MarketStar Blog

Key Takeaways

• Customer Success teams are at the forefront of helping customers achieve their goals. It is through them that a company optimizes its value in the eyes of their customers.

• In the dynamic marketplace we are in, customer success teams have become even more critical in the business growth of an organization. 

• It can also be a challenging task to establish an effective customer success function. 

• The demand for good CSMs far surpasses its supply. And unless organizations understand the core capabilities they require, the process will not bear fruit. 

When software-as-a-service became popular in the mid-2000s, vendors focusing on the business model faced a major problem- customer dissatisfaction. The product in question was complex, and many customers were unable to find value in it. 

This resulted in low adoption rates, which eventually led to greater churn. 

To counter the problem, companies began building customer-centric initiatives. Many created formal customer success functions with a unique set of tools and methodologies. 

In the aftermath of the pandemic, customer success services face a new sense of urgency around protecting and nurturing customers and enabling them to find success with the product or service. 

According to a Salesforce research, 89% of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive customer service experience. 

With the growing importance of retaining and maintaining long-term relationships with customers, customer success teams have become an indispensable function of any modern subscription-based enterprise. 

It’s undeniable that customer success has become the growth engine, with the potential of becoming a company’s most powerful asset. 

Deeply engaged with accounts, a skillful customer success manager (CSM) along with the entire team combines extensive product knowledge and domain experience with an intimate understanding of each customer and their objectives. 

But the backbone of a well-planned customer success framework is a talented staff. It’s the foundation of any robust customer success initiative. 

However, strong customer success leaders are in short supply. 

With an already stiff competition to recruit and retain the best in the field, many organizations are also unclear about the necessary skills for customer success management. 

So, how do you create a team that will amplify your customer success strategy? Have you set any expectations in advance? And if you already have an established customer success function, are you gauging their efficiency correctly? Let’s get started.   

What are the Top 5 Priorities in Building a Customer Success Team?

There’s immense power in great customer service. 

A company’s focus on customer success solutions heavily impacts its recommendations. It’s critical that 94% of consumers will give a company a “very good” CX rating and will be more likely to recommend it. 

As you get down to hiring your talent cluster, it is always wise to start with setting your expectations. Which roles are you looking for, and which skills will help you drive your customer success methodology? What reasons should you keep in mind? Some reasons have been listed below:

• Customer Retention: Customer success is about taking every step to ensure that your customers see value in your product or service, making customer retention a critical component. 

• Consistent Customer Feedback: In this, your customer success manager can help the organization get regular and detailed feedback from your customers. This can help other BUs such as sales, marketing, and product management teams to better align their strategies.

• Further Expansion: Upselling and cross-selling are an essential part of any customer success framework. By tapping on these opportunities, your customer success function will drive business growth.

• Brand Advocacy: While customer advocacy is usually a company-wide initiative, the customer success manager is responsible for guiding the customer throughout the journey, turning satisfied customers into loyal brand advocates.

With the why behind setting up a customer success function, let’s look at how you can make it a reality. 

1. Analyze Your Requirement

As a first step, organizations should examine their current team.

Link this information to the desired customer success outcomes, such as adoption, satisfaction, and growth. The insights you achieve will help you to transform your hiring and talent attraction processes.

2. Know How Many Members You Need

26% of respondents highlight that the typical customer success manager at their company handles anywhere between 51-100 accounts, according to a survey by Totango.

The number of people you require for an effective customer success framework depends on how many customers you check up on a weekly or monthly basis. Many organizations divide their customer base into three segments: High, Medium, and Low-Dollar customers. 

3. Create an Onboarding Process

It’s easy to assume that the ins and outs of your product or service are easily understandable to an outsider. But not everyone works on it every single day as you do, which means that what is straightforward to you might not be so for others.

An effective onboarding process can help your customer success team have a thorough understanding of the product, which, in turn, they will proactively use to help your customers gain value from your product. This saves the customer’s time in the early stages of their journey, and you benefit from a reduced churn rate. 

4. Upskill Your Existing Team

Equipped with the insights on your preliminary analysis of the team, you can deploy programs to build on capabilities. 

Many companies have established “field and forum”-based training programs where employees alternate between classes and apply them in the workplace. 

Ensure that you are creating personalized learning journeys since the strengths and weaknesses of each member of your customer success team will vary. 

5.Use Segmentation

Segmenting your customers can help your division of labor. 

When you divide your customers into groups based on shared features such as customer lifetime value (CLV) or geography, you deliver greater levels of personalized customer experience. 

Additionally, your teams provide contextual and relevant information. This type of segmentation can help you determine high-value accounts which require dedicated CSMs.

6.Get Feedback from Customers

How your customers feel about their interactions with your customer success team can help you assess their performance. This feedback is a simple yet effective way to boost engagement. Use this feedback to optimize your customer success framework.

Team Up for Success!

Companies derive more value when they identify opportunities to deliver greater value to customers. But few organizations have mastered this mutually beneficial relationship. 

Customer success management will only be effective when you have a team guided by the company's vision and mission. 

Looking to make customers your best growth engine? 
Benefit from a world-class CS strategy at scale with MarketStar.

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The temptation for any B2B sales team is to hunt for whales. If you can land that one big deal, you get a big payoff. But while you are spending all that time and energy hunting whales, dozens of smaller fish may slip past you. Too often, the focus on enterprise deals eclipses the profit potential from SMB sales. SMBs deals can be easier to land, and they can have greater lasting value.

The overall success of any sales and marketing initiative ultimately hinges on customer success. It’s one thing to complete a sale or close a contract, but the ultimate goal is to ensure that the customer receives maximum value from the sale or engagement. Turning a sale into a successful engagement means happy customers, which translates into additional sales to those customers and reduced customer churn.

When it comes to selling B2B technology, landing an enterprise deal is like grabbing the brass ring. Enterprise sales generate more revenue with larger and higher-value contracts. Enterprise sales also lead to longer engagements, which means ongoing revenue and more opportunity to cross-sell and upsell.

Selling complex technology requires special skills and technical expertise, but knowing how to sell the technology doesn’t mean you have to know how to build it. However, when you engage in consultative selling, the prospect is looking for sophisticated, custom solutions to complex problems. That’s why selling technical solutions requires sales engineers (SEs).

Selling technology is never easy, and when you are dealing with enterprise sales, there is nothing simple or fast about this selling process. Enterprise sales are complex because enterprise technology is complex. There are many variables, interdependencies, and integrations to worry about—let alone matching the technology to the customers’ needs.

If you are in sales (or a movie buff), you have undoubtedly heard the phrase “ABC, always be closing,” from Glengarry Glen Ross. That may be a good motivational mantra for selling real estate, but it’s less effective in B2B sales. When dealing with lead qualification for B2B technology, selling it makes more sense to think of ABC as “always be consulting.”

Ensuring customer success is at the heart of consultative selling isn’t just fluff. When you are selling technology, selling the product alone isn’t enough. You must sell a solution for a problem that your technology can solve. That means much deeper customer engagement that delivers an immediate return and more ROI over time. That’s why leading companies invest in customer success.

Every company wants a faster sales cycle. The challenge with selling technology is that selling complex solutions requires a more complex sale process, which means a longer sales cycle. The length of the sales cycle also depends on your target customer.

You know that selling B2B technology is hard, and selling B2B enterprise technology is even harder. Enterprise sales, like enterprise infrastructures, are more complex with higher price tags, and that means higher risks for buyers. Making the wrong purchasing decision can have a domino effect that can affect the entire enterprise infrastructure. That’s why enterprise buyers are more cautious and deals require more stakeholders and take longer to close.