S1E2 - Customer Success: The Importance & Best Practices With Mike Dry

Want to set up or grow your CS team?

Learn how to gain more revenue from your current clients and keep them longer. Mike Dry, Senior director of customer success at Leadfeeder will share the importance of CS and best practices.

Over the past 10 years, he has gathered immense experience working with customers, teams, startups, and established companies. To start things off, we get Mike's definition of customer success within B2B SaaS.

He observes that customer success entails leveraging technology to provide customers with support and the know-how to generate success on the company's product and, in the long term, continue purchasing the product. From the customer's perspective, customer success is having someone on the other end of the firm to speak with to try and solve their problems. In other words, it is having somebody they can bounce ideas with on new ways a product can be used. What is the right time for a company to establish a customer success program? On this, he explains that people need to get value from your product right away.

Establishing a customer success department is an immediate requirement. However, as Mike explains, it is most required when a company is having challenges answering every question that customers have while doing the firm's core operations. What are some effective strategies for getting ahead of the game with customer success? It is crucial to keep accurate data records and create reports on what customers are doing that are relevant to your business.

If you have a B2B SaaS business, for instance, you have to work out the critical determinants for value for your customer and then turn that into a report. Your company's growth is directly related to the value derived from your product. Your customer success team will also find those efforts invaluable. What are the three most important metrics for customer success? It comes down to financial metrics (growth churn, nature, expansion rate) for founders and business executives. The growth churn metric measures how well your product is doing on its own on the market. These expansion metrics enable the firm to see how effectively your sales team sells your customer base. His thoughts on tracking end value as a metric for customer success are also invaluable. He advises the need to seek feedback from the customer on the value derived from the product. Happier customers stay longer and bring return business to your business. You can apply this principle to any SaaS company you can think of. Furthermore, Mike spends some time illuminating some of the strategies and processes for growing your customer success team. He reckons that you should have elaborate metrics for determining the right time to hire somebody. These include workload - increased workload requires more personnel. Also, when you are experiencing diminishing returns, it is about time you hired a professional customer success team to improve the trajectory. Documenting and creating processes help make things easier for management and people coming on board and provide guidelines for customer success. Appropriately, Mike addresses some of the common challenges and obstacles to return rates. He argues that the economies of scale of a company greatly impact customer success levels; thus, smaller companies experience more significant challenges to their return rates than larger companies. If a customer leaves you, thoroughly investigate why they left and what you need to do for the remaining customers to realize greater customer success. At the same time, he provides valuable advice to startup and income-generating companies regarding customer success.

This show is hosted by ⁠Joran Hofman⁠, founder of ⁠Reditus⁠.