Practical Customer Success Management
A Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success

Practical Customer Success Management is a complete "handbook for CSMs", written by a customer success expert who has coached and trained many hundreds of customer success managers across the globe. The book is aimed at increasing both productivity and consistency of quality of output for customer success managers of all levels, from relative newcomers through to seasoned professionals. The book is highly practical in nature and is packed full of good humored but very direct advice and assistance for dealing with exactly the types of real world situations CSMs face every day.

Practical Customer Success Management provides a simple-to-follow, best practice framework that explains what the core customer success management steps are at each stage of the customer journey to business outcome success and in what circumstances to apply those steps. It describes and explains which situations each step applies to and provides recommendations for activities or tasks that the CSM can perform to complete each step, together with detailed explanations and step-by-step guidance for successfully completing each activity or task.

Included in this book is an entire suite of tools and templates that enable rapid completion of each task and ensure consistency of approach both across multiple customer engagements and by multiple CSMs within a team. Each tool?s use is clearly explained within the book, and CSMs are able to adapt and customize the tools to suit their own specific needs as they see fit.

Acknowledgments. Who is This Book For?. Foreword. About the Author. Introduction. Chapter 1: An Overview of the Customer Success Manager’s Role. Chapter 2: Readiness for Customer Success Management. Chapter 3: Customer Success Management Tasks, Tools and Techniques. Chapter 4: Practical CSM Framework Stage 1: Preparation. Chapter 5: Practical CSM Framework Phase 2: Commitment. Chapter 6: Practical CSM Framework Phase 3: Onboarding. Chapter 7: Practical CSM Framework Phase 4: Adoption Planning Part 1 – Concepts. Chapter 8: Practical CSM Framework Stage 4: Adoption Planning Part 2 - Practice. Chapter 9: Practical CSM Framework Phase 5: Adoption Implementation. Chapter 10: Practical CSM Framework Phase 6: Value Realization. Chapter 11: Practical CSM Framework Phase 7: Engagement Evaluation. Chapter 12: Concluding Thoughts.

Rick Adams is an independent author, trainer and consultant, specializing in helping companies of all types and sizes deliver measurable business value for their customers. Adams has over 25 years’ experience of helping companies to realize business success, including owning his own startup software-as-a-service business which he sold in 2012 to focus on writing, training and consulting.

Over the years, Adams has delivered training and consultancy to many hundreds of businesses and thousands of sales, technical and customer success professionals in over 30 countries across four continents. His recent work includes the development and delivery of a global certification program on customer success management for Cisco Systems Inc. In addition to authoring many training manuals and presentations, he has written numerous technical articles for US-based and UK-based publications with worldwide distribution.

He is now based in the rural west coast of Ireland where he lives with his two dogs Zeus and Terri. His current focus is on helping individuals and companies develop best practices in customer success management and in business outcomes focused selling.