The Confidence Question™

Customer Success & Growth Articles

• The True Cost of Meetings in Customer Success Management
• Meetings as a Customer Success Metric: The Misguided Path
• No Goals, No Customer Success: Unlocking the Power of the Goal Discovery Framework
• Revenue Roadblocks: How We’re Sabotaging Our Own Growth
• Good Fit vs. Bad Fit vs. Ideal Customers: The Key to Unlocking Sustainable Growth
• Opt-In vs. Opt-Out Trials: The Hidden Impact on Customer Retention and Success
• From Transactions to Relationships: Unleashing Customer Potential with AX
• Renewal Psychology: From an Adversarial Process to a Celebration of Success
• Pods in Customer Success vs. Sales: A Side-by-Side Comparison
• The Role of Pods in CSM Coverage Models: The Evolving Landscape
• Pooled CSMs: Benefits, Challenges, and Requirements for Success
• Beyond Touch Levels: Scaling Customer Success through Appropriate Experience (AX)
• The Goal Discovery Framework for Customer Success Management
• Storytelling in Customer Success: Use the Power of Goal Discovery
• Customer Success Scaling: Capacity Planning and Resource Allocation
• Bridging the Engagement Gap: Keeping Customers Actively Invested
• Build a Social Proof Machine: Consistently Generate Real Advocates at Scale
• The Untapped Potential of Social Proof through Earned Advocacy
• From KPIs to Connection: Transforming Metrics Into Meaningful Relationships
• 5 Outdated Email Tactics You Need to Abandon in 2024
• Every Department Must Recognize the Value of Customer Success
• Retention: Shifting from Reactive to Proactive to Stop Chasing and Start Leading
• Why High Usage Doesn’t Guarantee Customer Success
• Scaling Your Customer Success Team Without Losing Control
• The Art and Science of Continuous Goal Alignment in Customer Success
• Goal Discovery: The Essential Task You Never Had Time for (Until Now!)
• Aligning Customer Success and Sales: Bridging the Great Divide
• Motivating Action: The Hard Truth of Driving Customer Engagement
• Customer Retention: Proactive, Reactive, and At-Risk Analysis
• Navigating Partner Success in a Multi-Channel World
• Unlocking Potential: How to Allocate Customers to CSMs
• AX-Based Coverage Segments: Customer Success Evolved
• RevOps Evolved: The Key to Rapid, Exponential Revenue Growth (2024)
• Redefining Email Engagement: New Metrics for a New Era (2024)
• Understand, Classify, and Effectively Analyze Churn
• Customer Negotiation: Discounts, Retention, and Value
• The Art of Objection Handling in Customer Success
• Driving Exponential Growth: The Art of Selling to Existing Customers
• NRR Panic: The Rollercoaster Ride You Never Saw Coming
• Motivation vs. Discipline: How Knowing the Difference Skyrockets Customer Engagement
• Why CSM Positioning is so Important (and How to Fix it)
• Customer Status: The Hidden Motivator You Can’t Ignore
• The Power of Curiosity in Customer Success
• Creating Customer Success Playbooks with ChatGPT
• ChatGPT or Bing: Which AI Tool is Best for Customer Success
• Customer Success Pros: Stay Ahead of the Game with ChatGPT
• ChatGPT in Customer Success: Generative Output to Desired Outcome
• Stop Teaching Your Customers to Ignore You! A Guide to Effective Customer Engagement
• ChatGPT is a Customer Success Game-Changer
• Growth Unlocked: The Key to Exponential Account Expansion
• Customer Success: Defined (2024)
• Stop Confusing Free Trials and Onboarding (It’s Costing You Customers)
• The Importance of Consistency in Customer Success Management
• The Real Reason Your Company Invests in Customer Success
• Customers Hate These 3 Things (and How to Avoid Them)
• The 5 Secrets of World-class Customer Success Managers
• Customer Onboarding: How to Design and Implement an Effective Onboarding Process
• Eliminate Churn Forever in 5 Simple Steps
• Customer Success: The Lost Art of Churn Reason Analysis
• Customer Success: How to Quantify the Impact of Bad-fit Customers
• Customer Onboarding: How to Design and Implement an Effective Onboarding Process
• Designing a Sales-to-CSM Handoff that Actually Works
• What is a good SaaS Churn Rate?
• Achieve Exponential Growth by Focusing on CAC Efficiency
• TTFV as a Sales KPI to Drive Engagement and Expansion
• Time to First Value (TTFV) is a Customer Onboarding Goal
• Customer Onboarding: AHA! or WTF?
