Customer Success Managers are tasked with activities such as reduce churn, drive adoption and grow expansion.
One way to approach these challenges is with the idea of “control what you can control” which is a phrase my Dad quoted when I was looking for solutions to problems growing up.
We can learn more about the idea of “control what you can control” from Stoicism profiled in Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Stoic.
According to Stoic philosophy one of the most important virtues is understanding what is up to us or in our control and the things that are not up to us or out of our control. As The Daily Stoic quotes:
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually have control…” – Epictetus, Discourses, 2.5-4-5
Customer Success Managers can apply this philosophy to our work. Instead of thinking about ideas like “reduce churn” or “drive expansion” we may want to think what items behind these goals are in our control and which are not.
For example, we could take action on the following:
- Reduce churn: outreach to inactive customers
- Drive Adoption: provide an implementation guide for struggling customers
- Grow expansion: share a feature update based on a customer’s use case
And we can also let go of what’s out of our control.
- Customer churn: a customer tested a solution and decided it wasn’t a good fit
- Adoption Challenges: a customer’s corporate-wide policy is preventing adoption of a solution
- Customer expansion: a customer prefers to maximize the tools they have before considering expansion
When we apply the idea of “control what we can control” we focus on what’s in our power to change. We also free-up our resources to let go of what’s not in our power to change.
Another bonus of focusing on what we can control is our own performance management. For example, we can judge our performance on how well we completed actions under our control. If a customer churned because we didn’t engage enough – we can own up to the idea that we’re responsible.
My Dad and the Stoics likely didn’t know about Customer Success yet their philosophy of “control what you can control” can be applied to focus our actions to benefit our company and clients.