CUSTOMER SUCCESS

CONTENT CREATOR
How to build your personal brand
and never run out of demand for
your services.

Remark-able
 Table of Contents
03 - Churn

16 - Onboarding
23 - Customer Success Manager
36 - Customer Success Metrics
39 - Improving Customer Success
55 - Various
73 - CS Content Ideas

79 - Headline Ideas
82 - Best Practices
CHAPTER 1 - CHURN
Acquiring a bad-fit customer is acquiring churn.

It can't be said often enough.

Customer success managers can make all the difference but they are not magicians.

If

- the product does not fit the customers' needs

- they lack of basic skills and knowledge
- they are not willing to put in the effort required
- they don't follow the advice

they will never become successful.

On the contrary, the longer they stay the more costly they will become and the more
frustrated they will create.

And in the end, they will churn anyway and might even leave a negative review.

But it does not stop there.

Because you could have spent the time you've wasted with your great-fit customers
creating value for them and your business.

By the time you get back at them, these customers might be gone.

Customer quality > quantity any day.

Sort out your customer portfolio and stop the inflow of bad-fit customers.
I haven’t met a single SaaS company with an ultra-low churn rate where the CEO was not
involved.

But I’ve seen a ton with awfully high ones where the CS team owned churn and the blame for
it.

So let me say this loud and clear:

A high churn rate is a leadership issue.

Because churn happens when customers didn’t get enough value due to these 7 reasons

1. The product does not solve the customer's problem

2. Product flaws and/or frequent downtimes cause customers to leave before they see value
in the product
3. Customers come with the wrong expectations about the outcomes.
4. Customers don’t possess the means to become successful or are likely to acquire them in
the process.
5. The customer onboarding does not give customers quick wins to get their buy-in for the
long game
6. Customer support did not resolve issues in a timely and/or satisfying manner.
7. The customer success team failed to help customers achieve their

and the CEO is the only one in charge of product, marketing, sales, customer support, and
customer success.

This is what I call the “Churn Funnel” (added 3 more dimensions to prior versions).

A top-down approach to fix churn with the right measures at the right stage in the customer
lifecycle.

Want to reduce churn once and for all?

Give this a shot.

Churn is a strategic problem and that’s why so many SaaS companies struggle with it.

It’s NOT exclusively owned by the customer success team.

Because churn happens after the purchase but that does not mean that this is where it’s
caused.

That’s why generic advice like “improve your onboarding” is not really helpful.

Because even the best onboarding won’t change a thing if customers come with the wrong
expectations.

If you are serious about resolving churn you need to find out where and why it’s been
caused.

It’s essentially asking these 4 questions:

1. Customer expectations: Do the customers understand what we are offering?

2. Customer-Product-fit: Does the product fit the customers’ needs and do they possess the
means to become successful?
3. Customer Onboarding: Do the customers get quick wins?
4. Customer success: Do the customers achieve their goals repeatedly?

This is what I like to call the churn funnel.

Because customers with wrong expectations should never get to talk to sales.

Because customers who are a bad fit should never get onboarded.

If you want to fix churn you need to resolve its causes at the right stage of the customer
journey.

A low churn rate is essential to achieving high Net Revenue Retention.

Stop treating symptoms and start eliminating the causes.

Churn is an early-stage problem caused by the lack of customer insights.

But 95% of SaaS companies still fail to eliminate churn as they mature and here’s why

- They don’t understand what churn really is

- They don’t understand why customers really churn as they don’t - mine the right data
- They are treating the symptoms with random tactics and band-aid solutions.

Customer success and churn are 2 sides of the same medal.

If customers fail to achieve their goals they will churn - it’s really that simple - everything
besides external reasons you can't control eventually comes down to it.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Determine customer profitability

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - not all churn is bad. If a customer who’s been a pain
in the a** and required a ton of attention causing negative margins there’s no reason to
mourn. By determining your customers’ profitability you can separate good from bad
churn.

2. Identify the TRUE reasons for churn

“The product is too expensive” is just one of the reasons customers give why they churn. But
what they say is that they did not get enough value and need to find out why. I recommend
the “5-Why” framework to find the cause.

3. Determine recurring patterns

It’s impossible to fix all churn, at least not in an economical way. Follow the 80-20 rule and
eliminate the 20% churn reasons responsible for 80% of your losses (roughly). This is what I
consider systematical churn as opposed to the remaining random churn.

4. Fix it top-down

All churn happens after the purchase but that does not mean that’s where it’s caused. If
customers come with the wrong expectations turning your onboarding upside down won’t
solve the problem.

Deal with churn once and for all.

Make it your top priority.

Churn and customer retention are not black and white.

There’s good churn and there’s bad retention.

Good churn happens when bad-fit customers leave.

Customers who

- Need help 24/7/365 (exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect) but still don’t succeed
- Don’t follow your advice but complain about a lack of results (my personal favorite)
- Don’t show up to scheduled meetings repeatedly without any excuse
-…

Bad retention, which I like to call “inverse churn”, is when they don’t leave despite a lack of
success.

In that case, you need to politely show them the door because they waste your resources.

It’s not that you should give up on them quickly but at some point, it just does not make
sense to keep trying any longer.

With the resources freed up, you can focus on growing the value for your great fit
customers.

The additional revenue you’ll create will easily outweigh the revenue lost from “forced
churn”.

NRR is the new gold standard in SaaS and it requires a high-quality customer portfolio.
Bad CEOs blame the Customer Success Team for churn.

Average CEO understand that churn is a company-wide problem.

Legendary CEOs lead the project to take it down.

The numbers are crystal clear

- Companies are losing $ 1.6 trillion of revenue through a churn in the US alone (Accenture)
- A 5% increase in customer retention leads to 25-95% higher profits (Harvard Business
Review)
- It costs at least 5 times as much to bring in a new customer than to retain an existing one
(Gartner)

You know what to do.

“The product is too expensive”
“Feature X is missing”
“We got our budget cut and have to drop your product”

3 of the most popular reasons customers give you why they churn.

You’ve probably heard them all.

But the thing is that none actually tells the truth.

Because what these customers are really saying is

- We did not get enough value for what we pay

- The product was not the right fit
- We will continue to pay only for the essential tools

Why does that matter?

Without understanding why customers really churn you are doomed to set measures that
won’t solve the roots of the problem but harm your business e.g.

- Reducing your prices

- Building features for bad-fit customers
- Giving large discounts

What you need to understand is that in the end, aside from external reasons, all churn
comes down to customers not getting enough value.

The lack of value falls into these 4 buckets

- unrealistic/misguided expectations
- lack of customer-product-fit
- didn’t get first value during the onboarding (fast enough)
- failed to achieve their goals

and that’s what you need to fix if you want to eliminate churn once and for all.

The best-in-class SaaS companies have churn rates as low as 3%.

You can get there too.

The sales team plays a vital part in customer success for SaaS companies.

Because acquiring bad-fit customers is acquiring churn.

Churn that’s inevitable while a lot of resources are potentially thrown into it.

Sales’ purpose in SaaS is to find the right solutions for potential customers.

That also means walking back if you don’t have the right product for the customers’ needs.

It’s about starting to build long-term relationships built on trust and mutual benefit.

But as usual, the problem starts at the top.

