brooke.land
Writing on Customer Success, SaaS, and building customer-first teams.
Understanding the Customer Success Manager Role — Infographic
Read the full article here
How CSMs Can Manage Difficult Customer Situations
Similar to an earlier post , this is a summary of a presentation- let me know what you think of this alternative format. Types of difficult customer…
Why Customer Success Teams need to establish a feedback culture
It’s a typical Thursday at 2pm, which means you’re dialing in to your standing client call with ABC Corp. The call kicks off with the expected…
Ways Customer Success should influence Marketing
Most companies still think about marketing in terms of a funnel- a bunch of leads go in the top, and a few customers come out the bottom. But leading SaaS…
What’s the appropriate CSM to Manager ratio?
While there’s been a lot written (and debated on) the topic of how many accounts or how much revenue a Customer Success Manager should own, there’s been…
Deciding to be "Great by Choice" - leadership lessons during times of uncertainty
“Great by Choice” is a bestselling work by the popular writer Jim Collins, whose other business books include: “Good to Great”, and “Built to Last”. I’ve…
How Customer Success teams should respond to COVID-19
We all know the current situation we find ourselves in is unprecedented, and that many people’s lives and livelihoods have been fundamentally altered.…
Avoiding burnout on your Customer Success team
If you’ve made it past the headline, I probably don’t need to tell you burnout is a serious concern for individuals and employers. While burnout isn’t a…
Adding a human touch to product onboarding with Customer Success
Product workflows have a major impact on customer experience. They’re scalable, touch every user, and are measurable and data-driven. But customers often…
How Customer Success Managers should handle a big “Switch”
We’re confronted with change in a hundred different ways on a daily basis. A street on your morning commute is closed so you take a detour, your manager…
Why SaaS customers churn
This post is a summary of a presentation- curious to know what you think of this alternative format. What is churn? Churn fundamentally represents a…
Why Product Led Growth companies group Sales, Customer Success, and Support under the same org
SaaS companies and buyers are well aware of ways the flywheel model has changed go-to-market strategies. Companies leveraging this bottoms-up approach…
Everything you need to know about a job in Customer Success
What is Customer Success? The core responsibility of a Customer Success team is to drive success to the customers they work with (sometimes titles are…
4 SaaS Trends Affecting Customer Success
For the 7th year, David Skok has published the findings from his annual survey of privately held SaaS companies. And just like the previous 4 years, I’m…
Using help sites to deliver Customer Success
Help sites at a minimum explain how to use something. There’s usually a FAQ section, a few details about how to reset your password, and so on.…
Customer Success Without Recurring Revenue
The mission statement of Customer Success is simple: ensure customers realize value from your products or services. A defining characteristic that…
What Customer Success Managers can learn from "The Challenger Customer"
“The Challenger Customer” is a follow-up to the CEB team’s widely popular “The Challenger Sale” . The authors build on their existing challenger sales…
Professional Services and Customer Success in SaaS startups
The past 15 years have seen a massive shift in the tech industry where million dollar, multi-year, on-premise deals have given way to try-before-you-buy…
Customer Success Trends by the Numbers
Customer Success continues to grow 83% of Customer Success teams saw growth in team size within the past year according to survey results released by…
Customer Success Managers can't avoid conflict- they should tackle it head on
Customer Success is fundamentally about helping other people, and as a result, most Customer Success Managers have amicable and agreeable personalities.…
Customer Success Enablement
Customer Success teams have no shortage of responsibilities — from launching new accounts, to helping existing customers achieve their goals and realize…
Customer Success Compensation: Base, Bonus, and Quotas
The debate over what types of financial incentives companies should offer customer-facing employees has been unfolding for years. Department stores have…
4 Customer Success Mistakes (and how to fix them)
The start of a new year is a good time to reflect on our ambitions for the year ahead and acknowledge the mistakes we’ve made. Some errors are easy to…
3 Customer Success takeaways from the 2018 SaaS company survey
With 2018 retrospectives in full swing and a new year on the horizon, now is the perfect time to review David Skok’s annual private SaaS company survey.…
Thinking about taking a job in Customer Success? Here's why you should
Who should be thinking about taking a job in Customer Success? The backgrounds of people in Customer Success widely vary. You might be a recent grad who…
Customer Success FAQs
The ChurnZero team has been spotlighting Customer Success professionals to get their take on the industry as well as get to hear some of their top tips…
When To Tier Your Customers
Think about the last interaction you had with a service provider. Whether it was a livechat agent or a first-class flight attendant, your lasting…
Why CSMs Need To Be Capable Project Managers
Customers are conditioned to see their Customer Success Manager (CSM) as the central point of contact at your company. As such, CSMs are the natural first…
How to Re-engage Unresponsive Customers
