How to create SUCCESS PLANS that don't SUCK

hey everyone thank you so much for joining us today we're going to talk about success plans everybody knows success plans are this tool that you should have in your arsenal whenever you do value selling whenever you want to push more value to your customers and you want to maximize value to your customer base and today i have dj tate all the way from india we'll talk about his special background and why he's here but he actually recently published a blog about how can you improve the process of creating a success plan and he called it a mutual success plan and i really wanted to invite him to the show today to talk about you know what are the common mistakes that most customer success managers and sales people account managers account executives are doing as they're working towards a success plan and what are the some of the things that we should really be paying attention to when we're building one and hopefully maybe we can even talk about you know the different pieces of what sections etc but i think that's even less important right now because there's so many templates out there around success plans if you just google search success plan templates you'll probably be able to download something dj tate thank you so much for joining us welcome to the channel thank you eric thanks for having me here can't wait to get started [Music] all right so hey dj thank you so much for joining us again and tell me a little bit about your background you're actually from india and when i looked at your background on social media and linkedin it really looks like you're actually coming from a completely different industry and you have a very data-driven type of experience as a professional before you came to even doing customer success tell me a little bit about how that background really helped you get into customer success and also into this specific process of improving success plans for almost nine years before my foray into corporate i was working as an empirical researcher in elite scientific institutions in india as well as in germany specifically i was involved in evolutionary biology and what we had going for us was as part of research we had to become domain experts we always had to have a data-driven approach to our projects we were handling projects with multiple stakeholders across geographies across continents time zones and we always had to defend our projects weekly monthly in front of the best minds in the world in front of our directors bosses and so on right and finally when i decided to make a lateral transition to corporate all these soft skills actually stood me in good stead and here i am customer success was my calling ultimately that's amazing so you actually moved from biotechnology into software companies what made you want to do this transition so initially when i was looking for you know this 4a uh what i was aiming for was an application of my skills in research in project management in data driven decision making into something where i could make an impact in the real world and when i was finally applying to these industries i found that the it sector was the most amenable for me to make that transition in the most impactful manner possible so yeah i was fortunate that way but yeah there was a lot of efforts in the background but yeah i'm kind of happy that i'm here absolutely and so now are you yourself creating success plans these days yes absolutely with all the clients yes we are dog fooding our own product basically with any new customer that comes into the pipeline we use our mutual success plans to create these documents with them and to align with them on their pain points understand their desired outcomes and decide on the matrix so when you're creating success when the first time somebody asked you to do a success plan what were some of the things that you found okay not so much i think this is not working very well from a personal perspective i think when i was in the previous life as a customer success manager we had to collaborate with different stakeholders on different media for example with my clients i was communicating entirely on emails and our communications are obviously on multiple threads or we are working on sharing documents on workspaces with our management for example we are working on crm tools and with my internal team i was working with on emails or teams or again on crm for example right what mutual success plans does is it actually converts all of these communications into a single unified view for all your stakeholders across both your client as well as your vendor teams your own team and it helps you to effectively collaborate and engage with both internal as well as external stakeholders and creates a shared understanding of your client that's the mutual success part and drive a plan to you know drive those business outcomes that's the success planning of it let's focus on the process itself have you changed something in the process and if so what did you change in the process if you liked what you've heard so far that's awesome more coming in a second here but in the meantime i want you to click that like button so that youtube knows that this is great content and you can start sharing it with others so in the process i think i have personally become more prescriptive for example when it comes to managing certain phases of the customer journey for example i'm managing the post go life part for example the cadence part of it i think that's where a more prescriptive or more directorial approach has come into the picture where i'm prescribing to my customers what exactly to focus on at which particular stage and before that even happens what i'm trying to do is for every phase of their journey i'm first of all aligning with them on why we are here what we aim to do here what are our goals how can we become successful in this particular phase of our journey together and then what are the steps that we need to take there has been a more programmatic approach i would say are you creating a success plan for each phase in the customer journey so meaning when they're just starting their onboarding and