June 4th 12:00 – 7:00 PM
Registration Check-In and Conversation: 12:00 – 1:00
The Profitability Blueprint:
The Mission of Customer Success is to increase sustainable proven value for both the Customers and the Company. While the majority of Customer Success groups have become directly involved with managing income streams and profitability over the past 5 years, there has been little real discussion to date about the issues of actually proving the sustainable value of Customer Success to either the Customers or to the Company. It’s time for that conversation to start.
The 2019 Customer Success Standards Initiative Research survey asks: How many additional income channels does your company have beyond your primary product? The next question is about an increasingly vital issue: Which of the following income/revenue channels are either completely owned/managed by the Customer Success team, or the credit is shared between the CS team and other departments?
Questions
What does it mean for a Customer Success group to become a profit center? What are the phases of the journey, and how should the change be managed?
Proving your value to the company in financial terms is vital, but that’s only half of the challenge. How will you work with the customers to show the sustainable proven value that they are receiving from their relationship with your company?
Can you safely leave the onboarding phase up to the customer? Probably not, but how can you not only cover the costs of the professional team but also show a significant profit?
Making sure your executive team understands the positive impact your CS team has on sustainable profitability is critical. What are the specific tactics and actions you can take to get the executive team to commit the time, budget, resources and internal alignment you need?
Making a strong argument to secure more resources isn’t impossible. It just requires a deeper dive into the numbers to ensure your investment makes financial sense. What is the true cost of hiring, and how should you position your resource needs in terms of ROI?
The Profitability Blueprint is the result of over 9 years of research conducted by The Customer Success Association and the expertise of people who have “been there and done that.” Join us in Denver to explore what the answers might look like in your company.
Sessions: 1 pm – 5 pm
Best Practices: Removing Barriers to Monetizing Customer Success
Customer Success teams add huge value to their customers. To become a profitability center requires a complete transformation of their organization including process and technology changes. That’s a lot of change, for any size organization. As such, to be effective, the monetizing transformation requires a careful end-to-end change management process that has the customer needs and wants in the heart of it.
In this session, Irit Eizips, CEO for CSM Practice, will share a proven methodology to launch such an initiative in a manner that would be well adopted by your customer success managers, get the executive buy-in and be well received by your customers:
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- Identify needs (internal and external)
- Back your assumptions with data
- Develop service offerings
- Educate EVERYONE
- Plan for worst case scenario
- Launch by region
- Gauge for impact
- Adjust
- Prove value
- Create a pipeline!
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Irit Eizips
Irit Eizips is a Customer Success thought leader whose mission is helping startups to Fortune 100 enterprises, establish a proactive and scalable customer success practices. Irit is frequently featured in podcasts, books, and industry events as a subject matter expert on customer success strategy. In 2014, Irit founded CSM Practice, a boutique consulting firm providing strategy and technology services. Irit is known for her unique experience and expertise in launching customer success programs at scale, based on best practices, automated playbooks and client data analytics.
Best Practices: Customer Goals and Outcomes
One of the most important skills a CSM can obtain is how to uncover the reasons a customer made the purchase and continues to use the product, how to work with a customer to define clear goals, present progress and outcomes to the customer, and what to do if customer expectations change over time. Customer Outcomes have little to do with your solution, and everything to do with what your solution will help them accomplish.
We will address the follow topics to help CSMs learn this invaluable skill
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- Understand what Customer Outcomes are
- How to uncover Customer Value Points
- Turning Expectations into Goals & Aligning with Customers
- Measuring, Tracking and Presenting Customer Goals and Outcomes
- How to navigate when Expectations Change?
- Take away a Customer Goals Planning Worksheet to use with your customers
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Amy Mustoe
Amy Mustoe is a Sr. Consultant with The Success League, a consulting firm focused on helping CS Leaders educate, inspire and grow amazing teams. She believes that customer success is the key to driving revenue, client retention and exceptional customer experiences. Prior to The Success League, Amy built and led several award-winning customer success teams in Saas and Healthcare, most recently SendGrid and Cloud Elements in Denver/Boulder. She is passionate giving back to the CS community and spends time coaching and bringing CS practices to the Start Up Community including leading the first CS Track at Boulder Start Up Week. Amy lives with her husband, son and 2 slightly crazy cattle dogs in Lafayette, Colorado.
