Strategic Customer Success: The true guide for sales, marketing, and product

It can be tough to talk about the work your Customer Success team does on behalf of the customer. Sometimes the work isn’t pretty as CS covers gaps that may extend across your company. We can get consumed with the variability of what customers are struggling to overcome, or maybe we get distracted by who complains the loudest. Constantly addressing the squeaky wheel can prevent us from seeing the critical areas of improvement that will reduce surprise attrition.

I refer to this as the “doing what it takes” mentality or heroic efforts. A quick sidebar: heroic efforts is not isolated to making personal sacrifices with time, and they can include knowledge. Do you have a team member you rely on for their comprehensive knowledge or abilities? Relying on specific team members in this way is also a heroic effort.

Doing what it takes, or heroic efforts, will ensure you won’t learn anything. You will hopefully solve the problem at hand, but it will be difficult to get others in your company aligned with truly resolving a critical shortcoming. We need a more profound argument backed up with fact-based evidence, if possible. Strategic Customer Success (SCS) strengthens your ability to be persuasive within your company.

How does SCS help Sales, Marketing & Product?

• Empower product managers to connect to customers’ challenges in a relevant way to review product roadmaps, validate new features, and get product feedback aligned with critical moments in a customer’s adoption.
  
• We have a better chance of being there when a win happens which benefits marketing in case studies and referenceable customers.
  
• We capture stories to tell in the sales process, increasing revenue, shortening the sales process, and realizing additional internal efficiencies by selling recreateable successes.

SCS empowers your company to engage in continuous dialogue with their customers, continuously deepening the alignment between the vendor and the customer with the vendor ultimately becoming an indispensable trusted partner.