Member Success starts with acquiring Members that have Success Potential.
Members that have Success Potential are said to be good fit Members. This is the opposite of badly fit Members that cannot get value from a relationship with you, now or in the future.
If you knowingly allow badly fit Members to be acquired, nothing else you do in Member Success will have the result you’re hoping for as those Members – no matter what you do – will never achieve their Desired Outcome.
In fact, if you’re a CEO that allows your membership people to sign Members without Success Potential, you should fire your Member Success Management team because you’re just setting them up for failure anyway.
And if you’re a Member Success Manager that works for a CEO that allows badly fit Members to be signed, you should quit and go work for a CEO that isn’t setting you and your team up for failure.
Bottom line… if you want Members to:
- Stay longer
- Buy more
- Advocate for you
…then don’t acquire Members without Success Potential!
Okay, so let’s dig into this concept of Success Potential, shall we?
A Quick Reality Check
Before you even start logically segmenting your Members, you’ll want to do a quick reality check on what’s necessary for your Members to be successful in their relationship with your organization.
BTW, if you go through this Success Potential exercise, when you do start to logically segment your Members, you’ll be able to quickly see what segments you cannot help right now, and which are a perfect fit.
Success Potential is a binary, yes or no answer to this question:
Based on the realities of what we can offer right now, and – assuming Conditions for their Progress Milestones which we would set are met on both sides (theirs and ours) – is this prospect likely to achieve success in their relationship with us?
If your Member doesn’t have Success Potential, and you know it when you sign them, don’t be surprised when they churn out and say terrible things about you publicly.
Success Potential Evolves
There is no “set it and forget it” when it comes to Success Potential (or Member Success… or any part of your membership model!).
Success Potential can (and likely will) change, either because you’ve added or removed functionality, changed your culture, removed or increased your ability to serve certain Members, or because of changes on the Member’s side, like their expert quit, they got acquired and their culture changed, or they simply evolved out of being a good fit for your organization.
Once you have a Bad-fit Member Profile created, you’ll use that to figure out how to operationalize around your existing Member base. When you’re done reading this post, read my post on Member Success Goals: Cohorts, Metrics, and Prioritization for what to do next.
That all said, let’s get to the heart of the matter…
Stop Acquiring Bad-Fit Members
This is one of those little ideas that will challenge the status quo in your organization. This is the thing that will prove if you really do have a Member Success culture or if you are all talk.
Are you willing to stop signing bad-fit Members? Are you willing to disqualify Members already in the pipeline that do not have Success Potential? If not, why are you investing in Member Success Management? It’s a waste of money (and other resources) since you’re essentially setting everyone up for failure post-sale… including the Member.
Done correctly though, Success Potential isn’t limiting; it’s about focusing.
A typical reaction to any type of action that appears to limit your market is the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
When we say that you should not do business with a Member that doesn’t have Success Potential, FOMO is going to tell you that you should. FOMO is going to tell you that this is limiting your potential, that it’s lowering your Total Addressable Market (TAM is the total number of industry practitioners you could have as members).
If your product was for every type of Member, if you could provide an Appropriate Experience to every Member segment, and if you could afford to get in front of all of those Members, then that TAM wouldn’t just be a theory, you could actually “address” that total market.
Simply, right now you have two choices:
- You can either try to acquire as much of that TAM as possible, regardless of Success Potential, churning and burning your way through Members that are a bad fit, ultimately shrinking that TAM by not just the number of Members that churn out, but also those that the negative market sentiment (created through all that churn) pushes out of the TAM, or…
- You can recognize that right now you have a specific segment of that TAM that has Success Potential and that as you improve your product and your ability to serve Members, you increase the number of market segments that have Success Potential, opening more and more of that TAM.
In fact, if you choose the second option, your overall TAM should grow since your successful Members will spread the word, not just to Members like them, but potentially to Members in markets you haven’t considered in your TAM calculations.
The 6 Success Potential Inputs
There are six areas of Success Potential, and you need to be intellectually honest about what it would take for a Member to be successful – to achieve their Desired Outcome – in their relationship with your company.
You’ll note that four of the following Success Potential inputs are tied to the Required Outcome part of Desired Outcome (what the Member needs to achieve) and the other two are tied to the Appropriate Experience part of Desired Outcome (how the Member needs to achieve it).
Technical Fit (Required Outcome)
What technology must they be using – or must they acquire – to get value from our product?
