Member Success is when your Members achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your organization.
To ensure your Members achieve their Desired Outcome – or what they need to achieve, the way they need to achieve it – and not just hope it happens, you need to actively work your Members toward that goal.
That’s where Member Success Management comes in.
At Memberships Matter!, we define Member Success Management as the process of moving Members toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome.
And Member Success Management is made up of the following things:
1. Segmentation
Member Segmentation is at the core of a sound – and scalable – Member Success Management strategy.
Segmenting Members based on how much they pay you (ARR, LTV, ACV, etc.) is one of those traps that a lot of Member Success organizations fall into.
It seems logical (from your perspective, at least), plus it’s what the industries have been doing for a long time (it’s a holdover from traditional Account Management).
Just because that’s how it’s been done, doesn’t mean it’s right!
Each Member segment has it’s own Appropriate Experience (AX) – even if they share the same Goal – so if you understand what their AX is, you’ll know the type and level of Member Success Management to get them there.
Segmenting your Members based on AX is the only way to both give the Member exactly what they need and the coverage levels to do that.
2. Orchestration
One of the simplest – and yet amazingly effective – things you can do to ensure your Members aren’t just on the path toward success, but to know what to expect along the way is what we call Orchestration.
Orchestration is made up of three main elements:
- Properly Managed Expectations
- Joint Accountabilities laid out at the start of the Relationship
- The set-up of future Expansion and Advocacy
Managing Expectations with your Members during onboarding by telling them what to expect in the first 30, 60, 90-days as a Member and what the major Success Milestones are along the way are some very simple ways to reduce any anxiety they might have and to build trust in you.
Giving the Member a list of things they need to do – both in the product and outside of it, on their own – and what you need to do for and with them inside and outside the product – and showing that if both parties hold up their end of the agreement (that’s why I call it Joint Accountabilities) they’ll reach their goal.
But if they fail to do what they need to, and they made the commitment to do it, then they won’t reach their goal. Of course, you must do what you say you’ll do also… and if both parties complete their Joint Accountabilities, the Member should reach their goal.
Finally, letting the Member know that you rely on word of mouth (maybe you say to keep costs down, so you stay cheap; don’t say this if you’re the high-priced option!), and that once they hit a certain Success Milestone, you’ll ask them to give you a testimonial or do a case study.
Then you can start orchestrating Member Success – manage expectations, define joint accountabilities, and tee-up expansion and advocacy – right now; a very low-cost thing.
3. Intervention
To operationalize Member Success Management, you must proactively intervene in the appropriate way for that Member (a mix of technology and human touches; the “appropriate” part of AX will dictate the ratios therein) to get them to do the things they need to do to move from one Progress Milestone to the next.
If they do those things, great; they’re on their way to being successful members.
If they don’t do those things, however, you need to change up and/or escalate intervention to get them to act.
Intervention can be done on a timed basis (after x number of days, send an email or every three months do a Quarterly Mrmber Progress Review), based on data (the Member is not doing what they need to do to move to the next Pogress Milestone), or Triggers.
You’ll likely intervene based on a mix of all three of those factors, and the modalities for intervention (email, call, in-person meeting, etc.) will be determined by the Appropriate Experience of the Member (see Segmentation above).
4. Measurement
There are two types of measurement that must happen in a Member Success Management organization:
- How are the Members doing?
- How are we doing?
If the second one (how are we doing?) is not based off the first one (how are they doing?), you’re doing it wrong.
When it comes to Member Success, you actually want to pay attention to a financial metric (usually Net Revenue Retention or NRR) and a Member Success-specific metric like Success Vector, which we’ll discuss in a future article.
It doesn’t matter if we’re hitting our retention or expansion goals if we’re doing it in a way that’s not aligned with our Member’s success, that new (or renewed) revenue won’t stick around.
If you meet your NRR goals for the current time, but your Success Vector is getting worse, that could mean you did things to meet the financial KPIs in a way that had a negative impact on the Member.
5. Expansion (and Renewal)
It’s typically said that Renewal and Expansion (upsell, cross-sell, etc.) happen because a Member is successful.
But looking at it that way is what allows for the error of applying “new business” sales or traditional account management tactics to renewals and expansion when that’s exactly the wrong approach.
Rather, Renewal and Expansion are simply part of a Member’s success; in order for the Member to achieve their ever-evolving Desired Outcome, they’ll likely need to stay past a renewal and they’ll also likely need to consume more of your core product, adjacent products, etc.
This is part of Member Success Management because even if your organization decides to have a dedicated Member Success Manager (or Member Concierge) to handle Upsells, Cross-sells, and Renewals, those should be handled as primary parts of your Member Success Management plan.
