One is an activity that may have causal effect and therefore worth something but the other is the ultimate objective: increase revenue. I might consider having both as measurable objectives but use a weighted average that ascribes more value (a lot more value) to one over the other.

I would expect the Customer Success team to get the sales rep/team on the call to manage the pre-sales engagement. This is where I think enterprise collaboration can be important – e.g. shameless plug: CubeTree – where you can set up account rooms and have sales reps and customer success teams subscribe to feeds from these account rooms. That way, people are only alerted when something is happening that’s relevant to them and it’s not lost in a deluge of streamed email.

I think an ideal customer success manager is someone who has strong product/domain knowledge (or the ability to learn) and customer engagement skills. These people can come from sales, support or services positions. The best always have an extreme passion for being the customer advocate so it takes a special sales person to want to do this — service/support folks seem to transition well into this role.

Hope this helps.

Bruce

A great post, and just in time too, as I am now dealing with the same organizatinoal issues.

I would like to share with you some of the questions we are now facing and possibly to get your feedback:

- Should a ‘customer success team’ be measured by operational attributes (e.g. number of logins) or by financial attributes (e.g. repeat sales volume)?

- Once the ‘customer success team’ identifies an opportunity for an up/cross sell; Should they be the ones conducting the pre-sale engagment? If not, what is the relationship (and how do you manage the information handover) between the customer success team and the sales/pre-sale team?

- What is the profile of a customer success manager?

Thanks in advance,

Amit

Guy

There wasn’t much to it other than common sense. Here were a few of the things we did:

1. We created dashboards that enabled us to view usage rates for each customer. We created thresholds for login rates and if a specific customer fell below that percentage, it would prompt a call from one of our Customer Success Managers to the Admin for that site.
2. As part of that call, we attempted to determine if there were issues with the application that we could help rectify (e.g. training, performance, etc.).
3. We put together a “get well” plan and worked with the customer until they gave us a green light.
4. The Customer Success team worked with Customer Support bidirectionally. If there were bugs in our software, the Success team passed them into Support. If Support found that the customer was simply having trouble using the application, they passed the Customer over to the Customer Success team.
5. We held the Customer Success team accountable for achieving overall Usage Rates of the application across our customer base.
6. We used the Customer Success team to deliver a set of prioritized features by Customer to the Products organization.
7. The Customer Success team was held accountable for managing our Customer Surveys.
8. Each Monday, I reviewed a list of issues from the Customer Success team with my executive staff.

Bruce

Very important post. I’m currently talking to many SaaS companies. Some of them already share your observation and put in place VP of Customer Success, and some hasn’t.

A question though; I guess one of the most important concerns of the customer success team is being proactive about churn. Can you please share some hints on how your team proactively reduce churn?

BR,
Guy