With B2B organizations migrating away from functional silos in favor of a connected model, formed around Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Product functions united within a Revenue Team, Chief Revenue Officers and CS leaders are tasked with retooling to yield more revenue-accountable Success teams.
Here are five ways to reorient your Customer function away from legacy tactics and metrics to realize your vision of creating a growth-oriented Success team.
1) End the Input-Driven Culture
Traditional Customer Service functions, even the proactive ones, are input-driven, meaning the majority of activity is actioned reactively to customer requests/issues or time-specific client contract renewal engagement activity.
Building a more proactive culture within CS that goes beyond basic retention to continuously identify growth opportunities and undertakes strategic actions to expand existing client/user relationships is cornerstone to creating a revenue-oriented function.
2) Set Revenue-Accountable Success Metrics
The old way to judge the effectiveness of a CS function places all the emphasis on metrics like renewal %, Customer Satisfaction, and churn. While these elements are certainly important guideposts, they’re the CS equivalent of MQLs and Likes – vanity metrics that cause us to stray from what actually matters.
And what actually matters is growth.
A revenue accountable CS function is built around leading metrics such as usage, time, adoption, growth and ultimately Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).
In an ecosystem where more and more of us in B2B are adopting subscription economy models and deploying revenue frameworks that include zero-dollar at closed won engagements with usage-driven revenue models, this modernization of goal setting is unavoidable.
3) Build a Frictionless Customer Experience
A key reason for the migration toward the Revenue Team organizational philosophy is the overdue admission that the length of time we’ve spent attempting to align Sales and Marketing teams is evidence that these efforts were always a fool’s errand of Sisyphean proportion.
Within an optimized Revenue Team, the friction around alignment and handoffs is replaced with connected functional activity built around creating exceptional customer experience. And the need to de-silo the CS function and remove many of those same point-of-friction pitfalls that also exist between Sales and Customer functions cannot be overlooked.
After all, the customer only cares about the quality of their experience, not who “owns” the next touch.
4) Transfer Digital Strategy into Customer Success
While new business will remain the central focus of growth-minded businesses for the duration, it’s more important than ever to reprioritize strategic planning to include CS-driven growth.
Think about it. The average customer journey last something in the six to nine month range, of course with variances based on market and product-specific factors, but a good customer can last an exponential multiple of that timeframe. Expanding the scope of vision to a more holistic revenue journey that includes and proportionately prioritizes post-sale growth presents an obvious opportunity.
This will include building a growth strategy inclusive of the Customer function and giving CS teams the tools they need to successfully achieve their revenue targets.
Whether it’s augmenting your customer or buyer persona library to include User Personas or expanding your always-on campaigns to include post-sale nurture cadences aimed at increasing usage and/or expanding adoption (selling more seats) within existing engagements, you’re strategic thinking will not just go beyond MQL, but also beyond Closed Won.
5) Adopt User Revenue Management Frameworks for Growth
Especially true for those dealing in whole or part with zero-dollar at closed won deals as well as those operating within businesses built around product-led growth revenue models, there’s a need to expand your fundamental ARR expansion equations.
When operating within these parameters, simply maximizing new business wins and limiting churn will only yield a race to the bottom.
On the other hand, successful businesses will champion a new formula for growth that is, at least in part, inclusive of the maximization of how many users you’re attracting and how much time they’re devoting to engaging with your solution.
In short… Revenue = Usage x Time. Or what we call User Revenue Management.
How to Get Started?
At Ledger Bennett we go beyond the call of the traditional B2B Marketing Agency to serve as the end-to-end partner for modern Revenue Teams, with solutions to link composite Sales, Marketing and Success functions, and optimize everything from top-of-funnel activity to LTV.
By building client strategy and execution around a First Touch to Forever philosophy, we enable connected Revenue Team actions that yield optimal customer experience with frictionless journeys to revenue.
Contact Ledger Bennett today to transform your Customer Success function into a high-performing revenue growth engine.