Your customer can usually describe the need or needs they want your solution to address. But formally agreeing with them on the indicators that will prove the project a success is harder, and it takes method. Eliott Cahen, a change management expert, explains how.
Can you tell us about InsideBoard and your role there?
InsideBoard is a SaaS change management platform for major business transformations (technology adoption, operational performance improvement, cultural transformation and so on). With our customers, we define the objectives and success indicators of their transformations for each community affected (on the OKR model), and we use AI to deliver relevant, personalised content to each user over time, based on how far they've progressed towards their success objectives.
As a Senior CSM looking after a portfolio of high-touch customers (large French corporates listed on the CAC 40), I make sure that using InsideBoard creates lasting value for my customers. That means getting deep into the customer's use case and steering them onto an adoption path that gradually secures their success objectives. It's a trusted advisor role, for which I draw a lot of inspiration and methods from my 10 years in IT management and change management consulting.
In your view, what's the main challenge for a CSM?
Once they've signed up to our solution, customers have two kinds of question: questions about adoption (is the solution being used and mastered?) and questions about impact (business, social and so on) and how to maximise it. So I'd say that the CSM's main challenge, creating value, comes down to 3 key points.
1. ENABLE: As the customer's best ally, a CSM does everything in their power to enable and prove the creation of real value (objectives achieved, ROI) and perceived value (satisfaction). This can mean actions with the customer (advising on best practice, running workshops, showcasing their champion, mediating between parties and so on) and internally (removing blockers, influencing product priorities and so on).
2. SUPPORT OVER TIME: Onboarding is critical, especially for reducing time to value, but it isn't an end in itself. It's part of each user's learning journey. A person's capacity to absorb new things is limited, so you need to support them, communicate, move through the stages, consolidate what they've learnt and celebrate the wins. A CSM has to support the customer as they mature, and update the measures of success over time to reflect each stage reached.
Success objectives can also change for other reasons: a shift in the customer's strategy, a change of sponsor and so on. So a CSM has to keep listening and stay alert, put rituals in place that make it possible to be proactive in the face of these generally predictable changes, and adjust the success KPIs where needed.
3. ADAPT: The value expected is rarely the same for every stakeholder.
- The signatory expects ROI
- Sponsors expect ROO (return on objectives) in their area of the business. For example, with a CRM tool: increasing the win rate for the VP Sales, increasing campaign click-through rates for the VP Marketing, increasing NPS for the VP Customer Success...
- Users expect the solution to make their lives easier or improve the quality of their day-to-day work. They're often forgotten, yet without them the ROI and ROO will never be achieved and the customer will be at risk. So a CSM has to be able to prove and promote the value created from the user's point of view.
To prove the solution's value, you have to agree on what the customer expects from it. At what stage of the project do you do that?
Today, all of InsideBoard's customers are high-touch. So pre-sales is strategic and leads to a value proposition that answers the question 'how would you define success for this project?'. Whether it's new business, upsell or cross-sell, customer challenges are identified as early as possible and shared with all our teams (Sales, Delivery, CSMs and so on).
The difficulty, though, lies in turning the expected value into numbers. For example, customers find it easy to say they want to increase user adoption of a CRM, but harder to say what that means in terms of quantified targets.
What's your method for getting there?
When discovering a business case or a change in use case, we work hand in hand with the account managers and draw on the Customer Centric Selling (CCS) methodology. It's a structured conversational approach that leads the customer to express their real needs, helps the AM and the CSM understand them in detail, and creates a positive experience for the customer, not only during the sale but also post-sale.
We rely on our champion to identify and meet the different personas (mainly business, but also legal, IT and so on). Each of them describes their pain points and expectations, and defines what success for the project means to them. Through a pre-defined set of questions and answers, and by projecting into specific use cases, each contact is led to set out the quantitative impact they expect: the success KPI.
We map these contacts on a 'power map', which shows the power dynamics around the decision and identifies exactly who is involved in the buying cycle: negotiator, influencer, decision-maker. Each CSM maintains and updates it throughout the customer lifecycle to keep challenges and success objectives aligned.
Example of a power map. Source: https://www.lucidchart.com/
I imagine you often face different, or even conflicting, objectives between stakeholders. How do you reach a consensus?
That's right: each stakeholder expresses and defends their own challenges, and for business or political reasons, these can diverge. This is where the CSM's role (and the power map) becomes most meaningful, and most complex!
Spotting the divergence is already half the job. It's often the unknown that leads to major difficulties, or even churn. So it's vital to identify divergences as early as possible, to give yourself time to defuse them.
Our close relationships with the key players on the power map help us unblock certain situations, separate the essential from the nice-to-have and prioritise some stakeholders' interests over others.
In every case, we bring all the stakeholders together to share a summary of the challenges and present our value proposition, with consensus on the success indicators to achieve for the coming period. This proposal can of course be adjusted during the meeting until everyone is satisfied. The minutes are circulated widely to avoid any future debate.
A quick aside: tools such as an 'allies map' are a great help in managing social dynamics. This tool identifies how far the employees affected by a project support it. The aim is to characterise these partners by what they do, not by who they are... so that they can then contribute in the right way and make the most of their individual and collective involvement.
You also take a more playful approach with role-playing games. Can you tell us more, and when you bring this in?
Games are an excellent way to open a dialogue between the CSM and the customer! It's good to step off the beaten track and try new ways of working together; it's refreshing :)
One role-play that works really well is 'Back to the Future': it's a year later, and after a year of use, our solution is being presented to the leadership team for a project review. As a team (champion, key stakeholders, sponsor...), our customer identifies the achievements, results and testimonials they're proud of, to convince the leadership team that the project has been a success.
This exercise forces the customer to look ahead and prioritise the relevant information, and helps them set out their objectives in concrete terms, along with their success KPIs. We usually get to the heart of the matter quickly!
How do you track progress on these indicators with the customer? And do you adapt your steering committee format to the customer's initial objectives?
Every quarter, we hold a Success Review in which we share how the success KPIs have evolved in relation to the use and promotion of our solution. We identify areas for improvement and feed them into the Joint Success Plan designed to help us reach our shared objectives. These Success Reviews can be an opportunity to update the challenges, or even commit to new ones.
Success KPIs are the backbone of adoption and customer success: sponsors can't dispute them, they give employees a sense of purpose, and they're an invaluable tool for dialogue for CSMs!
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