Traces the origins of the customer success movement and describes what it takes to build an effective customer success organization.

1. Becoming a Customer Success Professional

2. The customer success movement
At the end of the 2000s, the newly labeled SaaS industry is struggling with
an issue: Retention.
Prior to subscription software, on-premise software companies would
typically have:
• Sales people bring in new business
• Account managers focus on upselling
• Tech support would be there to solve problems
SaaS had a problem, they were an industry that was based entirely on
renewable subscriptions and yet their customers had the ability to be as
fickle and disloyal as they wished

3. The solution
To engage their customers by making sure their software stayed relevant to
their customers’ business. By managing their relationship with each
individual customer in order to give each customer the most success
possible with a product, SaaS companies were able to retain customers and
with it Customer Success came into its own.

4. Salesforce coins the term “customer success”
In 2014, Salesforce made headlines with a major strategic shift from a sales-
driven CRM company to one focused on long-term customer success.
Customer success management has quantifiable economic benefits for a
SaaS Enterprise:
• Actively managing customers reduces churn
• Introduced the notion of product adoption
• Drives Upsells

5. Why focus on customer success?
As we scale, replacing churn with new bookings becomes harder and harder!
The health of a SaaS business is directly tied to its ability to retain its
customers and prevent churn.

6. Driving product adoption is critical
If you are in a reoccurring revenue business, most of your revenue comes
after the initial sale – proving value is critical!

7. Articulating value yields returns
Happy customers lead to upsells and new business!

8. Customer success goals
To reduce churn, drive product adoption,
and upsell…. we need the resources and
processes in place to help our customers
be happy and see value.

9. Becoming a customer success professional
Customer Success Professionals are first and foremost client advocates!
They have a broad set of responsibilities and work proactively with
customers and colleagues to ensure their ongoing success.

10. An effective customer success manager will…
• Make sure programs, processes, and tools are in place to ensure new
clients successfully launch and see the full value of your platform
• Ensure existing customers are getting the most out of our products and
service and remain happy, paying customers and brand advocates
• Collect customer feedback and use cases to guide product roadmap and
marketing initiatives
• Identify and engage at-risk accounts to prevent churn
• Drive new initiatives that create added-value for the customer
• Understand how the pieces of the company organizational puzzle fit
together
We are ALL accountable for our customers’ success!