Five steps to build your Customer Success team

Congratulations - you have proven that clients like and buy your products or services!

Here are 5 crucial steps to establish and nurture your Customer Success (CS) team and power your revenue growth.

1. Think System

Customer Success deals with the post-sales tasks of your revenue function. While you are building this sub-function, it will become instrumental in influencing your sales activities, particularly for any prospecting and focusing on the right ICP. Thinking of CS as part of a revenue system or bowtie is key to setting your mindset for growth and aligning you with other GTM departments.

I am a huge fan of Winning by Design and its models. This model showcases well the different stages of "Land" and "Expand," with Onboarding, Impact, and Growth being the key stages for CS teams to focus on.

2. Set up an Onboarding Process

Can you deliver what you promised in your customers' real world? You might assume that learning to use your product or service is straightforward. While it may be easy for you, who interact with it daily, it can be quite challenging for newcomers. What seems fundamental to you may not be as clear to someone just starting out. Setting up an Onboarding Process is crucial, and it needs to fully put yourself into your customers' shoes.

Instead of leaving customers to navigate your products and services on their own, your team takes a proactive approach to guide them. By teaching customers the most effective ways to utilize your offerings, you help them avoid common pitfalls and save them crucial time during the early stages of their journey.

This process is very valuable for understanding the early touchpoints IRL and gaining insights and data about your customers' usage behaviour to give feedback to other parts of your organisation, particularly Product. You can do this with short questionnaires covering 2-5 questions.

Setting up a process means understanding the variety of ways consumers use your products and services and checking in a systematic way.

3. Making a recurring Impact

While your customers experience your product or services, you should focus on understanding how to make a frequent impact and deliver ongoing value.

As customers differ, there are 2 ways to better understand your consumers: segmentation and customer journey mapping. These help you focus and deep-dive into how to make those impacts.

Segmentation involves dividing customers into smaller, more manageable segments based on shared characteristics, needs, or behaviours. It enables personalisation and addresses diverse needs and pain points.

Customer journey mapping is the process of visualizing and understanding the various touchpoints and interactions a customer experiences with your product and services throughout their entire lifecycle.

This is instrumental in avoiding churn, building trust and advocacy with your client base, and continuing to deliver ARR.

4. Get into scalable Growth Mode

Now, as you and your teams develop a thorough understanding of customer success, it is crucial to connect the dots and switch to growth mode. This is how you can become customer-obsessed and consider your customers' life value. After all, you're creating a win-win relationship with your customers that will lead to a cycle of success for both of you. However, you want to make sure this relationship can be maintained as both your company and customers develop and grow. Your CS efforts may be effective right now, but if they aren't scalable, then you risk disappointing your current customers down the road.

Getting in growth mode for me means thinking outside the box of your built-up stages and widening your view to broaden your relationship with clients:

• What can you up and cross-sell to the same client base?
• Are there any new client territories you can explore?
• Can you get recommendations on how to sell to new client personas?
• Any partnerships to super-serve your clients to enhance their journey experience?
• Can you run or initiate industry events, salon dinners, and CABs to add the value of connecting your clients while learning from all of them?

Getting into growth mode needs practice, and quarterly guided workshops across functions can spark those new ideas or review your growth plan.

5. Feedback!

Similar to my first key point of seeing your CS department as part of a revenue system to gather insights for new business, feeding back your learnings to Marketing, Product, HR, Finance, and everyone else in the company is transforming your CS team and the value it delivers.

Everyone in your company can learn tremendously from your CS team. Your success team can highlight the most current and long-term client needs and advise:

1. Marketing teams on how to format their content and optimise their demand generation strategies best
2. Product to re-confirm their roadmaps and feed them with inspiration and ideas for their work
3. HR to review the company mission, values, and how you all want to work together
4. Finance to get a thorough understanding of how your customers operate and how decision processes have been made to renew and expand. This will increase forecasting quality.
5. For you as CEO or senior leader, feeding your knowledge and advice on communicating exactly what it means to be client-obsessed and on track to remain product-market fit.

These are just some of the things I've learned from building customer success teams. If you want to learn more about how I can help you build your teams, please get in touch!