Customer Success For The Biz

CEOs - Sales Executives - VCs - Growth Hackers - Start-Up Founders

Are you placing Customer Success at the center of your organization? Have you laid the groundwork to setup your subscription model for success? How long do you need to keep customers to recoup your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)? At what point do you become profitable from a Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) perspective? Are you investing in companies that do and have placed CS at the center? If not, you could be in for a bumpy ride in the dog-eat-dog world of subscription based recurring revenue.

Don't take my word for it...these industry thought leaders are writing and writing and writing about CS, it's ideal place within your organization and why you should care:

• McKensey&Company: Customer Success is a key to growth strategies
• Gartner: Customer Success is a core part of a Customer Experience strategy
• Forrester: Customer Success Management is THE key to outstanding B2B CX

So...What do they know that we don't? Why is an entire industry talking, writing and strategizing about ways to focus their organizations on Customer Success? Why should VCs care? Customer Success is SO much more than just post-sale customer relationship management. Customer Success is a cross-departmental organization that should be driving retention, expansion and even pre-sale activities and when done correctly, will make EVERY other department more efficient and effective. If your company isn't executing CS correctly, you're literally leaving money on the table in either expansion, new sales and renewal revenue.

Slides recently provided by Gainsight provide some insight into how CS should be a key differentiator for your business and growth strategy:

Another great slide, this time representing the grown capability and rates relative to retention rates...Long story short: YOU CAN'T GROW your business if you DON'T KEEP YOUR CUSTOMERS.

In summary...everyone related to a SaaS company should see CS as the focal point of the business. If you are a CEO or Founder driving the direction of the business as a whole, a Sales Exec working to create sales velocity or a VC investing in up and comers...one thing is proven, to thrive in today's SaaS environment: CS is critical and will be the key performance indicator of success or failure for your business as a whole.