I recently had a ton of fun on Kristina Jaramillo's AMB Done Right podcast where we discussed how SaaS companies can tap into customer success to drive growth.
Some key takeaways:
🚀 Acquire the Right Customers Upfront
Profile your best customers using historical data to guide future targeting and lower customer acquisition costs. Prevent bad fits that absorb resources down the line.
📈 Communicate Value Clearly
Proactively showcase value delivered through metrics important to key decision-makers. Build trust and reinforce strategic impact consistently over time.
🤝 Take an Account-Based Approach
Apply account-based strategies post-sale. Segment and personalize messaging to guide customers to realize their goals.
“It’s a critical driver of your revenue. It's far easier and cheaper to expand existing customers than it is to go out and acquire new ones."
I highly recommend checking out the full episode for actionable advice on customer-driven growth frameworks. Link in the comments below 👇
That the customer OS we have built our company around in our product around what we call customer driven growth, which is the framework that we use to address a lot of these questions and it starts with. With retention and expansion, so understanding. Who are your high 5 customers? Who are your low fit customers based on those customers that have actually renewed and expanded with you previously? So that you know what who what, what is the data-driven profiles that sits behind the the best customers in your account, what does that look like, what industries are they from, what's, what problems are they solving, what did they, what did adoption engagement look like over their life cycle for those customers? And then we move on to. You know, once we know that. Then it it comes down to to creating that data-driven profile and then going out and acquire more customers that look like that, right. And so having closing the loop between your your end life customer management, your customer success function and then feeding that back into your sales marketing function. So, umm. And and we're able to do that through through lead scoring. So we basically have a have a score that we call IC your ICP Fit score that will actually take your new new acquisition pipeline and measure that against your actual successful customers and and give you a, a an indicator of of. Whether these people are projected to be successful with your software or not. And what that does is that that helps us control our customer acquisition costs, make sure that we we create or we are acquiring high fit customers which lowers our customer retention costs and ultimately drives up our lifetime value. So it's it, it comes from starting with acquiring good customers and and you know what those good customers look look like because they look similar to the ones that you already have. Once you've done that. And that's kind of a baseline foundation. You can actually start layering and predictive analytics over the top of this. And and so for every customer that we acquire and bring on the platform, we haven't expected lifetime that we calculate for that customer. And what this does is it actually gives us an, a, a benchmark that we can then now hold our customer success teams accountable too. Because one of the one of the biggest challenges with customer success as a function is it's typically not positioned as a revenue driver, it's typically. Viewed as a as a cost center, they typically don't own the renewal and expansion numbers or if they do, they're not treated with the same rigor and and or compensation as as your customer acquisition function. And so. By by being able to pull in and say this is a high that customer and high that customers that look like this are expected to renew for six cycles, it gives us a way to start evaluating the performance of our of our customer success team. Are they meeting expectation on customer lifetime, are they exceeding expectation or are they falling short?
Great way to look at how to acquire the right fit customers and ensure they are within your ICP Matt, to avoid issues later down the line. The time and resources that can be invested in a bad fit prospect/customer does not benefit either side, best to have qualified this through the necessary steps in the early stages.
President of Personal ABM and Host of the ABM Done Right Podcast - I Enable GTM Teams to Land and Expand Key Accounts with the Right Account Intelligence, Content, Messaging & Conversational Support
Great way to look at how to acquire the right fit customers and ensure they are within your ICP Matt, to avoid issues later down the line. The time and resources that can be invested in a bad fit prospect/customer does not benefit either side, best to have qualified this through the necessary steps in the early stages.