Companies spend a lot of time and money working to improve execution in an effort to scale and grow.
Great focus is placed on improving the sales and marketing disciplines with the aim of increasing pipeline velocity and closing more deals.
Yet when it comes to optimizing post-sales execution, the eagerness to establish and follow through with as much rigor looks to fall flat.
Why, when arguably post-sales execution is ultimately more critical for long-term revenue growth in a subscription economy, do companies seemingly not spend more time improving customer success best practices?
Executing the Value Proposition is Hard
Implementing the value proposition is hard.
It is significantly easier to communicate and sell the product’s value proposition than it is to actually implement it so that it delivers on the promise.
In addition to setting up the product, implementation also involves many cross-functional teams, across different companies (vendor and customer), each with their own cultures and processes, increasing the complexity to execute significantly.
And let’s face it, operationalizing processes is not sexy.
As long as vendors are running around reactively keeping busy attending to customers, there is an implicit excuse as to why no one can get to improving operations, especially when they are already struggling to deal with the challenges of implementing.
Who wants to deal with hard, complex and boring?
But the fact of the matter is that if companies continue to procrastinate and do not improve customer success best practices with as much vigor and enthusiasm as they do the sales side, they will fall behind and ultimately fail.
Is there a way to make this easier?
Customer Success Playbook for Prescriptive Success
Learn from your most successful customers and create a prescriptive approach to successful implementation (understanding the customer success journey map is the most effective way in getting this done).
A customer success playbook template, based on the aggregated knowledge of what works, is the best way to drive repeatable and consistent customer success.
From it, a set of rules and a framework – the customer success best practices – can be defined and used by employees to proactively manage customers through the journey.
Plays work because they incorporate learnings from what has worked in the past and therefore serve to direct, and act as guardrails for, the employee to operate in a consistent manner thus improving role discipline and customer success metrics.
When starting to build a playbook for the first time, be sure to assign a cross-functional team and executive sponsor to ensure this is a high priority for the company to accomplish.
Bottom Line: Commit to Customer Success Best Practices
Post-sales execution is hard.
Implementing a company’s value proposition is significantly more complex than promising it is.
Companies should therefore look to the patterns of their most successful customers to define a playbook that employees can use to drive repeatable and consistent customer success.
When it does, the company will be scoring the ultimate game-winning play – revenue growth!
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