Slava Vidomanets’ Post

Customer Success Managers are at times "Optometrist". Help them see 20/20 Are your clients failing to harness the full potential of your superior product, despite its creation by top-tier engineers and programmers? Are they viewing the product through a distorted lens, leading to underwhelming performance against KPIs? This common challenge poses a significant threat to adoption rates. Drawing from my tenure as a Senior Customer Success Manager, I've repeatedly encountered this issue and have leveraged analytics to showcase the reality to clients. While the sales team may effectively showcase the product's capabilities to key decision-makers, I've often observed a gap in understanding among day-to-day operators. This disconnect means that all users within the organization are now perceiving the product through the limited perspective of operators lacking comprehensive insight. To bridge this gap, a prescription must be prescribed, proactive measures are essential. Relying solely on surveys and NPS scores can foster a false sense of security. Instead, delving into internal analytics and reporting is imperative to understand how usage patterns impact all users. This approach enables early detection and resolution of potential issues, product challenges, and training gaps. Additionally, a thorough review of the onboarding process is crucial. It ensures a deep understanding of client requirements, engagement of relevant stakeholders, and consistent check-ins and updates. Establishing a "user group" fosters a collaborative community that prioritizes collective learning and addresses clients' evolving needs, thereby maximizing ROI. Don't allow misunderstandings to hinder your product's success. By proactively addressing the gap between product capabilities and client utilization, you can ensure that clients derive maximum value from your premium offering. Be that Optometrist and fix correct those lenses.

Transform Your Customer Success Strategy: Eat This, Not That! Customer success is a journey, and just like choosing the right foods leads to a healthier lifestyle, choosing the right practices leads to thriving customer relationships. And just like a bad diet, sometimes we learn by doing it wrong the first time. Check out the images below to discover the optimal strategies for achieving customer success and steering clear of common obstacles that many businesses encounter as they expand from 5-20MM. 1. **Repeatable Plans and Processes**: Eat This: Structured, repeatable plans that ensure a consistent and reliable customer experience every time. Don't Eat That: Ad-hoc, disorganized approaches that leave customers confused and dissatisfied. 2. **Separate Roles for Support, Onboarding, and Customer Success**: Eat This: Clearly defined roles for Support, Onboarding, and Customer Success, each with specialized functions to maximize efficiency. Don't Eat That: Overlapping roles that create confusion and reduce effectiveness. 3. **Proper Tiers and Segmentation**: Eat This: Segmenting customers into tiers to tailor resources and support based on their unique needs and potential value. Don't Eat That: One-size-fits-all approach that fails to recognize different customer requirements. 4. **Sales Using Customer Success in Presales**: Eat This: Leveraging customer success insights during the presales process to craft compelling pitches and set realistic expectations. Don't Eat That: Ignoring valuable customer success data, leading to misaligned sales strategies and failure to launch. 5. **Charging Fees for Implementation**: Eat This: Charging for implementation to ensure clients are committed and recognize the value of their investment. Don't Eat That: Offering free implementations that may lead to lower engagement and undervaluing services. By integrating these practices, you will be scaling your customer success strategy that drives growth and satisfaction. Feel free to share your own experiences or pose any questions below!

You hired your first Customer Success Manager… now what? Bringing on your first CSM is a huge milestone! But what’s next? How do you ensure they’re set up for success and delivering results right from day one? Here's a quick breakdown of a 90-day plan to help guide your CSM to success: Week 1-2: Orientation & Training ▪ Attend orientation sessions to understand the company’s mission, vision, product, and customer base. ▪ Review existing customer onboarding materials and workflows. ▪ Shadow onboarding calls and customer interactions. Week 3-4: Start Handling Customers ▪ Begin managing 2-3 low-touch customer accounts under supervision. ▪ Conduct first onboarding and check-in calls. ▪ Set up goals with each customer. ▪ Familiarize with customer success tools (CRM, CS platforms). Month 2: Customer Health Monitoring ▪ Set up tracking systems for monitoring customer health. ▪ Run CSAT/NPS surveys for a set of customers and analyze data. ▪ Create personalized engagement plans for key accounts. Month 3: Own a Portfolio ▪ Manage a portfolio of 10+ customer accounts. ▪ Prepare and present a customer health report to leadership. ▪ Identify 2-3 upsell opportunities and develop a plan with the sales team. ▪ Gather product feedback from customers to present during team meetings. Key success metrics to watch: ▪ Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) ▪ Churn reduction ▪ Product adoption ▪ Upsell and cross-sell success What other tips do you have for new CSMs? Drop your insights below! If you’re looking to improve your customer retention and success strategies, let’s chat! At Huckleberry Consulting, we focus on helping businesses drive post-sale revenue by retaining customers and increasing their spend. GetCSM is all about finding and training top Customer Success Managers to help scale your teams. Message me or book a quick intro—let's discuss how we can ROI from your customer success efforts!

