Customer Success Best Practices: A Startup Master Session with Alice Dinu of Ready Education

Alright everyone, and we're live for this monthly edition of the Alumni Master Session. Welcome, hope all is well with everyone out there and hope you're enjoying your summer. So for those of you that don't know me, my name is Mike Supravici. I lead the Alumni Success Group here at the Founder Institute, and our role is to basically help your business grow in any way that we can. Sometimes we do that through one-on-one help when you write emails to us via grads@fi.co. Other times we do it through master sessions like this, and other times we do it through structured programs like Funding Lab. And this— these master sessions are designed for you. They're designed so that they are highly interactive. So if you have questions, if you look on the right-hand side of your screen, there's a chat room. So feel free to go ahead and send those out and give us, you know, give us some questions to ask, and we want to make these as interactive as possible. I see some people already in here. It's like Carolyn, hello! Tori, how you doing? Good to see you on here. So, um, awesome, it's great to see you all. So with that being said, I'm really, really excited about this one. This is, this is one of the most, arguably the most important thing that you could probably do in your business. And, um, we have the best expert to talk about this. This is Alice. She's going to talk a lot about customer success and why that's important for your company. And so Alice, maybe you can go ahead and introduce yourself and kind of drop some knowledge on us with regards to customer success.

That's wonderful. Thank you, Mike. Hello everyone. My name is Alice Dino. I am the co-founder of Red Education and I've been a mentor at Founder Institute for quite a while. So it's exciting for me to be here and share some of the insights around customer success. So let's, let's get started and I'm just going to share my screen with you all. All right. So I think you're able to see my screen. Wonderful. Thanks. Thanks, Mike. So, well, first, thank you for taking the time of your busy day. I know in startup environment, there's always things to do. So I appreciate you taking the time to connect with us today. So just a little bit about Ready Education. Ready Education is the leading mobile platform for higher ed institutions. We are working with over 350 institutions across North America, and what we do is that we actually centralize the campus information at the students' fingertips. So if you're looking to check your classes or if you want to know what's on the menu today, or even if you want to actually ask a question to the community and make friends, Ready Education does all that. Um, so also Ready Education, uh, has passed through different stages of the startup journey. Um, you know, we were that scrappy startup where we had, um, a house where 8 of us actually lived. And fun fact, we only had 1 restroom. And then we evolved as a team and we went through our seed funding as well as our Series A. We have raised $5 million in the past, in the last 2 years. And also we actually went through an M&A. So really our team has grown from, from the founders to now a team of strong 70 individuals. And I'm here to talk to talk to you more about that startup journey. And also just some of the milestones that we achieved as a team is that our team actually got recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 for education. And we're also part of Y Combinator, which is one of the most prestigious accelerator startups in the world based in Silicon Valley. And our team got awarded by Startup Canada as being the fastest growth startup in Quebec, Quebec, Canada. So I want to talk about the startup journey, and I want to start by congratulating you of starting your dream. I know you're the 1% of individuals that had an idea and actually wanted to turn it into a reality. And I understand that the startup journey has— it's the most challenging journey as well as the most rewarding experience that, that you're currently having. And it doesn't get, you know, easier in some ways, even if you're— even if you've been around for many years, like already has been. So really, today I want to share some of the insights around customer success, and I hope that you're gonna get some helpful tips out of this presentation. I believe you are basically alumni of Founder Institute, so congratulations for that. And you might already have a product as well as you might have already customers and everything is going well. At the same time, I'm here to tell you that it's not enough. Um, and the reason why I'm saying that is because for you to build a sustainable business, most importantly, you really have to ensure that your customers stay with you. And, um, this is kind of the topic of our conversation that we're going to have today. And I want to start that by really showing you two simple equations, um, and that will kickstart our conversation. So really, when you're thinking from a startup perspective, um, everything boils down to what I believe are two simple equations. If you have new business, this is wonderful. Um, you know, a lot of startups are not able to get at that level. But if you have new business and renewals, as well as expansion, that means that your startup actually will survive. And, uh, that's phenomenal to be into that scenario. On the flip side, um, some of us, or many of us are also in a situation where we can have a new business. However, we're experiencing churn and what churn is, loss of revenue. And what happens is if you don't change, eventually your company will die. So this is where today we're going to be talking about churn and renewal strategies. One fundamental thing that is really important to understand that it took us some time to actually, um, to understand the insights is that new sales does not mean renewals. New sales have their own funnels and renewals are different. And I'm really glad that, um, at Founder Institute actually talks about what happens after you get your first sale. A lot of, um, programs are really focusing on getting you to the first sale, but then we forget what happens after. So this is where customer success comes in really. The customer success team is the backbone of your company. They are the frontline of your experience, and they're building the company from a renewal perspective. And, and this is really important. I've been building the customer success team from scratch until, you know, from one employee to until now when we're 70. And I'm going to share some of the lessons that I've learned throughout this journey. I will be talking particularly on 3 topics. I'll be discussing what is the definition of a customer success team and also what is the difference between customer support. I know all of us, we use different definitions about what is this implementation process, but I would like to provide clarity on what is the difference between the two. We're also going to be talking about how to build a customer journey. Really, how do you actually get your customers from an onboarding process to a post-onboarding process to a successful renewal and expansion of your account? And we're also going to talk about KPIs. How do you keep track of your renewals? How do you keep track of your churn? And what are the insights and strategies around that? So I want to start with the fact that your customer success team is fundamental to your success of your business. And the reason why is, is because first it is the frontline of your customers, but it also has a trickle-down effect across your sales team, your marketing team, and your product team. So for instance, customer success really interacts