Driving Results with Strategic Success Planning
Elevate your Success Planning methodologies to better align with your customers' business objectives. This session will guide you through evolving and scaling your approach to not only meet but exceed customer expectations. Learn how to identify and execute Verified Outcomes that showcase the tangible value of your solutions to both your internal teams and customer leaders. Gain practical insights into refining your strategies to effectively demonstrate success and foster strong, results-driven partnerships.
Good afternoon everyone. How are we enjoying Pulse? I don't think I heard y'all
. How are
we enjoying Pulse? Okay, perfect. Hello again, I'm Paulina Rodriguez, a CSM
here at Gain
Site, and I'm just going to go over some quick housekeeping items. Please
submit your questions
as you're thinking of all the amazing things that you're hearing. Put those in
the Slido
app and upvote the ones that you want to hear most about during the Q&A. We'll
send the
audio and the recording, recording audio and the deck. I just heard we're going
to send
it by the 25th. So be on the lookout for that in an email. We're going to send
the whole
library. All right, so I'm so excited to introduce Jamie Ryan, Head of Customer
Success at Atlassian.
And she's going to be talking about driving results with success planning,
which is a
huge topic right now, so I'm so excited for you to get some insights from Jamie
. So without
further ado, let's send her a warm welcome to have her on stage here.
[applause]
Hello. How's everyone doing today? Are we still awake after, as has been
mentioned, my name's
Jamie Ryan. I'm Head of Customer Success for EMEA in Asia Pacific with Atl
assian, and
I'm so excited to be talking with you about driving results through strategic
success
planning today. I've attended Gainsite Pulse in the past, and I know as a CSM,
a CSM manager,
and now managing the teams in both regions, I've been looking for insights on
how I can
help my CSMs and customers achieve results through success planning. So I'm
going to
wave with some key tips in how you can drive success with your customers.
So we have Austin Powers here with us today. I think that success planning is
pretty excellent,
and Austin Powers is all about things being groovy and excellent. So today, he
's going
to be our mascot to help guide us through this presentation. And hopefully, by
the end
of this, you will also feel as though success. So a couple of topics that we're
going to
focus on to guide the presentation will start with the why. I think it's always
really
important to understand the why behind what we're doing and how we're guiding
our customers
and our teams. We're then going to touch on challenges. I know through the many
iterations
that we've had with customer success planning for me, or we don't really
understand how
we're supposed to get from point A to point B. So we'll touch on the challenges
as one
of V3 of our success planning journey, and we're going to be rolling out V4 in
early
next year. So touch on some resources that we've built, and hopefully that will
get us
to next steps and give you some key action items that you guys can take back to
your
teams and help to evolve your success planning.
Okay, so first, we'll end the room with your success planning journey. So pull
up the Slido
and answer the question here. Okay, just getting started. All right, looks like
a lot of us
are just getting started. Great, I'm so excited to hear that. I will try to
kind of start
at the beginning and move our way through some of the journey and the
experience that
we've had so that you guys can take these back, given that you're a bit earlier
in the
success planning process. And maybe just a show of hands, how many of you are
eager
to you? Okay, cool. We have been using gain sites, so I'll talk about some ways
that we've
set up gain site to make us successful, as well as to showcase reporting and
visibility
across the business. Okay, so diving into the why. A success plan is a living
and breathe
something that you're going to come back to, and really as a CSM, you should be
using
this to guide your interactions. It's also connects to customer goals. So you
want to
really take what your customers are looking to achieve and put them into the
success plan,
and depending on if you're focused on products or solutions, you should then
connect value.
And lastly, it's customer driven. So it's really essential that you are working
with
your customer to understand what they want to achieve, because ultimately a lot
of the
objectives that they're going to be working on are going to be up to them to
make things
happen. You're going to be guiding that process. Something that's really
important when it
comes to customer success and success planning specifically is showcasing value
. So value
is the importance, worth or usefulness of something, and it's from the buyer's
perspective.