Many sales teams are forced to oversell and close every deal possible to meet their
ridiculous quotas and short-term goals to keep the company board happy.

That’s not how you build a sustainable SaaS business.

SaaS sales need to shift from high-volume sales to targeted acquisitions of customers with
high success potential.

Act accordingly.

#saas #customersuccess #customervalueledgrowth

The opposite of churn is not retention - it’s customer success.

Because churn is merely the consequence of customers failing to achieve their goals.

Churn only happens after the purchase but that does not mean that’s where it’s caused.

In order to achieve success for your customers, you need to master all the stages in the
lifecycle.

There are at least 4 different stages you need to get “right”.

As life is not fair it only takes one “wrong” to cause customer churn.

A lot of SaaS companies have a painfully high churn rate because they don’t understand it.

And it’s becoming worse as customer expectations grow and their willingness to pay for
mediocre outcomes moves towards zero.

It can’t be said often enough that customer success and churn are not owned by the
customer success team.

Customer success and churn are everybody’s responsibility.

The companies who figure it out will be the winners of the recession.

#saas #customersuccess #customervalueledgrowth #netrevenueretention #churn

I hope that soon I’ll no longer have to say it because it has become common knowledge:

Churn is not a customer success team problem.

It’s a strategic, company-wide issue.

That’s why generic advice like “improve your onboarding” is not really helpful.

Because a great onboarding can’t change misguided expectations or lack of customer-

product fit.

Churn happens when customers fail to achieve their desired outcomes.

They don’t churn because

- the price was too high, they did it because they did not get enough value
- a competitor has a better offer, they did not get enough value from your product
- their budget was cut, and they stop paying for the tools that don’t deliver enough value

The lack of value unfolds after the purchase but that does not mean where it’s caused.

Its seeds can be laid throughout the whole customer journey and this is why everybody is
responsible for churn.

Your churn analysis needs to identify WHAT caused customers' failure to achieve their
desired outcomes and WHEN it happens.

That’s what I like to call the churn funnel - a top-down approach to resolve churn in the
most effective and efficient way:

1. Positioning: Does the customer come with the right expectations?

2. Customer-product-fit: Does the product fit the customer’s needs and does the customer
possess the means to achieve/can acquire them through your services?

3. Onboarding: Do you deliver quick wins to verify your customer’s purchase decisions and
get their full commitment?

4. Customer success: Does your success program eliminate all roadblocks that keep the
customer from reaching the promised land?

If the answer to one of these questions is “no” customers will fail and churn is the logical
consequence.

Fix churn with the right measures at the right stage in the customer lifecycle.

Because you can no longer afford to waste time treating the symptoms with random
tactics.
CHAPTER 2 - ONBOARDING
Customer onboarding is NOT a product demo.

It’s not about introducing customers to each and every feature.

They will get lost, lose their motivation, and quit.

The goal of customer onboarding is to give your customers quick wins to

- Verify their purchase decision

- Get their long-term commitment
- Earn renewals and possibly additional sales

Stop with the madness

The goal of customer onboarding = giving your customers quick wins

It’s arguably the most important part of the journey.

Because there’s no second chance for a great first impression.

However, most SaaS companies don’t understand why it’s so important so please let me
explain:

- Your customers bought your product because they want the outcomes you’ve promised.
- But it takes weeks, months, or even years until they achieve their goals and a lot of effort.
- They are not patient and need a “proof of concept” before they commit.
- You need to show your customers that they’ve made the right choice by giving them quick
wins.

Align all your efforts to that single mission and goal.

However, the way to successful customer onboarding is not free of pitfalls.

There are 7 deadly sins you need to avoid:

1. Guessing and assuming about customer needs

Successful customer onboarding does not happen by accident, it’s engineered. If you don’t
spend time discovering your customers’ needs and priorities you’ll leave it to chance.

2. Lack of customization

This is not groundbreaking news but every customer is different. Even 2 companies from the
same industry, roughly the same size who share the same goal have the same needs and
priorities.

3. Focus on features and functions

It’s hard to kill but your customers don’t care about your product. For them, it’s just a tool
designed to help them get what they really want.

4. Overwhelming customers:

You know your product inside out and that’s great. But your customers don’t. Everything is
new to them and there’s only a certain amount of information they can process. If you
overwhelm them they will get lost, nothing done, and leave.

5. Not building relationships:

A great first impression is not restricted to your product. If you show up genuinely caring
about your customers’ success from the very first second you’ll grow much stronger bonds.
6. Not measuring customer outcomes

Customers care about their outcomes. They don’t give a damn about your internal
statistics. They want value and they want it fast. That’s what you need to deliver and that’s
what you need to measure.

7. Not sourcing customer feedback

If you don’t understand what works, what does not, and why you are doomed to repeat the
same mistakes over and over. Ask your customers what keeps them from achieving quick
wins and what you could do better.

Customer onboarding is super important.

Stop screwing it up once and for all.

Customer onboarding is the single most important step in the customer lifecycle.

Because the first impression lasts for a long time.

But many SaaS companies do a very poor job. Here’s why:

1. Focus on features and functions

You love your product and you are right to do so. But you need to understand that
customers don’t care about it. They are here for the outcomes that have been promised. The
goal of your onboarding is to give them quick wins.

2. Lack of customization

It’s not a groundbreaking observation that every customer is different. They may be in the
same industry and have roughly the same size but that does not mean they have the same
needs. Because they still may differ in terms of skills, knowledge, processes, company
culture, etc.

3. Guessing and assuming

Before you can customize your onboarding you need to understand where your customers
start and what they need to do first. There’s no substitute for an old-fashioned discovery
whether it’s human, human-assisted, or completely automated.

4. Overwhelming customers:

Customer onboarding is neither the time nor place to impress your customers with
everything you’ve got. There’s only so much information human beings can process at a
time. If they feel overwhelmed they’ll get nothing done, become frustrated, and be gone.

5. The wrong metrics

Customers only care about outcomes and not your internal statistics. What you need to
measure is your delivery performance. Time to value and accuracy - % of initial goals
achieved within a specific amount of time are critical. This is what you need to constantly
improve.

6. Lack of feedback

Without understanding what works, what does not, and why you are doomed to repeat the
same mistakes over and over. Ask your customers why kept them from achieving their
goals and what you could have done better.
Great customer onboarding is the key to successful long-term customer relationships.

If you delight your customers from the very first moment you’ll

- verify their purchase decision

- earn their commitment
- and possibly get them to buy more already

If you turn them off immediately, they will be gone in an instant and never look back.

Act accordingly.

#saas #customersuccess #customervalueledgrowth #netrevenueretention #onboarding

How to master customer onboarding

- Most SaaS companies lose 75% of their new users within the first week.
- 40 to 60% of free trial users will use your product once and never come back.

The data leaves no doubt that onboarding is the most important step in the customer
lifecycle. Because customers need proof of value before they commit to playing the long
game. If they don’t see it quickly they are gone and never come back.

Here’s how to ensure your customers receive a great first impression:

1. Stop talking about your product

I get it, you have a great product and you are madly in love with it. But your customers don’t
care. They didn’t buy the product for its features and functions. To them, it’s merely the tool
that helps them what they really want- their desired outcomes.

If you haven’t done it before you should translate your product’s capabilities into the
problems it solves. The most effective way, as always, is to ask your existing customers
about how it helped them to achieve their goals.

