The Essential Nature of Accountability Partnership When Designing Customer Journeys

I gave a talk last month at the Customer Success Collective’s conference, which led to a lot of conversations with CS leaders that are building first-iteration customer journeys. I want to share some insight I’ve been passing along in 1:1s to reach a larger audience, based on some common themes and struggles.

The gap between fantasy and reality can be hard to close when we’re building out our Customer Journeys, and we close that gap with the practice of accountability partnership. In some ways, achieving expansion and retention goals in the B2B SaaS space is all about being an accountability partner.

The customer tells us what they want, but if we’re not seeing the data/adoption/behavior change add up, we have to get some answers: is that goal you stated at the beginning of our relationship really what you want? If so, how do we hold you accountable and get you using the software as needed to achieve that goal?

We want our customers to be able to say:

“We used to do X, it took us Y long, it had Z associated pain points and it prevented our business from going in these ways. Using your product has mitigated these pain points, reduced the time we spend doing what we have to do, and because of you I now scale my business without having to scale my hiring at the same rate.”

We’re only going to get there by looking at the data, listening to our customers, and constantly evolving customer journeys as well as customer goals. When we do this, our customer journeys feel to the customer that we’ve anticipated their potential challenges and gotten ahead of them before they hit road blocks – because we’re the experts.

A frequent challenge, however, is that the contact who was engaged in the sales process had a goal for the purchase of our product, but the day-to-day contact doesn’t view that as a top priority. If it’s not one of the KPIs tied to their performance, they simply have other concerns they have to prioritize.

Because of this, we have to look at what other goals we can add to our accountability plan (which is a more evolved customer journey with milestones and tentative dates attached) based on how our point of contact gets bonuses or promotions – that’s how we get them motivated to engage.

This is as simple as learning a bit more about their title. A Director of IT is going to get bonuses and promotions based on very different KPIs than a CMO, for example, so start there. If we know that most of our point of contacts at customer orgs are CMOs, we know that conversion rates are a top priority. If that is a metric your product can impact, in our next meeting with that customer we want to ask them about adding a conversion metric to their accountability plan.

1. In practice, that conversation can look like:

“I know we’re not seeing the (insert goal/metric, such as adoption rates) we hoped for at this point in your journey with us, so I wanted to ask you about your goals around conversion rates. Based on what I know about your account, I’d like to suggest we add a goal to our mutual accountability plan around conversion rates. Would setting a goal of a 25% conversion rate, increasing 6.25% each quarter, align with your internal goals?”

If so, update that mutual accountability plan to include this new goal with four milestones, representing a 6.25% increase per quarter, and analyze progress in your recurring meetings. If their goal is a different number, adjust based on the conversion rate their supervisor/board etc. want to see. Once you’ve done this for a few customers, you have enough information to take that knowledge and apply it to every relevant account in your Book of Business. Then, continue to iterate on those automated journeys as you do this with more customers, see how things progress, and learn more.

When this is operating at a high level, you’ll wind up with many different journeys based on minor differences in customer size, spend, industry, goals, etc. that not only drive goal attainment but feel elegant.

1. Applying what you learn these priorities are is especially key in designing customer journeys for your lower ARR customers that you can’t give 1:1 time with CSMs. Top Tier customers will be able to meet regularly with CSMs to discuss progress toward goals, and the changes we make to their accountability plans can be applied to lower tier customers using automated customer journeys via CS software.

Behavior change is difficult, but we can work with the customer to develop an accountability plan en route to their goal. If the customer doesn’t have a specific KPI or metric that’s most important to them, Accountability Partnership means co-creating goals with your customer.

This varies by industry, but I constantly hear from CS leaders that the vast majority of their customers don’t come to them with an OKR or a metric tied to the purchase of their tool, so it’s imperative that you train your CSMs to be assertive: “based on your industry, size, and other things I know about you, I’m going to suggest that we make X your goal.”

If you don’t have enough data to do that yet, simply make a best guess and tweak as you go. Let’s say for the sake of example: “based on what I know about you, we’re going to propose that we set the following goal: 80% of your users recording at least one video per month by the end of this year, which is going to give those users significant time back in their week”.

Not only do customers appreciate this, feeding them a goal or two is an absolute requirement to ensure they see return on their investment and we secure their renewals. This should be a standard practice for any CSM with a customer that is not prepared with a goal or KPI attached to the purchase of our product.

This varies by industry, but I constantly hear from CS leaders that the vast majority of their customers don’t come to them with an OKR or a metric tied to the purchase of their tool, so it’s imperative that you train your CSMs to be assertive: “based on your industry, size, and other things I know about you, I’m going to suggest that we make X your goal.”

If you don’t have enough data to do that yet, simply make a best guess and tweak as you go. Let’s say for the sake of example: “based on what I know about you, we’re going to propose that we set the following goal: 80% of your users recording at least one video per month by the end of this year, which is going to give those users significant time back in their week”.

Not only do customers appreciate this, feeding them a goal or two is an absolute requirement to ensure they see return on their investment and we secure their renewals. This should be a standard practice for any CSM with a customer that is not prepared with a goal or KPI attached to the purchase of our product.

Next, I’ll dive further into this with how to apply the three Ts of B2B content marketing – teach, tailor, take control – which apply to customer success in a big way. More to come, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the meantime!