Archives for January 2018

Sales is part of Customer Success. Like it or not.

No, I don’t mean the Sales organization should report to the Customer Success Management org.

I mean that Customer Success as an Operating Philosophy, as a way of doing business, includes sales. It includes marketing, product, support, etc, too.

It’s critical to understand that Customer Success is not just about “post-sale.”

Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.

Those interactions start early – from the first marketing touchpoint, at the start of the sales cycle, on the first cold outreach email by your SDR – and they continue throughout the entire lifecycle of the customer.

Which means we need to be thinking about Customer Success when creating marketing campaigns, determining Ideal Customers, optimizing the sales cycle, etc.

In fact, let’s talk about Sales.

Sales is important. Sales is critical.

But…

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Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.

As I’ve said before, Customer Success as a concept is very simple. Don’t overthink it.

But I always have to unpack one piece of that definition and that’s Desired Outcome, or what your customers need to achieve (their Required Outcome) and the way they need to achieve it (their Appropriate Experience).

Required Outcome + Appropriate Experience = Desired Outcome

Desired Outcome is also a relatively simple concept. Unlike Customer Success, however, Desired Outcome isn’t something people tend to overthink…

… it’s something they just tend to ignore.

Well, if they don’t ignore the entire thing, they only focus on one part… the Required Outcome.

Appropriate Experience either doesn’t matter to them or is just too hard to figure out (which makes them give up and say “it doesn’t matter”).

I can’t help you if you don’t believe Appropriate Experience matters, but if you believe it matters but just can’t wrap your head around the concept, here’s something that might help you figure it out.

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