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Success Plans- creating objectives

  • 27 March 2020
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Hi everyone:

I’m interested in learning how some of you came up with your Success Plan objectives.

By way of background:

we’re an on-prem fintech company with zero in the way of telemetry of our client’s product usage. Think accounting and trade order management software for asset managers and like. I’m looking to launch Success Plans for a group of long time Tier 1 clients. The reasons aside from the obvious tie to enhanced ‘white glove’ type service, deeper client understanding and hopeful support of tough renewal conversations to defend our solutions’ ROI. 

I’ve done a fair amt of reading online as well as via Gainsight about Customer outcomes tracking. It’s all very conceptual vs concrete. Onboarding is obviously not a ‘thing’ for this group of active clients. Instead I’d like to identify a list of annual objectives jointly created with our CSM and the client that have some level of measureable outcome which would help solidify customer success as well as hopeful referenceability. I can certainly ask clients what they consider success with our products and see what I get back,. That said, I thought I’d ask this group of experts if there’s a more measured method to the madness. Even a series of questions you asked to guide this conversation would be helpful. 

Thanks in advance for your responses!

Heidi

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Best answer by keith_mattes 29 March 2020, 22:49

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Success Plans and objectives can be handled in an iterative manner where you can enforce certain procedural behaviors to figure out the right model/plan for managing your outcomes.  What I have observed with some success is starting out with some high-level organizational Objectives that the CSM’s are free to fill out their own tasks in order to complete them.  

After an initial round/time-frame of this being implemented you can derive reporting to see what Objectives had which tasks associated with them and type.  From there, you can start figure out what are the most common activities taken to accomplish these objectives/outcomes and create standard templates and/or playbooks to use.

Hope this was useful! Happy to chat/zoom to sling ideas :)

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@hcheema  We started with our voice of the customer survey, and were able to glean from there the top reasons why customers purchased our products.  From there, we were able to ask the “how do you determine success with our product” question a bit more guided.  So, it became most of our customers measure success using one of these methods, do you use any of those or another one?  Is there any one that would be good for you to share with your executives to demonstrate the value you are getting out of our product?  From there, we asked the CSMs what activities they used to help drive that particular metric, and created our first iteration of success plans based on those.  Then, we tweaked as we went a long based on feedback from the CSMs as well as customers.  Hope that helps!

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@keith_mattes  and @heather_hansen  thank you! I appreciate your insight 

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