As companies mature, organizations that were at one time encompassed in one person, become separate and distinct. Early on at many software companies, one person might be responsible for training, implementation, Customer Support, Professional Services, and Customer Success and perhaps even renewals and upsell. Over time, each of those will likely become a separate organization.
It is useful to think about Customer Success providing a roadmap and motivation to do more and Professional Services as the arm to help customers execute on that roadmap. If you are doing both, your customers are demonstrating commitment to your product and continuing to build on the value that your product provides. So how
We may never have met formally, but I think we know each other quite well. My name is Sally McField. My family knows me as Sally or Mom, and my business card reads Customer Success Manager. However, I have a secret life that I keep hidden when I go to work everyday – I transform
I was sitting in a board meeting for one of my portfolio companies last month and two interesting things happened. First, the company reported it had zero customer churn (or 100% retention) in the quarter for the first time in its history. Next, the company’s CEO shared a story about a panel at a conference
Although full bellies, football games and a giant Snoopy floating above the streets of NYC, often distract us, Thanksgiving is a time for family, friends and reflecting on what we are blessed with. We feel especially fortunate at Gainsight, having just gone through a second round of funding, a great experience at Dreamforce and the addition of several
Well in case you missed it last week, a small company called Salesforce.com hosted their annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The destination event managed to drive over 100,000 people to the city by the bay, resulting in a whole lot of traffic, but even more excitement over the future of the enterprise cloud computing
The subscription economy is forcing companies to take a serious look at revenue from existing customers. The success of your business now relies on retaining and growing revenue from your customer base… or in other words, making sure your customers are healthy. But how do you quantify the health of your customers? Today, most companies
Dan had some great comments in his post on Nov. 5 about “Aligning Customer Success and Customer Support.” However, there’s something to be said for many companies who have built a traditional sales/support organizational structure without Customer Success in the original plan. So how does a company get from the traditional Sales & Support model
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” – Wizard of Oz Today, we announced that we raised $20 billion. Just kidding and checking if you’re reading carefully. But we did announce we raised $20 million (almost as cool), led by our new friends at Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Summit Partners and our existing investor Battery Ventures. The
Although the title says “aligning”, the most important thing in this particular subject might be “defining”. Because so many Customer Success organizations grow up in the Services part of the enterprise, this means they sit right alongside the Customer Support function. Nothing wrong with that in theory, but in practice the differences can often be