You’re feeling pretty good about your Member Engagement metrics.

The data shows that users are logging in daily, clicking around, and seemingly making the most of your platform. But hold on.

Your churn numbers are still concerning. The possibility of having them churn out at renewal is creeping up. Also – expansion is way lower than it should be.

Something doesn’t add up, right?

You’re caught in what we call the “Usage Trap”—a deceptive metric that makes you think you’re doing great when you might be far from it.

So why does high usage often translate to a false sense of security?

Let’s break down this complex puzzle and guide you toward a more meaningful Member Success strategy—one that actually impacts the bottom line.

The Illusion of High Usage

You might think that if a Member uses your platform a lot, they must be getting value from it.

But here’s the kicker: usage does not equal value.

We’ve seen instances where usage metrics were sky-high but led to Member burnout, feature fatigue, and, eventually, to churn.

The reality is that usage can often be a vanity metric, seductive yet shallow in what it reveals about Member Health.

Success Gaps: The Silent Saboteurs

Imagine a world where all your Members are using your products but not achieving their goals with them. What you have here is what we refer to as “Success Gaps.”

A Success Gap is the gap between what you think represents the Member’s success and what they think equates to success.

It’s easy to think you’re doing a great job when users are active. Still, if their activity isn’t aligning with their ultimate goals, then you’re setting yourself up for a rude awakening.

And believe me, that awakening usually comes in the form of churn.

The Importance of Goal Alignment

The key to this whole setup is understanding your Member’s goals.

We’re not just talking about high-level, nonspecific objectives like “increase revenue by 20%” but more specific goals related to your products. Do they want to streamline their workflow? Enhance team collaboration? Save time on mundane tasks? And in what timeframe?

Knowing this helps you create a contextual framework around those usage metrics.

Essentially, without aligning with your Member’s goals, you’re sailing a ship without a compass.

Intervening When Goals Aren’t Met

Even with high usage, there’s a moment when you must intervene if you see that the goals aren’t being met.

This is what separates World-class Member Success teams from average ones.

Don’t just look at the dashboard and think, “Hey, this Member is logging in every day; they must be happy.” Instead, think, “This Member is logging in every day, but are they achieving what they set out to achieve?”

If they aren’t, it’s time to step in, see what’s going on, and course-correct where necessary.

Metrics Are Good, But Context Is King

No metrics exist in a vacuum. Success is always multifactorial.

It’s crucial to interpret usage within the broader context of Member goals and expectations.

This doesn’t mean you should abandon tracking usage or other activities; they’re essential, but not sufficient on their own.

Usage is like the pulse of your Member—important, yes, but it doesn’t give you the full health report.

For that, you need context, dialogue, and the ability to connect the dots between different kinds of data.

For further reading on this, see: https://membershipsmatter.com/2023/09/26/member-success-is-always-evolving-shouldnt-your-member-success-management-tactics-evolve-with-it/

Let’s get real. You’re swamped, your Member Success team is overwhelmed, and you’re juggling the constant demands of retaining customers while chasing that elusive long-term success.

You’re in firefighting mode—again.

You know you need to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive one. Deep down, you feel the urgency, but the ‘how’ eludes you. It’s like being stuck in a loop. So, how do you break free?

The inability to shift gears is more than just a tactical challenge; it’s a complex puzzle of resistance, skills gaps, and confidence that leaves even seasoned Member Success Managers (MSMs) grappling for solutions.

You’re not alone.

So, let’s try to de-mystify the path from reaction to proactivity in member retention.

The Art of De-prioritization

The first hurdle is to understand what’s truly essential and what’s not. Yes, every member matters, but let’s face it: not every member activity yields the same ROI.

De-prioritization is not about neglecting your members. It’s about auditing where your energy goes.

Can you identify lower-impact activities that are eating up your time and move that focus to proactive efforts?

A shift in focus frees up valuable resources, which allows you to delve into strategies that make a more significant impact in the long run. Think of it as judicious conservation of your Member Success team’s cognitive bandwidth.

Establish Concrete Objectives

Great, you’ve pruned the activities that were draining your team. Now what? Floating around aimlessly won’t do you any favors.

You need concrete objectives.

A common pitfall is setting vague or overly ambitious goals. Instead, specify what success looks like. It could be something like, “We aim for a 10% increase in proactive Member engagement by the end of Q2.”

By defining your objective and the timeframe clearly, you’re no longer shooting in the dark—you’re laser-focused on a target that’s both tangible and achievable.

Take High-Impact Actions

Remember, proactivity for its own sake is a vanity metric.

You’ve already de-prioritized to make room for proactive efforts; now, make sure those efforts count.

Every action should be mapped to Member outcomes—this is your guiding star. If the action doesn’t move the needle on Member success, it doesn’t belong in your proactive strategy.

The Barrier of Resistance and Objective Confidence

Change is never easy, and it’s always met with resistance.

Couple that with the gaps in skills and confidence, and you’ve got a cocktail of challenges.

What you need is a framework that serves as your Member Success team’s north star in times of change. That’s where a concept like “Success Vector” is so valuable.

It empowers your team, fortifying their sense of belonging and competence.

When your Member Success team feels confident, that feeling is communicated to the Members—a win-win for everyone involved.

Celebrate Milestones, No Matter How Small

If your Member Success team is used to getting that dopamine hit from the occasional saved member, moving to a proactive approach might feel less gratifying in the short term.

That’s why it’s crucial to celebrate Progress Milestones.

It could be as small as transitioning a Member from one lifecycle stage to another.

These victories matter; they accumulate and contribute to a broader success narrative.

Data Visibility: The Unsung Hero

Without visibility, your Member Success team’s efforts are akin to running in the dark.

Data isn’t just numbers; it’s the story of your Member’s journey with your organization and its resources.

A powerful MSM platform can serve as your eyes, helping you track progress, monitor actions, and, most importantly, celebrate the wins that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Its wise to invest in a good AMS or other system for tracking your Member’s journey with your organization.

As a Member Success Manager (MSM), it’s easy to fall into the trap of just going through the motions with your Members.

