How this Customer Success Manager automates and prepares for renewal

The sale doesn't stop at the signature. You've spent the contract period building trust and delivering on your promises, and when renewals arise, you want to continue that standard of excellence. Outreach Customer Success Manager Ann Rice demonstrates how she uses the Outreach platform to manage her customer lifecycles and prepare for renewals.

Automated tasks and every little detail

My name is Ann Rice. I'm a Customer Success Manager here on our enterprise team. I'm excited to walk you through how I use Outreach to manage my customer lifecycle milestones and partner with my Account Executives on managing renewals. Here at Outreach, we have automation that is built into our platform that triggers off of renewal close date.

What that does is create an automated task for the Account Executive and myself to have an internal account review where we take holistic look at an account and understand what is going on at that account risks, and then we move into the renewal opportunity from there. I want to show you where we do that in Outreach. We leverage the Smart Account Plan, which is a document that the AE and myself put together over time. That includes strategic initiatives and business outcomes that we know the client is trying to achieve, what our engagement strategy is for that account, any information we have about their tech stack, their competitors, and then we always take a few minutes, a couple of times a year actually, and update this relationship map just to keep it current.

If anyone has left the organization, new people have come in, hierarchies changed, we update all of those things in here so that everything we have in this account plan is as current as possible. Once we've done that, then we move into the renewal opportunity itself, and we look at this in Outreach, we get some high-level data points around the amount, the close date, all of that good stuff. But what we really spend our time on is the success plan that's associated with that renewal. This is projects, milestones, deliverables that we've committed to the client.

Actionable insights

We'll review these and make sure that we're on track. In this case, maybe we've done our executive alignments and all of these items, but the customer did request an adoption review 90 days before renewal. That actually hasn't been scheduled yet and is slated for this month. Then I would go back to my account, look for the relevant stakeholders that would be part of that conversation, grab those folks and drop them into my adoption, where it's adoption review sequence, add them to sequence.

In those emails, I always include my meeting link as well, because that way my clients have access to my full availability, they can book whatever time is most convenient for them, and it eliminates a lot of back and forth. So fast forward to when we're actually holding that adoption review meeting, and this is where I rely really heavily on KAIA. I have KAIA on my calls, obviously to record and transcribe. KAIA is also where I take notes during the call and I bookmark things that my customer is saying that I might want to go back to and reference later.

Meeting summaries keep leadership in the loop

But the after-meeting summary and functionality is something that I leverage a ton. This AI-generated meeting summary on the right-hand side is a really good 30-second read synopsis of everything that happened on the call. Red flags that were mentioned, customer sentiment, next steps, all those good things. But what I love most about it is that I can use this functionality to compose a follow-up email to my customers, the stakeholders attended as well as those that didn't.

Using that AI summary, it will generate three options for me, and then I can go through, read through them, select the one that's most relevant. Then of course, here, I'll just pick the second option. I still have the opportunity to modify this before I send it out. So I can put my own greeting in there, I can tweak anything that's necessary.

But it saves me a ton of time in terms of having to document all of those next steps and then compose this whole email. It's all done for me. So it's very, very efficient and the other thing I love about it is that I can quickly send this recording to my manager, to our sales leadership, and they read through this and in 30 seconds they understand exactly how the meeting went, any topics that came up we might need to follow up on, etc. So that's one of the ways that we use Outreach here in our CSM motion.