I don't know about you, but at lastion, sometimes we get really focused on what
we want to achieve,
and maybe that's increasing product adoption or expanding licenses, and take
the buyer's
perspective into account. So making sure that you're thinking about why did
these customers
purchase our product or solution, and how do I ensure that everyone from the
team to
the managers, to the leaders, to the executives are very, very clear on the
value. So the way
that we've set up our gain site is by incorporating customer goals into our
success planning.
This was something that was actually tested through a segmentation pilot that
we ran,
and we had some CSMs using customer goals, and we thought, "Okay, this is maybe
a really
great place for us to get clarity, partners, so that we're all aligned to
customer goals."
Something that we've brought into this is the corporate business and project
level goals,
and that's also a good way to get a sense for where are these goals going to be
important,
and how can I understand what level of effort or dedication I should put into
this customer
goal? As a product, you may really be focused on project level goals, or if you
're working
with an admin or smaller teams, the project level goals are really important
for building
trust. So you don't want to necessarily skip over those project level goals,
but you want
to make sure that anything that you're working on layers up into a business or
a corporate
goal, and you want to be having those broader big picture conversations as well
, because
it's really essential that you understand what their business needs, what value
is important
to them, and how does your product help to solve and achieve that value
together?
Then are the objectives. So the way that we've set this up in game site is
through the success
plan we've created objectives, and these are really your how. How are you and
your customer
going to achieve these goals together? So this is the way that these are kind
of your action
items. There's also tasks, but I would think of an objective as a larger task
or a set
of tasks, and then within that you can create smaller tasks within game site to
keep your
milestones and your efforts on track. And then there are verified outcomes. So
we've
actually synced our customer goals with the verified outcome, and that way when
you create
this in game site, you know what you're working towards, and once it's achieved
, you can go
in and add some kind of data to say this was verified by, this was quantifiable
, this was
qualitative, and that way your verified outcome is easily connected to the goal
. So if you
go in a game site, you can actually have the two live within. It's pretty
simple to get
that logged and kind of showcase that back to the business. Now there's four
customer
focus areas that we have identified at Atlassian. These may be different for
you, but I find
that they're fairly common when it comes to what businesses are looking to
achieve, and
then see and to improve experience. Something I've noticed with my CSMs is that
in the beginning,
improve experience is certainly kind of an area where we spend our time because
that's
more of a satisfaction outcome, but we want to work towards being more quant
ifiable and
making sure that we're guiding our customers in a way that's going to resonate,
not only
with the person that you're working with, like the admin, but with their
leaders as well.
So these are just four examples of ways that you could categorize outcomes. It
's been really
helpful for us in terms of the way that we've set up our success planning.
Okay, some key challenges. Now that we're on version three of success planning,
we've
had a lot of challenges along the way. We started with a Confluence page, and
it was basically
putting some account information on the page, and then kind of set it and
forget it. People's
streamer interactions, and we've evolved from there. So I have a couple of
things.
Pardon. So I have a couple of things that we'll talk about with challenges, but
first,
another thing to keep in mind is research that we've done on goals, and this
connects
to that customer goal within the success plan, and from an Atlassian poll. And
ultimately,
there's leadership that doesn't have visibility into what their teams are doing
, into when
they have blockers. So setting clear goals is really key to keeping the
business on track.
And 13% of customers that we analyzed in this research shared that customers
lack clarity.
They're broader business goals. And this kind of connects to some of the
challenges that
I'll talk to in a moment. Okay, so a poll here. What are your challenges
around success planning? Adoption.
Sincey resources. We'll definitely talk about resources. Time. No data. Lack of
system,
customization, scalability. There's a lot on this slide. Wow. Setting goals.
That's definitely
a challenge. Pardon? Okay, cool. So accountability, consistency, adoption,
engagement. Those are
definitely things that I know we've experienced in our customer success journey
, and hopefully
we can combat some of these challenges in some of the resources that we discuss
. Okay.