You have a list of tasks to complete, metrics to track, and goals to achieve.

But what if I told you that being curious could transform your relationship with your Members and position you as a trusted advisor and strategic partner?

Let’s dig in.

Curiosity and Engagement

Curiosity is a powerful tool in Member Success because it allows you to engage with your Members in a deep, meaningful way.

When you’re genuinely curious about your Members and their business, it shows that you care and that you’re invested in their success.

This level of engagement can help you build rapport quickly and establish a foundation of trust.

Uncovering Pain Points

Curiosity can also help you uncover pain points that your Members may not even be aware of.

By asking questions and digging deeper, you can identify areas where your product or service may be falling short and work to address those issues before they become bigger problems.

This proactive approach can save your Members time, money, and frustration, and can position you as a valuable partner in their business.

Unlocking Opportunities

In addition to uncovering pain points, and something that positions you as more valuable in the Members’ mind, curiosity can also help you unlock new opportunities for your Members.

By asking questions about their business goals (objective + time frame), you can identify areas where your product or service can help them achieve those goals.

This can lead to upsell opportunities, increased adoption, and advocacy.

This is where having a Well-organized (and actively used and updated) Database Management (person or Team) that can dig into your AMS where as much of your members’ data can be available for mining; creating visual charts showing their activity in- and out- of your tools and resources, and other targets (like what their main Desired Outcomes are– yes they can have MORE than one) and where they are on their path to reaching Member Success by way of their Appropriate Experience, surpassing each Success Milestone that you’ve set for them to help them succeed.

Curiosity as a Competitive Advantage

In today’s competitive landscape and market conditions, curiosity can be a powerful differentiator.

By being genuinely interested in your Members and their business, you can stand out from competitors who may be more focused on closing deals than building relationships.

This can help you retain and grow Members over the long term.

How 5 Minutes Changes Everything

So how do you make curiosity a habit in your practice as an MSM, taking into consideration your limited “extra” time for having deeper conversations?

Free-up 5-mins on a call by having the Member review a report that youve created with fata about them on their own, with the intent to discuss their current hurdles, or ones you may see them approaching (by having analyzed their data in you AMS) on the call.

Now, use that “extra” 5 mins to ask open-ended questions that encourage your Members to share their thoughts and experiences so you can listen actively and follow up with additional questions to dig deeper.

Don’t be afraid to ask “why” or “how” to get to the root of an issue or opportunity.

This also helps ensure the call is there to move them forward instead of looking back and is a way to generally make engagements more productive and add some level of “scale” to the value of their membership with your organization.

ABC – Always Be Curious

Curiosity is a powerful tool in Member Success Management that can help you engage with your Members in a deep, meaningful way, uncover pain points, unlock new opportunities, and position yourself as a trusted advisor and strategic partner.

By making curiosity a habit in your daily practice, you can transform your relationships with your Members and differentiate yourself in a competitive landscape.

So next time you’re working with a Member, remember to be curious – it just might be the key to unlocking their full potential.

The only universal truth in Member Success is that it’s always evolving and if your organization is using the strategies and tactics that were the ‘new norm’ in Member Success Management – new, even 3 years ago, – you’re being left behind.

Over the past few years, that evolution has happened far more rapidly than anyone could have foreseen.

I just finished reading “Member-Shift” by Sarah Sladek (available now on amazon.com!), Host of the Membership IQ Podcast and Author of some half-dozen books since 2007, focusing on Memberships in Associations. It’s an excellent read on the disengagement of members from their organizations, and the associations which have lost sight of who and what matters most (and, by the way, its your members!) and how associations are struggling to leverage their assets.

It’s time to buck traditions and Disrupt the Myths of Membership, Member Success, and Member Success Management.

Let’s Get Started.

The world of Member Success is Ripe for Disruption

Traditional approaches to Member Success Management – often held tightly by those that have implemented them – have left organizations still grappling with high churn, low expansion, their limited resources stretched thin, and burnout and turnover among Member Success Managers (MSMs).

But what if there was a fundamentally different way to think about your Members, a method so innovative that it could revolutionize how we approach Member Success and membership growth in general?

Enter Appropriate Experience (AX)-based Coverage Segments, the future of Member Success.

A Revolution in Member Success Management

In the quest for balance and efficiency, there is a novel approach to address the most pressing challenges of Member Success Management: delivering the Member’s Appropriate Experience at scale.

Remember, Member Success is when a Member achieves their Desired Outcome (Goal + Appropriate Experience) through their relationship with the organization, leading them to stay longer, use more resources, and advocate for their association.

By prioritizing the Member’s Appropriate Experience and segmenting Members accordingly, you should be able to reduce churn, massively and rapidly drive expansion, and increase Member satisfaction, while improving the Membership Teams’ wellbeing.

The Traditional Approach: Where Associations have Missed the Mark

Revenue-based Member Segmentation, the traditional and widely accepted practice in Member Success, has long been used to dictate the level of service a Member receives.

The bigger the Member’s Desired Outcome, the more attention the Member receives from the team, and, consequently, the smaller members and their DO, the less attention they get.

However, is this truly the best approach for the Member, your team, or the overall health of your organization?

More importantly, does it ensure reduced churn and improved expansion while keeping your MSMs from burning out?

Unfortunately, the evidence suggests not.

The New Approach: Appropriate Experience -Based Coverage Segments

What if we told you there’s a radically different approach that effectively solves all the issues outlined above?

Appropriate Experience-based Coverage Segments, a method that groups your Member by their shared Appropriate Experience (AX), allows you to deploy resources effectively and efficiently to ensure your Members achieve their Desired Outcome.

This resource deployment is called a Coverage Model.

It’s a bold shift from the traditional revenue-based Member segmentation model, focusing not on the amount of dues they pay, or the size of their business or agency, but on the Member’s experience, needs, and Goals (DO).

With AX-Based coverage segments, your Member Success operation becomes a finely tuned machine, delivering precisely what your Members need, when they need it. For this to work, you do need a solid Enablement and Operations layer.

