Managing expectations
Your customers come from different sources, usually categorized under inbound (they have been looking for a solution like yours), referrals (their friend recommended your solution), or outbound (your sales team got in touch with them explaining how your product can help them).
When they become paying customers, they will have expectations - indeed your product is supposed to solve the issues they are facing. As such, your customer success team is here to make sure they are successful in solving this issue.
In a classic marketing and sales-led environment, your customers will face the following pitches:
Marketing: the world is changing and you need to adapt. You can be like today’s leading companies which already made the shift!
Sales: By using our awesome features, you will be able to improve the situation you are currently in, and this will have this impact on your revenues.
This is the level of expectations your customers have when landing into your customers success team. And this is the pitch your team should have.
Success: Welcome to our amazing company, I’m here to help you reach your goal. I will help you by training your team and make sure you maximize the impact of our product on your company!
Make sure you align your team around your product-market fit canvas, which goes as follow:
Starting to deliver impact
Today’s main buzzword may very well be “impact”.
People are buying softwares because their current organization, situation and technical stack is preventing them from reaching theirs goals.
To help them reach their goal, you need to build a plan that your team will follow step by step. It can be very short when your product is very easy to use (usually low ARPA), and a bit expansive for high-touch customers.
But at the end of the day, you’d better must make sure that your customers’ situation has improved since they have moved forward with your solution.
A step by step process to insure a full experience of your value could be divided as follow:
Example with Successeve:
Success needs at each stage
Customers needs and will vary greatly at each and every stage of your customer lifecycle. The most important thing to keep in mind is that customers must experience real value with your product at each step.
Let’s take the classic customer lifecycle for high-touch customers:
Read the rest of this article here: Step by step guide to get started