2. Understand your customers’ needs

As you’ve seen above, you have to deliver value fast. If you ask your customers, they will
want to see results by yesterday. There’s no room for guessing and assuming. Your
customers’ needs are determined by the gap between where they are now and where they
want to go.

Of course, you can’t deliver on the customers' big long-term goal within days or weeks. But
you can help achieve the first of many milestones. That means you need to deconstruct the
overall goal into pieces and put them into the right order.

In the next step, you need to understand where your customers start in terms of
performance, skills, and knowledge. If you are selling sales software the first milestone
could be to create a list of ICP customers. What do your customers require to build that list?

3. Segment customers by their needs

Never follow a one-size-fits-all approach for your customer onboarding. Because even
when you have 2 customers from the same industry, roughly the same size, and the same
goal it does not mean they have the same problems and priorities.

Customer segmentation is a powerful tool to improve the odds of a successful outcome. But
most companies use it the wrong way. The purpose is not to make it easier for you to
distribute customers within your organization.

It’s to be able to focus on building expertise in solving the same problems better and faster
through higher repetition.
CHAPTER 3 - CUSTOMER
SUCCESS MANAGER
There are 3 types of customer success managers:

1. "Customers will reach out if they need my help" --> What if they don't? (Research says
most of them just disappear)

2. "I'll reach out to customers if I anticipate they have a problem" --> What if you don't see
them? (Customers "surprisingly" churn all the time)

3. "I'll take the lead and make sure customers will achieve their goals"

Aim to be part of the last group.

You can't afford to be not in control of your customers' progress anymore

Experience in customer success is overrated.

What matters are your people's skills.

You either have it or you don't.

Hire for personality, not profiles.

Old game: Customer Success Manager = Product educator

New game: Customer Success Manager = Strategic advisor

The level SaaS companies compete today is customer success.

It does not matter how awesome your product is - if customers don’t achieve their goals
they will eventually churn.

The technology is NOT your customers’ bottleneck but their limited skills and knowledge.

Unless you make it a requirement for your lead qualification most of your customers don’t
perform on an expert level.

And bad input will always lead to bad output.

As a consequence, it’s your mission to help your customers build excellence on the job for
which they need your product.

And the only way to do that is if you build subject expertise on your own or even better -
thought leadership.

That’s why you need to invest in building a high-performing CS team that acts as strategic
advisors (even better when you invest in all teams).

It’s an investment that delivers a tremendous ROI because the better your customers
perform, the more demand for upsells and expansions they will create to further scale their
value.

NRR is the new gold standard in SaaS.

Metrics most CSMs talk about

- Health scores
- NPS
- CSAT
- CES
- Product usage

Metrics they should be talking about:

- Customer outcomes
- Expansions & upsells
- New acquisition revenue from referrals
- Net Revenue Retention
- Customer Lifetime Value (Growth)

The first group always gets asked, “What’s the ROI of customer success?”

The second one gives a decisive answer.

Which group do you belong to?

Everyone in Customer Success talks about becoming a trusted advisor

But the truth is that many CSMs are not even close.

Because they don't have the right

- mindset
- approach
- data (yes, that matters too)

You don't become a trusted advisor by

- checking in once a month

- pointing customers to generic content that does not solve their problem
- talking about stuff customers don't care during your QBRs

What you need to do instead:

- asking questions to understand your customers' needs

- creating customized success plans
- scheduling follow-ups to ensure their progress
- treating QBRs as strategic meetings to discuss results, plan the next steps and get
feedback
- showing that you really care about their success by going an extra mile if necessary

Becoming your customers trusted advisor has to be earned.

There are no shortcuts.

Act accordingly.
The old customer success manager:

- product educator
- random vendor employee
- churn firefighter
- prioritizes scalability
- optimizes internal metrics

The new customer success manager:

- subject expert and problem solver

- trusted advisor
- growth accelerator
- prioritizes effectiveness
- optimizes customer value

Are you ready for the new era?

The 7 questions every CSM needs to be able to answer:

- What is the customer’s goal?

- How is it measured?
- What is the customer’s problem?
- Why does this problem exist?
- How can it be solved?
- What do we need to provide in order to do so?
- Did our customers get their desired outcomes?

Because this is what customer success is all about.

Everything else is redundant.

Customer success needs to become simple, effective, and customer-centric.

Customer success managers are burning out left and right.

Because they are not doing actual customer success.

They are firefighting, band-aiding, and quick-fixing.

High stress levels, underwhelming results, and lack of purpose.

None becomes a CSM to spend most of their days like that.

Customer success does not work how CS software vendors would like it to.

Measuring data that’s easy to collect and running automated playbooks based on what it
says.

It’s built on guessing and assuming and the reactive work is CSMs fixing the bets that
turned out to be wrong.

Trying to last-minute save customers with green health scores from churn is the perfect
example.

The way out is to put your customers front and center.

You need to complete a 180° mind shift and rebuild your strategies, frameworks, processes,
playbooks, etc. from the customers' point of view.

Because when you REALLY focus on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes
you’ll

- Do your best work and use your whole potential

- Build and grow valuable skills and knowledge
- Become a trusted advisor and celebrate wins with your customers
- Grow the value of your customer portfolio and advance your career
- And most importantly enjoy working on customer success
You don’t need to know everything about customer success to be a successful CS

You don’t need to have dozens of playbooks.

You don’t need customer engagement plans in book size.

You don’t need 100 different internal metrics.

What you need to do is make customer success simple, effective, and customer-centric.

- Understand your customers’ needs (= goals - starting point)

- Create a roadmap on how to take them from A to B
- Help them build the skills and knowledge they need to solve their problems
- Build relationships where customers want to engage with you
- Measure progress with the metrics that matter for your customers

That’s it.
The best Customer Success Managers

1. Never skip discovery/kick-off meetings.

2. Ask open questions but let customers do the talking.

3. Work to understand their customers' business, goals, and problems.

4. Create success plans to bridge the gap between "now" and "then"

5. Track the outcomes customers care about

6. Treat customer success as their success

7. Prioritize customer success over scalability

8. Master the subject to qualify as advisor

9. Turn QBRs into a delightful experience

10. Don't know all the answers but will find them

Are you one of them?

#saas #customersuccess #customervalueledgrowth

How to excel as a Customer Success Manager

These are challenging times for customer success managers as their customers'
expectations are higher than ever.

But at the same time, it's a unique opportunity because customers will redistribute their
spending according to the ROI they get.

Companies need to enable customer success excellence but it also requires CSMs to
upgrade their game.

Here’s how:

1. Change of mindset

This is the most important thing. If you don’t bring the right mindset, you are doomed to fail
in the new reality.

• It’s no longer enough to be a product expert. Because the technology is not your
customers’ bottleneck but their skills and knowledge.
• Customer success is also no longer about monitoring customers and reaching out if you
anticipate a roadblock. It’s about leading customers to their desired outcomes -
intentionally, accurately, and repeatedly.
• The technology has to follow the strategy and not the other way around. And the strategy
follows the customers’ needs. You have to prioritize customer needs over convenience and
scalability.

2. Knowledge

If you want to help your customers solve their business problems you need to build subject
expertise. Start by studying content in your space. An effective way for some products is to
follow thought leaders with relevance for your market space (especially in marketing and
sales).

