Bootstrapping Customer Success For B2B SaaS

January 15, 2024

7 min read

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Customer Success

Customer Success Is Crucial For Your Business

Users don’t convert if they don’t get value right away and customers churn if they don’t see enough value overtime. Your revenue depends inevitably on the success of your customers. Your customer success strategy makes sure it happens.

SaaS #101: What is Customer Success

Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company. In other words, Customer Success Management is where you take the goal of Customer Success, understand the steps required to get there, and ensure it happens.

(Source: Sixteen Ventures)

Building A Lay-Out For Your Customer Success Strategy

Map The Different Stages Of Your Customer Journey

It depends of your business model and what your product does, but your customer lifecycle stages usually looks like this: onboarding, trial, adoption, renewal.

There are success milestones.

Understand What Defines Success At Each Stage Of The Customer Journey

Every organization, team, product or market is different. That’s the reason why there shouldn’t be a “one size fits all” frame of conditions and events defining success for your customer.

Here are few very simple examples:

Onboarding: Connect at least 1 data source
Trial: Send at least 2 campaigns in the last week
Retention/Renewal: Active at least 5 days in the last 2 weeks
Upsells: Reached limited quota

Define How To Make Sure To Drive Customers To Success

Imagine the best way to engage with your customers to drive them to success at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

It could look like this, for instance:

Onboarding: Reach out to customers that have no data source after 3 days.
Trial: Focus your sales effort on “successful trial” users. Automatically extend trial and propose help to the others.
Retention/Renewal: Reach out to “likely to churn” customers before the end of their subscription to understand how you can drive them to success.
Upsells: Reach out to customers who reached their limited quota

How To Implement Your Customer Success Strategy

Your Sales Reps need a CRM to keep track of leads, deals and analyze how they perform. Your CSMs needs a CS platform like Successeve to keep track of customer health and analyze how they perform too! Here’s the 4 things you need to build a kick-ass customer success strategy that will grow your revenue:

Tracking Product Usage And Health At The Account Level

As a B2B SaaS company, your clients are accounts represented by a contract value (MRR). So your CSMs should be able to visualize usage frequency and score health at account level, not only at contact level.

Managing Customer Success Through The Entire Lifecycle

A customer success platform allows your team to identify who needs attention at each stage of the customer lifecycle – and why they need it, based on customer actions and status. So it’s super easy to focus your effort on the right customers.

Automating Health Monitoring

A CSM can manage up to 50 accounts. That’s a lot! So they don’t have time to check every accounts manually everyday. They need a system that monitors accounts health in realtime and alert them when they need attention: need help to set up, usage frequency dropped, bad NPS survey, quota reached, card will expire soon, etc…

Defining Playbooks And Emails Templates

Now that your CSMs are alerted when customers need attention, they need to know how to act. A customer success platform allows you to generate workflows (playbooks, tasks and emails) automatically based on customer health and actions. So your customer success team always knows what to do at the right time.

As a result, your customers are always proactively engaged!

Analyze Team & Individual Performance

Like every other teams in your organization, your CSMs need to evaluate their work and their progress overtime. Managers should be able to track performance of each CSM to help them reach their goals.