Search results for: “customer churn”
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Customer Success: The Lost Art of Churn Reason Analysis
Why do customers churn? If you can’t answer this accurately, you’ll never be able to prevent future churn. This guide will help you do just that.
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Churn Classification Framework For Customer Success Management
Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company. If you focus on Customer Success, churn will not be an issue. At least in theory. To take that from a simple theory to your Operating Model, you need to put systems in place, be able to monitor their […]
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The Only Two Reasons Customers Churn
Churn is the antithesis of growth. When you lose a customer, in order to grow by one customer, you have to first replace that customer you lost, and then add a new customer. And when a customer leaves, they take the revenue they were paying you with them (often to a competitor!); but they also […]
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You Have to Know why Your Customers Churn
When customers churn, that’s a problem. Even if their churn was “unavoidable” it still hurts. Churn hurts on several levels: from lowering revenue to hurting employee morale. And churn means something happened to the customer (out of business, acquired, etc.) or – and MUCH more likely – they didn’t achieve their Desired Outcome through their […]
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Customer Success: 22 Ways To Reduce Churn With Growth Hacking
As the SaaS industry continues to rapidly mature, more folks are looking at churn in SaaS companies – investors, analysts, executives, consultants, etc. – and more and more methods of measuring churn are going to surface… and that’s awesome. Of course, the problem is that, while analytics and metrics and new ways of measuring churn […]
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SaaS Churn: Measure Revenue or Customer Retention?
Okay, this is it… finally, my definitive answer on measuring SaaS churn! I’ve heard it all before… things like “Lincoln, you talk about churn a lot, but you don’t ever say anything!” First, that’s just hurtful. Second, all of these “how do I measure the success of a SaaS business?” questions depend on so many […]
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SaaS Churn Threats: Identify and Retain At-Risk Customers
Now that you are attracting the right customers and monitoring for and driving engagement to lower your SaaS Churn Rate, you need to start monitoring and getting proactive on Churn Threats. SaaS churn threats aren’t just a signal that you have an at-risk customer; these are literally threats to your business, your revenue, your valuation […]
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SaaS Churn Rate Reduction Starts with Attracting the Right Customers
Customer churn can have a devastating effect across your entire SaaS company. From the negative impact on your company valuation because your SaaS churn rate is too high, to the drag on growth you feel when you have to replace lost customers or revenue before you can make forward progress… churn is bad news. Over the […]
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SaaS Churn kills Growth; Customer Retention is a Growth Accelerator
SaaS Churn Kills Growth, Profit, and ultimately your SaaS Business… together we can end Retention Deficit Disorder today! Very often when I’m asked to help grow a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business, the CEO is often focused on Customer Acquisition strategies… the “how can we get more people into the top of the funnel?” issue. But when […]
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SaaS Customer Retention: The Secret to Reducing your Churn Rate
When it comes to SaaS Customer Retention, I get questions like this frequently: Hi Lincoln, I’d like to hear your perspective on minimizing churn, especially in an industry with steadily declining prices, Adding more value with a better customer experience and more product functionality to mitigate price erosion and churn helps. Better segmentation. What else? Churn […]
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The Real Reason Your Company Invests in Customer Success
The Real Reason Your Company Invests in Customer Success
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Customers Hate These 3 Things (and How to Avoid Them)
Customers Hate These 3 Things (and How to Avoid Them)
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The 5 Secrets of World-class Customer Success Managers
The 5 Secrets of World-class Customer Success Managers – CSMs.
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Eliminate Churn Forever in 5 Simple Steps
Churn… ya boring. Yawn. Time to move on. I’m so over talking about churn and if you really understand what Customer Success is all about, you should be, too. Churn is so easy to get rid of… you just have to do five simple things. If churn is a problem for you, this post will […]
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Customer Success: How to Quantify the Impact of Bad-fit Customers
What’s the cost of Bad-fit Customers? This post takes your intuition that Bad-fit customers are bad for business and helps you prove it.
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What is a good SaaS Churn Rate?
What is a good SaaS Churn rate? The easy answer is as low as possible. But there’s more to it; that’s what this post is for.
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Customer Onboarding: AHA! or WTF?
You think the AHA! Moment during Customer Onboarding is a positive thing. But it’s not.
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Account Expansion: How to Upsell Unsuccessful Customers
Getting your customers to buy more from you is awesome. Remember, you’re in business here and getting customers you’ve already spent money to acquire and serve to then expand their relationship with you – giving you more revenue – just seems like a super-efficient way to grow. And it is. But if you think for […]
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Customer Growth: Why Lack Of Expansion Is A Really Bad Sign
Customers buying more from you is awesome. I mean, you’re in business here and getting customers you’ve already acquired to expand their relationship with you just seems like a super-efficient way to grow. And it is. So when you have customers that don’t expand their relationship with you, it’s obvious that this is less-than-ideal revenue-wise. […]
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Customer Growth: Upselling Hurts Trust (When You Do It Wrong)
When it comes to Customer Growth or Account Expansion (upselling & cross-selling), I assumed people knew that… …you don’t have to hurt the relationship with your customer to hit your numbers. …it doesn’t have to be a difficult slog that you struggle through to barely hit your numbers. …giving CSMs or other non-sales people a […]
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Customer Growth: The Difference between Sales and Expansion
If you missed it, I’m done talking about churn. If you have a churn problem, read this post and follow my directions. Churn won’t be an issue for you anymore. Now we can move onto GROWTH! And the first order of business is understanding the difference between Sales and Expansion and why knowing the difference […]
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Customer Success and Sales: Why the Latter determines the Former
Sales is part of Customer Success. Like it or not. No, I don’t mean the Sales organization should report to the Customer Success Management org. I mean that Customer Success as an Operating Philosophy, as a way of doing business, includes sales. It includes marketing, product, support, etc, too. It’s critical to understand that Customer […]
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Appropriate Experience is Required for Customer Success
Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company. As I’ve said before, Customer Success as a concept is very simple. Don’t overthink it. But I always have to unpack one piece of that definition and that’s Desired Outcome, or what your customers need to achieve (their Required […]
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What Are The Best Customer Success KPIs?
