Customer Success Management solutions are all the rage these days, and so are myths about churn. The Venture Capital community loves them, all the experts are saying you need one if you run a recurring revenue business, and each vendor stands at the ready to explain why their solution is the best one. The one
We are in the SaaS business, so by definition “software-as-a-service” should imply the actual software is the only thing that matters when it comes to retention and driving customer lifetime value. Not exactly. Agreeing with Dan Steinman’s post, product adoption does not paint the complete picture of a customer’s health. There are a number of
Although I don’t believe that product adoption is the complete story of customer health, there’s no denying that it is a critical aspect. It is the primary factor in the success of your customers and the key driver of most Customer Success activities. It certainly deserves lots of attention and an intelligent discussion of what
Businesses that appreciate the value of repeat customers have always been interested in when, how and why their products are being used. In the SaaS world understanding how customers are doing, their adoption or health is not just a nice thing to know, it is a need to know. In a subscription business like ours,
How to score Customer Health is a subject near and dear to my heart and also critical to the long-term success of any Customer Success team. In fact, it’s really just an extrapolation of what you’ve all been doing for years by coding customers as red, yellow, or green. As you all know, that model
I recently gave the below talk at a CEO conference on Sales and Marketing on Customer Success. My goal was to convince them that Customer Success, when done correctly, can be a major driver of growth. It was very well-received (I was pretty much mobbed afterward 🙂 ). I made points including: 1. The fastest-growing
Some of you may have heard this story. Boy walks into a store, puts a coin in the telephone, makes a phone call, trying to convince the person on the other end to buy his grass cutting services. He talks about why his services are the best, what he can do, the wonderful recommendations that
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
Alignment with Sales is a critical component of the long-term success of your Customer Success team. If you assume that Customer Success owns the company retention number, then the combination of Sales and Customer Success drives the total subscription bookings number for the company. That’s interesting to understand because, in many ways, the two organizations
This should be a pretty easy blog post to write, right? However, I’ve only ever been one and have never hired one, so writing this is forcing me to think about it in a new light. A very interesting exercise. Credit here to my right-hand man, Paul Piazza, for great input on what he appreciates