How do we work with our Exec team to help narrow down what we focus on?

To understand what initiatives are critical to focus on within your business, you need to take a data-driven approach. A quick strategy would be to understand the financial changes within your customer base (add-on dollars, churn dollars) and then review the activities that occurred with these customers. Analayze this data to understand trends, and how the CS team is driving outcomes and then eliminate non-crucial tasks.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) indeed often find themselves pulled in multiple directions with everything feeling urgent. It’s important to work with the executive team to prioritize and focus on what’s most important for the business and the customers. Here are some steps to help narrow down focus:

Step 1: Understand Strategic Goals: Make sure you have a clear understanding of the organization’s strategic goals and priorities. Understanding the company’s larger objectives will help you align your work and prioritize effectively.

Step 2: Understand your team's goals: How is your team measured? What is your current incentive structure? This gives you an understanding of what's important for your leadership. Ask the question why if this is not clear. For example, if your team is measured on number of customer meetings, a fair question to ask is why the number is important and how we measure the quality of such meetings. Customer meetings in itself is a pretty useless metric unless CSMs are delivering value in every call.

Step 3: Evaluate and Prioritize: Evaluate all current initiatives based on their alignment with strategic goals, potential ROI, resource requirements, and impact on customer success. Prioritize initiatives based on these criteria.

Step 4: Use Data: Data is a powerful tool to communicate challenges. Highlight key metrics such as the number of customers you manage, the frequency of interactions, customer satisfaction scores, churn rates, etc. Also, show trends over time, e.g., an increasing number of customers, increasing support requests, etc.

• Show Impact: Highlight the impact of being thinly spread. For example, show how response times, customer satisfaction, or renewal rates have been affected.

• Tell Stories: Share specific examples and customer situations that highlight the challenges you face and the impact on customers.

• Highlight the Risks: Clearly articulate the risks associated with being thinly spread. This could include risks related to customer satisfaction, retention, upselling, or referrals.

Step 5: Engage Your Manager: Engage your manager in the process and get their support. They can be an influential advocate for you and can help communicate the challenges to the executive team.

Great question! I've fallen in this trap so I'm speaking from experience here. You need to lead the conversation here and find the right answer, and don't just take orders from the various departments on what they want CS to focus on. Being too responsive here (rather than proactive) is how we land in the camp of doing "all the things" and creating a ton of thrash on the CS team.

My recommendation:

• Start by understanding what customers need. Talk to them-- customers of all shapes and sizes. Understand where they struggle to learn about and adopt your product(s) and build a prioritized list of those things. Record your customer interviews and save them were others can learn from them too.

• Work with your cross-functional partners to identify potential ways to serve the biggest customer needs. The answer to some of them may be a CSM, but challenge the business to find other solutions- whether supplemental to CSM or replacing a CSM answer.

• If you have friendly customers, this is a good point to share some of the ideas and get their reactions.

• Then you go back to the exec team with your point of view for where CSMs will focus and where they won't, and the other solutions that also need to exist.

• Repeat the customer listening > CSM scope conversation periodically or as your business changes significantly.