Catalyst vs Totango

John Bosch

Hi GGR Community,

We are just finishing our CS Platform evaluations and we are down to Totango vs Catalyst.  I would love to hear from the group on your thoughts on those two platforms.  

To help with the conversation here are a few bullet points:  

• 35 CSM's - 5 Admin
• Enterprise B2B
• Land & Expand Focused on Driving Users
• Some unique Parent Child
• Key North Star Metric is NRR
• Sales Handles Renewals + Expansion/Upsell
• Health Score automation and trending is critical
• Customer Lifecycle Management with Growth and Risk Paths
• NPS still important to the business but maybe not the health score
• Capturing and reporting on the progress of customer outcomes in critical for the CS team
• UX/UI needs to just not be Salesforce 
• Moving from high touch concierge level to lower touch but not yet full "scaled CS".  
• Pricing and Effort to Maintain are critical

I'm looking forward to hearing back from the community on this!  

Jordan Silverman

We have been using Totango for 5+ years now and are extremely happy with it.

Some notes/comments - feel free to DM me if you have any other questions.

• 35 CSM's - 5 Admin --> We are similar size 30 CSMs + 2 Admin and use Totango really well
• Enterprise B2B --> Totango as an application and pricing leans toward enterprise SaaS so this should not be an issue
• Land & Expand Focused on Driving Users --> They are in beta with Opportunities. This will be a huge asset to easily tracking expansion opps. I would think you would currently manage this in SF until it is ready in Totango
• Some unique Parent Child --> They have parent child infra built out
• Key North Star Metric is NRR --> We still need to manage this outside of Totango unfortunately. Totango can tell you NRR but if you have any rules it breaks. For example - we have a rule where it is only churn if the customer is with us for more than 1 month (otherwise no sale). Totango cannot handle any customization like this.
• Sales Handles Renewals + Expansion/Upsell --> CS handles this for us so unsure
• Health Score automation and trending is critical --> Totango does this incredibly well. We are on our 3rd iteration of health scoring and we find it gets stronger over the years. They now have "multi dimensional" health which is really great.
• Customer Lifecycle Management with Growth and Risk Paths --> Love how they handle this
• NPS still important to the business but maybe not the health score --> This is how we are as well. We have NPS trigger tasks for CSMs + email campaigns but not impact health.
• Capturing and reporting on the progress of customer outcomes in critical for the CS team --> There is definitely room for improvement here but they have basic infrastructure around this.
• UX/UI needs to just not be Salesforce  --> We don't actually use Salesforce - we exclusively use Totango and their UX/UI so it is very strong. 
• Moving from high touch concierge level to lower touch but not yet full "scaled CS". --> We are an SMB tool so we have a huge portion of our customers on scaled CS all run through Totango 
• Pricing and Effort to Maintain are critical --> Totango is a beast - like all CRMs it absolutely takes effort and time to maintain

kmulhalljr

Hi John. Curious why those two platforms made it to your list as final choices? Our team has been going back and forth with senior management on several different products. If I were to choose based on somewhat similar objectives, it would be Pipedrive

shonafenner

Hi! We've had Totango for a little over a year. While I have no experience with Catalyst, I can say that we're very happy with Totango and find it GREAT for using an interactive approach to scaling the customer journey and running "mini-projects" to add efficiencies and visibility where we never had it before using a CS software. 
We're low touch - just 1 CS Ops/admin, 7 CSMs, and 2 managers using Totango daily. Soon we'll add Implementation (ie. one more manager and 5 Implementation reps) 

I agree with Jordan that Totango does a fabulous job of customer lifecycle management with growth/risk areas and health scoring (you can start with a standard model and move to weighted multi-dimensional health confidently... even without a data analysis team behind you).

Hopefully, the fact that I built out Totango and manage it solo gives you an idea of the effort to maintain... ain't bad, as long as you're strong with internal documentation and processes.