It’s also legit to learn from your customers. Identify the most successful ones that rarely, if
ever, require your help. Ask them to share how they’ve solved their problems and turned
them into outcomes.
It's not the CSMs' job to discover the customer goals.

The CSMs mission is to deliver what has been promised.

Unfortunately, many SaaS companies don’t actively manage customer expectations.

They also don’t spend time finding out during the sales process.

But what happens when you leave it to the CSM and they find out that they can’t deliver
what the customer wants?

You’ve wasted money on acquiring inevitable churn.

Worse if CSMs are additionally tasked to do everything to prevent churn.

It’s just wasting more time and money.

You need to identify the customers’ goals right from the beginning.

And the best way to do it is to set the narrative yourself.

So customers buy your product because they want the goal you are offering.

Your product is not the solution for everyone and every use case.

Customer success starts with setting the right expectations from the very beginning.

PS: Customer goals don't change - they evolve. Yes, if customers move on to the next goal
CSMs are deeply involved. Because without customers would not reach for the higher
hanging fruit.
CHAPTER 4 - CUSTOMER
SUCCESS METRICS
Health scores, Net promoter scores, and their relatives are NOT customer success KPIs.

They are internal statistics that do not tell the true customer story.

Just because everybody’s using them does not make them any more accurate.

Customer success KPIs are the ones your customers use whether they are of quantitative or
qualitative nature.

Customers buy your product because they want to increase their revenue, reduce costs,
improve productivity, and all their personal goals related.

- A healthy customer is a successful customer.

- A high net promoter score does NOT EVEN guarantee that the customer will renew
- The only thing measuring user activity will tell you is that inactive users won’t achieve any
results.

You need to stop measuring what’s convenient and start measuring what matters.

How do you get information about your customers' goals and metrics?

It does not matter what they’ll use, what matters is to create accountability on both sides.

The surprisingly unsurprising answer - you simply ask.

If they don’t know, help them find out and if that does not work either - make a proposal for
a shared metric system.

Take customer success back to where it belongs

Old metric = Net promoter score

New metric = referrals per customer

It's time we stop measuring pointless vanity metrics with and start measuring revenue
impact on customer success.

"What's the ROI of customer success?" will be answered once and for all.
CHAPTER 5 - IMPROVING
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
Want to take customer success to the next level?

Start by saying NO

- No to doing the product demos for sales

- No to dealing with bad-fit customers
- No to handling support tickets

Eliminate everything that stops you from delivering, growing and monetizing customer
value.
7 things CS leaders need to do in 2022 to get a (bigger) seat at the table:

1. Cut the crap: Assess your processes and activities in terms of contribution to customer
success. Scrap all the things that don’t deliver any value and free up resources.

2. Put yourself in the customers’ shoes: How do customer journeys look like from the
customers’ point of view? How do they measure success? How do they want to give
feedback?

3. Don’t go with the flow: Most SaaS companies have a mediocre CS organization because
they follow bad “best practices”. Stop copying their metrics, playbooks, etc., and create
your own frameworks.

4. Fire bad customers: They create nothing but opportunity costs and are a threat to your
CSMs’ mental health.

5. Strike cross-functional alliances: Customer success teams depend on the inputs

(customers and product) they get from marketing, sales, and product. Invite them to
collaborate with you by opening their eyes to the mutual benefits of a close partnership.

6. Build a CS Ops team: Continuously optimize resource distribution through analytics, build
processes that repeatedly deliver results with high accuracy, and build thought leadership
on solving customer problems.

7. Turn CS into a revenue function: The previous points set the stage for creating a working
environment where you can focus on creating revenue through upsells, expansions, and
new acquisitions from word of mouth. This is the language that’s spoken at the table. Make
sure you’ve got a voice that can’t be overheard.

Customer success is a growth engine - it's not up for discussion.

Lots of customer success teams want to change from reactive to proactive.

Here’s your roadmap to make it happen

1. Run a churn audit and present it to your C-suite

Determine how much of it is due to

- Product: design flaws and operating issues

- Customer: misguided expectations and lack of fit
- Services: failed onboarding and long-term outcomes

If the product is flawed and you are getting the wrong customers to work with you are
always on the back foot. The only escape route is to create awareness that churn is not only
caused after the purchase.

2. Optimize your resource distribution

Most likely your customer portfolio consists of a mix of great and bad-fit customers. If you
keep trying to make customers who lack basic skills, don’t follow advice, are not willing to
put in the effort, etc. successful being stuck in reactive work is self-inflicted.

Focus on the customers who are strong performers, avid learners, and easy to work with.

3. Change your mindset

Customer success is not what to software vendors want to make you believe. Almost all of
them are fundamentally flawed because they are built from the inside-out and not the
outside-in perspective. Customer success is not doing what’s most convenient and
optimizing internal metrics that are easy to measure.

4. Create customer success programs

Customers buy your product because they want to increase their revenue, reduce costs,
save time, etc. and that’s exactly what you have to deliver.

Your mission is to take your customers from A ( their starting point) to B (their desired
outcome) which includes

- achieving milestones
- solving problems
- completing tasks

where you are responsible to help them build the skills and knowledge required for either.
That means you need to build product and subject expertise to educate, train and consult
your customers.
5. Build customer relationships

Many companies skip that part because it’s not scalable and end up spending more time
band-aiding, quick-fixing, and re-engaging. The more you know about your customers the
better you understand their needs and the less reactive work you need to put in.

6. Source meaningful feedback

Your customers get dozens of surveys every month. Every single one of them means extra
work for them and they have little faith that there’s any impact. But if they feel you really
care they will be happy to share what works and what does not.

7. Put real customer success metrics in place

NPS, NSAT, etc. are NOT customer success metrics. They are internal statistics and your
customers could not care less about them. Complete your change in mindset by measuring
customer success with the metrics your customers use to determine the ROI of your
product.

Reactive customer success stinks.

It’s boring, frustrating, and exhausting.

Leave it all behind and do the fun part that also happens to create results.
Customer Success Ops helps Customer Success Managers (and others) to succeed.

Succeed with delivering, growing, and monetizing customer value.

Doing the right things (effectiveness) the right way (efficiency).

As a CSM it’s easy to get lost in a million tasks, metrics, QBRs, etc.

Resulting in doing things that don’t add customer value, avoidable churn, and missing
growth opportunities.

CS Ops needs to take a bird’s-eye view and look at the bigger picture to improve the CS
team’s performance.

So there are 3 key responsibilities in CS Ops:

1. Effective resource distribution

While all teams have to work with limited resources CS teams often find themselves at the
bottom end in terms of budget. So spending your resources wisely is a top priority.
CS Ops needs to understand churn and customer segments regarding their success- and
growth potential better than anyone else.

2. Program management

Most SaaS companies rely on guesswork about the customer success journey. It can’t be
said often enough that customer success does not happen by accident, it’s engineered.
CS Ops need to understand different customer journeys and identify bottlenecks and
service gaps to ensure customers get the right “treatment” at the right time.

3. Education and training

CS Ops have access to the collective insights, results, and experiences of their customer
success managers. They can identify best practices, skill gaps, trends, and customer
behaviors that influence the outcomes.
Consequently, they are well suited to develop the training and education programs the
CSMs require to deliver exceptional outcomes and experiences.