Here is how the four most common types of AX-Based Coverage Segments look – in detail.

Inbound Coverage Segment: This segment is characterized by Members who engage with you on their terms. They don’t have a dedicated MSM on your membership team, but access a pool of highly skilled resources. By allowing Members to control their engagement, you enable them to attain their success in their way, fostering a better relationship, reducing the chance of churn, and setting them up for expansion, also on their terms.

Asynchronized Coverage Segment: These are Members who prefer asynchronous engagement – emails, chats, videos – rather than regular one-on-one or group meetings. This approach not only meets Members’ needs but also drastically reduces the risk of MSM burnout as it provides a more balanced and manageable workload.

Synchronous Coverage Segment: This segment is where one-on-one, real-time engagement occurs most. While it may seem traditional, it is balanced by asynchronous carve-outs that help provide scale and prevent overwhelming your MSMs.

Task Force Segment: For the most complex, high-value, or at-risk Members, a task force is assigned. Multiple contributors from your membership team work with the Member simultaneously, providing their Appropriate Experience while boosting Member satisfaction and advocacy.

Those are just the four most common coverage segments and there’s so much more detail that’s beyond the scope of this, but that should give you a general idea.

You may employ all of those, some of those, none of those, or come up with others that make sense in your unique situation. Whatever works to provide your Members with their AX.

Just a Different Take on the “Touch-level” Model?

Isn’t Synchronous Coverage just “high-touch” Member Success? No, but if it helps you to make that connection, fine, but just understand that in something like “Synchronous Coverage” the model is weighted more toward synchronous meetings, but asynchronous modalities are also employed for scale.

But even if you can’t get past the “touch” level pyramid of ancient Member Success, then just look at it this way: in this Appropriate Experience -Based Coverage Segmentation methodology, you will have Members that pay a high dues rate (based on their size) that would be in the “low-touch” segment and Members that pay you very little that would need to be in “high-touch” since that would more align with their Appropriate Experience.

To make it even more clear: You will have Members in the same AX-Based Coverage Segment that pay dues in radically different amounts.

Coverage Segments do not take what the Member pays into consideration since that doesn’t figure into their Appropriate Experience.

A Member that is a larger business or agency with much more industry experience, larger staff, or more technologically advanced operations might have an Appropriate Experience that would dictate very little hands-on resource deployment across most lifecycle stages.

Whereas a Member that is smaller and uses less sophisticated operations techniques might require what would have been categorized in the past as “high-touch” engagement.

Association-World Impact: Appropriate Experience -Based Coverage Segments in Action

Coverage Segmentation is one of the “secrets” that World-class organizations use to get to >125% NRR.

But to truly appreciate the transformative power of Appropriate Experience-based Coverage Segments, let’s look at some real-world examples in organizations that are on their way to World-class, but aren’t there yet:

NRR Boost:

A Homebuilders association was struggling with a natural amount of unavoidable churn in their sizable Member cohort. However, by understanding the Appropriate Experience of their Members and shifting from traditional Revenue-based Member Segments to Coverage Segments, they saw their NRR jump from 98% to 105%, even with a (large) 15% churn rate. This surge in NRR past 100% led to a significantly higher valuation in their next funding round, proving the tangible financial impact of using Appropriate Experience-based coverage segments.

Rebalanced Capacity, Reduced Burnout:

A particular Bankers association was stuck in the rut of old-school Revenue-based Member Segmentation, creating a “low-touch” segment for low-paying Members and a “high-touch” segment for high-paying Members with dedicated MSMs for each of those segments. When an examination of the capacity planning model was run, it was shown that their MSMs (of which there were two LT-MSMs) working on the association’s membership team) working with “low-touch” Members were overloaded, juggling 3x more Members than they should if they were to actually deliver the Member’s Appropriate Experience (which they were not doing).

This resulted in high burnout and turnover for low-touch MSMs. Meanwhile, their two “high-touch” MSMs were severely underutilized; and could have effectively managed 4x as many Members with capacity to spare. The high-paying Members didn’t need as much synchronous engagement as expected. By implementing Appropriate Experience-based coverage segments, they could then rebalance the workload, reduce burnout, and boost efficiency.

Increased Profit Margins Through Efficient Resource Allocation:

Another association had used the “pod” approach for their Members, dedicating many resources for each Member, only to discover this was far from the Appropriate Experience for a large cohort of Members. Around half of their Members had the experience, internal expertise, and resources to manage on their own, with only occasional strategic guidance needed from the association. By moving these Members to an Inbound coverage segment, they freed up valuable resources, saw a 50%+ increase in profit margin for these Members, and still ensured the Members’ success.

These examples highlight the potential of AX-Based coverage segments in not just reducing churn and improving expansion, but also in creating an environment where MSMs can thrive.

By focusing on the Appropriate Experience for each Member, it will ensure that both Members and MSMs can succeed.

Making the Shift: Applying Appropriate Experience-Based Coverage Segments

Transitioning from the traditional model to AX-Based coverage segments might seem daunting, but the rewards far outweigh the effort. It’s not just about reducing churn or increasing revenue.

It’s about providing a Member experience that meets their unique needs and objectives, fostering long-term relationships, and allowing your team to thrive in their roles.

Remember, the goal of AX-based coverage segments isn’t to categorize your Members by their financial value to you, but to identify the level and type of engagement that best ensures their success.

By doing this, you ensure not just the success of your Members but also the success and wellbeing of your team, and the association.

We’ve created an Excel dashboard you can use as a tool to help you create a Member Success profile for each of your members. This resource will help you in planning and implementation of Member Success with them. You can use it when you have your preliminary discussions with them about their Desired Outcome and Appropriate Experience, and set Success Milestones to help them on their way. Then, you can enter other data you collect on the Dashboard into your AMS where you can further track their progress towards Member Success, and proactively adjust their Success Vector as they go along. Good Luck!

Member Success is a Growth Engine. Investing in Member Success-driven Growth is an efficient way to drive revenue and valuation, and we need a metric that is designed to measure that growth. Introducing, Success Vector.

Why “Vector” instead of “Health”?

