Dan Steinman, General Manager of Gainsight EMEA
Don't have time to listen to the full podcast with Dan? No worries!
We have taken the key insights from the pods and put them into "Bite-Size" chunks.
We have taken the key insights from the pods and put them into "Bite-Size" chunks.
Key quotes (play the relevant audio link to hear Dan expand on each point):
I try and convince everyone in the world that it boils down to one metric. In my very strong opinion, it is the most important metric in your company if you are a reoccurring revenue business. By that, I don’t mean just SaaS companies, I mean any company who is setting customers up to be on some kind of reoccurring revenue cycle, whether it’s pay-as-you-go, consumption based or subscription based. That metric is “Net Retention”. What Net Retention means is, if you never sold to another customer, is your customer-base a growing entity?
At what point with regards to the number of customers should I start looking at a Customer Success solution? My answer isn’t really a number, my answer is at the point where you feel across your company you’re losing knowledge or intimacy with your customers.
You need to buy into this idea that if Customer Success is important to you as a company, at some point you are going to buy a solution for your Customer Success team. You can’t build it yourself in the long-run and you can’t make a system that’s not designed for Customer Success solve that problem.
Customer Success is a data-driven organisation – so understand where the pieces of data are that will help you as a company understand whether your customers are healthy or not. The way to start doing that is just sit in a room with two or three people who really know your customers and been around for a while and just ask this question, “What does a healthy customer do every single week and what does an unhealthy customer do (or not do) every single week?”
The first thing I will say is that effective Customer Success organisations are separate and distinct from Customer Support....Customer Success is designed to be more proactive....for two reasons. First, to get ahead of any risk and second, to capitalise on the opportunities that appear based on the data at any given time.
Customer Success used to be just for churn mitigation but has become much more than that, it’s really now about also driving up-sell and then even bigger than that, creating advocacy so that your customers are speaking highly of you when they talk to your prospects or other potential customers.
It’s 100% clear that Customer Success is not just for SaaS companies; it is for all technology companies for sure – they are almost all exploring Customer Success....all B2B companies are starting to think seriously about Customer Success because they are all under pressure to move towards a reoccurring revenue business model.
85% of all of the software in the world is still “on premise” or perpetual licence. All of that software over the next ten years (and "all" might be a slight stretch) will migrate to SaaS or to the cloud or to some reoccurring revenue business....There is also a trend away from Customer Success being purely about relationships and being much more geared towards being process and metrics driven.
Read the full podcast transcript below (please note that in some cases the wording has been slightly altered for ease of reading but the emphasis remains exactly the same):
Your browser does not support viewing this document. Click here to download the document.