Customer Success Ops is an investment that delivers an incredible ROI.

Don’t wait for things to go south before you implement it.

Customer success is quite a relatively new profession but many teams are already stuck in
the "old ways".

That’s what I’ve come to realize after talking to dozens of CS leaders and CSM.

Everyone wants to become more proactive, it's their top priority.

But as long as you follow the inside-out approach it does not work.

You don't have to do the same things better, you need to change your perspective and build
everything around the customer.

Here are a few examples:

Old question: How can we improve our customers’ health scores?

New question: How can we make sure our customers achieve their goals?

Old question: How can we scale our onboarding?

New question: How can we reduce the time to the first value?

Old question: How can we re-engage customers that went dark?

New question: How can we build better relationships so we don’t have to?

The list is far from exhaustive.

In a buyers' world, the inside-out approach becomes obsolete.

Act accordingly.
If you don’t have CS Ops you should fix that quickly.

More than ever CS teams need to optimize their resource distribution.

You don’t want to spend your time with

- inevitable churn
- bad-fit customers
- busywork that does not add any value

but deliver, grow and monetize customer value while taking churn to all-time lows and
keeping it there.

If used correctly the CS Ops function/team becomes the Center of excellence not only for CS
but the whole company

That includes:

- Building and distributing subject expertise across the whole company, not only to the CS
team.
- Designing, measuring, and improving the customer success journeys
- Creating the inputs for educating, training, and consulting the customers
- Measuring customer success and its revenue impact
- Curating, evaluating, and distributing customer insights across the whole company
- Following trends and identifying best-practices
- Driving innovation in product and methodology
- Analyzing and deconstructing churn to find the patterns behind
- Measuring customer profitability and growth potential

Customer success is a competitive advantage.

The only one that matters to your customers.

Customer success is simple:

- Identify your customers goals

- Determine their starting points
- Deliver the education, training and consulting services to bridge the gap
- Measure customer outcomes
- Build relationships in the process

Everything that does not contribute to either is redundant.

Stop overcomplicating customer success and deliver better results.

Most CS teams are not doing actual customer success.

They do customer success the way CS software vendors would like it to be.

100% automated based on data that is easy to measure like product usage or net promoter
scores.

This is why they are stuck in reactive work and why customer success fails.

They are constantly firefighting, band-aiding and quick-fixing because they don’t have
enough meaningful data to understand the customers’ reality.

95% of CS software products are built for convenience, not effectiveness.

Customer success is NOT

- sending out generic E-mail sequences

- one-size-fits-all-eat-or-die-onboarding
- throwing random webinars, tutorials, etc. at the customer
- checking in once a month
- sending out NPS surveys and monitoring customer “health”
- running random playbooks based on scores without any context

Try this instead

- discovering your customers’ needs

- creating a roadmap that outlines how customers move from start to goal
- breaking it down into problems to solve and tasks to complete
- delivering the training, education, and consulting services customers require for
- measuring customer outcomes based on their definition of success
getting meaningful feedback to put your data into the right context (the “why”)
- Make no mistake, there’s a lot of scaling potential here as well.
- But it requires putting in the time and effort to get the customer insights to do it right.
- The strategy must never follow the technology - it always has to be the other way around.

Act accordingly.
There are no blurred lines between customer success and customer support.

They are crystal clear.

It’s the way companies execute it that causes confusion.

Customer success = helping customers increase revenue, reduce costs, save time, improve
productivity and achieve their personal goals.

Customer support = helping customers to use the product and their accounts smoothly.

There are no overlaps, they are complements.

A lot of CSMs are doing customer support.

If customer support lacks resources to handle customer requests in time it makes sense.

Because if e.g. a customer’s account is not working appropriately they will never become
successful.

However, if you spend half your day being “the single point of contact” handling everything
that comes your way it becomes problematic.

Because that means you spend only half your day helping customers to get what they
came for.

Consequently, the risk of churn increases, and the odds of growing revenue goes towards
zero.

This is a trade-off that does not pay off.

CSMs should stick with doing what they do best - delivering and growing customer value.
It’s sad that still so many SaaS companies think and work in silos.

When we talk about customer success and sales working together it’s about the contents of
the hand-off 95% of the time.

The best leaders understand that if you build and nurture real relationships there’s a lot to
gain for both teams and the whole organization.

Here’s why:

- CSMs spend the most time with the customer and consequently, they know more about
them than anyone else.

- Consequently, they can help sales reps to focus on the right leaders for higher conversion,
lower CAC, and churn.

- If CSMs are introduced to the later stages of the sales process (SQL or QSO) they can add
another layer - “customer success qualified opportunities” to check for red flags

- Including the CSM in the sales process can also help to close more deals by giving the
customer a great first impression about what working together is gonna be like.

- As the customer quality significantly improves CSMs will spend far less time firefighting
churn and much more on growing customer value and revenue.

Aligning Customer Success and Sales is a huge step toward an NRR of 150% and beyond.

Act accordingly
How to waste your CSMs time and create zero ROI

- Chasing support tickets

- Re-engaging customers that went dark
- Doing product demos
- Fighting inevitable churn
- Optimizing meaningless metrics

How to use it to turn your CSMs into growth engines

- Understanding customer needs

- Building relationships of mutual benefit
- Delivering high-quality consulting services
- Celebrating wins with customers
- Creating demand for expansions, up-and cross-sells

The possibilities in customer success know no boundaries.

It’s up to you what you make out of it.

Customer success is the only competitive advantage that lasts.

- Your product can be copied

- Your prices can be copied
- Your marketing can be copied

But deep expertise and thought leadership that empowers CSMs to deliver more value to
your customers are much harder to "crack".

It's no longer enough for CSMs to master the product because customers don't expect
anything less.

We keep talking about becoming a trusted advisor and that requires understanding your
customers' problems and the skills and knowledge to help them solve them.

Here are 5 ways how to build and distribute expertise among the CS team:

1. Hire subject experts

There are a lot of people with different backgrounds looking to transition into customer
success. If you are selling marketing software, hire former marketers. If you are selling
project management software, hire former project managers. You get the point.

2. Follow thought leaders

LinkedIn is the largest "marketplace" for expanding your horizons. Find the thought leaders
in your market space and follow their content.

3. Get coaching & training

Instead of hiring subject experts for your team, you can alternatively book courses and
training. There are plenty of coaches in literally any space.

4. Research & Experiment

Innovation is not limited to technology. Do your own research about customer problems,
why they exist, and the current best practices. Derive new and better ways, run tests,
validate the results and adopt what works.

5. Learn from your customers

This is often overlooked. You might have customers that are highly successful without
requiring any input from their CSM. Ask them to meet and uncover their secrets.

Remember:

Customer expectations have never been higher.

They will stop paying for everything that does not live up to their expectations.

Make sure you are the market leader in delivering customer value
Warning: This post is going to be controversial.

Customer success managers should own renewals, expansions, upsells, and referrals.

Because none is closer to the customer - the CSMs own the relationships.

If I had to give an estimate I’d say that 90-95% of all interactions (hopefully) with your
company happen between the customer and your CS team.

If customers spend half the time with your support team, you don’t need to worry about who
owns the commercial part because you have a lot of bigger fish to fry.