Something to keep in mind when it comes to your team, and this has been
something that
I've been really kind of coming back to with my team members, is that when it
comes to
success planning, this is really about collaborative problem solving. So you as
a CSM are not there
to solve all of your customers' problems. You are there to guide them to work
together
to really be a consultative partner to help them achieve their goals. And by
doing so,
you're going to involve their stakeholders. So you need to move past the admin,
or maybe
just the single point of contact that you're working with most frequently. You
need to
brainstorm solutions, and you need to create ownership. So it's not the
customer success
manager that's driving the success planning. It's really you guiding it as the
CSM, but
ultimately the stakeholders within the business are the ones that are going to
need to come
back to you and share what they have achieved, or if there's challenges or
blockers, and
then you can adjust the timeline. Because as we mentioned, the success plan is
a living
breathing document, and it's going to continue to evolve over time. And we all
understand
that priorities change, things shift, things get behind schedule, and so making
sure that
you're using this to guide your interactions is really the best way to make
sure that it's
a collaborative effort. Now, hopefully this is going to help guide some of
those in the
room, or most of those of you in the room who are really new to the success
planning
journey. When we got started, I was really kind of given the initiative like, "
Hey, great
success plans," and I had no idea about how it should be done. So I
collaborated with my
gain site CSM, I did a little bit of research, and we decided to break down our
customer
success planning with what, how, and why. And with the what, this is going to
be really
what is your customer looking to achieve. So this is how, what you should do to
ask open-ended
questions. Why did you buy your product? What are you looking to achieve? What
does value
look like for you? What are your challenges that are most pressing today that I
can help
you solve with our tools? Then it comes the how. The how, again, is how you're
going to
achieve success. So those are the objectives. In gain site, that lives within
the success
plan, so we have the customer-ified outcome is connected to that goal. And the
why. These
are those outcomes that I mentioned. So there's a four outcomes that we talked
about. This
is why you're measuring success. So oftentimes it's increased efficiency or
reduced costs.
Maybe you're working with an organization that has shadow IT. That would help
them reduce
costs. That's going to be the why or the verified outcome.
The last example, so it may or may not resonate with you depending on what kind
of product
or solution you're working on. But here we have developed cloud governance
strategy to
improve operational efficiency. So this is the what and the why. And once you
get more
evolved with your success planning, you're going to want to bring in and that's
going
to help you showcase the value. So you evolve your customer goal and the
verified outcome
to include a percentage of increase or a number in reduction of costs or
increase in revenue.
We can talk a little bit more about how to do that. Value realization and
taking a value
realization approach is really the best way setting baselines get to a more
quantitative
verified outcome. But this is really challenging. I know at Atlassian we're
still working on
it because not all of our customers are measuring success today. But if you're
working with
an admin and they're saying, I want to increase efficiency but I don't know how
. Tell them
to go back and test it with cohort of their team. If you're working on
something, how
much time are you spending our tool in this way and you're doing this best
practices,
is this going to help you save time? And can we make an estimated guess on what
that would
be and then say after a month of trying this out, yes or no, that didn't back
tap in and
then we can make assumptions on what the ROI looks like. So it's a long term
process
but ultimately eventually you want to get to having the leadership and with
executives.
Okay, we have another poll. What are common custom or verified outcomes? So we
talked about
those a couple of slides back.
Okay, we have some really intelligent CSMs in the room. You guys are going to
be able
to make sure that you're doing this. So we're going to be able to make sure
that you're going to be able to make sure that you're doing this. So we're going to be able
to
make sure that you're doing this. So we're going to be able to make sure that
you're
doing this. So we're going to be able to make sure that you're doing this. So
we're
going to be able to make sure that you're doing this. So we're going to be able
to make sure
that you're doing this. So we're going to be able to make sure that you're
doing this
very clear, great work of the contact that you're working with and showcase
that to their
leadership as well. So it's a bit of a win-win situation there. Okay, another
learning is
launching to drive outcome of success planning last July, I think. And it was
get the CSMs
to kind of really understand the what, how, why format. And then it took us a
really
long time to make sure that we were including this into our customer
conversations. You
know, focusing on adoption, talking about best practices, identifying risk,
collaborating
with your account team, all of these things are really essential parts of CSM
ing. But ultimately
you should be leading with the success plan to guide your customer
conversations. Because
this is what's going to get you to value. And this is again, what's going to
secure the
renewal. Okay. Now, a couple of key resources. We developed a goals bank. So
when we were
creating all of these goals and outcomes, we recognized for a company like Atl
assian, there's
a lot of different goals that our customer to give the CSMs a little bit more
support in
terms of like how they could get to those answers and also come in with an
informed
decision of, you know, what might guide the customer conversation. So we spent
a lot of
time on this. We also then used AI to help us build out these goals. So we came
up with a
couple of different focus areas. We connected them to our businesses solutions.
