AMA: Gainsight Director of Customer Success, Meenal Shukla on Customer Success 30 / 60 / 90 Day Plan

As a customer success professional and leader, you should ask the following questions during your one-on-ones with your cross-functional teams during your first month at the company: 1. What are the goals and objectives of your team, and how do they align with the overall company goals? 2. What are the biggest challenges your team is facing, and how can we work together to address them? 3. How do you measure success for your team, and what metrics are you tracking? 4. How do you currently communicate with customers, and what feedback have you received from them? 5. How do you ensure a smooth onboarding process for new customers? 6. How do you identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities with existing customers? 7. How does your team work with other teams (e.g., product, sales, marketing, customer success, support) to ensure a seamless customer experience? 8. What are your team's priorities for the upcoming quarter, and how can customer success support those priorities? 9. How can we work together to ensure customers receive the value they expect from our product? 10. What feedback have you received from customers that we can use to improve our product and customer success efforts? These questions will help you understand your cross-functional teams' perspectives, identify areas of improvement, and ensure that customer success is aligned with the company's overall goals and objectives. It is essential to actively listen to their responses and work collaboratively to solve any challenges.

Here's a framework you can use to help prioritize: 1. Assess the current state of customer success: Before you can prioritize needs and deliverables, you need to assess the current state of customer success at the company. What processes, tools, and resources are currently in place? What is working well, and what needs improvement? 2. Identify critical stakeholders (internal and external): Who are the key stakeholders in the customer success function? This may include executives, sales, product, and support teams. Identify their needs and expectations for customer success. Who are the key stakeholders from the customer's side? It is important to understand who your buyers are and the market that you are working in order to define your plan. If you are working in a highly regulated field, for example, your customer success strategy will be very different than if you are working on an unconstrained market. 3. Define customer success goals and metrics: What are the key goals and metrics for customer success at the company? This may include customer retention, NPS, and expansion revenue. Define these goals and metrics so that you can prioritize deliverables that align with them. 4. Prioritize based on impact and effort: For each need or deliverable, assess its impact on customer success and the effort required to implement it. Prioritize those that have the highest impact and the lowest effort. 5. Create a roadmap: Once you have identified the most important needs and deliverables, create a roadmap that outlines the timeline and resources required to implement them. Prioritize those that will have the greatest impact on customer success in the short term, while also planning for long-term goals. 6. Monitor progress: As you implement changes, monitor progress and adjust the roadmap as needed. Regularly assess the impact of changes on customer success goals and metrics, and make adjustments as needed. By using this framework, you can prioritize needs and deliverables in a way that aligns with customer success goals and ensures that you are making the most impactful changes first.

Scaling a customer success team beyond the first customer success manager requires careful planning and execution to ensure that the team can handle the increased workload while maintaining high customer satisfaction. Here are some steps that can help: 1. Define customer success metrics: Before you start scaling your customer success team, it is important to define the metrics that you will use to measure success. This could include customer retention rates, customer adoption, NPS or other relevant metrics. 2. Hire the right people: When expanding your customer success team, you need to make sure that you are hiring the right people. Look for individuals with experience in customer success, strong communication skills, and a passion for helping customers succeed. If your product requires deep domain knowledge, make sure that the people you have hired have worked or have experience about that domain too. 3. Develop a training program: Once you have hired your customer success team, it is important to develop a comprehensive training program that covers your company's products and services, customer service best practices, and your customer success metrics. Create a BootCamp resource library for the relevant trainings one needs in order to be successful in your team. 4. Establish processes and procedures: As you expand your customer success team, you need to establish processes and procedures to ensure that everyone is working efficiently and effectively. This could include defining customer communication protocols, establishing escalation procedures, and setting up a system for tracking customer interactions. 5. Leverage technology: Technology can be a powerful tool for scaling your customer success team. Look for customer success software that can help automate workflows, track customer interactions, and provide valuable insights into customer behavior. 6. Continuously monitor and optimize: Finally, it is important to continuously monitor and optimize your customer success team's performance. Use the metrics you defined in step 1 to track progress and identify areas for improvement. Then, make changes to your processes, procedures, and training programs as needed to ensure that your team is operating at peak efficiency.

(Please also see the framework proposed for 30-60-90 day plan). As a customer success leader, it's important to establish quick wins in your first 90 days to demonstrate the value of the customer success function and build momentum. Here are some examples of quick wins to aim for: 1. Conduct a customer health check: Review customer data to identify any at-risk accounts or customers who are not getting the most out of your product or service. Work with the relevant teams to develop action plans to address any issues and improve customer satisfaction. 2. Conduct 1:1s with your team: Not just your immediate reports but at every level of the team to assess challenges, the overall morale of the team and any cross-functional friction. Ideally, this should be done in the first 30 days to inform your 90-day plan. 3. Define customer success goals and metrics: Work with key stakeholders to define customer success goals and metrics that align with company objectives. This will help establish a clear vision for the customer success function and ensure everyone is working towards the same goals. 4. Develop a customer feedback loop: Implement a process to collect and respond to customer feedback. This can include surveys, feedback forums, and regular check-ins with key customers. Use this feedback to inform product and service improvements and demonstrate your commitment to customer success. By focusing on these quick wins, you can immediately impact customer success and demonstrate the value of the function to key stakeholders. This will help build momentum and support for future initiatives.

