AMA: RocketReach Senior Director, Customer Success & Sales, Wynne Brown on Customer Experience

The key to ensuring smooth customer onboarding are simple, powerful and sometimes hard to achieve: 1) Setting clear expectations on the path with milestones and timelines, and then get customer sponsor buy in: you will fail if you don't have a counterpart on the customer side that is equally invested in onboarding. 2) Meet users where they are: in this digital and high speed world, you have to have an offering that is on-demand and ideally in-product. Even your largest enterprise customer spendi ...Read More

Before you can worry about reducing TTV, you need to make sure you have clear definitions of what that value means. The sliding scale of standard to fully custom will depend on your product: commodity out of the box all the way up to an enterprise platform. Once you have a clear definition of value, publish to your customer a plan about how to capture that value on a timeline. The crucial part? Who owns what piece. The most common blocker to TTV is your Customer not know what to do when. Start a ...Read More

When we think about turning around at-risk Customers, the first step is to create categories that allow you to run plays against the risk. This seems obvious but often teams get paranoid and worried... and worry is not actionable. Throw into the mix that it is 2023, and it feels like so many more customers than usual are at-risk. Likely you think a customer is at-risk because usage has dropped off. The best defense against this is early intervention; have their priorities changed? Their strategi ...Read More

In many ways, Customer Success is the hub of all activity in a company. Sales needs to know where they are winning or losing with the expectations they're setting; overselling or selling shelfware will cause churn. Marketing needs to know what customers are thriving with your solution so that you can evolve your ICP; they also need great customer stories to fill your website, case study materials and panels. The product team loves what they build and they need to know if the baby is beautiful or ...Read More

Having a Customer Success Platform (CSP) is crucial to be able to personalize the customer experience. You should not even attempt to personalize without a CSP that will allow you these crucial things: 1) relating users to an account and the total spend of that account (this helps you prioritize since none of us have enough time to do everything) 2) setting benchmarks for what healthy usage looks like for different types of users 3) track user behavior against those benchmarks With this type of ...Read More

As you grow, the fear is that the quality of what you deliver will degrade. The question here is how to keep it consistent... but I pose that as your customer base grows, your customer experience should improve. The more data, the more insights, the more you should be able to more rapidly adapt to what is working and what is not. Here are the foundational components that you need to set up and that constantly improve as you get more and more data via a growing customer base: 1) Customer journey: ...Read More

The only constant is change and that should go for the customer journey as well. The assumption in this question is right: the customer journey should always be evolving. The market evolves, customer needs evolve...so your mapped customer journey should evolve too. The best approach to continuously improving the customer journey is listening. Listen to your customers and hear from them where they are frustrated or experiencing friction. Listen to your data by watching the key milestones in onboa ...Read More

There are two forums for showcasing and celebrating - most of you are thinking maybe there is just one? Case studies and panels, etc? I'm actually not going to talk about that since that is what is more well known. Let me pivot this question instead to talk about the second forum: internal. As your company grows, your non-customer facing staff grows. Whether it is back office folks in business functions like BI or Finance, or engineering functions like devs or QA, there are plenty of colleagues ...Read More

There a few "plays" you should always be ready to run when you think about customer relationships: 1) Change in champion: folks switch jobs. The loss of your champion can be engagement-killing if you haven't multithreaded. For every strategic account, you should have multiple contacts. For every large account, you should have more than one contact. Only for your VSB or SMB segments that should be running on a fly wheel anyway is it reasonable to think you would only have one contact. 2) The cust ...Read More