#5 | Product

"Great things in business are never done by one person." - Jobs

"Individual commitment to a group effort–that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." - Vince Lombardi

When I started leading IBM Customer Success, I remember reading a statistic that said acquiring a new customer is 5x – 25x more expensive than keeping an existing one. Organizations have to secure new logos because some customer churn is inevitable. Retaining and growing your customer base is the key tenet of a CSM. It’s worth looking at the impact of high churn rates. Let’s say three companies each start with $100M. They all grow annually at 50%. Company A churns at 3% annually, Company B churns at 10% annually, Company C has no churn. The net impact after 5 years is that Company B lost 30% of their revenue or $150M more than Company A. Think about what you can do with $150M!

No one likes churn, but it happens for different reasons including economic impact, M&A, competitive swoops, and poor experiences. 

Many GTM teams get feedback from customers including sellers, technical sellers, professional services, support, CSMs, and more. When it comes to learning how customers are really using your product and what they want to use, the CSM sits squarely in the middle of driving your product roadmap. Why? CSMs stay with your customer to drive adoption after the deal closes. As they do this, they get direct feedback on new features, expected features, and issues. It’s inevitable for CSMs to hear what users want and where they are struggling if they are helping them adopt.

I’m passionate about this topic because I’m living it. Exactly 12 months ago, I had no scalable feedback loop with the product teams. It was escalation driven. I had to change the way CSMs worked with product management and development. We needed some principles to guide us as we rebuilt the feedback loop:

1. Less is more: Prioritize a few big requirements or issues (like 5) that you want addressed. These must have the biggest impact for the majority of your customers. I know 5 sounds small but anything great started small. Don’t pile on more until one is shipped.

2. Patterns: Product Management likes to build for markets vs 1 customer. Show how many customers (and who) are impacted.

3. Impact: You are asking Product Management to invest and pick “your requirements” when they are likely dealing with a sea of other requirements from multiple constituents. Show the financial risk of losing customers or financial expansion of gaining customers if the requirements are built and adopted.

4. Specifics matter: The details matter for development so get it all written down. 

5. Automate: Leverage automated tooling with transparency and accountability.

6. Round trip: You owe it to your CSMs to hear back from product management on which of their requirements WILL ship. Set up the direct engagement for CSMs to hear from Product Management and Product Management to hear from CSMs.

7. Client engagement: Get Product Management and Development in front of your customers so they can hear first-hand experiences. Your customers could be beta testers for new ideas PM wants to experiment with.

We believe that transparency and accountability to each other are important for this to work. All have to be committed.

It’s not comfortable bringing forward problems or needs in your product. However, it’s your role as a CS leader to make sure development and product management hear what’s needed so you can plug churn and grow. 

I’d love to hear how your product feedback loop works between CSMs, Product Management, and Development.

Janine