How mature is your customer success strategy? Most CS teams fall within one of these stages as they move from being purely reactive to proactive and integrated with sales and marketing. Stage 1 - React: In the react stage, customer success teams primarily respond to customer complaints and issues as they arise. At this level, interactions are mainly reactive, and customer success teams have minimal customer data to work with. In this stage, the customer support agent and customer success manager is often the same person. Stage 2 - Define: Companies begin to structure and organize their customer success teams, defining individual roles within the support process. Goals and performance benchmarks are established to guide decisions and measure success. Stage 3 - Manage:  Customer success teams leverage data and insights to take proactive measures. This involves strategic engagement with customers, refining success strategies based on feedback, and using metrics to guide actions. The focus shifts from reactive problem solving to proactive customer engagement. Stage 4 - Optimize: Customer success efforts are fully integrated with other departments like sales and marketing, ensuring a unified approach to customer engagement and retention. The focus is on continuous improvement and optimizing every touchpoint in the customer journey. With HubSpot's Service Hub's reinvention this year, your customer success team now has an entire suite of tools at their fingertips to manage their own book of business.

HubSpot Service Hub's 2024 reinvention offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to meet evolving customer needs and enhance your company's customer success maturity. The HubSpot customer success maturity model—react, define, manage, and optimize—provides a roadmap for companies to systematically improve their customer success strategies, ultimately driving higher retention, satisfaction, and growth. Here's what this looks like in actual practice and why it matters: Immediate Issue Resolution 💻 Service Hub provides quick issue tracking and AI-driven support 💥 Impact: You maintain customer satisfaction and reduce your churn Structured Suport Efforts 💻 Service Hub gives you a detailed knowledge base, customer health scores, and performance benchmarks. 💥 Impact: You enhance team efficiency and customer understanding. Proactive Customer Engagement 💻 Service Hub allows for strategic follow-ups, detailed dashboards, and proactive outreach. 💥 Impact: Your team is able to prevent issues, identify upsell opportunities, and drive revenue growth. Seamless Customer Experience 💻 Service Hub has built-in omnichannel support, advanced analytics, and continuous improvement. 💥Impact: You team delivers a five-star customer experience, enhancing retention and scalability. #customersuccess #allsystemsgrow #hubspot #servicehub

In the realm of customer success, consistent engagement isn't just beneficial—it's crucial. Yet, many CSMs underestimate the power of strategic follow-up. Here's why it's a game-changer: Conducting insightful discoveries? Check ✅ Crafting actionable success plans? Done ✅ Delivering exceptional service? Always ✅ But what happens when you're not directly engaging with your customers? The silence might not be as golden as you think. Here's what I've learned over the years: 💡 Silence often masks unspoken challenges. Don't wait for an SOS to act. 💡Generic check-ins contribute to noise, not value. 💡 Reactive strategies lead to missed opportunities and rushed solutions. Intentional follow-ups, tailored to the specific stages of your customer's journey, can significantly alter the outcome. With this, you can: 👉 Keep your customers actively engaged and on the path to success. 👉 Identify potential churn risks before they become critical. 👉 Shift from a reactive posture to one that's proactive and strategic. An example from my experience: A client was quietly struggling with adopting a new feature. Regular, focused follow-ups allowed us to catch this early, leading to a tailored training session that not only resolved their issue but also opened the door to upsell opportunities that we hadn't previously considered. Bonus Tip: Tailor the frequency of follow-ups to your customer's maturity. New clients might need more frequent check-ins, while seasoned users can be contacted less often.

