Anika Zubair (00:00.236)
All right, let me ask you this. What happens in the first 90 days of a customer journey? If you're thinking onboarding calls, product training, and maybe a few emails, you're missing the bigger picture. The first 90 days can make or break your customer's long-term success. And here's the truth. Customers are making silent decisions in this period. They're asking themselves, did I buy the right product? Will my team actually use this?

and was this worth the budget I just signed off? And if those questions go unanswered, no amount of QBRs at month six will be able to save you. And that's why today we are diving into the single most important period of your customer's life cycle, the very first 90 days. In this episode, I'm gonna unpack why the first 90 days are the golden window for adoption, the

biggest mistakes customer success managers and CS leaders make during this period, and my step-by-step playbook on how to drive adoption and outcomes quickly. I'll also be sharing a personal story of how I got it wrong early on in my career and what I changed that made all the difference. And finally, I will always be sharing a tactical and practical weekly challenge for you so you can start applying immediately what you hear on this podcast to your own accounts.

So if you're new here, hey, welcome. My name is Anika Zuber, and I'm your host of the Customer Success Pro Podcast. Every week, I share frameworks and stories that help CS professionals like you become confident, strategic, and revenue-driving leaders. And hey, if you enjoy these episodes, why don't you hit that subscribe button so you'll never miss a new one? And why don't leave me a review? It helps this podcast reach more people who want to level up in customer success.

Hello everyone, I'm your host Anika Zuber and welcome to the Customer Success Pro Podcast, your go-to space for real talk, expert advice and actionable insights in the world of customer success. I'm a CS executive leader, award-winning strategist, CS coach and customer success fanatic. I help CSMs and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world-class CS teams.

Anika Zubair (02:22.702)
So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth. Because customer success isn't a destination, it's a journey. And I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks, and strategies you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years.

And once a month, I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today. So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in, and let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together.

Anika Zubair (03:15.63)
Alright, here is the honest, harsh truth reality. Are you sitting down? Are you ready to hear this? Well, here it is. The first 90 days are when your customers decide whether or not your product will actually become a part of their business and their ongoing tech stack. Think about that. When you buy something new, whether it's a piece of software, a gym membership, or even the Peloton you swore you'd use every morning,

Your first 90 days shapes the story of whether it sticks or not. If adoption doesn't happen quickly, customers lose confidence. They start to think, is too complicated, or this isn't giving me the value that I once thought it would. And once that confidence is lost, renewals are almost impossible to win back. And I've worked with companies that have had brilliant products. They are truly game changing.

But they struggled with churn because they treated the first 90 days as a checklist instead of a partnership. Customers never felt progress, so they drifted away. honestly, wouldn't you do the same if you signed up for a gym or got that Peloton spin bike and then you didn't actually use it in the first 90 days or you didn't actually see the full potential value? That's exactly what's happening in SaaS today. And here's the kicker. Churn, six to 12 months later,

almost always has its roots in those first three months. So if you're ever wondering why accounts suddenly go dark or why customers bring up cancellation at renewals, despite you working hard all year long, it's usually because adoption wasn't solidified in the beginning. So let's talk about the most common mistakes that sabotage adoption in those first 90 days. Now, the first thing I see is focusing on training and not out.

Now, if you've listened to many of my podcasts before, you know how important outcomes are in customer success. But what happens too often is teams think adoption means walking customer through every feature. And here's button A, and here's button B, and here's how you log in. But customers don't care about features. They care about the results that those features are going to drive. So you need to make sure that you're focused on those outcomes and

Anika Zubair (05:37.39)
time and time again, I've seen customer success pros focus on features. All right, the second mistake I see happen too often is generic success plans. So if you are building success plans with your customer, that's awesome. But if your customer success plan looks the same for every customer, I'm telling you right now, they are going to notice. Customers want to feel that their unique goals and their business is truly understood.

And there's a plan that's going to build around that, not some sort of cookie cutter checklist. And the third mistake or the third thing that I see happen too often, and I know I've been guilty of this, I'm guessing if you're listening to this podcast, maybe you've been guilty of this as well, but over-promising. And this over-promising tends to happen in sales. And again, I have definitely been a part of an organization where sales have promised the moon and then some.

