The success of your SaaS business is directly linked to the success of your customers. Why? Because a successful customer is a happy customer. And when your customers are happy, a number of things happen:
- They stay customers for a long time.
- They expand their purchases.
- They buy your other offerings.
- They refer friends.
All of which increase your monthly recurring revenues. In this post, discover the four game-changing impacts of customer success management
Dreaded Churn
Churn is one of the metrics most closely monitored by SaaS companies. It represents the percentage of customers who cancel their subscriptions (or the percentage of revenue lost to those cancellations).
Why Churn Matters
According to the 2017 KBCM Technology Group Private SaaS Company Survey, acquiring new customers is eight times more costly than retaining a current customer. And Bain asserts that a 5% increase in customer retention can produce more than a 25% increase in profit. That’s because returning customers tend to purchase more, and they’re willing to pay a premium price rather than take a chance on an unfamiliar competitor.
How Customer Service Management Teams Can Reduce Churn
Customer Success managers can reduce churn by making sure your product is delivering on its promise. Stay close to customers to see if their business needs – the ones that formed the basis for their purchase – are being met. You’d also do well to keep track of their product utilization, to check whether they’ve discovered all the features that would be most useful to them.
Another key area to watch is their customer support activity. If they’re placing a high volume of calls or if their tickets are taking a long time to close, there may be brewing frustration that you’d do well to address.
The Upsell
Reducing churn is a laudable goal. But you can do even better. You can even achieve negative churn, which occurs when increased sales from existing customers surpass lost revenue due to churn.
According to Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance, your likelihood of selling to an existing customer is much greater than that of selling to a new lead – we’re talking 60-70% compared to only 5-20%.
Why Upselling Matters
According to the 2017 KBCM Technology Group Private SaaS Company Survey:
- It’s twice as expensive to acquire new customers than it is to upsell current ones (i.e. to selling additional features to existing customers.)
- It’s four times more expensive to acquire new customers than to expand current ones (i.e. to sell additional licenses to existing customers)
How Customer Service Management Teams Can Help Increase Upsell Revenues
An effective customer success management team is in touch with their customers’ needs and the way they use your product. Armed with that insight, they know exactly when is the right time to approach customers with an upsell offer, and what the right offer would be.
The Cross-Sell
Like upselling, cross-selling is another strategy you can adopt to make more money from existing customers. Your focus here will be to sell additional products to customers who have already bought one.
Amazon is the king of the cross-sell with their “Customers who bought this item also bought…” and “Frequently Bought Together”, challenged only by the classic “do you want fries with that?”
Why Cross-Selling Matters
Cross-selling can be very lucrative. Case in point, Amazon reports that 35% of their revenues is the result of cross-selling.
How Customer Service Management Teams Can Help Increase Cross-Sell Revenues
According to Hubspot, Customer Success Managers can play a key role in both cross-selling and upselling by getting to know their customers, building out customer journeys, mapping out solutions to their customers’ problems and practicing active listening.
Referrals
Referrals happen when customers are so thrilled with you that they tell their friends all about you. Referral marketing is the strategy that catapulted startups like AirBnB and Dropbox into the massive juggernauts they’ve become. In fact, Dropbox attributes 35% of their signups to the referral program.
Why Referrals Matters
Referrals are a virtually unbeatable revenue channel. Leads are more likely to trust your company if it’s been referred to them. They’re more be willing to pay a higher price for your offering. Also, referrals traditionally boast a lower cost per lead, as well as a higher close rate than other channels. And if you need even more reasons to believe that referrals are where it’s at, check out what Hubspot has to say on the subject.
How Customer Success Management Teams Can Help Increase Referrals
If you want to know how customer success managers can help increase referrals, look no further than Bizible, which quadrupled their ‘opportunities from referrals’ metric after their customer success team set out to accomplish five goals:
- Become available to every customer
- Educate customers on all product features and functionality
- Offer quality customer support
- Communicate regularly and proactively
- Help customers become experts
Over To You
Are you convinced of the importance of customer success management? How do you manage customer success in your organization? We’d love to hear from you in the comments. And if you need a hand supporting your success management strategy with valuable customer insights, contact H today.
