I had an interesting conversation last week with the founder of an early-stage SaaS company. He was seeking advice on Enterprise Customer Success best practices, without hiring his first CSM. Now they have the first couple of contracted customers; his fear, as he put it to me, was "I just don't want to f*ck it up".

And that's entirely understandable. As a founder, he has spent years getting product-market-fit, has run umpteen trials and proof of concepts, and now all that hard work has suddenly come to fruition with actual paying customers. He is now feeling the anxiety that most CS pros already know; winning business is one thing, but keeping it is something else.

I gave him several pieces of advice and guidance about what he can do from here, but one thing I made very clear to him was that Customer Success is straightforward:

It can be very easy to overcomplicate Customer Success. As a profession, we're keen to roll out playbooks for every scenario, endlessly tweak a customer health formula and obsess over platform usage metrics, but, ultimately, the core job is ensuring customers get what they signed up for.

A CSM has to know intimately what pain their product solves. This is easy to understand if the product is a single point solution, but more complicated with enterprise-level platforms. But either way, an excellent CSM will know common problems and the solutions needed to solve them.

Having processes like Joint Success Plans and Value Reviews makes tracking and evaluating the customer's level of success a lot easier and more manageable. Such processes benefit the CSM and the customer by helping them understand where they are getting value and where they're not.

As I wrap up this week's newsletter, I'll ask you a question:

In one sentence, can you describe the problem your product solves?

Until next week.

Simon.

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