Thread by @eriktorenberg

High level thoughts on customer success:

- How to think about it
- What to hire for
- Who owns renewals?
- Common mistakes founders make
- How to pay for it
- Metrics

What's the best way to think about customer success—Is it a skill set? a function, a software stack?

Levels to customer success:

level 1: individual job function
level 2: a team that collaborates w/ all other post sales functions
level 3: company wide strategy

Relationship between sales & customer success: who owns renewal?

Depends!

If you're selling something that's $1K a yr or higher, it'smore of a team sport

After the sale, the customer is still talking to the salesperson abt expansion.

Early days customer success person is helping drive product market fit by helping the engineers understand what are people using.

Over time CS managers get more metrics driven and start owning renewals.

What are you looking for in your first customer success manager in the early team, maybe even before selling?

A strong utility player who can wear different hats from training the customer to supporting them to getting feedback to working w/ product

What's profile of CS manager?

If your product is a little bit more transactional, they tend to me more product-oriented

If it's a high touch enterprise type deal, they tend to be a little more consultative

Common mistake founders make about customer success:

In the beginning, CS managers need to be catch-all, but a mistake is keeping them as catch-all as you scale.

You should have a person doing training, another onboarding, etc

How to justify cost for CS as you scale?

You could say it's just cost of doing business, like support costs.

Another way is saying this is part of renewals expansion

Another is charging for it directly.

Why does CS matter more today than it used to?

Before SaaS became dominant business model, you used to pay for everything upfront.

Now, it's pay as you go, and there's so many other competitors, that you have to keep earning your customer's business every step of the way.

How else did this change building SaaS businesses? You now needed:

- More agile product strategy
- Different GTM strategy (old model was expensive sales channel partners. In new model, deals are smaller & higher velocity)
- Marketing & product can't be silo'ed

What metrics should CS managers prioritize?

Lagging indicators - Gross Retention Rate & Net Renewal Rate (includes upsell) & NPS

Leading indicators - Depends on product but could be overall adoption, daily active usage, NPS, e-mail engagement,

Much of this was inspired by @nrmehta, CEO of @GainsightHQ and author of "Customer Success"

amazon.com/gp/product/111…

I went deeper w/ him here: player.fm/series/venture…