during onboarding and then after that during go live and then what happens after that yes exactly so during onboarding or even preceding that when especially there is a handoff between my account executive colleague and myself we collaborate on the mutual success plan he creates the plan and then shares with me i have the entire client context in front of me what were their pain points what is their business context what domain they are in what are they looking for why are they looking to engage with us and then once i have that context that knowledge transition is accelerated i create an onboarding plan for my customers and then i share this plan with these customers and then on a call i'm aligning with them on the goals and success criteria for each phase be it onboarding be it go live for example and once we are gone live we are of course in the cadence part and cadence part we are breaking down for example into quarterly milestones to begin with and then each quarter we are breaking into weekly or bi-weekly touch basis where we take a very small part of our major milestone we break it into a small we have a very deductive approach and then see how far we are from our that milestone for example and then we are tracking that on the mutual success plan and this is not being done by me the client is actually aligning with me they are also an equal partner in this collaboration i really like it because you can actually have pre onboarding a list of use cases or accomplishments or business outcomes that they want to achieve and you could say all right there's three phases we're gonna do some of them during onboarding make sure you have some successes what we call first value delivered or time to first value is accelerated as possible so that's phase one but then you're going into another phase which you called cadence i oftentimes saw a company call it the adoption phase where or expansion phase where we're actually going to take more of those use cases we initially you know with your salesperson even identify that might be important for you or relevant for you and we're gonna continuously contribute to this mutual plan on what are we going to do next way after go live before we continue don't forget subscribe to our youtube channel and smash that notification button so that you don't miss out on any new videos if i'm a customer success manager what are some of the things that i could do to improve my success plan process a the success plan as a tool agnostic of which product you are using should be a differentiator in your customer experience this is not just a workspace or a worksheet that you are sharing with your customers for example b when you are making that document you have to be very clear on the client's outcomes you have to make sure that the document is made in a client first language quite often we feel that we are customer centric but our milestones and our matrix are very are vendor specific right so we have to make sure that those success plan metrics are in the language of the customer they're not only dealing with your daus and wa use for example right the customer is obviously here to solve their pain point so what i would make for example in my previous live data if i was only designing an excel file i would make sure that let's say i had only a worksheet for my overview on the the reasons for client engagement i should know very precisely on what exactly is the reason that the client wants to engage with my company and there should be some top three reasons that are validated by the customer himself and next in every worksheet for example in that excel file i would have my individual initiatives so whether it is onboarding i would map it out like who is my counterpart on the other side who all other members end users etc need to be onboarded so i should have a clear clarity on a stakeholder management any documentation that i want to share with them during that onboarding phase let's say some user manuals some knowledge base etc i should be providing links to them and so on and so forth right so basically the idea is that you should have a very clear idea on what each phase looks like and how you are driving that particular part of the journey with your customer one of the things that i really love about how you do things is that you actually have what are the success criterias for each milestone yes exactly so you should be very clear on why or how you are going to derive those milestones right those kpis for example and those kpis should be very easily achievable within that particular phase of the customer's journey so for example within onboarding for example if you have let's say a 10 achievement of your final kpi you should be very clear that we are only going to achieve this thing and you should have a very accurate plan to only finally achieve that particular outcome and then you should have some other phases to make sure that your final goal is ultimately achieved how about reporting around the results and of the efforts put into actualizing the value that was outlined in the success plan yeah exactly so in this case for example uh you will have a lot of reporting around the planning part of it so you will know first of all you need to know your account health right so you will have a direct real time access to where your project is currently uh what all for example tasks are due or not and then within those milestones for example you can create tasks which are clearly defining that the xyz values have been realized your poc from the customer team is actually validating that yes those particular values were realized and then you are sharing those mutual success plans during your ebrs or qbr's with your exact team in your blog you have mbr qbr and ebr can you explain the difference between the three if you're holding this the normal cadence meetings right with your eoc let's say a project management from your client side those are more tactical meetings right you are aligning with them on what is the adoption currently what are their users pain points what is the ticketing status what are the feature requests how soon are those deliverables going to be