What Customer Success Means to Me 🌟 Customer success is more than just ensuring clients are happy—it’s about building relationships, anticipating needs, and celebrating wins together. For me, it’s all about creating lasting partnerships where clients not only achieve their goals but exceed them! With 14+ years in customer service and operational management, I’ve been lucky enough to lead some amazing teams and work on projects that have made a real difference. From boosting customer satisfaction by 30% to securing a 90% retention rate through personalized strategies, I love getting into the details and finding creative solutions that work. Some of the highlights of my journey: • Leading and mentoring a team of 15 to deliver top-notch customer experiences. • Securing a continuous contract with the State of California Veteran Affairs • Implementing CRM systems and workflows that made everything run smoother and more efficiently. • Helping clients not only stay with us but become walking advertisers, thanks to a mix of upselling, cross-selling, and smart marketing. At the end of the day, it’s about making sure every client feels supported, valued, and excited to continue their journey. I’m passionate about creating those moments and finding ways to drive growth—for both clients and the company. Excited to connect with others who believe in the power of customer success! Let’s chat! 💬 #CustomerSuccess #ClientPartnerships #Leadership #CRM #Teamwork #GrowthMindset

Customer Success is more than a department. It's a strategy for enabling your buyers after the deal's signed. This philosophy of customer advocacy creates a domino effect that influences every part of your business. It's now 6-7X more expensive to acquire new customers than to hang on to the customers you already have. So, if your churn numbers are high, you're still losing money even if your revenue stream is strong. Customer Success is seeing many solutions spring up to help these teams support their customers at scale. Still, demo automation provides unique opportunities to enable users throughout their entire buyer lifecycle. Check out this blog post on benefits of adding demo automation to customer success strategies!

If your customer success strategy is based solely on one-to-one relationships, your customers are at risk. Why? 1. People leave companies. When your CSMs leave or your customer stakeholders leave their companies, your relationships disappear. 2. Your customers aren’t getting exposure to other people that sit in similar seats, have the same goals, and deal with the same challenges. 3. When different people do the same activity dozens of times per week, you have to spend a lot of time managing the quality of the work. And it’s a drag on resources. A new way: Scaled cs community programs. Here are a few tactical ways to get started: - Run a weekly new user onboarding webinar (vs. one-off calls with every new user) - Hold bi-monthly office hours call where customers can come together to talk about strategic topics related to their role. - Publish a bi-weekly newsletter with product updates and helpful content. - Launch a customer community organized by topics and customer journey stage (e.g., onboarding, optimization) where customers can ask questions and get answers from your team, partners, and other customers. Integrate LMS, Support, and knowledge base to create a centralized customer hub. - Allow product idea submission and up-voting in your online community. Work with Product Management to review and disposition ideas quarterly. - Hold topical webinars featuring customers and how they have used your product to solve advanced problems. - Create a knowledge base with bite-sized product guides, including videos and screenshots. Don't cancel *all* of the one-on-one customer calls; customers appreciate having a CSM, but... CSMs, Account Managers, and other customer-facing people need programmatic support to reduce their workload, improve consistency, and make customers feel like they are part of something bigger. How are you planning to scale customer success in 2025?

Customer success is the heart of a company’s growth strategy. But what truly defines success in this field? At its core, it’s about moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive value creation. 💡 In today’s fast-paced digital world, clients expect more than just service-they expect foresight. They want partners who understand their business goals and can provide tailored recommendations before issues arise. Building trust isn’t just about being there when something goes wrong, but being a partner who drives results consistently. So, how do we continue to shift toward a more proactive customer success model? I believe it starts with deep engagement, leveraging data to predict needs, and creating a long-term vision for client growth. What strategies are you using to move from reactive to proactive customer success?" #CustomerSuccess #ProactiveService #CustomerExperience #ClientGrowth