How a Customer Success Manager sets new accounts up for success

Chris Hoffman, Senior Enterprise Customer Success Manager at Outreach, shares insights into leveraging Outreach’s newest features to streamline the process of managing new accounts. He highlights the transformative impact of tools like Smart Account Assist and Smart Account Plans. Chris also discusses the importance of follow-up sequences to maintain accountability and ensure mutual success. These tools combined with a data-driven approach allow CSMs to build trust, foster collaboration, and achieve goals.  

The Challenge: Getting New Account 

Hi, I'm Chris Hoffman. I'm a Customer Success Manager at Outreach, and I'm really excited to show you some of the really great ways that I use Outreach's newest features. So, I'm a CSM. Sometimes we have to get new accounts. 

It's awesome. It's exciting. They have new goals, and new things to learn. Let me tell you what this used to be like. Getting a new account used to involve looking through slide decks, listening to old calls, reading Salesforce notes that left a lot to be desired.

Smart Account Assist is Here 

KAIA is here to help. One of our newest features that we have is called Smart Account Assist. This is going to pre-populate some questions that you can ask and look through the last 10 recorded calls and the last 80 emails to tell you: what are the desired outcomes or business goals of this account? Look at this beautiful list of 10 different business objectives. 

How to Use Smart Account Plans 

As a new CSM to an account, showing up with this kind of insight is gold, and it's going to help you earn trust. Once we've had a few meetings, that is a great opportunity for me to start to use one of our other new features, the Smart Account Plan. Smart Account Plan is a way that you can start to build out lists of strategic initiatives and outcomes, engagement strategy, some of the competitive and included tech stack, and one of my favorites, the relationship map. 

This beauty is a way that you can start to actually track who reports to who, who has influence over the decision makers, who's a supporter, who's a detractor, and who do we need to win over in order to build this relationship and expand the partnership. 

Follow-ups and Accountability 

Once we start to build out strategic initiatives and goals, one of the things that a successful CSM also must do is give our customers homework. Some things take more than one meeting to achieve. And so having a way to organize your follow up and hold your customers accountable is also really key to success as a CSM. 

To that end, I love follow-up sequences. A follow up sequence is a sequence that can piggyback off of an email that you send as a one off. So, after I had a great call, we talked about some project goals. 

I can add my prospects to a follow up sequence. And you can see this is four steps over 15 days. After three days, if I haven't gotten a reply, I'm going to check in, “hey, that thing we talked about, how's that going?” 

And then I’ll check in a subsequent three days after that. These can be automated, or manual. That's up to you. But in any format, this is a huge value add as a CSM. When your customers actually deliver and do the work that's going to help you both be mutually successful, that makes you successful as a CSM. 

And there you have it. That's how I use Outreach as a CSM to help keep myself and my customers successful.