AMA: Hook Head of Customer, Natasha Evans on Enterprise Customer Success

Personally I'm always a fan of holding CSMs accountable to a retention $ or % target, so that's always up there for me. I do also think that having an expansion component becomes more compelling for Enterprise CSMs as it is common to spend a lot of time working closely to help your customer achieve their business goals, which can naturally lead to an upsell. From there, I'd think of 2 other things: 1) Relationship/customer journey based KPIs: I expect every Enterprise customer to get shown the value they're getting from your platform/service on a regular basis and I'd expect Executive engagement regularly too. 2) What are the leading indicators of retention or upsell? I want to see the health score of an Enterprise customer and I want to see things like which teams within this larger customer are adopting and getting value vs not.

On top of all the usual traits of being a great CSM, I think of 3 things when I think of great Enterprise CSMs: Stakeholder engagement: To me in Enterprise CS this is the ability to confidently communicate with the C*suite, the ability to multi-thread across an organisation and the ability to achieve the buy-in of multiple stakeholders towards a common objective. Change management: As an Enterprise CSM you're usually dealing with much bigger and more complex organisations, and so you can't take all the action items yourself. This means you've got to get out of the weeds and focus on the bigger picture; driving a change to meet the customer's objective. You've got to be much better at both holding your customer accountable to executing their actions AND guiding them through what they need to do to drive this change. Project management: Essentially, being great at tracking all the strategies and corresponding actions that need to be completed in order to achieve the customer's objective, as well as being able to communicate this in a clear and concise manner to the customer. Your goal here is to keep everyone on track.

The ability to do this well totally depends on the size of your organisation but there's a couple of easy things that stand out: 1) Ask your product team to join specific calls and get feedback live from the customer 2) Set up a CAB (Customer Advisory Board) that invites your top and most forward-thinking customers to meet in a formal setting with your product team 3) Collect feedback in a repository that can easily tell the story of the feedback from your Enterprise customers

Question: You've got a brand new Enterprise customer starting tomorrow, $X ARR and X users. (Align the scenario to your business). You're walking home from work and you spot a lamp on the side of the road. You pick it up, rub it and a genie pops out. He says you can have 3 wishes that apply to this new customer and you can ask for anything in the world that you think will make this customer successful with you. What I'm looking for here: 1) How you handle having things thrown at you that you didn't expect :-) 2) What you focus on, in terms of what you think would lead to success. If you focus on training or product requests, you're not at the level of change management, project management or stakeholder alignment that I need.

I think that Enterprise Customer Success means different things to different companies. This term Enterprise is used very freely and generally means CS for your larger organisations. But you must first determine for your business size, what is a large organisation to you? And why do you think they need a different level of service? What's the feedback you've been getting or what are the difficulties you've been facing with your current model for these customers? That should tell you everything you need to know.