And when sales team promise the world, onboarding becomes a total nightmare. You spend the first 90 days managing disappointment rather than driving value. And then another thing I see that happens too often is once you get kicked off and once that first kickoff call actually happens, you stop engaging with executives. It's almost like you have that first call where everyone is introduced and you train the users

and then you start working with the champion and the everyday user, but then you start to ignore the decision maker. And then the renewal comes around and the executives have no idea what value was achieved or what the heck happened. That disconnect kills so much, including expansion. And of course it ends up killing the renewal because the executive is left out. And then finally, the last mistake that I see too often when it comes to

everything in the first 90 days is trying to do everything at once. Now listen, I know more than anyone else that CSMs have a big job. We are truly superheroes and everything a CSM is doing is so tough. And I know there is an endless to-do list that you are trying to accomplish, but CSMs sometimes overload the customer in the first few weeks and too many emails, too many calls, too many

Anika Zubair (08:03.078)
Next steps will just overwhelm your customer and it leads to disengagement and honestly, imagine your inbox flooded with checklist and to-do list and the next thing and the next thing. We are all busy people and when we overwhelm our customers, they are just gonna run away and hide and start ghosting us rather than actually working with us to see success and

I have seen this again and again where CSMs think more is more and more equals more value. But sending more emails or sending more checklists to your customers in the first few weeks is just going to lead to overwhelm and it's going to lead to your customer just thinking, I don't need this. I need to ignore this person because they're bothering me. All right. I want you to start thinking about your own account. Are you guilty of any of the things that I've just said?

Most CSMs are, and that's okay, because I have been there too. But awareness is the first step. If you are shaking your head and thinking, gosh, that's me too, that's okay. That's why you're listening to this podcast. And now we're going to talk about the solutions, how you're going to stop doing this and make sure that the first 90 days are super impactful for your customers and that they start adopting right away so that you have customers that are engaged rather than customers that are ghosting you.

and that are potentially at churn. So here's my playbook for driving adoption in the first 90 days. First of all, as I said, you want to start with outcomes. Most of your customers are not buying features, so you need to stop walking them through every single feature in your product. They are here for an outcome. So in your first kickoff call or the first call where you really start to understand what your customer is looking for, whether that's a handover, a kickoff, I don't...

really know, but whatever it is in your business, don't just say, we're going to train your team. Instead, I want you to ask what will make this investment a success for you in the next three months. Then based on exactly what they say to that answer and what the executives say, as well as the champions say in that kickoff call, I want you to co-create a success plan around that one answer, because that's what they really care about.

Anika Zubair (10:20.888)
That is what they want. They could care less if every user is using every feature, but that one question is gonna unlock everything for you. Then, once you've got that question answered, I need you to define a 30, 60, 90 day roadmap. Now, don't leave adoption super vague, don't use those generic checklists, break it down. A 30 day system, give them what they have to access, give them basic usage,

metrics, give them one quick win, show them everything that they need to be doing in that first 30 days. Then I need to go into a 60-day plan. So a broader team adoption, maybe it's measurable progress towards key outcomes or whatever they shared. Start to break down what's happening in those next 30 days. And then finally, you guessed it, break down 90 days. At 90 days, make sure there's executive alignment.

and that there's proof of ROI, by the way. If you don't have proof of ROI in the first 90 days, you're in big trouble. But this is where I wanna make sure that if you've been working with your champion or your daily user of your product at the 90 day mark or even between the 60 to 90 day mark, I need you to start critically thinking about what is the ROI here? How has this customer been using my product? And how am I able to prove ROI at this point?

So you need to start to create those wins and share them. Now, dive deeper into quick wins because that is a game changer, especially in the beginning. You want to make sure you're documenting any and all of these quick wins in a success plan. Again, I don't care how or when or whichever way you build it out, but I want to make sure quick wins are easily visible to not only your champions and the people using your product every single day,

I need you to make sure you're looping in those executives. So quick wins really, really, really build a lot of momentum and excitement. And the thing is your customer just bought tens of thousands of dollars of software potentially with you, if not hundreds of thousands if you have true enterprise. And they were super excited to do it. They had been budgeting, they were really excited and there's this momentum that happens in onboarding. And you wanna make sure that you have continuous quick wins.

