identifying the product/service MVP can not only bring value immediately now, but it can be worked into a typical onboarding process to increase customer sentiment during this phase. There is an opportunity to learn from this time and understand what friction can be removed once we are back to business as usual. While the KPIs and targets may change during this time, the overall metrics are largely the same.A reprioritized effort on outreach and proactive support is a consistent theme we hear from Customer Success leaders.--This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach

Jay and Jeff sit down to talk about the job market at B2B SaaS organizations during this pandemic. A couple of quick hits: Individuals need to find ways to stand out (LinkedIn connections, building a 'new version' of the resume)Organizations need to be forecasting so that they can have the right staffing model--This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach