Forget Pipeline and Focus on Customer Success with Mark Kosoglow
Nov 16, 2023
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Mark Kosoglow, CRO at Catalyst Software, discusses the need to prioritize customer success over pipeline growth. He emphasizes delivering incremental value over time and aligning promise makers with promise keepers. By empowering customer success teams, businesses can elevate customer success and drive revenue growth.
Delivering incremental value over time addresses delayed implementations and demoralization, resulting in meaningful moments of impact.
Aligning sales and customer success teams enhances trust, streamlines value delivery, and drives revenue growth.
Deep dives
Shift in Focus: Elevating Customer Success
Mark Kozlglow, CRO at Catalyst, emphasizes the need to prioritize the customer success function in order to maximize revenue opportunities. He challenges the common misconception that focusing solely on top-of-funnel leads to success. Instead, he advocates for investing in post-sales processes, where 92% of customer lifetime value is generated. Mark highlights the importance of aligning sales and customer success teams, setting clear expectations, and creating a culture of value creation and continuous improvement. By shifting the mindset from reactive firefighting to proactive value delivery, companies can enhance customer relationships, drive commercial impact, and ensure long-term success.
Overcoming Resistance and Driving Change
Mark addresses the challenge of changing mindsets and overcoming resistance to shifting the focus from acquisition to customer success. He advises CS leaders to educate revenue executives on the flaws in their thinking and the untapped revenue potential in post-sales activities. Mark suggests creating a sense of ownership around the customer journey and aligning promised makers and promised keepers to foster a culture of value creation and expansion. He encourages CS professionals to challenge the status quo, make proactive decisions, and showcase the evidence of success to drive organizational change.
Stair-Stepping Value Delivery
Mark introduces the concept of delivering value in incremental steps, likening it to a staircase approach. He emphasizes the importance of consistently providing small, frequent, and unpredictable moments of impact to customers, reinforcing their perception of value. This approach involves mapping business initiatives to jobs to be done, aligning solutions, and identifying moments of impact throughout the customer journey. Mark highlights the significance of setting expectations and fostering a proactive relationship with customers to drive commercial impact and secure long-term success.
Upskilling CSMs for Business Impact
Mark explains the need for customer success managers (CSMs) to evolve into business partners rather than simply focusing on product consumption. He stresses the importance of upskilling CSMs to present the business impact and return on investment (ROI) of their solutions. By providing a framework that links functionality to business outcomes, CSMs can deliver value, build trust, and have more strategic conversations. Mark suggests implementing regular meetings to strategize for each customer, exploring their goals and prioritizing moments of impact. This shift empowers CSMs and aligns their efforts with the organization's revenue goals.
It's time to stop focusing on pipeline growth. Yes, you read that right.
In this episode, Mark Kosoglow, CRO at Catalyst Software, shares his perspective about why you should be focusing on customer success instead of inbound pipeline. It's shaking up the industry by encouraging revenue leaders to truly focus on the incremental value — and revenue growth — that customer success teams can deliver.
Here are the key takeaways from our conversation with Mark Kosoglow:
Deliver more "moments of impact”: Time-to-value should not be measured as time to achieve maximum value but rather as time to achieve a meaningful moment of impact. Instead of delivering the entire value of your platform or product immediately, you should provide incremental value over time. This method addresses the problem of delayed implementations and demoralization.
Align promise makers and promise keepers: Organizations must bridge the gap between sales and customer success. Aligning the teams responsible for making promises with the ones tasked with keeping them can enhance trust, streamline value delivery, and drive revenue growth.
Elevate the success of the customer: Mark's approach not only benefits businesses but also transforms the role that customer success teams play. By empowering them to have more strategic conversations and become proactive value partners, they can deliver exceptional results for their customers and their organization.
Jump into the conversation:
[05:38] Why it’s essential to challenge current sales paradigms
[12:54] Turning operational sales dreams into reality
[18:45] How to change the time-to-value mindset within company culture
[23:36] The division of roles within customer success teams
[25:17] Mitigating the risks of Account Executive (AE) involvement
[27:39] Ways to shift the traditional CSM mindset to a business impact mindset
[33:41] Words of wisdom for aspiring industry change-makers
[36:06] Heather and Steve’s key takeaways
Continue the conversation with these resources:
Focus on people, processes, and technology to forge a stronger, more aligned future for your go-to-market team. Download this ebook for tips on how to do just that.
Empowered CSMs deliver amazing value in every interaction. See how to enable their success in this ebook.
Learn how Seismic can empower your customer success team with the training, coaching, content, and insights that make renewal rates soar here.