very closely with your sales teams, uh, particularly once the sales is closed, that's being transferred to the customer success team and ensuring that transition and know-how is being effectively transferred is really key to the overall success of the customer. We're also— you're going to be interacting on upsells and expansion, and you're going to be providing referrals as well as references. When we're moving on to the marketing team, your customer success team is really becoming an expert in serving your customers, and that naturally builds a thought leadership environment which your marketing team will tap on. So your customer success team will actually help your marketing team get partners through webinars, as well as conferences, and really build case studies that provide the ROI for the customer, um, to really help prospective customers see the value. And, uh, finally, and not the least, not the least is your customer success team really works very closely with your product and particularly around customer feedback. Is really essential for product iteration to have a very close relationship with your customer. So this is where your customer success team can identify thought leaders within your customer base, as well as gaps within your product. Um, your customer success team can also actually help your product team launch new product lines. So for instance, if you want to launch a new product, your team can help you in, um, through the increase of adoption. And then finally, it's really important to have that close relationship because your QA typically is part of your product. So ensuring that the platform is bug-free, which we know is— it cannot happen, but really ensuring that communication between your customer experience and the product is effortless is really essential to the overall success of the customer. So really the message here is that your customer success team should be as important as your sales, marketing, and product team. And once you have successful— a successful customer success team, it will trickle down across your entire organization. So now let's talk about what is the difference between customer success as well as customer support. I know many of us have heard different definitions around, but they're actually quite fundamentally different. So let me clarify that for you. Customer support, really, its role is very reactive. It's often in a firefighting approach, and it constantly tries to address immediate customer requests, which are really essential to the overall customer experience. At the same time, the customer support team is very reactive because it waits for the customer to bring an issue up or a question, and then this is when they're interacting with a customer, and typically they are a call center. From a customer success perspective, the customer success perspective is very proactive, so your CS team will manage and monitor the entire customer lifecycle. It would also drive strategic initiatives like maximizing and increasing your product adoption, also increasing the lifetime value of your product, and then helping your customers become advocates of your product. So really, your customer success team is taking care of your renewals as well as your expansion, and it's considered a growth driver. So the two teams are fundamentally very different. Customer support is very reactive, while customer success is very proactive. As an early-stage startup, it's normal and it's okay to actually have the same individual do both. Um, but it's really important to not fall into the trap of just waiting for the customer to bring issues up, but rather proactively interacting with your customer in order to help them bring the level of success that they're expecting. And the way that you do that is really through the customer journey. So let's pause and really understand what is the definition of a customer journey. So a customer journey map charts the path the customer takes from the beginning of the journey to the satisfaction of that need. And really, the customer journey starts with your marketing team. It starts with the first email that you're actually sending to your customers. So, um, your customers go through an awareness stage, then you pick their interests, and then finally your sales team is closing the deal. And then afterwards, the customer success team is getting involved in helping the customer retain and have repeat business, as well as bringing them to an advocacy level. So really, your customer success or customer journey starts from your marketing team, until— from awareness until advocacy. So today I'll be particularly focusing on the retention and advocacy portion, because this is the portion that your customer success team takes care of. You might be wondering, why do I need a customer journey? What is the point? So really the reason why you need a customer journey is one, to engineer repeatable success. So for example, already when we started, we had different customers. Um, let's say we had 10 customers, 2 customers were highly engaged and 3 other customers were in the middle. And then 5 other customers were completely ghosting us. So, um, why do you have inconsistent results? And the reason why you're having consistent results is because you don't have a customer journey that is effectively executed across your entire customer base. So this is why it's important for you to think about the customer journey so that you can bring all your customers to a repeatable success level. Your customer journey is also the blueprint of your future interactions. And, and for future interactions. And basically the idea around this is that you have to think about your customer journey as a piece of work art or as your product. It's never finished. You're constantly going to iterate upon it. So you need to always look at your customer journey and identify where are the highlights and where are the gaps and constantly improve on that. And the other aspect about having a customer journey is to create clarity across your entire team. Your team should understand how customers are interacting with your organization. So creating that customer journey will create that clarity across your organization. And that problem really gets more exasperated the bigger you get. So really start early and it really helps. It will help you scale faster. Customer success has 3 approaches. It has a high-touch approach, a low-touch approach, as well as a mix between the 2. Red Education actually uses a mix. We use a high-touch approach with interacting with our students. So you can really use a different way or different types of approaches. So let me dive a little bit deeper in terms of what is a high-touch approach. So typically a high-touch approach is being used when you are having a high annual contract and you are basically selling to an enterprise level. And it really, um, that ACV can start between $20,000 to $50,000 or $100,000 and above. Really, that's when it's really recommended for you to hire a high-touch approach. It also depends on the complexity of your product. Is your product simple or more complex? Are you helping your customers move from paper to digital, or does that require actually change management, or does that require change of human behavior? And if that's the case, you need to have a more extensive training after, after the purchase. And typically the interaction that you're expecting is either a one-to-one interaction or one to to a couple of hundreds. Here are some examples of different companies that use a high-touch approach. For instance, Box, Salesforce, or SAP. They use a high-touch approach because their products are pretty complex in terms of implementation. For a low-touch approach, it's typically used for small-medium businesses