Prioritizing Customer Success in the Zero to One Journey

In this episode of the Scale Tale podcast, ZapScale’s co-founder Mausmi Ambastha hosted Jarvis Harris, Chief Customer Officer at ScholarPath. Jarvis outlines a strategic framework to help early-stage startups prioritize customer success despite having limited budgets, resources, and time constraints.

About The Guest

Jarvis Harris is a visionary executive renowned for his expertise in IT business strategy and development. He is the Customer Chief Officer at Scholarpath and has a proven track record of delivering cutting-edge solutions under the budget and on time delivering those solutions. Jarvis is celebrated for his ability to lead diverse teams and drive multi-million dollar savings. His strategic mindset, and his deep understanding of technology’s role in enhancing profits and productivity, make him a respected leader and an invaluable asset in any organization.

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Key Takeaways From The Episode

Here are the 5 essential steps that Mausmi and Jarvis discussed:

1. Creating a Charter For Customer Success

The first step is to establish a charter for the customer success function. This charter serves as a guiding document tailored to the unique needs and goals of the company, product line, and target market.

While there are textbook definitions of customer success are available, customizing a charter will ensure alignment across all departments, which develops a strong understanding and commitment to the customer success mission.

Jarvis emphasized that a well-defined charter provides a foundational understanding of the customer success mission, setting the vision for the team and the company.

2. Figuring Out The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

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The next step is to define an ideal customer profile.

This requires building a close relationship with the sales team to understand who the customer is, and what are their needs and challenges. By collaborating with the sales team, customer success can tailor their onboarding process to address the most critical customer challenges efficiently.

Regular updates and upgrades in the ICP are needed as the company evolves and learns about its customers.

3. Starting Onboarding

Effective onboarding is crucial to retain customers.

Jarvis stressed the importance of achieving first value quickly, which directly correlates to customer retention. The onboarding process should start with a clear definition of success for the customer, aligning it with a company’s charter and ICP. It’s about guiding the customer through the process, ensuring they understand how to derive value from the product.

4. Focusing On Personas Within Onboarding

Mapping out customers' persona is an essential step for customer engagement. Jarvis introduced the concept of the “ driver, dreamer, and doer” personas:

Doer- The person on the front line using the product
Driver- The project owner or the line manager who oversees the implementation
Dreamer- The executive sponsor or the project owner who initiated the purchase

Understanding these personas helps you set up the right level of engagement, define meeting cadences, and establish success objectives tailored to each role. This approach ensures all stakeholders see value clearly and consistently, driving product adoption and satisfaction.

Increase product adoption by 40% with the #1 customer success platform

5. Putting Together CSM Requirements

Based on the mapped personas and their level of engagement, companies can determine the time and resources of their CSMs.

This approach helps in forecasting CSM's workload and effectively managing expectations. By understanding customer needs and engagement, startups optimize resource allocation, ensuring efficient delivery of value, while prioritizing efforts where they matter the most for customer satisfaction and the company’s growth.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Jarvis Harris's framework offers a structured roadmap for early-stage startups to prioritize customer success. Startups establish a solid base for success through major steps like charter creation, ideal customer profiling, streamlined onboarding, persona mapping, and CSM resource assessment. This method addresses initial resource constraints and paves a path for a customer-centric culture in the company, leading to both growth and retention in the long run.