As you can probably imagine, I’m asked all the time what the best Customer Success KPIs are. What metrics should you use to know if your Customer Success initiative is working. Here’s the deal. I’m not an analyst… I’m a consultant. Companies hire me to help them rapidly acquire good-fit customers, keep those customers longer, […]
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Those aren’t Problems. Those are Customers!
I work with companies around the world as a Customer Success consultant, I speak at events, and I do workshops. I’m constantly teaching others about Customer Success. And even more, I’m constantly learning. My understanding of Customer Success is constantly evolving. As I am exposed to what’s working – and what’s not – both at […]
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Customer Onboarding Success Secret: Don’t Overwhelm Customers
I’ve said this before, but it is worth repeating; Customer Success is not limited to one part of the customer lifecycle, and Customer Success Management is not limited to simply helping the customer get up and running at first or to save them from churning later. Rather, when a company has Customer Success as their […]
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Customer Success: The Importance of User or Customer Onboarding
Customer Success is not limited to one part of the customer lifecycle, and Customer Success Management is not limited to simply helping the customer get up and running at first or to save them from churning later. Rather, when a company has Customer Success as their operating model, they see every aspect of the customer […]
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Customer Success: High/Low/No Touch Customer Segmentation
The traditional Customer Success method of simply looking at what a customer pays us and giving them a particular level of ‘touch’ is old and outdated. It’s time to logically segment customers based on Appropriate Experience (AX). For context, on Friday, May 19, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Facebook […]
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Customer Success: Incorporating High/Low/No Touch into Onboarding
Proper Customer Onboarding isn’t done to prevent churn; it’s done to ensure the customer achieves their Desired Outcome. Retention comes from that. But what is “proper” customer onboarding? Let’s find out. For context, on Friday, May 19, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Facebook live. It was awesome. The video […]
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Customer Success: How to help Salespeople with Customer Segmentation
The age-old issue of Customer Success and Sales alignment, only this time focused on segmentation. This is my attempt to definitively address this eternal quandary. For context, on Friday, May 19, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Facebook live. It was awesome. The video is embedded below and below that […]
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Customer Success and Upgrading Grandfathered Customers
If you’ve been in business for any amount of time, you likely have customers that you’ve “Grandfathered” into old pricing tiers or feature sets that are obsolete now. How can you get Grandfathered customers to move to your current pricing model in a customer-positive way? I have some ideas for you… For context, on Friday, […]
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Customer Success in Early-stage Startups
Early-stage startups think Customer Success isn’t for them. Wrong! Not only is Customer Success for startups (along with established companies), it’s also your key to growth without the friction of churn and bad-fit customers distracting you from rapid expansion. Let’s talk about how to apply Customer Success in early-stage startups. For context, on Friday, May […]
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The Biggest Customer Success Mistake (and How to Avoid it)
Spoiler Alert: The biggest mistake you can make in Customer Success is not putting the customer first – this is CUSTOMER Success. If what you’re doing isn’t designed around the customer’s Desired Outcome, I have no idea what you’re doing. You’re doing something, but it’s not Customer Success. But let’s talk about why this matters… […]
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Determining the Ideal Customer Success Organization Structure
A persistent question in Customer Success Management is what the ideal organizational structure is. A great example of this is this question I received: In a large enterprise platform with a high-revenue customer base, do you see any pros or cons to having the Customer Success Management team and the pre-sales team working under the […]
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Customer Success: The Secret to Improving Customer Adoption
Customer Success Management is about ensuring customers achieve their ever-evolving Desired Outcome. It’s not about adoption. It’s not about the breadth and depth of use of your product. These are big ideas you need to move past if you want to be successful in your Customer Success initiative. Let’s explore this idea… For context, on […]
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Customer Success in a B2B2C (Partner / Value Chain) Scenario
Customer Success is defined as our customers achieving their Desired Outcome through their interactions with our company. Think of that definition of Customer Success as your Operating Philosophy. That philosophy can be extended to the greater value chain or ecosystem you work within. Every entity in the partner/distribution value chain has a Desired Outcome. It’s […]
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Determining the Perfect Number of Customer Segments
In Customer Success, customer segmentation should be logical (take a step back and really think about it) and done from the customer point of view (think: Appropriate Experience segmentation) rather than from an internal-focused view (i.e. ARR, revenue potential, etc.). It’s not about what a customer pays us… it’s about the customer’s appropriate experience. Let’s dig […]
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The 5 Fatal Flaws of most Customer Journey Maps
Customer Journey maps are a favorite tool of Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Success Management (CSM) professionals around the world. Very often, they are elaborate, colorful maps – some look like movie storyboards or even children’s board games – that take the customer on a journey to nowhere. What journey are you mapping? If it’s […]
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The Cost of Bad-Fit Customers: How a Simple Sales Mistake Wiped Out $1.2M in Revenue Overnight
Também disponível em Português por Superlógica Do you need to churn and burn customers to learn? A lot of people in startups think so. In fact, a lot of people in companies of all shapes and sizes think so. Think you need to churn and burn through thousands of customers before it starts to have […]
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Customer Success Goals: Cohorts, Metrics, and Prioritization
Também disponível em Português por Conpass I asked the VP of Customer Success what her goal was for the Customer Success Management (CSM) organization, and she said, “to ensure customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with our company.” That’s the definition of Customer Success that I developed, so I obviously loved that answer […]