While it’s easy to think that more sales mean great customer success, you cannot sell your way into customer success. Despite the numerous sales, a flailing customer success strategy will flat-line your sales, and it will be too hard to contain the fallout.
Usually, a SaaS company may consider having the sales team reconnect to clients on the verge of walking out and re-sell them on giving your business another shot; this is a short-term fix to a much larger problem. And if they luckily stick around and your business doesn’t improve the customer experience, their discontent could set off a chain reaction fallout with existing and even potential customers.
Losing touch with reactivating accounts
Proactively investing in customer success through analyzing user metrics and engaging with customers ensures your business doesn’t leave any money on the table. A satisfied, healthy customer base is more open to additional marketing. By recapturing your existing customers, you can effectively upsell & cross-sell to them and increase revenue without overstretching your acquisition spend.
Happy customers are volunteer brand & product evangelists. They become brand advocates and bring social proof that translates to more sales, a lower Customer Acquisition Cost, and sometimes, expansion to existing customers. Their customer success stories can be used in case studies and user-generated content that shortens your expansion effort while increasing customer lifetime value.
When customer churn kicks in, your customer success leadership will be working tirelessly to reduce customer churn, which will have them remarketing to at-risk customers and create even more churn with those left out. By investing in customer success from the get-go, your business can gradually uncover & predict issues and resolve them while giving your customers the best experience.
Eliminate contraction, encourage renewals
As your SaaS business grows, the intimacy with customers gets weaker. With an ever-increasing customer count, managing requests, refining product capabilities, and providing granular support to each client begins to get choppy without a solid customer success structure in place. A solid customer success foundation assures the long-term success of your customers.
For a SaaS company, growing metrics like NRR means getting existing customers to expand rather than contract their spending when renewing their accounts. Account value expansion with most of your customers translates to a healthy NRR and higher revenue, which can only be achieved with improved customer success. A half-baked customer success strategy flanked by higher sales can lead to a slowing down NRR. This means your company might be bringing in more customers, but spending more on customer acquisition and instead experiencing reduced lifetime value of customers is bad for business.
With customers paying less to remain customers because they need your services but figure the experience doesn’t meet their expectations, the contracted renewals affect your NRR and revenue, even in the face of greater customer retention. You also lose out on the resources spent to acquire and serve them.
Invest from the start
Investing in customer success is essential in growing customer loyalty and increasing their spending on your business. A great customer experience translates to customer success, and the two are crucial in driving revenue for your business. As a customer success manager, monitoring Key Performance Index (KPIs) for revenue growth from NRR to Revenue churn, helps point your strategies in the right direction while allowing you to grow your customer success programs.
