Top 10 in Customer Success - What to know for Week ending August 30, 2019

I spent the early part of this week hosting a Customer Success workshop with the amazing and customer-passionate Kirsty Traill in Auckland. The topic is fresh, so we’re making this newsletter a 100% customer-focused special. 

1. CUSTOMER CHURN: In SaaS Churn is the silent killer and the primary reason why customer success is so important. Here are 3 ways to evaluate and address customer churn.
2. PRODUCT TO CUSTOMER TRANSITIONS: Getting started - Many established companies have historically been product focused and Customer-experience transformations, just like digital-transformation, are organizationally hard. Here are the seven deadly sins to look out for with customer-experience transformations. Survey Monkey has a downloadable PDF on 7 ways a company can actionably put customers first, compare that to HubSpot who also have their (CRM Focused) 7 step version.
3. CUSTOMER ON-BOARDING: On-boarding is one of the most critical parts of the relationship with a customer. This is HubSpot’s 6-part playbook to make sure you have a well understand criteria for what an optimally on-boarded customer lost like and Sixteen Ventures have a great article (with a Trello template) on their approach
4. CUSTOMER JOURNEY: To add-on to the articles above, clearly mapping out a Customer Journey via a visual map is a great way to know at what points a Customer Success Team need to be involved (and what their responsibilities will be) via engagement models.
5. CUSTOMER JOURNEY: Another tie-in to above’s reference of engagement models. Visualizing the various interactions via customer journey mapping is actually replacing traditional sales funnel strategies as a means to close sales. 
6. CSM MODELS: Not all CSM’s are built the same. And it depends, based on stage and strategy, as to how your CSM teams will evolve…...but they will. Gainsight propose 5 basic kinds of CSM, along with a corollary org chart. But keep in mind IRL they all will be different hues. SaaSx have this model. Which one best resonates with you?
7. COST ATTRIBUTION: How do you account the cost of a CSM team? The team at Gainsight dive deep into this question and come up with some fantastic insights event though the question itself is complicated and the answer end up being non-monetary. Owning the renewal, up-sell, x-sell is a key delineation point between expense attribution to departments. 
8. CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION: In order to calculate cost for CSM’s, it’s best to segment customers out in order to understand efforts required. Chartmogul have this great visual and once again Gainsight take a look at how to Benchmark efforts over segmentation. Here is what they found. The median amount of ARR that an Enterprise CSM can manage is between $2M and $5M and The median amount of customers an Enterprise CSM manages is 10-50 - these revenue figures drop with mid and SMB customer segments and increase fairly dramatically with number of customers per CSM.
9. CUSTOMER OUTCOMES: The test of long-term success for a modern tech company is with their ability to demonstrate value to customers - which can determine whether a startup can continually generate waves of success that are sustainable.  Here is a playbook on mastering the art of successful (laser focused) customer outcomes.
10. CUSTOMER PRICING: In the SaaS world, great pricing prioritizes the customer’s success over that of the businesses. That logic seems a little counterintuitive, but the profitability of a customer in SaaS happens waaaaay after a customer becomes an actual customer. OpenView expands on this reasoning more in this complex post on achieving net negative churn (where the average revenue per customer increases at rates which offset any churn) by using customer based value metrics as a pricing strategy. 

POD OF THE WEEK: HeavyBit crank out great content. This podcast from them features Bob Tinker, former CEO of MobileIron and author of Survival to Thrival where they discuss the framework he developed for tech companies to build a go-to-market playbook.

BONUS: Next month (September 18-19 Pacific Time Zone) Survey Monkey are hosting on online Curiosity Conference looks to be a bunch of session designed to leverage feedback to make actionable customer-driven data-driven decisions.