CS moving from customer Ally to Nemesis?
One of our podcast listeners asked, “I would love to get your view on Jason Lemkin’s assessment that customer success is moving from the customer's ally to its nemesis.”
Jason Lemkin is a VC and is very influential in the SaaS world; for better or worse (worse being when he said in 2012 that CSMs should manage $2M/ARR and people took that as a legit benchmark. Many people still mistakenly believe that's valid.).
So Jason's view that "Customer Success Has Gone from The Customer’s Ally To Its Nemesis" (which is contained in a blog post - that reads like an emotional response to a bad experience - and is linked in the show notes of our latest podcast episode), definitely caught a lot of people's attention.
We really dug into this from different angles in the latest episode of our Impact Weekly podcast that just dropped today.
in this episode, we explore:
- The definition of an Ally and Nemesis in this context
- Why the negative things Jason is citing aren't actually Customer Success
- Challenges faced by companies in a downturn market and the pressure to increase revenue
- The significance of raising concerns to leadership and seeking a customer-centric approach
- And much more!
I was in Brazil for the past two weeks - 7 airports, 9 flights - and I caught a cold. Unfortunately, you can tell that in my voice on this episode. Sorry about that.
~Lincoln
BTW: Our Annual Customer Success survey is still open and we'd love to know how you'd answer questions like these:
- How fulfilled do you feel in your role in Customer Success?
- Do you think the leadership of your company practices what they preach when it comes to Customer Success?
- Do you/your team have the necessary capacity to make your customers successful?
- How much do you use GenAI (like ChatGPT) in your day-to-day job in Customer Success today?
So we put together this survey on Typeform to help fill in those - and other - gaps in the collective understanding of the CS community.
While the information we're collecting is super-important - and of course we'll share it with you and the community when we're done collecting it - the survey itself will only take a few minutes to complete.
Please share your experience with the community here.
Thanks in advance!
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Lincoln Murphy
I help SaaS companies Maximize LTV through Customer-centric Upselling
Don’t worry about upsells until churn is below 10%? Really? No, this mindset limits growth and stifles potential. Unless your environment is overtly customer-negative and you have massive churn across your entire customer base, you don’t need to hit some mythical churn threshold before upselling. Yes, address churn where it’s an issue, but also recognize that some customers are progressing and ready for expansion NOW. Here’s the truth: Even with higher churn in some cohorts, you have other...
Our 2-week Retention training and certificate program starts on Monday, June 17, 2024. Our first live session is on Tuesday. This program is so unique because we take a different approach to Customer and Revenue retention. We focus on the differences between Proactive and Reactive Retention, how to move from the latter to the former through better prioritization, orchestration, and directing limited resources to higher-percentage activities. This program is practical in every sense of the...
This week's Impact Weekly podcast episode is up (Listen here or on Spotify or Apple) and in it, Johan and I answer a variety of questions about Churn, including: What are the key indicators for predicting churn in advance? How to prevent churn when you have no control over price rises (set by head office) Is there a particular NRR %, or threshold below 100% NRR that would be a particular alarm bell for you? Is there a tolerance that you'd expect to see in B2B SaaS? And more! We give some VERY...