Webinar Key takeaways | “Building Your 100-day Customer Success Leadership Plan”

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Date: Thursday 21st January

Emelia D’Anzica – Founder, Growth Molecules hosted by ClientSuccess

About ClientSuccess

• ClientSuccess is a Customer Success platform, built to drive customer retention and growth across your entire company.
• It’s known (based on reviews) as the easiest to use and implement CS system you can find
• Leader on G2 2019 & 2018: https://www.g2.com/categories/customer-success

About Growth Molecules

• Growth Molecules is a customer success consultancy firm, founded by Emelia D’Anzica
• As said by Growth Molecules: “Our goals are twofold: Help people grow while building processes that scale.  We work with companies and individuals seeking to level-up their skills and implement strategies and technology systems that scale.”

Webinar Agenda and goals:

1. Common blindspots Customer Success Leaders encounter
2. How to build a 100-day plan as a customer success leader
3. Why your 100-day plan should be updated on a regular cadence

Webinar Take-Aways

This webinar was super useful for me because right now I’m growing our Client Success Team at WP Buffs and working on a lot of the areas discussed in this webinar. This webinar talked about what to include in your 100-day Leadership Plan to be able to implement a successful strategy that works for your clients, for your team, and for you. The overall goal is to help you map out a plan to help grow your team and identify and work toward your goals in CS. Below are some of my main takeaways that I found helpful.

Client Success Leadership Blind spots

• Rolling out processes without understanding the product and the customer needs
• When you start working with a team and you build out a new process, take the first month to build trust with your team first
• You need technology to implement a playbook – you must have data and insights that inform your decision-making
• Don’t put processes in place without having a plan
• When thinking of introducing new technology, ensure you have a budget and once you’ve introduced that new technology make sure your team are properly trained on that software.
• Measure your success!

How and Why

Select a Framework

Growth Molecules put a framework every quarter and they reflect on it. The below is their 1 page Framework:

Strategy – What are your goals and what do you want to achieve over the next 100 days?

Communication – How will you communicate your strategy to your executives, your team and your clients?

Operations – How are you going to operationalise this playbook/strategy?

Relationships – What are the relationships you need to build over the next 100 days to make this playbook successful?

Execution – Make sure the framework is transparent and company wide.

To help with transparency company-wide, Emelia suggested that each team has a V2Mom (Find out in more detail what that is here) that can be accessed by anyone in the company:

Vision

Value

Methods

Obstacles

Measurements

Implementing a 100-day leadership plan helps with:

• Executive alignment
• Team Enablement
• Accountability
• Having a strategy that you can review weekly helps you to focus on yourself.

Moving through your strategy

• In the first 30 days, you should be completing a Customer Success Assessment which gives you an overview of where CS is at in the business currently. This mainly focuses on people and should cover areas such as Leadership, Metrics, Account Management Processes etc. Scoring each area from 1 -5 to get you a final score.
• In the first 60 days, once you’ve realized your organizational score, you can then focus on the people on your team and what needs to happen over the next 100 days to make each person an A player.
• Review your customer journey – you could even get to a white board and walk through what happens for a customer, what happens when you’re reactive and what happens when you’re proactive.

Share your big picture year of priorities with your execs, and know that after the first 100 day review, these priorities may change. Execs like to see the big picture.

How do you define success (a year from now?)

• You should be defining success for your team and for your clients
• What parts of your technology are your clients using/not using? This gives you insight into your clients’ success
• Ask how your team are using internal technology – how can CSMs work impactfully if they don’t know how they should be using internal software?
• What are the best practices your team should be focusing on and leveraging?
• As a high-impact leader, your team should feel confident that they are impacting renewals, and retentions and making a difference in their work.

If you found this webinar helpful, you might like some of ClientSuccesses other Webinar replays which you can find on their YouTube channel. 👍