The key to winning in SaaS is customer success.
There’s one key reason why:
People trust what a company’s customers say more than they trust what a company says about itself.
The average software buyer spends only 17% of their time in-market interacting with vendors. And that 17% is split across all of the solution providers they are evaluating.
That means 83% of the time they get information from their peers via G2, TrustRadius, private communities, slack groups, unsanctioned reference calls, and recommendations from their investors.
Meanwhile, many SaaS companies have adopted an approach to customer success that is a band-aid for a broken product support process. Customer Success managers fight fires, handle escalations, and chase down technical issues they have very little direct control over. They are a point of contact for customers to bang on until their problems are solved.
This ineffective approach provides a mediocre customer experience, burns people out, and drags down gross margin.
It’s time for a new strategy where we put customer success to work building advocates that help drive the overall growth of the company.
Here’s the approach:
1. MINDSET - Transform from inside-out to an outside-in culture. Make it your company's stated purpose, from the top-down, to help customers meet their objectives.
2. STRATEGY - Separate inbound support issue resolution from outbound customer success activities and strive to make both processes best-in-class. The outbound success activities focus exclusively on driving the customer outcomes you promised them.
3. METRICS - Identify a few KPIs that are measures of customer outcomes. Add them to the company scorecard. Share them regularly in company meetings, and align marketing, sales, product, engineering, support, services, and success efforts toward driving them. These are NOT renewal rate, nps, expansion bookings. Those are your success metrics, not your customers' success metrics.
4. EXECUTION - Handle customer issues end-to-end within Support and Engineering. Support is accountable and responsible all communication with the customer and resolution. They inform and consult the CSM as necessary.
CSMs focus on outbound success plays like office hours, usage audits, product walkthroughs, benchmarks, audits, process consultations, small group collaboration, and peer intros. They run many of these activities community style, one-to-many or one-to-few. One-to-one for larger customers or as a paid service.
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Everyone claims to focus on customer success. But many companies haven't yet figured out how to create space for CS teams to do real customer success work. The kind of work that create legions of raving fans who say good things about them in slack channels, communities, and online reviews. This is how customer success drives growth in SaaS.
**You can read the original LinkedIn post here
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Jay Nathan is the Chief Customer Officer for Higher Logic and Co-Founder of Gain Grow Retain. He is focused on helping SaaS companies build amazing experiences through their customer communities. If you want to find out more, check out HigherLogic.com.