Tools

These are some of the tools we've picked up along the path. They've served us well for a certain period of time. Each tool has a vintage year and  purpose which is detailed below. They are yours now. We hope they serve you well.

All things sales!

One of the better video collections on SaaS sales, compliments of Peter Levine, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. I also found this really good summary of Peter’s videos created by Bulgarian entrepreneur Nikolay Tsenkov.

 

Know your customer

One of the hardest challenges in Customer Success is consistent documentation of customer information. To jumpstart this process, we created a “Know Your Customer” (KYC) template to capture key customer intel on one slide. This format allows for rapid iteration prior to migrating to your CRM / CS platform.

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CSM Compensation

To start the conversation around Customer Success compensation, we offer a v1 blueprint for how one might approach this decision. Incentives guide behavior, and behavior lead to outcomes. That said, a question to ask yourself is: what is the #1 most important metric I want my Customer Success team to achieve? Retention? Usage? Adoption? Value? Expansion? This model assumes a CSM role that owns both renewals/retention and expansion.

 

customer journey map

One of the biggest SaaS challenges is serving diverse customer needs. There is no silver bullet. What you need? A customer journey map. Start the conversation by bringing this framework to your next cross-functional meeting to seek feedback on how your company can engage your customers with different levels of sophistication and maturity. 

 

Customer testimonials

Let your customers do the talking. Simplify. All sales and customer success humans should be on the same page. Therefore, bring your best customer stories to life!

CSM job levels

All too often career development conversations are a haphazard compilation of subjective manager opinions and recency bias. Below is a blue print for building CSM job levels for your team to enable objective career development conversations to ultimately increase CSM performance, reduce CSM attrition, and increase transparency across Customer Success.

 

equity dilution simulation

Explore scenarios for founder's equity, fundraising, option pool size, dilution, and valuations.