Setting Your Customer Success Vision – Part 2 of Three Part Series
Go To Market Strategy by Target Market
As we discussed in Part 1 of this series on Customer Success Vision, there are three elements that should be defined as part of your strategic vision for your Customer Success model:
Customer Success Corporate Climate Shift
Go To Market Strategy by Target Market
Customer Life Cycle Model
The second element is the Go to Market Strategy by Target Market which helps your company focus on a specific plan for landing new customers and expanding all customers for a defined target market or market segment.
There are two parts to your Go To Market Strategy;
Acquiring New Customers
Expanding Existing Customers
Once you have defined your market segments and a GTM strategic plan for each market segment, I recommend conducting a brainstorming session with your customer success team including the consulting team and experts on customer on-boarding or implementation execution to identify the common problems customers face as well as obstacles or challenges in guiding customers to success. The team would focus on defining the high value outcomes for each target market that will operationalize the use of your solution that will produce ROI long term. In your brainstorming session, the team may come up with several solutions and identify many other innovative approaches to creating value. The key is to start with the top three that have a high potential for generating soft and hard ROIs for the customer.
Armed with the understanding of what it takes to make a customer successful with your solution, the Customer Success (CS) team can develop programs focused on delivering specific solutions to the common problems in each of the market segments that ensure realization of the high value outcomes. CS can then align with the Sales and Marketing plans for how they present your solution to help make it clear to prospects and customers on how you solve these problems and provide value specifically within each market segment.
The team can also define the appropriate packaged programs that include licenses and services to make It easier for sales to present and sell your innovative approach as a differentiator to your competitors. From successful execution of these programs with each customer, the CSMs will be able to create compelling customer success stories and references for the sales and marketing teams to utilize in the future.
The team can determine different approaches and solutions for new customers versus existing customers. Many companies will bundle up programs that provide solutions to specific problems within a market segment as a solid land strategy. Then create follow on programs that follow a best practice roadmap to expand a customers utilization of your solutions. These expansion programs lead a customers naturally into a next phase for existing customers to continue expanding the use of your solution.
A well thought out Go To Market (GTM) strategic plan is the key to understanding how to develop a customer success model that includes the right services and programs that deliver the right high value outcomes with well defined roles, processes, standards, policies and procedures to deliver a consistent, high quality customer experience with repeatability.
We will finish discussing the last element in this series on developing a Customer Success Vision in my next blog where we will focus on building a Customer Lifecycle model that drives high value customer execution.
I welcome your thoughts and feedback.
Jackie Golden