Farm Don’t Hunt
The Definitive Guide to Customer Success
Guy Nirpaz, founder of Totango, breaks down customer success as a theory, and offers actionable advice for building your business around a customer-centric model.
“A really practical handbook for anyone looking to be a leader in the space. Customer Success is something that is evolving really quickly, and this book is the right combination of simplicity and insight to understand it.”
What to expect
What’s inside?
A practical guide for the Customer Success Leader. The first half of the book provides the structure for you to think about your Customer Success efforts. The second half of the book provides practical advice for managing customers under this new paradigm.
Here is a full list of essays included in the book:
Introduction
- The hunt for customers
- A change in the customer relationship
Customer success – the farming paradigm
- Your customers are like trees
- Your grove is your business
- Your harvest is your revenue
- The goal
The customer success cycle (or, how trees grow)
- The customer success cycle
- The customer journey
- Where the farming metaphor breaks down
Managing your grove
- Customer success is a portfolio management exercise
- Customer success vs. pipeline management
- Customer success vs. project management
- Customer success vs. customer support
- Focus on drivers to influence outcomes
- The customer success scorecard (or, your grove report card)
Doing the work
- Setting the strategy
- The tactics: Activities of a customer success manager
- The engagement model: Combining activities into success
- Programs and success plays
- Putting it all together
- The importance of incremental and iterative improvement
- When to do what—prioritizing the stages
- Prioritizing success plays within stages
- About planning and predictability
Onboarding
- The customer onboarding program
- Customer onboarding success plays
- Trigger: The customer is unable to use the product
- Trigger: The customer is unhappy with the onboarding process
- Special topic: Customer health indicators
Nurturing & growing
- Nurturing success program
- Feature adoption program
- Usage reporting program
- Periodic business review program
- Customer feedback program
- Best practice sharing program
- Nurturing success plays
- Trigger: Account suffers from a drop in utilization
- Trigger: Users affected by a service outage or SLA breach
- Trigger: A key user leaves the company
- Trigger: A support storm – many similar cases occur
- Case study: Do as I say, not as I do!
Harvesting
- Harvesting success program
- Harvesting success plays
- Success play: Outbound upsell/cross-sell communication
Saving
- Saving success plays
- Trigger: Too many escalations
Building the team
- Customer success manager (CSM)
- Support manager
- Education manager – training manager
- Operations manager
- Upsell/renewals manager
- Professional services
Customer success relative to other business functions
- Sales
- Customer support
- Product
- Marketing
- Special topic: The need for customer marketing
Farming tools
- The limitations of CRM
- The rise of customer success tools
- Aggregation
- Signalization
- Workflow
“I have been saying for some time that sales itself needs to move way down the funnel and focus on what happens after the customer sign on the dotted line. But the question is “how do you do that?” Well, what “Farm Don’t Hunt” captures is how you do customer success. A great resource for any customer success leader who is wondering what to do.”
“Farm Don’t Hunt is a working guidebook for every senior management team and customer success executive. What to do. Why it matters, how to measure it. Action plans. Baselines. Success Plays. It’s an indispensable consultant-in-a-book that will be tapped many times through the first couple of years of your customer success journey.”
MEET THE AUTHOR
Guy Nirpaz
Guy is a Silicon Valley-based Israeli entrepreneur and founder of Totango, a Customer Success software platform. A pioneer in the Customer Success field, Guy established the Customer Success Summit and is a well-regarded industry speaker and community contributor.