135: Rick Adams Top Customer Success Managers Proactively Seek Further Sales Opportunities

The purpose of customer success is to turn customers, who desire value and have bought your product, into customers who are getting value from your product. This according to Rick Adams, author of Practical Customer Success Management: Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success. Since that is the purpose, customer success managers (CSMs) should focus their energy close this gap and help customers realize the value they were promised when they bought your product. Rick's book is written specifically for CSMs and lays out a framework for how a CSM can be successful at the job of customer success.

In just one example for a competency that CSMs should master, and we talked about this in the show, is that the CSM should proactively seek further sales opportunities. This is a critically important competence. It doesn't mean CSMs should have a quota, and it's not an argument for who should own the renewal. It does mean that a CSM, who wants to be good at their job and maximize their contribution to the organization, should constantly be on the look out for opportunities to expand relationships with customers and even bring in new customers. Even if all that means is they'd then introduce that existing or new customer to the sales team and say, "I think there is a new opportunity here. I'd like to introduce you to ________." This is what a professional CSM should be among the other competencies that Rick describes in his book. 

Learn more about Rick Adams:

The book: Practical Customer Success Management: Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success. Book comes out July 2 Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Customer-Success-Management-Generation/dp/0367182769/ Barnes and Noble - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/practical-customer-success-management-richard-adams/1130660095 Rick's Website, Practical CSM - https://www.practicalcsm.com/ On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickadams01/ Rick's Linkedin Article, The 14 Tenets of Customer Success: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/14-tenets-customer-success-rick-adams/

 

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