So why would customers rather want to buy from an AM/AE they’ve maybe spent 15min with
than their trusted advisor?

That does not make any sense.

Read more in the newest edition of my newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/dR4Z2VtT

PS: And no, that does not mean CSMs should have a quota because that drives the wrong
behavior.
CHAPTER 6 - VARIOUS
For too long you’ve been brainwashed and it’s time to wake up.

I’m talking to you SaaS CEOs, CFOs, and CROs.

The SaaS business model is not built on

- raising a ton of cash

- hiring a legion of marketers and sales reps
- trying to acquire everyone with a pulse
- and hitting short-term growth goals

That’s how you end up with 0.1% conversion rates, 36 months of CAC payback, and 15%
churn.

With economics like this, your business has no future.

Here’s how to grow faster, further, and more profitable in the most natural way:

1. Marketing’s purpose is no longer to create a high number of leads that don’t convert.
Instead, they are educating customers with targeted content aiming to create demand
from the customers who will benefit the most from the product.

2. As sales reps get fewer but much better leads, conversion rates increase while CAC and
churn go down. They now only close deals with a strong customer-product-fit.

3. Customer success teams no longer spend most of their time firefighting, band-aiding,
and quick-fixing. Instead, they can lead their customers to the promised land with a high-
quality mix of training, education, and consulting services.

4. Because customers now get a ton of value, retention becomes a mere formality. Churn
becomes merely a bump in the road instead of an existential threat.

5. Your customers won’t stop there but they’ll be looking for ways to further grow their
outcomes. They’ll create demand for expansions-up- and cross-sells because they need
more resources, features, and/or products for the next growth stage.

6. New acquisitions from referrals have insanely high conversion rates. Guess who likes to
give them? Yes, highly successful customers is the correct answer.

7. Winning customers for life is the most underrated growth lever. People change their jobs
every few years these days. When your raving, loyal fans start a new role, they’ll bring your
product with them.

8. And finally, highly successful customers have a low price sensitivity. They are willing to
pay more for more value. It’s as simple as that. Value-based prices are your most scalable
growth lever.

Try the Customer-Value-Led-Growth business model.

It will pay off 100% and you’ll never look back.

After all these layoffs I'd like to make a little suggestion
Let's make profitable growth cool again.

Contrary to belief, profit and growth are not mutually exclusive.

There's no law forcing you to spend series A-Z on 0.1% conversion rates, 36 months of CAC
payback, and >15% churn.

Instead, you could use your series A to run experiments at scale fast and then use the next
round(s) to double down on what works.

(Of course, I'm aware that there's a lot of pressure from clueless VCs but these are not the
only ones)

So let me show you how a profitable growth strategy works

1. Acquire your first 100, 1000, or 10k customers (depending on your business) based on
educated guesses about the best fit - at the beginning, you have to work with a hypothesis

1. Validate your hypothesis by determining your ideal customers and the outcomes they've
achieved based on your now-existing customer base (reverse-engineering)

1. Double down acquiring more of them - your ideal customers are defined by their
profitability, growth- and success potential (no success = no retention = no business)

1. Grow these accounts by helping them to solve more/bigger problems or scale their initial
outcomes to create demand for expansions and upsells

1. Turn them into advocates that drive new acquisitions through word of mouth (hint: a high
Net Promoter Score is not the same as actually getting referrals)

1. Use the insights you get from working with them to build a product roadmap that contains
value-adding features

1. Raise your prices in accordance with the growing value your customers get from your
product.

This is Customer-Value-Led-Growth.

Try it, it works.

If you are firing your CSMs you are not saving money.

You are losing it.

I get it, you’ve been taught to go for the easy way.

But what none told you is that there’s another variable to consider.

It’s not only you who needs to cut expenses - your customers are doing the same.

That means they’ll stop paying for your product if their outcomes do not live up to their
expectations.

And for that very reason, their expectations have hit an all-time high.

Ultra-high customer expectations meet lower customer success resources.

What could ever go wrong?

Firing CSMs will only start a race to the bottom.

The job market for CSMs, CS leaders, and CS Ops is on fire.

But not every opportunity turns out to be as great as advertised.

That's why you should ask these 3 questions during your interviews:

- Does the company say no to customers and revenue if they are not a great fit?

- Does the CEO frequently talk to customers?

- Who is responsible for churn/customer success?

If the answers are

- "Everybody needs our product"

- "Our CEO is too busy"

- "The CS team"

you might want to pass because that company is definitely not customer-centric.

That means you'll most likely spend your time firefighting churn (which may on top get
blamed for) and fixing all kinds of things.

Life is too short to work for a company that does not get customer success.
You don’t need customer success managers with SaaS experience.

What you need are people who love and excel at helping other people.

That’s why teachers, coaches, and consultants make great candidates.

Customer success is not anything new.

What’s new is that we are calling it that.

If you open your mind you’ll realize that customer success exists for decades or centuries.

Hire for people skills, not profiles.

Everything else can be taught.

PS: Of course, like everywhere else, there are bad apples among those professions as well.
The VP of CS wants to hire 3 more CSMs and everybody’s going crazy.

Like “customer success is a cost center” and “what’s the ROI of customer success?”.

The company spends $ 1M per month on ads that convert at 0.1% and none bats an eye.

I hope this madness will come to a halt no.

Customer success is the investment with the highest returns.

Here are my 19 customer success rules:

1. Customer success is not the responsibility of a single team. It’s the result of matching
product, customer, and services. If there’s no match, customers will churn.

2. Your goal is to help customers achieve their goals. Even when it means doing things that
don’t scale.

3. Customer success starts with setting the right expectations. No keeping things vague
and no overselling and tricking them into buying.

4. Sell only to customers who will benefit from the product. If there’s not a strong match,
don’t close the deal.

5. The goal of your onboarding is to give customers quick wins. Deliver proof of value and
get their buy-in for playing the long game.

6. Churn does not happen because the product was too expensive. All churn eventually
comes down to customers failing to achieve their goals. Find out where they fail and why.

7. Fire bad-fit customers earlier than later. You keep spending resources. The customer
won’t become successful and churn anyways. Force the issue and break up with them.

8. Build relationships right from the beginning. Trying to re-engage customers that went
dark is much harder.

9. Measure customer success the way your customers do. They will evaluate the ROI of your
product one way or the other.

10. If you want to check in, you should rather work at the airport. Stop wasting your
customers’ time. Reach out only if you are adding value for your customer.

11. Don’t guess and assume. Ask your customers about renewals and referrals.

12. You don’t need to know everything right here right now. What matters is finding answers
and solutions. Customers don’t care about who comes up with it.

13. Use QBRs as a strategic asset to understand what worked, what didn’t, and why. Make
them all about the customer.

14. Start every new customer engagement with a kick-off. If you properly understand your
customers' needs you’ve probably raised the odds of success to 80%.

15. The customer success plan is the gap between where customers are now and where they
want to go.

16. Get feedback the way customers want to give it. Surveys with a 2% participation rate are
useless.

17. Show that you genuinely care about their success. Ask open questions as often as
possible but otherwise, let the customers do the talking.
18. Don’t be afraid about the commercial part of customer success. If you make customers
successful, they’ll want to buy more from you.

