Customer Success Management
About
A curated list of customer success management resources. The goal is to list information that's helpful for defining the role and building your career, understanding the industry, as well as resources for articles, interviews, presentations, books, software, and case studies. This is just the beginning, so I'll continue to add more info here as the project takes shape.
If you're interested in contributing, please see the guide here [coming soon].
Credit for inspiration goes to the awesome Open Product Management repo created by Nicholas Ivanecky.
Content
- Core 1: Customer Success Management
- Core 2: Resources
- Core 3: Real life customer success
- Core 4: Joining the team
Core 1: Customer Success Management
What is customer success management?
- The 8 Elements of Customer Success Management - Lincoln Murphy
Customer success is when your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company.
- The Definition of Customer Success - The Customer Success Association
Customer Success is a long-term, scientifically engineered, and professionally directed strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven value.
- The Essential Guide to Customer Success - Gainsight
The business methodology of ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Customer Success is relationship-focused client management, that aligns client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial outcomes. Effective Customer Success strategy typically results in decreased customer churn and increased upsell opportunities.
- What is Customer Success? - The Mindtouch Digital Team
Customer success encompasses the ongoing efforts of an organization to continue delivering value to its customers. A good customer success program aims to deliver value throughout every step of the customer journey, from pre-purchase to post-sale and beyond. This can include (but isn’t limited to) onboarding, product training, customer service and support.
Customer success is the function at a company responsible for managing the relationship between a vendor and its customers. The goal of customer success is to make the customer as successful as possible, which in turn, improves customer lifetime value (CLTV) for the company.
Becoming a Customer Success Manager
- The Essential Guide to Landing Your First Customer Success Job - Todd Eby.
- First 90 days in customer success management - Brooke Goodbary.
- How to Start a Customer Success Program from Scratch - Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré.
- Keys to become a successful customer success manager - Shree Neve.
- Understanding the customer success manager role - Brooke Goodbary.
- What Is a Customer Success Manager? - Andris A. Zoltners, PK Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer.
Getting the job done
- 9 Things Customer Success is Not - Lincoln Murphy.
- Customer Success: Nearly everything you need to know - Eric Johnson.
- How a Single-Page Success Plan Produced Big Customer Value - Chad Jasmin.
- Managing Customer Success to Reduce Churn - David Skok at for Entrepreneurs.
- What Does a Wildly Successful CSM Look Like? - Brett Andersen, the fourth article in a five-part series that helps organizations define the Customer Success Manager role.
Measuring customer success
General articles
- 10 Customer Success KPIs every SaaS company should track - Nilesh Surana.
General presentations
- The Secret to Subscription Success - Gainsight webinar, discusses churn rate, LTV, CAC, and more.
ABF
- The Account Behaviour Formula - Presentation by Ben Winn at the 2018 CS100 Conference on measuring customer health to improve the churn rate.
CLV
- The Only Metric That Matters: Customer Lifetime Value - Michael Collins.
NPS
- 4 NPS Challenges for Customer Success Teams
- How SaaS Companies Do NPS: Learning from Customer Success at HelloSign and Optimizely
- How to leverage NPS to build advocacy - Irit Eizips, Chief Customer Officer & CEO of CSM Practice speaks at SparrowCast.
- A modern approach to measuring and boosting customer loyalty with NPS - Webinar presentation by Lisa Abbott at Wootric, goes into detail on high-touch, medium-touch, and low-touch strategies.
- NPS in SaaS: What You Need To Know About Net Promoter Score
RFM
Organizing your team
- SaaS Role Definitions - Sari Eisendrath at Winning by Design, proposes a "bow-tie" model for developing roles within the marketing, sales, and customer success teams.
Customer fit
- A B2B Startup’s Guide to Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- How to Identify, Attract, and Nurture Your Ideal Customer - Brad Smith.