Example: Our product is built on top of Salesforce.com; they need to be – or become – a Salesforce.com Member
Functional Fit (Required Outcome)
What features and functionality are absolutely required for this Member to be successful?
Example: Associations need a roll-up (if not comprehensive) view of all Members and their current success capabilities; not having that is a showstopper
Resource Fit (Required Outcome)
If they do not have the resources to invest (money, time, energy, etc.) into everything required to be successful, they are badly fit.
Example: if they can’t afford the required advanced integrations – even though they can pay our base fee – that will be a problem.
Competence Fit (Required Outcome)
What level of expertise internally must they have – or be willing to acquire – to be successful?
Example: They could functionally use our product for for its basic functions, but without someone on their team that knows how to prepare the data for needed to successfully use the tool, they will not be successful. We offer training, are they willing to use it?
Experience Fit (Appropriate Experience)
We cannot give them an experience that is appropriate for them, from how they buy to how they get value across their lifecycle, and including reactive support and proactive Member Success Management, we cannot give them the overall experience necessary to ensure their Desired Outcome is met.
Sales Example: Using this tool to help them achieve their Desired Outcome requires a high-touch relationship, often with long, extended training and we don’t have the resources to provide that level of service.
Support Example: We do not have the ability to staff a 24/7 telephone support center.
Cultural Fit (Appropriate Experience)
What beliefs, morals, attitudes, etc. do we feel like won’t be a fit with our culture?
Example: If they speak ill of their peers or our other Members, have an abrasive attitude, and demand rather than ask, it’s a bad fit.
Example: If they publish their views on our social channels, that’s a bad fit.
Success is not Guaranteed!
Acquiring good-fit Members – those with Success Potential – is foundational to Member Success.
But Members with Success Potential aren’t guaranteed to be successful! It’s just potential… and it’s up to you to unlock that potential! If all it took was to acquire Members with Success Potential, that’d be awesome. But it’s not guaranteed.
This means we need to know what is required for our Members to be successful and ensure that’s possible. We need to know what is required for them to be successful and orchestrate the process of moving them toward that success.
That’s Member Success Management.
One aspect of managing the success of your Members is knowing where to meet them, and for that, we must look to the Spectrum of Readiness (SoR).
A good fit Member is one for whom you can check all the Success Potential boxes.
They meet all the criteria that would indicate they have the potential to be successful as your Member.
But within that cohort of good fit Members exists a Spectrum of Readiness, from those Members that are not at all ready to those that are able to hit the ground running.
It’s up to you to meet them where they are and take them where they need to go, but you can’t do that if you don’t know where they are on the SoR.
If you fail to recognize that Members exist across this spectrum and instead normalize an experience across all good-fit Members, you will fail to unlock that Success Potential for at least some of those Members.
And a good fit Member that churns out (but is still in business themselves) is the worst kind of churn. It means you failed them.
Is this All or Nothing?
Recognizing that some of these inputs into Success Potential are going to require you to spend some cycles working to uncover, meaning some of these will be harder to come up with at first. That’s perfectly okay.
Should you wait until you have all the inputs fully developed/discovered or should you start with what you know and evolve the definition of Success Potential from there?
Start with Technical and Functional Fit (the two that are generally the most obvious) and share that with sales and marketing; don’t go after – or sign – Members that don’t meet these criteria.
Other “Fits” like Resource or Experience may take more time to uncover, so don’t wait until then to start implementing the Success Potential checklist across your Member experience.
As you add to the Success Potential definition or as it evolves, share the updated definition with everyone so you’re all working from a single version of the truth.
Don’t wait until it’s perfect… it never will be, so go with what you have and iterate from there.
Communicating Success Potential Internally
Acquiring Members that cannot achieve success in their relationship with you is the antithesis of Member Success.
You cannot say your organization is Member Success-centric and knowingly and actively acquires bad-fit Members; those two things are at odds with each other.
That said, most of the time it isn’t that an organization is acquiring bad-fit Members on purpose, it’s that they’ve never gone through the process of defining Success Potential… and they certainly haven’t communicated that internally.
When you identify the six things that make up Success Potential and require a checkbox by each one for every new Member that’s acquired, you’ll truly be on the path toward Member Success.
And now that you know about Success Potential, you can’t un-know it… if you choose to go forward without doing this work on Member Success and continue to acquire bad-fit Members, you’re choosing to do things that will hurt your association, its stakeholders, and Members.
Memberships Matter! 