- Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor, creator of SAS Academy. In this episode, I'm
going to share with you, the eight, I was figuring how many
fingers I put in my, how many fingers do I
throw up on my hands? The eight tools that you need for your customer success process and make sure that you not only activate and onboard new customers, but retain them because that's where
the real money is made. And be sure to stay the hour and we'll tell you how to get access to my EBR flow planner worksheet that's Executive Business Review. It's the agenda structure you need to make sure that you're upselling and cross selling in your customer success process. Let's get into it. (upbeat music) So what's crazy still to this day in the world of SAS software as a service, the concept of customer success is still being developed and innovated in companies like
Gainsight's and many others. I've really set the framework for a lot of companies that are trying to understand based on your sales motion, right, a trial process or a SMB purchase process, or a demo to a enrollment or a POC, a proof of
concept for more enterprise, depending on your target customer and the sales motion or
your onboarding process, how you do customer
success will be different. So I've covered that in other episodes. But in this one specifically, I want to share with you the three tools per category of customer success activity that your team or yourself should be doing to make sure that you not only get people that stick around, but
my favourite part is renewals, upsells and cross sells so that you can do what's
called land and expand. So here are those eight tools. Number one, Adoption Management. I know I said eight tools, but it's eight categories of tools because for each one, I wanna give you the three tools that I recommend. Now I normally never share these because I like for my content to be evergreen. But in this episode, I want to make sure I give you context for how to use it, what it's for, what's the current state of the art. It's going to change. Go check out the G2 Crowds or the Capterra of the world to figure out what's the latest hotness for each category. But these are my preferences. So the way I think of adoption management is really about managing not only, who are the new clients that you have, but also where are they at in that life cycle of adoption. And there's tools out there that can give you dashboards. So a customer success manager, a CSM can understand, where are people at in that process? What stage they're at? As well as kind of what's their level of activity? Are they red, green, or yellow? So the three tools that I recommend is number one is Pendo. A lot of my clients that I coach use that. It's a great tool. Gainsight is really arguably, well ToTango. And that's the third one. I met the founder of ToTango back in 2009. And it was interesting as customer success used to be called revenue retention. And a lot of these products have morphed into kind of what they do today. In adoption management those three in regards to getting insights to how the products being used, are the clients active, what accounts or what team members in those accounts are being active. Those are the top three tools. Pendo, Gainsight and ToTango. Number two, Co browsing. If you're doing any type
of customer success, sometimes you're going to need to see their screen. You're going to want to have them share their computer and have to kind of take over it and a remote onto their computer. So you can kind of click
around and show them. It's just a lot easier experience. And there's a few tools that I like. Upscope is the one that
I use most frequently. I would highly recommend it. Surfly number two. And then three, and kind of like present these in order of like maybe cost or complexity. And then finally Acquire. Check them out. I think they're worth a mention. But if you're trying to and even in customer support, if you're trying to like get access to another computer or
a customer's computer, those are the tools to use. Number three, Calendar. This is a big one. I mean, everybody's probably gotta calendar tool today. If you don't, you're spending way too much time trying to coordinate meetings, but the one that we use predominantly with our
customer success team is Calendly. I use it personally. We use it there. The other ones that I've seen used by a lot of other teams is Acuity and ScheduleOnce. We actually use scheduleOnce as well for our sales team. So it's interesting how different products evolve
at different levels. And I'm sure some of the reasons why we didn't use ScheduleOnce or Calendly for the sales stuff is
probably been fixed. But anyways teams have
the tools and preference they want to use and I let them make those decision. But check those out. If you're not using a calendar tool to allow yourself to provide availability and make it really easy for clients to book in with your team, either your, it could be an engineering resource or review some integrations or your customer success team, then you're just working way too hard, and honestly, you're not creating a
great customer experience. Number four, Surveys. So getting feedback, asking customers things like an NPS score, net promoter score, or your CSAT, which is your customer
satisfaction rating, or your, CX on your customer experience rating, CET, your customer experience score, CES. There we go. I'm gonna get it eventually. But using survey tools not only on product,
but on customer success, just to try to understand
where the friction is, understanding the heartbeat of the customer is really important. So I like these tools, I've used all three of them. Typeform is what we use for the most part. It's quick, easy. The user experience in the UX is really well designed. I don't like the fact
that they don't save state if somebody goes through a survey and they don't finish it. So that's kinda weird. Two is Ask Nicely, an incredible tool, well-versed, a lot of different features and then Delighted came
out five years ago. And we also use Delighted
for our NPS tracking. We hook it in to front
which is our email tool. And it works really well. But if you're not getting any feedback from your customers, if you don't have some kind of touchpoint, trust me, you're gonna wanna do that because when you get negative feedback, you're gonna wanna have, what's called a Red Playbook, so you can react. A lot of my clients that I coach, we build the Red Playbook to take a client that's at risk and turn them in to retained. Number five, Metrics. So the big metric you want to be measuring is a health score. Okay. I call it, sometimes I've heard HubSpot calls it the customer happiness in its index. I call it the member at
risk monitor framework. So that's the framework
