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The key to solving customer churn is consistently driving customer results. The purpose of the customer success analysis is to correctly understand why customers succeed. This guide explains the process of interviewing successful customers to gain essential insights. Guide to: Conductiong Success Analysis Customer Interviews The key to solving churn is consistently driving customer results. The purpose of the Success Analysis is to correctly understand why customers succeed. This guide explains the process of interviewing successful customers to gain essential insights. The Success Analysis involves just two key elements: 1. First identify successful customers. Be careful because the instinct is going to be to tap customers who are happy or who have a good relationship. But neither of these are relevant. Remember that happy customers churn at the same rate as unhappy customers. What we are looking for are customers that have achieved measurable results. Some of them might actually be in the "unhappy" column. Look for customers that: Have a renewal history Have achieved measurable results that are important to them Have successfully leveraged the core product capabilities Regularly rely on the product for important business functions Spend time vetting a list of at least 10 of these successful customers. The objective is to schedule 5 customer meetings. 2. Second, investigate their success deeply. This isn't just an interview, it is an investigation into exactly why customers succeed and involves more than simply asking the right questions. It is necessary to prove and explore the customer's answers to uncover the full picture of their path to success. This is because most interviewees don't instinctively think of some of the most important elements in their success. Instructions 1. Gather Key Customer Information Create a spreadsheet that will be used to schedule the success interviews, and include some key information to assist in preparing for the interviews: Company Name Point of Contact (Name/Title) Product Type (What products they have purchased from your company) Industry (What industry they operate in) CSM/Account Manager 2. Schedule The Interviews Once you have your list of clients to interview, begin reaching out to schedule 45-60 minute interviews. Not all of the clients you have selected will be able to schedule an interview, so this should give you enough options to be able to complete 5-7 interviews. If you can’t schedule enough interviews from the initial list, then you may have to identify additional successful accounts. We recommend that someone other than the CSM/Account Manager conduct the interview. The CSM/Account Manager should schedule and attend the call. This will increase the likelihood of the appointment being held, and allow the CSM to handle any requests brought up by the customer during the call. The appointment should be 30-45 minutes and the time of the customer should be respected. The request to the customer can be made in any way or forum that is convenient. Below is a sample email request. Sample Request Email Hi [Customer], I hope things are going well. I’m reaching out because our team is working on a project to increase our understanding of our customers and how to make them much more successful. As part of that, we are conducting interviews with our most successful clients with our product and you were one of the first to come to mind. The interview will be used exclusively for internal purposes and none of your responses will be shared outside of the company. Would you have 45 minutes to discuss your business and how you have been getting results within your organization? Thanks, [CSM] 2. Conduct the Interview The next step is to interview each customer to investigate their pathway to good results. The interview questions suggested below help guide your customer quickly to the essence of their motivation for both choosing your solution originally, and also why they are continuing to renew. The interview agenda below is intended to make these interviews not only painless but very interesting and enlightening! Customer Success Interview Agenda 1. Kicking Off The Call Begin with the CSM/Account Manager greeting the customer and introducing the interviewer. They should thank them sincerely for their time and hand off to the interviewer. The interviewer should start by explaining the purpose of the interview: to better understand how our most successful customers achieve results, so that we can improve how we support all our customers. Explain that these insights are for internal use only and not be used for marketing, or any other external purpose. If you are recording the session, be sure to get the customer's permission. 