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Lincoln Murphy

I help SaaS companies Maximize LTV through Customer-centric Upselling

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Outcomes > Meetings (calendar chaos)

I'm on a flight to San Francisco and the person to my left is talking to their colleague trying to find a time for both of them to meet with a customer. I glanced over and saw their calendar and... OMG! Back to back to back meetings, all day, every day. Completely full. Unsustainable. Even worse, it really seemed to be a source of pride for them. Now, I don't know the nature of their business and I didn't keep looking - I got a sense of it and I looked away - but their calendar looked just...

HEADS UP - On 4-Sept, I'm doing a masterclass on making your meetings FAR more efficient and effective. Learn more and sign-up here. As I've been saying, meetings are the most expensive activity in Customer Success Management, yet we often overlook their true cost. If we understood this better, we’d have far fewer unproductive meetings. There are three types of costs associated with meetings. The first type was Direct Cost, or the cost of the CSM or other contributor's time, including the...

HEADS UP! - On 4-Sept, I'm doing a masterclass on making your meetings FAR more efficient and effective. Learn more and sign-up here. Meetings are the most expensive activity in Customer Success Management, yet we often overlook their true cost. If we better understood their cost, we’d have far fewer unproductive meetings. There are three types of costs associated with meetings. The first type is: Direct Cost: This is the actual cost of your CSMs' and other contributors' time on the call....

Our 2-week Success Plan training and certificate program starts this Monday, August 19, 2024. This program for CSMs is all about working with customers in that "ongoing" phase of their lifecycle. As you know, this is the lifecycle phase where momentum is lost, engagement suffers, and customers often operate without direction. This program fixes that by teaching you: Ongoing Goal Discovery Meeting Prep and Brainstorming How to use Progress Milestones Objection Handling Joint Accountability And...

TL;DR - On 4-Sept, I'm doing a masterclass on making your meetings FAR more efficient and effective. Learn more and sign-up here. Meetings are the most expensive thing we do in Customer Success—both in actual and opportunity cost—yet most of them are a waste of those resources. If you’ve mastered meetings—getting attendees interested, setting up agendas, using async carveouts, self-service deflection, and ensuring proper follow-up—feel free to skip this workshop. You’re good. But if you’re...

Our 2-week virtual Success Plan training and certificate program starts on Monday, August 19, 2024. This program for CSMs is all about working with customers in the "ongoing" phase of the lifecycle; you know, after Onboarding and Adoption but before Renewal This is the lifecycle phase where momentum is generally lost, engagement suffers, and customers often operate without direction. This can lead to churn, but more often leads to contraction at renewal (revenue churn) and definitely keeps...

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...

In this context, "busy" is a feeling, one that leads CSMs to feel overwhelmed and eventually burnout. Busy isn't about the performance of activities, per se. You can have two CSMs, both spending 75% of their time on customer-facing activities, but the one performing efficiently won't just NOT feel "busy" but will feel productive and satisfied with their job, while the CSM operating inefficiently is suffering and looking for a way out. Here are a few ideas for you to make your CSMs feel less...