How to Turn Customer Success into a Main Revenue Driver

28 Dec 23

In episode six of our podcast, discover how symplr invests heavily in branding and customer success to drive revenue growth from a loyal customer base.

Invest in creating value for your customers and your customers will become more invested in your brand in return. As a company that enjoys 97% penetration into its target market through all its various solutions, customer success and customer marketing become central to symplr’s approach to continued value creation.

Episode 6 of the GTM Value Creation Corner Podcast shines the spotlight on Part 1 of SBI’s interview with symplr, a leading provider of software and services in healthcare operations. The episode was hosted by Tony Erickson, Senior Partner and TMT Practice Leader at SBI.

Healthcare facilities today struggle with significant operational complexity, from managing vast amounts of data to inter-departmental coordination and maintaining rigorous compliance with not just healthcare regulations, but also data security and privacy. This operational complexity takes a significant amount of caregivers’ time from their healthcare duties to ensure all operations and paperwork are in order, lowering the overall efficiency of healthcare facilities.

The value that symplr brings lies in their integrated platform approach to what would otherwise typically be a “patchwork quilt of disparate systems”. By consolidating the dozens of software solutions that a healthcare company relies on into an integrated, user-friendly platform, symplr drives improved operational efficiency and savings in cost and time, giving caregivers more time to give care.

The symplr approach to customer retention and churn reduction

With healthcare companies already under tremendous pressure to lower operating costs, symplr’s approach to building and retaining their customers’ trust in their brand involved a significant focus on branding and customer success.

“You’ve got to build your brand. We probably overspend on brand versus revenue marketing or demand generation marketing compared to some of our contemporaries. But when we have 97% penetration into our target market already, I’m not looking for new logos—it’s all about cross-sell and upsell,” said BJ Schaknowski, CEO of symplr.

This large investment into branding was necessary for symplr to build a solid reputation for delivering for the customers. Of course, the other side of the equation—customer success—was just as necessary to actually help customers increase the value that they got out of symplr, which enabled their team to tell a brand story that was both compelling and true.

“Now what we’re doing is really proactive engagement—looking at each of our products, what are the different value propositions, what is the value creation and the return on investment we bring our customer—and then help them adopt and utilize our software in a better way,” said Nicole Rogas, President of symplr.

“So really, it’s just taking the great value proposition and translating into something where we can go execute and create incremental value for our customers.”

With most healthcare companies likely to already be using a product that belongs to the symplr family, this often becomes a starting point for the GTM teams to explore other challenges that a customer may be dealing with and work together to find other symplr solutions that they could really benefit from.

“If we have a multi-million-dollar investment in them getting more value out of the software they already own from us before we try to cross-sell them more, what do we earn the right to do? Add more value. That’s where the commercial teams can come in and say, ‘We do this well for you. Will you trust us? Will you have a conversation with us about the next problem?’” BJ added.

The results speak for themselves: significant reduction in churn and big increases in sales bookings, almost all of which are cross-sell and upsell conversions.

Catch the whole conversation on “Big Returns from Customer Success”—episode 6 of the GTM Value Creation Corner podcast. Listen to the podcast here.