Anika Zubair (12:43.512)
to continue to build that momentum. And maybe it's automating a painful manual report in week one, or maybe it's cutting a task from two hours to 10 minutes. They might seem small to you, by the way, and these little wins might not seem like anything, but these small wins, when you make them visible, will create, first of all, champions really, really quickly, but this will create that level of engagement that you want to have with

your executives. Your executives want to see the output. They want to understand what is this software doing for us and how is it helping us reach our goals. These quick wins might not seem like anything to you, but I'm telling you after that 90 days and after you start recording all of them, you're going to realize, wow, all of these quick wins are going to make renewals easier, but are also going to make my ROI storytelling that much easier as well.

Okay, another thing I need you to do from day one is multithreading. This is something that honestly I think as CS professionals we really lack and it's something that happened by the way already in sales and it's something that's part of this playbook to make sure the first 90 days are super impactful. Now, your AE or salesperson actually did tons of multithreading. They had to probably get multiple people to review a contract, to sign off on it, to get the budget, to really get buy-in.

And the thing is, we tend to drop this in customer success. And I know I've been guilty of it as well, but I want you to remember that multi-threading is the key to show value in the first 90 days and the key to your renewal being a no-brainer. And we do this in the kickoff call and maybe in the first few weeks, but then we let things drop off. And I don't want you to just talk the day to day with the users.

It's so common and it's super natural, by the way. You start working with a champion, you start building that trust, and that champion ends up loving you, and you just work naturally with maybe one or two people. But I need you to schedule executive alignment early, okay? And even in those first 90 days, I know when I was a CSM, I would schedule executive alignment at the end of each month of onboarding so that at the end of 30 days, I was able to showcase all my wins

Anika Zubair (15:03.982)
and then again at 60 and then at 90 and 90 days became our first QBR. And then once you did monthly value realizations with those executives and adoption is not just usage, it's a buy-in and the executives really understanding the value of the product and the ROI, your quarterly business reviews are built on that. So start doing value realization calls with your executives. And they don't have to be an hour, by the way. Please don't make them an hour if your executives are all busy.

I've had value realization calls that have been 15 minutes. So you don't need to recreate a QBR every single month. It can be an easy 30, 15 minute call just so your executive doesn't start fading into the distance in those first 90 days. Okay, another thing I want you to do as part of this playbook to make sure that your customer is seeing value and that adoption happens as quickly as possible in the first 90 days.

and who's gonna help you with those executive calls that I was just talking about is I need you to start tracking and communicating progress. Now, I personally do this in a success plan. And the reason I do it in a success plan is it keeps it easy for me to organize my thoughts and my customer coming back to one place. However you decide to do it, just do it. Like make sure you are tracking progress. You wanna show adoption metrics and tie them to a goal. Remember that question you asked at that kickoff call?

that one that how are they going to see this as a positive investment, I want you to make sure that you tie every adoption metric back to that one goal. This is where the critical thinking and customer success really comes into play. This is not your product, by the way. I know a lot of times CSMs that I work with tell me, my product isn't going to tell me an ROI. This is you using critical thinking skills to be able to tie what your customer is saying their outcome is

to your product. So instead of saying, hey, your team logged in 300 times in the last 30 days, I want you to start thinking and translating that into your team actually saved 40 hours this month using the automations within our tool. And this is how and why. Using that sort of language and showcasing those kind of wins to your executives is what's going to keep them coming back to every quarterly business review.

Anika Zubair (17:25.334)
and what's gonna keep that excitement and momentum going as you drive adoption throughout the first 90 days. Now, another step in my playbook is making sure you celebrate milestones. Here's what I see happen way too often, by the way. And I know we're super busy in customer success and we love to do this. We love to glaze over the wins. But whenever your customers hit usage,

or they hit an outcome milestone, or maybe they've actually started seeing ROI way sooner than you calculated in your 30, 60, or 90 day plan. I want you to just send a note, okay? That's the email, that's all it is. Send a celebratory note to your executives and the champions and share that success story. I need you to start to recognize how all of this new behavior is leading to them getting to their outcomes that much faster. Now,

