Enhance Your Finance Operations with airSlate SignNow's Customer Success Funnel for Finance

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all right good morning how's it going good awesome all right so everyone know who this is every anyone ever heard the best uh way to think about a public speech ever anyone know the answer Franklin dor Roosevelt what did he tell his son about public speaking any any ideas he said be sincere be brief and be seated so that's my goal in the next 25 minutes so you can hold me accountable to this so let's Dive Right In so my name is Nick I'm with a company called gain site um we work with hundreds of subscription and recurring Revenue businesses to help them drive more growth from their existing customers and I want to share a bunch of stuff that we've learned over the time about how growth isn't just about new customers and we have this metaphor that we use at gain site called turning the revenue funnel into an hourglass but this morning I actually figured out that I'm going to relabel the speech um because there's a hot new term out there in San Francisco so how many how many of you have growth hackers how many people have a growth hacker or are a growth hacker admit they're a growth hacker I know there's some here admit it um and growth hacking is this kind of hot new area of how do you drive customer acquisition in very interesting ways and I relabeled my speech uh 10 customer success growth hacks because what I challenge you to do at the end of this is think of customer success not as a way to drive customer sat although it will do that not as a way to understand your customers better though it'll do that not as a way to just feel better about your company though it'll do that too but is a way to drive growth so at the end of this presentation I actually have 10 things that I think you should consider doing at least one of them going back to your office in your companies so with that let's start just a level set a little bit with a few questions as a poll so easy one first one if you're at a vendor Tech vendor or you've worked at one how many of you have had a customer success team or an account management team of some kind that works with your existing customers great all right awesome cool okay uh how many of you feel your companies are too successful already and you don't want to talk about customer success too too much success already anyone no no too much success how many of you feel like your company's growing too fast and you just can't keep up and you don't want any more growth no one no no too fast all right good and then how much feel like you have just too much money and it's just flowing out and and you don't want to deal with any more money More Money More Problems if uh if you guys get the reference anyone here no okay great so we've got The Right audience because I want to talk about how customer success which sounds really nice and friendly is actually all about growth and all about driving more money for your company and if you're a CEO you should think of customer success just like you think of customer acquisition and so hopefully that's what I can convince you in the next uh 22 minutes here uh so let's dive in so uh before I talk about the 10 growth hacks for customer success let's talk about why this is relevant right now and I think everyone every vendor at this conference has some version of this slide Things Are changing right and and our version of that slide is that the world is changing because of changing business models old business models did not hold vendors accountable right so a vendor would sell something they'd get a lot of money up front and whether the customer got value or not the vendor got the money and so the vendor's success was fundamentally not aligned with the customer success I know that sounds kind of obvious but it's actually a massive significant thing that we should all internalize because with a new world of subscription businesses payer transaction you know increasing kind of freedom of choice for customers uh customer success and vendor success are totally interlined and what that means is that your growth depends on your customer success and that's something I want to keep reinforcing throughout this presentation so that's kind of the high level I think everyone probably gets that right well let's dive in further so in the old economy where you sold something and you kind of got the money up front how did your customer life cycle work so I I I'm sure everyone has a slide on how it should have worked but but here's how it actually worked I worked at a big software company for a long time here's how it actually worked uh we're at the vendor right we got all the money up front so when we interact with a customer it's to get something can I get a reference can you do a case study for me you ready to buy more do you want to renew um and by the way who are you again because I actually have lost track of who you are and are you've changed a lot right and and but I care a lot about you actually because you're the most important thing to me because a customer is number one right that's I don't know how many people have felt like that in past companies but that's really how the world worked for a long time and I'm not here to criticize that because frankly that funded a lot of wealth in silon Valley a lot of private jets and Yachts and it's pretty cool right but the world is different it's just different whether you like it or not it's changed and our our view and I think a lot of people here it's not just us is the customer really is at the center now that's not just a kind of a nice thing that a CEO says to make the customer feel better they really are at the center and there's a life cycle from from the time you get that customer to them them adopting your service renewing growing Etc and so you got to really rethink what growth means in that model and that's what I'm hoping to share with you today so let's talk about this metaphor that I want to change right so how many of you have seen a