As you might have read on LinkedIn this week, I’ve been sitting on this little site and the idea of a newsletter for about six months… maybe longer.
But here we are. Just you, me, and some simple learnings from the week.
I’m grateful for each of the 103 of you who decided to join me on this journey.
Let’s get started.
First up? Leslie’s Compass…
Leslie’s Compass is a framework developed by venture capitalist, Mark Leslie, to help early stage companies decide how to spend money on marketing and sales for their products.
To illustrate the framework, consider two significantly different products: a tube of toothpaste and a jet engine.
Toothpaste is easy to buy. It’s low-cost and ready to use after you buy it.
Marketers create demand for toothpaste through mass advertising and incentives such as coupons.
In contrast, jet engines are complex and expensive.
Not only that, jet engines must be integrated into a larger, even more complex product after they are purchased.
Jet engines are sold by salespeople who maintain high-touch relationships with their buyers.
The go-to-market for toothpaste is, therefore, marketing-driven while the go-to-market for jet engines is sales driven.
These examples make it easy to understand, but Leslie’s Compass gives us seven criteria to evaluate when it comes to designing a product’s go-to-market: price, market size, complexity, fit & finish, customer (business or consumer), relationship, and touch.
Check out the illustration from Leslie’s 2017 LinkedIn article:
credit: Mark Leslie
It probably won’t surprise you to know that when I first saw this framework, I immediately tried to apply it to customer success.
For the customer, the post-sale customer journey should feel similar to the sales approach we used to acquire them.
If a product is sold using a marketing-driven approach (product-led growth included), the customer success model can and should be digitally driven and one-to-many.
More complex products, whose sales are facilitated by an account executive, will likely need one-to-one support for onboarding, adoption, relationship management, and product support.
Where companies get into trouble is when the post-sale customer engagement model doesn’t match the pre-sales motion.
In extreme cases, customers expect high touch and we give them automation.
Or, we spend way too much money on high-touch customer success when a strong digital program would do the trick. This is when Gross Margin gets out of whack.
So, my question to you for this week is…
Considering the criteria in Leslie’s Compass, what is the right balance for your customer base? Do you need multiple customer success programs tailored for the selling approaches you use to acquire customers in different segments of your business?
Weekly Favorites
A few of my favorite podcasts, blogs, or videos from the week:
Philip McKernan on Fully Understanding Yourself on the Elevate Podcast by Robert Glazer. I loved McKernan’s story and purpose. Lessons of Greatness: Leslie’s Compass – Mike Maples Jr – Starting Greatness podcast. The inspiration for my thoughts above. Akimbo by Seth Godin: Game theory and the infinite game. The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek is one of my favorite books. Seth does an amazing job illustrating what it means to play infinite vs. finite games
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. If you liked what you read and think your friends or colleagues would enjoy it, too, please consider forwarding this to them.
Until next week… ✌🏼
