In your customer success efforts, especially when you are going deep with several high touch engagements, you have to think about how to spread yourself for maximum effect. It may be exacerbated when you have several customers each with several engagements. How do you choose what will benefit the customer the most with scarce resources and achieve your goals within your organisation? I have a simple framework and here it is below.
It’s pretty simple really, which is a critical component of any good sensemaking framework 🙂
Scale of impact
What potential does the engagement hold for making an impact, this is the central question.
To answer this, you must first look to the customer engagement and what it is trying to achieve.
If it’s framed in terms of the right business outcomes, you are off to a good start.
If those outcomes are quantified in the right way, you should be able to tie in your engagement activities to those outcomes.
If the scale of impact is high in terms of achieving high returns and the customer holds these returns as a major priority, you are on a good path.
Ability to influence outcomes
This is a kind of sanity test. I mean you can nail the aforementioned activity on scale of impact perfectly but if you have limited means of achieving what you’ve identified, it’s no good.
Your ability to achieve the right business outcomes could have as much to do with resources on your side as those on the customer’s side. Or your organisational intent or that of the customer, or some other blockers that may prevent you from achieving the right outcomes.
So think carefully not only about why and what you want to achieve but also how. If the latter is missing, this should be a major factor in reaching the next point.
Prioritised solutions
You could use a scoring mechanism to help in this task but that’s probably not necessary. You should be able to tell just by plotting the engagements into a visual multidimensional matrix, focused on the two activities covered by two axes – as per below.
This is not rocket science, just sensible thinking. Good luck with your customer success engagements 💪💥
