It’s been quite a year but we’re on the home stretch, folks. Before you say,
“thank u, next” to 2018, check out Gainsight’s top blog posts, webinars, and resources of 2018.
Top 5 Customer Success Blog Posts of 2018
‘CSM & Product’ Is the New ‘Sales & Marketing’
You can’t have a business without a product and you can’t maintain a customer base without Customer Success. Gainsight CEO, Nick Mehta, shares why it’s so important for Customer Success and Product to work together and how Gainsight’s acquisition of Aptrinsic, a product-led growth platform, will drive these initiatives.
“In the Age of the Customer, CS teams have joined the ranks of Sales and Marketing in driving business growth by focusing on customer retention—more specifically, impact to net retention as a function of growth. However, for all of us who are building digital products and services, so many invaluable customer insights and personalized engagements are happening within the product itself.”
Gainsight Elements: The Science of Customer Success
It’s not enough to be “nice” to your clients, you need to have the bravery to be prescriptive. Gainsight COO, Allison Pickens, explains why it’s so important that you provide a path for your clients and shares Gainsight’s prescriptive methodology, the Elements of Customer Success.
“Gainsight has a terrific platform. But in general, our clients don’t think about product features first; they think about the business challenges they have to solve. We need Solutions in order to map our product features to clients’ objectives.”
How to Calculate 6 Key Customer Success Metrics
This blog post covers the six metrics every Customer Success professional needs to know. You’ll get the lowdown on what to use each metric for, what data you need beforehand, and how to use our Customer Success Metrics Calculator to calculate them.
“You did enough work to get your data, so let us take it from here. Our Customer Success Metrics Calculator eliminates the need to seek out formulas and manually solve them. All you have to do is have your data on hand, plug it into the calculator, click your heels three times, and that’s it! Okay, we were kidding about the last part, but it really is that simple.”
What is a Customer Retention Rate and How do I Calculate It?
Acquiring a new customer can be up to 25x more expensive than selling to existing customers. That’s why customer retention is a cheaper and easier way to grow your company. This blog post will go into why your customers are churning and how you can use Customer Success to stop them.
“Retention is inextricably linked to the amount of effort you put into delivering positive outcomes and experiences to your customers. This is not the job of just one department—Customer Success is a company-wide mentality that needs to be shared by everyone involved pre- or post-sale.”
Synecdoche and SaaS: What Title Should the Customer Success Leader Have?
Customer Success leaders go by many names—VP of Customer Success, Director of Account Management, Chief Customer Officer, and so on. We compiled data from the Bessemer Venture Partners’ Public Cloud Index to get a deeper insight into what companies are calling their post-sales leaders and how this impacts the entire industry.
“Fragmentation is the enemy of sharing knowledge. The more we can speak a common language in business as in technology, the more modular our solutions can be. The solutions that are flexible enough to adapt at the widest variety of business models and yet rigid enough to be scalable and effective will naturally spread as the evidence proves them. The same goes for titles!”
Top 5 Customer Success Webinars of 2018
How to Run a Cross-Functional Quarterly Business Review
Quarterly/Executive Business Reviews are incredibly strategic moments, which is why so many people struggle to pull them off seamlessly. This webinar covers who needs to be involved, what you need to accomplish in every meeting, and much more.
Click here for the on-demand webinar.
How to Onboard at Scale Without Sacrificing Personal Touch
If you want to make more money, you need to get more customers. But all those new customers need to be onboarded well so they adopt, expand, and ultimately renew. This webinar will teach you how to better guide your users to “a-ha” moments in your product, create “release experiences,” and re-engage users to complete critical tasks.
Click here for the on-demand webinar.
How to Create a Consistent Customer Experience Across Functions
Everyone needs to work together when it comes to retaining customers, whether you’re building the product, marketing it, selling it, or anything in between. In this webinar, you’ll learn who should own the customer experience, how to coordinate communications, how to align your customer-facing functions, and much more.
Click here for the on-demand webinar.
How to Define Your Customers’ Objectives and Consistently Deliver
Your customers bought your product for a reason, but are you delivering on that? In order for your customer to achieve their desired outcomes, you need a success planning process that’s built from the outside in, not the inside out. This webinar will show you how Gainsight’s Success Planning Element helps you capture customer objectives, define success, consistently deliver goals, and prove the value of your solution.
Click here for the on-demand webinar.
A Powerful Process to Improve Your Renewal Rate
Gainsight’s Renewal Management Element provides a framework that will impact the way you process renewals. You’ll walk away from this webinar with actionable advice for improving your renewal forecasting accuracy, scaling your renewal process across segments, and much more.
Click here for the on-demand webinar.
Customer Success Tools and Resources
Customer Success Metrics Calculator
Gainsight’s Customer Success Metrics Calculator takes the guesswork out of calculating six key metrics: Net Renewal Rate, Gross Renewal Rate, Expansion Percentage, Logo Retention, Net Promoter Score, and Cost of Retention. Helpful for individual contributors and leadership alike.
Click here for the calculator.
Customer Success Slack Channel
Join the open community for Customer Success leaders, powered by Slack. You’ll have every opportunity to learn, network, and share your thoughts on all things CSM. We also host monthly Ask-Me-Anything sessions with leaders in the Customer Success community.
Click here to register for the Slack Channel.
Customer Success Maturity Assessment
Take this 5-minute questionnaire to learn how your CS strategies compare to companies your size, where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and how to improve your sophistication in each Customer Success Element.
Click here to start your assessment.
Stepping into 2019 like…
Stay tuned in 2019 for more content that’ll have you throwing open the doors to your next board meeting with all the confidence to absolutely crush it. Subscribe to our email newsletter to stay up to date with our Customer Success content and events. If you want to be even more ahead of the curve, register for Pulse 2019 (May 21-24, 2019) to be first in line to learn the latest thought leadership and best practices.
