How to Build your DIY Customer Success platform

Every Customer Success platforms are marketed to reduce churn, increase expansion and renewals, and they can do this, but only with the right downstream data.

A platform will not solve your churn problem. It is not a silver bullet. Your platform will only give you a representation of your data. If you are putting garbage data in, you will get garbage data out. In the early stage, it's OK to use a spreadsheet or Salesforce. The most important thing is knowing where the information lives, how to capture it and how to access it.

For example, Nils ran a worldwide, ten person team using Salesforce to manage 130 accounts. It wasn't perfect, but it served it's purpose and got the job done. To put this into practice, Nils created a new section in Salesforce at the account level record called Customer Success and added fields to track the following:

• The primary contact
• The sponsor's name
• Renewal date
• Contract value
• Health status (red, yellow and green)
• Background information on the customer
• The top three priorities set during the QBR

He then used this information to create a simple reporting stack:

• Upcoming renewals
• Amount of revenue up for renewal this quarter
• Account overview of top three priorities
• Exceptions (prioritize and identify blank fields grouped by CSM)

Taking this 80/20 mindset to your Customer Success platform will free you up. It's very easy to get caught up in overengineering a solution when a very simple approach will work. Otherwise, you'll end up drained and overwhelmed by wasting so much time on fields, labels and other tactical minutiae that you won't bother following through.