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    Consistent Customer Success is the Key to Scale Up Your SaaS (or Any) Company

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    Happy, successful customers are the lifeblood of growing a SaaS business (or any business). When your business depends on monthly recurring revenue, you can’t afford to churn customers. And that’s not the only reason why a scaling SaaS company must invest in consistent customer success.

    Understanding why it’s important that your customers thrive on your platform, as well as how to make sure they do, will ultimately make the difference in whether your platform thrives.

    5 Reasons Why Customer Success is THE Key to Scale Up Your SaaS Company

    There are plenty of reasons why customer success is key to scaling up your SaaS business. Some of them are pretty obvious. For instance, losing customers that you invested in winning is painful, and expensive. Some of the reasons are more subtle but no less important, such as the value of early adopter champions to your reputation and word of mouth efforts.

    Here are five big reasons you should invest in your customers’ success:

    1. The cost of churn
      When your success depends on monthly recurring revenue (MRR), every lost unsuccessful customer is a lost customer - which is lost revenue.
    2. The cost of winning new business
      Every time you lose a customer, you have to spend more to win additional customers. Lost customers represent the loss of everything you invested to win them in the first place.
    3. The value of champions
      Happy early adopters often become vocal champions for the platforms they love. External champions for your product are like having salespeople on your team without having them on your payroll.
    4. The value of reputation
      People check your reviews. And if your reviews are in the toilet, so will your sales be. Successful customers, on the other hand, can be encouraged to leave glowing reviews which, in turn, generates new business. So does word of mouth. Your reviews and word of mouth reputation become like having marketers on your team… without having them on your payroll.
    5. The opportunity to sell more
      Most mature SaaS companies don’t expect to sell their whole product to every customer right away. You sell a piece that makes sense for the customer, and then as they grow and learn, you sell them more. And the more successful they are on your platform, the more likely they are to grow with you.

    In the early stages, it might be good enough to have a great product and a team available to answer questions. But in order to continue to grow past the early stages, you need a reliable, repeatable system for consistent customer success.

    If you can nail the customer success piece, your company can easily outstrip its competition.

    How Most Companies Get Customer Success Wrong

    If you can nail the customer success piece, your company can easily outstrip its competition. It pays to understand what most companies are doing wrong.

    • They are reactive instead of proactive
      Most early-stage companies think of the customer service role as a reactive one. They set up agents to answer incoming questions from customers… which are almost always complaints. Instead of getting ahead of the process and ensuring that customers understand the product and know how to get the most of it, they’re behind the process and forced to defend and recover instead of supporting customers making progress.
    • They flub the handoff from sales and marketing
      Too often, sales and marketing teams “toss it over the fence.” The onboarding and customer service teams are left to manage new customers without clear context for what they bought, why they bought it, or what success will look like to them, let alone what promises were made during the sales process. All the information and discovery that the sales team did to win the business is lost to the sands of time, and the customer has to start over again educating the onboarding team to their needs. This leaves a bad taste in the customer’s mouth, and reduces the likelihood of their success on your platform.
    • They rely on superstar CS agents instead of a reliable process
      Especially in the early stages of a SaaS start-up, it’s easy to rely on the excellence of a few superstar CS agents to onboard and manage accounts to make the customer happy. These agents rely on gut, talent, and experience to understand what the customer wants and get them set up in a good way. As the company grows, however, this “system” inevitably fails, leaving business leaders frustrated as the growing CS team fails to keep up with the performance of the original start-up team.
    • They don’t adequately train CS agents
      Most companies think of the customer service function as a reactive, problem-solving function for which the primary training is in resolving customer complaints and issues. A truly outstanding customer service team, just like a truly outstanding sales team, will also understand business and know how to ask valuable questions. Only when they can understand the business purpose of the customer, and help the customer discover and understand their own needs, can the customer success agent truly help the customer grow.
    • They have no clear customer success structure and process
      Related to the “superstar CS agents” problem, this leaves customer success agents to develop their own approach to solving customer problems, and can never provide the consistent, repeatable results you need when scaling a SaaS company.
    • Not reinforcing and executing on the process
      If you invest in creating a structure and process, the investment is wasted if it’s not executed. Customer success agents, just like salespeople, thrive when they are supported by a process that is built into their daily workflow, so that they always know exactly what to do next with each customer, when to bring in help, and how to be proactive in ensuring each customer’s success.

    How to Achieve Consistent Customer Success to Grow Your SaaS Company

    Consistent customer success leads to customer growth, which in turn contributes to your growth. So, how do you go from a reactive, poorly structured, start-up-energy-fueled customer service team to an effective, consistent, reliable customer success process that helps your customers thrive (and helps you scale your company)?

    • Think proactive instead of reactive
      At Membrain, we changed the way we talk about customer success by moving from “customer service” to “customer success.” This simple mindset shift goes a long way toward changing the way you develop your customer success system.
    • Establish an effective hand-off process
      Create visibility between your sales and marketing teams, so that customer success agents can easily see the conversations that have already occurred, and the needs and priorities that each customer already expressed, and what promises were made.
    • Maintain consistent collaboration among teams
      Take down your silo walls, and help CS agents consistently communicate with sales and marketing. Encourage cross-team collaboration and communication on a daily basis on whatever is pressing for customers and prospects alike.
    • Develop an effective customer success process
      Starting with onboarding and continuing through customer growth and account management, set your customer success team up for success by providing them with an effective, proven milestone-based process for managing and growing their customers.
    • Train your customer success team in business skills as well as conversational and empathy skills
      A customer success team that knows how to ask valuable questions, to uncover business needs, and to respond to the emotional context of their customers is a customer success team that will outstrip the competition any day.
    • Embed the customer success process into the daily workflow of your CS reps to make it easy for them to follow the process, and easy for you to track their progress, as well as to reinforce the right behaviors and actions.
    • Continuously improve
      If your workflows are embedded into a software platform that also tracks data and analytics, you can use this information to continuously improve your customer success process.

    How Membrain Customers Use Our Account Growth Module to Scale Up Their Customer Success

    When we created our account growth module, we had sales teams in mind. The Membrain account growth module was designed to help manage and grow accounts in a systematic way that aligns with the customer’s needs and helps both companies grow together.

    But we always knew this module had the potential to be so much more than just a sales tool. Its powerful process and analytics tools have many potential use cases, and for many of our customers, the use case that they’ve embraced and thrived on is customer success.

    Our Account Growth module enables customer success leaders to embed an effective onboarding and customer success process directly into the workflows that customer success agents use every day. From within the platform, they can communicate, schedule meetings, access customer information, and find valuable help content to share with customers.

    The process-based workflow means that they always know exactly what to do next with each customer to support their success. The account growth grid shows them which customers have the most potential to grow, so they can work with sales teams to grow those accounts together.

    Account Growth, when combined with the Active Pipeline module for sales teams, also helps to break down silos by making it easy for customer success to see everything that happened during the sales process, reducing the amount of effort to accomplish a smooth handoff, and increasing the thoroughness of the handoff.

    Finally, Account Growth provides powerful analytic capabilities that can enable you to coach and train your customer success teams more effectively, as well as to see where new revenue may be entering the pipeline due to customer success efforts.

    And that’s really only the beginning. Account Growth as a customer service tool has grown so much in popularity with our customers that we’re investing in additional upgrades that will make it even more powerful for this function. The product team hasn’t authorized me to share those details with you yet, but I can say that there are some pretty exciting developments coming down the pipeline on this.

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    George Brontén
    Published January 4, 2023
    By George Brontén

    George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.

    Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn