How to Leverage Customer Success to Grow Revenue

Customer success is one of the things SaaS companies operating in B2B environments leverage for revenue growth. However, increasing revenue by using customer success for your SaaS organization may not be a straightforward process. You need specific approaches to achieve the objective. This article looks at some of these techniques.

What is Customer Success?

Customer success is an approach to managing a business that prioritizes the needs of the clients. Organizations that utilize this ideology deliberately establish and maintain close relationships with their clients. The companies deliberately seek to understand what their customers like about their products and then use the feedback to improve service delivery and fuel growth.

Customer success means providing personalized support to the clients. If your organization uses this strategic approach, it will ensure it understands and addresses the needs of the customers. Customer success teams focus on identifying the problems that customers experience when using the products and ensuring they provide effective solutions. Therefore, customer success goes beyond customer retention strategies to helping companies grow by providing support to the clients.

What is Revenue Growth?

Revenue growth or expansion covers how companies try to increase sales income. Firms may grow their revenue in various ways. For example, a company can expand revenue by acquiring new customers. Alternatively, revenue growth can result from simply retaining the existing customers or using additional methods like upselling and cross-selling. You can monitor this using metrics like net retention rate or revenue retention rate.

You can expand the revenue of your business by simply retaining the existing customers instead of focusing on getting new ones. The costs of acquiring new clients are much higher than those of retaining those you already have.

Therefore, companies simply invest in customer retention management to help them avoid the costs of seeking new clients. Customer success helps firms to reduce overall customer churn and, thus, open new opportunities for increasing their revenue.

Customer Success and Revenue Growth

Customer success is one of the most important factors that drive revenue growth in SaaS organizations. Enterprises that understand the relationships between customer success and growth can easily use it to achieve their objectives.

However, using customer success to increase the revenue of your business requires a lot of skill and dedication. You must first identify the right opportunities for expanding the revenue of your SaaS company.

These opportunities should arise from how you engage and relate with the people who consume your products or services. Doing this goes beyond merely trying to have very high customer retention scores.

In addition, it means that you do not simply focus on squeezing more money from your customers but using renewal management techniques. Here are some of the methods businesses can use to increase their earnings from customer success.

1. Building an Effective Customer Support Team

Customer success teams are representatives of the customers within organizations. The teams comprise individuals who are dedicated to making the voice of the customer heard in internal processes within companies. Customer success teams help to ensure that the organization understands and responds to the needs of the clients when producing and delivering its products and services.

It is important to develop an effective customer success team for effective customer retention management. Having a good team in place requires several things and methods. Here are some of them.

• Prioritizing the input of customer success teams
  Customer success is not merely a simple function among organizations. It is now one of the most important approaches in the operational and strategic objectives of many companies. Ensure that your customer success team has a voice in the internal decision-making processes. Customer success professionals should participate in the making of key decisions that affect the products of the company.

• Helping the customer support team focus on growth
  Conventional customer success teams do not focus on the relationship between their work and the growth in the revenue of their organizations. However, business managers who would like to grow their revenue appreciate how customer support is a good place to start the process.
  
  A growth-focused customer support team is less reactive and more proactive in its approach. The professionals avoid focusing on addressing customer complaints only and attempt to anticipate issues and resolve them before they escalate.
  
  You can open up revenue-increasing opportunities in the organization by transforming the customer success team into one that focuses on growth. For example, doing this helps the account managers actively pursue new business opportunities for the company.
  
  Another benefit of helping customer success professionals focus on growth is that it gives your business a chance to engage with clients effectively. Growth-oriented account managers are likely to focus on retaining existing customers and obtaining new ones. Thus, their efforts may improve the net retention rates for the organization.

2. Creating a Comprehensive Plan

Your organization needs a comprehensive action plan to leverage customer success for revenue growth successfully. Having a plan in place helps your team members to have a strategic focus when doing their work. Customer success professionals can identify and categorize the accounts of the clients based on various factors like customer lifetime value. The professionals can then use the plan to develop interventions tailored to the customers.

An account growth plan has various components. Furthermore, the customer success team addresses each of these components when implementing the plan that determines the outcomes in the way.

• Clear action plans
  Your account growth plan must have clear action plans for the organization to increase its revenue growth targets. Outline the specific tasks, responsibilities, and steps that members of the customer care team should take to help realize the revenue expansion goals. The actions may include targeting high-end clients for cross-selling or upselling initiatives, giving personalized offers to other customers, and addressing specific types of complaints about the product. Also, these action steps should be in line with the overall strategic objectives of the organization.

• Measurable goals
  Good plans for leveraging customer success to drive revenue include processes for monitoring the progress. The customer success team needs to track the metrics of their initiatives. Important metrics such as net retention rate and revenue retention rate help the team assess the overall impact of their efforts on the revenue of the company.
  
