For Customer Success to be the driving force it needs to be, the CEO must own it. Why is that? Because without successful customers, your business will ultimately fail. It is your job as the head of your company to make sure that every part of your company is oriented around your customers. But how do CEOs cram one more responsibility onto their already-overloaded plates? Let's find out.
That's right, if you're the CEO of your company, you need to own Customer Success—along with everything else you own. Granted, ownership is one of the most overused terms in the modern work world; it shows up in the business buzzword dictionary right next to synergy and “taking things offline.” In a typical large company, you'll find at least a dozen people who “own” hot initiatives with buzzy names like “the cloud” or “our AI strategy.”
If you're a CEO reading this, you're probably thinking, “Have you seen my schedule? How can I possibly own anything more?” You've already been told to own your product destiny, your growth plans, your capital strategy, your culture—heck, Nick even owns our “rap video offer letter strategy” (that's right: Nick occasionally sends rap videos to candidates).
But our challenge to you is, “How can you not own it?” The future of your company depends on it.
Truthfully, we don't know any CEOs who are eager to own more. Most are looking to recruit, delegate, and empower (more buzzword bingo). And in the early days of Customer Success, this tactic served companies well. Leading CEOs typically recruited a CS leader, delegated core functions to that leader, occasionally empowered the leader with resources and a seat at the table (more buzzwords), and maybe even doled out a C-level title such as “chief customer officer.”
But what worked in the early days is no longer good enough. We've learned from working with literally hundreds of companies on CS strategy that Customer Success begins as a department and a function, but it only thrives as a company-wide transformation. This transformation always requires the CEO to personally own it.
When he joined Altify (later acquired by Upland Software) as its CEO, Anthony Reynolds was charged with driving the next phase of growth. He knew that Customer Success strategy would be critical, so he invested his own time in it. “As a CEO, you can't just give CS lip-service. The rest of the organization will watch your actions. So how you respond to customers and prioritize them is the most important thing to take care of when you walk in every single morning. You should personally spend time with your customers and truly listen to them.”
Reynolds points to the importance of CEOs as role models in Customer Success. That sounds great in theory, but let's explore what it means in practice. We'll discuss three steps to becoming a more customer-oriented CEO—without losing sleep.
Let's first make an honest statement that is really important: Most CEOs' natural tendencies are to lean toward Sales and/or Product. And that's because most CEOs grew into their role by coming up in Sales or Product. This means that leaning into customers is unnatural. And I don't mean just meeting customers. The CEO role in the new customer economy requires deep involvement in decisions made about the customer experience, journey, segmentation, and so on. No major Sales or Product decisions are made without the CEO's input. Neither should any major customer decisions be made without the same perspective. Specific activities that force this customer focus are included below.
Start by organizing to convey the importance of Customer Success. If you put Customer Success under Sales or Product or Support, it conveys one level of importance. If you make the leader of Customer Success a peer to your VP of Sales and VP of Product, it communicates something very different. Also, assign the retention number to that leader. You would never run a company without having one person owning the Sales number. You should not run a recurring revenue business without forcing the same accountability for retention, which over time will be a much larger number than the new business Sales number.
Now proceed to infuse discussions about customers into your conversations with each department. Some departments are by definition constructed around customers (Customer Success and Customer Support most obviously). Others are not intuitively aimed at customers. The trick is to define the jobs where there is natural orientation around CS and the roles where you need to inject CS into the existing way people work. Customer Success, when approached strategically, reimagines the way companies think about product development, marketing, sales, and other functions.
You can break it down with the following series of questions:
Product
Marketing
Sales
Channel
Services
Support
IT
Now that you've started to infuse the topic of customers into your conversations with each department, let's explore how you can enable those departments to work together in service of your customers.
We've done dozens of “Success Briefings” with CEOs and general managers where we get management teams together to talk about Customer Success cross-functionally. The goal is to get other departments up to speed on the business imperative and then introduce models for collaboration across functions. This cross-functional discussion covers how Customer Success changes every role.
From there, you can define tangible steps forward:
Even as you're empowering your management team to collaborate closely, you're not off the hook. You personally should be engaging with clients. Let's hear from Nick, in the first person, about how he does that.
