Nothing in customer success causes CSMs to suffer “feelings”, as Naomi Aiken puts it, as reliably as losing a customer. Churn often brings feelings of shame, blame, and frustration in its wake, making it hard to analyze and learn from the loss.
But what if you could break the cycle?
A former ChurnZero CSM and team leader, and now the founder of Techtonic Lift, Naomi has developed the Outcomes Club format for learning from churn. Collaborative, analytical, and team-focused, it works because it focuses on preventable churn, and keeps blame to a minimum.
This month, Naomi shared how to do it in a ChurnZero webinar, which you can watch in full at the end of this article.
By analyzing preventable churn, she says, your team becomes better equipped to prevent it in the future. In fact, treating preventable churn as a professional development opportunity for CSMs is the mindset shift many CS leaders need going into 2025.
Of course, churn is often more preventable than meets the eye.
The collaborative framework for analyzing customer churn.
Outcomes Club is an exercise that CS leaders can do with their CSMs to get them in the right mindset to own and mitigate churn. The main components of this include:
The Concept: Opportunity for CSMs to learn and grow by engaging in a structured churn reflection activity and presenting their findings.
The Format: Choose a venue and audience size that make sense for your team – see details below.
The Framing: You can introduce Outcomes Club as early as CSM hiring/onboarding as a professional development opportunity.
The Participants: Experienced and tenured CSMs should lead. Watch the webinar below to learn why having a “newscaster” makes a difference.
Once you have these dialed in, you’re ready to do the exercise!
Each participant creates four presentation slides. The content of the actual four slides may vary, but Naomi recommends:
- Top Signals
- Value Realization Summary
- Financial Impact
- Customer Watchlist
As a rule of thumb, the four slides should take a CSM no more than 30 minutes to create and no more than 10 minutes to present.
As a CS leader, it’s up to you to determine your Outcomes Club presentation format and venue, but most opt to host a virtual call, with three or four CSMs each presenting on one customer of their choosing.
Does it work? According to one Techtonic Lift client, a director of customer success who uses the Outcomes Club format:
- She has never had to force a CSM to present at Outcomes Club. Her CSMs eagerly volunteer and want to present about their clients.
- Leadership continues to be impressed with the level of thought and strategy coming out of Outcomes Club sessions.
- Outcomes Club has built a new sense of camaraderie amongst the CS team. Everyone contributes and works together, strategizing on common churn themes and how to overcome them.
How do CSMs typically feel about Outcomes Club? Here’s some feedback so far:
As a concept, Outcomes Club is one of many that you can leverage to create a team culture where CSMs learn from churn together, and bounce back stronger.
Churn is never an easy topic of discussion, but it’s possible to create a better culture around discussing it, which starts with educating CSMs on its causes and impacts, including how it affects GRR, NRR, and other revenue-based metrics.
From there, building a greater sense of ownership through exercises like Outcomes Club can help you reframe the whole churn conversation to benefit each CSM and your company as a whole.
Want to try Outcomes Club? Watch the full webinar here.
Techtonic Lift is a ChurnZero Certified Partner whose services include fractional CS operations, customer success platform admin, CS strategy and more. Get to know them here.
