Customer Success

Armed with insights into the previous year, it’s now time to navigate a cross-functional planning process. Learn how.

With a new year comes a new opportunity to reflect and put your organization on a path to stronger cross-functional collaboration.

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 [...]

One of our favorite business moments is celebrating a sale to a new customer. We suspect each of us has our own traditional celebration. Whatever that custom is, it’s important to do, in that each new customer acquisition is further proof of the market fit that each of our businesses strives to achieve. But then what? Once the initial sale has happened, the hard work begins of making your company a must-have, joined-at-the-hip partner to your new customer. While celebrating the successful acquisition [...]

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 [...]

As a customer success manager (CSM) at a recurring or repeating revenue company, the principle objective of your role is to create successful customers who are loyal and engaged.  Lincoln Murphy, a customer-centric thought leader, says: “Customer Success is [how] your customers achieve their desired business outcomes through their interactions with your company.” Creating customer success begins with developing meaningful relationships and cultivating trust with customers. There’s no better way to build trust with customers than by delivering on their desired business outcomes--the [...]

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 [...]

Through our work with customers of Carema Consulting and with companies that come through Chicago-based revenue accelerator VentureSCALE, we’ve observed that most early-stage B2B SaaS companies (seed or Series A stages) utilize evergreen software licensing terms with their customers. While this may make sense logically, we believe otherwise: Too many early-stage B2B SaaS companies revert or default to evergreen renewal terms when they would be better served using opt-in renewals. Before we dive into why opt-in licensing is better than evergreen licensing for [...]