Before we had a single customer, Node hired a customer success (CS) manager.
Why? As a B2B technology company, we’re building an ambitious product with a diverse cohort of users. Our buyers are sales and marketing executives with hundreds of tools to choose from. So when they invest six figures in Node’s Account Based Intelligence platform, they want to see a return on their investment.
That’s the foundation of our CS mission: to maximize clients’ ROI. By providing dedicated customer support and keeping communication lines open, CS has helped us post 100 percent customer retention thus far. After just four months on the market, we’ve closed our first two-year contract, begun the march toward a contextual, proactive web, and earned Mark Cuban’s investment.
So if you’re a B2B brand selling to mid-market and enterprise companies, don’t underestimate the following benefits of a CS initiative:
1. Stronger feedback loops
Our CS initiative helps drive product adoption through training and education, but it also helps our engineering team shape the product through customer feedback. It’s incredible how many use cases customers have found for our platform that we hadn’t even considered.
Especially in a startup’s early days, the CS team should serve as the customers’ voice. By monitoring client needs, CS personnel can help technical leaders squash bugs, prioritize feature development, test unique use cases, and plan for future iterations.
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2. Increased sales velocity
Our CS manager believes one of the CS team’s main roles should be to stockpile customer success stories. Humans are hardwired to absorb information best when it’s delivered via stories, so CS can be invaluable when it comes time to close a sale. Our CS manager always attends personalized client demos to share customer success stories with prospects.
As venture capitalist Jason Lemkin says, “Customer success is where 90 percent of the revenue is.” Without a story-driven CS team, you’re effectively giving up a major slice of your total addressable market.
3. Decreased churn and increased customer lifetime value
Initial customers often give startups a grace period, overlooking early bugs and clumsy processes, but that doesn’t last long. To maximize customer retention — which, by the way, exponentially increases profits — CS must quickly determine what’s working and not working for customers.
To do so, it needs to gather data from day one. But CS personnel can’t just relay that information to engineers to improve the product: By sharing trends and sincere feedback, it should steer the entire organization toward more customer-friendly sales, marketing, and operations.
The goal of a CS team is, of course, to help customers succeed. As your company grows, that role only becomes more important. More customers lead to more feedback opportunities, more success stories to document and share, and more revenue from existing customers at stake.
But that’s hardly the CS team’s only role. By facilitating product and process improvements that customers want, it’s also designed to help you thrive. Only when your customers succeed, after all, will you succeed.
I’m CEO and founder of Node, the first Account Based Intelligence platform that’s making the 1:1 sales and marketing dream a reality and driving tomorrow’s contextual web. I worked at Google for six years as the youngest employee of the company, where I focused on global expansion, Google.org, and building strategic partnerships for YouTube. As a business development executive, I next spent five years advising entrepreneurs on everything from infrastructure to drones. From the front lines of Silicon Valley, I write about company building. Follow me on Twitter @falonfatemi.
