ContextSmith

When managing B2B and Enterprise accounts, email is the most prevalent form of engagement with the account.  In fact, number of business email is increasing 7% year-over-year as more and more tools automate sending emails (who says email is dying?).  However, when we make business decisions daily about our multi-million-dollar strategic accounts, we’re not leveraging this engagement data […]

Software as a Service has dramatically changed the B2B landscape over the past few years.  With software moving into the cloud, deployment can also be done remotely with customers without on-site consultant.  Service directors, who used to be account managers in a traditional software company, are now doing the same job as Customer Success Managers in […]

Wow, six months ago, my co-founder Richard and I were still meeting at McDonald’s, hacking away, getting fat on the late night snacks, and convincing our wives that we were really working.  Since then, we have doubled our team and are backed by some really great investors and customers.  We’ve been beta-testing our software for months now, […]

I came across an HBR article from 1988 about how to measure productivity of manufacturing plants, and the formula was exactly as expected: Productivity = Units of Output / Units of Input The simple formula above can directly be translated into revenue, and it’s easy to measure (and test) productivity of one plan against another. […]

As fifth employee and head of Customer Success in my previous startup, I learned a few tips about growing a company and making customers happy, while keeping everyone’s sanity.  The story I’m sharing isn’t about all the perfect things we did to grow the startup from seed stage to 60+ employee Series B (it was far from perfect); this […]

​Every successful project requires a cohesive team effort; however, getting people to work as members of a team is often more difficult than it sounds. Customer-facing teams such as Customer Success and Sales face an even more arduous challenge of collaborating with customers and vendors outside their organization, resulting in miscommunication and huge loss in […]

In a world where every information can be tracked as “Big Data”, we are becoming increasingly thirsty for data to make informed decisions to grow our businesses.  However, there are times that you feel like you are drowning in the sheer amount of information, especially information that is hard to keep track, such as customer […]

Whether you’re new to Customer Success or a veteran CSM, one of the biggest challenge has always been able to onboard your customers effectively. The first few interactions with your customers are usually the building block of a long-term relationship, and it is important to have a success plan in place to get the customers […]

​Your customers are the building blocks of your company. You’re tracking their activities on your website, their engagement with your email campaigns, and also issues that they submit through your support portal.  Customers in different stages will prefer different ways to engage (as diagram above illustrates), and all of these information need to be captured […]

​One of the toughest challenges about managing a large, enterprise project is mitigating the communications overhead.  Communications within the project teams may include technical lead, engineers, business analysts, project manager, trainer, sales and customer success teams.  This doesn’t include communication with external stakeholders, such as the sponsors, IT team, security team, business users, and sometimes […]