  Furthermore, setting up milestones can help customer success teams understand the specific needs of their clients. The professionals can then tailor their responses to the specific needs of the clients. This approach can enhance the revenue retention rate and reduce churn for the benefit of the company. In the end, your organization will have an effective renewal management process in place.

• Feedback mechanism
  You need a robust customer feedback mechanism for the customer success plan of your SaaS company. A feedback mechanism helps the customer success professionals to capture the sentiments of the clients. The information from the customers is vital for improving the performance of the product over time.
  
  In addition, having a good feedback process in your plan helps to drive up revenue in many ways. For example, the customers feel more satisfied with the product if your company demonstrates that it understands and considers their input. Such customers are likely to renew their subscriptions, thus enhancing net revenue retention scores of your organization.

3. Monitoring Accounts

One of the primary functions of any customer success team in an organization is to monitor the health of the accounts. The teams consistently check the overall health of clients to determine whether there is a need to intervene urgently. This approach helps to reduce the overall customer churn rate and improves the outcomes of customer retention initiatives.

However, you can leverage customer success to grow revenue by doing several other things apart from simply monitoring the health of the accounts of your clients. Here are some of the technical steps related to account health you can take to expand revenue, reduce customer churn, and build the success of your SaaS business.

• Using Key Performance Indicators
  Identifying, tracking, and utilizing key performance indicators is critical for using customer success to expand revenue. Customer success teams usually access huge amounts of data about the health of the customer accounts. The data usually cover various types of metrics like usage, adoption, and even customer satisfaction.
  
  The teams must identify the metrics that matter for the organization and then track them for insights. For example, if your business sells a SaaS product, it makes sense to focus on metrics such as net revenue retention or renewal rate. 
  
  Such scores can help you understand aspects like customer lifetime value and net retention. You can then use them to identify the accounts that need urgent intervention.

• Integrating performance outcomes with other customer processes
  Monitoring key metrics is not enough to help you grow the revenue of your organization. The key to revenue expansion is integrating the outcomes with customer flows and other related processes. You can use the outcomes on customer lifetime value and net retention rate to shape customer onboarding, training, and support processes in the organization.
  
  Using metrics on customer health accounts on other processes is beneficial in many ways. For example, the data can help you be more proactive in the way you handle the clients. The customer success team can quickly identify accounts that show signs of stopping to use the product. The team can then communicate with the customers to address the underlying issues and reduce the overall churn rate. In turn, the organization can benefit from increased revenue.

• Sharing metrics across the organization
  Customer success teams do not work in isolation. Companies that focus on this strategy ensure that the customer support teams are involved in many other processes and functions. Thus, it makes sense for the customer support team to share the data with other functions within the organization to facilitate effective decision-making for the benefit of the client.
  
  Sharing data about account health with the client may also be appropriate. However, this depends on the nature of the product and industry in which the company operates. Typically, sharing information with the client has one purpose: to help them understand that the organization is addressing their issues. This approach helps to encourage the clients to continue using the product of the organization and may lead to increased revenue over time.

4. Focusing on Subscription Renewals and Customer Retention

SaaS companies should monitor customer retention and renewal data closely. These and other related measures are good indicators of the overall performance of the organization. A decline in new subscriptions means that your customer success team needs to identify and address the issues causing low uptake of the product.

Similarly, when many clients are not renewing their subscriptions to your product, the customer success team needs to address the problem to protect the revenue streams of the company.

• Mapping the customer journey
  Your clients move through a complex process before finally signing up for the product. This customer journey begins at the time when they get into contact wit the product and typically ends with the subscription.
  
  Effective customer retention management relies on understanding and optimizing the customer journey map. You should identify important touch points in the journey and optimize your interventions to maximize the rates of subscriptions and reduce those of clients failing to sign up for the product.

• Understand your customers
  Customer retention strategies depend on a deep understanding of the needs of the customers. Having a deep knowledge of the unique needs of your customers helps you to serve them better and improve your retention strategies.
  
  It is possible to improve the outcomes of your renewal management initiatives by understanding how your customers behave when purchasing and using the product. Customer success teams can do this by developing customer personas using psychographic and demographic criteria.
  
  Data from the customer personas is valuable for optimizing campaigns. The customer success team can utilize it to develop and implement marketing initiatives that address the needs of customers who fall into specific personas to improve net revenue retention scores.
  
  Therefore, you can improve the revenue retention rate of your SaaS business by giving your customers personalized support services based on a deep understanding of their behavior when they are using the product.

Conclusion

Retaining clients is a better way of growing the revenue of your B2B SaaS business. The costs of obtaining new clients are typically higher than those of retaining those who are already paying for the product. You can leverage customer success for revenue growth by focusing on customer renewal and retention metrics. Also, put in place a customer success team and ensure it focuses on revenue growth and expansion. Lastly, monitor the health of customer accounts and implement intervention measures whenever it is necessary.