The future of Customer Success

Last week I participated in a Customer Success Meetup in San Francisco (thanks John Gleeson for hosting) and that was the conversation about: what the future of Customer Success (CS) looks like from the perspective of two Venture Capitalists who have recently made investments in the space. The guests were Gaurav Jain, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Afore Capital, and Vas Natarajan, Partner at Accel Capital. I would like to share my notes (and questions) with you:

• Customer Success is a very important matter. A good example of what happens if you don’t care about it is what happened to Blackberry.
• Product Market Fit can be verified in early-stage startups when a customer is able to renew services after a year.
• When choosing a new company to invest, they evaluate if the company has an engine for CS or if they will have to invest a lot of money in marketing in order to bring new customers/keeping them.
• A measure you could use to decide when to bring the first Customer Success onboard to your company is having around 20 to 50 customers.
• Customer Success Managers are the voice of the customers, therefore they are useful for helping you to find PMF when you are starting a new business.
• It’s important founders believe in CSM and, if they don’t have a dedicated person, they should spend part of their time executing this function from the early days.
• You must have reports that show you how much time you spend with specific customers and which clients are more profitable.
• Also, you can’t serve the customers in the same way, it’s important to segment the customers.
• There’s a complexity when evaluating your customers, as a CSM you have to interact with many tools. Something (more) unified is needed.
• They see a trend of Customers Success overtaking Sales in the future, regards to the number of employees. There’s and it’s gonna be bigger the need for talents.
• Maybe this one seems obvious, but when you look at what the companies are doing, you realize it is not: it’s more difficult to scale on the sales side (effort of acquiring more logos). Nowadays it is much harder to stand out (that’s why CSM is even more important!! 😎).
• When preparing/promoting people to become CSM, a Sales Engineer is a good fit to be a first CSM at your company.
• Which one you should invest in? Product or CSM? 🤔
• Sharing slack channels with your portfolio of customers could be a best practice, but it usually works for some accounts (power users). The benefit is the perception to your customer you are accessible (it’s easy). The clients like the concept of even though you are not getting the advantage of it, it is available for you.
• Retention is a pretty important metric. Plus, measuring if the customers are referencing your company (customer advocacy), if they became champions?📣
• How to decide if you are hiring enough capacity? You have to realize when you automate processes instead of hiring. 🧩
• How can we start helping customers to self-succeed? You should observe how to teach and engaging the customer deeper.🔬
• Offering professional service is always important, even in the early stages. It pays off because you can reduce customer support and it impacts the expansion/upselling. 🤑
• Ask yourself if you really need many different people touching the customers, like SDR, Sales, Onboarding, etc? 🤔
• An entry point to start a Customer Success Manager career could be working in Customer Support.

I always learn so much in those meetups! 😍 If you care about making your organization more customer-centric like I do, this meeting occurs every month in different locations in San Francisco. If you want to know more about it, you can access the group in Meetup. Stay tuned for more posts about Customer Success! 📻