Deep Dives

Swallowing the Fish

The phrase “swallowing the fish,” from TSIA’s Technology-as-a-Service Playbook, gets tossed around frequently in the technology industry. Even though it sounds like an instruction on eating seafood, the term refers to the transition from technology as an asset to technology as a service. What’s the difference? An asset is something you buy and then have […]

The 10 Simple* Traits of an Awesome CSM

Every year, LinkedIn publishes a list of the “most promising” jobs in the American job market. Two years in a row, Customer Success Manager (CSM) has made the top 10, with year-over-year growth of more than 80 percent both years. Many of the jobs on that list didn’t even exist five years ago. Others, like […]

Effectively Managing Subscription Consumption

Subscription-based businesses, especially in software, are taking the world by storm. According to The Software Report, software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses make up an industry with revenues in the tens of billions of dollars. In the SaaS world, aggressive growth is not just desirable, but expected. According to forentrepreneurs.com, median revenue growth in the SaaS world is […]

Breaking Down Customer Success Costs

Ready to stand up a Customer Success strategy in your organization? It’s crucial to understand the true cost of Customer Success (hint: it goes way beyond salary). Well-meaning organizations may find themselves with significant investments in human capital only to find their processes aren’t scalable or they’re overspending on hard, soft, and fringe benefit costs. […]

Onboarding your customers with purpose, momentum, and precision

“The seeds of churn are planted early, and those seeds are planted deep if your onboarding experience is bad.” – Lincoln Murphy It’s widely understood that a good onboarding is critical to ongoing customer happiness. But it’s tricky, and we often miss the mark because: Onboarding a new customer is hard to do. We tend […]

Building a Business Case for more Customer Success resources

In the archives of the prestigious research firm Forrester, there’s an article written by a seasoned analyst highlighting what she foresaw as key business trends for the coming year. Number two on her list was “Companies Will Explore Proactive Engagement.” She wrote: “Proactive engagements anticipate the what, when, where, and how for customers, and prioritize […]

Neuroscience and Customer Success: Building a strategy that supports human interaction

In 2015, researchers Dominic Fareri, Luke Chang and Mauricio Delgado published an article in The Journal of Neuroscience on the power of collaborative interactions in building and maintaining relationships. One of their experiments involved playing a simple game. Some participants were told they were playing the game with other people while others were told they […]

Customer Success at scale

Automation gets a bad rap. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the same story gets told and retold, and it certainly sounds intuitive: as technology improves, human beings lose jobs. But a closer look at the historical evidence reveals quite the opposite: technology ultimately creates more jobs than it destroys. A 2016 article in The Economist […]

Success through Customer Segmentation

“Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.” – Nido Qubein I read a case study recently about an international cruise vacation company. They were creative and aggressive marketers and were driving brand awareness and lead generation across a variety of geographies and audience […]

Putting your customers (and your company) on the map

We’ve all been there. You’re at a restaurant or buying something online and it’s just not going well. The service is bad or the online functionality doesn’t work or the product you want is no longer available. You’re getting upset, and the more the bad experience drags on, the more frustrated you become. We’ve all […]

Integrating Education Services for more powerful Customer Success

Walmart founder Sam Walton once famously said, “There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” From the earliest days of the technology revolution, software companies applied that maxim almost exclusively on customer acquisition. Make the initial […]

Inside Sales Optimization guide

Best-in-class strategies for driving revenue & reducing cost As organizations look to drive down the overall cost of sales, optimizing the sales process has become essential. Best-in-class inside sales teams are lean, and fully aligned with corporate objectives. This tightly integrated approach is what makes them agile and positions them for success. How can your […]