I am assuming that given the size of the company, this question may be for the first hire in CS. First Month: 1. Understand the company's product and services thoroughly. 2. Familiarize yourself with the CS team processes. If there are no established processes (and you are a team of 1), ensure that you establish a risk escalation and management with clear lines of escalation to the product, support and services team. 3. Familiarize yourself with the customer data, including customer profiles, purchase history, and feedback. Understand what's the contract size look like and how the product is priced. 4. Understand what the key metrics that you are responsible for and accountable for in your new role 5. Introduce yourself to key stakeholders and establish a working relationship with them. 6. Make sure you are establishing cadence calls with the customers 7. Understand your customer's buying center: Who are the most relevant stakeholders in your customer organization 8. Begin creating a plan for measuring and achieving customer success (Especially if you are a team of one). First Quarter (If you are a team of one or the first hire of CS): 1. Develop a customer segmentation strategy to identify key customer groups and their needs. 2. Establish clear customer success goals and metrics that align with the company's business objectives. 3. Work with the customer success team to develop and implement a comprehensive onboarding process for new customers. 4. Identify opportunities to upsell or cross-sell to existing customers and develop a strategy to execute these opportunities. 5. Establish regular meetings with the sales team to discuss customer feedback, engagement, and issues. 6. Develop and implement a customer feedback survey to measure satisfaction levels. 7. Analyze customer data to identify trends, challenges, and areas for improvement. 8. Develop a plan to address any identified challenges and areas for improvement.

As the Head of Customer Success in a startup that did not have Customer Success Managers before, your primary objective would be to establish a successful customer success function. To do this, you must take a phased approach in the first 30/60/90 days to develop a foundation for success. Here are some possible goals you could set for the first 30/60/90 days: First 30 days: 1. Understand the company's products/services, customers, and their pain points. 2. Meet with key stakeholders such as sales, services, marketing, and product teams to understand their goals and align customer success strategies. 3. Analyze the current customer journey and identify areas for improvement. 4. Hire a team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) or identify existing employees to fill these roles. 5. Develop a customer success playbook and define the key performance indicators (KPIs) to track. Next 60 days: 1. Establish a scalable customer success process and standard operating procedures. 2. Create a customer onboarding program that ensures new customers receive a seamless and successful onboarding experience. 3. Define and implement a customer health score and identify at-risk customers to address any issues proactively. 4. Launch a customer advocacy program to drive customer referrals and positive reviews. 5. Provide coaching and training to CSMs to improve their effectiveness. Next 90 days: 1. Implement a customer success technology stack to automate and streamline customer success processes. 2. Develop a customer feedback loop to collect customer feedback and use it to improve products and services. 3. Analyze customer data to identify trends and insights that can be used to improve customer success. 4. Create a customer success roadmap to guide the team's efforts for the next six months. 5. Establish a culture of customer success across the organization, emphasizing the importance of customer-centricity in all business decisions. By focusing on establishing a strong foundation in the first 30/60/90 days, you can set your team up for success and build a strong customer success function that drives customer satisfaction, retention, and growth.