That is my exact framework, by the way. It is step by step of exactly what you need to be doing in order to start to really show value and make sure your customers are adopting your product as quickly as possible in the first 90 days. This framework is gonna shift you from reactive onboarding with boring checklists to proactive adoption. And when this is done consistently, it's gonna create customers who stick, who want to renew and expand with you.

and they're gonna be so much easier to have a conversation with because you're actually showing value right away. So I just wanna quickly jump into this episode and I wanna pause and share something important. RevUp Academy doors are officially open for enrollment. Now this is back due to popular demand and this is the last time that you can actually join RevUp Academy in 2025. RevUp Academy is my six week

a program designed to help customer success managers become confident, revenue generating, strategic professionals. We cover everything from proving impact to leading strategic conversations and driving expansions. So if you've been waiting for the right moment to invest in yourself, this is it. The next time doors are opening is in 2026.

Anika Zubair (19:43.886)
So if you want to invest in yourself and you want to level up as a Customer Success Pro, enrollment closes on September 17th. And after that, doors are not reopening until 2026. So if you want to really level up and become that strategic Customer Success Manager, then head over to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash rev up and save your spot before it's too late. Again, that's the Customer Success Pro.

I look forward to seeing you inside the Academy. Now back to our episode. All right, let me share a little bit of a personal story. And the reason I share personal stories on this podcast is because I want you to understand that I have been there too. I have truly been in the trenches. I have been part of customer success teams and led CS teams where it has been tricky and difficult.

but it is possible to come out on the other side. And early on in my career, I was leading onboarding as well as customer success and support. So part of the customer success team was all three functions. And within my onboarding team, it was a SaaS tool and I thought adoption meant running customers through every single training module. Heck, I built those training modules. I was like, if our customers...

actually do every single training module, they will see results. And week after week after week, I myself and my team covered features and we covered one module to the next. And it was so rigid. I remember module one, then module two, then module two, and then module three. And if you finish three early, then we can only move on to four, but you can't skip to five until you do four. And honestly,

All of that looked great on paper. My executives loved it because you know why? Every box was checked. Every single time it was like, we did another perfect onboarding because another perfect checklist was complete. But guess what? At that same company, when renewal time came around, there was such silence. Customers weren't using the product 12 months later. Why? Because they didn't care about every

Anika Zubair (22:06.03)
feature. They didn't care about going through my modules one, two, three, and four. They cared about one or two outcomes. And that's all they wanted. They wanted to solve their problems, and we didn't focus on those. All we did is focus on training and focus on customers using every single part of our feature and functionality list. But in reality, most customers don't need to use about 90 % of the features with

in your product and service. They need one little thing to work. If you think about it these days, most SaaS businesses have 20, 30, 50, maybe 100 SaaS tools that they're using. Do you think that every team is using every single feature within their tech stack? No. So what did I do? I flipped my approach. Instead of training first, I started every single engagement with outcomes. I would ask customers,

What would make this project a win for you in the next 90 days? And then when 30 days went by, I asked again, what would make this project a win for you in the next 60 and then in the next 30? I kept checking in on what mattered. What do they actually care about? Because what I started learning as well is when I started asking that question is customers said, well, we really just need this one thing to work.

or we really need customers and teams to do X or Y or whatever it is. And it made me realize that going through every module and training all our customers on every little thing was such a waste of my time and their time. And I was eating into so much time that they didn't even care anymore. Any single time I asked for anything from them, they were just not interested because I was just going through all the motions instead of building something.

custom with them and driving for, like I said, the one or two outcomes that they cared about. You know what one customer actually told me? They said, if you can reduce my team's reporting time by half, I will consider this BI tool a success. So we made that the focus. That's all I focused on, by the way. The entire journey, by the way, not just onboarding, but since we are specifically talking about the first 90 days. By week two, I had basically

Anika Zubair (24:25.216)
automated their reporting and made sure that the team was easily able to run a report with the push of a button and the team was thrilled and the executive sponsors saw value immediately. I was able to build them a dashboard, their team was able to edit that dashboard and again, the executives hit one button. So something that they were spending hours and hours and hours a week on building in spreadsheets and in documentation that they already had, I showed them.

how to build and do it within minutes and hours. And that is where the true value lied. I didn't need to show them every fancy detail of the report. They just wanted to run the report as quickly and as efficiently as possible and save their team some time. And that was the big light bulb moment. And throughout the entire three years, by the way, I worked with that customer. That's all they cared about, by the way. They were trying to run reports as quickly as possible.