Relationships are at the core of all customer interactions, and it’s impossible to have a productive one if all communication is one-sided. In our…
Negotiating as a Customer Success Manager
Every company I’ve worked for has offered a different mix of resources to support Customer Success Managers (CSMs) when it came time to negotiate with…
Understanding the Customer Success Manager Role
As Customer Success continues to find its way into the mainstream, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are at the forefront of this growing movement. In…
The Rise of Customer Success
83% of Customer Success teams saw growth in team size within the last year according to survey results released by Totango just this week. Meanwhile, a…
When to buy Customer Success software
There are a lot of companies marketing their software to Customer Success teams. By some estimates there are 20+ purpose built Customer Success software…
How Customer Success teams can communicate more effectively across departments
A core responsibility of Customer Success teams is to communicate and interact with cross-functional teams internally and within their customers’…
When and How to Make your First Customer Success Hire
In the early days of a startup everyone from the CEO to the Content Marketer is a defacto member of the Customer Success team. Being removed from…
Not all churn is the same
Although churn is a common topic in the Customer Success circles I frequent, it’s not unusual to hear even an experienced CSM ask “wait, what type of…
Customer Success metrics that matter
As Customer Success teams we’re constantly striving to help our customers achieve their goals and objectives- but how do we know if our efforts are having…
Risking it all for a European adventure
“Have you thought this through?” We were celebrating Christmas at my grandparents’ house a few days before the 25th. The day was clear and you could see…
Customer Success trends of 2017- dissecting SaaS metrics survey
The days are getting shorter, holiday shopping is approaching its climax, and companies are starting to make plans and projections for 2018. But what SaaS…
Creating a post-sales process for customer success
Customer Success teams interact with many cross-functional departments, building and maintaining relationships from Support to Account Management . But…
Where Customer Success and Customer Support goals overlap
It should never be Customer Success vs Customer Support. Yet, somehow these departments have become separated and even disassociated from each other. It…
What Customer Success Managers can learn from "The Challenger Sale"
“The Challenger Sale” has been one of the most popular and influential sales books since it was released in late 2011. And while it’s been primarily…
Hiring for Customer Success teams
You’re ready to make your first Customer Success hire- congratulations! Establishing a dedicated Customer Success team is an investment in the long-term…
Collaboration across Customer Success and Growth Marketing drives a more positive customer experience
If someone were to ask who at your startup owns growth and the customer experience, which people or teams would raise their hands? Or perhaps a better…
2016 in Review
The end of the year presents a natural opportunity for reflection on how things have changed and what we’ve accomplished, and after reading so many…
First 90 days in Customer Success
You’ve been brought in as the founding member of the Customer Success team — congrats! Your company is making a major investment in helping customers…
The Value of Account Executives who don’t just sell
The typical Account Executive is more focused on prospecting new clients than driving value for existing customers. By allowing Account Executives to pass…
The case for sales reps as project managers
Most startups, particularly in the B2B space, start to gain traction by selling their product to other startups or smaller firms with less demanding…
Customer Success isn’t just a feel-good name for Account Management
Customer Success is still a relatively young discipline, and as a result, leadership teams are often unsure about where it fits into their organization.…
Customer Success and Support aren't the same thing
Pop quiz: a customer reaches out with a question about how to use a feature- which team does their message get routed to? If their question warrants a…
5 Customer Success commandments you should break
Customer Success is a new discipline and can mean different things to different people. Some companies see Customer Success as being synonymous with…
Customer Success is not change management
I have heard people say that Customer Success is about implementing “change management” (sources: Gainsight , and ProcessMAP ). Although there is…
Customer Success must articulate and identify “Why”
Every company knows what their products or services are, and most have an idea of how they differentiate themselves through a unique process or value…
5 common Customer Success questions — answered
The topics in this post are the most common Customer Success questions I'm asked by friends and colleagues who also work in Customer Success, as well as…
Customer Success tools to help you scale
Humans have known for millions of years that tools allow us to make a greater impact without exerting additional effort. Whether your team has been around…
Growth and Customer Success should work together to create value-based pricing
Pricing is one of the most important decisions a company can make. Revenue, sales velocity, customer satisfaction, and the longterm viability of the…
Developing habits that drive user adoption
I recently read Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit”, and it encouraged me to consider how Customer Success and product teams can create and shape…