2. The Conversation The interview is a conversation, not a questionnaire. The goal is to identify insights and go beyond the customer's first answer to any question by probing for more information and explanation. The discussion should be guided by 4 high-level questions: What key results are most important to them? How do they measure their results? How good are their results? What did they do to get results? Get underneath the generalities to the specifics Customers will generally answer your initial questions with broad, abstract statements. But the goal is to define the precise results that matter to the customer clearly, and the specific actions they have taken to achieve those results. There is a simple but effective method for penetrating vague statements and that is to keep asking for more detail. This is often called the "5 Why's" method. The interviewer simply keeps asking some form of "Why?" continually until the interviewee provides the essential detail. It has been suggested that you can't do this more than 5 times without getting to the point. For example: The customer says that their goal is "To gain better insights by connecting our marketing and sales data". The interviewer responds with, "That's interesting. Why is that valuable?" The interviewee responds, "It will improve our sales performance." The interviewer responds with, "Specifically which area of performance are you looking to improve?" The same method works well for "How?" questions. For example: The customer says that a key action was "We made sure to get staff buy-in for the initiative." The interviewer responds with, "That's difficult to do. How did you get everyone onboard?" The interviewee responds, "We showed them the product and explained the benefits." The interviewer responds with, "Specifically how did you go about that process?" 3. Wrap up Respect the customer's time, and wrap up the interview by thanking them sincerely and offering to help them in any way. Collect and post notes and interview recordings in an accessible location. Follow-up with the CSM/AM regarding any issues that came up in the interview to ensure they are addressed. back to guide

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Blog Search Log in / Sign up Greg Daines Mar 31, 2023 2 min Churn Strategies Newsletter (4/31/23) This week: DATA STORY: What's the impact of fumbling the Sales to Customer Success hand-off? PODCAST: 10 Customer Churn Benchmarks for... Greg Daines Mar 24, 2023 6 min Churn Strategies Newsletter (3/24/23) • My 5-Point Emergency Churn Strategy • There Can Never Be Too Many Tickets! • VIDEO: How do I define a "Customer Result"? • more... Greg Daines Feb 2, 2023 1 min HUGE CUSTOMER SUCCESS MISTAKE → "First get a customer to renew, and THEN expand the account." "First get a customer to renew, and THEN expand the account." Wrong. Our research shows that this thinking is actually backward... Greg Daines Jan 12, 2023 2 min 3 THINGS SALES CAN DO TO IMPROVE RETENTION NOW How you sell has a huge impact on customer retention. Here are 3 proven ways sales can start boosting retention right away... ① IDENTIFY... Greg Daines Dec 5, 2022 2 min 3 KEYS TO COMPENSATION FOR CUSTOMER SUCCESS I just got off the phone with an executive who needed some quick advice on improving their compensation plan for CSMs. While it's fresh... Greg Daines Nov 8, 2022 2 min WILL CUSTOMER CHURN GO UP IF YOU LAY OFF CUSTOMER SUCCESS REPS? A massive wave of layoffs at companies like Twitter, Stripe, Opendoor, Shippo, Gem, and Facebook is likely only the beginning of a tough... Greg Daines Nov 7, 2022 1 min The 7 Deadly Sins of Customer Success ① PRIDE: Our product is amazing and creates phenomenal results for customers. TRUTH: Technology doesn't produce results, customer... Greg Daines Nov 2, 2022 1 min It's not enough to deliver value every day New research proves that even if you consistently drive measurable value, you'll still likely lose the customer. Why? Because, customer... Greg Daines Nov 1, 2022 1 min Does customer adoption lead to customer results, or is it the other way around? Obviously customers won't get results unless they make use of the new solution. But that just begs another question: Why don't all... Greg Daines Oct 24, 2022 1 min The REAL Sales Conversation Most salespeople misunderstand what conversation they are having with prospects, and this impacts both sales success and churn. How? Most... Greg Daines Oct 19, 2022 1 min Just say NO when customers ask you to do this... You can't get better results unless you change your