Customer-Centric Company Goals
This article was originally published last year, but it still relevant today. Enjoy!
By Russell Bourne
“The company laid off the entire Customer Success department”.
I’ve had multiple conversations so far in 2023 where someone said that to me. Are we surprised by layoffs right now? No. Do we expect an entire CS organization to be eliminated? Also no.
To be clear, SaaS isn’t about revenue anymore, it’s about profit. While it’s easy to become short-term profitable by cutting costs - like an entire team - surely you would see a devastating long-term revenue impact from taking away the primary points of contact for all of your customers. Surely investors would see what’s going on and not feel good about the direction of a potential investment.
Accordingly, it seems insane any executive would make such a decision; yet, they must have had a justification. Poor CS team performance, perhaps? Think again - I’ve seen an entire CS team be laid off even though they were overperforming year-to-date on their team goals. How could that happen?
Clearly, in these companies there’s a disconnect between executive leaders and leaders of customer-facing teams. The disconnect is one of two things: the company isn’t customer-centric, or the company is customer-centric but hasn’t acted on it. In this article, I’ll explore both.
Ask for Executive Engagement
If you’re a CS leader and you don’t know what your executive leadership team expects out of your CS organization, you have some work to do. Fortunately, the first step is simple: ask for a meeting. Specifically, the highest-ranking CS leader needs to ask for a meeting with their direct leader, and potentially include the CEO if the CEO isn’t their direct leader.
It’s easiest and most natural to ask for this meeting during annual planning cycles, and the agenda can be as simple as: “Align on company expectations of the CS team next year, and agree on goals for those expectations”. Mid-year, you can still frame the agenda as something valuable to revisit.
Your executive is either going to decline or accept the meeting.
A company’s existing customers account for the overwhelming majority of the company’s revenue in a given year. In the 2023 economy, it may be as high as 95%. If an executive leader won’t participate in goal-setting sessions with the leader of the team responsible for that number, it’s unlikely the company is customer-centric. Unfortunately, this may not be fixable and may be a sign you should consider moving on.
On the other hand, if they accept, you can proceed as follows.
Collaborate on Key Metrics and Goals
In the goal-setting meeting, you might start by asking, “Why does this company have a CS organization?” or “What are the company’s top goals and how does it expect CS to contribute toward them?”. The answers to those questions will probably come in the form of qualitative statements like “We expect you to keep the lights on (read: revenue retention)” or “We expect you to keep customers happy (read: CSAT)”.
Once you have those statements, continue collaborating and turn them into SMART goals. SMART goal-setting is a topic for a different article, but if you’re reading this and thinking it sounds a lot like creating a customer joint success plan, you’re right. If it helps, think of your CS team as a company and your executive as its customer. After all, they’re investing in you to solve a business problem, and it’s important to help them self-realize their hidden expectations so you can objectively meet them - otherwise, they might cancel.
Collaborate Briefly on Supporting Activities
If you came out of the goal-setting sessions with SMART goals that have executive buy-in, great. Now comes the fun part - going out and hitting the goals.
An executive, by the nature of their job, must focus on areas of the business at a high level of context. They need to focus on things like funding strategy, exit strategy, marketplace position, and so on - and less so on tactical details.
That being said, before you go off executing the tactical part, it’s a good idea to get their buy-in that your tactics are the right ones. The best way to get buy-in? Include them in high-level planning. Collaboration is consensus.
You may need to start at the beginning, by ensuring your CS team and your customer base are set up for success with each other. Our CEO Kristen Hayer wrote an excellent article about how to do this in a guest blog for ChurnZero last week. Segmenting customers, and then delivering customer journeys custom-built for each segment, is essential.
Within those customer journeys are valuable touchpoints which, if executed well, are the foundations of hitting your SMART goals. As an easy example, if you have a SMART goal that lays out an expansion quota, you could focus heavily on touchpoints involving discovery of a customer’s additional business problems your product suite solves. You’re hypothesizing that executing those touchpoints well (the tactics) will result in closed/won expansion deals (the SMART goal).
Close the Loop
Finally, make sure you reward your executive’s engagement with you by telling them how it’s going.
Many of us have had the unpleasant experience of working hard on a goal, meeting it, and presenting the results to someone whose reaction was something like “So what?” or worse, “We didn’t need that”. Think back to the CS team who hit its goals and was laid off anyway - it’s likely the executives of that company hadn’t had enough collaboration on whether CS team goals materially supported company goals. This is the power of presenting results on the key SMART goals to the executive who collaborated with you on creating the goal up-front - if they had input on which goals were important, they won’t question the “why” when you share results on those goals.
Plus, any time we present our results, good or bad, we need to be prepared to explain why they were what they were. By including the executive in framing out the supporting activities, they automatically believe your wins came from the great planning you did together; or they believe your losses were the fault of a bad hypothesis, not of you. Now, you still get to be in on testing the next hypothesis.
Business is truly survival of the fittest; company leaders who don’t have a clear idea of how each department contributes to the company goals are unlikely to meet their goals. As a departmental leader who takes the leap and asks for the goal-setting meeting, you’re showing you understand your value to the business, and are ultimately a major factor in its success.
The Success League is a global customer success consulting firm that also offers a CS Leadership Certification program which includes such classes as Setting Goals and Leading Change. Please visit TheSuccessLeague.io for more on these and our other offerings.
Russell Bourne - Russell is a Customer Success Leader, Coach, Writer, and Consultant. In a Customer Success career spanning well over a decade, his human-first approaches to leadership and program management have consistently delivered overachievement on expansion sales and revenue goals, alongside much friendship and laughter. Russell serves on the Board of Gain Grow Retain as co-lead for Content Creation. He is passionate about equipping individual contributors and business leaders alike to lean on their Success practices to grow their careers and help their companies thrive. He holds a BA from UCLA, and in his free time plays guitar semi-professionally.
