Keys to Scaling Your Customer Success Program In a recent Sandhill.com poll of Silicon Valley executives, many execs expressed concern over scaling their customer success teams while maintaining a high quality and personalized service experience for their customers. At Gainsight, we don’t believe scale and quality to be mutually exclusive. There are 3 key areas of focus that can ensure companies achieve their customer success goals and realize the economies of scale that are so important to growing businesses. On June 25th at 10 am PDT, Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight and world renowned SaaS expert, will show you how a customer success strategy focused on segmentation, automation, and documentation is key to scaling Customer Success. A customer success program that lacks strategic thinking in any of these areas is sure to fall short and unlikely to achieve scale or meaningful results. In this 60 minute webinar on the keys to scale we will discuss: - How can you implement automation without harming customer relationships? - What is the right strategy to segment your customer base? - Which process are important to document and which aren’t? The most successful Enterprise SaaS companies know that growing revenue only through new customer acquisition is the less efficient way to scale. Rather, they understand that growing revenue within your existing customer base - through up-sells, cross-sells, and expanded use - is the most profitable way to scale. In fact, Enterprise SaaS companies that grow revenue - and company valuation - by expanding revenue within their existing customer base also know the key to making this work is to focus on - and operationalize - Customer Success.

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Child-like Joy
June 25, 2015
The Keys to Scaling Your
Customer Success
Program
©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved.

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Housekeeping
• Q&A panel on your right
• Recording for colleagues who can’t make it
• All attendees will receive slides
• Twitter hashtag #customersuccess

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Presenter
Lincoln Murphy
Customer Success Evangelist
@lincolnmurphy

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What We’ll Cover Today
2 Customer Segmentation is Critical
3 Operationalizing around Segments
4 Automation and Technology
5 People and Processes
The Reality of Scaling a Customer Success
Program
1

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1. The Reality of
Scaling a Customer
Success Program

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The Reality of Scaling a Customer Success Program
• The best Customer Success Managers don’t
tell customers what they want to hear
• You tell customers what they need to hear

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The Reality of Scaling a Customer Success Program
• Everything in Customer Success is evolving
• Industry / Best Practices
• Your Company
• Your Customers
• Your Organization

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The Reality of Scaling a Customer Success Program
Which means "set it and forget it" cannot exist in
any aspect of Customer Success.

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The Reality of Scaling a Customer Success Program
You came here for specific answers… but I can’t
give those to you in a setting like this.
#truth

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The Reality of Scaling a Customer Success Program
If you get a definitive answer on how to scale your
Customer Success Program – or anything in
Customer Success – from someone that isn’t
speaking to you about your situation… be careful.

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When Planning to Scale a Customer Success Program
• Study Current Best Practices
• Look for Frameworks
• Explore Methodologies
• Be Thoughtful and Creative

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When Scaling, don’t ask “Will it Scale?”
• Do what needs to be done
• If it works, you’ll ask “how can I scale this?”
• If this happens, you’ll figure out a way!
• “Will it scale?” as a starting point will lead to
premature optimization and may keep you
from even getting started.

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2. Customer
Segmentation is
Critical

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Customer Segmentation is Critical
• Scaling a Customer Success Program requires
leveraging (scarce) resources wisely
• The most effective way to do this is to segment
your customers and assign resources logically
• Only by segmenting customers logically can you
develop an appropriate coverage model

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Most Common != Best For You
• Customers are generally segmented by current
annual revenue (ARR) / contract value (ACV)
• Easy to look at customer data and see the natural
segments across revenue bands
• Relatively easy to extrapolate costs associated with
each segment
• Unfortunately this may not tell the whole story!

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Customer Success Benchmark Report
Download
Your Copy
Today!
http://j.mp/csmbench

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Caveat on the Benchmark Report
• Represents a moment in time
• Customer Success is Rapidly Evolving
• Best Practices aren’t widely adopted… yet.
• We’re working on that!

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The Scientific Method

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The Scientific Method

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The Scientific Method
• Create a Customer Segmentation Hypothesis
• Basic Components of a Hypothesis
• What you are testing
• What impact we expect the change to have
• Who you expect it to impact
• By how much
• After how long

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Three Basic Types of Customer Segments
Shared
Characteristics
Shared
Characteristics
Requirements-
Based
Requirements-
Based
Value-BasedValue-Based

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Three Basic Types of Customer Segments
Shared
Characteristics
Shared
Characteristics
Requirements-
Based
Requirements-
Based
Value-BasedValue-Based
• Company Size
• Industry / Vertical
• Company Size
• Industry / Vertical
• Level of Support
• Number of Touch
Points
• Level of Support
• Number of Touch
Points
• ACV (Potential)
• Social Proof
• ACV (Potential)
• Social Proof

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Common Segmentation Questions
• How do you decide the best way to segment
your customers?
• Will there ever be a case where you can segment
across multiple criteria?
• How can you be sure you made the right
decision in your segmentation model?

