Hello, I was curious if anyone had best practices for managing success plans for accounts that could have different teams/divisions in different lifecycle stages. For example, a live customer may expand by adding a new team/division that would go through our customer journey starting at onboarding but the overall account would be live and in a different journey stage. Would it be best to have multiple success plans by opportunity for an account or have one success plan that accommodates expansion? Thanks!
Question
Success Plans - How to manage a customer in multiple lifecycle stages
+11Hi
I love this question because it shows you’re thinking carefully about the long-term. One probably needs more business detail on your goals what you’re trying to accomplish as a CS team to offer a complete solution, but here are a few things to ponder:
- I personally believe that a customer can be in a certain lifecycle stage, but that various parts of a customer relationship may be ahead or behind that stage. In your example, you may have a customer who is mature and obtaining value, so much so that they’ve added a team which isn’t mature and is back at Square One.
- I think of a Success Plan as a long project: it has a beginning and a clear end. Hopefully at the end, you’re celebrating success that you defined as success criteria, or a desired outcome, at the beginning.
- I personally favor unique Success Plans based on outcomes. If the outcome is Onboarding, that’s a Success Plan. If the outcome is growth, that’s a Success Plan. If the outcome is gaining advocates, that’s a Success Plan.
- That will help you file your Success Plans into Success Plan Types. And with Success Plan Types, you can then link up templates that are specific to the outcome.
- That helps the CSM team and the customer focus on getting to those individual outcomes, and celebrating when you get there. This can be a bit less of a jumble than if you’ve got a new onboarding outcome mixed in with a long-term growth outcome.
I hope that’s helpful, and enables you to weigh potential solutions based on what exactly you need to accomplish.
Making people their best....currently disguised as a CS Ops Architect. How can I contribute to your success?
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