Top 6 Focus Areas for a Customer Success Leader

As we enter another year, Customer Success is poised to be more sophisticated. Let’s assume that a growing SaaS firm acquires more customers, hires more employees, and increased the number of all other key stakeholders. With such an increase, aligning everyone to one goal, using the old reactive approach just wouldn’t make sense. It becomes imperative for the company to be proactive.
Managing customer relationships is crucial. So identifying and understanding the key focus areas for your CS team is essential.

Here are the 6 Focus areas for a Customer Success Team or a Customer Success Leader-

Create a Value Framework
Understand Value. Your customers need to understand what value your product is adding. Similarly, you need to know exactly what value your product is offering. Create a Value Framework that explains clearly the points where there’s a value proposition. A Value Framework assists your customers to quantify how they can achieve their business goals and KPIs by using your product.

Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
If there’s one metric that every B2B SaaS firm must measure is this one- NRR. Maximising NRR should be the core focus area going forward. Net Revenue Retention takes into account,
Revenue gained from renewals and upgrades, and Revenue lost due to churn and downgrades.
Hence, it paints a clear picture of how your business is performing at the end of a specific month with respect to the beginning of the month. NRR measures the performance literally at every stage of the customer journey.
Onboarding -Identifies how many people churned out.
Renewal – Identifies and measures the renewal rate.
Expansion – Measures the percentage of expansion that happened with the existing customers.
NRR = [(Revenue from renewals + Revenue from upgrades– Revenue lost due to churn and downgrades) / MRR at the beginning of the month]
NRR is one of the top focus areas that as a CS leader you need to know. You should be ready to explain and back up your NRR. Don’t freak out as NRR is your friend!

What is your Use-case?
Clearly define and understand what use-case is the customer looking to solve. Do not underestimate the importance of use cases. It makes no sense to just go from ROI to product features. You need an intermediate layer of use cases. An accurate customer use case covers all aspects of customer experience. A comprehensive analysis of how a customer journey would be is what differentiates a great organization from an average one. Every stage of the buyer/customer journey, be it customer onboarding, adoption, renewal, upsell, etc. must have a use case. If realized, it could add a great deal of value to your business. Thus, making it one of the top focus areas for you not to overlook.

QVRs (not QBRs anymore)
Change is dreadful. It’s a nightmare for your Customer Success Manager when there’s a change in a key stakeholder/sponsor of your customer. Definitely, a tricky place to be in. Unfortunately, that’s the reality of every business. You might find yourself in a situation where you’d have to start building the relationship from scratch all over again. Highly likely it is that the new executive might be planning to introduce a new product that s/he might have been using.

Measure CSM Performance
Measure your Customer Success Manager’s performance not on the number of accounts held, but on the “verified outcomes/value delivered”.