First 30 Days: Understand the lay of the land 1. Understand the current state of Customer Success: Meet the Customer Success Team and know the team members. * Understand the existing process of engagement, interaction, onboarding deployed by the customer success team * Understand the data and metrics captured by the customer success team. What are the metrics that the CS team is compensated on and how are they doing against those? Understand the GRR, NRR, and Cost to serve for every segment. Make sure that you know what is the historical achievement of these metrics. * Identify challenges, gaps, and points of friction. * Understand which tools are being used for Customer Success, get a demonstration of the solution used from your CS ops team and assess the current state of its deployment. 2. Meet with key stakeholders: Schedule one-on-one meetings with key stakeholders in the company, including executives, sales teams, product teams, and support teams. Get to know them, their goals, and their expectations for customer success. * Sales: Dive into the sales process, and understand their methodology and market sentiment. Understand the pricing strategy of the products and services. Deep dive into the challenges faced by the sales team. Understand customer segmentation, financials, metrics, churn etc. How are they capturing customer goals during the time of sales and how do they work with the customer success team around renewals and expansion? * Product: Understand the product, its value proposition, future roadmap, client feedback etc. Understand the competitive landscape of the product and the firm, peers, product differentiation etc. Become a product expert. Get a comprehensive download on the use cases to grasp product capability. * Services: What are the services option presented to the customer and what is the service penetration for ongoing services? Is your product complex and requires specialized services to onboard and maintain? What are the support tiers (premium, standard, elite etc)? How does onboarding to CS? Is CS responsible for onboarding and if not, is CS involved at the time of the onboarding? 3. Connect with the customers: Engage with a cross-section of customers across all segments. * Make sure that you are not only speaking with your best customers but also customers who are struggling and have the potential to churn. * Understand your customer's points of view, product feedback, challenges, expectations, engagement experience, etc. * Understand what ROI/Value means for your customers After completing all these interactions and conversations, it's crucial to reflect on them, take notes, and prepare for the next steps. Next 30 Days: Assess and strategize Over the next 30 days, the focus should be on gathering and analyzing data to gain a perspective on the business. 1. Getting deeper into Customer Success: * For Immediate Action Items: The Customer Success Leader should take immediate action on the areas that the management has highlighted as critical. This may involve handling at-risk customers, preventing churn, or engaging with key customers. In a rapidly growing company, it's common to encounter situations where one must learn how to build a plane while flying it. * Analyze customer success data and metrics to identify gaps and key focus areas such as churn reduction, engagement improvement, supplementing growth, improving customer experience etc. Some of the critical metrics one should be familiar with at an org level are: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Life-Time-Value (LTV), Average Recurring Revenue, Net Renewal Rates, Gross Renewal Rates, Annual Churn, Adoption and Engagement Scores. * Take a fresh look at the current customer segments, including their metrics, health scores, etc., to develop and implement segment-based interventions. Map out the customer experience journey, identify key touchpoints, and compare it with the existing framework to identify areas for improvement. * Begin creating process documents to standardize Customer Segmentation, Onboarding, Education, Customer Engagement, Adoption, Usage, and reporting. Develop churn, renewal, and growth plans to solidify the position of the Customer Success function. * Evaluate the team's current capabilities and compare them with the required capability to meet present and future goals, identify gaps, and start addressing them through hiring, training, or coaching. * Customer Succes Software: If the solution is not solving for your needs, make sure you are establishing a clear path of execution with the CS ops team. 2. Establish a working cadence with your Stakeholders: * Sales: Set up regular weekly meetings with Sales leaders and representatives to cover topics such as account health, churn and revenue forecasting, engagement plans, customer health scores, and NPS. Start having conversations on pricing decision-making processes. * Product: Collaborate closely with the product team and familiarize yourself with their product roadmap. Given the close relationship between Product and Customer Success and the many shared metrics between the two teams, it's crucial to integrate various types of reports and feedback, such as dashboards, usage reports, adoption reports, feature reports, churn reports, and NPS scores, in order to align with each other. Both teams must gather the voice of the customer, and it's essential to establish a process document that outlines conversations on alignment and report sharing to ensure that efforts are predictable and consistent. * Services: Work with services to define a process of Dsmooth handoff between services and Customer Success. Establish ROE and RACI if it is missing. 3. Establish rapport with your Customers: During this period, it's important to start proactively engaging with customers through activities such as Business Reviews, Usage Reviews, Escalation Calls, Churn Conversations, Expansion conversations, and more. The Customer Success Leader should take the lead in initiating periodic conversations or sense-checks with key client decision-makers. At the end of 60 days, one should have secured some quick wins, established rapport with the functions, grown influence with some key stakeholders and established rapport with key clients Final 30 Days: Refinement and Execution A Formal rollout of the Customer Success strategy : * It is necessary to formally implement a Customer Success Strategy that aligns with the metrics and plan. * Additionally, there should be a formal launch of the Customer Experience Journey Map that includes a comprehensive plot of interaction points for various functions with their defined purposes. * The Customer Segmentation Framework should be incorporated with clear and defined parameters. The Engagement Framework should be built around customer segments and personas, with defined objectives, metrics, timelines, and ownership. Key activities, such as onboarding, education, engagement, and reviews, should be standardized, and their effectiveness should be tracked through metrics. * Plans to drive scaled programs should start taking shape. The Customer Success Leader should introduce periodic dashboards with metrics at all three levels - Organizational, Functional, and Individual - and lead discussions with all relevant stakeholders. * Prioritizing decisions regarding efficiencies and effectiveness is crucial, and the adoption of a Customer Success Platform or an Integrated SaaS platform should be considered. Work on established goals with your Stakeholders: * Sales: The Customer Success team should play an active role in all post-sales interventions, including discovery, developing engagement plans, onboarding, education, health reporting, and business reviews. The team should also provide feedback to the sales department to help improve sales processes. Meetings should be scheduled periodically, and expansion plans, such as upsells, cross-sells, and referrals, should be collaborative efforts. There should be increased collaboration and cohesion between the Customer Success and Sales teams. The Customer Success Leader and Sales Leader should hold regular meetings, while representatives from both teams should work together to drive business outcomes. * Product: It is essential for the product team and the Customer Success Team to establish a regular schedule for meetings, either every two weeks or once a month. These meetings should focus on understanding Customer Sentiments, Feedback, Engagement, Adoption, Churn, and Feature usage. The meetings should have clear outcomes and next steps. Clients * Engagement should be based on a documented plan that has been approved by decision-makers. This document should include the following components: the objectives of the clients, goals or milestones to measure success, metrics, key intervention plans with timelines to achieve the goals, and sign-off from the necessary parties. Implementing such a plan will make the customer journey more predictable. 