or consumer businesses, and this is where your onboarding process has to be exceptional, and your product is really— will help you create an automation process to engage with your customers. And for instance, Slack or Zapier or Skype, you don't really need, um, an extensive training process for you to understand how you use Slack. You just download it and you can just create a channel and use it. So it's a very simplistic, um, onboarding process. So really my question to you is, What type of approach will you take? Is it going to be a high touch, a low touch, or a mixed? And really, there's no right answer to this. It's really up to you on how you want to interact with your customers. The next step, once you have identified your customer success approach, the next step is to build your customer journey. And particularly, I'll be focusing on the high touch approach, and you can use that approach as well for the low touch. Um, And typically a high-touch approach is being used for B2B companies. Before we jump into the customer journey, I want us to actually understand that for your B2B model, you have two different types of customers within the same contract. You're going to have the executives as well as the end users, and they're very different customers. Your executives are going to be the decision makers. These are the individuals that are going to think about strategy. They don't necessarily care about your product. They are going to demand ROI. How can you increase my revenue? How can you increase— how can you decrease my cost as well as how can you increase my productivity of my team? While on the flip side, your end users are going to be very interested about your product. They are gonna try to understand how can you make their life easier. So they're gonna be the type of users that are gonna ask you about very small feature requests. So really the way that you are building your customer journey, it has to be relevant to these type of users. And what's important to understand from your renewal strategy is that end users are very highly influential to the executives. At the same time, executives can trump end users' decisions. So, um, when you're thinking about your customer base, you have to create a relationship with both, because when you have a relationship with both, you're actually decreasing your churn risks. Typically, if you— a quick way to think about executives is also, for instance, you draw the line And your executives are the ones who are above the line. And then you have the end users who are below the line. So I will use ATL and BTL as acronyms for these two particular customer sets. All right. So your customer journey always starts with your onboarding process, and really your onboarding process can make you or break you. And this is typically real— is really essential for your renewal strategy. Your goal is simply launch successfully, and, um, your onboarding process typically could account for around 50% of your renewal strategy overall. When you're thinking about your onboarding process, first think about, um, how do you define what is a launch customer? I think this is a very important definition, and because this definition really provides the north star of your customer success team. For instance, Ready Education has a very different definition of a launch customer than their competitors. So at Ready, what a launch customer means— it means a customer that we centralize all campus information into a mobile app, and most importantly, that all first-year students actually use the application. While on contrast, um, our competitors, what they consider a launch customer is really just putting the information within the app and putting the app in the app store. As you can see, there are two fundamental definitions, but they're the same type of, um, of business. So it's really essential on how do you define what a launch customer is. And always put yourself into the customer's shoes. What is success? What does success actually mean to them? And make that the goal for your customer success team. The second aspect is to measure and track each stage of this onboarding process. Never keep statuses in your mind because your brain is just not a very good tool to to remember, to remember things. So really measure and track every stage and be diligent about that. If you don't have a CRM, that's okay. Just keep everything organized in an Excel sheet. Every single team member should be able to understand at which stage its customer is at. The other tip is that I always like to talk about the onboarding process as always constantly to get curious about the customer. Your, your team always ask questions, and you should always kind of do only the 60-65% of the talking, that customers should do the 60-65% of the talking. So if you're doing about 70%, that's not a successful call. So really ensure that you give the opportunity for your customers to express how they feel, and you give the opportunity for for them to actually tell you who they are. And then finally, really aim to get early wins fast. Don't drag it on. It's not, it's not going to help you. Get the early win fast and try to have a very short onboarding process. And throughout that process, really find ways to delight the customer. So I've listed here an onboarding process that you can take and implement, uh, as of tomorrow. It really has 6 simple steps and every company, um, can use this. The first step is a really important step, is the account transfer. So once your sales team closes the deal, typically there needs to be an account transfer process. Um, do not just do an introduction to the customer right away. It's really important to transfer the know-how of the sales team to your customer success team. And that could take different forms. It could be, um, actually a form filling, or it could be an actual meeting between your CS team and the sales team. It's really important for you to understand what are the customer goals, what were some of the challenges during the sales process, uh, where's the budget coming from, uh, who's buying, what is the customer's personality overall. So really, um, Your CS team should already know all those information before they go into the first call. Then obviously we have the first email introduction, and then you have the first kickoff call. So really the first kickoff call is really important. And a lot of startups miss the fact that to have both type of customers, the executive customer, as well as the end users, the ATL and the BTL. Typically, sometimes after you sign a contract, the ATLs vanishes, and then you have a kickoff call with your BTL, and that is actually a churn risk. It's really important for your sales team to communicate effectively and bring the ATL during the kickoff call. That will ensure a smooth transition internally for the customer from the ATL to the BTL, because really the end users are the ones who are going to be implementing the platform. Between the third step and the fourth step, which is a launch, there is really a lot of steps that you as a company will need to do and really map out what's essential. And typically there's always going to be a product training with your end users, but most importantly, don't forget about your executives. So really try to engage into strategic conversations with your ITL in terms of how the implementation is going to go, What is the ROI that you're going to bring to the table? And then finally, you're going to get a product demo and a sign-off and then launch. Launch, I always call it the honeymoon of the customer period. You really need to be very close to your customers during this period and try to send them encouragements as well as be close to them because the next stage is about Having a