behavior. The same applies to customers. Their results won't improve as long as they... Greg Daines Oct 17, 2022 1 min Sell Results NOT Features One of the biggest sources of customer churn is selling features rather than results. Most of the customers who buy because of features... Greg Daines Oct 13, 2022 2 min Your ideal customer is whoever you can make the most money. Measurable results drive customer retention. The more measured results achieved, the longer customers stay. That’s why bad customer “fit”... Greg Daines Oct 4, 2022 1 min Why does "LAND AND EXPAND” usually turn out more like “LINGER AND EXIT"? The problem isn’t the idea: expansion is absolutely CRITICAL to success → • Customers won’t stay long-term unless their results are... Greg Daines Sep 30, 2022 1 min WHAT ABOUT THE CUSTOMER SATISFACTION PARADOX? If customer satisfaction has nothing to do with retention, then why do companies with high satisfaction tend to have high retention? Past... Greg Daines Sep 23, 2022 1 min Can you "touch" customers too much? The fundamental idea behind a customer success “touch cadence” is based on the myth that merely talking to customers improves retention.... Greg Daines Sep 21, 2022 1 min CAN YOU REALLY "RESCUE" CUSTOMERS? There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you’ve brought a customer back from the brink of cancellation. You’re a hero and your value... Greg Daines Sep 21, 2022 1 min “Customer bonding is the driving force in strategy.” - Arnaldo Hax This statement from the legendary MIT business professor Arnoldo Hax totally changed how I think about everything I do in business. He... Greg Daines Sep 12, 2022 2 min The Powerful Alternative to Churn Rate (4/4) In this final post on customer churn rates I reveal the simple yet powerful way to measure and understand customer churn... Greg Daines Sep 9, 2022 2 min Churn Rates Lie (3/4) The biggest problem with churn rates is that relying on them can MAKE CHURN WORSE by hiding the the truth about your churn.

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Search Results All (115) Blog Posts (50) Other Pages (59) Services (6) 115 items found for "" Blog Posts (50) Churn Strategies Newsletter (4/31/23) This week: DATA STORY: What's the impact of fumbling the Sales to Customer Success hand-off? PODCAST: 10 Customer Churn Benchmarks for SaaS Leaders UPCOMING EVENT: KAMCon 2023, Boulder Colorado, April 12-13 QUOTE OF THE WEEK... What's the impact of fumbling the Sales to Customer Success hand-off? I've sensed for years that time is of the essence for new customers. Any delay in getting customers started always seems to be a bad sign. But the hand-off from sales to onboarding can take time because people are busy. Anyway, what do a few short days matter in the grand scheme of things? IT TURNS OUT IT MATTERS A LOT! 📊 To answer this question, we looked deeply into one of our clients' retention data by comparing long-term retention differences based on how quickly customers started. [COMPANY INFO: SaaS, B2B, $50m-$100m] The difference was astonishing... 👉 Customers that engaged with the solution within the first few days experienced virtually no churn over the next FOUR YEARS, whereas those who didn't get started quickly NEARLY ALL CHURNED over the same period! 👈 ► Why does speed matter so much? ⦿ Remember that getting good results always requires customers to expend effort and change their behavior. ⦿ Their willingness is a finite resource that is most available right at the beginning. ⦿ Customer enthusiasm drops with every minute that passes as other problems and priorities demand their attention. HOW TO GET CUSTOMERS GOING FAST 🚀 ① SET YOUR KICK-OFF SLA: Determine the maximum number of days within which the customer kickoff or first engagement will happen. For example, in many cases, I recommend ensuring that the kickoff happens within two business days of signup. ② SCHEDULE THE KICKOFF DURING THE SALE: I've found that meeting the kickoff SLA is difficult to impossible unless the meeting is scheduled during the sales process. Finding a time to meet often takes too long. Provide a method for sales reps to quickly set up the first call 'live' while they're talking to the prospect. ③ GET CUSTOMERS STARTED PRONTO: Even if implementation and onboarding will take time, it's extremely important to get the customer going quickly. Build a "quick start" playbook for new customers by identifying key things they can DO within just a few days. PODCAST: 10 Customer Churn Benchmarks for SaaS Leaders I had a terrific conversation last week with Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach on the Gain Grow Retain Podcast talking about my latest 