In the previous installment of this series, I introduced one of the strategies we implemented to turn our flatline SaaS startup into a growth machine. A more viable Customer Success strategy emerged from the mindset shift I outlined. Among several other factors, our new CS strategy helped us handle 70x growth over a period of 18 months. It also contributed to a decline in churn throughout our explosive growth period.

Before we dive into what can happen when you base a CS strategy upon the relevant competencies of your customer (rather than solely upon the vertical they operate in), let’s take a moment to define what I mean by “competence”. For this, I’ll hail a model Stuart and Hubert Dreyfus proposed back in 1980 when working on a research project for the US Air Force at UC Berkeley. It’s called The Dreyfus Model Of Skill Acquisition.

What is Customer Success competence, exactly?

The Dreyfus model proposes five stages of skill acquisition. A notable professor of education at the University of Sussex summarized the model into the following labels:

1. Novice
2. Advanced Beginner
3. Competent
4. Proficient
5. Expert

Here’s my interpretation of the five labels, laid out as Customer Success game rules:

Novice: I have no idea how Customer Success works; in fact, I don’t even know enough about CS to be able to ask relevant questions about it. I giggled when you enunciated “CAC” phonetically during your fancy QBR presentation, and I thought churn was something that happened to ice cream.

Advanced Beginner: My startup sent me to a seminar for three days and now I’m an expert on Customer Success. I’ll prove it by regurgitating the shitty advice I received into a post on Medium, and will immediately add “Growth Hacker” to my Twitter bio. Your favorite grandma will literally churn from life if you don’t join my email list right now. #startuplyfe #pingpong #blessed

Competent: Holy shit that advice was terrible and didn’t work at all. Now that I’ve been hustling really hard at a SaaS startup for like twelve straight months, I’m confident this is way more complicated than I ever imagined. I just spent most of my day trying to figure out what to do next, and the rest of the time panicking about a customer salvage call tomorrow. I actively seek direction, responsibility, and accountability in my quest to be more proficient at what I do (mostly so I can start sleeping again at night). Suddenly, my time feels scarce and precious.

Proficient: For some reason, somebody put me in charge of a Customer Success team. If it can go wrong, I’ve seen it go wrong, and I have a plan for how to fix it. My experience guides me, and I write my own rules and maxims to fit our specific CS needs. My team gets a lot out of my trainings, and my processes become more refined and effective every day. I have an intuitive grasp of how to approach the systemic issues causing most of the problems my teams face every day. I know how to allocate resources to the right things, at the right time, to move the needle in the right direction.

Expert: I’m basically the Neil Degrasse Tyson of Customer Success (but you knew that already, since you’re paying me the the cash equivalent of a new Honda Civic to speak at your conference). You probably use my frameworks, maxims, and processes to be better at Customer Success. I sit on panels and committees to help standardize Customer Success best-practices. I have an intuitive grasp of how to increase the efficiency of almost any organization (not just CS). I probably have a cool mustache or a signature hat/scarf combo.

What does customer competence have to do with Customer Success?

According to my interpretation of Professor Michael Eraut’s interpretation of the Dreyfus Model, the primary difference between an Advanced Beginner and a Competent customer may be their level of self-awareness about the limitations of their current skill level. In my experience, the gap between Advanced Beginner and Competent is massive, and takes great emotional maturity to bridge.

Early on at my last company, we chose to do some customer analysis in an attempt to figure out who might have a chance to be successful with the product. Even though most of our customers were Competent (or in some cases, Expert) in their industries, many of them were Novices or Advanced Beginners when it came to marketing. We sold a lightweight marketing automation product – one which required a fundamental grasp of content marketing concepts to get value from.

Our Novice and Advanced Beginner customers weren’t in the habit of producing effective marketing content designed to encourage email optins. These customers seemed to get more value from my silly support responses than they did from the product. Unfortunately, Internet memes and onboarding poems didn’t justify the monthly subscription fee in most cases; no matter how diligently we worked to implement Customer Success strategies, customers left almost as quickly as they came in. Customer happiness did not necessarily correlate to Customer Success.

This experience led me to the following conclusion:

If a customer isn’t at least Competent at the thing our product is supposed to help them do, even the most elegant, delightful Customer Success strategy will be doomed from the start.

I began to question whether or not my CS team could ever be effective, especially if we didn’t first have a customer who is capable of being successful with our product. Novice and Advanced Beginner customers barely understood what was possible (probably from a pure lack of experience, gosh bless them), and were therefore incapable of defining what a realistic, successful outcome looked like for them.

Another trait Novice and Advanced Beginner customers had was that they used the (alleged) outcomes of others as a benchmark for their own success. For example, some of our kickoff emails would start with a new customer saying something like this:

“So, I switched to your tool because [insert name of somebody with a Strong Personal Brand®] wrote this AWESOME post on [insert name of blogging about blogging blog] about their optin rate increasing 4.5 BILLION PERCENT IN TWELVE HOURS after they switched to your tool!”

At this point in the email, I’d close my eyes, try not to falcon-punch a hole through my laptop screen, and would palm-cradle my entire face as I placed mental bets on which day of the week this person would cancel. This person’s lack of competence in the skill-set required to be successful with the tool made my job as a CSM impossible, and made me feel completely ineffective as an employee.

After many facepalms, I put together a simple analysis process for each new support ticket. It looked something like this:

1. Is this customer Competent at the thing our product is supposed to help them accomplish?
2. If the answer is “NO”, is there somebody else at the customer’s org we can interface with who does have relevant Competence?
3. If your answer is still “NO”, I’d love for you to be brave and ask yourself the following question out loud:

“Why is this person a customer?”

Want more Customer Success Manager insights? Keep reading…

• How to stop firefighting and start managing your time as a CSM
• Documentation: the silver bullet for your Customer Success team