Vector is defined, according to a quick Google search, as “a quantity having direction as well as magnitude, especially as determining the position of one point in space relative to another” and to me, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Direction + Magnitude.

It All Starts with the Member

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in Member Success is when the CEO of an organization hires a Member Success Manager (MSM), declaring they are now Member-centric, and then telling the MSM to “figure it out” without giving budget or resources. Though sometimes, if any resources are given, it’s to buy software or adapt to some other technology. Because technology solves all the problems. Right.

People are a huge part of  Member Success Management. Systems are necessary. Processes and Technology tie all of those together for efficient scaling.

But if the implementation of those things isn’t predicated on a deep understanding of the Member – and knowledge that the Member will evolve over time so your understanding must, too – then the people are going to be setup for failure, the systems won’t do what you “designed” them do, and the technology will fail to deliver a real ROI.

If we want our Members to grow with us over 5, 10, 15 or even 20 years, ensuring the Member is engaged and continues to achieve their evolving Desired Outcome is critical. In fact, it’s why your organization exists in their world.

Before you can Orchestrate, Operationalize,  Instrument, and Intervene – or develop a Success Vector – you need to be clear about the Desired Outcome for each of your discrete Member segments.

And remember, Desired Outcome has two pieces: Goal and Appropriate Experience.

Desired Outcome Simplified – DO = Goal + Appropriate Experience

Goal is what they need to achieve; there are some things that must happen otherwise you know they couldn’t possibly achieve their Goal.

You should be measuring their progression through the required activities and Success Milestones (Are they making required progress?), check on Joint Accountabilities (Are they doing what they need to do, are you doing what you need to do?), look at Ascension Velocity (Are they buying more, expanding use, etc.? Because if they are, they’re likely to find success), and other things that indicate whether they’re achieving their Goal.

Appropriate Experience is how they need to achieve their Goal, so it takes some of the previous measures into consideration, as well as Satisfaction & Confidence, Support interactions, and other contextual inputs… including the gut feel of any human interactions / interventions that took place with the Member.

Together those make up the core of the Success Vector of the Member and will tell you if the Member is on track, needs help getting back on track, or is heading out the door.

Key Success Vector Inputs

The inputs that are 100% required for Success Vector to be meaningful are:

Success Potential

Success Milestones

Joint Accountabilities

Success Potential

If my Member doesn’t have success potential, that’s something we need to address (possibly by actively separating from those bad fit Members).

When it comes to Success Potential, there are several things we need to look at:

Technical Fit – They aren’t using or don’t have and can’t / won’t acquire a key piece of technology

Functional Fit – Our product is missing a key piece of functionality for them

Resource Fit – They can invest – beyond simply paying our fee – in what’s required to be successful as our Member

Competence Fit – They have – or will acquire – the expertise internally required to be successful?

Experience Fit – They do not have the experience internally and cannot get / are unwilling to source or train resources that have the necessary experience to be successful with our product

Cultural Fit – They have beliefs, morals, attitudes, etc. that you know won’t jibe with the way you work

If we can’t check all the Success Potential boxes, then we can be absolutely sure that those Members are not going to achieve their Desired Outcome – both their Goal and the Appropriate Experience – so we’re setting everyone up for failure if we keep them around.

Success Milestones & Joint Accountabilities

The biggest problem with Member Health Scores is they rarely include whether or not the Member is actually doing the things necessary – inside the product and beyond – that would indicate they’re on the right path toward achieving their Desired Outcome.

For Success Vector, knowing where the Member is on their path toward success – including whether they’re holding up their end of the bargain on the joint accountabilities we agreed to – is the main input.

In fact, if you don’t pull in any other contextual data and only looked at Success Milestones and Joint Accountabilities, you’d be better off than most organizations that pull together complex Member Health Scores.

Look, if the Member does have Success Potential, but they aren’t doing what needs to be done to achieve success, that’s a problem and we need to intervene.

If those things aren’t included in the Success Vector, then what purpose does it really serve? It’s like creating a Member Success strategy without starting with the Member (which, sadly, is pretty common still).

When it comes to predictable revenue, this is where it gets good.

Some Success Milestones will have a logical Upsell or Advocacy opportunity associated with them. Based on which Success Milestone our Members will hit in the next month – and our confidence in both hitting that and taking the upsell or advocacy opportunity associated with the milestone – you should be able to accurately predict the revenue expansion from your existing Member base.

Success Milestones – Logical Upsell and Advocacy

Revenue Ascension Pipeline vs. Expansion Quotas

And when you can build a revenue forecast model based on actual Member Success Vectors, then you can manage against that rather than the other direction where we have expansion quotas. We can say “according to Success Vectors, this cohort should deliver $90k/ARR in the next month.”

When you have Success Vector in place, internal expansion quotas are not needed, which means you won’t have Account Managers trying to shove products down a Member’s throat when they aren’t ready for it, don’t need it, or are otherwise not in a place where that is the logical next step.

Rather, we can say “this is the expected, logical expansion from these cohorts in the next 30, 60, or 90 days” and if we hit that, it means you simply did your job.

However, if we miss that mark, it means the Member didn’t hit that Success Milestone, because if they had, according to Success Vector analysis, they would have taken the upsell. So that’s a fail on Member Success Management; not that they didn’t make the upsell, but because the Member who we thought would reach that milestone didn’t.

So there’s no need to quota on expansion; instead, use Success Vector-based projections to manage the success – or failure – of your Member Success Management (including Account Managers, Expansion Resources, etc.) org.

Additional Success Vector Inputs

Organizations with more robust Success Vectors also have inputs like:

Ascension Velocity – Are they taking upsells when they’re logical?

Meaningful Product Activity – Also known as product usage data. It has to be meaningful activity, though.

Adoption – Did they meet initial adoption goals? Are they meeting ongoing adoption goals?

Advocacy – Are they advocating for us in appropriate ways where logical?

Usability Issues – Are there problems or missing features keeping them from achieving success; missing features would indicate a lack of Success Potential and should be noted as such

Member Organization (Account) – Are negative things happening with their organization? External triggers, bills not being paid, M&A, etc.