B2B Revenue funnel everyone right everyone knows the B2B Revenue funnel um what do you look at that funnel and and what's the first impression you get it looks like marketing's job is really hard right because there's a lot of stuff up there at the top and then sales is pretty hard because you got to catch all those things and the bottom just takes care of itself right because it's kind of the easy part right it's the bottom of the funnel it looks really easy and and frankly I think a lot of companies have been influenced by this metaphor to put more weight at the top than the bottom and I hope to change that and that's kind of I think the visual metaphors if you're a CEO make a big difference our argument is that the funnel should be an hourglass and I know it sounds like a dumb simple chees easy idea I think it's massive the idea is basically that you're going to get as much growth from your existing customers as you are from your new customers now if you have zero customers that's obviously not true right because you couldn't get any growth from your existing customers but as you grow and as you take more and more of that green field customer base and you get them your growth is going to come from your customers there's just no doubt about it it's formulaic and yet we in the past have said that look if you're responsible for customers at your company your job is that little tiny thing at the bottom right if you're an account manager customer support customer success Services your job's that little thing at the bottom great job keep going we're working on offshoring your job and Outsourcing and automating it but great job right and the people at the top get the glory they ring the gong and they're the people that get paid a lot and our argument is that really needs to change um that the bottom of the funnel customer success is the key to Growing fast and I think you all probably get that at some level but let me just hit it home there there's a lot of research out there that shows that companies that actually can acquire customers and then grow within those customer bases grow much much faster and it's kind of obvious right if you acquire customers at this level and then if each of those customers are growing your slope of your growth is going to go up a lot right and so there's no doubt that if you want to be a high Growth Company you can't just grow by acquiring customers that's like number one number two Goldman saxs did a a research study about a year ago and publicly traded recurring Revenue businesses that have a higher retention rate have a higher multiple and so what that means is not only do you grow faster but you actually get valued more so it's actually a double value third thing which is really interesting is that if you retain more of your dollars that you acquire you can actually spend more to acquire customers because your lifetime value of your customers is higher so therefore not only can you actually grow faster and be worth more but you can invest more in growth so you know again this is kind of all hopefully obvious at this point I think most people in the room understand this question question is how do you actually go do that but before I get to that let me just show you a couple other ways to think of this metaphor uh how many people know who Aaron Ross is Aron Ross uh wrote this book called predictable Revenue it's a great if you do cold calling or inside sales it's kind of the Bible of that and um he just wrote a new book which we we helped him with uh where he talks about the three engines of growth and it's just a different metaphor where he talks about Spears being growing through new acquisition Nets being growing through bringing inbound leads in and then seeds being growing from your existing customers either through Word of Mouth through land and expand through retaining your customers and that's just another way to think about what we're talking about here and a third way to think about it is how many people seeing spinal tap um the reality that a lot I talk to CEOs and I say um what's your retention rate and they say oh we're doing great 90% 90% retention rate I'm like dude your or D that your retention rate can go much higher than 100% the best companies retain 120 130% of the revenue by upselling into their installed BAS base and so retention can be more than your existing base and that's an important concept to think about so let's dive in and come go through the 10 growth hacks that'll get you more revenue from your existing customers with that big setup okay so and to put these into context we actually created this model at gain site called the customer success maturity model and the idea is that not every company is ready for the same investment in customer success when you're getting started and you have a new business it's really just about driving adoption in your company right driving more people to use whatever you have right and that's great um once you got a bunch of people and they're coming up for renewals and you know they're at that cycle of do I stay or do I go it starts be about becoming about retention once you have that installed base and you've like sold a lot of people that stuff you're now thinking about how do I land and expand how do I cross sell how do I kind of grow my my existing Revenue now once you have a lot of people doing that you're starting to think about optimization like how do I get more out of the people that I have and how do I cut the costs in this area and then over time hopefully customer success becomes truly strategic for you and and it's really a strategic advisor to your clients so think about customer success in different phases based on where you are in your Evolution the 10 things I'm going to show you I think apply almost across the board and we'll kind of highlight each one so let's start number one um actually I think this is the most important one so I should have done the last um what is your pitch for customer success so I want to go listen to all your sales pitches at your C from your