19. Technology follows strategy, not the other way around. Customer success is not how the
CS software vendors want it to be. The customers call the shots.

What rules do you follow?

Dear SaaS CEOs,

if you genuinely care about your employees' well-being you need to abandon your
unhealthy approach to growth.

Stop growing for the sake of it by pumping up vanity metrics and short-term revenue and
start building a sustainable business.

No, your goals aren't ambitious, they are ridiculous and put everybody under high pressure
because of abysmal economics.

- There's no point in putting marketers under pressure to create tons of leads that don't
close

- There's no point in forcing sales reps to close every (bad) deal just to meet their quota

- There's no point in building product features for the sake of it that customers don't care
about

- There's no point in having customer success teams fighting churn that is inevitable.

That's how you run a business into the ground with lots of collateral damage.

The mass layoffs could have been avoided and they won't solve your underlying strategy
issues.

It's time to wake up.

In the past 6 months, I’ve talked to dozens of CS leaders in SaaS.

What I’ve learned is pretty devastating:

Customer success in most SaaS companies is broken.

And there are 2 reasons why:

1. Customer success is NOT a team sport

- The customer success team is solely responsible for customer success and churn
- Customer feedback about product design and issues is often ignored
- There’s a continuous inflow of bad-fit customers that would be easily avoidable
- There’s no collaboration between the customer success team with marketing, sales, and
product so every team fights its own battles
- In some companies, there’s not even alignment among different CS teams

2. The customer success department IS a cost center

- CSMs have to handle too many customers to really understand their customers' needs
- Despite not knowing what works, what does not, and why scaling inputs is the highest
priority
- CSMs don’t have any meaningful relationships with their customers and they go dark left
and right
- They entirely rely on inaccurate internal statistics like NPS and Health Scores and don’t
have any insights into the real customer journey
- Consequently, they are trapped in constantly treating the symptoms of churn without
resolving it at its core.

It’s not a surprise that CSMs and CS leaders are completely exhausted and the company
leadership asks “what’s the ROI of customer success?”

We need to fix this.

Customer success is the real growth engine in SaaS.

While you were busy

- hiring a lead generation agency

- scaling new customer acquisition that converts at 0.1%
- looking for growth hacks to make it 0.2%
- spending 6-7 figures on ads every month

The best-in-class SaaS companies

- achieved Net Revenue Retention Rates of >150% at $100M+ in ARR

- created >50% of their new revenue from existing customers
- got >1.000% ROI from expansions and >150% from upsells
- reduced churn to 3% per year

and grew highly profitable while pushing their company valuation above and beyond.

The best way to grow a SaaS business is not an enigma.

Land and expand is not a buzzword.

Stop hunting for instant gratification, and start building a viable business.
Customer success has a positioning problem.

Most SaaS companies still see it either as

- extended (glorified) customer support

- a single team
- a cost center (a necessary evil)

But it’s actually

- a company-wide operating system

- a growth strategy
- an outcome

The only reason why customers buy your product is to achieve their goals.

Consequently, everybody in the company works for the customers' success, whether their
tag says marketing, sales, product, customer success, or customer support.

If you succeed, you will not only retain these customers but also trigger new revenue from
expansions, upsells, and acquisitions sourced from word of mouth.

Customer success is the “growth hack” everybody is looking for.

It’s just that almost none sees that it’s right in front of them.
"I want to do real customer success"

That's what a CSM told me after she quit her job".

The company she worked for was paying her well but it was not enough.

The role simply lacked purpose.

If you want to attract and retain the best CSM talent that's what you need to provide.

None wants to

- constantly firefight churn

- be part of a do-everything department
- spend half their time doing customer support
- optimize internal metrics

Customer success' purpose is to grow customer value and revenue.

If you don't offer the culture for CSMs to do what they do best you'll never get access to the
top tier.

Act accordingly.
Selling to bad-fit customers will kill your SaaS business.

Because they create a massively negative ripple effect:

- High service intensity (customer success and support)

- Useless product features are built on their requests
- They’ll churn eventually or worse - they don’t and continue to pile up
- Loss of reputation because they’ll likely blame you for the lack of success
- Last but not least they can be a menace to your employees' mental health

If you compare them to the upsides of great fit customers:

- Low service intensity

- New features add more customer value
- They’ll renew seamlessly and continuously grow their demand
- They become raving fans driving advocacy
- Working with them is a breeze

the difference is not small or medium, it’s humongous.

How do you find your great-fit customers, usually framed as your Ideal Customers?

The most effective way is to reverse-engineer their profiles from your existing customers.

Here’s how:

→
1. Identify your most successful and profitable customers they go hand in hand as
customer success is the trigger for a growing demand that drives profitability.

2. Find out what they have in common that’s been crucial for their success →
skills/knowledge, processes, mindset, etc.

3. Add the firmographics and create your ideal customer profiles.

It’s impossible to completely avoid acquiring bad-fit customers.

But as your business grows, its share among your customer portfolio should go down.

Sign-up for the newsletter in my featured section to learn how to improve your customer
portfolio.
There's no low-touch and there's no high-touch customer success service model.

There's only the exact amount of touch customers require to become successful.

This is another example of a common customer success practice that's been built from the
company's and not the customers' point of view.

"But Markus, we can't afford high touch on a customer that pays 50$ per month."

Of course, you can't afford it but if that customer requires high touch there's something
wrong with your business model:

1. Your product and/or the subject is too complex for low touch.

2. You are not charging enough according to the complexity.

3. You are acquiring the wrong customer that does not possess the requirements to
succeed with low touch.

It does not matter what product you are selling, you need to create a balance between
complexity, pricing, and customer.
Life is too short to work for a CEO who does not get Customer Sucess.

Before you consider joining a company you should always ask one question to figure it out:

"Does the company ever say no to a potential customer and revenue?"

If the answer is 'no' you should run for the hills unless you like to spend your days preventing
bad fit customers from churning.

Usually paired with also getting blamed when the inevitable happens.

Customer success is a growth function.

Work for a CEO who gets it.