implemented on production and so on on the other hand the business reviews are with the exact team of your client and whether you are meeting them on a monthly basis or a quarterly basis you want to align with them only on the end goals that they came to you for so for example if it was experts in reduction in sales cycle or y percent improvement in forecasting accuracy they want to see at the end of the month or at the end of the quarter how much of that milestone was achieved and you need to make sure that the message is passed across you of course might have some hits or misses so you need to be very upfront and clear about it on that meeting and accordingly you need to drive a plan for the next quarter that's great so an mbr would be a monthly business review versus it just depends on the cadence and the quarterly would be quarterly and then the ebr would be something that would you you would do just once a year they're all the same meaning just that cadence is different the cadence is different and also it depends on how difficult it is for you to achieve those milestones for example so if you are dealing with the customer having long sales cycles then having an mbr would make little sense having a qbr or an ebr would obviously make more sense because the meeting ultimately has to have some outcomes also so it's not just to just meet the people of course that's important to understand their evolving business needs but you also want to make sure that you're aligning on those matrix driving those outcomes in your next couple of quarters absolutely i think it's really important to decide the cadence and it's not it has to do a lot with the success plan and what's the cadence in which you expect to deliver value because when you meet with those executives you actually have to demonstrate some value otherwise don't waste my time in just giving me tactical updates exactly and here in front in your success plan everything is right in front of you right even if the exec member is not a part of your ongoing project on a day-to-day basis the moment you share their plan with them either online or offline newly onboarded stakeholder can have a very quick knowledge transition right they can immediately see what impact your organization had on their team for example and then how far they are from achieving their final goals there is a very clear cut and very upfront display of value realization and reinforcement of the value delivery that your customer success team is making actually you touched on a really important point because i believe that if you are so wrapped up in just showing only what is the value that was already actualized already achieved already delivered instead of focusing on what else can we do to maximize the full value the percentage like the progress you made into completely accomplishing that goal and what else can we do to you know really achieve the business outcome fully then you're missing on upsell opportunities any tips on how to report on the progress of success plans to executives do you actually share the detailed plan what do you share of the plan in a qbr or an ebr yeah so basically there are two ways one is just the task management part of it where directly the manager of customer success or sales or the rvp is dealing with the day-to-day tactical activities of your success planning and making sure that the the plan is on track and for example your exact team from the vendor side would make sure if they want to fast track some deliverables they can help prevent some you know avoidable escalations in presentations to the exact team what you are going to do is you are actually going to share the entire success plan with them the customer view of it and your value deliveries that is they will be each of them will be designated as tasks and we will be showcasing the percentage milestone hit as a separate task or a separate variable in that particular success plan so it will be very short and succinct for every milestone or for every quarter for example but that in itself will be a shared piece of info that you're sharing with with your exact team from the client side do you have an example of what you're you're planning on using for your renewals or qbrs so right now we are using it only for our monthly cadence for example and for uh qbr's we are showing them like a midwater review for example that we did currently with our prospect where we showed them what was the percentage adoption of the matrix what was their internal business context for example and how soon we could make sure to reach those milestones so we used the milestone details section in the qbr to make sure that yes we had reached up to say x percent of our final goals and then planning on the road ahead so it was the same milestone but we just tweaked our plans to take into account our current uh reality thank you very much i think this is was really enlightening and i think it's thought provoking around what and how we should approach success plans and make it a lot more transparent not just as you know internally within us but with the customer and then being accountable to all the things we said we're going to do and have agreements around what are the success criteria how we're going to measure success and where we are in the process as we're doing these cadence calls with customers all right guys if you enjoyed this video give it a like subscribe to our youtube youtube channel because it really helps the channel a lot and uh thank you dj thanks everyone i'll see you at the next video [Music]

Channel: CSM Practice

Views: 3,571

Keywords: customer success, customer success manager, customer success strategy, irit eizips, csm practice, account plans, key account plans, solution selling, account plan example, collaboration, customer retention, customer success plan, optimizing your customer success plan, how to best optimize your customer success plan?, customer success plan document, optimize your customer success plan, success plan key initiatives, customer value, success plan, success planning process

Id: hB8VBShsG8I

Length: 18min 29sec (1109 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022