An old Country & Western song about lost relationships includes a funny line: “When the phone don’t ring, you’ll know it’s me.“ There is little to smile about, however, when the subject is lost income streams and customers for a SaaS company. Customer Success Managers who don’t want to be singing the blues can’t afford to wait until renewal time before making sure that the relationship is in good shape, for by the time the renewal doesn’t happen, it may well be too late to recover. Early detection of an at-risk scenario is a challenge common to all CSM teams and practitioners. What are you doing about it in your company?
SaaS Risk/Churn Indicators
Behind the typical Green/Yellow/Red status indicators in a CRM system for the health of a given customer relationship, there are various metrics and calculations. We know that the two biggest churn generators for SaaS B2B vendors are disconnection, the loss of a sponsor in the customers’ organization, and disengagement, the failure by the customer to fully adopt the features & functions of … Read the rest
That your Customer Success Management team is going to have significant connections with the Sales group and role is a given. Where the lines are drawn however, varies widely and the political infighting can be fierce. The strategic decisions to be made are core-level, and absolutely require CEO leadership. Without such direction, what’s likely to occur is a perpetuation of traditional on-premised perpetual license thinking — and increased losses from unnecessarily high churn rates.
The debate over the nature and process of the relationship between Sales and Customer Success Management comes up at some point in virtually every meeting of The CSM Forum I’ve done to date, in every webinar discussion, and in every conversation I have with individual CSM’s or teams from literally around the world. The issues include: Who is/should be responsible for revenue opportunities after the first subscription contract is signed? Renewals is one question, but how about up-sells? Cross-sells? Sales of Implementation / Professional Services? Training? Beyond getting signatures on contracts, who is/should be responsible for analyzing customer interaction and financial data to determine ideal profitability … Read the rest