sales reps and I want to hear how many times they talk about your customer success program so you guys all sell products and services do you talk how many people talk about your customer success program in your sales pitch so a few people that's great if I go to your websites will I see a video or landing page about your customer success team so sounds like a couple people are there great slides about your customer success team is it a differentiator um because the reality is almost everyone this room as competitors products kind of do a lot of similar stuff no matter how much we love them right your customer success team can be a differentiator so growth hack number one is grow faster by marketing your customer success team so on your website in your video on your PowerPoint presentation talk about customer success and talk about how you're not just selling a product you're going to drive success for your customer if you want to get extra credit in that sales pitch so you're going to pitch a CIO or a head of sales or what your your Target customer tell them that you are going to schedule a meeting 6 months after the initial sale and you're going to come back and review the success that you've driven tell them that you're actually going to show them the success that you've driven six months from then and kind of sign up and even calendar that meeting so really make sure that it's part of your sales process that's number one I think it's a really big potential differentiator number two think about customer success like a Sprint where the very beginning matters a ton right so why do Sprinter stand on SP starting blocks right they're trying to get as much explosion out of their calves and their legs as they can at the beginning of the race because it makes a big difference right and I think most people understand but customer success starts from the time they signed that contract and what's funny about companies is we've gotten really good at moving fast to get a deal done right all of us probably are really good at doing everything possible to get a deal done and you get that Echo sign or that you ring the gong and it's exciting does that velocity stay at the same level once you got the contract signed do you guys keep the same energy up to say how do we going to get the customer to Value you probably measure your sales cycle but do you measure your time to value and I don't mean measure time to Value like ah our customers get live in a few weeks I mean like the average customer is getting live in this many days and this customer went past that and the best customers within the first 17 days are doing activity X Y and Z and monitoring the people that haven't done those how many of you guys do that how many of you are thinking of it like a Sprinter versus think of like a marathon or where you know you get started and you just kind of keep running the reality is the scrutiny from your customer is very high from day one so that's the second growth hack I'd encourage you to think about third one okay so um people buy your products and services for lots of reasons right they buy them to drive more Revenue to make their employees happier make their customers happier how many of you understand the goal of every individual customer that you have I don't mean the high level goal on your website I don't mean the benefits on your data sheet I mean the actual goal of that that customer and I don't just mean you I mean your employees so if I go to the customer success manager or the sales WP at one of your prospects or customers could I ask them what's the actual goal of this customer not in our language but in theirs so I mean you know it'd be another question to ask yourself how many of your team members would be able to answer answer that by the way if it's in your language it's probably wrong so if I said you know we sell customer Success software and some of my reps you I'll say what's the goal of this customer they say oh their goal is to try to reduce turn by 50% while driving upsell using an early warning system and I was like that's straight off our website that's not their goal that's a different they have a different goal right what's their goal and how many of you understand that goal and religiously write it down so when you have that sale are you figuring out what that goal is capturing it because it's going to be really valuable later which I'll talk about bunch of ways you can capture it you could survey the customer directly you could actually have a kickoff success meeting if you have a higher touch business we recommend this so right after you sign that deal have a 30-minute call and just ask one question of the customer thank you for buying our product or service what does massive success mean to you massive success what is it paint the picture massive success a year from now I want to be able to deliver massive success tell me what that means not in my words in your words so that's the third third growth hack fourth one so how many people have either heard or been on a call where you hear an account manager CSM say the following hey this is Nick from gainsight this is so and so from my company I'm just calling a check in and see how you're doing just checking in how many people have seen the checkin call the heard the check-in call ban the check-in call ban the check-in call because customers don't want the check-in call anymore they expect you to know what they're doing and what value they're getting they don't want to talk to you about how things are going in general they want you to come come sorry about that they want to come with value they want you to call them and say hey I I know you bought our product for this goal and I see that you're driving these results and other customers are driving more results how can we help you drive those more results when you call and say I'm checking in you're basically saying I have no freaking clue who you are I have no idea who you hi um Acme Corporation we love you just want to check in and see how things are going I've gotten that