In this solo presentation, Natalie, a Customer Success Manager at monday.com, explains what customer success management entails and shares her top best‑practice takeaways. She defines the role as ensuring customers derive real value from the product, emphasizing relationship building and advocacy. Natalie outlines four core principles: (1) prioritize product usage over sales, using metrics like MAP (Monthly Active Paying People), adoption rates, engagement, and health scores; (2) treat the client’s success as the CSM’s success, conducting quarterly business reviews to align on growth strategies; (3) act as a strategic business partner by understanding long‑term client objectives, conducting research, and crafting detailed success plans; (4) maintain a pure, trust‑based relationship by avoiding commercial incentives and focusing solely on delivering value. She concludes with a data‑driven insight that retaining existing customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones, underscoring the importance of demonstrating ongoing value to prevent churn.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Natalie and I'm a Customer Success Manager at monday.com. Success management is a fairly new profession, and today I want to show you what it is and share some of my best practices. So what really is success management? In my eyes, it's making sure that the person or company who bought our product or our software is using it in the best possible way. It's about building strong relationships with clients and serving as their advocate to ensure they are getting real value out of it. So here's my first rule for making success management work. Customer success key takeaway number 1: Focus on the use, not on the sale. At monday.com, we don't measure just how many people bought our software. We actually measure how many people use it. And we call this metric MAP—Monthly Active Paying People. And that's a much more honest look at our business. We've actually gone even deeper and now measure the adoption and the engagement rate of our users. We give our accounts a health score to understand if we are treating them right. And that's where customer success really makes the difference. If we help them see the value, then they'll use the product more and more. Customer success key takeaway number 2: Your client's success is your success. Our goal is to help our clients with growth and ensure that their use of Monday is set up for both scalability and also success in order to support their growth. We want our clients to succeed so much that we even meet them for a quarterly business review to see how we can support their needs and also align on strategies to support their goals effectively. And that's where our interests collide and really how everybody wins. Customer success key takeaway number 3: Be a business partner to your clients. So the way I see it, it's not enough to understand the client's immediate need and solve it. A great success manager understands the deeper, long-term business objectives of the client and helps them achieve them in a more strategic manner. And that really calls for harder work on my end— doing research, building a detailed success plan, and learning the specific industry. But it almost always pays off in the long run. And it's much more interesting that way, right? Customer success key takeaway number 4: Remember, this is a relationship. And here's a big one for me. You want your relationship with the client to be as pure as possible. I tell the clients I work with right off the bat. I don't manage their account commercials, I don't get a commission, I don't even deal with the contracts or the payments. My focus is helping them make the most of the Money.com platform. I'm creating value for them, not money for my company. And that puts me, as a success manager, on a different level of trust. And trust is the key to any good relationship and the cornerstone for building a strong partnership. Before I sign off, here's something interesting that our data has been telling us for a long time now: gaining a new customer is far more expensive and complicated than making sure your current customers don't churn, which is really just a fancier word of saying they dumped you and moved on. So all we need to do is to show them the real value they can get by using us. I hope I was able to give you some value today too.