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3. Operationalizing
around Segments

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Operationalizing Around Segments
• Start by understanding the customers that make
up the segment.
• Their Desired Outcome – Required Outcome and
Appropriate Experience
• What Success Gaps you need to bridge
• The Proactive Orchestration necessary to help
them reach Success Milestones

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Three Types of Customer Engagement
• Pre-planned, Proactive engagement
• Onboarding, QBRs, Lifecycle Messages
• Ad-hoc, Proactive engagement
• Alerts, Changes to customer health
• Reactive Engagement
• Break/Fix, Bugs, How-to

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Coverage Levels
• Map the Coverage Level to
their Desired Outcome
• Look at the level of touch
required across the entire
customer lifetime
Tech TouchTech Touch
Medium
Touch
Medium
Touch
High
Touch
High
Touch

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Tech TouchTech Touch
Medium
Touch
Medium
Touch
High
Touch
High
Touch
Coverage Levels: High Touch
• Multiple in-person
meetings during a quarter
(depending on each
customer’s initiatives)
• QBR meetings
• Creation of a blueprint
success plan
• One-to-one meeting(s)
with your executive staff

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Coverage Levels: Medium Touch
• One in-person meeting per
quarter (or as needed)
• Focus on at least one high-
value meeting per month
via online or video
conferencing
• One-to-one meeting with
your executive staff
Tech TouchTech Touch
Medium
Touch
Medium
Touch
High
Touch
High
Touch

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Coverage Levels: Tech Touch
• Webinar-style one-to-many
customers meetings on product
adoption
• Monthly to quarterly newsletter
• Email campaigns
Tech TouchTech Touch
Medium
Touch
Medium
Touch
High
Touch
High
Touch

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Common Segment Operationalization Questions
• After Segmentation, how do you prioritize
customers?
• How do you balance what the customer needs vs.
what my segmentation dictates?
• How do you know when you've sold to the wrong
customer?

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4. Automation &
Technology

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Automation and Technology
• Customer Success Management
• Orchestration across the Lifecycle
• Varies across “touch” levels
• Technology enables Scaling, especially in areas
where scaling humans costs too much

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Automation and Technology
Automation is - or should be – what we’d do manually
if we had unlimited time and resources.

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Automation and Technology
• Allows you to scale touches with low-revenue
customers instead of letting them fend for
themselves or opting not to serve them
• Helps you deepen your engagement with those
customers you already have a high-touch
relationship with

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High-Touch and Automation Don’t Mix?
• Will it hurt our relationship?
• Will automation erode trust?
• Is it unethical to pass off automated emails
as “personal” emails?

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The Scientific Method

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Gainsight: Scalable Customer Success
http://access.gainsight.com/copilot/
High
Touch
Medium Touch
Tech Touch
STRATEGY
ENTERPRISE
MID-
MARKET
SMB
SEGMENT
PRO-ACTIVE
Customer360
JUST-IN-TIME
Cockpit
AUTOMATED
CoPilot

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Gainsight CoPilot
http://access.gainsight.com/copilot/

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5. People &
Processes

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People First
• Know where people fit
• Some people like interacting with other people in
person or on the phone (high-touch)
• Some people are more analytical or creative, but
don’t do well in 1:1 situations with customers
(tech-touch)
• Map Resources to Customer Segments

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People Power!
• Company Leadership
• Organizational Leadership
• Team
• Individual Contributors

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Humans
• Company Leadership
• Customer Success must be top-down
• Company buy-in is critical due to cross-functional
requirements
• Must communicate what “success” is for Customer
Success

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Humans
• Organizational Leadership
• Develops Customer Success Strategy
• Builds and Leads CSM Org
• Sells (and continues to sell) Customer Success to rest of
the company
• Ensures a Deliberate Focus for the CSM Org and
pushes back where required

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Humans
• Team
• Aligned around a core set of principles and Goals
• Operationalized around logical customer
segments
• No Silos between segments

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Humans
• Individual Contributors
• CSMs, Ops, Customer Marketing, Renewals, etc.
• Empowered to Help Customers achieve Desired
Outcome
• Trusted to push customers toward success
where required
• Knows where to focus, but is kept updated on
evolution

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Scaling CSM Doesn’t Happen in a Vacuum
• Product
• Focused on our customers’ Desired Outcome
• Sales & Marketing
• Acquiring the right customers
• Support, Operations, Etc.

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Processes Second
• Customer Success Management
• Single Version of the Truth
• Document and Centralize Processes
• Orchestrate via Workflows and Playbooks
• Operationalize the Handoffs
• Between Teams
• Between CSMs

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http://www.gainsight.com/pulsecheck2015/

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Customer Success Benchmark Report
Download
Your Copy
Today!
http://j.mp/csmbench

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Q&A
©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved.
June 25, 2015

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THANK YOU
©2015 Gainsight. All Rights Reserved.
June 25, 2015