• Emotional Disconnect During Customer Onboarding
• Bad Sales Handoffs Cause Customers to Ghost During Onboarding
• How to Know if Customers are Actually Ghosting you
• Why Customers Ghost you
• The Basics of Customer Onboarding
• Success Potential: Real Customer Success Starts Here
• Account Expansion: How to Upsell Unsuccessful Customers
• Customer Growth: Why Lack Of Expansion Is A Really Bad Sign
• Account Expansion: If You Want To Grow Fast, Do This…
• Customer Growth: Upselling Hurts Trust (When You Do It Wrong)
• Customer Growth: The Difference between Sales and Expansion
• Introducing the BEAST Message Framework for Customer Engagement
• Introducing the Customer Engagement Communication Model
• Churn Classification Framework For Customer Success Management (2024 Update)
• Customer Success and Sales: Why the Latter determines the Former
• Appropriate Experience is Required for Customer Success
• What Are The Best Customer Success KPIs?
• You Can’t Solve Upstream Problems Down Stream
• Customer Success is a Simple Concept (Don’t Overthink It)
• Customer Success can’t fit into Existing Frameworks
• Those aren’t Problems. Those are Customers!
• Customer Onboarding Success Secret: Don’t Overwhelm Customers
• A QBR is NOT Required for Customer Success
• Customer Success: The Importance of User or Customer Onboarding
• How to Define Roles in Customer Success Management
• Customer Success: High/Low/No Touch Customer Segmentation
• Customer Success: Incorporating High/Low/No Touch into Onboarding
• Customer Success: How to help Salespeople with Customer Segmentation
• Customer Success: Determining Which Customers on which to Focus
• Customer Success: Who Should Handle Upsells?
• Customer Success: How to Reset Mismanaged Expectations
• Customer Success: Customer Engagement Across the Entire Lifecycle
• Customer Success: Working with Customers that don’t like Technology
• Customer Success: How to Tell Customers What to Do
• How to Get Customers to Help Define Engagement Models
• Customer Success-driven Marketing: Targeting Offline Customers
• Lincoln Murphy Customer Success AMA Transcript and Video – May 19, 2017
• The Process for Discovering your Customer’s Desired Outcome
• Customer Success: How to Close the Feedback Loop with…
• Customer Success and Upgrading Grandfathered Customers
• Customer Success in Early-stage Startups
• Drawing the Line between Customer Success and Support
• The Best Customer Success Management (CSM) Software
• Why Aligning Sales and Customer Success is Critical
• Customer Success and Charging Setup Fees
• The Biggest Customer Success Mistake (and How to Avoid it)
• Determining the Ideal Customer Success Organization Structure
• Customer Success in Two-sided Markets
• Customer Success: The Secret to Improving Customer Adoption
• Customer Success in a B2B2C (Partner / Value Chain) Scenario
• Customer Success: How to Monitor Customer Happiness
• Determining the Perfect Number of Customer Segments
• The Difference between Customer Success and Account Management
• The Secret to Defining Customer Success Coverage Models
• Lincoln Murphy Customer Success AMA Transcript and Video – May 5, 2017
• The 5 Fatal Flaws of most Customer Journey Maps
• The Cost of Bad-Fit Customers: How a Simple Sales Mistake Wiped Out $1.2M in Revenue Overnight
• Customer Success Goals: Cohorts, Metrics, and Prioritization
• Contents of an Awesome Customer Success Playbook
• Understanding Customer Success Management Compensation Models
• Determining the Number of Accounts per Customer Success Manager
• Customer Success-driven Growth: Rapid, Exponential, and Efficient
• Why You Can’t Offset Churn with Upsells
• 9 Things Customer Success is Not
• Customer Success Management: An Executive Overview
• Customer Success Management: The 8 Elements of this Valuable Business Function
• Logical Customer Segmentation: The Key to Scaling Customer Success
• Orchestrating Sales and Customer Success Alignment
• Success Potential: The Foundation of Customer Success
• Excuses and the Myth of Near-Zero Churn
• Success Vector – a Better Customer Health Score
• Don’t Mix SaaS Free Trial and Churn Metrics
• SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate Benchmarks
• Churn is a Symptom, Not a Disease
• 7 Ways Customer Success drives Company Valuation
