A Customer Success Leader's Guide to More Effective 1:1 Meetings

When you’re a customer success leader, it’s easy to prioritize time with customers over everything. Sometimes that means neglecting your own team’s communication and development. But putting your internal team on the back burner can have detrimental effects on your goals and success metrics overall.

When internal team meetings are sidelined, long-term goals get overlooked in place of tyranny of the urgent. The consequences? Your team loses sight of your mission and vision, disengages, and burns out. 

So how do we prioritize our customer success manager: employee relationships? Through consistent 1:1 meetings. 

Here are some tips to help prioritize and simplify your internal 1:1s.

1. Use a collaborative platform with recurring agenda items 

Sometimes 1:1 meetings feel like a waste of time when you don’t come in with a clear agenda where both the manager and employee can address their pressing concerns and ideas.

Fortunately, there's a solution: leverage a collaborative platform with recurring agenda items. Here's why.

1. With recurring agenda items, you alleviate the burden of repetitive preparation while ensuring alignment between all parties before the meeting even commences.

2. The use of a collaborative meeting agenda empowers customer success leads and team members to contribute agenda items, share notes, and collaborate seamlessly. With a structured and consistent framework in place, everyone involved can prepare in advance, saving time and mental energy. This enables a more focused discussion during the meeting and promotes better decision-making.

3. It's also a great tool for performance tracking. Going into annual performance reviews or trying to reference a note from a past meeting? Collaborative meeting agendas keep historical data all in one place, saving you time sifting through various, disconnected platforms.

2. Ask intentional questions

Alignment is key when it comes to setting your own team up for success. Asking the right questions in order to gather valuable insights, identify bottlenecks, and drive productive discussions. Here are some to consider in your next 1:1 that help unpack what’s working, what’s not, and how to adapt for future success:

• I've noticed the overall health score of your book-of-business has dropped 5 points in the past quarter. Let's talk about that.
• I see three of your clients coming up for renewal this month with below average product adoption. How shall we deal with that?
• We had two detractor NPS scores from your clients. Have you followed up and what did we find out?
• Great work on customers X and Y. Both have improving health scores and bought more licenses. What did we learn that we can duplicate?
• What information/data do you need to make your conversations with customers more valuable?
• How can I make your life easier as the leader?

Here's an example of what this looks like using a collaborative meeting agenda like Leadr:

3. Ensure there are next steps

Just like you would never leave a customer call without next steps, your internal 1:1s deserve the same intentionality. With each item on the agenda, make sure there is a next step. Take 5 minutes after your 1:1 meetings to block time on your calendar for the projects that depend on you, schedule future meetings that need to happen, and create tasks for yourself if there are administrative items that were determined in the meeting.

Following through on the topics covered in your 1:1 show that you’re invested in the success of your team members.

4. Maintaining Meeting Momentum

Consistency is key when it comes to supporting your team members. Ramping up communication ensures alignment between you and your team members, visibility across the org chart, and a clear path forward for improving customer satisfaction down the line.

But knowing this and practicing it are two different beasts.

Utilizing a tool to track and store everything from goals set to conversations held, activities in progress, and the results you’re hitting (or missing) can help save time and streamline communication so you can focus on hitting your success metrics.

Leadr is a people platform that helps you streamline your communication, progress, and employee experience in one platform. Watch a quick product overview video or request a custom demo of the platform here.

*Thank you to Dan Steinman, Leadr Board Member and Chief Evangelist at Gainsight for these powerful insights on becoming a more effective customer success leader.