Hobbies improve your work
As someone with many hobbies and passions outside of work, it can feel like these interests are competing for attention versus self-directed professional…
Incremental deployment needs to be accompanied by incremental onboarding
Consider the last time your company released a new product, feature, or UI tweak. Was it last week, last month, or just yesterday? As software teams shift…
Dissecting Pacific Crest’s 2015 SaaS metrics survey
Pacific Crest Securities’ annual SaaS survey has become something of a staple in SaaS circles for its useful benchmarking across key SaaS metrics. The…
Dissecting Pacific Crest’s 2016 SaaS metrics survey
Customer Success nerds everywhere rejoice- the annual Pacific Crest SaaS Survey results are in ( Part I and Part II ), and there’s plenty of great…
Communicating with customers when your SaaS product is down
For cloud-based products outages are an occasional headache at best, and at worst a cataclysmic churn-producing nightmare. Even if your company hasn’t had…
Why Sales and Support should be friends, not foes
Sales and Support teams usually aren’t seen as having much in common. In fact, at most companies a certain amount of tension between these two teams has…
Sales Development Representative metrics you should be tracking
Having a dedicated sales development team is still a relatively new concept. The idea was popularized by Aaron Ross’s book “Predicable Revenue” and…
Scaling Customer Success
Limited bandwidth is a common complaint across all startup teams. Engineering teams are pressured to release new features faster while maintaining a high…
Startup lessons from BlackBerry's demise
At its peak BlackBerry was one of the most influential tech companies in the world. The company grew from a broke startup with just a few engineering and…
Startups need to work smarter, not harder
You’re sitting at your desk slogging through a queue of emails trying to reach inbox zero. It’s only when your phone chirps with a reminder that you…
Benefits of user segmentation
Not all your users are the same. Aside from the obvious differentiators such as how often they log into your product, what pricing plan they’re on, and…
Analyzing your customer churn
By analyzing your customer churn (i.e. cancellation) rate is a great way to gain insights into the state of your business and to identify the true cost of…
How to stop a customer cancellation
It’s a moment every Customer Success Manager dreads- you just received an email from a customer requesting to cancel their contract. Don’t panic, there…
Creating a customer health score
A customer calls out of the blue to let your Customer Success team know they will not be renewing their contract. This news completely blindsides the…
Which customers should Customer Success focus on?
Customer Success teams are often understaffed and bandwidth is stretched thin; in Preact’s Customer Success Priorities Report the median ratio of accounts…
Why your Customer Success team needs a launch process
The moment has arrived, Sales has closed yet another deal and the Custom Success team has a new customer. Following the handoff from Sales it's easy to…
Customer Success 101: managing expectations
This is the third post in a 3 part series that dives into the components that lead to a successful partnership with your customers. My second post…
Customer Success 101: establish a point of contact
Every SaaS company starts with the same idealistic visions of what their relationship will be with customers. Customers will of course see immediate value…
Dissecting Preact’s Customer Success priorities report
Preact recently released a report on Customer Success priorities. Their findings were based on responses from folks in the Customer Success field who…
Customer Success 101: relationship management
This is the second post in a 3 part series that dives into the components that lead to a successful partnership with your customers. The first post…
Pairing Customer Success with Enterprise sales
The traditional approach to selling software to the Enterprise market has been to start with SMB customers and incrementally grow until you're ready to…
6 strategies for building customer trust
Some Customer Success Managers only give lip service towards building customer trust. Tell them you understand where they’re coming from? Check. Followed…
How Customer Success Managers should deal with difficult customers
You find yourself thinking, “is this guy being a bit of a pain in the butt, or is it just me?” If this isn’t a one-time, out of character outburst, you…
Getting feedback from churned customers
As mentioned in a previous post , the Customer Success team is given a unique opportunity to gather critical feedback following a customer's request to…
How to hit negative customer churn rates
So your customer success team is up and running, revenue churn is down to a record low of 0.5% per month, and everything is right in the world. Or is it?…
How Customer Success should handle negotiating with customers
Depending on your Customer Success team structure, Customer Success Managers might be tasked with negotiating contracts for the relationships they own.…
The true cost of SaaS customer churn
Calculating and tracking churn is a great starting point for anyone tasked with owning Customer Success. Churn is a unique metric that can provide…
Sales to Customer Success knowledge transfer
The relationship between Sales and Customer Success often comes to a head during the handoff of a recently acquired customer. Account Executives (AEs)…
User onboarding for Customer Success
In an earlier post I touched on why to establish a launch process for new customers- but what about the users who actually use your product on a day to…