• Customer Success: The Difference between Stretch and Bad-Fit Customers
• Two Ways to Reduce SaaS Cancellations
• The Only Two Reasons Customers Churn
• You Have to Know why Your Customers Churn
• Use Customer Success to Reduce Credit Card Failures
• Upgrading Grandfathered Early Customers
• Pricing Strategy Framework for SaaS Startups
• Qualifying Leads in a SaaS Free Trial
• Customer Success and Logical Account Expansion
• Reasonable SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate
• Acceptable Churn Rate for Small Accounts
• Success is Uncomfortable
• The Risk (and Opportunity) in Stealing Customers
• A Foolproof Way to Get Testimonials Without Asking for Them
• Success Milestones: The Path to the Customer’s Desired Outcome
• Customer Accountability: The Missing Piece in your Customer Success Strategy
• This Customer Acquisition Mistake Can Kill your Growth
• Stop Using these Anti-Customer Terms
• 7 Reasons to Optimize your SaaS Free Trial
• Desired Outcome is a Transformative Concept
• The Seeds of Churn are Planted Early
• 5 Situations When Massive Churn is Just Fine
• 5 Lesser-Known Ways Churn Hurts your Company
• Podcast: Getting Inside the Minds of Your SaaS Customers
• The Fiction that Friction Improves Customer Onboarding
• Customer Psychology and the Unexpected Power of Surveys
• How Social Proof Actually Works in Marketing
• Customer Success Starts at Sales Done Right
• Achieve Network Effect on a Smaller Scale
• Podcast: Customer Success is the Foundation of Your Success
• 3 Secrets of High-Converting SaaS Free Trials
• How To Get Sales To Help Test your Ideal Customer Profile
• Stick Point: When Your SaaS Customer is Truly a Customer
• Free Trials Do Not Devalue Your Enterprise SaaS
• 4 Undercover Ways to Hack Social for More Sales
• The Success Gap: A HUGE Opportunity You Haven’t Considered
• Your SaaS Metrics Are Wrong if You Include These Customers
• Active Users are a Vanity Metric
• CAC Strategy is the Key to Scaling your SaaS Company
• Let Your Customers Write Your Marketing Copy
• Exposed! A Top-Secret “Enterprise Pricing” Growth Hack
• The Only 3 Acceptable Pricing Page Discount Tactics
• Engaging at Scale: The Secret to Automating Personal Emails
• 5 Growth Hacks to Supercharge your Invite or Referral System
• The Myth of Unavoidable Churn
• The Secret to Successful Customer Onboarding
• 7 Sanity Checks for Sending Cold Email
• You’re Doing Annual Pre-Pay Renewals Wrong
• 10 Growth Hacking Lessons from Dodgeball
• Understanding Your Customer’s Desired Outcome
• How-to Avoid SaaS Free Trial Abuse
• SaaS Free Trial Extension Requests are a Bad Sign
• The Best SaaS Free Trial Length
• Ideal Customer Profile Framework
• 4 Sales Mistakes That Lead To High SaaS Churn
• SaaS Free Trial: Requiring a Credit Card is Shortsighted
• 3 Email Lead Capture Hacks to Get More Customers
• 5 Steps to Unstick Your User Onboarding Flow
• How-to Use SaaS Pricing Discounts to Grow Revenue
• Customer Development Hacks for SaaS Startups
• The Greatest Word of Mouth Follow-up Question… Ever!
• How to Get in Front of your Ideal Customers
• Email Marketing: How Vero Got a 450% Increase in Conversions
• Customer Success: 22 Ways To Reduce Churn With Growth Hacking
• Time Management for Startups: Quantify, Prioritize, and Automate
• The best way to grow your SaaS business
• Case Study: Growth Hacking Pre-Launch Revenue
• Freemium or Free Trial? There’s a Better Question
• WTF is a Growth Hacker, anyway?
• Predictions for Customer Success in 2014
• Autoresponders are Dead: 5 Types of Follow-up Emails
• SaaS Pricing Model: Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems
• The Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Myth and Misguided Optimization
• 5 Rules for Successful Growth Hacking
• Use Partner Offers to Quickly Grow Your Business
• Growth Hack: Warm-Up Your Leads Before You Email Them
• When Customers Go Dark: Customer Success to fight the Zombies
• SaaS Customer Success: Best Practices for Unplanned Outages
• SaaS Pricing: Multi Currency Support
• How to Create an Affiliate Program for your SaaS
• SaaS Marketing: 21 Growth Hacks to Test Today
• SaaS Sales Funnel: Stop Optimizing for the Wrong Customers
• SaaS Freemium Customer Acquisition Costs
• No More Email from Your SaaS App? Introducing GMail Tabbed Inbox and Categories
• SaaS Marketing: Are you Lazy or Deliberate?