Onboarding
- 5 Actionable Tactics to Create Onboarding Emails That Convert - Irina Maltseva
Core 2: Resources
Dedicated software
- Akita
- Amity
- ChurnZero
- ClientSuccess
- CustomerSuccessBox
- Gainsight
- Natero
- ProfitWell
- Strikedeck
- Totango
- UserIQ
- Vitaly
Books
- Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine - Jeanne Bliss
- A Complaint Is a Gift: Recovering Customer Loyalty When Things Go Wrong - Janelle Barlow and Claus Møller
- Customer Experience 3.0: High-Profit Strategies in the Age of Techno Service - John Goodman
- Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue - Nick Mehta (CEO of Gainsight), Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy
- Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose - Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com
- The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty - Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DeLisi
- Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success - Guy Nirpaz, Fernando Pizarro
- From Impossible to Inevitable - Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
- HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands - David Cancel
- Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days - Joey Coleman
- Practical Customer Success Management: A Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success - Rick Adams
- The Relationship Economy: Building Stronger Customer Connections in the Digital Age - John R. DiJulius III
- The Startup's Guide to Customer Success: How to Champion the Customer at Your Company - Jennifer Chiang
- Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It - Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert
- Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard - Dan Heath and Chip Heath
- The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences - Matt Watkinson
- To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others - Daniel H. Pink
- The Trusted Advisor - David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford
- What Customers Crave: How To Create Relevant And Memorable Experiences At Every Touchpoint - Nicholas J. Webb
- Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back): (24 Reasons People are Leaving You for Competitors, and How to Win Them Back*) - David Avrin
Professional development
- The Fast Forward MBA in Project Management - Eric Verzuh
Newsletters
- Akita's Customer Success Newsletter
- ClientSuccess Newsletter
- The Customer Success Newsletter - Curated by Alex Bakula-Davis, Director of Customer Success at Copper Inc.
- Gainsight's Newsletter
- Strikedeck's Newsletter
- Totango's Newsletter
Blogs
- CSM Practice
- Customer Bliss - Insights from Jeanne Bliss, writer of Would you do that to your mother?
- CustomerThink - "The world's largest online community dedicated to customer-centric business strategy".
- Enlightened Customers
- Natero's Blog
- Sixteen Ventures
Podcasts
- CHURN.FM - "The podcast for subscription economy pros to learn how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth." New episodes every Wednesday.
- Customer Strategy Podcast - Weekly podcast hosted by Nils Vinje, founder of Glide Consulting.
- Customer Success Conversations - Hosted by the founder of CustomerSuccessManager.com, Adam Joseph, he interviews a Customer Success executive in each episode on how to be successful, overcome challenges, and trends influencing the industry.
Training
- CSM Bootcamp - Offered by CSM Practice.
- Tri Tuns - Offers training and certification for early career, leaders, and teams.
Thought leaders
- Peter Armaly - Senior Director, Customer Success at Oracle.
- Alex Bakula-Davis - Director of Customer Success at Copper Inc.
- Catherine Blackmore - Head of SaaS Customer Success at Oracle.
- Mikael Blaisdell - Executive Director: The Customer Success Association.
- Julie Devaney Hogan - VP Customer Success & Services at Drift.
- Todd Eby - Co-Founder of SuccessHACKER.
- Irit Eizips - Chief Customer Officer & CEO of CSM Practice.
- Brooke Goodbary - Customer Success consultant, writer, and expert.
- Kristen Hayer
- Lincoln Murphy - Founder of Sixteen Ventures, a SaaS Growth Consultancy.
- Guy Nirpaz - Founder and CEO of Totango.
- Donna Weber - President of Springboard Solutions Consulting.
Core 3: Real life customer success
Interviews
- An agile manifesto for customer success – Interview with Todd Eby of Success Hacker - A conversation between Adrian Swinscoe, of CustomerThink, and Todd Eby of Success Hacker. "At it’s heart, customer success is about understanding why your customer hired you, what are they attempting to achieve and then doing all that you can to help them achieve that."
Communities to join
Associations
- The Customer Success Association - The free tier provides access to more "library" materials, with additional paid tiers available.
Groups
- The Customer Success Forum - Largest online community, with nearly 36k members.
- Customer Success Managers in Action - LinkedIn group with the goal "to bring together ideas, strategies and tactics from Customer Success professionals around the globe in order to elevate the profession of Customer Success".
- OUTCOMES: The Customer Success Community - Active community at nearly 7,000 members and growing. Keep up with the latest news and events, as well as interact/share/learn with others in the field.
- r/CustomerSuccess - Subreddit for anyone involved in the fields of Customer Success, Customer Support, Customer Experience, Product Management, etc.
- Support Driven - Primarily support focused, however they have a dedicated CSM channel that is becoming more popular.
Conferences
- CS100 - "The Premier Conference for Customer Success Executives & Leaders".
- Customer SuccessCon - Annual one-day events held in Seattle, Boston, London, Oakland, and Denver.
- Pulse - Annual events held in North America and Europe.