The HotLine Magazine

Customer Success Management and Sales: A Question of Role and Relationship

Mikael Blaisdell — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:34:32 +0000

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 …

Justifying Your Customer Success Management Team Budget

Mikael Blaisdell — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 21:25:35 +0000

Cost justifying a customer success management team's budget can be a challenge, especially in the beginning. The key tasks of the first phase of a CSM team’s development are to understand and categorize your interactions with the customers (type, duration, volume, cost & effectiveness) and to begin to define the statuses of the customer relationship health measurement graph. You have to be able to use this data to prove the truth of that old adage "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Ultimately, you need to show that you are directly associated with an income stream and that you are making a strategically significant contribution to the company's overall profitability. Continue reading →

Staffing Levels for Customer Success Management Groups

Mikael Blaisdell — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 18:54:13 +0000

A common question keeps coming up in my conversations with SaaS/Cloud CxO’s all across the industry: “How many Customer Success Managers does it take to keep customers from churning?” The question appears in other forms, such as “how much CMRR (Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue) should each CSM be responsible for?” Or, “How many customer accounts can a CSM handle?” Staffing …

Mind The Gap: The Disconnection Between Customer Retention Strategy and Process

Mikael Blaisdell — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 20:18:05 +0000

There is one point upon which everybody is in full agreement about Customer Success Management. The core strategic purpose of a CSM / group and program is to reduce churn. Some companies go a step further to charter the team with the additional responsibility of moving customers up the value tiers wherever possible; others do not. But when …

The Technology of Customer Retention

Mikael Blaisdell — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 01:52:53 +0000

One of the most well-represented sectors in the SaaS/Cloud lineup is the general group of technologies to automate and assist companies with everything up to the execution of a sales contract with a customer. The category takes in a range of functions and often goes by a variety of labels: Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligence, List Management, Business Analytics, Marketing Automation, Sales Force Automation (SFA) etc. There are lots of on-demand tools for “Hunters.” But what about systems for effectively managing the ongoing customer relationship? Where are the products and technologies for the “Farmers?”

While there are a few vendors beginning to advertise Customer Retention Software, most of the offerings appear to be still primarily focused on marketing and sales to new customers. However, as the pressure fromWall Street increases on SaaS/Cloud firms to improve their profitability and valuation by increasing customer retention and the predictability of their recurring revenue streams, and as Customer Success Management teams proliferate, the market for tools is set to expand. Here is a beginning list of what will be needed in a basic customer retention manager's technology suite:

Customer Engagement / Application Adoption Monitoring

In the research of The HotLine Magazine over the past several years, the lack of customer adoption of a application's feature set has been consistently reported as one of the primary indicators of churn. Awareness of that factor is rapidly growing, and Customer Success Managers have accordingly started to track feature usage as closely as they can. For companies whose applications weren't designed themselves to track actual usage of specific features and functions by customers, there are currently five vendors who can provide that capability, and more are on the way. Application feature usage tracking is an absolute must-have for a CSM team.

Customer Health Dashboards / Operational Status Monitoring

Apart from tracking usage of key features and functions, there is much more that needs to be known about your customer relationships in order to maximize retention. Simple Green-Yellow-Red indicators on a display, especially where there is no understanding of the definition of these status levels, are often worse than useless. As the initial Implementation and Training phases are rolling out, the CSM team needs access to the project management system reporting in order to keep an eye on the customer's progress and to compare it to the ideal for that value tier and/or type of customer. (If the implementation is not being done by a professional team, yours or someone else's, that's a significant warning sign in and of itself.) Add the Case Management System of the Customer Support team to the toolbox as well, and be sure that the support reps can set status alerts visible to the CSM team if problems are not able to be speedily resolved. If more than one customer is affected by a bug, all should be automatically included in the tracking.

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The Customer Success Management Video Series

Mikael Blaisdell — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 00:06:11 +0000

The CSM video series is a joint effort by DreamSimplicity and The HotLine Magazine, and there will be a new short video on various aspects of CSM published each week. As each video is released, I’ll add the link below. Each video is about two minutes in length.

Introduction

About the Series.

Origins of the Customer Success Manager

Being …

No Churn: Customer Success and the Valuation of a SaaS Company

Mikael Blaisdell — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:24:02 +0000

SaaS/Cloud company management teams have always recognized the economic necessity of spending a certain amount of money to acquire a customer. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a standard part of the business plan. What is not so readily acknowledged is that spending money to retain customers is also a necessary aspect of the new business model. It’s unfortunately very common …

The Management of SaaS/Cloud Customer Lifetime Value

Mikael Blaisdell — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:48:09 +0000

Customer Lifetime Value is one of the essential management metrics for any SaaS/Cloud application vendor. CLV is what remains after the CAC, Customer Acquisition Cost, and the CRC, Customer Retention Costs, are subtracted from the revenues of the relationship. The actual duration of that relationship, therefore, is of paramount importance — far too vital to be left unattended. …

The Future of Customer Success Management: A Look Ahead

Mikael Blaisdell — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 21:12:55 +0000

A common thread throughout the research of The Customer Success Management Initiative has been the interest in members of the growing CSM community to meet other professionals and to learn what is being done in their companies and groups. Curiosity is high, and questions abound. What will the future of CSM look like? What will drive the CSM role to …

The Centricity of Customer Success Management

Mikael Blaisdell — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:12:55 +0000

In his recent book, “Inside Apple; How America’s Most Admired –and Secretive– Company Really Works,” Adam Lashinsky makes a point that ought to resonate throughout the SaaS/Cloud ISV community and especially with the growing profession of Customer Success Management therein. “Apple’s challenge isn’t finding new customers anymore, but instead figuring out what amazing new products to sell us.…