And we built
out a pretty big goals bank. We decided to go with breadth here and really
create several
goal options. And that way the CSM, really anything that the customer was
trying to
achieve, they could come into this actually control F and search by keyword and
get an
idea, okay, if shadow IT is a challenge for my customer. Or maybe I know that
they want to
save time, so I think that's going to be connected to operational efficiency.
And therefore I
should check out what goals that have been and give me a little bit more of a
resource
and leg up going into my next conversation. So developing a goals bank was a
really excellent
way for us to provide this resource with our customers. Highly recommend you
take some
time to think about what is it that I think goals, objectives and outcomes
should look
like, as well as talk to your team members and get their input on what they're
seeing.
But we found that consistency in this practice is really key. Otherwise you
kind of end up
getting a lot of tasks. And it's challenging to know, okay, well what's a
business or
corporate goal and how does the work that I'm doing via an objective or a task
layer
up into this. But I would recommend taking a step back, really thinking about
what you're
trying to achieve and creating a pretty clear format of what that looks like
for your team.
And that way they have the resources to go and start building these
conversations with
their customers. Another thing that we built was a workshop exercise using Conf
luence Whiteboards. Who uses any whiteboard tool in general? There's one in Confluence
as well.
This has been something that we've been using to drive workshops and
conversation. And highly
recommend you guys incorporate this into your ways of working. We'll do it both
virtually
and in person when we can. Because it's a great way to get people thinking and
sharing.
And so the whiteboarding exercise has been super valuable for us. And so when
you look
at them, we have a couple of customer use cases. So if someone is interested in
increasing adoption, we know what that kind of sounds like from a customer. So we built
out a use case
in that. Maybe governance is really key. You have a large admin system. You
have team
members coming and going. So we set up a couple of use cases. We've got more
than this.
But this is just sort of how we wanted to guide the CSM team. And then we came
up with
the what example. So what are you looking to achieve? And then we came up with
the how.
What are some ways to do that? Oops. Is it through enablement? Is it through
implementing
better security measures for governance? Is it through collaboration and
visibility of
your tooling? There's a lot of different hows that could be helpful to your
team to achieve
those goals. And then you're going to come up with the why. And oftentimes the
why is not
exactly correlated to the verified outcome. But when you set up your goals bank
and you
really kind of developed clarity from that bank in what your customers want to
achieve
responsible for connecting the why of your customer to that verified outcome.
So if you
have a lot of team members that are struggling to adopt a tool, maybe they're
not having a
great experience because they haven't experienced solid training or guidance on
how to adopt
a tool. You know, I'm really interested in improving this. But the way that
they phrase
it is slightly different than the outcome. What I'm hearing and I believe that
that connects
to improve experience. And then I'm going to go back to my goals bank that we
talked about.
And I'm going to figure out the varying ways that I might recommend how we
could achieve
that together. And suddenly you have your what outcome. And then when you write
your
goal, it's actually the what and the verified outcome. So I'm going to share
this deck with
you guys afterwards as well because I know this is a lot. But that way when you
go into
the EBR or these executive, being a cloud training rollout plan to improve
experience, we are developing
cloud governance strategy for improved operational efficiency. And then again,
once you get better
at the measurement piece, you're going to say, and we did that by 20%. And
suddenly you have
leaders and executives attention to you for my business. How do I expand? What
other teams
do you want to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools
that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going
to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to
do? What are the
tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are
the tools that I'm
going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I
'm going to do?
What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to
do? What are the tools
that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the
tools that I'm going to
do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going
to do? What are the
tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are
the tools that I'm going to
do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going
to do? What are the
tools that I'm going to do? What are the tools that I'm going to do? What are
the tools that I'm going to do?
