What should CSMs do during Implementation?

We often get asked how to differentiate CSMs from implementation consultants. That then leads to the big question- what are the CSMs doing during implementation? Jeff walks through some customer journeys and outlines what CSM's role is during implementation .

Transcript:

Hey there. It's it's Jeff. I, got a few questions, in some of the slack communities that I'm in, I'm going to try and combine them all together here. The majority of the, or the. The big theme here is, a how to differentiate CSMs from implementation consultants. During the implementation phase, obviously. And then what are the CSMs do?

During that time. And so what I wanted to bring up here is a customer journey. Removed all the bits and this is sort of standard sort of thing that we do for our customers. When we go in and reevaluate the customer journey and really get down into it, and say, this is a level two, three. And so what you see here is a clear line here at launch in a clear delineation between implementation and this adoption and value realization.

Phase, which is that's, that's what the CSM should be doing here. So I, so first of all, if you have, separate implementation resources, like chef's kiss, right? You're halfway there or 70% there. That's, that's the hard battle. Everything else is easier if you've got a separate implementation team and several reasons for that.

First of all, if you've got an implementation here and you've. And hopefully you've sold it. You're a sales team and you've sold it as, Hey it's X amount of days, you know, let's just say 90 days to make it easy. 15 K. And by the way, it ends, oops. It ends at, it ends at that time. So, so.

If you have that in place. That allows you to have some leverage where you can say, Hey, look, we are ending here and we've sat, you know, you've bought our implementation resources for 90 days. So if they start ghosting and not showing up to meetings and not doing the configuration work or not sending files over and things like that,

Implementations job is to get on top of that escalate if they need to, and then say basically like in or to have a manager come in and say, listen, You know, as I say, Johnny rolls off and turns into a pumpkin in 15, 20 days. So we gotta make sure that this happens here. Otherwise we're going to have to keep Johnny on for another 30 days and charge you X amount of dollars, or we're just going to transition you into support into your CSM.

Now sounds tough. Obviously want customer success. So it's just some positioning that you talk to. And there's, there's ways around that. But as you see here, clear line of demarcation. So what are the CSMs do? I don't like CSM showing up to all of the weekly meetings, their strategy. They should be there at the kickoff.

They should be, Recognized as the quarterback, the person who is helping with strategy decisions, and then if you're having conversations and implementation where key decisions need to be made, that could strategically alter. You know, their goals are, make sure they're aligning to what you've agreed to is as a joint success criteria.

Say, Hey, let's invite the S let's invite the strategy resource. Let's invite your CSM in for that. And then they can come in and say, no, we recommend X, Y, and Z ours. X, you know, and do all that fun stuff. Besides that, I would also make sure that the CSMs are having a high level value conversation during implementation. A lot of people.

Wait and make the mistake of saying implementation. Doesn't get brought in. I'm sorry. CSMs. Don't get brought in until after implementation. But implementation is not doing the value work. They're very tactical. Their project managing through. They're just not project managers, but if, if you are loading data in and you're making good progress and everything.

You need your CSMs to come in and be doing a weekly sort of, or sorry, a monthly sort of summary of, Hey, this is what's going on beyond what the weekly statuses are. This is where we are at the higher level, because it's not usually happening with implementation resources. So they're brought in, they're doing some value work. They're talking to probably the champions who aren't really on the day-to-day on the projects. And then after that, they are do all the CSM work you get to launch.

And then you start making sure that they're seeing all the value you're doing whatever you're doing with cadences, whether it be EBR quick wound videos and things like that. And you are then not blurring into like, oh yeah, you did implementation. And now you're helping out. Oh, with ax. It's like, no, this is valued strategy resource. When they talk my ears pick up and,

And so that's, that's a general sort of overview in terms of the difference between the two. And how you should position. The strategy on both roles and how they should tactically work during the implementation phase. I hope that helps and, feel free to fire any questions out. Thanks.