B2B SaaS Customer Success Solutions
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STRATEGIES THAT WORK
THREE PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITY AREAS
Our Customer Success Philosophy
Carema Consulting’s engagement outcomes and deliverables are based on what we believe are the three primary responsibility areas of a customer success organization. This provides an easy way for you to organize and prioritize the activities and focus of your SaaS customer success team—whether as part of an early-stage company or a growth-stage company.
Our customer success philosophy consists of three key areas: Entrench | Expand | Land.
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 implementation towards repeatedly achieving their desired business outcomes for ongoing customer growth.
When Customer Success successfully entrenches with a customer, two valuable outcomes occur:
- Mutual trust is built.
- A moat is built around the business that not only shields your company from poaching by competitors, but also discourages customer churn.
Expand
Once you have established mutual trust with a customer, your customer success team has the opportunity to build on that trust. In fact, 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 account expansion. Both are especially important when a SaaS company utilizes a “land and expand” strategy.
Land
Referrals, references, case studies, positive word-of-mouth, impactful ROI models—these are all outcomes of satisfied, loyal customers with whom you’ve developed mutual trust, leading them to rely on your company to solve more of their problems. These outcomes add new customer opportunities to the top of the sales funnel and provide important proof points during the middle and end of the sales funnel. By leveraging these outcomes together, your company can accelerate its new customer acquisition.
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.
WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT
Carema Consulting Deliverables
Carema Consulting is skilled at leveraging a variety of methods to deliver on our clients’ engagement outcomes, including:
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 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.
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.