Here are some steps you can take to create a strong 30/60/90 plan: 1. Understand your role and goals: Before you start creating your plan, make sure you have a clear understanding of your role and the goals you're expected to achieve. This might involve reviewing your job description, learning the complexity of the product, talking to your manager or colleagues, or doing research on the company's customer success strategy. 2. Break down your goals: Once you know what you're expected to achieve, break down your goals into smaller, more manageable tasks that you can accomplish in the first 30, 60, and 90 days. This will help you stay focused and make steady progress towards your overall objectives. 3. Prioritize your tasks: Once you have a list of tasks, prioritize them based on their importance and urgency. This will help you focus on the most critical tasks first and ensure you're making the most of your time. 4. Identify key stakeholders: As a customer success professional, you'll need to work closely with a range of stakeholders, including customers, sales teams, and product managers. Identify who these stakeholders are and how you can work with them to achieve your goals. 5. Curate: Build your 30-60-90 plan with the following ingredients in mind: Product knowledge, Domain Knowledge and Customer knowledge. Understanding and putting time into learning your product is critical. Learning about the domain and getting relevant certifications can be a part of your first 90-day plans as well if you are working for a company that requires highly specific domain knowledge. Customer knowledge, knowing who your customers are, what are their pain points that they are trying to solve with the product is just as critical. 6. Create a timeline: Once you have your goals, tasks, and stakeholders identified, create a timeline that outlines when you plan to accomplish each task. Be realistic about how much time each task will take and build in some flexibility to account for unexpected obstacles. 7. Communicate your plan: Once you have your plan in place, communicate it to your manager and colleagues. This will help ensure everyone is on the same page and can support you in achieving your goals. Remember, your 30/60/90 plan is a living document that can be updated and revised as you learn more about your role and the company. Don't be afraid to adjust your plan as needed to stay aligned with your goals and priorities.

I am going to answer this question from the perspective of a Customer Success leader: 1. How do you measure success in your role? What metrics do you use? (Understanding how the sales team is incentivized is important because that drives behavior) 2. Who are the important competitors that we see often during the sales cycle and post-sales? 3. Are services being sold as a part of the package and how are the services and support tiered? 4. What is the process from Sales to Services and Success handover? 5. How and where are the customer pain points that were discussed in the sales cycle recorded?? 6. Is sales involved throughout the customer lifecycle or only at the beginning? 7. How does the sales team work with their CS counterparts on top accounts and account planning? 8. How does the sales team identify expansion potential? 9. What are the current points of friction (if present) between sales and customer success? 10. Do sales own renewals or does CS owns renewals or is it a combined responsibility? 11. How early do sales get involved in renewal? Do you track that and is there a metric that will hold the sale team accountable (Send a quote 90 days in advance for example)? 12. Are there any auto-renewals? 13. What is the renewal term? Do we have multi-year terms? Do we have month to month? 14. How is the sales team structured? Is it at the product level, geo etc?

1. Surveys: Surveys are a popular way to gather feedback and needs from our customers. You can use surveys to ask specific questions about your products or services, customer service, pricing, and more. 2. Customer interviews: This method is particularly useful when you want to gain deeper insights into specific issues or topics. We interview all our churned customers to learn from the churn and solve systemic problems. 3. Customer feedback through support channels: Customer feedback can also be gathered through support channels such as email, phone, or chat. This feedback can help you identify common issues and areas for improvement. 4. Community: We use the customer community to solicit ideas and feedback from our customers. Our product, support and CS team regularly monitors our customer community. We use Insided from Gainsight. 5. Adoption analytics: Adoption analytics can provide insights into customer behavior, such as how they navigate your site, what pages they visit, and how long they spend on each page. This information can help you identify areas where customers may be experiencing issues or where they may be looking for more information. We use Gainsight PX for adoption analytics. 6. Persona-specific events: We create several events catering to different personas of our customers to learn about the customer needs. Think CXO summits, VP Coffee chats, Product beta cohorts, Product advisory board, Admin office hours, etc. Almost all of these are done virtually.