How to Start Building a Customer Success Organization

As a SaaS leader, you already understand that building a customer success organization is critical to the success of your business. But that’s never been more true than today.

All too often, sales teams and leaders are hungering for that next opportunity. New customer acquisition is important for growth, but customer retention and expansion are the foundation for realizing both company value and financial resilience. Today’s economic challenges underscore the need for SaaS leaders to place some focus on building a customer success organization that’s both effective and scalable.

Over the past two years, SaaS companies enjoyed significant market strength with multiples higher than ever and booming M&A activity. Despite the pandemic, 2020 ended 91.8% above 2019 in global technology deals. That trend continued into 2021, with deals landing 71% above 2020 — representing one-fifth of all deals globally by value and volume. Deep into 2022, the game has changed with multiples dropping significantly and companies that were about to go public being repriced.

As a result, investors are advising their SaaS partners to batten down the hatches and look to solutions that will sustain them during uncertain economic times. Despite this, you as a SaaS leader still have a business to run and grow — likely with bigger numbers that you still want to hit. Building a customer success organization is one of the most effective strategies for achieving those goals. More retained customers means more net revenue retention and more satisfied customers, which is the key to one of the strongest sources of new customers: referrals.

Whether you’re beginning to see the importance of building a customer success organization or you already have one and are looking for ways to maximize its potential, it’s important to view customer success as a growth engine for revenue. Here, we’ll explore a scalable way that you can get started — or step back and restructure the way you’ve been tackling customer success to date.

How to Start Building a Customer Success Organization in Your Business

If customer success is going to be viewed as a growth engine in your business, it’s important that it supports growth at all stages — not just now or six months down the road. As you grow, your customer success organization should grow with you — in size, in sophistication, in its capability, and in its results. The key to achieving success here is implementing a scalable framework from the start — or revisiting how you’re going about customer success to make it scalable. There are three stages to this framework.

1. Build the Foundation

The first step is to solidify what “success” even looks like to your customer. You created your platform to solve a specific problem in the market, so understanding the outcome for your customers paves the way for everything else. Expectations should also be set both externally and internally; customers and internal teams should understand the role that customer success is going to play and how they should collaborate going forward.

Go deeper: Learn how customer success evolves in an organization over time.

2. Streamline the Process

Once you’ve started building a customer success organization and collecting data on performance and results, opportunities for improvement will become clearer. There will be ways to make customer success more efficient and repeatable. More specific segmentation will become possible with more data collection. And new onboarding plans can be developed once sales and customer success teams have had time to collaborate and discover common bottlenecks or pain points in the existing process.

Go deeper: Learn how to make customer success better — without adding headcount.

3. Plan for the Future

With a solid foundation that’s been refined, you can begin to scale your customer success framework up to support stronger results and organizational growth. At this point, the customer success organization itself may need to shift or grow. Additional leaders may need to be hired to manage a larger team or more processes. New metrics may need to be implemented to track more specific measures. Accountabilities may need to be increased to ensure consistency. What matters is that you grow, customer success grows with you.

Go deeper: Learn if you really need to hire that second customer success manager…

Navigate the Customer Success Framework with the Experts

At Carema Consulting, we’ve already built a proven, scalable customer success framework so you don’t have to — allowing you to dig in and experience results from this critical function sooner. We’ve helped multiple SaaS leaders achieve significant results through this framework, and we’re ready to do the same for you. We offer two solutions based on your current situation and long-term goals:

• 90-Day Scalable Customer Success Framework — Accelerate the development of frameworks, processes and playbooks configured for your business in order to create and execute on a scalable customer success model for your organization.

• Customer Success Consulting — For organizations with limited internal resources, leverage Carema Consulting’s experienced customer success professionals to act as a catalyst for the development of a scalable customer success model optimized for your organization.

Let’s Get Started

Connect with our team today to learn more about the scalable customer success framework and how we can support you.

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