4 Customer Success Data Hacks to Identify your Ideal Customer Profile

1. 4 Customer Success Hacks to Identify your Ideal Customer Profile Lincoln Murphy September 2014 Customer Success Evangelist

2. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. Agenda 1. Methodology 2. Ideal Customer Profile 3. Ideal Customer Hacks 1. Surface Your Most Successful & Healthy Customers 2. Find Your Most Profitable Customers 3. Identify Customers with Expansion Potential 4. Leverage Your Army of Advocates 4. Q&A

3. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. Methodology 1. Get access to your Customer Success data 2. Look for patterns 3. These patterns will expose your Ideal Customers 4. Fill-in Ideal Customer Profile for those customers 5. Acquire Customers matching your Ideal Customer Profile 6. Profit!

7. Hack #1: Surface Your Most Successful Customers • Your Ideal Customers are the ones most likely to 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. achieve success with your product • Find those with the highest average lifetime Customer Health Score • They didn’t just achieve a high Customer Health Score two-years into their contract with you, but were healthy from the beginning and kept that up over time. And then we’ll look for patterns.

8. Hack #1: Surface Your Most Successful Customers • If you don’t have a Customer Success Management platform yet, an actual Customer Health Score may be hard to find – especially historically – so you’ll pull together other data points to try to come up with your own “Customer Health” score • Sure, a real Customer Success Management (CSM) solution like Gainsight could give you this report quickly, but even without that you should be able to get this data. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

9. Hack #1: Surface Your Most Successful Customers 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. • For instance, you could pull together: • average Net Promoter Score (NPS) over time • Sales cycle length • Time to first value • on-boarding/implementation milestones and timing • Customer Support data • and maybe get your Account Managers to apply a “health” score – based on their gut – to each of the customers they manage • Apply a “weight” to each input

10. Hack #1: Surface Your Most Successful Customers • You have to consider all on-boarding, customization, data seeding/cleansing, etc. • Also the technology/infrastructure requirements on their side • Is there an industry, company type or size, or revenue amount that appears to be more successful (healthy) than the others? • Did the companies that found success buy through a VAR? Was an internal champion present? 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

12. Hack #1: Surface Your Most Successful Customers • What are the patterns that seem to lead to success? • Understanding what goes into making your customers successful will surface ideas on what to look for in prospective customers. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

14. Hack #2: Find Your Most Profitable Customers • The definition of – or even the need for – profitably acquiring and supporting a customer changes depending on your company stage and goals. • Because of the deep dependence on the situation, I won’t spend a lot of time here except to say that acquiring customers has a cost and you may want to make sure you recoup that cost as quickly as possible. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

15. Hack #2: Find Your Most Profitable Customers • This cost is generally referred to as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and should be “fully loaded” including all the costs to: • Advertise to • Sell to • Support during a Free Trial or Proof of Concept • Convert to paying customer 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

16. Hack #2: Find Your Most Profitable Customers • If the sum of all that is less than the profit you get from them over some pre-determined time-frame (we’ll say in the first 12 months), then you can say that you’ll acquire them profitably. • But CAC isn’t the only cost you need to be aware of in figuring out the “Profitable” input for your Ideal Customer Profile. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

17. Hack #2: Find Your Most Profitable Customers • Need to figure in the immediate-post-sale costs such as: 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. • Onboarding • Provisioning • Data cleansing/seeding • Customization/configuration • Training, etc

18. Hack #2: Find Your Most Profitable Customers • And then the ongoing cost to support regular use: 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. • Infrastructure costs • Technical Support • Customer Success

19. Hack #2: Find Your Most Profitable Customers • The difference between skating by on razor-thin margins or living large with super-fat margins, ultimately comes down to the customers you acquire. • The customer you go after determines whether they’ll pay the premium price, whether their support costs are too high, their CAC is too high, sales cycles are too long, their customization/integration needs are too high, etc. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

20. Hack #2: Find Your Most Profitable Customers 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. • Some hacks are to look for customers: • That had a short sales cycle • Have a high LTV • Have long-term contracts • Frequently Increase usage/buy add-ons/etc. • Have a low cost to support • Or all of the above? • What are the patterns? What are the characteristics of those customers?

22. Hack #3: Identify Expansion Potential • This is what I refer to as Intra-Company Virality and provides you with tons of opportunity for Cross-Sell within the same company. • “Should we go after Enterprise or SME customers?” • This should be an input into answering that question • Now the real answer to the question – target Enterprise 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. or SMEs? – has many inputs: • sales cycle length • deal size • etc.

23. Hack #3: Identify Expansion Potential • But one input that few really consider is the Expansion 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. Potential of the account. • If you sell to a company with 25 employees and they buy 25 seats and have 100% usage, how do you expand the account? How do you grow revenue? You need additional features or non-user-based usage fees you can charge, right? • Because if you wanted to add just 1 more user, the company would literally have to grow by 4%.

25. Hack #3: Identify Expansion Potential • But if you sold that same 25 licenses with the same usage, into a department/org in a large Enterprise, if you wanted to grow the account by 1 user, they’d just add a user. • The department growing by 4% is nothing. A rounding 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. error.

26. Hack #3: Identify Expansion Potential • Couple that with other departments that are interested in what you have (which happens even more and a lot faster when you fully orchestrate this process; the “virality” piece I mentioned), and there is a ton of expansion potential. • Maybe the sales cycle will be longer for the initial Enterprise-focused sale (though if you do things right you can accelerate this significantly, especially in this land-and-expand fashion), but the long-term growth after the initial sale might just make it worthwhile. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

27. Hack #3: Identify Expansion Potential • And you should be able to gather from your Customer Success Management system a list of companies that have expanded their use over their lifetime with your company. • What are the patterns and common characteristics? 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. Who did you initially sell to? • What department/persona?

28. Hack #3: Identify Expansion Potential • When it comes to expansion potential, that potential is only realized when the customers have achieved success... when their customer health score is high. • No Customer Success… No Expansion Revenue. Period. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

30. Hack #4: Create an Army of Advocates • I think of Advocacy as Inter-Company Virality... • This is how boring ol’ B2B products “go viral” and it’s how you can leverage your focus on Customer Success to drive Second Order Revenue by having your customers bring you more customers. • Chasing logos is fine... but chase logos that’ll bring you 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. more logos!

31. Hack #4: Create an Army of Advocates • And the only way Advocacy happens is if customers 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. are finding success with your product. • If they’re ever going to be an advocate for you, it’s when their Customer Health Score is high. • No Customer Success... no Advocates. • And no “viral” growth, either! • So use your Customer Success Management solution to look for customers that have been your biggest advocates.

32. Hack #4: Create an Army of Advocates 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved. • Look for customers that have: • Referred new customers through their use of your product (think: they send a file, the recipient gets the file but also becomes a user and then a paying customer) • Have given testimonials • Have talked to prospects on your behalf • Have spoken at your events • Participated in case studies with you • Or with other vendors • Written guest posts for your blog • etc.

33. Hack #4: Create an Army of Advocates • While you may not WIN the deal because of the advocacy of your customers, you may be IN the deal because of it. • Don’t underestimate the value of Customer Advocacy. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

34. Hack #4: Create an Army of Advocates • When you pull this data on your biggest customer advocates – again, ensuring other situational parameters are set, too – what patterns emerge? • Types of customers? • Size of customers? • Industry? • LTV? • Now you take that Advocacy data and use that input in your Ideal Customer Profile and all of the sudden you have an amazing picture of your absolute Ideal Customer. 2014 Gainsight, Inc. All rights reserved.

4 Customer Success Data Hacks to Identify your Ideal Customer Profile

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