I teach my clients. And there are tools out there that'll do this. many of the ones I mentioned earlier, Gainsight, Pendo, etc. But the ones that I think are just easy and you probably already have them is one ProfitWell, which is really around SAS metrics. So be sure to check out ProfitWell. shout out to Patrick one of my friends in the SAS world. He is an incredible guy, has built a great product. UserIQ is another one that'll give you that same kind of dashboard metrics, a
health score, big one. And then finally, CustomerSuccessBox. It's actually designed, and again, there's so
many overlaps on features, I just want to throw that out there. I know that CustomerSuccessBox
could have been an adoption management
platform and vice versa. It's just I wanted to
look at them independently based on, the kind of function
that was being used for. So those are the three that I recommend you need, need, need a health score. You need to design this. To me Customer success starts with the health score. From there, you can then ask yourselves all these other questions and deploy the tools that help you solve the problems that you discover. Number six, Help Desk. Now, much like email marketing tools, this list could be like 50 to a hundred. There's so many different help desk software out there. I'm going to mention the ones that I just personally like. And honestly one that I have a complete bias towards
because I'm an investor. So help Scout, amazing
company, check them out. A lot of my coaching clients use help scout. Zendesk, arguably the
category owner in that space. They're a publicly traded company. It's a great startup story, great product. But they're big, they're kind of like the Salesforce of Help Desk software. I apologise if the founder watches this. But it's true, kind of, you've built a way
better product, I think. But then finally Intercom, because it just offers
so many other features along with help desk and support. And I'm an investor in Intercom, so they're gonna make the list. They have built a world class product. They're an incredible company. They're playing the long game. So if you've already got it, use it. Some people actually have it and don't use it for the support side. I'm a big fan of less
tools because it removes, like it gives you the 360
review on the customer. It keeps everything integrated. You don't have to use Zaps to send data all around. So check those out. But the key with help desk software is creating your FAQ pages. You need the ability to create an FAQ for
customers as self-serve. 60 to 70% of your customers don't want to call, don't want to wait for an email. They don't mind searching your FAQ. So be sure that you have that feature in whatever tool you choose
to use for ticketing. Number seven, Screen Recording. So, a picture's worth a thousand words, okay. A video is worth like 10,000 words. So I'm a big fan because I've always run, distributed teams all over the world, right? Hundreds of people I've
hired over the years that work in remote distributed teams. And I'm a big fan of screenshots. I'm a big fan of recordings, audio, etc. And your clients are
gonna want the same thing. So tools that I love to
use for this purpose, I use Loom a lot. It's kind of a new entrance, a little buggy at times.
I'm not gonna lie. I also use CloudApp. That's number two, CloudApp does scream. Why do you use Cloud versus Loom? I just find the flow of Loom is a little cleaner CloudApp's great, I use it for screenshots And then Camtasia, again, is a bit more evolved. If you want to do kind of like higher production stuff, I think of Camtasia. I've used it in the past, it just feels a little bulky for some of the use
cases I'm using it for, but not having screenshot or screen recording ability as part of customer
success is a big no-no. It's just, you shouldn't
try to explain a client, go to this page and click on this button. You literally should
just record your screen, do it for them, ideally,
and then show them or screen record how they
could do it themselves to get them on block. Big, big, big benefit there. And number eight, probably a little left
field for some of you guys is Status Page. You know, as part of the software
world we all live in having the ability for clients to see the status of our infrastructure and our servers in our systems, so that they know if
there's an existing issue and you can kind of put it in your email signatures as a customer success manager. There's really, there's a bunch of ways you can do this. I've built it myself that just monitors the kind
of different infrastructure, but StatusPage.io is a great tool. And what's funny is
there's their competitor, which is Status.io which I've also used are essentially the exact same product. I've got to imagine they probably fight over some level of market confusion around copywriting. But for whatever it is, two different products, serving same need almost the exact same name and they both work or you can use open source examples. There's a bunch of
different solutions to that. But having a status page, I think is just a really great way to just button up the
ability for a customer to self serve, to understand, Oh, the servers are down, I don't need to email anybody at my account manager or whatever. I'll just see if it gets
fixed in the next hour. I mean, Twitter was
notorious for doing this when they had the Fail
Whale back in the day. A bunch of companies
now have status pages. So be sure, you make sure you add it to your stack. So quick recap of the eight core kind of areas and tools that you need. Adoption management is number one, number two, co-browsing, number three, calendar four surveys, five metrics, six help centre, seven screen recording and eight app uptime. As I mentioned at the
beginning of this episode, I want to give you a gift. It literally will make you money. It's called the EBR flow Planner, Executive Business Review, or you may have heard of QBR quarterly business reviews. But some people don't
do them every quarter. So I call it the EBR flow planner. You can click the link
to download your copy. It's not only the five hot principles to how to do an EBR, an Executive Business Review, but I'll give you the
exact meeting structure, the 9-box framework that I use, to not only get your accounts connected with your product, committed to delivering it, retained in a big way, but most importantly, upsell cross sell new opportunities to expand the revenue. At the end of the day, the game, the name of the game in
SAS is, land and expand. Get an account, grow the account and use the EBR flow planner to do that. Click the link, download. That is my gift to you. And as I mentioned, if you like this video, I didn't mention this. I mentioning it now. If you like this video, smash like button, subscribe to my channel and most importantly, click the notification button or the bell, that little thing. click the bell cause that'll tell you next time I publish a video, which I do at least every week, sometimes twice a week. I wanna make sure that you see them. And so you can do that. And as per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business. And I'll see you next Monday. Ooh.