post-call or post-launch debrief. This is where you want to give the space for the customer to really identify what's, what worked and what didn't. And then finally, don't forget about your executive. This is where it's really important to bring them as part of the conversation. After your onboarding process, really recommend to implement the NPS score. So this is where you're going to find how your customers are feeling about your implementation process. So after you do have a successful launch, you have the post-onboarding period. And really the goal is to keep clienting for renewal. And what this means is that you can establish monthly or quarterly status meetings with your team and your customer. And during particularly those meetings, it's really essential that you are always providing value to the customer. Don't show up at a meeting and really just ask as a check-in status, What do you think about the product? It's really, it's about how do you provide value to the customer? How can you, how they can improve and maximize the usage of the product? You can bring trends. So really learn about the customer, go on their Facebook page, go on their website, understand what's happening within their industry. The next step is about health reviews. This is where your team is actually systematically reviewing your accounts. And where are they, and identify opportunities for growth. The next, the next stage is about executive business reviews. So this is where you are engaging your executives or the ATLs. This is a very crucial step within your renewal process, and I'll be talking more into detail in the next slide, but this is where you're engaging your executives and providing ROI to the platform. The next stage is about advocacy. So this is where you're helping your customers become your sales team. Really is when your customers are so in love with you that they are going to talk about you to other customers and they can become your sales team. And then finally, you're moving into renewal and expansion. So I want to take the time to talk about this executive review because I believe every single B2B company should have this. So what this is, is this a moment where you are showing ROI to your executive team as well as your end users. But primarily this is geared towards your executive. You're trying to show qualitative and quantitative success data and really ensure that the data that you're showing is relevant. You can do that through a report or through kind of review through the dashboard. But the idea here is to have a conversation about what worked and what didn't and how successful your product is. This is also an opportunity where you can set new objectives. So you can see, um, maybe the first objective of your customer when, when they closed the sale, they had one, but your customers will constantly change objectives. So if you want to stay, um, and, keep yourself relevant, you need to always identify what is the customer's objective and how can you help them in this new objective. And I always believe that these executive reviews should always have a space where you can, you can present an expansion opportunity. So this is— definitely do not make this a sales call because you're there to provide value to the customer. But I always believe that you can provide a really nudge on how they can improve and how they can be better. So really this call could also be as a, as a qualification call for your team to also move this customer to the next step, which is the upsell. So really your executive reviews are a pivotal stage within your customer journey. And you should think about How can you build that for your customer base? So now let's talk about KPIs. Really, your customer success team's KPIs are renewals and churn. This is the fundamental, most important KPI. And I'll be talking into more details about this. But I understand that as a startup, sometimes you see renewals as far away. For instance, Ready has a 3-year deal with our customers. So we can see the first renewal 3 years after, which it's a really long period. But majority of the SaaS services are within 12 months or monthly. So it's really important to understand that your renewal strategy starts in day zero. It doesn't start close to your renewal date. And I'll be talking more about that. But it's a really important insight to learn. If you don't have any history around renewals, it's really good to track your customer engagement. Are your customers engaged or not? And it's very simple to measure this. Are they seeing your emails? Are they replying to your emails? Are they taking a call with you or are they ghosting you? And if you are in the category of ghosting, it's okay. It's normal. Every single startup is going through that process. But it's really important for you as a customer success team to identify what topics are engaging for your customers. How do you actually start a conversation and how do you learn to build thought leadership where your customer actually wants to talk to you? And then the third KPI, it's actually product engagement. And always as a startup, you have to identify what is that metric that if we nail that metric, we can guarantee renewals, even if renewals are within 12 months from today. So for instance, at Ready, a really key product metric is student adoption of the platform as well as student retention, and we're measuring that. So for instance, now we're in the back-to-school season, we're measuring our targets, how many students we're expecting to get on a platform and how many students are actually on the platform. So I highly encourage that you identify what is your product engagement metric. Your CS team can impact adoption. They cannot really impact product engagement. Sometimes they can, but you can try to think about how your CS team can impact adoption and product engagement. So now let's talk about your renewal process. Really, again, as I mentioned, your renewal process starts on day zero. So a well-executed customer journey should bring you to a renewal account. Um, at the same time, I highly recommend that you actually establish monthly renewal meetings with your entire team. So bring in your CEO, bring in your VP of product, bring in your VP of sales, your VP of customer success, and sit down with all the customer success team reps and review account by account. You as a company should make renewals as a priority in a similar way that you're making sales a priority. Um, and what's interesting is that the more you grow, you're going to have a bigger portion of renewals than actually new sales. So it's really important to build that diligence early on during your startup lifecycle. And you can also build an MVP of a health score. And let me kind of give you more into details what this is. So really, it's very simple. Take a list of all your accounts and ask this simple question: will this customer renew? And most importantly, why? Categorize each account into a renewal confidence. And you really have 4 categories that you can do this tomorrow. Identify if— is this customer going to renew? Yes, maybe, probably not, or no. And this is going to be kind of the backbone of your cash flow projections. You're going to need to learn how to project renewals in the same way as the sales team is learning how to project new sales. You need to have the same philosophy in your customer success team. After you have identified how many customers are within each bucket, the next step is to really identify what is the reason behind it. So list the factors of renewals and churn. They're both important. You need to understand why customers are renewing and why customers are churning and try to identify patterns within the system. So this is kind of the early stage health score, and you