It Takes a Village: Ten Tactics To Drive Customer-Centric Thinking in Every SaaS Function

A company’s success hinges on its ability to drive value for customers, but that work too often falls to customer success alone. Here are ten concrete tactics to help increase customer centricity and commercial velocity across every team in a SaaS organization.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again and again: if your organization does everything in its power to ensure the success of your customers (within its financial means, of course), something would have to go catastrophically sideways for the company not to succeed, because retention is always your cheapest form of growth. Given that a SaaS business with 120% net dollar retention could theoretically never win another new logo ever again and still grow 20% year-over-year, all teams should be operating in pursuit of maximizing value realization and mitigating the risk of churn.

But despite this well-understood truth, when I ask SaaS executives how they are driving customer centricity in their organizations, I’m usually greeted with trite, yawn-inducing answers such as Slack channels for customer wins and/or product feedback, executive sponsorship programs, and so forth. Building a culture wherein all functional teams are deeply committed to ensuring customer success and accelerating the go-to-market engine requires much more than FYIs and information cascades. To be best-in-class, companies must commit to time-intensive, deliberate, and consistent methods for fostering deep engagement across teams. Organizations that galvanize their teams to share responsibility for customer and commercial success enjoy stronger trust from customers and, in turn, more fruitful financial results.

Here are ten low-effort, high-impact tactics to help you get started today:?

1. At the leadership level, use the same variable compensation targets irrespective of the function the exec owns

They say you need to hear something seven times before it sticks, so here goes nothing: Your teams will never be aligned if their compensation plans are not. If you offer a bonus plan for senior leaders, you should evaluate each leader against the same metrics and results, irrespective of their function. And those metrics must align to your most important business priorities.

Early into my years at Sailthru, we suffered major challenges with churn and net promoter score (“NPS”); our customer base and usage had scaled faster than our technology, and we had lost customer trust as a result. When Neil Lustig took the helm as Sailthru’s CEO in the spring of 2015, he preached the gospel of an aligned executive bonus plan, and changed our plans such that each member of the leadership team had exactly the same targets: a payout that was 30% of annual base compensation and was calculated using the same three metrics for everyone: 1) exit ARR at end of year, 2) NPS, and 3) net burn (later replaced with EBITDA once the company was cash-flow positive). You can argue the merits of each pillar of that plan, but they made sense for our business at that particular time. NPS, for instance, was a lagging indicator, but ours was so bad that we knew we would not be able to effectively compete in the market if we did not turn things around.

Guess what? When your Head of Product’s annual bonus is being dictated by ARR, NPS, and cash, behaviors really start to change in an organization. Once the technical teams were being held directly accountable for business results, we suddenly lived in a world where we were allocating 70% of our roadmap resourcing to improving the experience for existing customers vs. shipping new features with mixed adoption rates. In the two years that followed this change, we increased NPS by 51 points, cut gross churn by 60%, and made major gains in net retention rate and exit ARR as a result.

Editor’s note: Earlier this year I devoted an entire installment of Tactic Talk to the importance of 1) identifying and memorializing the most important metrics for your business and 2) over-communicating those targets to employees in a clear, consistent manner.

2. Bring in technical resources from customers to speak with your sprint teams

At Sailthru we regularly invited customers (usually CMOs) to be interviewed in fireside chats in front of the entire company. Our technical teams were good sports about attending these sessions and we did our best to inject questions that would appeal to them (e.g. the first thing the customer would change about the platform, their perspective on the best feature recently released), but I still couldn’t help but notice some technical eyes glossing over in these sessions. To shake things up, we asked our customers’ technical stakeholders–the individuals tasked with implementing our product–to invest an hour or two with the sprint team responsible for building the product they implemented. Engineers loved hearing feedback from fellow engineers about API responsiveness, historical imports, etc.

A tangentially related idea to ensure customer centricity in the product organization: Lindsey O’Sullivan recently mentioned to me that while she was SVP Operations at Nautilus Labs, each of their “SKU”-specific product teams had a formal sponsor from a member of the customer success team and additionally, that every Tier I customer was assigned a formal sponsor from the product team.

3. Require all managers to shadow the support desk on a regular cadence

We’ve all heard about Starbucks requiring employees to serve as baristas or DoorDash mandating that employees complete a few deliveries per year. The expectation for SaaS employees should be no different, especially at the management level. At Sailthru we required all people managers to shadow the support desk for one week each year. This requirement not only increased empathy for both our customers and our support team, but also actually enabled us to ship some quick fixes when engineers were riding shotgun!

As my old VP Support Ronan Conroy reminded me, for better or worse, painful UI issues escalated by the support team often aren’t addressed until there is full sunlight on them (e.g. sharing a recorded user experience interview during an All Hands). Hearing feedback directly from the customers always spurs a more emotional response and cultivates a stronger sense of empathy.

