Building your 90-Day PLAN as a CUSTOMER SUCCESS EXECUTIVE

think it's extremely important to understand how important delivering a great customer success is which is a combination of great experience and also really delivering great outcomes for the customer [Music] hello my customer success friend ziri ezips here for csm practice the customer success strategy consulting firm today it's with great pleasure to introduce you my dear friend co-thought leadership in this space and an amazing customer success executive dutta sadadeep hi dota hi rick how are you doing so grateful you had the time to join us as you know duterte is a thought leader he's a keynote speaker tech industry veteran he specializes in customer success strategies customer acquisition customer retention and his core competencies really working with clients or organizations that are high growth and large-scale companies like pinterest and google where he actually built the organization of customer success to increase customer engagement scale the company and increase profitability and so he's been an industry veteran in customer success for about 20 years so he brings a lot of industry experience and he worked with a lot of different leadership roles so it's really interesting to hear what he has to say today before we start i'd like to remind everyone subscribe to our youtube channel for all the great videos that we produce on customer success so dota without further ado when you start out as a new head of customer success what are the first things that you are starting to do to make sure that you're set up and is able to create a strong customer success organization for the company you're hired for when i join any company or any kind of role i take i think the first thing i try to do is to really get 360 degree view of the current state of the organization when i say that it sounds super simple but there are few things i like to do i divide them into roughly three things number one the overall team members and one of the thing i will always do is sit down with them and really understand what they're doing how they believe their work is impacting kind of like the top line of the business where they find meaning in their work and a question i always like to ask is what is one thing you think we should be doing for our customers so that's kind of what my you know like the individual contributors team members were regularly connecting with the customers at the end of the day the second set of variables i use is to really understand and engage with the customers directly and ask them a little bit different question what things are working well what things do you think we could do to improve the value of your business not things that you should do to help me do xyz better what do you think we are not doing to improve the value of your business and last but not the least is my overall management team and this is an interesting one i ask questions around things like hey how would you define the customer life cycle what do you think we are doing well where do you think we are missing the mark and when i combine the inputs from my team members the customers and the management team because the management one is an interesting one it's a combination of the data they share combination of the process they share you kind of end up with a very good state of affairs what are some of the things that are really working from the top line goals of the company where are the connections super clear what is the future iteration of the organization and kind of move from there and then if you think about once you get all this data how are you approaching next step so this is what you do in the first few weeks what is your overall 90-day plan i'm sure you get asked that a lot of times everybody that went through an executive interview have asked that question what is your answer yeah i think i think it's an interesting one i think so i this is like my first step sort of kind of going through this and this does take some time to really unpack and figure out what's going on but there are probably a few things i really index heavily on one is to work with management team and also whoever i'm reporting to to really establish what i would call the mission and vision and like the behaviors of the organization the second thing i want to do is really index on the organizational metrics the third and the four things are sort of a little bit more simpler which is the people plan how do you motivate how do you engage people and last but not the least organizational structure sometimes org structures need to be changed sometimes they're already set up but certain other things need to be changed so those are the four areas i usually try to double click and like deep dive and have a perspective on so in terms of key areas you define the vision and the mission the plan for the people how you're going to reward them compensation plan and then really assess whether the organizational structure is set up correctly and what changes needs to be made and then you made a reference to metrics yes how do you think about metrics for customer success because i think you have a really interesting approach that probably everyone in this call should be aware of i i think metrics are an interesting one there is a saying like you can have all the data you want but that doesn't mean you are doing a data driven business you know when i sort of like engage with organizations both at google and at pinterest one of the things i see is it's not like individual teams don't have metrics but there are two challenges that people face one people conflate things that they need to do operationally all the time and then what i think are more kind of like lagging indicators and i kind of classified them as input metrics and output metrics input metrics are things you need to do daily they're more around continuous improvement but if you do all those fundamental things you're going to get a great outcome at the end the second challenge i find a lot of organizations have especially as customer success is evolving from a singular function to covering end-to-end customer journeys where all touch points of interacting with customers whether it is professional services onboarding services renewals support analytics are coming under the scope of one leader teams really struggle to connect the dots between what they are doing and how it ladders up to the top line goals things like