10 Customer Churn Benchmarks for SaaS Leaders. UPCOMING EVENT: KAMCon 2023: Boulder, Colorado; April 12-13 I'll be speaking at the upcoming KAMCon event in Boulder in two weeks. The title of my presentation is: "Building Account Strategy On The 3 Laws of Retention" Quote of the week: Customers don't leave because they have a reason to leave. They leave when they no longer have a compelling reason to stay. Churn Strategies Newsletter (3/24/23) This week: ARTICLE: My 5-Point Emergency Churn Strategy RESEARCH: There Can Never Be Too Many Tickets! VIDEO: How do I define a "Customer Result"? ARTICLE: Why don't some customers know their key results? ARTICLE: How to choose which customers to 'save' QUOTE OF THE WEEK... MY 5-POINT EMERGENCY CHURN STRATEGY FOR PROFITABILITY Solving customer churn is the fastest route to stability and profitability in hard times. With the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and looming market disruption, here are the five things you need to be doing right now... ① STOP BUYING CHURN ▪︎ The primary source of churn for most companies is new customers that are destined to fail. ▪︎ Taking chances on bad-fit customers is a luxury companies cannot afford in hard times. ▪︎ Therefore, the first step is to choke off churn at the source. ② PRIORITIZE SAVE-ABLE ACCOUNTS ▪︎ It’s essential in a crisis to spend limited resources where they’ll have the biggest impact. ▪︎ In good times, you can focus on the customers who are most likely to fail. ▪︎ But difficult times require a shift in mindset to prioritize the accounts you can most likely make successful. ③ MEASURE + MATERIALIZE CUSTOMER RESULTS ▪︎ When the going gets tough, your customers will ruthlessly cut any costs that aren’t connected to their survival. ▪︎ You can no longer rely on your product's “benefits”, “value”, or even its “ROI". ▪︎ Retention depends on measuring and materializing the customer results that are vital to their business. ④ HELP CUSTOMERS DOWNSIZE TO STAY ▪︎ During challenging economic times, it's necessary to shift priorities from retaining DOLLARS to keeping CUSTOMERS. ▪︎ Budget pressure will lead customers to look for ways to “right-size” their spending. ▪︎ Helping customers down-size their accounts is a key crisis retention strategy. ⑤ INVEST IN UP-SKILLING YOUR TEAM ▪︎ You can never have as many people as you need, but in bad times you can often lose some of your best people. ▪︎ That’s why it’s critical to figure out how to improve your team members’ confidence and abilities to punch above their weight. ▪︎ The key is to focus on simplifying your processes and coaching key customer skills. THERE CAN NEVER BE TOO MANY TICKETS! WHAT DOES THE DATA SAY? 📊 ⤵ "A few support tickets are a sign of customer engagement, but too many tickets are a red flag for customer churn." Not only is this wrong, it turns out it's just the opposite → 👉 THE MORE SUPPORT TICKETS CUSTOMERS SUBMIT, THE LONGER THEY STAY! 👈 Our previously published research on customer retention (you can get the full report by following the link in the comments ↓) reveals a consistent relationship between customer tickets and average customer lifespan. But the fascinating finding here is that there is no threshold number of tickets beyond which the relationship reverses. In other words: customers can't submit too many tickets. 📊 Our research reveals that the customers who submit the most tickets stay many times longer than those who submit none or only a few tickets! WHY? Like so many other findings, this may seem counterintuitive. Doesn't a large number of tickets indicate that a customer is failing? Remember that... ► Support tickets are a signal that customers are engaging with the solution and trying to make it work. ✅ PRINCIPLE: Customers who are engaging and trying are more likely to run into issues AND ALSO more likely to achieve results! 💭 Now, simply follow that principle through to its logical conclusion... ⦿ Customers who are trying are more likely to run into issues. → When their issues are solved, they get results. → When they get results, they want more. → So they try to do even more things. → This leads them to run into even more issues. → (and so on...) What about high-severity issues? Our research didn't address this factor directly, though it's obvious these can lead to customer frustration and even the potential for churn. But in my experience, if an issue severely impacts a customer's business, it means that the solution is extremely important to that customer. These are the customers most likely to stay. I have found that when we do our best to address high-severity issues, customers tend to appreciate the effort, and most