CHAPTER 7 - CUSTOMER
SUCCESS CONTENT IDEAS
The questions you ask customers at a kick-off
How you've increased your survey response rate
How you got difficult customers to comply
Comparing 2 customer success metrics (e.g. health scores and CSAT)
How you successfully decrease the time to value
The impact of CS Ops on your team's performance
How to ensure that all customer stakeholders achieve their goals
How you failed with scaling and what you've learned
The best customer feedback you got from a QBR
New CSM onboarding best practices
How you've reduced the time your team spends on reactive work
How to build strong customer relationships
How you measure customer value
The data and stories you present to your company's leadership
Your best last-minute churn save and why it worked
How you introduce yourself to new customers
How you've built customer success from scratch in your startup
Why customer success failed in your former company (post mortem)
How you've operationalized customer value
The customer data you are gathering
How you segment your customers (ideally different than most)
How you collaborate with customer support
How you sold firing bad-fit customers to your leadership
How you determine your customers' needs
Your secret ingredient to customer health scores
How you help your team in these difficult time
What you've learned and adopted from your customers to your playbook
How you effectively manage your customer relationships
Your #1 onboarding hack
Your top 3 playbooks
How you ensure that customers get value from every interaction
How you've improved cross-functional collaboration
How you've learned to say "no"
Tasks you've eliminated from your workdays
Best practice for re-engaging customers that went dark
How do you prevent customers from going dark
How to determine if you've achieved trusted vendor status
The 5 key metrics you could not live without
Project management best practices in customer success
Account-based success management
Your 3 golden rules for creating content
The most effective customer training/educating resources you've ever created
How to grow into a CS leadership role
How to build an effective customer communication framework
How to build a CS organization from scratch
Customer success life in the enterprise (your company)
How to recover churned customers
How you successfully transitioned into customer success
The feedback you've got that had the most impact on your progress
Different methods for getting customer feedback
The structure of your sales to customer success hand-off
The last 5 people you've hired for your team
How you've improved NRR in different cohorts
The easiest way to identify the reasons for churn
The top 3 goals you've set for your team and why
How you transitioned from reactive to proactive customer success
How you've aligned CS and sales
What you've learned in 2022/how it's been different from 2021
The best sources for learning CS from your pov
How you measure customer value
How you measure the quality of customer relationships
How do you react to losing customer champions
Share and explain a template you've created
What customer success means to you
Walkthrough about how you implemented CS Operations
The first 30 days as a CS leader at a new company
CS in PLG vs. Non-PLG companies
How to create alignment between CS and sales
The X pillars of scaling customer success
How you get buy-in from your C-suite
How you improved collaboration with the product team
Contents of your presentations to the company’s leadership
How to grow QBR participation rate
How to do an effective customer kick-off
Customer success scaling traps
CS in startups vs CS in scaleups
The 1 thing you did that cut churn
The #1 skill of a top CSM
Why customer feedback matters
What you look for when hiring
The 3 things you need to do to build a career in SaaS
The roadmap to change your goals
Your #1 churn predictor
Your personal predictions about the future of customer success
3 common things customers don’t care about but everybody does
Out-of-the-box customer data you work with
Project management in customer success
Account-based customer success
Onboarding new team members
Your favorite metric and why
A metric you’ve abandoned and why
How to grow into a strategic advisor
How to offboard customers to leave the door open
One question you always ask your customers
How you work with Account Managers and Customer Marketers
How you’ve operationalized Net Revenue Retention
The components of your customer success plans
How you create customer advocacy
How to become a trusted advisor
How to decrease TTV at the customer onboarding
SMB vs. Enterprise approach
Your best hires and what they brought to the table
How to deal with angry customers
Breakdown of your budget distribution
The most important learnings in 2022 so far
How you structure your QBRs
How you collaborate with the product team
The 3 metrics you could not live without
How you manage the loss of your champion
How to create an effective customer education program
How your past career in X helped you in CS
Reporting to CCO vs CRO vs others
How you keep your CSMs motivated
Your 5 most important learnings about customer relationships
How you've successfully scaled customer success
Why you failed at scaling customer success and what you've learned
How to collaborate with customer support effectively
3 most important things when managing enterprise customers
Checklist for CS software implementation
Your experience with the 10 most popular CS metrics
How you've stopped being the do-everything department
Breakdown of your onboarding process
How you've structured your CS team
How you've operationalized NRR
Your most important learnings about customer success
How you've improved the accuracy of your health scores
How you measure customer success
Why cross-functional collaboration is essential for customer success
How you identify bad-fit customers
Breakdown of your churn recovery process
How to create a value map for enterprise customers
Breakdown of the evolution of your customer onboarding
The 3 most important assets you've created
How to structure a CSM team
Your secret sauce to building better customer relationships
How to optimize your time spending
How you incentivize your CS team
Framework for a customer exit interview
How you measure the quality of customer relationships
5 Steps to build an effective success plan
How to conduct an effective kick-off meeting
What you've learned from scaling a CS team
Your customer metric system framework
How to fire bad-fit customers
The challenges of CS in an early-stage startup
The 5 pillars of your perspective on customer success
How you've made your C-suite "get" customer success
How to create an effective customer success program
How you've established yourself as a trusted advisor
How to succeed in budget talks with your leadership
How to create an effective sales-to-customer-success hand-off
What you've learned after conducting X QBRs
Why X metric is overrated/underrated
Why CS should do support/why not
How you give feedback to the product team
Your most effective customer success plan framework
How you've decreased time-to-value at the customer onboarding
Breakdown of the reports you create for your leadership
Why you've stopped tracking NPS
How you create accountability with your customer about outcomes
CHAPTER 8 - HEADLINE
IDEAS
Life is too short to …
I’ve talked to [e.g. a dozen CS leaders] and here’s what I’ve learned:
The biggest problem when ...
I stopped doing [something most companies do] and that happened:
Here’s the secret to ...
Here are X pillars/steps/ingredients to …
The most important thing …
X vs. Y
How not to do X/Instead
Old game vs. new game
The key to winning
X is much easier when …
Customer success is not magic …
[] of time [] fails and here's why:
Too many customer success teams ...
A>B
[] is not the holy grail in customer success
[] things that boost your ...
[] is hard, here's how to make it easier:
The [] pillars of ...
I believe ...
Even the best [] is doomed to fail when ...
When you realize ...
You just don't [] and everything's becoming
What every CS team should stop doing asap
What every CS needs to start doing asap
Why customer success is not X,Y and Z
How to reduce [] in 5 simple steps
The 7 pillars of []
5 steps to build []
Here are my 8 ways to []
How to build a [] without the headache
How to get rid of []
Why every CS team needs []
[] is overrated in customer success
What everybody gets wrong about []
3 things you won't miss in customer success
Why you should []
Everyone in CS is talking about []
How to deal with [] in 5 simple steps
The 3 most important things to do before []
The one thing you need to avoid when [] ...
Do you lack []?
Are you stuck with []?
Customer success has a [] problem.
One of the most underrated things ...
Here's what happens when ...
Why [] is excellent for [] ...
Everyone wants [] but few do what's necessary to get it ...
5 steps to a successful [] ...
3 questions to ask before ...
The one thing you need to avoid when [] ...
People (Customers) always ask me [] ...
X % of our customers [] ...
Here are 3 myths about [] ...
CHAPTER 9 - BEST
PRACTICES
Write for scanners
You may have heard about it before and it’s true for all kinds of content. Most
people are not reading your content, they are scanning it. No matter what you
post or how long your post becomes, make sure that it’s easy to scan.

That means you should use:

bullet points
short paragraphs
short sentences

Timing matters
People keep saying that great content always performs. But I've run some
experiments and the timing matters a lot. When I reposted my content at different
times not only once it got -80% of likes, comments, and reach.

Copy & adapt

There are a lot of great content creators on LinkedIn. I follow people in marketing,
sales, entrepreneurship, etc. Save great posts and try to adapt them for your
purpose.

“Life is too short to work for a CEO who does not get customer success” is such an
example where I've simply replaced marketing with customer success.

Don't post random stuff

It's tempting to write posts about topics that get lots of engagement and views.
Like hiring, leadership, or sales. But they will not create any opportunities for
customer success. Make 95% of your posts about customer success topics.

Repurpose your content

If you are posting every day you'll quickly run out of new topics to write about. The
solution is to use the same content more than once. You can either repost it 1:1,
slightly alter it, or write it from a different angle.

If you e.g. write about the 5 biggest mistakes in customer onboarding you can also
write about the 5 most important things in customer onboarding which are
virtually the exact opposite.