Why you should build your first customer success team.

The way we grow our businesses has changed. Our organizations should evolve too.

A new growth engine for subscription-based businesses

A few decades ago, before the subscription era, companies were only selling products or one-time licenses. They had to invest massively in customer acquisition through marketing and sales in order to sell their products to more people and grow. The growth engine was powered by closing new customers.

But today’s economy has changed. Most internet companies are now selling monthly or yearly subscriptions instead of products or licenses. This fundamental change is compelling subscription-based businesses to deliver consistent success to their customers in order to avoid churn and keep growing. The new growth engine is now powered by retaining and growing existing customers.

Don’t get me wrong, you will always need to add new customers to grow. But from now on, the heart of your growth engine is your existing customer base.

How to build your growth engine

Retaining and growing your existing customer base requires new strategies. The success of your customers across the entire lifecycle is the foundation of your growth engine.

Onboarding

Make sure your new customers get value from your product and adopt your product smoothly.

Adoption and Maturity

• Consistently drive customers to their new desired outcome.
• Proactively engage with at-risk customers (those who are not successful enough with use your product) to prevent churn.

Expansion

Identify upsell candidates to drive up-sells.

Renewals

Personalize renewal processes to avoid churn.

These new challenges require a dedicated team: the customer success team.

Introducing your customer success team

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are responsible for maximizing the lifetime value of your customers. They are the ones that will power your growth engine.

CSMs are in charge of for onboarding new customers and increasing product adoption — in order words, they help customers be successful. They can also take care of renewing and up-selling customers (unless the organization counts with Key Account Managers, in which case they will be responsible for upsells and renewals).

The smartest SaaS companies have already built a customer success team to power their growth engine. And it turned out to be an unfair advantage to accelerate their growth.

It’s time to build yours.

Want to learn more about how to build your growth engine with Salesmachine? Request a free demo.