will not churn. How do I define a "Customer Result"? In my latest Churn Strategies Live Stream (3/23/23) I answer the question: What is the right way to define a customer result? WHY DON'T SOME CUSTOMERS KNOW THEIR KEY RESULTS? Customer results are everything, but... You can't drive your customer's results if you don't know what they are. It can be surprisingly difficult to get some customers to identify which results ultimately matter to their decision to renew and expand. Some customers already know their key business objectives, but many more are not that prepared. I've found that three things frequently happen when I ask customers for their key business objectives: ① They don't know what they are. ② They don't care what they are. ③ They won't tell you what they are. Knowing how to knock down these obstacles is key to establishing the customer's results and setting them up for success. In this post, I'm going to address the first (and most common) of these obstacles. ① WHAT TO DO IF THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT THEIR KEY RESULTS ARE? The most important reason they can't articulate their results is that they haven't translated WHAT they are doing into → WHY they are doing it. They often assume the business benefits are obvious and think this step is unnecessary. But we know that making the results explicit is critical to measuring and materializing (M+M) them for success. THE SOLUTION: The key to shifting the customer from a "WHAT" mindset to a "WHY" mindset is something called: ►► THE 5 WHY'S The great Sakichi Toyoda realized that you can't ask "why" more than 5 times without getting to the root cause of any problem. And the same applies to identifying the fundamental purpose. And since most people don't think in terms of root causes or purposes on a daily basis, we need to be able to ask "WHY" in up to five different ways to help them reason it out. For example, when you ask a customer what is their purpose in adopting your solution, they will commonly respond that their purpose is to "enable new tools", or "do new activities." They are thinking in terms of WHAT they are doing rather than WHY they are doing it. So we ask WHY Questions: 💭 "Why is this important to the business?" 💭 "How will it impact the business?" 💭 "What is driving the need for this now?" 💭 "How will you know if it works?" 💭 "How will you measure success?" If you are speaking to the right person, your customer will engage with these WHY questions. My experience is that the vast majority of customers genuinely appreciate the exercise and value the clarity it produces. [This simple skill is one of the 8 Core Power Skills we teach in our customer success team training. Reach out to me if you'd like to learn more.] HOW TO CHOOSE WHICH CUSTOMERS TO 'SAVE' It feels like you never have enough people, but in hard times you may quickly find yourself operating with far fewer resources than you need to execute your customer success process. There are two key strategies... The first strategy I'll discuss in a separate post: dramatically reduce what you do for your customers to only the things that directly impact results. In this post, I'm going to talk about the other strategy: reducing the number of customers you are actively engaging to concentrate your resources. Even when you've pared back your customer success playbook, you'll likely still need to target a subset of customers for active engagement. Doing this well requires a key shift in mindset... In good times, we work to identify which customers are at risk of failing and prioritize them for help. But in hard times, we have to flip this idea: Instead of focusing on the customers who are most likely to fail, the key is to target the customers who, with your intervention, are most likely to succeed. This ensures that your limited resources have the absolute highest impact on your results. HOW TO PRIORITIZE CUSTOMERS FOR SUCCESS: 1. AT RISK CUSTOMERS: The first step is to identify the customers at risk of failing. In order to get a manageable list, we need to be able to eliminate customers we have a genuine reason to believe are stable. Be careful not to assume "happy" customers are stable! Identify the lightest-weight processes that will be sufficient to maintain these customers. 