If you're new to customer success, what's a good way to think about, contextualize, and approach a 30/60/90 plan if you've never done one before?

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.

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.