can start it tomorrow. Highly recommend you that even if you, your renewal is within 12 months, do this exercise on a month-to-month basis and you can see if you're able to move customers from a specific bucket to a different one. And what were those actions? At a later stage company, you're going to build a health score. So you're not going to rely anymore on your customer success team. You're going to start to predict your, your renewals at a higher level of confidence with data. So for instance, at Reti, we have 3 categories and then 3 different categories have actually a weightage that impacts renewal. So for instance, our customer success team has a predictive level of about 30% on the renewal. And then we have the value of the account. Then we also have demographics as well as product. We have identified about 72 factors that could impact renewals. And then we basically try to identify which one is significant and which ones are actually predictive. And out of those 72, we only identified that actually only 20 factors are important for us to look at. But this, this is more at a later stage. And for instance, here's how we presented to our board members. We are bucketing our customers into 4 different categories. Obviously, these are not the correct numbers, but I just wanted to show you an example of how health score can be presented to a board. So for instance, you have high-risk customers that get a score between 0 and 32%, then you have at-risk customers, and you have strong customers and very strong customers. And then how many customers are within that category? What is the contract value, as well as what is the likelihood of them retaining in the next year? And what are the top drivers or terrance of, of that particular health score. You should build a renewal contract cadence. So this is really all about contract management. Let's say if you're, if you have a 3-year contract, we typically engage our customers within a year to 6 months. If you have 12-month contracts, engage your customer within the, within the 6 months of the contract, and then you basically start to trickle down 3 months, 2 months, 1 month. And typically within the 2 and the first month before the renewal, you should be able to close the contract and have a signature. The reason why you're going so methodical about this is because you want to have on-time renewals. And this particular process helps you to have on-time renewals. It's great to have renewals, but it's even better if you, if they actually happen on time. Customer success team always focus on providing value to the customers. How can we make the customer experience better? And that is kind of the number one thing that in general customer success teams think about. And this is why you build your customer journey. But I also want you to think about and train your team to assess the risk associated to each account. So this is where it comes in, your risk management. Strategy. So I've listed here a list of churn risks that you should always keep in mind, um, that could impact your churns. So for instance, customer engagement is really important. Um, maybe customers who are not engaged with you during your onboarding process, they're very, um, likely that they will not engage with you during your renewal process. So it's really important that you measure that and see if this is actually a churn risk or not. We also have about customer fit. So customer fit is, are we selling this product to the correct customer? So for instance, Actually Ready Education, um, had— when we started, we didn't have the right customer fit, um, and we moved from a departmental sale to an actually enterprise sale. And, um, this is really important where you're trying to always analyze if this is the right customer or not. And then you also have product fit. You might have the wrong customer, but they do have actually a good product fit. So, but maybe they're not utilizing the product at its full extension. So really think about product fit. Do you actually solve the customer's problems? And are they using your customer to its full potential? Keep in mind of champion turnovers. They can be a blessing or they can be a nightmare. So you really have to be, understand that there is a risk every time when there is a champion turnover, because you have just spent 12 months of your time building this relationship with your customer. And then now you have a new person. So you need to learn as a company, how do you manage that change? Um, And it's really important to effectively manage it by onboarding processes, specifically when you have champion turnover, but also your team should know when a champion turnover actually happens. Do you have an executive relationship? Do you actually have an ATO relationship? And if you don't, you might be building a really great relationship with an end user, but understand They're not the decision makers. So it's really important to assess across your customer base. Do you have an executive relationship? And if you don't, learn how do you actually effectively engage them? So this is when we before talked about executive business reviews. How do you engage them early on in the sale? How do you engage them at launch? Then monitor your product engagement. You might be having a great relationship with your customer, but your customer is just not using your product. So that, that is a risk. And identify how can you, how can you help with that? You also have product gaps. There are certain product gaps that your customer is identifying that stops them in actually using your product. So this is where your relationship between customer success and product is really essential because these communications and information should flow between the two teams. And, um, you can also keep in touch with your competition. Is your competition talking to your customer or not? Um, and really finally is having a KPI dashboard. Build a very simple renewal churn dashboard. This dashboard should show up at your, um, all hands meeting with your entire team. You should review this dashboard on a week-to-week basis. Um, and really you should measure how many renewals are upcoming, How many, what is the contract value amount? How many customers are churning? Are we on target with our, with our renewals? So really, the takeaways from today, I hope you learned about what is the difference between customer support and customer success, and also how do you actually kickstart your customer journey and what are some of the things that you should keep in mind of. And we also talked about KPIs like renewals and churn. So I've also listed here 5 simple steps after this presentation that I recommend you, you, you actually talk to your team and try to do it. So first, review all your accounts and build that MVP of your health score. Are these customers going to renew? Yes, no, maybe, probably not. And set up a monthly meeting on renewals with the entire team and identify what's working, what's not. The third item, map your entire customer journey step by step and be very precise because if you are missing a step, you'll be coming— you're creating confusion for your team. So the more clear your customer journey is, the more easier it is for your team to actually implement it effectively. Then identify what is that northern product engagement metric, um, star, and look at it diligently and see how you can impact that. And then finally, identify who is actually your ATL and your BTL if you're in a B2B business model. I hope that this was helpful for you, and I really wish that you take a really good care of your customers and you build an exceptional experience for them, um, and that overall you're going to be, um, having a great time while, while you're doing that as well.

