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.

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.

Without a doubt customer success management is a hot topic right now. Businesses of all kinds realize that if they wish to keep a hold of their customers and win further business from them they must be able to help those customers to realize measurable value from using their products and services.

Whilst there are several excellent books that are aimed at helping business owners and executive decision makers with developing a customer success strategy, there are far fewer options in the way of best practice guidance for the CSMs themselves and practical resources such as tools, templates and checklists to ensure consistency and quality of approach whilst increasing productivity and efficiency are even harder to find.

Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for managers and professionals provides a simple-to-follow best practice framework that explains the core steps at every stage of the customer journey to business outcomes success. It describes the situations each step applies to and provides detailed explanations and guidance for successfully completing all tasks related to each step. Included within this book is access to an entire series of downloadable tools and templates that enable rapid completion of tasks and ensure consistency of approach across multiple customer engagements.

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.