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Whether your customer success team is in its infancy or more established, it’s important to have a strategy in place to ensure your team’s success as they approach a new quarter. With about a month to go until quarter’s end, it's a great time to reset the dials, take a step back, and ensure you (and your customers) are prepared for the upcoming quarter. It important to start now, so the last couple weeks of the quarter (that valuable time reserved for closing deals and renewing contracts) doesn’t disrupt your preparedness.
Unfortunately, many organizations put new quarter preparation at the end of their to-dos and it certainly does feel that way for CSMs. It's crucial to have a game plan in place to set both you and your customers up for success.
The health of a SaaS business and its customer success department are directly tied to its ability to retain its customers and prevent churn. To do this, you have to ensure that your customers are happy. That means making sure they get the promised business benefits and value of your software.
Here are 3 techniques you can adopt to prepare for each quarter:
Similar to ensuring your customer is prepared for the next quarter in terms of product usage, it’s just as important to understand their goals and KPIs.
Here are a few questions to ask your customers:
Discuss KBOs (key business objectives) and KPIs with your customers and, if possible, try to understand how your key stakeholders are measured and comp’ed. Knowing and documenting those important measurements will ensure clear alignment in the coming quarter.
Asking these questions and having a keen sense of what success means in the following quarter and then striving to hit those KPIs with your customer is incredibly important. Going blindly into a new quarter (or new year, if you’re approaching Q4) without having that all important conversation will set you behind before the quarter even begins.
Preparing your customer for the following quarter is about understanding where they are in the customer success journey (cycle) and having a keen understanding of what they need to do in order to be successful. Many of your customers may have recently completed quarterly planning exercises and have outlined their plans to drive success in the following quarter. Make sure you are aligned with their plans.
Reviewing those now will ensure you’re helping your customer hit the ground running in achieving those goals. Often times, this means reviewing how they are currently using your product or service, asking questions about what could be better or why members of the team are not more engaged. Dig deep into use cases and help them identify new and innovative ways to use your product or service to see the most value and return so they are sure to renew when the time comes.
In addition, understand your customer’s industries. Are they in retail? If so, Q4 is likely one of the most crucial times of the year for them, and it’s important for you to understand how your product fits into their stack. What do they need from you in order to be exceptionally successful? What can you do to help ease the burden or give them more information on how to thrive during these busy months? No matter their industry, take it upon yourself to understand what success means in Q4 and even in Q1, and how you can ensure they meet those goals.
As a customer, there’s nothing worse than having limited interaction with a customer success representative, only to get an “urgent renewal” notification at quarter’s end. Or worse, a pushy upsell for a product or service that had never before been introduced, with a generic sales message. This communication strategy is frustrating for the customer because they feel like they are only valued for their money, versus feeling valued as a true partner. And for a CSM, it creates that awful end-of-quarter stress that can keep you up at night, and following up with customers last minute to push upsells or renewals over the line. This scenario is less than ideal for both parties.
As a CSM, it’s important to understand exactly where each customer is in the buying or renewal process, and to map out an engagement plan that starts weeks - if not months - before the actual line-in-the-sand renewal date. This engagement plan should consist of an internal evaluation of the products and services the customer currently uses, a recommended path forward directly aligned to customer goals, KPIs and KBOs as discussed above, and a plan of when and how you will engage with the customer to present them with your plan.
Start the education process early, listen to their questions, and respond thoughtfully. The technique of working in advance for renewals and upsells will help both parties win - and will certainly make the end of the quarter much less threatening. In addition, you’ll have visibility into the health of the customer weeks or months in advance, giving you a chance to be proactive in the process.
Preparing effectively for the EOQ (end of the quarter) is just as important for the CSM as it is the customer. While the above 3 techniques are important, there are certainly many more ways that CSMs have found to be successful.
How does your customer success team prepare for the end of the quarter?
Check out our resources below for more customer success best practices and insights for how your organization can approach customer success with the customer at the center:
eBook:
5 Ways to Surprise & Delight Your Customers
Blog Posts:
The Golden Rule of Customer Success: 8 Guiding Principles
6 Listening Techniques of Great Customer Success Leaders
Learn more about how ClientSuccess can help your company develop a strong customer success methodology and strategy with easy-to-use customer success software by requesting a 30-minute demo.