Support – Support tickets aren’t bad unless they’re not being closed in a positive way quickly; also if support tickets slow or stop.

Satisfaction & Confidence – NPS – Net Promoter Score

Success Vector Status Definitions

The Success Vector of a Member will change from time to time, but we ultimately want all our Members on a Positive Success Vector. Stagnant Members on a Neutral Success Vector simply renewing at the same level is no longer considered good enough.

The new measure of success is Members that are engaging, evolving, and expanding.

Positive Success Vector – They’re on the right track. “The right track” means that they aren’t just static but are expanding or on-track to do so.

Neutral Success Vector – They are Stalled or Stagnated. They don’t fit with the new measure of success. You need to get the Member back on track to achieving their Desired Outcome and on a logical Ascension Path.

Negative Success Vector – They’re not on the right track and you need to intervene. Come up with some type of gradient to indicate level of and type of intervention

Ghosts – Your key contacts at the Member have stopped engaging or responding; This Member is about to churn.

Situational Awareness and Member Triage

If you’re just starting out integrating the Member Success Operating philosophy into your business, there’s a really good chance you’ll have some Members that have gone dark. For the Members that are a good fit and should be saved, you need to do what must do to save them. Just know… that’s not Member Success!

To pull them from darkness back into the light or otherwise save them from churning, that’s begging, promising, discounting, etc. but it has nothing to do with helping them achieve their Desired Outcome. They’ve given you another chance, but they should be considered to still be on a Negative Success Vector.

Member Success would have been ensuring they didn’t get to this point, to begin with!

You now have to work to take that cohort, plus any other Member that’s on a Negative Success Vector and move them to Neutral and then Positive.

At first, you’ll have Members in each category, but eventually, as you Orchestrate and Operationalize your Member Success Management processes, you’ll get to a point where you only have Neutral and Positive Success Vector Members.

Success Vector shares many of the underlying qualities of Member Health Score, but the big differences are what make this the key indicator for Member Success-driven Growth.

When it comes to Member Success Management, you first need to know where the Member is right now (point A).

When they’re just getting started, this is easy.

However, when they’ve been using your product or resource for the last18 months to help them reach their Desired Outcome through their Appropriate Experience with your organization, and they have increased the breadth and depth of that use, brought their product into other areas of their company, purchased some add-ons, added capacity, and just purchased a license for an adjacent product, and there’s a second wave of users getting ready to start the onboarding process, it gets a bit more challenging.

It’s situations like these where technology like bots – and the underlying Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning – hold so much as-yet unrealized promise, but that’s a topic for another day.

Regardless of the complexity of the Member’s relationship with you, you should be able to know where the Member and users are always in their life cycle as a member. 

Second, you need to know what the next Progress Milestone is for the Member (point B). When the Member is just starting out, or their relationship with us isn’t complex, knowing the next Progress Milestone for that Member is necessary.

Then you need to figure out the steps required to move the Member from point A to point B.

This includes things they will do using your product, things they need to do on their own outside the product, etc. (the promised Conditions).

Some things they do, you’ll have direct visibility into; others will need to be self-reported. Some things, your Members will know how to do, but some things will require training, guidance, or professional services. For the things you can’t do for them, you will need to provide or point them to the resources to bridge those “Success Gaps.“

Systematized Member Success Management

To operationalize Member Success Management, you will need to proactively intervene in the appropriate way for that Member segment (a mix of technology and human touches; the “appropriate” part will dictate the ratios therein) to get them to do the things they need to do to move from point A to point B.

If they do those things, great; they’re on their way to being successful.

If they don’t do those things, however, you need to change up and/or escalate intervention modalities to get them to act.

If an email is sent to get the Member to take the next required action, and that action is not taken (regardless of whether the email is opened or the link is clicked), send a different email from a different person.

If the action still isn’t taken, escalate the modality to another option for contact – perhaps a social contact platform – Facebook Messenger or SMS. If the required action is still not taken, escalate to a phone call that, upon connection, brings the Member Success Manager into the mix.

What starts as a proactive intervention to move them toward their Desired Outcome escalates to a Reactive Intervention to prevent the Member from going off course and getting them back on track.

Of course, there are other context clues to keep in mind – Are they on vacation? Are they out on some sort of Personal Leave from Work, etc. – but, in general, this is what needs to happen.

Done correctly, systematizing Member Success Management will take you from just Member Success to Member Success-driven Growth.

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:

1. 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…
2. 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.

Member Success is not about making Members happy. Associations exist to make Members successful, not happy.

Monitoring Member Happiness

 “What’s the best tool to monitoring individual Member happiness with my Concierge Onboarding and Member Success teams?”

Let’s talk about Happiness versus Success. If you try to go for the Happiness of your Members, you’re probably going to be in for a long, disappointing ride.

Sometimes that can cause you to go down the wrong path of solving things that are either outside of your control or outside the scope of what you need to be solving for your members.

That said, what we need to be focused on is the Success of our Members, which means we need to talk about Onboarding.

What does that even mean? It’s something which you may discuss regularly: When is a Member on board? What is that point?

Organizations will say, “Our Members are onboard after 30 days. Onboarding is 30 days,” and then on day 30, they move them out of onboarding. Whatever that means. They check a box. They’re not onboard. They just made it through 30 days. They didn’t achieve anything. They haven’t reached their first Progress Milestone. That’s a problem.

What we want to make sure of is that we know what onboarding means:

The Member has achieved some actual value for the first time. In your onboarding process call it something like ‘First Value Delivered (measured by Time to First Value – TTFV). Time to First Value (TTFV) is a commonly used Member Engagement metric to measure the efficiency of Onboarding.

Time to First Value (TTFV) is the amount of time between the inception of the membership and when the Member is Onboard.

Your Members are considered “on board” once they get actual value from, or (in more complex scenarios) they see the real value potential in – outside of the promises made by your membership marketing and sales team – their relationship with you.