net dollar retention or net revenue retention so as an executive those aren't metrics that you know all of us are asked to improve but then how do you connect something like a net revenue retention all the way down to what does it mean for a support organization and what does it mean for a customer success organization what does it mean for professional services and so on and so forth yeah absolutely and i like how you structured it input versus output you help essentially both the team and the management team understand input metrics are the things that we can control with activities and output metrics is what we expect to impact and so with that said after you outline you know what are the activities and what are we going to impact how do you actually build the customer success organization to meet those quantifiable goals and be able to measure them accountability is like the first thing i really index on significantly the second thing i like to think about is what are the pivots this organization actually needs to make and why is that change needed so i think it's equally important to sort of talk about behaviors talk about values of the organization and why they matter and the reason that matters is one could accomplish the top line goal by demonstrating behaviors that are not sustainable got it i think that's that's brilliant in terms of the structure changes you're talked about uh moving the team from being reactive to more proactive thinking in advance where the vision might be are you doing that specifically with customer success or how do you impact change with everyone that's customer facing what is the remit of the organization is i think the first thing i think folks are much more appreciative when you are clear about the remit the purpose about each of their organization and explaining to them what success means but i think there is also a leadership responsibility because if everybody just works in their own little silo you will lose the visibility across what's going on so couple of things that i have done in the past is to have horizontal organizations around data process improvement connecting with uh pm and eng that takes inputs from all these different functions customer success support etc and really puts a complete voice of the customer in a more you know end-to-end way and that helps sort of bridge the gap around end-to-end communication internally but the other thing as a leader one should also do apart from org structures is really encourage the heads of all of these organizations to work on initiatives projects that are cross-cutting that helps build deeper understanding of each other's challenges but also opportunities to learn how they see the customer maybe somebody's doing things in support and they're seeing certain patterns and of course you can use data to surface that but it might also be an important input for somebody in customer success to say hey if we set this up a little bit differently we may not have these type of problems down the road going back to your 90 day plan what are some of the things that you think you're comfortable promising a company and other executives where they come in for the first time as an executive for a company what what are the things that they can promise the company would happen within 90 days especially if it's a large-scale organization so one thing like every leader and this is like a commitment i always make is to have an honest assessment completed and a real executable plan one of the things i always do is to present an end-to-end dashboard that connects what each of the teams are doing and how they connect to top line and really sort of use that to highlight areas that we need to focus on and why we need to focus on you know any kind of an organization you can just say hey we're gonna have like this amazing thing built in next year you kind of have to say hey here's what the overall assessment is but also be very precise about here are the first two or things i would like to change here is why i would like to change and here is how it's going to start to improve some of the output metrics for any new leader it is going to be always very uncomfortable to commit to pure improvements not knowing anything in the organization but i encourage everybody to put a line in the sand and have that honest conversation with the executive team there's a line in the sand this will probably change but this is what i believe we should be aspiring towards hence i want to give another 90 days to see how much i make the plan and then continuously iterate that plan to become much more definitive much more precise as time goes by thinking about your previous experience of pinterest google and other companies you work for what are some of the challenges you typically see in the first 90 days as ahead of customer success in a large organization of course you know large and small organizations whenever a new leader comes in you know the human instinct is to show that things are working well and so the biggest challenge is really unpacking what is actually going on well because some things are and what really needs to change i think that's probably like the toughest one because everybody tries to present the best possible face and celebrate the amazing work that they have been doing and that is rightfully so i think the so think upon the leader to really ask insightful questions along that the second one is to really start building trust at a personal level with the management team i think managers are key to making any change successful and change is not because something bad is happening change could be because the company's literally doubling it today may not work tomorrow because the growth is happening at such a large scale so not all changes needed because something bad is happening some changes are needed because great scale is happening great growth is happening and you just can't do the same things over and over again so i think building that trust with your management team is super important and it's challenging because you are assessing while you are trying to develop relationships and so on and so forth and one of the things i like to really index on is is really understand people's motivation why they like the job why they're in this role and how does that fit with their career goals career aspirations everybody has one and i think making those connections the faster you can make them the more impactful