Best Practices for Setting Up SuccessTeams

Why is SuccessTeams Important for Enterprises?

Every company, especially a large enterprise, builds an organizational structure around their customer operations. Whether by region, product, vertical, or any other business parameter they define, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are broken into teams to give them focus, tailored processes, and specific metrics that make sense for their line of business.

Totango SuccessTeams is designed with the flexibility to meet the organizational needs of companies with a structured Customer Success team.

Totango Pro/ProPlus Edition: Customers have 1 SuccessTeam, the default team out-of-the-box. Click here for details on the default team and how to set up Zoe.

Totango Enterprise Edition: Customers have 1 default SuccessTeam out-of-the-box. Enterprise customers can create up to 10 SuccessTeams. Click here for details on setting up additional SuccessTeams.

Structuring Totango SuccessTeams

When creating Totango SuccessTeams, we suggest mapping them to your internal organizational structure and how Customer Success Managers manage their accounts today.

For example:

• By geography or region
• Example: Team Europe, Team USA, Team Asia
• Customer Success Managers in Team Europe will be managing only accounts in Europe
• By product line
• Example: Team Microsoft Office, Team Microsoft Dynamics
• Customer Success Managers in Team Microsoft Office will be managing only accounts that purchased Microsoft Office
• By industry or vertical
• Example: Team Financial Services, Team Telecommunication
• Customer Success Managers in Team Financial Services will be managing only financial service accounts
• By account type
• Example: Team Commercial Accounts, Team Key Accounts
• Customer Success Managers in Team Key Accounts will be managing only Key Accounts 
• By other security parameters
  • Example: Only certain team members can see certain accounts for security purposes

When creating SuccessTeams, we recommend placing Customer Success Managers only in one SuccessTeams instead of multiple. This way Customer Success Managers can benefit the most out of this feature by focusing on their core day-to-day work to stay focused and extremely productive. 

Upon creating a SuccessTeam, click on "Edit" on Account Set and define the criteria on what accounts a team can access based on organizational structure. 

Totango Default Team

Totango SuccessTeams comes with one default SuccessTeam out-of-the-box. The default team contains all accounts and all users. We recommend keeping this team for a myriad of purposes. One of which is for executives and managers to have a birds-eye view of how the entire organization's customer portfolio and all customer success managers are performing.

Zoe in SuccessTeams

As a Global Admin, the first time you are setting up SuccessTeams, make sure to add Zoe to the default team (Default team comes out of the box with Totango). This applies to all customers and all plans.

Enterprise Customers with Account Hierarchy

If you are an Enterprise Edition customer that uses Account Hierarchy, there is a special way to define a SuccessTeam's account set. When setting up Totango Success Teams, we recommend selecting an attribute that flows throughout the entire hierarchy. This will allow team members to access both parent and child account sets. 

For example, if you set up SuccessTeams based on geographical region, then the common attribute needs to be the state, country, region, etc. If you set up SuccessTeams by product, you need to have an attribute for the type of product they've purchased at all levels of the hierarchy. 

If no attribute is used throughout the entire hierarchy, Totango Global Administrators can simply select the following segment criteria, "The Parent Account Name is" and input the name of the parent account. This will allow users in a particular SuccessTeam to access accounts from that Parent and all Child accounts below it.

Example of Account Set Definition:

Additional Resources

We recommend you review these other articles:

How to Manage SuccessTeams - Admin Guide

The Team Member User Guide for SuccessTeams

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to your CSM directly.