4 Scenarios for Growing Your Customer Success Organization

As Your Business Grows and Changes, So Too Must Customer Success

Even during the current economic uncertainties, SaaS companies in multiple markets are experiencing significant growth, and the competition for opportunities continues to increase. While customer acquisition efforts should always be a mainstay in growth strategy, preserving the revenue your business worked hard to win is more essential than ever. Scaling for growth necessitates change — if not constant reinvention — in a customer success department just as in any other. Your customer success leader and managers (CSMs) will play vital roles in this process. Growing customer success must start with them, and they must reinforce the why going forward.

Here’s where a common scaling issue first arises: At this point, your customer success organization has likely been operating in “reactive mode.” They’ve been information-gathering and using what they’ve learned to shepherd customers toward success while building initial workflows — yet still functioning without established processes. But when the time comes to grow, it is important to operate on a more solidified, process-oriented framework and to re-evaluate what the CS leader and CSMs should be focused on.

Here, we’ll explore four scenarios for growing customer success that your leader should consider to spark business growth and enable more consistent delivery of customers’ business outcomes.

1. Specialization

The first barrier to growing customer success is a challenge consistent with newer teams: broad focuses and skills sets. Your first CSM was likely a jack of all trades. They supported marketing, sales, and product teams with insights while also striving to define what customer success even looked like for the business. This was fine during the early stages of the business; however, to enable your business to scale, customer success needs more specific skill sets — i.e. your customer success managers can’t be everything to everyone.

• How a framework helps: A scalable customer success framework helps your CS leader not only better define what success looks like for customers, but also helps determine what roles and skills are needed to support growth.

2. Onboarding

As more customers license and implement your software, it follows that the amount and complexity of your customer success team’s work will increase. Greater efficiency is needed from customer success — particularly when it comes to onboarding. A successful onboarding process is crucial because it frames perceptions and influences long-term customer retention. Constantly refine the onboarding process so CSMs are empowered from the start to independently and effectively manage their books of business.

• How a framework helps: Using best practices and the insights gained from early customer success efforts, a formal process can be established for onboarding that is streamlined, repeatable, and proven to be effective.

3. Resources

Just as with onboarding processes, the resources customer success managers use to execute consistent, high-performing work must also be refined and polished. Playbooks are an example of this — the processes, tools, roles, talk tracks, and other related information around a customer success function. An example of a playbook that must be polished to increase efficiency and produce stronger business outcomes includes effectively running a quarterly business review. Additional resources that should be refined include your current CRM. Your CRM must evolve along with the growth of your business, which means the CRM’s configuration needs to be re-evaluated and modified as your customer success organization scales.

• How a framework helps: Resource optimization is a key part of building an overall customer success framework. Evaluating all of the tools at leaders’ and teams’ disposal is essential — not just once but on an ongoing basis.

4. Commercial Focus

In addition to understanding the industry, platform, and end user, CSMs must also have an in-depth understanding of how they contribute to your company’s revenue growth strategy. Simply put: your customer success organization must be commercially experienced and savvy. As growth accelerates, a SaaS organization leveraging a land and expand strategy — and many of them do — should consider implementing a Growth function within customer success (again, referring back to the deeper specialization needed for growing customer success). Additionally, it may become advantageous to carve out a Renewals function — a team tasked specifically with carrying out the responsibilities for renewal creation and execution alongside the CSMs.

• How a framework helps: The purpose of a scalable customer success framework is to not only make the function more efficient and profitable, but also to keep it in-step with the scaling growth of the organization. Refining customer success to give more attention to specific opportunities for growth (e.g. renewals) ensures that the department continues to make a meaningful contribution.

Ready to Start Growing Customer Success with Ease?

Carema Consulting has developed a scalable customer success framework that supports SaaS organizations looking to maximize the performance — and results — of this important function. We partner with early and growth stage companies to help them develop workflows and playbooks that scale their customer success organizations, resulting in sustainable growth. We offer two solutions to ensure you’re able to get started in the manner that works best with where your organization is today:

• 90-Day Scalable Customer Success Framework — Accelerate the development of frameworks, processes, and playbooks configured for your business to create and execute on a scalable model for your organization.
• Customer Success Consulting — For organizations with limited internal resources, leverage Carema Consulting’s experienced professionals to act as a catalyst for the development of a scalable customer success model optimized for your organization.

Reach out to our team today to learn more and to get started.