Success Runbooks

A strategic playbooks are broad and high level, not often detailed or prescriptive. A runbook on the other hand, is highly detailed. It is an applicable, executable, and repeatable set of prescriptive instructions for a given process. Runbooks are a plan that can be pulled off the shelf and used repeatedly to achieve desirable and known outcomes. This is the fundamental basis for SanSigma's philosophy to client strategy.

The high level goals for Customer Success in any B2B organization are always the same: make clients successful quickly, increase adoption, reduce churn, and increase revenue. Why not take each of these, map them to phases of the client lifecycle, and develop a set of highly prescriptive processes that can be tracked and measured towards each goal? We believe that this methodology will make your teams more efficient and reduce time to value for your customers, all while yielding tangible metrics that will allow you to demonstrate real value.

Below you can find brief overview of our thoughts on each of the main phases of the customer lifecycle.

Client Onboarding Runbook

First impressions are crucial as they set the tone and expectations for the rest of the client-vendor relationship. Tight and tactical control of your onboarding process is the most imperative aspect of the client lifecycle. It will not only allow you to set boundaries and clearly define success metrics, it'll allow to track progress and measure value early in the partnership.

At SanSigma we don't believe in improvisation, we believe that every process can be scripted and studied. Our team will partner with you to gain a deep understanding of your use case, product, and processes. We will then work with your team to craft a tightly orchestrated runbook that will accelerate your client onboarding and allow you to clearly quantify value, setting you up for success early in the engagement. Our runbooks typically consist of well a defined customer-vendor RACI analysis, clear milestones, and tangible success metrics that will allow you to measure and optimize your processes and demonstrate value.

QBR Strategy

The most important, yet most forgotten piece, of the value realization pillar of Customer Success is the value demonstration piece. Many teams worry so much about defining and measuring value that they miss sharing that ROI with the stakeholders in a clear and cohesive way. This is the fundamental basis for having a Quarterly Business Review. However, in many case the QBR becomes a repetitive reselling and product roadmap session. It drives little value for either party and becomes a monotonous chore.

In SanSigma we strive to make every executive engagement highly valuable. Our goal is to help your team craft a set of QBR structures that can be applied at the various stages of the client lifecycle. Each showcasing the success and progress that the partnership is delivering. Compelling data-backed storytelling is the key for turning your passive champions into active backers that will help drive growth for your business.

Use Case Maturity Curve

What's the point of having a Ferrari if you never take it past second gear? Adoption of use cases is important, but ensuring that your customers are taking full advantage of your product is paramount. Making sure that your clients mature in their usage of your product will help both the adoption and the stickiness, thus helping reduce chances of churn.

Most tech companies tend track the quantity of use cases and the number of users, but many fail to focus on measuring the quality of that usage. The SanSigma team we'll help your craft a customized multidimensional maturity map that will allow you to visualize each of your customers' journey. This will then enable your teams to easily identify which customer are just using your product a lot versus which ones are getting a lot of value from their usage.

Value, Health, & Engagement Metrics

How do you currently measure your client's success, or even the account health? Is it data driven or is it intuition based? Many companies struggle to quantify these values leaving them exposed to risks that will creep up undetected.

In SanSigma, we believe that if the universe can expressed through numbers, so can your customer relationships. Our goal is to help you craft answers based on clear leading indicators that will showcase data backed metrics that will allow you to better track all aspects of your accounts. From account health and engagement to adoption and ROI, SanSigma will partner with your team to deploy and operationalize custom metrics that will allow you identify risks and react quickly.

Pre to Post-Sales Transitions

The path to success begins much before signature, it start with the sales team. The early discovery efforts driven by the pre-sales said produce immense amounts of crucial information that your account teams can later use for strategy development. These early stages allow your company to probe, ask the right questions, and gain a deep understanding of your customer's challenges. Information is incredibly valuable, but if the information is not accessible it becomes useless. We often see many client teams engaging new accounts blind and asking the same discovery questions that your client already answered twice over; making your teams look disorganized and slowing down the onboarding process. SanSigma aims to parter with your pre-sales and post-sales teams to help craft a seamless transition plan that will allow your account teams to hit the ground running the moment the ink is dry.