Customer Success as a Culture — How CampusLogic Approaches Customer Success Compensation and Quotas
Customer success teams have gone through strategic changes and growth over the past few years. This important strategy and business focus drives toward the outcome of retaining and growing your customer base. As you continue to adapt and change your customer success strategies and tactics, remember this key focus—customer success is not a department, it’s a culture.
We are passionate about customer success and it’s positive outcome—building relationships that last™. In our latest eBook, our team at ClientSuccess interviewed 7 customer success leaders at the forefront of these changes. These leaders have incredible advice they’ve learned by actually going through the process and learning firsthand.
Our newest eBook entitled “Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Leaders Edition”, shares best practices focused on the strategic and tactical aspects of building and scaling effective customer success teams. Each week, we’ll highlight one of the customer success leaders and will share some of their key learnings with you. This week, you’ll learn from Chrisy Woll, VP of Customer Success at CampusLogic. Let’s get started:
About CampusLogic
CampusLogic is on a mission to transform financial aid. In 2014, the company delivered the first and only cloud-based student engagement platform for financial aid. Now, with 300K+ active students across nearly 50 colleges and universities, they help higher ed deliver a simple financial aid experience at a fraction of the time and budget institutions spend today.
How do you determine salaries for your customer success managers (CSMs)?
For Chrisy and the CampusLogic team, the salary and bonus structure is still a work in progress, probably always will be to remain competitive. “We are very competitive with our salaries and we are still trying to figure out the bonus structure,” explained Chrisy. “Right now we have a base salary and we are still trying to figure out how we want our bonus to be structured, we will most likely have a 90/10 split – the CSMs total earning potential will be 90% salary and 10% bonus. I spend a lot of time identifying the metrics to motivate and encourage the right behaviors. It is very important to me that the bonus goal is a stretch but not unattainable which would cause a defeated mentality. I also need to provide my team with all the resources necessary so they feel empowered to hit their goals.
How do you determine quotas for your customer success managers (CSMs)?
The CampusLogic team uses the “WIG” (wildly important goal) and leading measures that help them to hit their WIG. Chrisy explained, “The WIG methodology is from the book ‘4 Disciplines of Execution’. The WIG is a lagging measure and the leading measures are the daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly targets that will help us hit our WIG. The CSM’s goals are based on leading measures.” These leading measures are:
- Decrease support response time,
- On-boarding in 30 days or less, and
- Increase Success Score
The CSMs at CampusLogic have targets and goals based around their quarterly goals, which are broken down to daily and weekly goals for the leading measures. The team has weekly WIG meetings to talk about what was accomplished the past week and what the goals are for the coming week. Chrisy advises that this meeting, if others choose to adopt it, should be very focused and only talk about the WIGs.
What are the most important tools that your team uses?
The most important tool CampusLogic CSMs use every day is ClientSuccess. This software helps them manage their daily tasks and follow up plans. As a VP that is in charge of the overall success of customers, Chrisy is constantly in the ClientSuccess platform as well looking at customers that are at-risk, up for renewal, on-boarding success cycles, scoreboard, etc. Chrisy explains that the only way for this tool to be effective is to truly ingrain the process in your day to day practice. “If the data isn’t in there, or if it isn’t updated accurately, the tool is not effective in truly monitoring customer success.” CampusLogic CSMs have 4 things they do after every customer interaction:
- Update the Pulse,
- Update the Scoreboard,
- Update Success Cycle, and
- Add a note in Communication
These 4 follow-up steps are critical to ensuring their information is updated and showing the current state of their customers.
Read Chrisy’s full contribution to the ebook entitled, “Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Success Leaders Edition” and learn from 6 other customer success leaders like Chrisy.
Download the full “Customer Success as a Culture” ebook collection:
Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition
Customer Success as a Culture: Marketing Leaders Edition
Customer Success as a Culture: Product Leaders Edition
Learn more about how ClientSuccess can help your company develop a strong customer success methodology and strategy with easy-to-use customer success software by requesting a 30-minute demo.