We’re growing — now what? Ways CS teams can accommodate more customers

"As the World Churns" podcast Episode 6 transcript, featuring guest Nils Vinje:

< Listen to the full episode here >

Host:

Nils Vinje. Well, what can I say? He's the man. Nils is a three time, top 25 customer success influencer author, speaker leadership coach, and success consultant. It's a fair bet. You'll give you some ideas on what to do when it's raining new customers. Okay. So great, great news. You have a company that's found that magic thing that has triggered hyper growth as a customer success professional yourself and now a customer success consultant and leadership coach. How have you seen this affect the customer success function as a whole?

Guest:

Well, first, I mean, just exciting times that you found  the fit, the company and the organization, and found the fit very exciting. And there's a lot of emotion and a lot of things change at this point in time when you go through a growth and scale period. And one of the most important things I think to keep in mind is imagining and looking at all of your operation from a scale perspective, when you get to this point. So up to this point, there's probably you, a lot of ad hoc processes and things that you did, and you know, one off things that worked because they had to get done. But at this point in time, it's gonna be really valuable to take a step back first, look at what you have built. Look at it from the standpoint of what can possibly sustain another growth stage over the next three or six or nine months, and retool some of those things that you already have. And that is an incredible place to start. You don't have to rip everything out. You don't have to start from scratch. You just have to evolve what you have been doing. And that can be a, a wonderful, like kind of next step into the growth phase before you get into more organizational challenges, changes, uh, which we'll talk about in just a minute.

Host:

What would you say is that biggest thing that teams tend to have to retool? You say, you don't have to rip it out from scratch. What's that thing that you see that they have to redo?

Guest:

So in the earlier stages of companies, typically CSMs, a lot of times will be responsible for everything post sale. So they'll take over the relationship from the customer post-sale. They will onboard the customer and implement the solution and then work with them on an ongoing basis and sometimes even manage the renewal. So when the CSM is responsible for the entire life cycle of the customer, there are lots of touch points, lots of pieces. And everybody typically develops their own little nuanced way of engaging with customers. So let's look at the onboarding example. And at first, when you scale, this is oftentimes the most common place to split off and develop a specialized function that just focuses on onboarding. So you go from having a team of, let's say, eight to ten CSMs who have all run onboardings themselves. And we used to just distribute clients amongst this group of people and everybody would onboard and everybody would take care of those customers ongoing.

Guest:

Now we might take a step back and say, all right, instead of having everybody do onboarding, we're gonna put one person or perhaps two people that are dedicated just to onboarding. And as part of that effort, we take a look at the best of what works from everybody's onboarding and standardize our onboarding to the point where this is the process. These are the decks, these are the templates, these are the structure, these are the meetings. And all of those, if we can nail those down and have it very consistent execution by just one or two people, we'll have a lot more consistency than if we had eight people doing it a little bit differently.

Host:

How do you know when you're at the stage where you can actually dedicate someone to onboarding?

Guest:

Yeah. Well this question comes up all the time, I've faced it myself as a CS leader, I've helped my clients work through this a tremendous amount. There is a, a pivot point that will come onboarding in a client's life cycle, no matter the company size stage or anything is usually one of the most intense periods. And one of the most important to make sure that we get everything right, because it sets us up for the future. Now, if everybody is doing onboarding a little bit differently, it leaves us an awful lot of risk there. So what we see is that oftentimes the onboarding will take precedence over all the other activities that are post onboarding because they're different in nature. So onboarding is a great place to have a very specific project plan, a set of tasks, things that the client has to do, things that you have to do when you get post onboarding, the engagement model with a client changes dramatically, cuz you're no longer just teaching them about how the product works. You're actually working with them on their business and helping them to realize the full value of using your solution to improve their business. So what you will see is that more time is being spent across your entire, let's say eight person, CSM team, more time is being spent in onboarding than post onboarding. And what that does is set you up for potential risk. Yeah, because not enough time is being spent with customers throughout their life cycle because all the effort and energy has to go into the beginning, because it's so intense and so much going on in a period of time. So that is a point at which I would say there's too much risk in the back half of the customer's life cycle, post onboarding that we're not spending enough time having strategic conversations with them and going deep with them, we have to shift this. And then if we get one or two people dedicated to onboarding, now, all of a sudden, everybody else on the team has their entire focus can go into that post onboarding period, which is gonna return a greater result for the time invested.

Host:

Yep. Makes sense. All right. So this figure has been thrown around occasionally. We know that up to 90% of churn decisions are made during the onboarding process. What are some ways that hyper growth companies can improve onboarding and not let the details slip through the cracks? How do you make this repeatable? I know you're big on a repeatability. So whether you have a person dedicated to onboarding or people or the CS person is doing the entire life cycle, how do you actually make this repeatable?

Guest:

Yeah. So there's a couple really important things that an onboarding program has to do. Number one, it has to capture the excitement and enthusiasm of the client at the point of sale and bring in that excitement and enthusiasm. The level of engagement, excitement, enthusiasm from the client will never be greater than the point at which they signed on the dotted line and said, yes, your solution is the right one for us. We are committed to this. That is the greatest point of openness where you can take full advantage, but you have to do it in a very strategic way. So that's point number one, you have to capture with that energy and enthusiasm and excitement and take advantage of it. Number two is you have to set expectations for what is going to happen during the onboarding period. So there is a period whether it's 30 days, six days, nine days, four months, whatever the time frame is, that's the specific kind of project that is the onboarding and the implementation, which is all focused on the tech side.

Guest:

And, you know, bringing them into the fold, understanding their business objectives, aligning on a success plan, all that good stuff happens in that onboarding period. Now the third piece is one that I see that is often missed and that is you have to set expectations for what's going to happen after onboarding is over and how you and your company are going to continuously engage with the client and continuously add value over time. So oftentimes this is missed because all the focus and energy goes to the onboarding itself. There's a project plan, there's a set of tasks, there's all these things that have to be done and there's lack of attention to detail on what's gonna happen after that because if you wait to the end of onboarding to tell the customer what's gonna happen next, you lost a huge opportunity to set expectations that you can actually deliver on. And now you're a little bit behind the ball.

Host:

And set systems to achieve those goals, right. That's right. Based on real life and not on false presumptions.

Like what you see? <Hear the whole "As the World Churns" interview with Nils Vinje here.>