Robyn Fernandez [00:00:02] Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Maximizing Value through proactive stakeholder management. My name is Robin Fernandez and I'm the Director of Customer Success here at Totango and my counterpart, Vijay. 

Vijay Rao [00:00:15] Thank you Robyn. Hi, everyone. I'm Vijay Rao and director of product here at Totango. 

Robyn Fernandez [00:00:21] Thank you all for joining. So our agenda today is first, what is stakeholder management and then, how can I be proactive with my stakeholders, And then Vijay is going to be unpacking these stakeholders SuccessBlock that we will be releasing over the weekend. And then we'll do a quick summary and Q&A at the end of our time today. So let's talk about what is stakeholder management. I get this question all the time. So let's unpack it a little bit. 

[00:00:48] First, stakeholder. Who are these stakeholders? These are our key customer contacts that are important in the role of success in our engagements with them. They're gonna be our key drivers. They're going to help us drive value, understand their company, their organization, their goals, and help us map all of that. 

[00:01:06] And they're gonna be your key advocates. Stakeholder management is the process. 

[00:01:11] So how are we monitoring our conversations and understanding if we are? How often we are the types of conversations that we're having with our key stakeholders and they're going to improve our relationship. The more we have those conversations, the better relationships going to be and the results, and that is increased retention and reduced churn, which is what we all want in the end. 

[00:01:35] Well, let's talk a little bit more in-depth about stakeholder management. 

[00:01:40] Versus about identifying the patterns with the stakeholders. Are the conversation patterns that we're having, are those matching the engagement model that we set? Are we talking to them once a month, once a week, depending on the size of the client? Are we connecting with them enough? Or is it not enough? And are we having those right conversations allows us to understand dissatisfaction early. They're going to be able to tell us if they're unhappy or if there's concerns or if there's problems and their lack of engagement is a sign as well. They're not willing to talk to us. We know we have a bigger problem at hand, making sure we're addressing their concerns proactively. If they're telling us that there's a problem, how are we handling it? Are we letting it sit? Are we taking action and helping to resolve that and making sure those escalations are handled swiftly and then sharing it with the rest of the organization? If we're truly customer centric, we need to create visibility for the entire organization to understand the conversations we're having, who we're having them with. Are we getting executive involvement from our side, not just from the customer side? So we can drive to the right outcomes in the end. So how is this done today? Right now, it's really being done manually or in some kind of spreadsheet somewhere. Many customers are relying on CSM, some sentiment. I have a few that have executive relationships score to take it a little bit further than sentiment. That's much more manual. And so you're not getting the sentiment is fasters as often as you would like to see it. There's no structure to the process. Sometimes there's tasks for you know, account reviews or cubic cars, but not for the other kinds of conversations you need to be having within your relationship with your customer. And then there's always as trailing indicators, maybe something that they've posted on LinkedIn. 

[00:03:29] We know a lot of LinkedIn profiles don't get updated quickly. 

[00:03:35] So someone may have left and that's why they're not talking to us. And then we find out three months later, it's because they went to another company. So let's to understand a little bit more about how you guys are doing it today. And we're going to launch a poll to understand how are you managing stakeholders today? Are you doing it manually? Do you have some type of process? Are you like, what is this thing? And help me make this happen. It looks like a lot of you are not managing it or you're doing it in some type of manual fashion, which is what we hear a lot. So you're not alone. So now I'm going to go ahead and turn this on over to Vijay and he's going to talk about capturing your engagement and analyzing it and walking it through. Our brand is Stakeholder Management Success Block. Vijay,. 

Vijay Rao [00:04:19] Thank you, Robin. 