Those of us who kind of built this process were available for the team,
especially when we were
rolling it out for them to come and ask questions. Sometimes no one would show
up and I would sit
there and do other work. Sometimes I'd get five or ten people in the room and
they had really excellent
questions and we were able to take a customer use case or a challenge that they
were hearing and
work through it together. Maybe we would pull up that Confluence Whiteboard and
say, "Okay, let's break it down." This problem feels really big, but we have the resources
together. So,
having enablement, we do that through plays and they live in Confluence, but
you can do that in whatever
fashion works for you. But spend time on the enablement. As I mentioned, I
think it was really like six
months from the time that we initially introduced this new version to the time
that I saw kind of the
light bulbs go off. So, don't skip out on the attention during team meetings,
during one-on-ones,
having office hours, and maybe also include champions in that. So, you hear CS
Ms who are more familiar
with this and they can kind of help guide some of this enablement and be a
resource for those
newer team members who are just getting started or aren't as familiar with this
approach to
success planning. Okay, measuring success. We all know that metrics drive
behavior and so it would
really encourage you to create a metric for your team around success planning.
We did this,
or get around identifying goals with the percentage of your book of business,
because everyone has a
slightly different size book. And that was a really great way to make sure,
okay, and then you're going to be working with your customers and you're going to be figuring out why
did you buy this
tool, what is important to you, you know, how can our solutions help you solve
these problems,
and then you're going to add those into members, and maybe your sales
counterparts who have an
account plan, they can come in and see your, via Gainsite, or maybe it's
connected to Salesforce
or your CRM, oh, this is what my customer is looking to achieve, and then you
have those
insights readily available. In H2, we shifted focus to achieving verified
outcomes. So, these are a
more challenging, I have to say one thing that I learned is that when you ask a
CSM, you know, what are you working on, they know the ins and outs of their
customers, but they don't always necessarily connect it immediately to a very
new process like this.
But getting everybody to speak the same language and format their goals and
outcomes in the same way is going to be the best way to showcase value, so take
the time to talk through it, and oftentimes they've achieved several project or
business level goals, but they
just haven't necessarily, because they're busy, a CSM's busy, they haven't
necessarily gone and tried to your reporting, and that everyone's using that on
a daily and weekly basis to guide their interactions and guide one-on-one
conversations.
I think it's really essential to implementing this successfully.
So there's some outcomes of positioning value rights from serious decisions,
and positioning value does have an impact.
31% of those who say they position value with their customers, they increase
their win rates.
30% see sales cycle acceleration, and 46% increase in sales meeting their quota
So shifting the conversation to be value-driven, so what does value mean to the
customer?
It's going to have an impact on your sales team, and that's going to foster
more collaboration and ultimately more growth of your product.
And then we're going to celebrate wins.
It's so important to celebrate the small wins, whether it's a project, business
, or their journey with their product, or maybe they're less mature, celebrate
those wins.
And I have to say I think that that's super groovy.
You want to ensure that both your customers and your leaders across the
business are informed of these wins.
I think I was here at Gain Site Pulse last year, and someone shared that they
have a slack integration to their outcomes, and so when verified,
everyone has visibility into that win, and they can celebrate and offer kudos
and really kind of have visibility into what you're achieving through success
planning.
So I don't know about you, but I think that that is super groovy.
Okay, so search industry best practices.
Spend some time figuring out how are other people doing success planning?
All of us have different products and approaches to customer success, so figure
out what else is out there.
Don't skip on this step, because it's really interesting to see what other
people are doing.
There's definitely podcasts I've listened to, Snack, which is something that's
based here in Amsterdam.
They have great ideas, things pop up on LinkedIn, and I kind of dive into an
article.
So definitely don't be shy in spending or carving out the time, I should say,
to do your research and figure out what are the varying approaches,
because you never know what might work best for your team and for your approach
to driving success,
as well as what tools you have included in your stack.
So if you have gain site, you may want to go to your gain site CSM, like we did
, and say, "How are you guys doing success planning?"
