CS 2021: Making Customer Success Less “Squishy” [CS BOD Slide Pack Template]

When I reflect on what excites me the most about the evolution of customer success over the past year or so, it’s most certainly the increased appreciation around customer success being existential for organizations.

There is widespread acceptance that infusing customer-centricity throughout your organization and having Net Revenue Retention as a north star metric for your business, will reap great benefits (both financially and culturally).

As a result, as they say “with great power comes great responsibility.” Just as any revenue leader does, customer success executives have an even greater responsibility to bring the same level of operational excellence, rich data-driven business insights, and a bias for action into every strategic meeting.

One thing I’m personally passionate about is seeing the community of customer success executives come together to better standardize the common metrics and best-in-class reporting of performance. We have a unique opportunity to truly be the learning engine for our organizations given the first-hand knowledge of our customer base. We also owe it to our teammates who are tirelessly working to drive successful customer outcomes to clearly articulate the impact of their good work.

As such, I want to personally take the first step in collaborating with all of you on this topic. We had our quarterly Board of Directors meeting a few weeks ago and the CS portion of the meeting was very well received. Our CEO, Nick Mehta posted about this on LinkedIn and we received a ton of requests to share it.

While we can’t share the original, I put together a template to provide some inspiration and direction on what we’ve personally seen resonate. We’ve included a Board of Directors CS slide pack template that you can customize to make it your own, an example data template with charts to accompany this, and some guiding principles to get you started. The feedback from our BOD was that they really liked how we crafted a data-driven narrative with clear business impact, associated customer stories, and a connected action plan with success criteria to drive the go-forward strategy.

Click here to view the full template doc previewed above!

Just as we have an internal rally cry for our CS organization around a stretch goal, I’m going to throw one out here for all of us. “Let’s make 2021 the year that we make Customer Success less squishy!” I’d love to hear from all of you on your suggestions and ideas so that we can continue to iterate on this together.