How to Grow B2B Sales with Customer Success

Your business will be successful if your customers are successful. Customer Success is a way of supporting and growing business with existing customers, in a way that is focused on their success.

What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is a philosophy that comes from the software world but has been so successful that it has grown in popularity to be used across many industries. 

Enterprise software feels so much a part of business life, that it seems hard to remember a time when it wasn’t always that way. Software companies had to work out the best way to do things, just like any other industry. Early in their journeys several decades ago, many software companies went down the rabbit hole of building out more and more functionality into their solutions, as a way of out doing their competition. This led to large complex systems.

Although the functionality was great, software companies were struggling to understand why customers weren’t using all of their great functionality. Research done by the Standish Group in 2015 showed that 64 percent of the features in an average enterprise application were rarely or never used.

There was also the constant tension between providing good customer service and technical support, and bringing on new business. Traditionally, software companies did not want to over invest in ‘support’ seeing this as an expense. Support – as many of you may have experienced, was largely reactive and involved responded to customers when things broke.

Software companies were finding what was previously a strong subscription model, was becoming a leaky bucket – dissatisfied customers would get frustrated at the complexity of the product and the limited help available - and were canceling.

Eventually, it was obvious that there must be a better way to do things. Software companies began focusing on proactively on helping their customers to use more of their products effectively.

Instead of waiting for customers to contact them when something broke, they began focusing on the ‘health’ of their customer’s implementations. It became clear that there was a correlation between how well implemented the solutions were – that is how successful the customer implementations were in getting the customers to actively use all of the functionality available to them - and customer satisfaction and the likelihood of customers to renew.

How does Customer Success help me grow my business?

The idea is, that if you work proactively with customers to ensure they are using your product to the full, they are more likely to get the most out of your solution and have a positive experience.

This is usually done by a strong onboarding process, that is followed up with regular health checks. During health checks, a Customer Success representative checks to see what aspects of your product your customer is using. If they see an opportunity for the customer to make use of more of their product, the Customer Success person helps them to do so.

In addition to improving the customer experience, this helps the business to identify opportunities to sell in a fuller solution. It also increases the stickiness of the customer relationship, making them more likely to renew.

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Customer Success: Grow your Business with Existing Customers