Congrats on deciding to set up a customer success management practice at your SaaS business. You have decided to invest in customers, helping them derive more value from your product. But the question remains — where to begin your customer success plan?

This 90 days customer success plan will help you set up a Customer Success Management (CSM) practice at your company and understand what you should be able to accomplish in the first 90 days.

Looking for a 30-60-90 day plan to achieve positive ROI? Download the guide to building a customer success leader’s plan.

At the end of implementing all the strategies in this blog, I expect you to understand your customer personas, build customer segments, map the customer journey, know when and how to engage with your customers, hire a customer success leader, set up reporting and dashboards, expand your customer success team and decide to build or select a customer success platform.

When to create a 90-day plan ?

Basically there are two such times when you should get started with creating a customer success plan. They are either 
1. During an interview cycle
2. or when you are starting with your new job as a customer success manager.

While in both cases, your 90-Day Plan will follow the same structure, the level of detail will likely vary based on how much access you have to the specifics of the role and the environment.

Customer Success Manager 90 Day Plan

First 30 days

Spend the first 30 days on customer personas, customer data, and creating segments (buckets).

Ensure the product roadmap includes delivering value continuously.

No customer success plan can be successful if your product roadmap does not deliver the specific value due to which the customer bought the product in the first place.

Be on top of product usage metrics

Track daily/weekly/monthly usage, number of active users, license utilization, i.e., number of active logins for a group of licenses, and understand how each customer is deriving value from your product.

Build a basic segmentation strategy

Using key indicators to automate the process, each account has to belong to one of these buckets at any point in their lifecycle.

• Good Health — Customers are in a good health state and they are not going anywhere.
• At Risk — Something is triggering a potential churn. These are the accounts you should focus 80% of your time on in the first 90 days or even the first year.
• Poor Health: They have one foot out of the door. You could give the world to them and they might still leave.

Monitor customer sentiment

Monitor customer sentiment using tools (such as Hootsuite Insights and Rapidminer) or tracking via Twitter Advanced Search. They may tell you that you are the best in an email and simultaneously slam you on social media.

Speak to your customers

Understand your ideal customer profile (ICP) and related use cases. Understand their challenges in using your product. Review the progress they have made in terms of achieving value as compared to the goal(s) of buying your product. This will have to be primarily done in coordination with your sales and marketing teams as they are the ones who create the ICP in the first place. So, compare the ICP you have deduced from the customer calls with the ICP that sales and marketing have agreed on.

Review your product pricing

Review product pricing to link the value a customer gets to the money s/he is paying for your product. Early experimentation will go a long way in deciding on a suitable pricing plan so that customer success does not have to bear the repercussions of too many pricing plans.

An important thing to keep in mind is that not every customer will talk to you but you need to nail down the ICP and build a strategy in the next 30 days to meet the goals and deliver value to your customers.

Days 31–60

Create a high level CS strategy, hire a CS leader, map the customer journey, build a customer engagement model and identify upsell opportunities in the next 30 days

Create a high level Customer Success strategy

Turn your research and data from the first 30 days into a high level customer success strategy. Test and fine tune the strategy for the initial 2 weeks as you hire an experienced customer success leader and share your high level strategy.

Work together to test customer success strategy

Work with this leader to test that strategy and step back (yes, you are still the CEO) and let him/her drive customer success. Document everything. What was the starting point, what you changed and what were the outcomes of each change. The plan that you two agree on will be the baseline for your customer success hires after your customer success leader.

Design an effective customer onboarding framework

Once you know what value your customers are looking for, you need to find the shortest path to help them reach their goals as soon as possible. Hence, you need to ensure that each feature that you train a customer on is critical to getting value.

Here’s a customer onboarding framework template that you can use to build an effective customer onboarding process.

Map the customer lifecycle journey

Ensure that you engage with your customers as per their lifecycle stage. You obviously don’t want to send a renewal email to a customer who has not been onboarded yet.

Connect the data to real customer case studies

Say, a customer has been logging in more than two times a day and all of a sudden you see that the account has been inactive for a week. This could be an account about to churn. So, you need to set up such checks for each account to keep a track of customer success.

Set up a customer engagement model

Now that you know what your data means and the actions you want to take at each lifecycle stage, you need to set up an engagement model. A typical engagement model would have Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), 1-to-1 meetings, automated campaigns, feedback calls and more.

Identify expansion and upsell opportunities

As part of mapping the lifecycle, you can also identify accounts which are ready to buy more licences or move to a higher pricing plan.

For example, if the number of active users suddenly increase, there is a high probability of expansion. Or say the account is hitting the monthly limit of data upload in 20 days, you have to engage with them for an upsell opportunity.

Days 61–90

Build dashboards, set up KPIs, expand the team, and select a customer success tool.

Reporting

The moment you start attributing and factoring monthly recurring revenue (MRR) targets into your annual revenue goals is the moment that your customer success plan starts paying for itself.

Analyze data early and often. Most customer churn happens in the first 90 days. You need to know why so you can plug the leaky bucket. It will also help point out flaws in your product, sales, pricing plan and / or customer success strategy.

Set up the right Customer Success KPIs 

Success for one company might not be the best success metric for another company. For example, if you are Slack, you would want to know how many messages did a user send, the number of channels created, the number of devices being used to login, etc. Or if you are a marketing automation company, you would look at number of conversions per campaign for clients using your product.

Expand your Customer Success team

Understand what it looks like for your head of customer success to manage 100 or 200 or 1000 accounts. Let him/her define a hiring plan. FYI, remember (and Sales will hate me for this) you can convert a sales executive to a customer success manager and they are not bad at it 😉

Select a Customer Success platform

Build or buy a product to support your customer success management practice (building it into your CRM vs. buying CustomerSuccessBox or Gainsight or Totango…Intercom or Segment is not a customer success platform).

Setting up a customer success management practice for the first time can be overwhelming but if you follow this 90 day customer success plan, you will be able to establish a strong foundation for future growth.

. . . .

This story was first published in Hacker Noon, part of the AMI family.