[00:04:23] Like Robin said, the first step is, of course, to be able to first document the engagement and the various types of engagements that you're happening. And I wanted to specifically have a view of the touchpoint featuring Totango. That gives you the ability to capture the granular level, all the various aspects of the type of engagement that you're having. You can capture the type of engagement, whether it's Web meeting or in-person meeting. I don't get not having any of those anymore. That was a thing in the past. But generally having the type of engagement captured as well as capturing all the participants who participated in the touchpoint. What we also have is the ability to, of course, capture success flows. But for those scenarios that have some additional tags that you want to capture to further the classified type of engagement, we have configurable touchpoint reasons that you can capture additional information. Once you have these pieces of information, the participants is really the key here where we can get into the next step of trying to capture patterns or decide for any analytics that gets surfaced up. So once you have the engagement documented, you can capture weariest patterns on, such as what is the level of engagement that you're having? Are you having a certain type of engagement more than other types of engagement? Maybe you're only interacting via e-mail where maybe you need to have a more instead of a face to face. Maybe a Web meeting. These are all various patterns and signs that indicate the level of engagement that your stakeholders are providing with you. And you could, you know, surface these signals up and try to take certain actions or decisions based on that. Obviously asking for feedback and surveys in a best practices manner,  at the right points of customer journey also goes a long way to make sure that you have a pulse on the customer. Once you have all these signals, it's not enough to just know about it. But obviously, taking action is where you're going to make a difference. And the key is to be able to close the loop, identify those, low usage trends, act on them, identify the causes and try to take corrective action. Obviously, with the survey feedback, you have a closer look functionality within Totango that allows you to immediately send out campaigns or SuccessPlays and reach out and try to address the inconsistencies or the causes of dissatisfaction. And you're going to want to look into all of these in a more detailed, SuccessBloc. What we have for those of you that are either new, who are not used to the Totango community for the sake of them. What I want to call out is that we have what is called a SuccessBloc marketplace, where Totango is actively publishing SuccessBlocs that our best practices that address various customer journeys. And like Robyn said, stakeholder management is a brand new SuccessBlocs that we are looking to publish this weekend. A SuccessBloc is nothing but a set of best practices, KPIs, metrics, call-to-actions for you and your team on how to address various signals and trends that are happening as you are engaging with the customer. We look at all of these metrics in a little more detail in a minute, but before that, what I want to do is first give you a sense of your own profile and outline certain definitions of certain topics and then we can dive right in. So what you're looking at is the account of your customer profiles. We look at all the information that's available, and we also have a place where we can see who are the customers and who are we engaging with. I will just zoom in just one more level just for this piece. So as you can see here, the two contacts that we are engaged with on this account is John Linden and Julie Schneider. Obviously, we can see that we are engaged at decision maker of level of titles. And then the account rule is a very important feed that is going to gain even more prominence with the release of stakeholder management. So if you were already capturing the various account roles that these contacts are going to play in your engagement, you will now have the ability to surface up insights based on this. And this is what we are going to look at. So let's go back, I'll zoom back out one level and then we'll dive into the specifics. OK. So once we have these details outlined in terms of the contacts and that type of engagement that you're happening, you can now start creating segments based on this information. And segments in Totango is really a  filter set of the view of users or accounts that you're looking to take action on or trying to view the behavior or the trends and metrics around them. So as you can see here, I have a simple segment with specifically filter attributes that are using these touchpoint attributes. For example, I'm looking for those that contacts that only engaged with email. And I'm obviously looking at those touchpoints ones that were created in the last 30 days. You can see here that I have all the details and that I also have the CSAT scores that I received from these customers. And I can view that here, obviously, if I want to take action right away. I can. I also have a what you just saw here was - lets go back here. What you saw here was a user segment. So what you see is the result of users. I can also have a similar segment there. I'm just looking at all the touch points and I have the ability to analyze touch points across all these different fields that are there. For example, touch point reason, touch point success flows so I can have all of these as filters where I'm looking at, various patterns of the type of engagement that my team is having that be with the stakeholders. So now with that, if you look at the kind of patterns and the insights that are being surfaced up, I can see what percent of what customers are engaged. What percent of customers are not engaged. And this could be alarming, depending on different numbers. And I can have various SuccessPlays triggered. And we'll get into that in just a minute. But let's make sure that we understand all the metrics that is possible. You can also see the breakdown of the type of engagement that you're having. And if once type of engagement is too much or too little, you can have your team feed back sort of engagement and make sure that you're having a more favorable kind of engagement that is helping you drive the right outcomes. Also, the touchpoint reason was a field that I talked about, which is an additional field beyond the Success flows, that also gives you the ability once you have them defined and your team is loving the touchpoint points with those reasons. You can see where your team is spending additional time and even choose to do really is sort of percentage representations. So that a lot of different ways in which you can slice this data. Here I am looking at the type of engagement that I'm having across different success flows to see which sort of business customer journeys that my team is spending more time on. And then curiously, the most important aspect. This is the part where I'm able to see a breakdown of what are the various rules across my customers organizational hierarchy that I'm most engaged with. And if this is in the right pattern mix that I, I expect, I want my team to be talking to more decision makers and more higher up the chain. I can have that insight exposed here and have corrective action taken by the team. If this is right , this gives me a way to constantly monitor and make sure that I'm on top of this. I can also create additional metrics here that give me percentages to see the breakdown of maybe combination of things. I can do all of those things. I can also have a view of the various usage patterns of key contacts and again, take action when I'm noticing a change. And the key here is taking action proactively rather than realizing somebody has already left or has already switch jobs by looking at creating indicators. So these are leading indicators that that prepared you and your team to step in and take corrective action. So you're not facing a challenge when it's time for renewal and the customer is not seeing value and is already looking to churn. And then, of course, the feedback mechanism is always there where I can constantly view the kind of feedback and the kind of experience that our customers, especially the primary stakeholders, and have a view of that and and take corrective action that is necessary. Now, I mentioned taking corrective action several times. Now, each of these signals can trigger SuccessPlays is which is Totango's module, which allows you to operationalize your team when you notice a particular metric, a changing or trending in a direction where you want to step in and take action. And the idea is that you can have these tasks triggered for your team based on certain criteria already happening and here, the beauty is that I can have these tasks with the context of the users that I want to have my team engage with. So I have the user's name here. So in the scenario that I describe, if I have a key stakeholder who's given me a negative response in the C-side, or I'm noticing that that is a trending of usage in the in the direction that I am not expecting it to be, these SuccessPlays will automatically fire to your team assigned to your team with the information of the user so that the success managers can engage with those stakeholders and address the concerns that they may be having. And then obviously the campaigns is for those scenarios where I want to send out C-side or NPS campaigns. You can look at, you know, having campaigns being sent either post onboarding or if you are doing trainings or CBR. So you're constantly having a pulse on the feedback and making sure that you are identifying those causes that are, you know, affecting the usage and adoption of your stakeholders and able to, you know, make a change. All right. So that was the summary of the Stakeholder Management SuccessBloc. And this block will be available over the weekend. So look out for that in the gallery. And once it's available, you can download it. And these metrics will immediately reflect on your system based on the data that you've already started capturing. But if not, you always have the opportunity to start capturing that data so you can start seeing the patterns. 

