Setting goals is essential to drive your Customer Success team's performance and engagement. But how do you make sure they're ambitious, realistic and motivating all at once?
Clément Muletier, Product Manager at Objow and a gamification expert, shares his advice and best practice for setting motivating goals for Customer Success teams.
1 - Why are motivation and engagement essential when setting Customer Success goals?
There are two main ingredients for setting motivating, ambitious goals in Customer Success. The first is autonomy in choosing the goal. The second is helping people progress towards the goal they've set.
1. Autonomy for motivation
When it comes to motivation, there are two main levers:
- Extrinsic motivation, driven by external factors such as salary or incentives, but also by the wish to avoid an internal penalty.
- Intrinsic motivation, which means doing something for personal satisfaction. This is the most lasting kind of motivation.
By definition, autonomy is very much intrinsic. When you choose your own goal, free of any constraints, that's pure intrinsic motivation. In practice, autonomy helps define a goal that has meaning and that people buy into.
There are three criteria for setting inspiring goals and motivating teams to reach them autonomously:
- Rationality: if the goal is aligned with the company strategy, it's natural to want to achieve it.
- Personal reasons: if the goal is ambitious enough, people may be more motivated to reach it, for example with a view to career progression or to showcase their skills in a competency-based interview (CBI model).
- Highlighting collective goals: cooperation gives meaning and creates motivation.
2. Progress for engagement
To bring a goal to life, you need to create engagement. That means helping Customer Success teams progress; otherwise you risk discouraging them.
This principle is illustrated by the idea of the flow state, a theory popularised by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Flow is a state of focus and well-being.
To reach this state, it's essential to pursue a goal that matches your skills. And to stay there, the challenge has to grow in complexity; without that progression, boredom sets in. We recommend setting up quick wins, i.e. goals to be reached regularly, to create this momentum.
2 - How many goals should you set in Customer Success?
As explained above, to reach a goal, you need to be able to drive it properly. That's why spreading yourself across too many goals can hold back progress.
In practice, it's best to set one or two main goals per cycle. You can keep a backlog of goals; the idea is to select and commit to a small number for a specific period (a quarter or a half-year, for example).
3 - Top-down or bottom-up: which approach should you use to set CS goals?
When setting Customer Success goals, it's important to bear in mind top-down and bottom-up approaches. You need to ask yourself whether goals should cascade down from management or be defined together with the teams.
If you start from the principle that autonomy is key, the bottom-up approach is the one to favour. The idea is to encourage buy-in and engagement by involving Customer Success teams in defining the goals. You could even consider a voting system to decide which goals are the most relevant and achievable.
Going further, for cross-functional goals, you can agree together how to assign goals to different teams. It's a way of reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches and aligning teams.
For example, strategic goals are identified top-down; then the bottom-up approach determines which CS goals are most likely to be achieved during the cycle. These might include increasing customer satisfaction (CSAT), reducing the churn rate or increasing the upsell rate.
4 - Which methods should you use to define Customer Success goals (OKRs, SMART)?
The OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method involves setting an overall goal that's inspiring and ambitious, with a medium-term vision. For company OKRs, that means goals over 2 years, updated every year.
Here, with a view to driving the Customer Success team's goals, we'll try to shorten that timeframe and break it down into sub-goals that make sense, to create buy-in and motivate people.
Next, you define the key results, which are used, among other things, to drive the goals set earlier. This is where the SMART method comes in (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound).
Taking the example goals mentioned above, you could break them down into different key results, for example:
- Increasing customer satisfaction:
- Hold X Business Reviews per customer per quarter
- Maintain a 4.5/5 rating for customer onboarding through surveys
- Reduce onboarding time based on time to value (TTV)
- Reducing the churn rate:
- Set up a product tour
- Define a playbook to prepare for renewals in advance
- Create a dashboard to track the churn rate
- Increasing the upsell rate:
- Generate X leads over the quarter
- Convert X leads into meetings over the quarter
- Identify X upsell projects to pass on to the sales team
5 - How do you engage teams with gamification?
Keeping engagement going all year round can be hard once you factor in the human element. At Objow, we like to talk about the engagement curve. It shows how employee engagement varies over time.
Here, how goals are driven can influence employee engagement and motivation. The basic way to drive goals is to run challenges. At Objow, we also rely on regular goal tracking and gamification with badges, rewards or virtual trophies.
In a department with many teams, the manager also plays a vital role. They need to set up rituals and feedback to drive goals every week.
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