Best Practices: Premium Onboarding Packages
Without a successful customer onboarding program, most of your customers will never fully realize the value of your product or service. While the pre-sales journey has matured dramatically over the last ten years, the post-sales journey is still ad hoc and reactive. Customers struggle to figure out your product and are burdened to connect the dots between customer-facing resources. Internal teams use heroics to save accounts, are under resourced, and exhausted.
McKinsey says that onboarding customers is the most important part of the customer journey. They find that when you carefully monitor and engage customers throughout rollout, you’re on a path to a lucrative customer relationship. Yet, even though onboarding is vital, it’s the main cause of churn. Front loading the relationship with prescriptive guidance and an orchestrated onboarding program is the game changer. But how are you supposed build a comprehensive program with limited time and resources? The answer is to create premium onboarding packages and then charge your customers for them. When you do this your customers are more accountable because they value your services, and your leadership team is more likely to resource your team.
This session enables you to:
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- Define the Orchestrated Onboarding framework and why you and your customers can’t live without it
- Design a go to market plan for premium onboarding packages that details marketing, pricing, and selling strategies, as well as a resource plan.
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Templates will be provided.
Donna Weber
Donna Weber, President of Springboard Solutions and Principal of Kickstart Alliance, specializes in the post-sales customer success journey. She helps B2B software companies move beyond ad hoc customer onboarding and enablement, by providing scalable frameworks to onboard, engage, and enable customers. The result is improved customer satisfaction, higher renewals, and increased net retention. She has a proven track record as a senior customer enablement leader designing and executing programs that help companies build loyal and satisfied customers, resulting in higher net promoter scores (NPS), customer health scores, renewal rates, and net retention. Prior to beginning her consulting business in 2016, Donna worked at several startups, where she built Customer Success and Customer Education programs and organizations from scratch. Colleagues know Donna as a leader who makes a difference.
Best Practices: Headcount and ROI
You need more resources to accomplish your goals, but Finance won’t approve your headcount request. Sound familiar?
Making a strong argument to secure more resources isn’t impossible. It just requires a deeper dive into the numbers to ensure your investment makes financial sense. In this session, we’ll look how to win leadership buy-in for the resources you really need. We’ll begin with the true cost of hiring, and then talk about how to position your resource needs in terms of ROI.
Michael Harnum
Michael Harnum is Chief Executive Officer of ESG. With more than 27 years of experience in the Technology and Services industry, Michael has proven to be an influential leader maximizing employee productivity, improving customer satisfaction and helping businesses grow. He is passionate about providing world class customer care and is driven to help organizations succeed.
ESG delivers Customer Success as a Service, helping companies efficiently extend their customer coverage model with a pay-for-performance approach powered by people. ESG’s process-driven formula combines technology expertise with the power of human interaction to help clients catalyze untapped revenue and build value at every point throughout the customer life cycle.
Best Practices: Setting Your Customers Up For Success
Maintaining and scaling profitable customer relationships requires a dedicated Customer Success team equipped with the necessary customer training tools and process to measure and communicate VOI and ROI. But how do you transfer Customer Success expertise into something that has institutional longevity?
In this session, Barry Kelly, CEO at Thought Industries, will discuss:
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- How to develop a customized success plan for your customers
- How to work with your customers to establish baseline assessments, benchmarks, KPI’s and milestones
- How to measure outputs such as customer VOI and ROI
- How to train your customers on how to interact with your CS team to maximize ROI
- Putting the plan in action: how on OnShape scaled customer onboarding from 12-12,000
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Barry Kelly
Barry Kelly is CEO and Co-founder of Thought Industries. He is a marketer and digital learning innovator with a proven track record in elearning web and mobile product development, customer success, and creative digital strategy. His career has been focused on helping organizations leverage the power of online learning to grow their businesses. He has over 20-years of experience in learning technology and SaaS product development.
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Reception: 5:00 – 7:00 pm
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Customer SuccessCon Denver 2019
June 4th 12:00 – 7:00 PM
