Wynne Brown

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

The best way to improve your interviewing skills is good old-fashioned practice. And it is key to practice with another human so you can get feedback on how you are telling your stories. Customer Success is all about humans, so practicing in a vacuum won't give you what you need to improve. I love this expression: "Practice until you get it right; then practice until you can't get it wrong." You will want to have stories ready to showcase: 1. Your curiosity and aptitude for learning new things 2 ...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

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

What problem have you solved in your work that you are most proud of? This is a great question for a few reasons: If they fumble for an answer, they haven't been reflecting on their experience and professional journey so that is an easy red flag to spot Their answer tells you a great deal about their real values - what is really important to them - and lets you get to know them more deeply. If they've said they value collaboration but then their story is all about them solving a problem on their ...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

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