Now, of course, the reports changed over time, and of course, they did start to use some of our other feature functionality, but the main core reason the sponsors and the executive buyers wanted was saving time. They wanted to save time, and they wanted to make sure that their team was getting accurate data as quickly as possible. And that's where I want to remind you is that not every feature is going to matter to your customers, but what does matter to your customers is the outcome.

of those features that matter. And that account that I was working with not only renewed, by the way, because they were seeing value, they expanded multiple times within the three years that I worked with them because they saw the value. They were like, wow, everything Anika was showing us, everything that our team was doing was saving us so much time that the further investment that they made in our software and our BI tool, they were like,

this is obviously gonna keep saving us more and more time and giving us more and more accurate data reports that they were just bought in. So any single time that there was a new feature that I was showing them that helped them build more reports that got them more results quicker, they were bought in. And again, all I did was focus on that one outcome with them. So here's one thing I wanna share with you as well. And I love doing this with my coaching clients and anyone in RevUp Academy as well is I'd like to tell

Anika Zubair (26:49.218)
all the CSMs that I work with, teaching customers adoption is like teaching someone to drive. You don't start by explaining the mechanics of an engine. You show them how to turn the key, press the pedal, and actually start moving forward. Once they feel the forward movement and that progress, they're gonna feel motivated to do more or to learn more. Then they're gonna be like, okay, so how do I turn? How do I indicate right?

How do I turn on the radio? All of those, by the way, are those additional features within your actual software. But if you don't actually turn on the car and get your customer going and get your customer using the software for the one reason that they bought it, they're never gonna look at all the extra functionality. So just get your customer to actually start.

and get them focused on that first outcome. And you will be so surprised at how many more feature functionality they're gonna be interested in. All right, we're at the favorite part of my solo podcast episodes, which is your weekly challenge because I'm a tactical and practical coach and I wanna leave you with something to do today. So what I want you to do is I want you to take one of your current customers and I want you to map out their first 90 days. Write it down, okay?

You know, if you've been listening to my podcast for a while, you know how much I love writing things down. So do not type this out. Do not put it in a CRM. Do not put it into a spreadsheet and God forbid, do not put it on a PowerPoint slide deck. Okay. Nope. want you to physically write down 90 days. Okay. What happens in the first 30, the first 60 and the first What's the outcome that you're helping them achieve?

quick win can you deliver in week one, week two, week three, et cetera, et cetera? And then how are you going to multi-thread across users and executives? I need you to start writing all of these things down. And also, also don't forget, what are you going to actually measure and celebrate at day 30, 60, and 90? I need you to write all of these things out. Again, just pick one account and apply this framework.

Anika Zubair (29:08.012)
and you'll be amazed at how quickly your relationship with that one account changes. And the reason I want you to write it down and the reason I want you to start with one is because once you do it with one, you will realize how natural it is to do it with the next customer you onboard, and the next, and the next. But you've got to break the cycle. And breaking the cycle, the easiest way to do that is by actually writing it down and then going and putting it in practice. So.

I hope you enjoyed this episode, if this episode helped you rethink customer adoption, do me a favor, share it with a colleague who's working on onboarding right now. And if you haven't already hit subscribe, please do, because it means the world to me. Did you know there's actually over 3,000 of you that listen to my podcast every month, but there's only 500 of you that are actually subscribed. So please go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a future episode.

Oh, and remember RevUp Academy is currently open for enrollment until September 17th. This is your last chance to join in 2025. So if you really want to level up, if you want to help your customers reach those outcomes that we talked about in this podcast, and if you want to be that strategic customer success manager, go ahead and head over to the customer success pro dot com forward slash rev up to sign up before.

doors close. And I hope to catch you in our next episode next week. Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show.

And creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcast episodes. I drop a new episode every Wednesday packed with practical tips. And if you've got a topic you'd love for me to cover or want to be a guest on my show, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you.

Anika Zubair (31:29.11)
And hey, if this episode helped you, share it with a fellow CSM or CS leader. Remember, sharing is caring. Cheers to your CS journey, and I'll catch you next week for our next episode.