4 reasons keeping customers happy is hard (Target Burn is back)
You made the sale. Now you have to make them happy "proactively".
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Listen to customer success leaders and you’ll hear it over and over again:
Post-sales needs to be more proactive, less reactive
Post-sales being onboarding, customer success, and account management.
Ask what “proactive” means in practice and you hit a wall. The frameworks are too high level. There are no workflows. There’s no guidance on how to become this mythical thing: The Proactive Customer Success Team.
The problem isn’t that people don’t want to be proactive. It’s that nobody is explaining what proactivity looks like when you’re operating under a different set of constraints from every other customers-facing revenue role in the business.*
*This is not just about customer success. It’s about anyone doing the work to help customers get value from a product. Call the role whatever you want.
Success is not like sales and marketing, despite being close to customers and responsible for revenue numbers.
Understanding those constraints is where real solutions start. Where teams can get proactive and start owning more revenue.
The four constraints of customer success
Success teams have it harder than most people realize. It’s not a free-for-all like marketing and sales and growth.
If you work in success or do success-like work, see if these resonate.
1 — Your addressable market is finite and revenue-attached
Most marketing and sales teams have a gigantic total addressable market (TAM). That’s the fun part of those roles. For most B2B businesses, there is a big market out there.
Marketing gets to target the whole TAM. Sales gets to work through a pipeline of those who put their hands up, a list that keeps growing if marketing does its job well.
Success manages a fixed set of paying customers on any given day. Every one of those customers represents real, recurring revenue. Success does not get endless opportunities to test and trial — you can’t iterate your way through a list of customers like you would through market experiments.
2 — Success competes for a sliver of the attention
Hopefully your customer base is growing. But even if it is, your audience as a Success role is already a subset of a subset of the market. Within that you only get a tiny fraction of their time, energy, and focus.
Customers juggle your tool alongside everything else. That’s other vendors, internal initiatives, competing priorities, and buyers remorse.
It’s not ok to demand more of their time and attention just because you want to test something. When a marketing test doesn’t work, marketing tries again to get new dollars.
When a success initiative flops, customers stop paying and real revenue bleeds out the door.
3 — Your mission is to be a value maximizer for everyone
Yes, you’re job is to help customers get value your app they just bought. But your job is also to make sure your company harvests as much value as possible from each customer, too.
You're there to make sure customers realize more value from your products than they’ve investing in time, money, effort and emotion. That’s not just an operational goal — it shapes every decision you make.
Yes other teams build the products and promote the products with the promise of delivering value. But only the people charged with making sure that value is delivered (and understood and FELT) feel the pressure to keep everyone happy.
4 — Customer success functions are chronically under-resourced
Understaffed, under-funded, under-tooled. That’s not a bug in most orgs. It’s structural.
And I’m sure any team could argue the same, from product to marketing to leadership. But success teams seem to feel this more than others.
I think one reason is that when success does its job well, either nothing happens or there are incremental gains.
The silver lining on any constraint
These constraints don’t apply just to companies with big customer success teams. Every SaaS company operates within them, whether it’s a formal function or not.
Constraints like these aren’t obstacles to work around. They are the way, as Ryan Holiday says.
Agree with them or not, these are the foundations for how success teams get creative and become proactive.
Sales and marketing teams can chase proactivity with experimentation and volume. They get reps. Success has to be different — by understanding what’s actually possible within these realities.
I’m filled with hope by recent in-person conversations about this. More and more companies are taking success roles more seriously. That doesn’t mean success roles get any more headcount or funding. But it means teams are starting to think creatively about the role.
And that’s what I’d like to explore over the next days. It start with a Crawl. Walk. Run. approach to signals and experimentation. All with the goal of increasing the value of your current customers and building a rock-solid revenue foundation for a healthy business.
TTFN people,
Peter