Traditional Account Management fails because it treats Members like Accounts: as numbers. It is focused on Renewal and Expansion from the organization’s financial health perspective only. Account Management doesn’t care if the Member is “successful”, only that they would take the latest offer we’re trying to sell them on – and that is not Member Success Management.
Traditional Account Management doesn’t work anymore, but Member Success-driven Growth absolutely does, which is why this function should sit within, roll-up to, or otherwise be governed and monitored by Member Success Management.
6. Communication
It’s obvious that a major part of Member Success Management is to communicate with the Member (including champions, sponsors, and other personas).
Perhaps it’s proactively guiding the members to take the next logical step, giving the champion a status update, or scheduling the next Quarterly Member Review (QMR) with the executives or other appropriate personas.
Or maybe it’s intervening reactively when the Member hasn’t taken the action necessary to reach their next Progress Milestone.
Those are rather obvious times when Member communication is critical; but one type of communication with the Member that’s not so obvious is Member Marketing, of which there are two types:
Marketing to your existing Members to drive adoption and increase the breadth and depth (land and expand) of use, including upsells, add-ons, etc.
Using your Members in your marketing (case studies, testimonials, etc.)… combine 1 & 2 for a Member Marketing power play.
Member Marketing is either the responsibility of – or heavily influenced by – Member Success Management. Responsibility is ideal.
There is a fourth type of communication that Member Success Management is responsible for and that is internal communication.
It is critical that the Member Success Management team communicate what they’re learning from Members, how they’re impacting Members, and the value they’re bringing to the association by getting Members to stay longer, buy more, bring us into other parts of their company, and advocate for us externally.
Not only does that internal communication enrich the rest of the organization with Member intelligence, it also lets the rest of the association know just how valuable Member Success Management really is.
7. Instrumentation
Elements 1 – 6 really don’t require much technology or engineering work. Certainly, everything we’ve discussed can be greatly enhanced by leveraging technology.
But these final two are where you heavily start bringing technology into the mix.
Far too many organizations jump to buying a purpose-built Member Success Management software product assuming it’ll fix any problems they have, give them the structure they need, etc. But just like any other part of your business, if you select a piece of software without knowing what it is you’re trying to operationalize, you’ll end up building your strategy around the capabilities of that software.
Figure out what you need first, then find the solution that you think fits that model. Sure, you may not be 100% right out of the gate, but you’ll be a lot closer to where you need to be if you work in that direction.
Instrumentation is the process of collecting data on the Member’s interactions with your company, across their lifecycle.
From gathering usage data from your product to interaction records with the client, to Integration with other systems, Instrumentation is critical step in leveraging technology to guide your Members along the path toward success.
Context is everything when it comes to Member Success Management, so the more visibility you have into whether your Member is moving toward their Desired Outcome, the higher value your intervention will be.
What you collect all this data in – Excel, a BI tool, a purpose-built Member Success Management product (by the Way, we like the tools built on Microsoft Dynamics), is something you’ll need to figure out.
And the next, and last, Element on this list will help you figure out what that should be.
8. Operationalization
Wrapping all of this – Segmentation, Orchestration, Intervention, Measurement, Expansion, Communication, and Instrumentation – with processes – called Operationalization – is what takes Member Success Management in your company from a lovely thought experiment and turns it into the Growth Machine that it can be.
Operationalization is the simply the process of taking the data from Instrumentation and acting on it. Whether the system acts on it without human interaction or the system notifies a human within your organization to take a certain action should depend on the Appropriate Experience of the Member.
That’s why it’s so critical to have a clear idea of what the Appropriate Experience is for your various Member segments. If you try to operationalize across a normalized view of all Members, you’ll likely create a mix of technology and humans that is inappropriate for most of your Members.
Best case, you’ll over-deliver to Members that don’t need such high-touch and lower your profit margins. Worst case, you’ll provide an experience that is so incongruent with what the Members need, you’ll drive them away. The latter is bad, but don’t assume the former is okay; one of the biggest barriers to scaling that we’ve run into is when organizations over-deliver for their Members; don’t over-deliver, or just deliver an experience that is appropriate.
Member Success Management is not a technology-centric initiative; it requires you to understand what Member Success is, how Member Success Management is the orchestration of Member Success, and what all that means in the context of your Members.
From there, you can – and probably should – leverage technology to enable you to perform Member Success Management activities in a predictable, operationalized manner, which is absolutely required at scale. After that, the technology decisions will be easier as those that fit into your well-defined Member Success Management needs will be few.
Now that you know what Member Success Management is, the elements that make it up, and you have a general idea of what it will take your organization and your Member Success Team to be successful at it, you can dive in to the Processes and Training to be successful at Member Success Management.
Reach out to us soon, and let’s talk about training for your organization. We’d love to help you achieve Member Success.
Memberships Matter! 