3 Step Guide to Starting the Year Off Right

Ready, Set, Customer Success!

A new year inspires renewed energy and excitement for what could happen. It’s a fresh start and the perfect time to reflect on the past and plan for the future, to set goals and figure out how to meet them.

We may already be a couple of weeks into the new year, but it’s not too late to kick things off with a bang and help ensure growth for you, your customers, and your company.

Check out these three steps to being mindful about your progress this year.

1.) Reflect

There’s no time like the present to rid yourself of bad habits. Review your biggest wins and losses from last year and ask yourself:

• What did the customers who succeeded the most have in common? What about the ones who didn’t?
• Were there common threads in your behavior with renewed and churned accounts?
• What worked and what didn’t work with tricky customers?
• What were your best moments last year? What were your worst?
• Were there key soundbites or best practices that consistently worked across varying customer accounts?

Outside of asking yourself these questions you should also ask your boss if there are things you should be focusing on for the new year.

2.) Share

It’s great that you spent some time thinking about your wins/losses from last year, but you should also encourage your teammates to do the same. Consider organizing and hosting a lunch & learn with the Customer Success team for everyone to share their findings along with any other ideas that would be helpful in making it a strong year.

Here’s some tips for having productive lunch & learn:

• Select someone beforehand to be the discussion leader to help kick off the topic and encourage group sharing and feedback.
• Select another team member to take notes during the meeting. This will be useful in re-sharing back with the team as a takeaway.
• Have a learning objective. Challenge each CSM to find at least one valuable takeaway that they can focus on in the new year. You want them to walk away with more than just a free lunch.
• Make sure to promote the lunch and learn with the team and extend the invite to other departments outside of just the Customer Success team. Chances are others in the organization can benefit from the discussion as well.
• Provide the food and beverages. Instead of asking attendees to just bring their own brown bag lunch, bring in food for the team. (Maybe even consider ordering something other than pizza.)

3.) Set Goals

Now that the team has come together and shared their proven keys to success, it’s time to put that into action and set goals. When thinking about goal setting consider these three main areas that you will want to track and measure against.

• Customer Metrics– It’s obvious as a CSM your job is to help bring value to the customer, but how do you track that? Metrics here can include, the time it takes for a successful implementation, positive net promoter scores, and product adoption.
• Company Metrics– As an employee you play a pivotal role in the company and you should prove that value by tracking your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), bookings, retention rate, and expansion revenue.
• Individual Metrics– You should also set goals for yourself this year based on what you reflected on before. Are there a certain number of calls you would like to make per day to keep you on task? Should you set a goal for number of early renewals in a quarter to discourage procrastination? Do you want to end the year with a certain number of referenceable clients? Now’s the time to put pen to paper and state your goals.

Now let’s go out and make 2019 the best year yet and fight churn!

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