the change will be but it is always a tough one it's it's not as easy as it sounds excellent so the first 90 days essentially you're really digging in on what's going on what do the people want management customers and at the end you're presenting your assessment and a plan for the years to come what should that plan include you have to really start thinking about teams into segmenting how you want to deliver services who you want to deliver it for so simple one if i can put it this way if you think about it there are some customers who are going to be what i call strategic partnerships there would be probably folks who have extremely high a customer lifetime value and on the other hand there'll be lots of sort of low lifetime value customers but probably acquired very easily more like the direct self-service type of customers and on the other side if you look at your services you'll have services that are sort of more consultative more proactive and some that are more transactional and when i sort of plot them i i kind of say you should really be offering high-touch services for your most strategic customers so i'll give an example you know at pinterest we have a high-touch product called a shopping ads it is where customers send their entire catalog to us and we create advertising and and we should promote them on the on the platform it's a service that has very good results for the customer in terms of the number of clicks adding to cart all the actions that we look for in advertising but there's a big uplift you know there's a feed which is a technical thing there is a tag on the website which is like javascript like an average marketer is not doing this somebody in their id department is doing this but people who do this integration with us they spend a lot of money so this would be a great example of a more proactive consultative engagement on the other hand you may have a situation where you're trying to really improve a certain aspect of product adoption and i could give an example back from my google days one of the things we found was many customers did not have the right website listed on the landing pages so the ads would not go to the right landing pages so simple thing and the way we executed this was we actually whenever somebody came on to our support lines we would do a quick diagnostic and then after they finish their call or their email or whatever we would say hey by the way you should think about changing this to this because it's not going to the right place and you're not seeing any value but if you do this you're going to see value so that's an example of what i would call a tech touch enabled by some automation giving you an insight when people have the right landing page in the ad the ad will perform better but somebody actually needs to add the landing page but that's a way to sort of do a much more scale tech touch versus you know versus trying to bake this into a one-on-one phone call and so on and so forth well can you share so that those who are about to be hired as the first uh customer success executives what are some of the important things that the do's and don'ts that you can impart with them i think it'll depend you know for everybody's a little bit different around career aspirations what they want to do but a few things i have found to be true i think it's extremely important to understand how important delivering a great customer success is which is a combination of great experience and also really delivering great outcomes for the customer this is an interesting time because i feel if somebody is hiring for somebody in the customer success role they truly need it otherwise they wouldn't be hiring for that role but in general i think top line alignment to business metrics strategy etc is super super super important because then you are doing something in service for the overall goals of the company versus keeping the lights on i think the next thing to really have an honest discussion is direction of the company and the role that customer a success will play and is that something they believe is already there why are they hiring you are they hiring you to transform are they hiring you to manage the team better like what is the purpose i think the alignment on both of them goes a long ways into being successful in these roles so in other words really make sure you understand what the company's go to market strategy and how do you have an opportunity to impact it and on the other hand what is the specific goal for you as the head of customer success within your own world how are you going to be assessed whether you're successful or not is it managing the team better or getting better outcomes with clients like what is the main focus right now that the company has that they think that you should be resolving asap and it's never one thing it's never one thing for one thing it's a few things but it's good to know what those few things are it's a combination it's always a basket but you want to know what that basket is and also to your point when you think about that 90-day plan that's another great time to validate whether that basket that was given to you originally is still true because the business is growing external things are changing so those are also ways to continuously calibrate so that you're not executing on something you're not building something that is disconnected from the overall company strategy awesome brilliant thank you so much for sharing all these insights in your experience with our channel guys if you like this video subscribe to our channel it helps our channel get exposure to other customer success managers who can benefit from this video look at the description below we're gonna have a link to the site that deuta shared today as well as a whole blog about all of his insights and so thank you so much for listening i'll see you at the next video you

Channel: CSM Practice

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Keywords: Customer Success, Customer Success Manager, Dutta Satadip, 90 day plan, customer success executives, 30 60 90 day plan, plan for customer success executives, 90 day plan for customer success executives, Newly Hired Customer Success Executive, 90-day CS executive plan, how to build an excellent 90-day plan, Building 90-Day Plan, Newly Hired CS Executive, 90-Day Plan as Newly Hired Customer Success Executive

Id: psAIpk1JWVo

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020