Wow, that was amazing. Thank you so much for that convers— for this presentation. You know, to your task list of the 5 things, so for everyone here, what I would do is add a number 6 and say schedule yourself once a quarter to come back and review this webinar. I mean, seriously, you should do this for like the next 2 years basically, because as your business grows, you're going to be applying all this, and there's just so much information that's really good in here that you can come back to all the time. This was just absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for the detailed information.

Thank you, thank you so much, Mike. And also, I'm, um, I'm very passionate about customer success and bringing kind of more education in the startup community. I never really learned about customer success back like 7 years ago when we started our business, but I want to share this. So please, actually, I'm going to have open office hours in the next 2 weeks. So I'll dedicate, you know, half a day on Fridays. So please book 30 minutes with me and I'm happy to provide you any feedback on that.

That's amazing. Carolyn has a question here in the chat room. So she's, she's, uh, she's, she's struggling a little at the earlier stage, right? So she's saying you would love to hear your thoughts very early in the product when there's like some client mismatch expectations, um, and, and how to manage, you know, like what the customer believes, right? Versus like your kind of crappy product and how do you basically onboard them? So what are your thoughts on that? I'd love to hear.

Yeah. Um, I, I love that stage and I think it's such an amazing stage, because this is when you're building really strong relationship with your customer and your customer believes in your vision. And it's really important at the same time for you to be very honest about what are the current capabilities of your product and paint the, paint, you know, um, the future and paint the vision of where you're going. So early stage, be honest about what your product can do and really listen to your customer and identify what are some of the, you know, what, what do they really love about your product and what are the gaps and bring them as part of the conversation and actually building your product. They are going to be pivotal. And this is when you are in that family tribe moment where your customers will become your best friends. Like we have some customers that are cheering for us, you know, 7 years later. And these are the customers, our first customers, that when we started, and they're really strong relationships there that will never go away.