Robyn Fernandez [00:16:28] Right. Thanks so much, Vijay. So let's just summarize what we learned today. So we want to make sure being proactive in managing our stakeholders, which will increase our retention and reduce churn. The Stakeholder Management Success Block provides KPIs and activities to drive to your desired actions and outcomes. And as Vijay just said, please make sure you download it on Monday. We're really excited about it. We put a ton of work in this to help you be successful with your stakeholders as well. So let's go ahead and check in for some questions. If you haven't typed in your question yet, please go ahead and do so in the Q&A. So, Vijay, one of the questions coming in is what is account role and how does it fit into the stakeholder management. 

Vijay Rao [00:17:12] So whenever you're engaging with your new customers, you always have various roles that the account contacts play with respect to your engagement. You could have champions, you could have sponsors, you could have technical leads. And these controls is important for you to identify and capture in your account when you're engaging with your contacts in such a way that you can then analyze how. What are all your engagements and what level within the organization or do you engage with and make changes to that pattern as you see fit? 

Robyn Fernandez [00:17:49] Right. Thanks so much, Vijay. 

[00:17:51] One of the things you talked about is our new touch point reasons that came out just a few months ago. And they're wanting to know what is the difference between a touchpoint reason and a success flow? 

Vijay Rao [00:18:04] Great question. So the Totango's success flow. Of course, customers use it in many different ways. But it's primarily designed to help you capture the various customer journeys as you go about doing actions. For example, customers in onboarding, loading or adoption or potentially you also have certain other sort of sub customer journeys to track in more granular detail. But the touch point reasons just provides an additional means mechanism of capturing some information about that's related to your engagement. That is something that spans across these success flows. For example, training or demos or any of those additional activities that you feel the need to track, that you can create that as a touchpoint reason in global settings. And then you have your team logged back in when they're logging the touch points. And when that happens, then you can then start analyzing and doing analytics on it. 

Robyn Fernandez [00:19:04] Great. Thank you so much. Well, another question that's come in is how can I analyze the white space in my engagement? Can you clarify that for me? 

Vijay Rao [00:19:17] Yes, certainly. So when I showed the breakdown of the engagement across various roles, I can see a pattern where I'm engaging with a certain set of roles and I can also see the set of roles that I'm not engaged with. And this can sort of up those white spaces to make sure to r for me to take corrective action as to whether I should be engaged with those additional controls that are in that can have an influence on this account. So that's the white space that analysis that you can do based on capturing all of your controls and the engagements that you're having with these account roles. 

Robyn Fernandez [00:19:57] Right. 

Lorena Fikes [00:19:59] So those look like all of the questions that we've received so far today. Just as a reminder, we are posting a recording of this should be up tomorrow and our YouTube channel, everything, customer success. So you'll be able to reach out there to rewatch this if you need to. When you download the new success block on Monday, your CSM is also available to help you with any questions that you have that may come up while you're trying to get this rolled out for your own organization. So please feel free to reach out to them. That's what they're there for. 

[00:20:34] Thank you, everybody, for joining us.