Revenue Growth Chronicles: Strategies from the Top - Featuring Markus Rentsch

At Mayple, we understand the pivotal role that Customer Success teams play in driving company revenue growth. To shed light on the strategies and best practices that can make a real impact, we’ve launched a new monthly series where we ask top Customer Success voices to share their insights. This series will explore effective strategies for increasing company revenue and highlight the crucial contributions of Customer Success teams.

This week, we have the privilege of featuring Markus Rentsch , CEO of Remark-able . Markus has extensive experience in transforming Customer Success organizations to drive revenue and deliver exceptional customer outcomes.?

Passion & Purpose:?

I am passionate about helping SaaS companies grow by focusing on customer value. My mission is to transform Customer Success into a revenue-generating function by equipping CSMs with the right mindset, skills, and tools. I believe that by prioritizing customer outcomes and delivering strategic solutions, Customer Success teams can become indispensable assets to their companies.

What is the biggest challenge in driving customer revenue growth from a Customer Success perspective?

The biggest challenge is that Customer Success Managers (CSMs) often lack the mindset, skills, and tools to unlock their revenue potential. Instead of growing into trusted advisors who provide strategic solutions and high-end education and training, they spend most of their time firefighting and applying quick fixes.

As a result, customers receive mediocre outcomes and are not inclined to buy more. In fact, it's often a struggle just to retain them. This situation arises from how CSMs have been trained and educated. They have been taught to prioritize internal processes, efficiency, and scalability over customer outcomes. Concepts like product adoption, customer engagement, health scores, and NPS have contributed to this misguided evolution of the CSM role.

How can the Customer Success community effectively address this challenge?

Customer Success needs to return to its roots, focusing on delivering tangible customer value. This shift is difficult for the CS community to achieve because there's no unified movement guiding CSMs in the right direction.

Despite CS failing to establish itself as an indispensable asset for many companies—evidenced by numerous layoffs and disbanded teams, such as at Twilio—many people continue to defend old practices or suggest minor improvements. As long as the number of innovators and their influence remain limited, progress will be slow, and more CSMs will lose their jobs due to their companies' failures.

Could you share two best practices (dos) and two common pitfalls (don'ts) for Customer Success teams aiming to enhance customer revenue?

Best Practices:

1. Run a customer discovery: Clearly define, together with your customer, their goals and how to measure them. Avoid guessing and assuming. If your customers are unsure, provide qualified suggestions based on peers or your experience with similar use cases.
2. Demonstrate value at every opportunity: Start all strategic customer meetings with a recap, benchmarking your customers' actual results against their starting point. This ongoing awareness of their benefits from working with you makes selling renewals, expansions, upsells, and asking for referrals much easier.

Common Pitfalls:

1. Upselling/expanding to struggling customers: Avoid trying to upsell or expand customers who are struggling. Focus on customers who have achieved their goals and measured success by metrics they care about.
2. Pitching features and talking about price: When selling additional resources, features, or products, don't just pitch the features and discuss the price. Instead, sell the additional value that comes from seizing growth opportunities, which eventually requires buying more from you.