We all have parts of our jobs we love more than other parts. My favorite thing is the diversity of people with whom I interact across all our stakeholders—teammates, their families, clients, partners, investors, and even folks in our community. Yes, I am definitely an “E” (for Extrovert) in the language of Meyers-Briggs personality types.
So when I saw a recent Harvard Business Review paper6 that said the typical CEO spends 3% of their time with clients, I was shocked enough to ask an intern to determine, based on my calendar, what percentage of my time I spend with clients.
The final number was 17%. That averages out to roughly 11 clients a week, 45 clients a month, and over 500 client meetings a year. I love these meetings, but even for me, it takes a good process to make it work. Logistically, operationally, emotionally—it doesn't happen by accident. So, for all of you who are wondering how on earth you're going to truly own Customer Success, here's my process. (Note that we run a high-touch business, with our average client paying us more than six figures of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) per year, so this process may not apply to you. Even if your clients are smaller in spend, there's a way to scale this down.)
I relish the chance to meet companies considering a Gainsight purchase. It gives me a vehicle to learn what the market is thinking, allows me to help set expectations with clients before they buy, and enables me to help our Sales team in a small way.
To make this happen, I have our Sales team identify specific client execs for me to reach out to. My assistant prepares a standard email draft for me and I personalize the message before sending.
Aligning with execs at our clients doesn't stop at the sales process. Many companies talk about “executive sponsor programs,” but very few operationalize them. If you have “exec sponsors” on your top accounts, when was the last time the exec-to-exec connection happened for each account? Are you confident that you are “covered”?
When we close a new deal, we identify the exec sponsor on the relationship. If it's me, here's what happens:
The Customer Success Manager for the client will get a Stakeholder Alignment notification (in the Gainsight product) on a regular basis depending on the size of the customer. They send a sample email to me (based on a template) with a recommended “check-in” message for me to send to the client exec; it also includes some background for me. My assistant places the message in my email drafts. I can then personalize the message and send it out.
If I end up having a call with the client, I post my notes to our Timeline—the history of our client relationship within the Gainsight product—or simply BCC the email to the client to Timeline.
As with most companies, we receive no shortage of feedback. We survey our client executives twice a year. When the response comes in, we auto-post it to our internal collaboration system (Slack). Since I'm kind of obsessed, I read every response. If I see a “promoter” (very happy) response from someone I know, I drop them an email of thanks. If I see a “detractor” (lower score), I drop them a note of thanks for the feedback and sometimes ask for a quick call to learn more.
Similarly, I read all the write-ups our clients post on third-party review sites like G2 or TrustRadius. We learn so much from our clients and our clients' users in this way. Sometimes, I'll even post my response to a review, thanking the client for the feedback. In other cases, if the client identified herself, I will sometimes email her to hear a more detailed account or to thank her personally.
As painful as redeye flights are, I enjoy making sure that my business trips are full of meetings. When I go to a city, we do the following:
My Chief of Staff pulls a list of clients from Gainsight in the city and filters (1) clients that are healthy (where we could possibly get them to be an advocate or expansion) and (2) clients that need help.
We review the list with our CS team to make sure they agree with the targeted contacts. Similarly, our Sales team pulls a list of prospective clients to meet. My assistant drafts emails (which I personalize) from me to each potential meeting. After the meetings, I post our notes to our Timeline.
My personal record was ten in-person client meetings in one day in Manhattan. I'm particularly proud of that, given the number of Ubers, lobby sign-ins, metal detectors, and slow elevators I had to deal with!
Like most companies, we've identified a list of our top strategic clients for our advisory boards. We have one Strategic Advisory Board (SAB) that helps guide the company overall, and separate boards to advise us on new products, on our technology, and on our delivery.
We host our SABs in person when our clients are together. I've found that the strategic discussions are harder to hold remotely, no matter how great the video technology is. Our top client execs typically attend our Pulse event in San Francisco and our annual CXO Summit. In addition, many of them go to twice-a-year events hosted by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), and we pick a lunch spot during these four events to bring people together.
To make sure I have a rhythm of feedback, one of my favorite traditions is a near-monthly dinner series that I hold for CS leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have a few core rules for this:
Logistically, we've made this pretty easy. My assistant keeps a list of client execs in the Bay Area. She books a private room. We then email the list and tell folks that (accurately) the dinner will book up fast. The takeaways from these dinners are invaluable as are the relationships that develop.
