The value and purpose of Quarterly Business Reviews has been under scrutiny lately in Customer Success circles. Sangita, my guest today, explains her experience and approach to these strategic customer meetings. She is passionate that they are still relevant and indeed has an example where they have transformed a client relationship and have helped to significantly grow revenues.

If your product is sufficiently complex, you might have a professional services team to onboard your clients. How customer success and professional services interact is really important for the successful management of the client and, as Steve explains, also potentially great for additional recurring revenues.

A large part of what Customer Success is all about is helping customers change what they are currently doing to something that will make them more successful. Helping customers launch a new product or continually helping improve adoption levels are examples of this. Luckily, Change management (and methodologies such as ADKAR) is a mature discipline and we can learn from the experts, one of whom is on this week’s show.

This week Victoria shares with me, Dean Colegate, the way she uses a dedicated data science resource to enable Oracle to effectively communicate at scale with their tens of thousands of customers.

Helping customers maximise the value they get from your platform is the core purpose of Customer Success. That said, it’s not always straightforward to define this value and the KPIs to measure it. My guest this week is Emilie Dubau (VP of CS at Sana Commerce), she and her team developed a systematic framework for doing this that was adopted by her whole business and helped their clients achieve great success.

Are you ever unsure of the right cadence and method of engaging with your customers?

It’s easy to think there is a ‘best practice’ methodology you should use and stick to come what may. My guest this week is Stephen O’Keefe (Senior Director of Customer Success at HubSpot )who describes his decision to revert to simplicity and how it made significant improvements - not just for his key client metrics but also for his team as well.

There’s a skill that every great customer success person has that is often not fully appreciated. This relates to having to present complex datasets and explain what various dashboards mean. What my guest Elena Cocco explains is that in order to bring the data alive, CSMs need to be able to paint a compelling narrative around this data.

The title of this episode is a little misleading. My guest, Aileen Brown from Workday, isn’t talking about the return of CSMs being the clients trusted advisor, she is saying this role has never gone away.

The trend in many CS organisations might be to have CS be the people who also own upsell and renewal revenue however this is not the case everywhere. Aileen explains why in her organisation, the account executive owns those numbers and has those commercial conversations assisted by the CSMs.

If you have a particularly technical or involved product or platform, you might find it challenging to discuss what your product does in a uniform way with people within your company and with your clients. My guest today, Adrian Beck (VP of Customer First at OKTA), shares with me how he instigated a project to define a product taxonomy based on use-cases that simplified what the product does and also led to many unexpected benefits.

It might seem obvious but really understanding the business value drivers that your new customer wants to achieve is fundamental to the overall success of the partnership. Customers have a dream to improve efficiency or reduce costs, etc. but if you don’t know the specifics of their dream, how are you going to make their dream come true?