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.
5 Tips for Creating Long-Term Partnerships with Customers
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 [...]
10 Best Practices for Cementing Trust with Customers
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 [...]
5 Strategies for Developing Highly Effective Customer Success Managers
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 [...]
5 Reasons to Use Opt-In Licensing at Your Early-Stage B2B SaaS Company
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 [...]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Customer Success
IS WHAT WE DO.