Kathleen Marcell

Considering belt tightening on your company’s budget? Probably a good idea given that, according to The Conference Board, 60% of surveyed CEOs foresee a recession by the end of 2023 and 55% expect inflation to extend into 2023. Are your investors increasingly looking for their portfolio companies to spend more wisely in the interest of preserving financial runway? Here are three ways to enhance your Customer Success IQ in the face of economic uncertainty Develop a consistent, repeatable plan for addressing customers that [...]

Customer Success Managers (CSM) are the eyes and ears of your organization, and they often serve as a customer’s first point of contact. A customer’s experience and interactions with their CSM will easily influence how they perceive your company and, ultimately, your product. This makes both hiring the right people and developing a CSM training plan of critical importance. The role of a CSM is fast-paced and carries high expectations, requiring a creative mindset and the ability to strategically pivot with agility. Even [...]

For a typical company in the start-up or growth phase, it’s common to go through a period of furiously creating new features to stay ahead of its competition. It often involves deploying multiple releases each month; incorporating Voice of Customer as often as possible; and perfecting product- and feature-market fit. However, this laser focus on product and feature evolution is often to the detriment of a critical success component: customer readiness. That’s why, at Carema Consulting, we encourage our clients to think through [...]

We have all encountered the email from a client who says they want to cancel because they no longer use your service. It is a painful reality as you think back to the day they became a customer, when they so clearly had a desired business outcome you were going to help them realize. It’s like joining a gym with great intentions of frequent visits and getting fit, and months later realizing you’ve only visited a few times. It probably is not worth [...]

In SaaS companies, there are often several customer touchpoints occurring across an organization, from Account Management to Product to Support, and even emerging functions like Product Marketing. That said, it’s the role of a customer success manager (CSM) to own the overall customer relationships for a subset of accounts. A CSM is ultimately responsible for 1) partnering with their subset of customers to help them achieve their business outcomes, and 2) creating raving fans within these accounts who want to expand their [...]

Should your early-stage B2B SaaS company use opt-in licensing or evergreen licensing to guide its renewal process? We answered this question in a recent post about why you may want to reevaluate your approach. To recap, with opt-in licensing, a customer must receive, review and sign-off on an agreement from the SaaS vendor in order to renew its licensing of the software for another term. With evergreen licensing, a customer’s licensing of the software automatically renews. In this post, we examine another piece of [...]