TTFV is a Member Onboarding metric that is just a Goal (Objective + Conditions + Timeframe. Remember: most people equate Goal with Objective, and omit the time element, which is critical. Without a timeframe, a goal is just a wish).

Every Member makes progress on their own cadence, on their own schedule, on their own timeline. But you must set goals or Progress Milestones for them:

You would like your members to achieve their first Progress Milestone (define whatever that is that moves them toward their Desired Outcome, in their Appropriate Experience) and in some amount of time.

Then you must set and discuss the conditions of the Goal with them, so that they know what they are expected to accomplish on their own, and what you will assist (train, implement, etc.) them with in the process to get them to that Goal.

Again, they either get actual value from their relationship with you or, for the first time, see the real value potential in the product or in the relationship with you.

Maybe you want them to achieve that milestone in 30 days. That’s just a number you made up that you’d like to hit. As you learn more about your Members, improve your product and your processes, etc. you’ll readjust your TTFV goal.

No matter, some are going to achieve that goal in three days; Some might take 45 days. For those that take longer than your goal, you need to intervene and just make sure that everything’s good.

It might be fine, but it’s a goal, and you want to make sure that if things aren’t fine, you’re keeping them on track. You would want to intervene before the 30 days is up if you see that they’re not on track.

You can look at your overall TTFV to see how things are working at a macro level, but you can also look at how individual Members are progressing against the goal and take appropriate action.

TTFV should also figure into Member Engagement KPIs like Success Vector.

Just to be 100% clear… if your goal TTFV is 30-days and a Member hits 30-days… that doesn’t mean they got value and should be considered Onboard at that point. Their status should not change to Onboard until they reach what they determine is their value.

There are some products which might take months and months and months before members can actually get real value out of it because there’s not just setup time, but there’s actual time of using it before it becomes truly valuable. In that case, onboarding may be when a Member for the first time sees the value potential in your relationship.

Maybe that’s after going through some setup and onboarding and getting some dashboards and things like that up and running. There’s setup and implementation and getting those things set up for them, but they’re not actually usable. They’re not getting true value from it yet, but they will, and they see it for the first time outside of your promises and sales and marketing. They see the value potential. It’s either when they get the first value or when they see for the first time the value potential. That’s onboarding.

What must happen to get us there? Work back from that.

If they’re doing those things. If those things are happening … If we have a dedicated onboarding person or a dedicated onboarding team, that may look more like a project management situation. Are the members doing the things that are necessary to get value? If they aren’t, they’re not successful. The onboarding isn’t working.

Your Member Success Manager, or whoever owns the relationship with the Member, needs to be able to have visibility into those steps that the onboarding team is taking with the Member so that they can see whether things are working.

If things are not working … “working”, meaning: are we moving through these Progress Milestones in the onboarding process? If they’re not working, then the Member Success Manager could intervene with the onboarding.

Do you also look for satisfaction or happiness in the onboarding process? You can, but most of the time if you’re moving them through the steps that are going to be necessary, you won’t have to go look at other things to discover if they’re getting their Appropriate Experience, on .

We know that they’re on the right track to being successful. That’s the most important way to look at it.

Today, Investors, Boards, Executives, and Associations in every industry are all looking for rapid, exponential, and efficient growth. And yes, you can have all three of those.

In fact, there’s no more efficient (and if done correctly), rapid, and exponential – growth than growth within and from your existing Member base.

And the key to unleashing the power of this growth engine is Member Success.

Let’s dig into what Member Success-driven Growth is…

Member Success as a Growth Engine

Member Success-driven Growth – seeing Member Success not as a way to make Members “happy,” but as a true Growth Engine – is all about expansion (upsells, add-ons, land and expand, viral expansion, etc.), but in a way that absolutely requires a baseline focus on the Member’s success.

Member Success is when your Members achieve their Desired Outcome through their Interactions with your organization.

The actual process of moving Members toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome is called Member Success Management.

Member Success-driven Growth is growth – upsells, cross-sells, Member advocacy, viral expansion, etc. – that occurs as part of the Member’s evolution and success.  As Members succeed and evolve, their relationship with you should evolve and grow as well.

Through Member Success-driven Growth, account expansion happens in a predictable, scalable way that is a part of the Member’s journey through Progress Milestones.

However, within Member Success it is said that Renewal and Expansion happen because a Member is successful; but that’s not quite accurate.

The truth is…

Expansion and Renewal are Part of a Member’s Success

For Members to achieve their ever-evolving Desired Outcome, they’ll need to stay past a renewal, and they’ll very likely need to consume more of your core product, adjacent products, services, etc., so we say Expansion and Renewal are part of the Member’s success.

Through a combination of effective orchestration (managing expectations and teeing-up expansion opportunities early in the lifecycle), operationalization, and proactive intervention (three of the 8 elements of Member Success Management), Members that achieve a Success Milestone with a logical expansion opportunity attached – and that are on a positive Success Vector – will take the upsell when it’s presented.

The key to making Member expansion work in a way that is Member-positive on a scale that meets your organization’s Appropriate Experience is knowing exactly what expansion offer to present to the Member and when to do it.

This means knowing – for each Member segment – exactly what Success Milestones have associated expansion opportunities and knowing when Members will hit those Success Milestones.

It also means understanding how to short-circuit the Member’s journey to that Success Milestone by offering training, consulting, add-ons, etc.

Done correctly,

Member Success Leads to Truly Predictable Revenue

It doesn’t get more predictable than being able to look at your existing Members, say these 100 Members will reach this Progress Milestone in the next month, that milestone has a logical expansion opportunity associated with it, the value of that upsell is $1000/ARR, and the percentage of Members that should take the upsell based on their Success Vector is 90%.

That means, for that cohort, you’ll add $90k/ARR next month. Then, by combining the expansion value of all the milestone cohorts, you can give an accurate prediction of the revenue you’ll generate from our existing Members.

Now that’s actual, real predictable revenue.

Something that needs to be addressed, however, is…

Management by Objectives vs. Expansion Quotas

When you can build a revenue forecast model based on actual Member Success Vectors, then you can manage against that rather trying to force the issue through expansion quotas.

