Rating: Good
Customer Success blurb excerpt: Customer success teams are being created in companies to quarterback the customer lifecycle and drive adoption, renewals, up-sell, and advocacy. The Customer Success philosophy is invading the boardroom and impacting the way CEOs think about their business. Today, Customer Success is the hottest B2B movement since the advent of the subscription business model, and this book is the one-of-a-kind guide that shows you how to make it work in your company.
My opinion: It's difficult for me to rate and review this book as it is the first book on customer success I have read. In time I will come back and adjust my review if required. What I can say is that it provided some really valuable insights into the role, benefits, KPI's and processes of a successful CS team. I felt the book was dense in value in the first half but declined as it progressed. Regardless it was a valuable read and one I would recommend.
Lessons from Customer Success:
In a reoccurring revenue model or a subscription model, there is no such thing as post-sales. Every action is pre-sales. Once we close a deal, we are pre-selling the renewal by doing everything right onboarding, issue resolution, etc. Customer success is a key factor in this process. Customer Success:
Customer satisfaction and customer success aren’t always symbiotic with each other.
Achieving customer success is the by-product of adopting a customer-first approach, listening to your customers, and operating in ways that help them get closer to their goals/customers as well as addressing their unmet needs.
Success cannot be standardised. It should the product of asking each customer the following three questions;
How are they measuring success?
Have they achieved that, or are they on target to achieve it?
How was the experience along the way?
Customer success is not just an idea or a department, it is a core value and it should be driving everything we do. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s a business imperative. The primary goals of a customer success team are to;
Improve customer experience, satisfaction, and advocacy, as well as second-order revenue (When a customer joins a new company and advocates for you there).
Reduce churn. This negatively impacts company valuation, growth, and morale.
Drive increased contract value for existing customers via uncovering upsell and cross-sell opportunities. This is valuable revenue to the company as it often has less attached expenses (contributions from marketing, sales, legal, onboarding, etc)
Why Customer Success: If customers are leaking out the bottom of the funnel at a high rate, it will be difficult to replace them at the top of the funnel. New logos + high retention + consistent upsell are key to helping grow the company. These are the three levers that investors will look at and reward.
In traditional business models the customer relationship ends at the point of purchase, in subscription business models the customer relationship begins at the point of purchase. What Is Customer Success:
Customer success is the process of creating customer loyalty.
There are two types of loyalty.
Attitudinal (Emotional) – preferable as you create advocates.
Behavioural (Intellectual)
Customer success metrics:
Gross renewals, net retention, adoption, customer health, churn, upsell vs down-sell, NPS. Monitor and manage customer health = product adoption, how often do they engage in support, what are the quality of the survey score, marketing engagement, community engagement, do they provide references, etc, growth, are their bills paid on time, how far up the org chart does the relationship go. What percentage of customers increased their contract size?
Which industry had the highest churn rate?
What are our retention and growth rates for each product?
By what average amount did we reduce discounts at the first renewal?
What is the current contract size vs the original contract size of all customers who have been with us for more than 3 years?
Customer success activities:
Health checks, QBR’s, educational training, risk assessment, and risk mitigation...
Customer Success vs Customer Support:
Customer success is not customer experience or customer support. There is organisational proximity, but a clear separation.
Customer Success:
Is proactive
Primary metrics used to measure success if revenue
Customers Support:
Is reactive
Multiple metrics designed to understand efficiency (Do more with less) – number of tickets closed per day etc
Presenting a CS update to your team.
We have 123 customers who haven’t opened a ticket in 3 months, let’s contact them.
We have 123 customers who have renewals coming up in the next 90 days.
This week’s priority are the customers who have P1 and P2 tickets opened. They are....
We have 123 customers who are currently overdue on their invoices past 30 days.
We have 123 customers where our internal champion has gone to a different organisation, who has changed job role or has unsubscribed after our last marketing email.
We have 123 customers who haven’t even tried this product, upgrade or feature – let’s get an email out to them and invite them to next week’s training on this topic.
A good product team:
Makes it easy to implement.
Designed for ease of adoption, not just functionality.
Stickiness is more important than features.
Performance is more valuable than demo quality.
Create modules that can be upsold rather than including all features in the base product.
Making customer self-sufficiency easier to attain.
Managing accounts;
Create 2 lists;
Ranked chronologically on renewal date;
Ranked on revenue;
Assign each account based on value/risk to be either;
High touch
Low touch
Tech touch
Three things to consider when communicating.
Communicate as often as possible
Provide real value
Be as transparent as possible
Effectively using your CRM can create;
Predictability
The ability to forecast
Repeatability – what worked, what didn’t.
Visibility
They did mention 10 laws for customer success. Things like sell to the right customer, how are they measuring success, how can you move the NPS score up, why you no longer build loyalty through personal touch, how can you learn to win by building value, why you should obsessively aim to improve time to value, etc.
Customer Success Best Quotes:
“Customers who advocate for us are critical in advancing our agenda and adoption.”
What Next:
If you are interested in this book, you may want to check out our list of reviewed Sales Books.
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