For our June Webinar, Peyton Marshall shared the ways in which Value Propositions can be used by Customer Success and account management teams to retain and grow their existing accounts. To conclude the webinar, he answered some questions from the audience. Here are his live answers:
How does Value-based customer success get started?
Sometimes it starts without a push. There’s the fire drill approach, and sometimes it happens organically where a customer success team suddenly has a customer at risk, and they scurry around to come up with an understanding of their delivered value. The other way it starts organically is when large account managers realize that, when they have contractor reviews for multimillion dollar contracts, they better be able to talk about value at a C-Suite level.
So the great thing about that is that it can start organically because you have a value selling resource who already is doing good value propositions for new accounts, but then is called to the rescue when it comes to existing accounts. So think about all of those as elements that can start from the ground up. And what then becomes important is that they become success stories, and those success stories then lead to hard data, and that data supports sustainability.
How do you ensure alignment between new business (and those accountable for revenues) with customer success/service/support teams?
The customer success world in software is certainly talking about this all the time in the same way. Marketing and sales are talking about alignment for new accounts. Alignment is really about some of the fundamental objectives that customer success has. And a broader problem is setting expectations, monitoring those expectations, and making sure the expectations are realistic. And then having a good way to measure and talk about value at the end.
So value and value propositions used by customer success actually become a solution to the alignment problem because they become a single yard stick way to get to what the outcomes actually are and what they mean. This way, both people responsible for revenue and people responsible for success can collaborate together.
Any hints on how to make this process consistent across Customer Success?
It’s interesting because the fire drill approach we just talked about often happens and then great content gets lost. So consistency is all-important with customer success, and thinking about taking those meetings that work, and the value measurement that actually helped succeed in a specific situation, and making that generalizable and applicable is really important. And in times where face to face meetings are hard, making it generally applicable and interesting in online meetings is triply important.
