SFB #20-01: Kill Check-Ins; Revenue Growth; Leadership Culture
The Startup Foundations Builder Newsletter
Note: this was originally a paid subscriber-only post that has now been made available to paying and free subscribers in order to provide as much useful information to all in light of COVID-19.
Kill the term "check-in" from your customer success team's vocabulary.
It stands out like Prince Harry at a royal function: "Customer Check-in Call". It's in bold type, masquerading as a touch-point and scattered throughout the engagement or lifecycle plan in many of the customer success programs I review at MX Growth.
It's a bugbear I can't overlook! There's little to no value in your Customer Success Managers making customer check-in calls based on some arbitrary time-frame. It's 2020 and every subscription based SaaS business should be capturing an abundance of data.
Use this data to know when and why to connect with your customers. Maybe you don't need to go all Minority Report-like and predict the future... actually....yes, that should be a stretch goal. You can certainly get close. Put on a Tom Cruise voice if it helps.
Context is king when it comes to high-value customer success interactions. Leave "check-ins" at the airport.
Instead of "check-ins":
Ensure well-defined and meaningful milestones aligned to the customer achieving value are what drives your customer journey.
Have black and white criteria (i.e. not gray subjective wishy-washy stuff) to define when a customer meets the milestone and when they are at risk of not meeting.
Use data and automation tools to alert CSMs when milestones are met, likely to be met or at risk of not being met. Trigger actions for CSMs at each of these points.
This results in CSM interactions being timely and with context and of much higher value. Moves away from "Hi, this is Sarah, I was just calling to check-in in things" to "Hi, this is Sarah, I understand you're going live tomorrow and I just noticed you have some configurations which aren't best practice that I thought we could quickly fix together".
Three Steps to Fast Revenue Growth for Early-Stage Startups.
Kick off revenue growth by doing these three things well...and continue to thrive.
1. TARGET FIRST CUSTOMERS - You know the exact use case you solve for. So shortlist a few customers you know for sure have the problem. Market to them in an extremely targeted, customized, personalized way...something you couldn’t do if marketing to a broad (and probably vague) target market. You don’t have time and effort to waste, choose the low hanging fruit and win some early deals quickly.
2. BROAD MARKETING EXPERIMENTS - Once you’re won a few of the targeted customers, broaden your target market to those that might have the problem and perfect use-case you solve or a similar problem/use-case. Then work through a long list of different marketing tactics to experiment with what works with which customer. Collect the data. Then do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Collect more data.
3. DEVELOP A LEAD TO REVENUE MODEL - all the hard work in step 2 pays off here as you begin to build your predictable sales process. Use results and data collected to understand the variables between generating a lead through to closing a sale. It becomes science, not guesswork. Ultimately, you’ll know if you tweak “x” then “y” will happen. This gives you predictability in revenue and also accuracy in budgeting and forecasting.
The Leadership Culture Equation
When managers or leaders believe pride > trust & humility, a toxic environment is created, people begin to think only with self-interest in mind, and basically everyone hates coming to work (but everyone is too proud to admit it).
In other words, when self-interest and a fear of being vulnerable are dominant traits in leadership teams - things go bad.
I call it the Leadership Culture Equation. Yes, I made it up. Think it'll stick?
Trust and vulnerability are the basis for building a highly effective leadership team. In fact, absence of trust is the first of the five dysfunctions of a team based on Patrick Lencioni's model (which we apply in our practices at MX Growth. You can download a PDF summary of the model here.).
Here's some nuggets to consider. Consider these thoughts in the context of your current team or organization...how dies it stack up? I've observed these either from reading Lencioni's work or from my own experience:
The best teams and organizations have a humble leader. Someone who feels the gravity of the responsibility of being a leader.
Teamwork and culture is becoming the ultimate competitive advantage, as technology, access to capital, access to global markets and even strategy becomes more and more commoditized.
Being a people manager is often deeply underrated by organizations and even individuals. You can literally change people's lives as a manager - for better or, unfortunately, worse. Not investing in training and developing great managers can be disastrous.
Anonymity, irrelevance, and loneliness are some of the biggest factors which destroy the ability for people to enjoy their jobs.
>The Bottom Bit
Nice one, you made it to the end. High-five to you. Here's a couple extra goodies.
What we've enjoyed reading
The Riddle of the Well-Paying, Pointless Job - This baffling paradox is the leading cause for today’s restless workplace
What we've built
A simple Customer Success Onboarding Plan template: download the XLS file
NEW MXGROWTH WORKSHOP - Critical Thinking for Leaders. We recommend delivering this to small teams either remotely or in person. Go here and click on Workshops for more info.
"Bethan's course about Critical Thinking is a fantastic learning experience regardless if it is intended for business or private use. She covers numerous topics for example communications or argumentations that makes you stop, consider and improve. Highly recommended!"
‘till next time -
Clayton 👋
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