Introducing PulseLocal – The Next Chapter of Pulse

When we first planned the Pulse Conference back in 2013, nothing could have prepared us for the response from the community.  You see, other departments within a business have their own traditions.  Sales has Dreamforce or the annual President’s Club trip for high-achieving reps. Marketing has the Marketo Summit, countless meet-ups, and even national organizations

How to Handle Common Customer Success Scenarios

As you grow your Customer Success Management operation, you’ll find yourself seeing very distinct patterns in what – at first glance – appears to be an endless variety of situations with your customers. When you and your Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are feeling that sense of déjà vu and you hear yourself saying “I’ve been

Deploying Gainsight Without Usage Data

There’s an abundance of data in every enterprise.  There always has been but today, it’s much easier to extract and move around.  One of the results of this is that most organizations are becoming more and more data-driven.  Take Marketing for example.  10 years ago Marketing was perhaps the least measurable organization in the enterprise. 

Reach the Full Potential of your Customer Relationships

One of the realities of Customer Success that is certainly recognized by practitioners – but may be missed by most of the rest of the organization – is that it actually contains all the other customer-facing functions within it (a topic touched on previously). A complete Customer Success operation would ideally contain elements of Strategy,

3 Steps to Understand and Engage Your Customers

It is impossible to understand and engage your customers in a one-size-fits-all fashion if you have more than a handful of customers. You’ve probably been told – or told others – something like this: “Here are your 150 customers, now go understand them and get engaged.” Yikes! Okay, so I’ve done this a thousand times and

Understanding the Role of Customer Success in the Customer Journey

When you create your customer journey map, outline the process your customers take to that first “Wow!” moment and eventually onto realizing value and achieving success, you must do so with them in mind. Obviously. But how do you overlay what happens on your side to ensure that success map is followed; that your customers

Customer Referrals: The CSM Metric You Can’t Ignore

Earlier this week, Lincoln wrote a fantastic article that outlined the three most common methods for measuring CSM performance. If you adopt any of the three methods outlined, you will be well on your way to increased retention and upsells. I’d like to add to that list with one more measurement that, unfortunately, not enough companies are using

3 Ways to Measure Customer Success Manager Performance

As with most jobs, there may be many different ways to measure the performance of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) It’s a complex job encompassing many different activities and working with many different kinds of customers. The biggest variable is probably the maturity of your company, which will dictate the specific role you’ll be playing.