Like, tell us what's working for you, because we want to emulate that, or maybe
we'll pick pieces of it that really work well.
So spend time on the best practices.
And perhaps you might want to take a design thinking approach.
How many of you in the room are familiar with design thinking?
Okay, a fair amount, cool.
I think design thinking, if you have the time when you're starting an
initiative,
I think it's a really great way to make sure that you're putting people at the
center of your decisions
and your ways of working, your operating procedures.
Often times, myself included, I want to skip to the solution.
I want to say, "Oh, this is your problem. I even do it with my friends."
"Oh, this is your problem. Why don't you try this? Have you done this?"
And instead, as a really good leader or as a really good friend,
maybe it's just important to ask more questions and figure out, "Well, how do
you feel about this?"
Or, "What does this mean to you?"
Or, "Why do you want to take that approach?"
And really getting behind the people side of things, I think, can help shape
whatever it is you're looking to build.
And so, with design thinking, I think 60% talking about solutions.
And you need to kind of remind yourself throughout the process when people jump
to solutions.
Oh, no, we're not there yet.
People side of this initiative and how we can drive success and why we're going
to do that meeting.
Comes later.
And then you need insight.
This has been essential for us to achieve success and have visibility across
the business.
And make sure that our teams are focused on the right things.
I know CSM's have so many tools and sometimes it can feel a little bit like a
box tick.
But if you're using this to guide your conversations with your cutting the
updating of the success plan or the goals get behind,
is a really essential way to keeping yourself on track and keeping your
customers on track.
So, I highly recommend using Gate Sight or another tool.
For us, Confluence, our own tool, even though CSM's are like, we want to use
Confluence for this.
It becomes static and it's not going to create the visibility that we need
across leadership.
So, definitely check out ways that you can mention you're going to highlight
those wins and celebrate the success.
And you're also going to want to develop a change management plan.
So, thinking about what does this change mean for my team as CSM's we're change
agents, of course,
but sometimes when we're rolling out our own processes or tools, we can, again,
jump to the solutions and skip this step.
So, I would definitely recommend that you think about change management and not
rush it,
because you have to think about all the other things that are being rolled out
across the business
and asks of your CSM's and they want to focus on their customers.
So, creating in those workshops, those one-on-one conversations, build a calm
plan,
create some timelines and deadlines for yourself and try to stick to it,
but don't we did our Success Planning v1 again, it was in Confluence and it
ended up being a set it and forget it
to guide our CSM's and our customers over time and really kind of flex and work
out this muscle.
So, make sure that you're taking a change management approach to Success
Planning as well.
And with that, I wish you much success.
[applause]
It's amazing. Insights, Jamie. I love it.
All right, we're going to do some Q&A. I'm going to help moderate.
Wonderful.
Yes. So, we're going to start with the ones that people have voted the most, so
please keep a voting.
And let's see.
So, when would you say is the best time in a customer journey to do a Success
Plan,
concerning the sales cycle and onboarding training and why?
Success Plan. And I think that as soon as you start engaging with a new
customer or even your current customer,
you should start the Success Planning process. It's part of the discovery.
Something that I didn't call out in the -- we as CSM's or even our customers
are having a version to the term Success Plan.
So, I like to say like you don't have to use the word term Success Plan.
You can just start the process through discovery, asking those open-ended
questions.
Doing your research on the customer. So, I would say get started right away.
It's not -- it's an ongoing part of the relationship.
And this -- it's not necessarily having, you know, a certain kind of meeting
and never bringing up Success Planning.
You should always be coming back to what are you looking to achieve to ensure
that our tools are driving value.
And that's really should always be a touch point in your call.
Maybe on an escalation, it's not something that's going to be so much of a
focus.
But ultimately, there's -- you shouldn't wait to start your six.
We'll change and evolve and priorities will shift.
But you should be spending your time on things that are going to provide value.
And that means Success Planning is an ongoing thing that you should focus on.
I love it. You mentioned earlier living, breathing partnership plan.
Exactly.
Yes.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Awesome.
So, what differentiation do you see in renewal rates for customers that
complete their Success Plans?
