Customer Success

Your business success is now forever linked to the success of your customers Customer Success is the groundbreaking guide to the exciting new model of customer management. Business relationships are fundamentally changing. In the world B.C. (Before Cloud), companies could focus totally on sales and marketing because customers were often 'stuck' after purchasing. Therefore, all of the 'post-sale' experience was a cost center in most companies. In the world A.B. (After Benioff), with granular per-year, per-month or per-use pricing models, cloud deployments and many competitive options, customers now have the power. As such, B2B vendors must deliver success for their clients to achieve success for their own businesses.

Customer success teams are being created in companies to quarterback the customer lifecycle and drive adoption, renewals, up-sell and advocacy. The Customer Success philosophy is invading the boardroom and impacting the way CEOs think about their business. Today, Customer Success is the hottest B2B movement since the advent of the subscription business model, and this book is the one-of-a-kind guide that shows you how to make it work in your company.

From the initial planning stages through execution, you'll have expert guidance to help you:

• Understand the context that led to the start of the Customer Success movement
• Build a Customer Success strategy proven by the most competitive companies in the world
• Implement an action plan for structuring the Customer Success organization, tiering your customers, and developing the right cross-functional playbooks

Customers want products that help them achieve their own business outcomes. By enabling your customers to realize value in your products, you're protecting recurring revenue and creating a customer for life. Customer Success shows you how to kick start your customer-centric revolution, and make it stick for the long term.

Gainsight Book Foreword xi

PART I Customer Success: The History, Organization, and Imperative 1

Chapter 1 The Recurring Revenue Tsunami: Why Customer Success Is Suddenly Crucial 3

Chapter 2 The Customer Success Strategy: The New Organization versus the Traditional Business Model 25

Chapter 3 Customer Success for Traditional Nonrecurring Revenue Businesses 45

PART II The Ten Laws of Customer Success 63

Chapter 4 The Practice of Customer Success 65

Chapter 5 Law 1: Sell to the Right Customer 69

Chapter 6 Law 2: The Natural Tendency for Customers and Vendors Is to Drift Apart 79

Chapter 7 Law 3: Customers Expect You to Make ThemWildly Successful 91

Chapter 8 Law 4: Relentlessly Monitor and Manage Customer Health 103

Chapter 9 Law 5: You Can No Longer Build Loyalty through Personal Relationships 113

Chapter 10 Law 6: Product Is Your Only Scalable Differentiator 125

Chapter 11 Law 7: Obsessively Improve Time-to-Value 137

Chapter 12 Law 8: Deeply Understand Your Customer Metrics 147

Chapter 13 Law 9: Drive Customer Success through Hard Metrics 159

Chapter 14 Law 10: It’s a Top-Down, Company-Wide Commitment 171

PART III Chief Customer Officer, Technology, and Future 181

Chapter 15 The Rise of the Chief Customer Officer 183

Chapter 16 Customer Success Technology 199

Chapter 17 Where Do We Go from Here? 215

Index 229

NICK MEHTA is CEO of Gainsight, where he brings the right people together and puts them in the best position to win for customers, partners, employees, and their families. He's a big believer in the Golden Rule, and he uses it to bring more compassion to interactions with others.

DAN STEINMAN is the chief customer officer for Gainsight. He is the author of dozens of relevant blogs, contributed articles, and Customer Success University created by Gainsight and a recognized thought leader in the Customer Success world.

LINCOLN MURPHY is founder of Sixteen Ventures, a consultancy helping companies accelerate growth through Customer Success. He's a prolific writer and international speaker on Growth and Customer Success.

The subscription business model is hot—from software to music to movies to diet programs—investors and public markets want businesses that create recurring payments from unlimited customers. The old sales and marketing methods can handle attracting new customers for growth, however, only in the last five years has a discipline emerged that views growth in relation to retention, not just sales. Customer Success is the first-of-its-kind resource for business leaders who need best-in-class guidance for developing a recurring revenue business.

Software as a Service (SaaS) businesses led the charge into the subscription economy, and this guidebook is highly relevant to leaders of those companies by providing a methodology for creating the infrastructure and teams to both renew and upsell customers. The success of SaaS companies has spread across industries, and now all types of businesses are looking to convert to a subscription or pay-as-you-go model, or at least add a like component to their existing business model. Leaders in these situations can equally benefit from the A-to-Z coverage inside, which walks you from the very beginnings of the Customer Success movement to the latest best practices and success stories.

The practical chapters are rated by relevance to business type for quick reference and focused learning. Additionally, this next-level tool doesn't stop at a singular perspective, but features authorial contributions from today's leading Customer Success practitioners who share their personal insights into the realities of focusing a company on the success of its customers.

Whether this is your first step into a recurring revenue business model or you need to revamp your SaaS company into the big leagues, this game-changing presentation by three industry influencers from the leading company in Customer Success gives you the understanding and solutions you're looking for, including:

• The Ten Laws of Customer Success, including complete explanations, real-world examples, and customized information for different business needs
• How Cloud technology has redefined Customer Success and what a customer-centric company needs to do to maintain a competitive edge
• An in-depth look at the critical technology needed for outstanding Customer Success
• Easy-to-understand approaches to capturing the sophisticated metrics that drive prosperous customer-centric programs

Accelerate your revenue model with Customer Success.

Praise for CUSTOMER SUCCESS

"Having been at Salesforce to witness the birth of Customer Success, I'm excited to see a book focused on this subject around which I have so much personal passion. One of the foundations of our success at Salesforce was Customer Success so it's particularly great to see the history of the discipline, along with a glimpse at the future, documented in this book. I recommend it to every CEO or leader out there who is truly seeking to build a customer success-centric company."
—Jim Steele, President and Chief Customer Officer, Insidesales and former President and Chief Customer Officer, Salesforce

"As one of the early investors in the technology of Customer Success, I'm particularly pleased to see the rapidly accelerating growth of the entire industry. The 'subscription tsunami' as outlined in the book has profoundly disrupted the software world, and forced a focus on customers that did not exist previously. This book will help those who need to understand how this brave new world works, and also people looking for some practical guidance on how to execute successfully in the subscription economy. The team at Gainsight helped pioneer the Customer Success movement and definitely has the chops to put together this hitchhiker's guide for those traveling the same road."
—Roger Lee, General Partner, Battery Ventures

"The world is moving to a Subscription Economy, and this book directly addresses that shift. Smart companies aren't trying to pitch products to strangers anymore. They're figuring out how to grow, monetize and build an ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship with a dedicated base of subscribers. Customer success is fundamental to this process, and this book documents three core aspects — philosophy, discipline, and organization — in a sharp, practical way."
—Tien Tzuo, CEO and Founder, Zuora