So for everyone that's live here, please ask your questions in the chat room. I will go ahead and relay them over to Alice. I had a question about, you know, you talked about almost like this process that you have with like customers. There's like 4 steps and things like that. You know, how did you go about implementing this process? Was this like an iterative process that you had, or did you, you kind of like just took some best practices, put them together? How did you go about that? And how can people get started with creating a process of onboarding a customer?

Yeah, definitely. So really, the first step is to be honest to yourself. Like, what are we actually— what is the experience that we're providing to the customer? And that starts by simply mapping your interactions and, and you're going to see just by mapping that you either don't have any customer interaction or you're creating a lot of noise for the customer. So it's really important to map it and visualize it. If it's in your brain, it's a problem. Your brain is not meant for that. Your brain is meant to solve problems, but not remember things. So use your brain in the right way. So map your customer journey and identify what works and what doesn't, and really put green mark, red mark, and start to iterate on the red marks and watch how your customers are reacting to that. So really, as a founder, be very attentive to your customer and show them that you care. And most importantly, show them the value that you promised at the sales process. That's how you actually show them that you really care about them.

What are some tools or processes that you use to kind of get everybody on board, right? Because it feels like everything is kind of related to everything. If you don't do step 1 right, then step 2 is not going to work, step 3 is not going to work, right? So, you know, like step 1, customer success person comes in, step 2, they need to talk about this, whatever. How would you do this? Like in a Visio or whatever? Do you like use Google Docs? Like how do you, what are some tools and like processes and how do you get everybody to communicate around this? Seems like there's a lot there, right?

Yeah. Um, you know, at the same time you want to make it simple and, um, you, so one process that, that we do is, you know, just first use, use your Google Sheets. They're amazing and they're free. Um, so, you know, don't spend the money in actually going to a CRM, but be very methodical and know at which stage your customer is at. So do they actually do the first email introduction? Did you have the kickoff call? So measure all of those stages. It should be under status and, um, have a conversation with your team week to week. Are we progressing in the way that we would like to progress? And if your customer is sitting at the stage for like couple weeks is a huge problem. Like you need to raise that and you need to figure it out. How do you solve that problem? So Google Sheets, are really great. And, um, another tool that just really have a big whiteboard and have your customer journey listed in there, or you can use a simple Google Doc and map it out. Um, that would be kind of the other aspect. We also actually document our call flows. So for instance, when you're going to a conversation, there's very specific questions that our team will consistently ask. Ask across the entire customer journey at different call flows. So also, basically, as we talked, 60% of the time your customers should be speaking, or 60 to 70%. So how do you actually engage your customer in that conversation? It really goes in terms of you clarifying that to the team on how do you start a conversation, what kind of questions you should ask that actually gets your customer to talk, So I'll say Google Sheets, Callflow documents, and whiteboards of mapping your customer experience are a good start. If you want to spend some money, then you want to go to the next step in terms of building a dashboard. So your Excel sheets can actually build dashboards and you can visualize them through different systems. Like, you know, you have GeckoBoard, like other systems. And then if you want to go to the next level, it's when you're actually bringing in your CRMs and you're a lot more methodical about tracking your customer experience.