check-in call before from vendors I know what that means by the way it probably means they're about to ask me for an upsell or renewal or reference you know they're about to use me so it's it's ban the checking call every time you hear it in your office you have an open Office I'd encourage you to go and uh you have some ritual maybe you you all like ring a bell or you all kind of blow a horn or something checkin call is not valuable next thing Define the scoreboard for your customer the scorecard the measurement system for each customer take those goals that you captured up front Define how you're going to measure them just like you have your own goals internally and then have a regular process to review them with the customer because here's the problem you sell something to somebody right and maybe have an annual contract two years whatever A year later how often is that somebody's still there and that new person who's unfortunately often a CFO procurement person say saying why do we even need this thing and they don't remember why they bought it and the person that bought it isn't there anymore Define that goal up front every quarter every month whatever the frequency reinforce that goal and come back to the client with a scoreboard that says here's why why you bought here's what we're delivering two questions is that still why you bought do we have it right are we delivering what we say we're delivering you know what that makes the renewal a lot easier because now you have maybe if you do quarterly you have four check-in points where you've said here's what you wanted here's what we did and you agreed now when you try to nickel and die me for Renewal and reduce the price or whatever I can say look I'm delivering the results you asked for what more do you want right so Define a scorecard and review it with the client on a regular basis next remember that you are not just selling to a company you're selling to people and so Define I challenge you to Define three people if you sell to Enterprises three people at every customer that you're going to interact with and I'd actually identify three people in your company if you're big enough they're going to reach out to them so don't just have your CSM or account manager reach out to Joe or Sally every month and see how things are going identify Joe Sally and Bob the three people that matter in your company and have three people in your company reach out to them and build a relationship it's hard to do but you can systematize it and make it regular and then you then if Joe Sally or Bob leave you've got somebody else to deal with it's a kind of basic concept but I can't tell you how many companies become single threaded where they just have one contact next out of those people identify your raving fans who are the people that are really going to go B to bat for you and there's simple ways to do it right you send a survey everyone focuses on the negatives in the survey the the the lowest net promoter scores what about the people that give you nine or 10 right there they give you nine or 10 send them a bottle of wine send them thank you gift card a donation to charity and then invite them to be a reference invite them to speak to your conference at your conference you know what's funny if you get people to Advocate on your behalf they become more satisfied not the other way around obviously everyone knows that satisfied people will probably Advocate on your behalf if satisfied people Advocate on your behalf they become more satisfied they become part of your company they're your fans so promote and Advocate your fans next when you think about upsell in your installed base because it's not just about renewals and retention think about speed so you have a product maybe it's licensed by users or maybe of two products the time to go from that initial sale to the upsell is is a lot on you it's about how fast you deploy how fast they adopt and every month that you slip in deployment or usage is a month slip in the sales cycle so how many people like slipping a sales cycle nobody right and yet we kind of Let It Go when the adoption is slower or the the deployment is slower and we don't have that same sales mentality yet adop option is going to lead you to faster upsell so think about it in terms of speed next deliver an early an early warning system internally and that's what we gain site does so obviously it's self-serving but even if you do it manually figure out the early triggers where there is risk in that account and I don't just mean usage because frankly people don't just buy your product to use it they buy it to drive value so I mean all the different signs of disengagement from you know people giving you low feedback on surveys to to Long support cases that get closed but the customers really frustrated people that stopped attending your webinars unsubscribed to your emails all those signs that you've kind of lost that customer and figure out a way to do something about it and last one um what's this a picture of anyone gong okay how many people have a Gong tell me tell me that folks have a Gong in the office for sales no nobody has a Gong okay few gongs okay buy gong for customer success and make that gong bigger the in our office the top one is the sales gong and the bottom one is the customer success gong because you send a subtle message right which is I mean right now what's the message CEO send sales is all that matters the initial sale is all that matters but if you believe customer success can be a growth driver celebrate that expansion that adoption that reference that renewal that Advocate just as much as you celebrate that new deal this thing can make a big difference it can really change the way people in your company operate so to summarize I've got my 10 here well so you can have them in the slides afterwards and we kind of walk through all of them and what I challenge you to do is pick any of these to start with I think very few companies are doing all of these I think every one of these could have a material impact on