Boost Recurring Revenue by Focusing on 3 Key Tenets of Customer Success
Almost every recurring revenue business — especially a B2B SaaS company — has a customer success organization.
And every top-performing B2B SaaS company has a commercially-focused customer success organization that serves as an important revenue-generating partner to its company’s sales organization. It does this by devising and executing its activities in support of three key tenets:
- Entrench
- Expand
- Land
These tenets provide a simple way for a customer success leader to focus the activities of their SaaS customer success team in order to predictably secure renewals and generate revenue expansion opportunities — leading to greater recurring revenue.
Here, we’ll explore each of these tenets to explain what they mean and what occurs in them to give customer success leaders a foundation for strengthening their processes and growing recurring revenue.
Customer success is only as strong as its leader.
Learn what to ask a candidate for a customer success leadership role. READ MORE
1. Entrench
Entrench is the default role and responsibility of a customer success team. Once a prospect becomes a customer, Entrench describes how customer success guides the customer through onboarding/implementation and toward repeatedly achieving their desired business outcomes for ongoing customer growth.
When a customer success team successfully entrenches with a customer, two valuable outcomes occur:
- Mutual trust is established.
- A moat is built around the business that not only shields your company from poaching by competitors but also discourages customer churn.
Go deeper: Removing friction during the first year of a new customer relationship is crucial to success and the Entrench process. Learn what to consider here.
2. Expand
Once you have established mutual trust with a customer, your customer success team has the opportunity to build on that trust. Simply put, a happy customer expects their customer success manager to serve as a trusted partner and bring forward best practices and solutions. They want your company to solve more of their problems.
Expand includes upsell and cross-sell, both of which drive revenue growth from existing customer accounts. Both are especially important when a SaaS company utilizes a “land and expand” strategy to grow the ARR (annual recurring revenue) from the customers licensing its solutions.
Go deeper: Are your customer success managers set up for success — and thus able to create success and value for your customers? Get 5 tips to help them win.
3. Land
As SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin has said, almost all software companies get about 80% of their new customers from their existing customers once they hit scale. They do so via effective Land activities.
Generating positive word-of-mouth, providing referrals, serving as references, participating in case studies, helping to devise impactful ROI models — these are all outcomes of satisfied, loyal customers with whom you’ve developed mutual trust.
Positive word-of-mouth and referrals add new customer opportunities to the top of the sales funnel. The other outcomes serve as important proof points that accelerate new customer opportunities through the middle and end of the sales funnel. By sparking these outcomes, customer success is an important revenue-generating partner to its company’s sales organization.
Maximize Recurring Revenue from Customer Success — Partner with Carema Consulting
Our team works directly with founders and leaders at B2B SaaS companies to help them strategically improve the customer success function — thereby maximizing recurring revenue, streamlining and enhancing processes that support better scaling, and delivering consistently positive customer outcomes. We are also SaaS product marketing experts that assist with message development and how to execute an effective product launch.
Whatever your growth goals may be, our team takes a consultative approach to ensure you achieve them in a way that sets you up for repeatable and scalable long-term success. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our capabilities.