You can say “according to Success Vectors, this cohort should deliver $90k/ARR in the next month.”

When you have Success Vector in place, internal expansion quotas are not needed, which means you won’t have Member Success Managers trying to upsell products to members when they aren’t ready for it, don’t need it, or are otherwise not in a place where that is the logical next step.

Vector is defined, according to a quick Google search, as “a quantity having direction as well as magnitude, especially as determining the position of one point in space relative to another” and to us, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.

Direction + Magnitude.

People are a huge part of  Member Success Management. Systems are necessary. Processes and Technology tie all of those together for efficient scaling.

But if the implementation of those things isn’t predicated on a deep understanding of the Member – and knowledge that the Member will evolve over time so your understanding must, too – then the members are going to be set up for failure, the systems won’t do what you “designed” them do, and the technology will fail to deliver a real ROI.

If we want our Members to grow with us over 5, 10, 15, or even 20 years, ensuring the Member is engaged and continues to achieve their evolving Desired Outcome is critical. In fact, it’s why your organization exists in their world.

Before you can Orchestrate, Operationalize, Instrument, and Intervene – or develop a Success Vector – you need to be clear about the Desired Outcome for each of your Member segments.

You can create Objectives to manage against, essentially saying “this is the expected expansion from these cohorts in the next 30, 60, or 90 days and if we hit that, it means you simply did your job.”

However, if you miss that mark, it means the Member didn’t hit that Success Milestone, because if they had, according to Success Vector analysis, they would have taken the upsell. So that’s a failure of Member Success Management; not that they didn’t make the upsell, but since the Member who you thought would reach that milestone didn’t.

There’s no need to identify quotas on expansion; instead, use Success Vector-based projections to manage the success – or failure – of your Member Success Management (including Success Managers, Expansion Resources, etc.) team.

Member Success-driven Growth is the way to get rapid, exponential, and efficient growth in a Member-positive (and, ultimately, sustainable) way.

We have clearly laid out the definition of Member Success for you, and we have also discussed at length what goes into Member Success Management – reminding you again that these are two separate concepts, but they go together.

There’s still a chance however that you have a misconception or misunderstanding about Member Success that could keep you from fully embracing this potentially transformative concept.

We’d like to make sure any preconceived notions about Member Success aren’t standing in your way of understanding something this powerful.

Let’s go through a few things that Member Success is not…

1. Member Success is Not Magic

Simply claiming to be a Member-centric organization isn’t enough to magically make your Members successful.

Even operationalizing Member Success Management and hoping it will magically transform bad-fit Members into successful, growing Members isn’t going to work.

In fact, if you’re knowingly acquiring bad-fit Members (those without Success Potential), then you are setting up everyone who will work with the Member after they become a Member for failure. You’re also setting the Member up for failure.

Member Success, when done correctly, can have results that appear magical (Members stay longer, buy more, invite you into other parts of their business, and advocate for you externally, ultimately driving up the value of your organization), but behind those seemingly magical results are a lot of changes that must happen and a ton of work.

2. Member Success is Not Just a Department

It’s critical that you understand the difference between Member Success and Member Success Management.

But even if you understand that difference, if you have a part of the organization that’s responsible for Member Success Management (whether you call it that or not), then it’s easy to fall into the trap of “it’s their problem.”

But unlike the adage, “everyone’s in sales” … everyone on your association staff really is in Member Success.

Even if you have a Member Success Management department, the cross-functional realities behind true Member Success dictate that everyone must be working toward the same goal.

Member Success has the potential to be transformative, but you must work together as a organization to unlock that potential.

3. Member Success is not just Account Management

Member Success Management is not just another name for Account Management.

Traditional Account Management fails because it literally treats Members like Accounts… like numbers.

Account Management 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 take the latest offer we’re trying to sell to them.

Traditional Account Management doesn’t work anymore, but Member Success-driven Growth absolutely does. This is why the function of Account Management, which is still required, should sit within, roll-up to, or otherwise be governed and monitored by Member Success Management.

Historically within Member Success (yes, historically), it was 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 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 renewals and will likely need to consume more of our core product, adjacent products, training, etc.

Which means this is all part of Member Success Management; even if your organization decides to have dedicated Member Success Managers to handle Upsells, Cross-sells, and Renewals, those should fall under Member Success Management plans.

Account Management is part of Member Success Management, but Member Success Management is not just Account Management.

4. Member Success is not Member Support

Member Success Management is not simply another way of talking about Member Support.

Member Support – reactive, break/fix type of support where Members go when they have an issue, encounter a bug, etc. That is an absolutely required, super-valuable part of the business.

But it’s not Member Success Management (no matter how much the Support providers want to ride the Member Success wave to get web traffic).

The best organizations – those growing rapidly and taking over or redefining their product category – recognize that helping their Members achieve their Desired Outcome is critical and they’ve operationalized around this simple notion in the form of Member Success.

These companies understand that offering reactive, break/fix support – while required – is not enough and have evolved to providing proactive Member Success by orchestrating the journey of the Member on their way to achieving the outcomes they desire and ensuring the Members stay on that path.

Member Support – specifically the number of interactions with the Member and how quickly those interactions are resolved – is a critical input into an overall Success Vector (a key Member Success metric). It’s obvious that if Members can’t use the product, they can’t achieve their Desired Outcome.

But Member Support is not Member Success.

5. Member Success is not Churn Mitigation or Saving Members

If you focus on churn mitigation, you’ll always have churn to focus on mitigating. Remember, churn is a symptom of an underlying disease; if you only focus on the symptom, and not the disease, you’ll always have the symptoms to worry about. And the symptoms will likely get worse.

Member Success isn’t about saving Members who are about to churn; it’s about not letting Members get to that point in the first place.

Keeping a Member from canceling often involves begging, promises, and discounts, which is fine if you must do that (though, again, you shouldn’t have to do that), but just remember this is not Member Success.

If you can save a Member from churning, great, but once saved you must work diligently to get the Member back on track to achieving their Desired Outcome. At that point, they are likely still at risk.

