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Ripples of Customer Success Across Your Organization, Handoffs Between Sales and Customer Success, and Boosting Customer Success Team Morale
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Something beautiful happens when organizations break down the silos between Customer Success and other departments. It can result in less firefighting, increased budgets, demonstrative reviews on G2Crowd, and a more cohesive experience for your customers. The ripples of a great Customer Success programs can be felt across the entire organization.
We decided to highlight briefly some of the impact that can be realized once you begin to break down those silos and how they can lead to more support for Customer Success teams.
Marketing
Customer Success teams can play a critical role in future communications and growth. They can send marketing potential leads for case studies and accurate data for their Account Based Marketing efforts.
Your team can also help avoid fires caused by unfavorable reviews and feedback on such public forums as Facebook, Twitter, and G2Crowd.
Marketing and Customer Success should work closely together in the first place. Forbes mentions the importance of bringing data together in a Customer Success Software to help CMOs understand if their campaigns are working. Consider sharing customer data to ensure unity in messaging and to avoid communication mishaps. One that comes to mind is offering a discount on upgrading to a customer that you already have a contract in front of for renewal. Yikes…
Sales
Reviews and willing references are impactful and influence on closing new business. By providing a stellar customer-centric experience – we can help sales teams close larger deals and shorten the sales cycle.
Not only that, but 83% of satisfied customers are willing to refer a product or service to a friend or colleague according to a survey conducted by Texas Tech.
Customer Success is everyone’s job. Organizations that allocate resources to their Customer Success departments see increased retention rates, accelerated new customer acquisition, and a lower overall cost of both.
Finance
About cost, if you have a bad service or don’t use it at all, how likely are you to cancel that service? Customers that are happier and use are much easier to collect payment from on time according to Swift Capital.
By investing in your Customer Success team, the accounts receivable team will have an easier time tracking down that overdue payment or the recent upgrade revenue.
Your team should begin to realize a shrinking overdue accounts list and much less push back in their daily role.
Executive Team and The Board
As you bring on more customers and increase your Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) or Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) – it becomes more imperative to reduce churn to fuel growth.
We know that it is much less costly to keep a customer than get a new one. We also know that we must close much more business to offset a churn of even a few percentage points.
It is a relatively new concept to invest in purpose-built Customer Success software to help fuel this growth. If you’re a Customer Success team asking the executive team for budget – you need to run the numbers. Showing them the raw data makes the discussion to allocate resources to help your team do their job and serve your customers much easier to have internally.
Customer Success and Account Management
Not all Customer Success teams own the revenue goal for retention of customers as well. This is sometimes owned by Account Management or sales teams and without cohesive data it can make for an unorganized experience for your customers.
Combining insights from Customer Success software and your CRM can help both teams by alerting them of potential churn early on, help increase solution adoption to help customers reach desired outcomes faster, increase opportunities for account expansion, allow your teams to be more proactive in their outreach, and can make a drastic impact in renewal discussions.
One of the biggest challenges Customer Success teams face today is visibility of impact that they have on the organization. When seeking more resources for your team present the true impact across the organization and not just your department’s view.
Need help getting the resources and support you need to be successful? We’re here to help!
Customer Success Around the Web
- How To Get Frictionless Handoffs Between Sales and Customer Success: Almost every CS team has experienced some type of challenge when it comes to working with their sales counterparts. Even now, most Customer Success Managers still admit their number one obstacle is their relationship with sales, and specifically the handoff process from their Sales Executives. Read on about how to facilitate successful handoffs between Sales and Customer Success.
- Customer Success Content: Creating Resources That Empower Current Customers: The sales/inbound marketing funnel doesn’t end after the sale, so why does almost all content and inbound marketing advice focus on winning customers but not keeping them? Our job’s not done yet. The funnel represents the customer’s entire journey, which includes being a customer, in addition to the process that got them there. After all, if you’re trying to get repeat business, current customers are also future prospects and leads. But so many of us are ignoring our current customers in the activation and retention stages of the funnel. Read on to learn more about creating resources that empower current customers.
- How to Boost the Morale of Your Customer Success Team: Low morale is a problem for any team in a SaaS organization, but especially customer success. An upset customer, a lost account, a stressful week – these common occurrences are just some of the ways your team can get worn down. It’s hard to create a positive experience for customers if the office is filled with tension and disappointment, so CSMs (and their team leaders) have to take steps to keep the energy and job satisfaction high. Glide Consulting offers some advice on improving the morale of your customer success team.
Word to the Wise
Colin Shaw, Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosphy LLC, recently wrote an article about the dangers of setting “vague” goals and what you can do to get the entire organization on board with your mission.
“Vague goals like “wow” are close cousins of impossible ones, like “we’re going to give every single customer an exceptional experience.” Sorry, it can’t be done. You can’t give everyone a great experience, every day, all the time, no matter what you do.
When senior management comes up with these lofty mission statements, they mean well. They mean to be inspiring and aspirational. But what really happens in the ranks of employees is quite the opposite. Either the employees immediately recognize the “goal” as a meaningless mission statement that they feel no particular desire to follow through on, or they try to “wow” everyone and fail, leading to poor morale and a perception that they’ve failed.” – Colin Shaw