your company what is gain side do we we build software to help with all this obviously and bottom line is we bu build software to help companies grow faster our early customers have actually driven a eight points of net additional growth and this is on businesses of 100 million and higher in many cases so lots of Revenue while actually scaling their team more efficiently by figuring out which customers to interact with and and we do that through a bunch of stuff like bringing all the data together about your customers analyzing what's happening with those customers and then automating the workflow to manage that customer life cycle the other thing we do at gain site is help teach people about this because frankly this is new all of this is pretty relatively new you know some old Concepts but a lot of it's still pretty new so we have this great resource center online that gives you information on how to structure your team should they report to sales or Services how do you compensate them um we run this big conference unfortunately it was last week but we'll run it again next year videos will be online we had 900 people there last week all about best practices in driving growth through customer success and what was really cool I mean we have the CEO of maretto Viva systems Survey Monkey Evernote this stuff is really this area is strategic and so that's something you know those folks you know believe in this and hopefully a lot of you do as well so let with that let me pause for a couple question you got a couple minutes for questions so questions from the audience my name is mik I'm with in viio and we're actually experimenting right now with with applying actually turning taking your hourglass and turning it upside down so when we get prospects in the sandbox we're actually getting customer success people in there playing with them and then uh letting them know that you know when you're ready to convert I'll be the one that'll help you through the implementation process and I wonder if you've had any experience with that and any comments you can make on that yeah it's a great question I if I had more time I would have talked about that as part of driving growth I think getting csms in the sales process is a great idea the question is going to be uh workload balancing and scalability because a CSM will have a lot of tasks with existing customers and then sales Cycles can be a little unpredictable in some cases as you guys probably all know so that's the only challenge but we've actually been doing it we bring our csms into our sales cycle maybe one time so not the whole sales cycle but it's been really effective so good question in the back hi Nick uh great presentation thanks I got a two-part question the easy part and a hard part easy part the easy one writes on the previous question so who are really these customer success managers are they part of sales are they part of marketing or are we creating a whole new Silo that lives off the marketing budget great question yeah long long term I think it's actually a new Silo so just bottom line but I'm super biased so obviously take it with a great Assa but I really think that in the future you'll have marketing sales and customer success today most people have a report into either services and support or in sales um I actually don't think it matters massively either way it's more about the people you have as long as the person it reports into is thinking about growth so the only way you can fail at this is to just relabel customer support customer success if that's what you've done that's cool actually it's a bad idea for you're a CEO because all you've done is rais the salaries of your people because they're all going to get called by recruiters that's the only thing you've done if you if you want to do make a change have it reported into somebody who cares about growth uh the second part if I may um having run a bunch of sales teams in the past one of the challenges that I see and I know you talked about you know checking in is not customer success it's a lot beyond that and one of the challenges that I see is that salese are very reluctant to immerse themselves into some domain knowledge about the customer business I mean there is a certain element of knowledge that you need if you're a farmer client versus a media client versus is a telecom client you need to know something about the domain of the customer before you can even ask intelligent questions and and and Salesforce is very reluctant because they have blinders on they're focused on their quotas that's what matters to them really so how do you how do you get over this this this hurdle about getting people interested in you know knowing about the customers domain I think that's why honestly people are separating customer success from sales because a lot of sales DNA is exactly what you described I think a great CSM is like a business con consultant and they understand the client's real business need that's why it's a little different from sales for that reason so that's a very good question uh I don't do have time for one more are we we up one more all right last one sales put that in CSM measured on that with a quota or is that with the Reps come in in yeah we we had a great discussion on this at our conference last week and honestly there's like two totally different points of view on this so many I think more as companies get bigger they tend to actually like put more scrutiny on the ROI of the CSM and so a lot of them are actually giving the CSM renewal responsibility as well so that is happening in bigger I think in the early days it's worth separating it because I think in the early days the adoption and success of your customer isn't just about the renewal it's all the other stuff the advocacy the reference Etc and if you're just focused on the renewal you'll miss that so if you're I'd say sub 50 million my recommendation is renewal and installed based sales n CSM hand in hand but not the same person all right great awesome thanks so much here's to your success great