Have Success Plans, but don't achieve goals.
And those that don't have a documented Success Plan.
So, there's a few questions in that one.
That is a great question.
We have a value at Atlassian Open Company Noble Shit.
I always like to say the full thing.
I'm going to be open with you.
We haven't actually measured the correlation of this.
We at Atlassian have a separate renewals team.
We've actually just kind of restructured.
And now I'm partnering more closely with our renewals folks.
So, this is something that we're going to explore and how Success Planning
relates to retention.
But it's not something that I've necessarily had the data to connect the dots.
But actually, thank you for raising this.
I think it's maybe the next iteration in our Success Planning journey, which is
for V4.
So, I think it's certainly something that's important.
But we haven't done it yet.
That's actually a great way to start measuring the progress.
We've done some statistics trends research at game sites.
So, a few trends that we've seen is customers that do have outcomes
have a 30% higher retention rate, GRR rate.
And 36% higher net retention rate.
So, those are some recent trends that we started measuring at game site.
Thank you.
So, the next question is, how do you track that Success Plans are created and
maintained by your CSM?
And which KPI do you use?
That's a good one.
Yeah, great question.
So, we have the reporting and game site.
So, we have a report on goals and outcomes.
I shared an image of that.
I'm hoping to get that process shifted a little bit in terms of the way that
the tooling
is integrated.
But ultimately, you really want to have those metrics.
So, it's setting customer goals and that's something that you can measure in
the reporting
and then achieving outcomes.
And there's a couple different ways to set that up.
You do have to trust that your CSMs are doing the quality of the work.
So, that's something that we rely on our managers to do quality check and kind
of go in
and success planning with your customers.
And it's now, it's always.
It's the same goes for guiding your conversation if you're a manager or if you
're a CSM in
that one-on-one.
You can talk about your customers at a high level, but pull up the Success Plan
and make
sure that the conversations that you're having are aligned to the goals and the
outcomes.
Because if you get stuck on something that's not really connected, so, yeah,
those are some
of the KPIs goals and outcomes and then we look at the Success Plan for Quality
I love that.
All right, we have time for a couple more questions.
So, how can you make customer see you as a strategic advisor when your tool is
more
operational?
That's a really good question.
I think it comes from Building Trust, the teams that you're working with.
And I think that having the conversation and spending the time, even if you're
advised,
because as an operational tool, there's going to be a value proposition, right?
So it is going to provide value and maybe you need to expand what other teams
could
benefit from this value.
So, I think I hope that answers the question.
Yeah, that's a great answer.
All right.
Any tips on Success Planning when the customer has misaligned expectations from
the sales
process and how do you bring the customer back to zero?
Hey, I think that's a resonating question.
We all know this challenge, right?
Yeah, it's a tough one.
I think that that's why Success Planning is so key to guiding your conversation
And it starts on day one and it carries through so that everyone's expectations
are aligned.
And so I believe that you really need to hand over how you guys are structured.
But I think revisiting the goals and just saying, this is my understanding of
what you're looking to get out of our tool, is that in fact correct?
And if you have a new contact, maybe that's something that's not super clear
and you need
to go back and do a little bit more of like enablement and the value discussion
But I think that it's really key to making sure from the beginning that you
guys are
aligned on the value.
And sometimes you have contact, maybe someone's left the business, you know,
the product wasn't
sold correctly.
And maybe if the customer doesn't see value initially, that's the challenge
that you
have as a CSM to figure out, okay, maybe it's not a fitting the exact need that
you thought it would make use of this and ensure that your teams are getting the
most out
of what you purchased.
And also sharing feedback to your product teams as well.
Because maybe it's something that's on the roadmap but isn't quite available
yet,
so making sure that you have those feedback loops in place as well as a clear
roadmap
with timelines and making sure that you're communicating back to your product
teams what's really important and valuable so that you can get alignment there.
I think that's a key aspect as well.
Amazing.
All right, well that's all we have time for.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And feel free to pick our brain at the end here.
So come up and ask questions and enjoy the rest of Pulse.
Thank you.
Thank you.
