Product Marketing & Customer Success Insights
LEARN FROM THE EXPERTS
Carema Consulting has 30+ years of B2B SaaS leadership experience applying customer success and product marketing best practices that result in sustainable growth, enhanced gross margin and avoidance of costly mistakes. Discover our insights in the articles below, or contact our team to learn more.
3 Ways to Grow Customer Success Capacity Without Adding Headcount
With a potential recession looming, both early and growth stage companies must be fiscally prudent, including taking into consideration headcount freezes. A hiring freeze doesn’t mean a Customer Success team is stuck at its current capacity. Here, we share three battle-tested ways to increase Customer Success capacity - and improve CS performance - without adding headcount. Revise your CSM variable compensation plans A CSM focused on achieving the right outputs will naturally increase productivity and performance. Confirm each CSM’s variable compensation goal is [...]
3 Ways to Make Customer Success Smarter During a Recession
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 [...]
Answer These 6 Questions Before Hiring Your Second Customer Success Manager
Is your start-up ready to make its second Customer Success Manager hire? If so, follow this approach: Make the second CSM hire the right hire by first stepping back and determining the type of Customer Success organization needed to reliably deliver on your customers’ business outcomes. Avoid hiring another CSM just like your first CSM When picking its first CSM, a start-up typically selects an individual best described as a jack of all trades. That’s because a jack of all trades is [...]
Three Stages of Customer Success Evolution
A start-up SaaS company continues to evolve over time as it grows. As such, it’s important to recognize the stage of maturation that your company is in and, based on that, know what’s needed from Customer Success in each stage of your company’s evolution. Know these Customer Success focus areas so that you’re ready to fuel your company’s continued growth by transitioning and scaling the Customer Success team to best support the next stage of evolution at the right time. Stage 1 - [...]
3 Best Practices to Achieving Cross-Functional Alignment (Part 3)
With the planning process concluded, it’ll be time to maintain cross-functional communication to keep teams aligned.
3 Best Practices to Achieving Cross-Functional Alignment (Part 2)
Armed with insights into the previous year, it’s now time to navigate a cross-functional planning process. Learn how.
3 Best Practices to Achieving Cross-Functional Alignment (Part 1)
With a new year comes a new opportunity to reflect and put your organization on a path to stronger cross-functional collaboration.
Why Customer Success Playbooks Are the Best Tool for Team Growth
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 [...]
4 Considerations for Your Customer Readiness Strategy
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 [...]
How to Optimize a New Customer’s Experience with Customer Journey Mapping
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 [...]
Brian created, built and constantly morphed Microsystems’ Customer Success team and workflows that achieved a 98+% revenue renewal rate and that fueled the company’s 4x growth in ARR. Brian developed his team of Customer Success Managers to be highly attuned to our customers. The CSMs knew the proper time to push and when to hold back. As a result, our customers eagerly engaged with us, remained our customers for a long time, and provided references and referrals that buoyed our Sales team’s new customer acquisition efforts.
At Vertex Analytics, Carema Consulting led an initiative to research and prove the value of a pivot of the company’s flagship product to an entirely new use case. This included securing and leading 1-on-1 conversations with thought leaders and target buyers in order to validate the pivot, authoring a positioning document to insure consistent messaging across our Marketing mix, and producing a go to market strategy. In order to assess and sharpen the positioning and GTM plan, Brian drove the Sales effort for the newly repositioned solution; in the process, Brian closed Vertex’s largest sale.
My two years working with and for Brian represented a PhD in Customer Success for B2B SaaS. To execute against our ‘land and expand’ strategy, Brian led the creation and implementation of strategies and tactics that have empowered me to consistently forecast and achieve quarterly renewal and upsell goals for my enterprise customer base. He’s become a mentor to me.
Carema Consulting was the pivotal factor that enabled interviewstream to form, execute, and grow our customer advisory boards at a time when greater customer intimacy was urgently needed to inform our future strategy. Carema Consulting showed us how to use customer advisory boards in a way that created a level of engagement that we didn’t previously think was possible.
Carema Consulting understands deeply the essence and process of a well run Customer Success organization. In addition to helping Genivity form a sound process, Carema Consulting helped us define success and ensure that we as an early stage fintech company were focused on the right things, including zealously capturing voice of customer.
Brian is smart, even-keeled, and he understands that a company’s success only comes from the success of its customers. Rarely do you get to work with, and for, an individual who has that rare balance of intelligence and humility, and who you look forward to going to work for every day.
Customer Success
IS WHAT WE DO.