Buying criteria for B2B companies have shifted dramatically in recent years. In fact, according to G2’s 2024 Buyer Behavior Report, buyers prioritize ease of use, ease of implementation, fast ROI, and scalability ahead of cost, features, and even security.
These findings will lead many Go-to-Market (GTM) teams to adjust sales, marketing, and brand messaging to prioritize what today’s buyers really care about early in the sales cycle.
They will change their sales deck to focus on quick ROI and their homepage to highlight how easy their tool is to use, implement, and scale. If the effort is successful, it will result in more customers coming on board.
But we have an even better idea for you.
In addition to making your GTM strategy focus on the appearance of better ROI, ease of use, and scalability, focus on actually delivering on those buyer priorities.
After bringing a customer on board, let’s make sure they stay, renew, expand, and become advocates because we actually delivered on the promises we made during the sales cycle.
That means bringing Customer Success (CS) into the GTM team and looking at CS as more than just a cost center.
The new customer success is a revenue center that has a crucial and strategic role on the GTM team.
Turning Customer Success From a Cost Center to a Revenue Center
Business leaders are under increasing economic pressure to get to efficient growth at scale, which means the days of growth at all cost are gone. In other words, a myopic focus on new acquisition land grab strategies are over.
But the hard truth is that to drive towards efficient growth companies must learn to grow more through existing customers than new acquisition.
Practically speaking, it means when you bring a customer in the door the first time, you move them through a process that sets them up for long-term success and happiness with your brand so they will come back around for more products, services, and value over time.
As they come back around you’re also creating new use cases, new personas, more teams, and departments, more products and services. In other words, it’s a focus on full-revenue cycle thinking.
In this way retention is the new acquisition.
In order to reap those recurring revenue rewards, your customers have to be more than just happy.
We’ve all sat in on the dreaded renewal call or QBR where the customer says they love you, they love your product, they love their CSM, but their boss is cutting their budget and they just can’t justify continuing.
Renewals, expansions, and referrals will depend on a CS team that is able to deliver:
- Smooth implementation and onboarding that quickly makes your solution an essential part of your buyer’s business.
- Guidance on achieving and quantifying the anticipated results.
- Messaging to empower and equip customers to communicate ROI and value to economic buyers who could pull the plug when budgets get tight.
The days of looking at a CS department as necessary overhead are over.
CS is a critical part of your recurring revenue team, and should be evaluated and incentivized accordingly.
Customer Success Is More Than Just a Department
Now that we’ve tried to convince you that the CS department is a crucial GTM player and revenue center, it’s time to address the fact that customer success is actually way more than just a department and money maker!
The customer’s success needs to be EVERYONE’s job. It’s not a department, it’s a mission.
In fact, the executive team needs to spend more energy thinking about their customer’s actual success and less time on thinking about the customer success department.
This shift in focus brings a more holistic approach to ensuring both customer achievement and long-term revenue growth.
Is Your Team Ready to Align on Customer Growth?
Next time your GTM Team gets together for an offsite, ask yourselves these questions (and it needs to be the whole GTM team, not just the customer success department):
- Do you view helping customers achieve success as a cost center or as a growth driver?
- Are you focused on building a CS department or a GTM mindset?
- Are you relying on CSMs or all GTM teams to meet the needs of customers?
- Are you focused on securing the renewal or creating lifetime value for you and your customer?
- Are you thinking, ‘how can we sell them more’, or for more ways to serve them?
- Are you focused on the outputs of your CS team (issue resolution / QBR’s) or the outcomes of your customers (value creation)?
Learn More
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