Customer Success is when your customer achieves their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company. Desired Outcome is Required Outcome + Appropriate Experience. Each customer segment will have its own Appropriate Experience (AX) – even if they share the same Required Outcome – and this will tell you the type and level of coverage […]

Customer Success Management, Marketing, Sales, Product, and the Executive team all have unique information about the customer. This includes how the customers talk about what they do, how they talk about and use our product, how any of this aligns with our strategic direction (or not). So creating feedback looks among all of those parts […]

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, […]

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 […]

What is the best Customer Success Management (CSM) Software on the market today? As you might imagine, that question comes up frequently for me. Below, I try to give you the best answer I can on this very important piece of your Customer Success strategy.

The goal of Customer Success for your company is to get customers to stay longer, buy more, and advocate for you. So it’s critical to remember that Customer Success begins at the first interaction with prospects by your sales team, continues across their entire lifecycle, and is required for scalable, repeatable Account Expansion. Which means […]

So, do Setup Fees jibe with Customer Success? Are they mutually exclusive? Can they play well together? Is there a time or place where they’re more appropriate? The answer is, of course, yes. And no. Don’t worry… I unconfuse it all below. For context, on Friday, May 5, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask […]

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… […]

Customer Success Management is about ensuring customers achieve their ever-evolving Desired Outcome. Regardless of the model – two-sided market, partner model, direct-to-customer, etc. – every entity in the value chain has a Desired Outcome. It’s up to you to discover what that is and facilitate the achievement of that (ever-evolving) Desired Outcome, and it all […]

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 […]

Customer Success is not about making customers happy. In fact, there are 8 other things Customer Success is not if you’re so inclined. But for the sake of this post, just know that we’re here to make customers successful, not happy. But how do you monitor that? Good question… let’s explore that a bit. For […]

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 […]

Customer Success is not Account Management. This means using traditional Account Management ideas will either limit your (and your customer’s) success… or will cause you your Customer Success initiative to fail miserably. The traditional method of simply looking at what a customer pays us and giving them a particular level of ‘touch’ is old and […]

On Friday May 5, 2017, I did a Customer Success Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Facebook live. It was awesome. The video is embedded below and while there seems to be an audio/video sync issue, the audio is crisp and listening to this will be time well-spent. If you don’t want to watch or listen, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Customer Success has been clearly defined and what goes into Customer Success Management has been fully documented. But when it comes to certain aspects of Customer Success Management, there are still a few things that remain a bit mysterious to some. A great example of that is the concept of the Customer Success Playbook, the sports […]

What’s the best Comp Model for Customer Success Managers (CSM)? How can I create a compensation model that drives the type of behavior we need? What percentage of CSM comp should be variable, and what impact should individual vs. org-level performance have on the variable piece of compensation? The more this comes up, the more […]

This is otherwise known as, “How to Determine Customer Success Practitioner Coverage Ratios.” Initially, the question was “how many accounts should a Customer Success Manager (CSM) handle?” But people quickly realized that answers like “37 on the low end; 200 on the high end” weren’t actually helpful. Then, an ex-CEO-turned-VC with a strong content marketing […]

Doing whatever you can, spending whatever you can spend, to acquire any and all customers – whether they’re a good fit long-term or not – is played out. That’s not a valid growth strategy anymore (it never really was). Today, Investors, Boards, Executives, and Startup Founders are all looking for rapid, exponential, and efficient growth. […]

If you lose $1 in revenue through churn – either because a customer cancels their subscription or decides to stay but pays you less because of discounts or downsells – you first need to replace that $1 before you can start to grow. Now, you can acquire those churn-offsetting revenue dollars in two ways: by […]

The definition of Customer Success has been clearly laid out. What goes into Customer Success Management has been fully documented. But there’s still a chance that you have a misconception or misunderstanding about Customer Success that could keep you from fully embracing this potentially transformative concept. So I want to make sure any preconceived notions […]

Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their Interactions with your company. The actual process of moving customers toward their ever-evolving Desired Outcome is called Customer Success Management. It’s important to understand the difference between Customer Success and Customer Success Management; the former can be thought of as an Operating Philosophy, while […]

What actually is Customer Success Management? This article takes you through the 8 elements of this valuable business function.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Customer Success yet, it’s when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome (what they need to achieve, the way they need to achieve it) through their interactions with your company. Customer Success begins at the first interaction with prospects by your sales team, and continues across their entire […]

Também disponível em Português por Exact Sales Customer Success starts with acquiring customers that have Success Potential. Customers that have Success Potential are said to be good fit customers. This is the opposite of bad-fit customers that cannot get value from a relationship with us now or in the near future. If you knowingly allow […]

Churn is a drag on growth. Churn hurts company valuation. There is no good reason to have churn in your business. I did an “Ask Me Anything” on Slack as part of the build-up for my “Building an Engine of Growth” Workshop and Keynote at SaaStock 2016 in Dublin, Ireland and it was awesome… until […]

Any metric that’s not acted on is a vanity metric, right? Sure, but that doesn’t cover every situation. Sometimes we measure things because we’re “supposed to” but honestly don’t know what to do once we have the result (add that to the list of things that are true but few people will admit publicly). It’s […]

I’m frequently asked about SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate Benchmarks; after being asked for the 97th time – this week – I decided to publish this post. First, a bit of a disclaimer. Benchmarks are neat… it’s cool to see how you stack up against other companies. Benchmarks are how some executives make decisions and […]

Também disponível em Português por Mathias Luz Churn is when customers cancel their account, don’t renew their contract, or remain your customer but pay you less; the latter is referred to as “revenue churn” and includes discounts, down sells, etc. Now, many companies find out about Customer Success when searching for ways to reduce customer […]

I’ve been saying for years that Customer Success is transformative; driving exponential value for both the vendor, as well as the customer. In fact, it’s that value growth for the customer that truly drives the value growth for the vendor. What goes around, comes around. And while the following is something I’ve shared with clients, […]

Fairy Tales have happy endings. That’s why they’re so popular; even if they include scary moments with monsters and evil blended family members, everything is pulled together nicely at the end when the naive protagonist is magically okay. In business, the same types of fairy tale exist, with one being that customers cancel their subscription […]

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 […]

What’s a reasonable conversion rate from free trial to a paid customer? I get some form of this question from time to time and I’ve answered it several times over the years. Well, I got it again so it’s time to revisit this very simple question. As with most “simple questions” the question is easy to […]