Our Top 5 Customer Success Articles Of 2020

What A Year!

There’s no doubt that 2020 was a year of radical change. From a professional perspective, we experienced a rapid restructuring of the way we work with our coworkers, partners, and customers. In the customer success and lifecycle management domain specifically, we saw a profound evolution in how we interact and engage with our customers, as once bustling boardrooms and conference halls were replaced with Zoom calls and virtual events.

Reflecting on the enormous change the past year has brought, we wanted to share our top 5 customer success articles that capitalize on the massive shifts we’ve seen in this domain. From outcome selling to lean customer success methodology, here are the year’s most popular pieces of thought leadership from the Valuize content library:

1. 4 Steps For Building A Prescriptive Customer Success Plan Template

A prescriptive approach to customer success enables predictability and scalability; however, many CS leaders struggle to establish the tools and processes required to enable this within their organizations. A customer success plan template is a simple yet powerful framework that lays the foundation for transitioning to an outcomes-based approach to customer success. In this article, we share 4 simple steps for creating an organization-wide customer success plan template.

2. How To Shift From Unrealistic To Achievable Outcome Selling

Is your organization promising outcomes that your pre- and post- sales teams can consistently and reasonably deliver to your customers? Unrealistic outcome selling creates high walls between an organization’s Sales and Customer Success teams and generates high churn risk customers. This article breakdowns how your organization can prescribe value-based outcomes that will unite your Sales and Customer Success teams to maximize your customer retention and expansion.

3. Engineering Customer Success Processes For Maximum Impact

Customer success processes in B2B software businesses today are often inefficient, siloed and lacking scalability. In fact, according to the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), only 26% of Customer Success organizations have aligned their customer success processes to their customer journeys. Implementing lean customer success methodology will streamline your CS processes to create measurable, recurring value for your customers at all touchpoints of the customer lifecycle. Read this article for guidance on how to implement lean customer success methodology in your organization.

4. 5 Expert Steps For Building Outcomes-based Customer Success Playbooks

Customer success leaders at the top of their game understand that customer success playbooks focused on driving the achievement of value-based outcomes for their customers are critical to a successful customer success strategy. These playbooks must be focused on achieving and sustaining adoption of the right parts of your product(s), from the right customers, at the right time, to achieve outcomes that create tangible, measurable value. Here is our 5-step framework for building outcome-based customer success playbooks.

5. The Customer Lifecycle Transformation Era Has Arrived

There’s no doubt it was going to take something cataclysmic to trigger the Customer Lifecycle Transformation era, but who could predict it would be a worldwide pandemic? Thanks to COVID-19, the dinners, conferences, executive briefings, etc. have all been stripped away and when they return, they will never have the same impact on acquiring, retaining and expanding customers that they used to. Instead, the customer lifecycle must evolve to answer one very important question: “what exactly is the measurable value that our product creates for a customer”? This article proposes a future-forward solution to answer that very question.

For 2021 And Beyond

Welcome to the era of digital customer engagement. Now more than ever, it’s time to continue to advance and transform how we meaningfully engage with and provide value to our customers. We hope these customer success articles bring some fresh perspective into the current state of the domain, and help inspire your strategic planning for the new year and beyond.