2. KEY SUCCESS FACTORS: The next step is to identify the factors that improve the likelihood of your interventions driving results for at-risk customers. This is where your knowledge of your customers and their business is critical. Some key questions to ask: ► Why do some customers respond better to our help? ► What factors make a customer more likely to change their behavior? It's best to choose just a couple of key factors rather than build a complex model. The reality is that everything is a rough guess, but don't underestimate the value of that judgment. In order for this to work, a simple framework works best. I've found that in many cases, the two best factors to use are: The 'newness' of the customer: how long have they been a customer? The size of the customer: how big is their business or organization? 3. PRIORITIZATION FRAMEWORK: Once you have your key factors, the idea is simply to tag the at-risk accounts according to those factors. Now you can see one big reason why simpler is better: tagging accounts can be time-consuming. Finally, you simply organize them into groups by the key factors to form a basic prioritization framework. I've included a simple doodle to illustrate the idea below. WHY IT WORKS Understand that this method works primarily because it focuses your resources, and that cannot be done without prioritization. The power is not in the precision but in the concentration of effort. Quote of the Week... HUGE CUSTOMER SUCCESS MISTAKE → "First get a customer to renew, and THEN expand the account." "First get a customer to renew, and THEN expand the account." Wrong. Our research shows that this thinking is actually backward because... 👉 RENEWAL IS A FORWARD-LOOKING DECISION. 👈 Customers don't renew because of what you did for them. They renew because of what you ARE GOING TO DO for them! It's all about what's next. What you did in the past is important only because it makes your promises for the future credible. Our data clearly shows the powerful connection between account expansion and long-term retention. That's why I say... ► Companies that focus on retention tend to have poor retention. Companies that focus on expansion get retention for free. ◀︎ View All Other Pages (59) Demo | ChurnRX Email info@mysite.com Call 123-456-7890 Follow ChurnRX | Training & Consulting GET THE 2023 CHURN BENCHMARK REPORT! ACCESS NOW → Join The Churn Benchmark How does your churn compare? Participate in the benchmark to get the insights and leverage needed to drive your retention. Join The Free Benchmark The best companies know why their customers leave and more importantly why they stay. 2x Longer Customer Lifespan 6x Improvement in Renewals 500k+ Customers Analyzed 89% Reduction in Early Customer Churn Proven Live Training for Customer Success Teams to Improve Retention and Scale. Provide your team with the playbooks they need to fight churn with ChurnRX's Live Expert Training. ​ Playbook and Skills Training Proven Playbooks, Guides, and Templates Leader and Rep Certifications ​ ​ Learn more about our Team Training → ​ ​ Expert Churn Consulting To Drive Company Growth. Our team of world-class retention and growth experts are armed with battle-tested methodologies for creating radical improvements that scale across your entire organization. Our expertise includes: ​ Retention Analysis Ideal Customer Profile Whole Company Retention Strategy ​ ​ Learn more about our Consulting Practice → ​ ​ Get My Exclusive Churn Research and Tips Delivered To your Inbox Weekly Subscribe Thanks for subscribing! "Simple isn’t easy…but damn if Greg doesn’t make simplifying these concepts around customer retention so easy!" Brandon Chaney, VP of Product @ DRIP "Working with ChurnRX, we were able to not only efficiently scale our Customer Success efforts but also drive improved retention. They helped us to implement key processes, educate our teams and drive greater value to our customers." Selina Eizik Chief Operations Officer Get control over your churn with ChurnRX today. Talk to a Retention Expert May 2023 Expert Chats | ChurnRX On-Demand: Why Your Company is NOT Customer Centric Is your company really Customer Centric? Come and learn from Dave Jackson (Founder and CEO of TheCustomer.Co) and Greg Daines (Founder and CEO of ChurnRX) as they discuss why your company is NOT customer-centric, and exactly what you can start doing to make it customer-centric. ​ Watch this session on demand First Name Last Name Email View Session View All Services (6) Self-Improvement Workshop Describe your service here. What makes it great? Use short catchy text to tell people what you offer, and the benefits they will receive. A great description gets readers in the mood, and makes them more likely to go ahead and book. Corporate Life Describe your service here. What makes it great? Use short catchy text to tell people what you offer, and the benefits they will receive. A great description gets readers in the mood, and makes them more likely to go ahead and book. 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