I'd love to hear your thoughts a little bit more about like the ATL versus BTL, like management process. Oftentimes they don't communicate in a lot of big enterprises very well, right? And so it seems like sometimes the ATL will kind of be like, why are we doing this or whatever? So what's the kind of like the cadence of the ATL and what's the kind of like the process and the reason why you want to kind of get back in front of these people that are extremely busy and things like that? So how do you, how do you get them engaged? Because again, this is not something they care about as much, right? Because they're just, you know, in charge of like the high-level decisions. So how do you get them back in touch and kind of what's like a good cadence for everyone to think about?

Yeah, really your ATL is the goldmine in terms of your renewals. So your ATL is the one that actually is going to sign your renewal document. So even if you are spending a lot of time with your BTL, that's important, but understand that how do you spend your time in a way that is strategic towards your renewal? So also identify that ATL and BTL have their own language. So as soon as you start talking about product features to your ATL, you lost them. They're gone. They're not interested. They don't want to talk to you anymore. So, um, engage them in strategic conversations like ROI. Um, how do you— trends in your industry, really educate, make yourself a thought leader in a space and show them that you understand what you're talking about and how do you provide value. So really you engage them in strategic conversations like ROI, you show them reports that actually had an impact. You also keep them up to date. Don't give them, don't kind of keep them out of the loop, keep them up to date at important stages and milestones. And really your BTLs are going to be really strong proponents of your product. So they can also bring your product up, but also bring it down. So understand that that relationship is really essential. In a way that they would advocate to the executive on your product, on your behalf. So really keep the relationship. It doesn't have to be on a weekly, monthly cadence, but at least every 6 months, you, or once a quarter, you should have some sort of engagement with the ATO.

You know, and early on, it's the founder, right? You were, you were doing this. And then later on, it's kind of like the, kind of like the team, you know, how do you, how do you get, how do you get good at this? What are some of the things you've done maybe to kind of improve and iterate and get better at? And what are some things that people can do now to get good at, to begin getting good at this?

I think it really starts with your heart. Honestly, it's like you have started this company because of a reason. You want to change the world and that is the first core fundamental that will drive you through all the ups and downs. And, and it's really important for you to, to stay open, really always open about new opportunities and show your customers that you truly care. So talk to them daily. Really, the best advice is that if you haven't talked to your customer in the past 7 days, that's a problem. You need to talk to them daily, independent of where we are within the hierarchy. I believe even as a CEO or as a VP, you should constantly be talking to your customers on a frequent basis. Um, and then beta test, push the boundaries, then see what happens. So it's really, um, think about your customer journey as your product development. You're constantly iterating. So with your language and the way that you're communicating with your customer, think it in that perspective. What tests What are we going to do in this month? And how is this going to impact our customer engagement and measure if the customer is more engaged or not? So really, it's all about testing, talking to your customer, and become an expert of your customer, and your customers will start to see it through the conversation that you're having.

You know, as is always the case with these webinars, all the questions start coming in like right now, right at the top of the hour. So we only have like 1 minute left, but Marwa does ask the questions like, how do you talk to customers daily? Like what prompts you to do it and how do you do it?

You simply, you take the initiative. That's it. You take the initiative and you reach out to your customers depending if it's like, if you're a B2B enterprise or are you B2C? So independent of where you are, you should be constantly talking to your customers. Especially early stage. This is when you have the luxury to always talk to your customer. At a later stage, you're going to start to think you're going to— there's other problems that are going to come up that you need to kind of focus on. So really early stage, enjoy this time and really understand what is the problem and book 30 minutes in your schedule every day to talk to your customer. And if no one shows up, then and try to learn more about your customer during that 30 minutes.

Amazing. Well, we've reached the top of the hour. There's some questions in here about how people can get in touch with you. I know you flashed it on the, on the deck, but maybe you can comment on that a little before we sign off here.

Yeah, definitely. I will, I will comment and leave my, my email address. So please, I'm always happy to talk about CS startups, growth, financing, whatever you have as a topic, I'm always happy to engage. So please add me. I've just listed my email address in there, but add me on LinkedIn. I'm more than welcome to share the insights.

And for everyone here, Alice is a founder too, so she has a pretty easy email to guess, right? It's usually the first name. At the company.

So yeah, so alice@readyeducation.com.

Exactly. So thank you so much for doing this. This was amazing. Uh, thank you, thank you, thank you. This was, this was really good. I learned a lot and I, you know, I can't wait to, to share this out with the rest of the community as well. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you for having me and I wish you all founders the best and never give up. It's all, if you're constantly thinking and iterating, you're gonna make it. Um, so I wish you all the best and I hope this was helpful to you.

¡Perfecto! Bye-bye, everyone.

Take care.