Being the Main Character
By Kristen Hayer
I haven’t made it a secret that I like TikTok. One of my dogs is a minor TikTok star. It is the one social media platform that isn’t about looks or status – it is a place for nerds on any given topic to join forces. One of my new favorite creators on TikTok is a businesswoman, roughly my age, who claims to be the main character in her story. I love that. Too many women take a back seat to the guys in their lives, and live for their kids, their partners or their family. Or their customers.
Yes, this post is about Customer Success. As the CSM, it is your job to help customers, but your role is to be the main character in the story. You need to embrace the fact that you are the person whose primary job it is to help your customer get value from your solution. And value doesn’t always mean saying yes. It doesn’t mean giving in to every request. It means being the person your customer can depend on to tell the truth and provide guidance. It means being the main character.
How can you live that out every day?
Run Your Meetings
If you got a customer to show up for a meeting, you’ve already won a battle. However, facilitating that meeting well is how you get them to come back for the next one. As the vendor of a solution, you are the one who knows best. You know how to implement it, modify it, and draw the most value from it. You need to plan the agenda for your meetings, effectively run your meetings, and make sure that every attendee is walking away with some tangible value. That value could be a story about how another customer used your solution in an innovative way, or it could be as simple as giving your customer a best practice to implement. Make sure every meeting is valuable. If you suspect that an upcoming meeting isn’t going to add value, cancel it, or change the agenda.
Highlight Best Practices
Customers, especially executives, love to hear about what other companies are doing and how they could be doing things differently. The whole point of having leaders is to have people who are out there looking for ways to be better. This drives growth and helps organizations avoid becoming stagnant. CS professionals who continuously point to best practices for their field and highlight how a customer could improve tie into this need for continual growth. It is easy to prove value to a customer in year 1: They went from nothing or something worse to a good solution. It is harder to prove value to a customer over time. You should be continuously suggesting ways to be better, grow more or drive more value.
Own Revenue
I’ll be honest, I’m over the whole conversation around whether CSMs should own revenue. They absolutely should. What does this mean? Well, there is a spectrum of what it means to own revenue. On the light side, it means you should be responsible for making sure customers renew their contracts. On the more robust side, it means you should handle every deal that happens after a customer agrees to your service in the first place. Where you or your company land depends on several factors, but at a minimum, you should take responsibility for uncovering growth opportunities and making sure customers see enough ongoing value to renew. Otherwise, why have a CS team?
CS Professionals need to step up, and in TikTok terms, get some main character energy. By owning and managing their customers in a proactive and business-focused way, they will prove value and drive retention. They will also prove themselves as a competent leader, which only helps their career as they move forward in customer success.
The Success League is a global Customer Success consulting firm focused on building and developing top performing CS programs. Learn more about what solutions we offer by visiting our website at TheSuccessLeague.io
Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with growth-stage tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of 3 podcasts about the field: Innovations in Leadership, CS Essentials with Gainsight, and Reading for Success. Kristen serves on the boards of the Customer Success Leadership Network, the Customer Success program at the University of San Francisco, and the Women in Leadership Program at UC Santa Barbara. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.
