Customer Success Segmentation & Prioritization Strategies
Ursula Llabres, VP of Customer Success at InsideSales.com, brought her high-octane energy to the CS100 Summit stage in Park City, Utah. At InsideSales.com, Ursula thinks big-picture about ways to scale, segment, and create a culture of success throughout her department. Excitedly, Ursula announced to the CS100 Summit crowd that she had recently accepted a position at Facebook at Work. This excitement followed throughout the entire presentation, which Ursula kicked off with a little reminiscing about her family trip in Moab, Utah.
In a true storyteller fashion, Ursula gave a tale about her family ATVing in Moab a ‘successful’ ending. She related trusting your tools, in this case her family’s ATV, to help you succeed in business – and in having fun on the road. Keeping goals simple and focused is imperative.
Watch Ursula’s 30 minute customer success segmentation strategies presentation below:
To introduce her presentation, Ursula first ran through the four key elements of scaling a Customer Success strategy.
4 Key Elements to Scaling Customer Success Strategy
- The Customer Journey: What are the expectations of your team, of your customer, and why? What does success look like at every stage?
- Account Segmentation and Prioritization: Who are your white-glove accounts? How does your team know where to focus?
- The Playbooks: What do you want to accomplish with your customers at every phase of the lifecycle? What are your objectives?
- Content, Technology, and People: How will you execute these plans? What types of content will you share with your customers, and how will you use the content they create for you?
Segmentation Strategies at Box
With these four key elements outlined, Ursula tackled one point in-depth, showcasing a use case of account segmentation from her days at Box. Ursula joined the Customer Success team there in 2014, and as part of her leadership duties she inherited a truly demoralized team that was stuck in reactive mode. As part of the strategy to scale and grow her team, Ursula struck a deal with her counterpart in sales: the CSM team would be responsible for 10% of the overall company ARR.
Account Prioritization Matrix
While at first this deal seemed daunting, it created a sense of energy and excitement across the Customer Success team. And, while the four key elements of scaling customer success provided the underlying foundation of the team’s strategy, focusing on a single element is what allowed them to succeed. In conjunction with the Box sales operations team, Ursula and her Customer Success team built an account prioritization matrix that allowed them to identify where to expand, retain, and maintain customer accounts.
4 Quadrants of Segmentation
Using data and analytics from other teams, Ursula and the Customer Success team segmented current Box customers into four quadrants: High Value/Low Risk, Low Value/High Risk, Low Value, Low Risk, and High Value/High Risk. Each of these quadrants correspond with a pre-determined customer sophistication index marker, which told Ursula and the team the depth of the customer’s engagement.
With these parameters in place, Ursula’s team was able to meet their goal of 10% of the overall company ARR. After this success, interdepartmental planning and support became the norm. Ursula created Hackathons that included sales, sales engineers, CSMs, and others to work together to create playbooks for these accounts. When everyone was working towards one cohesive goal, moral was high and team excitement was palpable.
“We focused on a single challenge – even though we had 4 measures of success. We surpassed our goals because we owned it and had focus.”
Ursula ended her presentation by reinforcing the theme of community and engagement between customers and a Customer Success team. Intentional engagement should always be a continual focus of any Customer Success team. Ursula’s Box team created an ongoing cadence of messages and posts for their customer community. Not only did this create habits for CSMs to engage with their community, but customers began to look forward to these interactions as well.
You can also read best practices from other executives who are aligning customer success across their departments in our eBook series called Customer Success as a Culture.
Download the full “Customer Success as a Culture” eBook series:
Customer Success as a Culture: Customer Success Leaders Edition
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.