Everyone knows a CS leader who stands out from the competition. But what playbooks, strategies and techniques do the best customer success leaders have in common – and what do they prioritize to help their teams succeed?
Peter Armaly, a seasoned CS leader, principal at Valuize, and author of Mastering Customer Success, recently dove into this topic for our recent webinar, exploring the most effective strategies of the top CS leaders and why they work, how they help their teams through roadblocks, and how they coach and influence their leaders as well as their teams.
Throughout his time as a leader and consultant, Peter has found that the top-performing and best customer success leaders have a few things in common. You can find what they are below, or watch the webinar in full here.
Here are Peter’s five key traits that separate the highest-performing CS leaders from their counterparts.
1: The best customer success leaders shift from reactive to proactive engagement models.
Reactive models don’t work for customer success because they don’t work for customers, says Peter. Companies that understand this will continue to see success and upward growth within their customer relationships.
For your CSMs, proactivity is the key to success. Having models and processes that encourage CSMs to be proactive in their day-to-day duties will only benefit the team and organization as a whole.
2: The best customer success leaders use technology and data analytics to scale personalization.
AI, for example, will continue to evolve and improve. This will only help CSMs better manage customer relationships and gather more accurate data and insights. Staying current on AI-related trends and knowing what tools will be paramount to your team’s success.
3: The best customer success leaders move towards measurable, outcome-focused strategies.
Attribution will continue to rule as the CS profession evolves. Peter has been predicting this shift for a while and is now seeing it happen in real-time.
4: The best customer success leaders balance the human touch with automated processes.
Having automated processes in our CS efforts doesn’t mean detaching from customers, or not providing them with a human-first experience. It simply means allowing your CSMs to handle more strategic initiatives while using technology to gather data and insights that power your automated processes.
5: The best customer success leaders adapt to changing customer expectations.
“If you want me as a customer, you need to understand how to provide me with what I need, at the moment I need it, and the way I prefer to receive it. If you can’t do that, I’ll just go somewhere else.”
We’re in the subscription economy, and customers demand more from us as their vendors. Peter shared this quote to emphasize how the subscription economy feels at times. Providing the best service should always be the priority, and this new economy makes it even more important.
Building a strong foundation for your CS team.
Peter shared a number of other insights throughout the webinar. All of these insights were geared towards helping customer success teams rise up to new challenges and ultimately become better at driving customer outcomes. One of the insights was that the best customer success leaders invest in building a strong foundation for their teams. These foundations have many key components, including:
- Mastering soft skills like empathy, communication, and relationship building.
- Deep product and industry knowledge.
- Understanding customer business goals and desired outcomes.
- Success plans aligned with customer objectives.
- Effective internal partnerships throughout the organization.
Without a strong internal foundation for your team, customer relationships will be in jeopardy. The components listed above are what Peter outlines in Mastering Customer Success as keys to a highly successful customer success team.
Peter also emphasizes the importance of CS strategies that are highly data-driven. Essentially, customer success teams should have robust processes to gather data and use it to drive better customer outcomes at a faster rate. Data gathered through health scores, surveys, product usage reports, and CRM findings all play a role in finding expansion opportunities, mitigating churn, and building stronger customer relationships. AI makes all of this much easier for CSMs and CS leaders.
What the future holds for customer success.
All of this information begs the question, “What exactly does the future look like for CS?” Peter laid out a few of his predictions on what this exciting future looks like:
- Embracing AI, automation, and emerging technologies
- The CSM evolving to be more strategic and business-focused
- CSMs to develope new skills in data analysis, AI utilization, and technology
- Organizational models shifting to be customer-centric
At the end of the day, we can only make predictions. However, what’s happening right now in the technology/SaaS space – as well as the latest strategies that the the best customer success leaders are deploying – offers a pretty good window into what kind of future to prepare for.
