Data-Driven Habits: The Foundation to CSM Success

[Product] usage is not sufficient for a renewal. It IS pretty much necessary, so we need to get that part right.

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What We Covered

Rather than looking at lagging metrics, Bridget Sicard focuses on the leading indicators that help her team reach their goals. Here are some of the great insights we received from this session:

RevOps experience makes for a great CSM

Bridget shared her own experience of starting off in rev ops and then moving to a CS role, which is a common element for many of Atrium’s employees. Atrium loves rev ops experience because Atrium sells into that function. CSMs better understand their customers as well as know how to use Salesforce. This plays right into their value prop and the outcomes they are driving for their customers.

Metrics for measuring the success of a customer success team

Bridget’s team use to focus on leading indicators like emails and meetings, but now they work backward from their best renewals. They find the common factors that lead to the success of their best accounts. Then they try to replicate those steps with the rest of their book.

These factors include manager usage (they’re looking for two logins/week), leadership alignment, and budget. They also emphasize the need for CSMs to actively prove ROI, multi-thread and engage with executive leadership, and perform value delivery reviews to drive success.

Product usage data is necessary, but not enough to measure customer health

While product usage data is necessary to understand customer health, it is not sufficient. Other factors such as proof of ROI and decision-makers are also crucial to assess customer health. Atrium has defined a user health score that combines usage and other factors. They also have a set of customer success plays that their customer success managers log in Salesforce after every interaction. These combined data signals show a customer’s true health and enables the necessary actions a CSM should take to improve it.

Moving Forward

Based on Bridget’s experience, CS teams can do the following exercises:

Reverse engineer your most successful accounts. Find the commonalities between them, the steps it takes to get them there, and build processes and habits in your CSMs to encourage that adoption
Get your product data in order. It may not be everything, but without solid product usage data in place, you’ll be blind when it comes to understanding your customer health.

We look forward to seeing you at our next session!