Customer Success Leaders to CEOs: Show Me The Money

I had a long conversation with my CEO last night around executive-level commitment to a Chief/VP’s access to budget for staffing, tooling, and various resources needed to make a new Customer Success team truly successful. I found myself channeling Jerry Maguire. No, I didn’t just yell, “Show me the money!” but instead had the type of moment that produced a ton of clarity and strong opinions. The half a bottle of merlot did help.

As we discussed this issue, we strongly agreed that often times a team is created, some kind of partial budget is created to get the team started. But once the honeymoon is over, access to additional resources is akin to a court battle. Fighting for access to budget for tooling or headcount is downright grueling.

He went along to share a few personal experiences with me, and after thinking about my own experiences and trading a few more war stories, I came to quickly realize that there seems to be a common theme with some CEOs who make a commitment to the creation of a Customer Success team: The commitment is only half baked.

Here’s the trend that I’m seeing with many of my peers:

• Decision is made to create a Customer Success team.
• CEO announces this decision to the masses and appoints someone to lead the effort.
• 1-2 Customer Success Managers are assigned to support the effort.
• Customer Success leader creates policy and procedure after policy and procedure.
• Customer Success leader finds that to really drive adoption (or insert company objective here) they need either tools or man-power.
• Customer Success leader pulls together all of the supporting documentation and prepares for “CEO court”.
• Customer Success leader pleads his/her case for budgetary need.

(Cue the crickets)

I know that many of you are reading this and nodding your heads. No matter how awesome your CEO might be, it’s a painful process. His/her job is to keep money in the bank and grow the company as quickly as possible without tipping the boat over. That can often be directly opposed to your efforts when you need to spend money to do your job better.

What’s a Customer Success leader to do? Here are a few ideas:

1. Report on value:

• Renewal Rates – Show the increase in renewal rates that your team is brining in.
• CSAT/NPS® – Show the uptick in customer sat that your team is producing.
• Up sales – If your team isn’t responsible for up sales, then track leads passed on closed deals that you/your team had a hand in uncovering and/or closing.
• Escalated accounts – Highlight issues that were uncovered by your efforts that drove positive change to the company.

2. Report on effectiveness:

• Show increase in adoption – If you don’t have tooling available, take a few sample customers and analyze them. After your Customer Success Manager interacted with an account, did said account’s usage increase? Keep it simple, look at number of logins or some sticky feature usage as a benchmark to effectiveness.
• Show increase in evangelists/reference accounts.

Remember, team value isn’t just the number of accounts that you’ve saved because of heroic efforts.

Oh, and one more thing, here’s a question for all of our CEOs out there: If your Customer Success team can be responsible for a quarter, or even a third of your company revenues, why can they not be responsible for a X million dollar budget?