We host a ton of events, from our annual Pulse event to CXO Summit to our Pulse World Tour to Pulse Europe. The event's cocktail party is a great opportunity to hear from clients in an ad hoc fashion. I always try to have some prepared questions to help get feedback:
I attend a lot of third-party events, including some swanky CEO boondoggles. We make sure we are hyper-prepared for these. My Chief of Staff and I scour the list to identify clients and important prospective clients. If we decide to meet some, we draft emails in advance per the processes above. Then, when I'm on the spot at the event, I use our Gainsight Mobile App to look up the current health, sentiment, and financial relationship for a client that's walking toward me. (Yes, that was a shameless plug for one of our products.)
Obviously I love meeting clients, but what I enjoy the most about it has nothing to do with business goals or product roadmaps—it's connecting with them as human beings. As such, I relish the chance to talk to our clients during some of their most important and maybe even stressful times—such as when they're in transition between jobs.
I've spoken with hundreds of CS leaders one-on-one to help them navigate the job search process including:
In these processes, I learn so much about the true motivations of our profession—and about how brave people in this new role are.
It's really a work in progress, this Customer Success phenomenon, and I always try to keep sight of the people blazing the trail. It's not easy to try to convince your board you need more budget, more people, more clout; it's not easy to carve out a place for yourself in a company that perhaps isn't sure what you're doing. I'm impressed by the CS professionals I meet every day.
As we mentioned above, Nick meets a lot of customers. As such, he often finds himself waiting in many tech company lobbies. He's done his fair share of lobby sign-ins (he thinks he's signed every NDA in the world!) and has even resorted to eating office mints for the nutritional value. When you sit in a company's entrance, you get exposed to the business's culture. You notice the little things like how the front desk people treat guests—and how the employees treat the front desk people. You get to see the face they show to world, and more explicitly, you often see the values of the company. If you're like Nick, you've seen values on plaques. You've seen values on TVs. You've even seen values on poker chips! And you know what? Nearly every company Nick has seen has a value around “customer centricity” or “customer obsession” or “the customer is #1.”
If “customer success is all about culture,” and every company has a value around it, why do we still have such a long way to go in Customer Success? We don't want to turn this into yet another cheap denunciation of hypocrisy in business—we all know business can be better. We want to offer a solution.
In a recent meeting with a CEO, Nick heard that solution. This leader of a large software company told him that while a culture shift is clearly the beginning of a company transformation, it's not the end. Just because you have great people aligned around a mission doesn't mean your customers will consistently have great outcomes and experiences:
That's starting to sound like a process issue—just improve your training, customer experience, and cross-functional cohesion. But as we have learned, it's much more than fine-tuning the problem areas where values are falling short.
The CEO went on to tell Nick that the next step is to “industrialize” customer success across the company—to move it from an art to a science. In the Industrial Revolution, new processes and technology enabled workers to specialize and allowed manufacturers to standardize, which powered companies to scale. It was much more than incremental improvement—it was transformative at a fundamental level.
This CEO was looking at customer success industrialization across three specific vectors, which we'll align to those three principles of the Industrial Revolution: specialization, standardization, and scale.
In addition, the CEO wanted to be able to measure this process like other parts of the business that have been “industrialized.” How effective is teammate onboarding? How quickly is it happening? What is the comprehensive customer experience and where are the gaps? How customer-centric is the company across functions?
Throughout the book, we'll talk about strategies to industrialize the theory of Customer Success.
To ensure a company's long-term survival and success, the CEO must own the CS process. Active involvement is a requirement! We've outlined how to make this happen without completely overloading your already-packed schedule. Hint: You start by leading through example. From there, you can take three steps: Ask questions about customers in your daily conversations with your execs, run a Success Briefing (we can help), and do a few more client meetings every week. We also discussed a long-term goal: that CEOs need to go beyond words on a wall and create processes, metrics, and systems to turn good intentions into success for clients.
In the next several chapters, we'll discuss how a CEO can guide each function to evolve in line with your overall CS transformation. In Chapter 9, we'll explore how to tweak your product design process from the start so that CS is at the forefront of the R&D team's mind whenever they're building for the next release.