In fact, if you all you do is “save” the Member and you don’t get them back on a path toward success, you’re just prolonging the inevitable; they will churn. Only this time when they churn, they’re going to be really upset since you wasted their time and now on their way out, they might leave negative reviews.

Focus on making Members successful and you won’t have to worry about saving Members.

6. Member Success is Not “Checking in” with Members

This is one of those things that people who think they understand Member Success say, but when they do, it’s clear they don’t know anything about Member Success.

Don’t ever “check-in” with the Member. In fact, remove “check in” from your vocabulary.

Only call or contact a Member when you have value to add.

Sure, there may be times when you legitimately don’t know where the Member is on the path toward success (though there are often context clues that we have access to but, perhaps, choose to ignore), so you need to find out where they are.

Just make sure that when you find out where they are, that you know where they need to go (the next Success Milestone) and come equipped with a plan, resources, and whatever else they need (based on their Appropriate Experience) to get there.

Isn’t this just semantics? No, it’s not… and here’s why. Interactions with Members where you provide no value (from emails to in-person meetings) will teach Members that interacting with you is pointless and they’ll start to ignore you.

And then you’ll wonder why your Member goes dark.

7. Member Success is Not Member Handholding or Babysitting

To create systems and put processes in place to ensure our Members achieve their Desired Outcome, we need to understand our Members.

We need to have empathy for them, or at least for the humans that make up our Member organizations.

We need to understand what happens in their world, where our product fits in their daily life (you might not be the center of their universe yet… or ever; be realistic), and what your Member is trying to accomplish in their relationship with you.

So if you talk about how unintelligent your Members are, how you need to hold their hand, or that you spend all your time babysitting them, that says that you’ve lost focus on why you exist in their world.

Sure, you just told the Member something that you’ve told 1,000 other Members… but you forget: for your Member, that was the first time they’ve heard that.

You forget that while your Member is struggling with the functionality of your product or hasn’t mastered something they need to in order to get value from your product, that they didn’t buy your product to do those things.

They started a relationship with you – and keep that relationship going – because they believe, through their interactions with you, that they’ll achieve their Desired Outcome.

If you’re doing everything on your end correctly, and you’re maintaining empathy for the Member, you should never feel like your Members are helpless or that you must coddle them.

The good news is if you aren’t doing the things that you should be doing to ensure your Members are successful… you can fix that by doing those things.

And if you do all of that and you still feel like your Members just don’t get it; maybe they won’t ever. They could be a poorly-fit Member, which is also good news because you can just stop acquiring Members without Success Potential.

8. Member Success is Not just Product Usage

Active Members never churn. True or False? False. It’s false.

So, since active Members can and do churn, does that mean product usage isn’t directly correlated to Member Success. True or False? True. That one’s true.

It can also be said, without a doubt, that if you’re a member-based, resource-driven organization, you either think – or thought before you realized you were wrong – that having visibility into a Member’s functional use of your product was everything you need to know.

We’ve talked about this in the past: Active Users are a Vanity Metric.

Remember, Member Success is when your Members achieve their Desired Outcome through their Interactions with your organizations… “interactions” being the keyword.

Product usage is one interaction: perhaps a big one. But it’s likely not the only interaction.

And beyond their interactions with you, there are things your Members need to do on their end that their usage of your products and resources won’t help you with.

In Member Success, context is everything. Yes, product usage can be a valuable input into Success Vector, but it’s just one, properly weighted input.

9. Member Success is Not Happiness or Delight

Happy Members never churn, right? Members we have “great relationships” with stick around forever, always buying more and advocating publicly on our behalf. Right? Unless the “great” part of that relationship is predicated on the Member’s success, no. realistically, they won’t stick around forever.

The only thing having a great relationship with a Member guarantees is that – if they aren’t successful – it’ll be a little more difficult for them to tell you that they’re canceling their membership and moving to your competitor.

If they aren’t successful, they will churn; whether they’re happy or you have a great relationship. It is going to happen.

We’ve saved the best – and most controversial thing that Member Success is not – for last. This is the one we get the most pushback on when we discuss it with most every organization, but hopefully, you’ll see where it’s coming from.

Member Success is when your Members achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.

Desired Outcome includes the Member’s Required Outcome (what the Member needs to achieve) and their Appropriate Experience (how they need to achieve it).

Unless one or both parts of Desired Outcome is that the Member is emotionally happy (perhaps the Required Outcome for a Cirque du Soleil ticket buyer is to leave emotionally happy), then trying to make the Member happy is trying to deliver something that’s unnecessary and may even be impossible.

The road to Member Success can be hard to travel, the journey requires work to implement its processes, members’ minds often must change, comfort zones have to be broken out of, and that stuff doesn’t always come with emotional happiness, at least (or especially) in the short-term.

Members are very demanding, always pushing back when you say no, always asking for more, calling in (for the 7th time) for resources help or guidance, never giving you a high NPS score, etc. This doesn’t mean they aren’t successful. It doesn’t mean they’re not getting all the value they expected to get from their relationship with you; it just means they aren’t happy.

But if you confuse Happy and Successful, you might look at the Members that don’t seem happy and try to optimize your processes around them, not realizing they’re your best Members! Remember, context is everything.

On the flip side, you might not worry about Members that “seem” happy enough – because they don’t ever open support tickets, ask for things, push back, etc. – when, if you’re going to optimize around any Members, it should probably be them.

So operationally, not understanding the difference between Happiness and Success can lead you down the wrong optimization path.

But also, Member Success can seem fluffy and something that can’t really be quantified (which is not true), yet many people still talk about Member Success in terms of Member happiness or delight.

While you can call your Member Success Management team the Member Happiness Group (or whatever), if you want to be taken seriously by your executives and your board, focus on making your Members successful and instead of reporting on satisfaction and delight, report on how the Member’s success is impacting the business.

Report on what matters to them… how Member Success is helping drive the value of your organization!

Okay, so now that you know what Member Success is not, We’ll have you check out an Executive Overview of Member Success Management is in an upcoming article so you’re clear on what it is.

And, We’d love to have you 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.