4. Democratize access to NPS and CSAT data

When you collect robust feedback in tandem with your regularly scheduled NPS and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys, it is important to democratize access to those insights for the entire company. My general position is to actually share all of the verbatim feedback with the organization, with two caveats: 1) if there is anything egregious written about a specific employee, redact that comment before sharing publicly with the broader team (e.g. customer tears apart the CSM) and 2) you stress to the team that they are not authorized to reach out to customers directly (just so you avoid having the same customer hit up by 10 different people on your team). Customers’ write-in feedback has powerful insights for every function in the business and will spur creative thinking around increasing time-to-value, ROI realization, etc.

At an absolute minimum, management teams should be reviewing every write-in comment and discussing key themes and how to action them (pro tip: ask customers for one thing your business could do to move their response score one point higher). At Sailthru, we made it a regular affair to host a takeout dinner with the entire executive team following our thrice-annual longer-format NPS survey; in that meeting, we not only synthesized the feedback, but we also aligned on extremely specific follow-up plans for any account that needed one and appointed a responsible party for each (which oftentimes meant pulling in people beyond the executive team, e.g. the product director over a specific product).?

Editor’s note: When organizations review NPS feedback, invariably most attention gets pointed toward detractors and negative comments. Don’t forget your promoters! Your 9 and 10 responders are explicitly saying, “I would recommend your product to a friend or colleague,” so make sure you actually ASK them to send you referrals! And at minimum, be sure your account management team has this data in-hand so they can prioritize pushing upsells/cross-sells to those customers first.

5. Bring the bus to both sales meetings and quarterly business reviews

In the early days of Sailthru we recruited a number of commercial folks from the legacy ExactTarget business (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and they had a saying I still use to this day: Bring the bus. Managing large enterprise sales cycles is hard and must be navigated as a team sport. As a deal advances, it is imperative to bring along executives to establish exec-to-exec alignment, product owners to dive deep into the minutiae with technical stakeholders, etc. CSMs are non-obvious sales meeting attendees, but I am a huge champion of offering a potential customer an opportunity to learn first-hand how a CSM has enabled other customers (you can caveat to the prospect that you are not promising them that particular CSM). Your sales team also benefits from absorbing these CSM anecdotes in different meetings. When we brought a CSM into a late-stage prospect meeting at Sailthru, the deal was more than 80% more likely to close, so we ultimately mandated this step as part of our sales process for large deals.?

The importance of full-team support doesn’t just apply to new logo sales; the same mentality should be used for your existing customers: companies should also bring the bus to formal business reviews (or really any meeting where key customer stakeholders are committing a lot of time). I’m particularly passionate about the importance of sellers joining business reviews for the customers they closed; those meetings are robust business discussions and are once again a great way to learn by absorption and to become a better storyteller for future deals. Inviting sales into the QBR fold is also a forcing function for maintaining a strong tie to the economic buyer so that the relationship can be worked for referrals, events, and so on.

6. Build a forum for bringing non economic buyers together on the customer side

When Ellen Terchila , Chief Customer Officer at Hootsuite, was my VP Customer Success at Sailthru, she advocated for launching a program called RUGs, or regional user groups. These events happened in different cities a few times per year and brought together the day-to-day users of the product for a different purposes: 1) to share best practices on how they were using the solution (each session had 3-4 customers present on a very specific use case they had implemented and the results they achieved), 2) to give the CSM team exposure to more customers beyond their own books, and last but arguably most importantly 3) to bring the everyday customer closer to our product team. Ellen’s team collaborated closely with the product team on the RUGs and used part of those half-day programs to deliver an updated product roadmap and to host a “town hall” of sorts to address questions, ideas, complaints, and everything in between. Customers loved the opportunity to network with peers at other companies (more often than not it was their bosses getting invited to networking events, not them!) and we also learned that these sessions were fruitful opportunities to seed upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

7. Celebrate “time to advocacy” as a metric in its own right

SaaS companies frequently talk about time to value, but I admittedly had not heard much about the concept of time to advocacy as a metric until Ejieme Eromosele , GM of EMEA at Quiq, told me about the work she’s doing to pilot this concept with her team. Ejieme had an aha moment for this idea when she learned that one of the largest deals in their pipeline came from hearing an existing customer deliver a keynote at an industry conference.

It’s well-understood that software buyers always start with their existing networks when seeking recommendations for new solutions. This is a positive reality for SaaS companies because deals that are generated from referrals usually boast higher win rates and faster sales cycles, thereby reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC). But to really maximize leverage from referrals, SaaS companies must have a strong pool of advocates in their installed base of customers.

