How Customer Success Powers New Customer Acquisition
SaaS CEOs, CROs, CMOs and CSOs alike are constantly looking for ways to grow faster from new customer acquisition. But there is one direction that most of them never think about. The only “growth hack” that creates more and better leads, higher conversion rates while getting CAC and churn to all-time-lows. Possibly even creates higher initial ACVs.
That growth hack is to make marketing and sales closely working with the customer success team.
Sounds super obvious and easy but the truth is that most SaaS companies are far away from aligning their teams. Instead every team optimizes for their own goals and sits on invaluable information in their isolated silo.
The Secret Sauce
Customer success teams build the closest customer relationships among your organization. They get an invaluable amount of in-depth intelligence, which, when injected into the acquisition process, generates tremendous ROI and growth.
Customer success teams know the nature and scope of the customer value (hopefully) inside out. They know what customers struggle most with and have built expertise in solving their problems. Transformed into your messaging and content you’ve got the power to create more and better leads.
More and better leads is what probably 99% of sales teams want from marketing. However, not everything that looks great on the outside turns out to be a gem on the inside. While marketing and sales teams work with assumptions about who the ideal customer is, customer success teams know.
Because they work with them – and with those who are not. With better lead qualification sales reps spend more time with real opportunities and less with non-buyers and suspected churn.
The Cherry On The Cake
An ongoing question in SaaS is when to introduce customer success managers to the customer. The latest viable point is prior to your customer onboarding. But what about the other end?
Here’s a new idea:
Bring your customer success managers to the sales process at the “sales-qualified-opportunity” – stage. Let them check for red flags and sort out the suspected black sheep in advance. Think of it as another layer against churn and of those who move on as “customer success qualified opportunities”
Introducing your CSMs early in the process also has the potential to move the needle in your favor and boost your conversions. Because as a CSM you can move the talk away from the product to discussing the customers problems and possible solutions and eventually make an impression.
So many SaaS leaders don’t understand the power of alignment among their various teams. Don’t be one of them.