• SaaS Churn: Measure Revenue or Customer Retention?
• SaaS Marketing: Random Effort Yields Random Results
• SaaS Growth Hacking: An Interview with Lincoln Murphy
• Engagement is the key to lowering SaaS Churn
• SaaS Marketing: Rise of the Growth Copyists?
• SaaS Free Trial: Require a Credit Card to begin?
• Who’s your ideal customer?
• SaaS Customer Success: Eliminate ‘Dead Ends’ to Drive Engagement
• SaaS Customer Success: Start with Quick Wins
• SaaS Churn Threats: Identify and Retain At-Risk Customers
• SaaS Churn Rate Improvement: Monitor and Drive Engagement
• SaaS Churn Rate Reduction Starts with Attracting the Right Customers
• SaaS Churn Rate: Go Negative with Expansion Revenue
• SaaS Customer Onboarding: 3 Steps to a Successful Welcome Email
• SaaS Market Positioning: How to Compete in Crowded Markets
• SaaS Marketing Plan: 5 Ways to Get your App to Sell Itself
• Common Conversion Activities (CCA): SaaS Free Trial Metric
• 5 Rules for SaaS Email Marketing and Transactional Messages
• List of SaaS and Cloud Consultants and Analysts
• Growth Hacking: 43 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Website
• Beta Testing & Pricing: Examples (Video)
• Beta Testing & Pricing: A Hazardous Combination (Video)
• SaaS Marketing Plan: 100 Places to Promote Your App (Part 2)
• SaaS Marketing Plan: 100 Places to Promote Your App (Part 1)
• SaaS Conversion Rate Lies: 97% won’t become customers, anyway
• How to Develop your SaaS Pricing Model
• Pivot to Profit: Ditch Freemium and Start Making Money
• SaaS Customer Retention is the key to Long-term Profitability
• SaaS Churn kills Growth; Customer Retention is a Growth Accelerator
• SaaS Customer Retention Requires Ongoing Realization of Value
• Free Trials: Not just for Startups or toy Web Apps
• Why $1 Trials are a REALLY Bad Idea
• SaaS Pricing Model: How a 10x Price Increase lead to Happier Customers
• Free Trial Frustrations from a SaaS CEO
• SaaS Free Trial: How Self-Service fits with a High-Touch Sales Process
• Simply Offering a SaaS Free Trial Increases Conversions
• SaaS Free Trial: Your Customer Qualification Machine
• SaaS Free Trial Optimization: When to start?
• 7 Tips for Software Vendors Moving to the Cloud
• How to keep App-generated Email from Being Marked Spam
• SaaS Free Trial: Confused Minds Don’t Buy
• SaaS Free Trial Users are a Vanity Metric
• SaaS Pricing Page Design: Highest Price on the Left?
• SaaS Conversion Rate: A Simple Trick to DOUBLE Your Revenue
• SaaS Pricing Strategy: The 10x Rule
• Display a Phone Number to Increase Conversions?
• SaaS Affiliate Marketing: How-To Supercharge Your Growth
• 9 Ways to Instantly Improve Your PPC Results
• Why SaaS Free Trial Optimization is So Important
• SaaS Free Trial: The #1 Reason You Fail to Convert Customers
• Switch from a Reactive to Proactive SaaS Free Trial
• SaaS Free Trials: The Shorter the Better?
• SaaS Pricing Models Resource Guide
• SaaS Pricing: The Advanced Stuff
• SaaS Pricing: The Basics
• SaaS and Web Apps: Increase Your Free Trial Conversion Rate
• SaaS Free Trial Conversion Rate Optimization Resource Guide
• Where is Your Ideal Customer on the Awareness Ladder?
• What’s the biggest issue you’re dealing with right now?
• Your Signup Form is Hurting Your Free Trial Conversions!
• How to Offer Both Freemium and Free Trials
• SaaS Customer Retention: The Secret to Reducing your Churn Rate
• What’s Your Biggest Challenge in 2012?
• Average Free Trial Conversion Rates… and why they don’t matter
• What’s the Ideal SaaS Free Trial Length?
• Year-End Free Trial Conversion Ideas
• Freemium isn’t just for “Startups with Nothing to Lose”
• Classical Freemium Doesn’t Exist At Scale
• SaaS Free Trials: Common Problems with Sign-up Forms
• Focus on People, not Features, in 2012 (Happy Holidays!)
• The Free Trial Secrets of 100’s of SaaS vendors… just for you
• SaaS & Web Apps: Optimize Your Pricing Page for 2012
• SaaS Customer Success Experts Resource Guide