As we discussed in tactic #1, the inventive will always help to drive the outcome, so Quiq is experimenting with changing CSM compensation plans to include advocacy targets. CSMs must achieve a certain number of advocacy “points” each quarter, dictated by format (e.g. case studies, webinars, conferences). And because customer advocacy is of course a team sport, other cross-functional teams have aligned KPIs as well (e.g. Marketing is also on the hook using advocacy for activations).

8. Include cross-functional representation in your planning and learning

I’ve already emphasized the importance of customer centricity being a team sport a few times, but I’ll beat that drum again. It is important to find opportunities for cross-functional representation in your various planning and learning exercises: pipeline brainstorms, account reviews, churn retrospectives, the list goes on and on.

Pipeline Generation Examples

You won’t have the luxury of being worried about customer centricity if you can’t close new customers in the first place. Nearly every SaaS company is somewhat rate-limited by its ability to grow a pipeline of new opportunities, and most companies will experience the “our pipeline coverage situation is DIRE” feeling at one point in their lifecycle (if not at several points!).?

A powerful way to generate creative, no-obvious pipeline-building ideas is to bring together a cross-functional working group that includes 1) colleagues outside of the sales and marketing functions and 2) top-performing individual contributors from sales and marketing, not just management. At Sailthru we did this every 90 days or so—gather a dozen or so really smart brains from all levels of different teams to push our creative thinking on new strategies to try. One of our better-performing marketing campaigns of all time (mailers with personalized videos preloaded on them) was born from one of these sessions.

Another means of driving full-team energy is through incentive compensation—shocking, I know! Offering a customer referral SPIF to the entire organization (e.g. a bounty for each qualified lead generated, and then a more material bounty if/when that deal closes) is an effective way to mine every employee’s personal rolodex for relevant leads. Tools such as The Swarm offer quick methods for mapping employee paths into different target accounts and buyers.?

Latané Conant , CRO at 6sense, pioneered the concept of “PG Tuesdays” at 6sense and has become a public champion of the entire organization contributing to pipeline generation efforts (e.g. advocating that the CIO can reach out to CIOs at prospective buyer accounts); she frequently writes publicly about their efforts, and I highly recommend their content on the topic.

Account Expansion / Planning Examples

Christina Kearney , former CMO at SoftwareReviews, recently shared a very focused effort her management team ran to boost net retention rates. Her team selected ten named accounts from their installed base for cross-functional account review deep dives, with a primary objective of driving retention and expansion of those key accounts. These meetings were held ~7 months prior to the renewal and had representation from all functional areas. A key to success was keeping the meeting template very straightforward: seven content slides that had specific prompts on product utilization, value realization, growth opportunities, etc. Each of these meetings would conclude with a synthesized list of 3-5 initiatives to boost account penetration, and meeting attendees (namely, sellers) learned enough in these meetings that they were empowered to employ similar thinking in other accounts that perhaps were not eligible for one of these sessions.

9. “Build” in public

I mentioned at the onset of this installment that effective information cascades are table stakes for any organization, but there are certainly ways to be novel in how you approach your information cascade. Throughout my many years at Sailthru, I started every week with a signature weekly note where I detailed specific information around how our bookings, pipeline, and churn were shaping up for the quarter (redacted pipeline example below). I was authoring this note for our sales, marketing, and customer success teams, but at one point an engineer got his hands on it and asked that I begin sharing this rundown with the entire company because it was so transparent and helpful. I learned that “building” our execution plan publicly was very powerful in making everyone in the organization feel like they were along for the ride.

Sample Weekly Pipeline Rundown

We used a similar format to share churn risks (including the implied dollar impact), which drove a “bring the bus” sense of urgency around helping to save at-risk customers.

10. Leverage your board members for reinforcement

Board members can provide helpful support in reiterating the importance of customer centricity and cross-team alignment to their portfolio company employees. I have had the privilege of joining several portfolio company leadership offsites to opine on the importance of First Team leadership, and have also made a point of joining several of their all hands meetings in a “fireside chat”-type capacity. There can be great weight that comes from a board member saying, “this is how we’re evaluating your business and your CEO” versus the CEO just providing that direction to the staff.?

I’ll share a specific recent example: As a customer-obsessed leader, the proliferation of AI has me very worried about the provocative “is it ARR or ERR?” question Jamin Ball outlined earlier this year. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to share this concern directly with portfolio companies as a rallying cry for everyone to be maniacally consumed with customer utilization and ROI.?

A key function of the Board is to hold leadership accountable to financial results, but I candidly believe that many investors could be doing more to hold portfolio company management teams accountable to customer success results, as these will have a powerful trickle-down effect on overall financial performance.

Editor’s note: A bonus idea for board involvement is to offer up 20-minute “office hours” sessions with board members for top performers in your company on the back of the board member joining an all hands or other event.