Bonus: Customer Success Strategies that Work - for Companies of ANY Size

Customer Success: Protecting Your Value During Tight Budgets

In this bonus mini pod, we discuss the importance of maintaining value in customer relationships, especially when clients are looking to cut costs. Learn how customer success strategies can prevent your services from being replaced by cheaper alternatives and ensure you are not simply viewed as a line item in a budget.

And learn how companies of any size, with any budget, can incorporate a customer success strategy.

Related Resources & Links:

• 2025 Predictions - what the future-focused CEO will master
• Podcast: Turning Client Success into a Competitive Advantage

Show notes:

• Connect with Summer on LinkedIn
• Visit Rise of Us for more information about Summer's services or to guest on the show and share your insights
• Episode recorded and edited using Descript
• Repurposed content, such as this description created using CastMagic

Transcript

0:00

It is 5.7 times more expensive to acquire a new client than it is to retain a client. So retention should always be your focus, but it needs to be your focus more. Now, some of the reasons I hear are perfectly valid reasons. We don't need to worry about customer success. We'll put that in when we need it. Our retention's fine. Okay? I get it. Our team is small. We don't have the budget for our customer success team or person. I get it. I've worked with those companies before. Welcome back to Revenue Remix, a podcast from Rise of Us where we take a fresh spin on driving revenue growth hosted by Summer Pauli, a fractional CRO, who works with business owners and leaders who feel held back by outdated systems. This podcast explores how adaptable unified frameworks can transform static processes, equipping teams to meet, evolving customer needs, and drive resilient, lasting growth. Each episode features insights from summer and her guests offering practical strategies to sidestep common pitfalls and build real revenue momentum. It's time to remix the way we think about growth. Enjoy the show. Hi there and welcome back to another episode of Revenue Remix. I am your host Summer ti, and today I am going completely without a script because I feel like I have given this message so many times I could deliver it just straight from the heart. Today we're gonna talk about customer success and why I think it needs to be part of every growth stage company's strategy, whether you have the budget or the work for a full-time person or not. So a little bit of reasoning behind this. Unless you've been living under a rock, you're gonna know that the stock market has a little bit of a dual personality. These days. We never know what it's gonna do. It's up one day, it's down another day. What I'm seeing is that it is creating a little bit of uncertainty. In today's buyer. I work with and collaborate with businesses all over the us, different industries, different sizes from brand new startups. That were born yesterday all the way to public companies, what I see is that status quo is often the hardest thing to get over when people are selling B2B. Good software or service. In an uncertain market, status quo becomes a much more attractive thought. So if somebody had been thinking about upgrading software or buying a new software to automate something, some of that might be perceived as nice to have. It is 5.7 times more expensive to acquire a new client than it is to retain a client. So retention should always be your focus, but it needs to be your focus more. Now, some of the reasons I hear are perfectly valid reasons. We don't need to worry about customer success. We'll put that in when we need it. Our retention's fine. Okay? I get it. Our team is small. We don't have the budget for our customer success team or person. I get it. I've worked with those companies before. That's okay. We'll talk about that later. And the reason why I think at a minimum you need to have a customer success strategy is when we come into an uncertain climate, People are gonna start looking for savings. And when people start to look for savings, they look for the nice to haves or they look for, Hey, how can we get the same result but spending less money? And if we've got customers who are looking for ways to save, they could be very tempted by swapping out what you offer them for a good enough alternative that happens to be cheaper, and you do not want to reduce yourself to a line item on someone's budget that is up for scrutiny right now. That is what customer success is all about. So let me take you all the way back to when I first created a customer success with a company that I was working with. We had some attrition, growth stage companies experience that sometimes where the sales engine is starting to rev along and sometimes the operations. Is challenged to keep up, especially in a year when sales are better than anticipated. You get new operations folks on, they gotta get onboarded and trained, and sometimes the service can suffer a little bit. So this company was experiencing that and unfortunately, even though the sales engine is chugging along, they were experiencing a, a revenue attrition that was approximately half of. what the sales team sold that year. So despite solid sales, sales is over quota. We're not growing as fast as we want to, right? And the sales team is getting sick of all the diving saves. Hey, your customer decided they wanted to quit. Go try and save them. It eroded the. The morale of the salespeople. So we decided to shift the focus to a relationship manager, which was really just a retention person, and they took the complaints, and first of all, that's a sucky job. So second, we also realized that we were losing at least 90% of those diving saves. Salespeople are happier. But now you have this relationship person who feels like a failure and we're realizing that we're getting there later than we should. We're getting there too late. So we decided to shift the focus to something that we now know as customer success. We put together a strategy and it included some of the things that we'll talk about a little bit later. The end result was that we cut attrition in half by 50% in just the first year. And the proactive focus, the person in the role was happier. We're getting in front of clients and keeping them happy instead of trying to win back their trust much easier. So what can you do if you can't? Focus an entire person on customer success. What you can do is create a customer success strategy. Start with some goals. You might wanna improve your retention. You might wanna improve account expansion and place some tactics around it. We'll talk about those later. Have someone own the customer success strategy. Even if it is somebody who does it part-time, it could be a sales person who might be a little bit more of a farmer than a hunter. It can be someone in your operations team who shows some sort of sales acumen. You know, you can use this as your ramp up toward sales as long as someone owns it. I personally think that customer success works best on the sales team, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Write a strategy with a measurable goal and make sure somebody owns it and make sure they know they own it. And then what you wanna do is you wanna get everybody together, get all heads together and figure out what you guys wanna do. Here are some things that I think that customer success can do. Monitor health. Of your accounts and we wanna monitor it proactively. We wanna look at little signs of disengagement so we're not getting there too late, right? Login rates for your system, incoming calls to your call center or your customer service folks, the unsubscribe rates from your marketing emails that go to current clients. Open rates for those emails. Look at little things. That will proactively show signs of disengagement. I, for one, think that if you've got clients that are unsubscribing to your newsletters, that is a huge red flag. So we wanna get ahead of that before they take that call from your competitor. Right? And once you know the customer health signals, I suggest you monitor them monthly. You wanna categorize your clients, segment them like you would your CRM, your clients that are high revenue, your clients that are lower revenue, and your clients that are mid revenue. And then you wanna decide the proper cadence for proactively outreaching to them. Your larger clients, you're probably gonna wanna do it quarterly. Your mid clients, maybe you wanna do that twice a year and your lower your clients that don't bring in as much revenue. I don't wanna be mean, but you know, we check in with them annually or it can be a couple personal checkpoints per year. An annual meeting with the middle ones, and maybe you can rely on some digital channels if you have a lot of those lower clients, however you choose to slice it up, just do it, and those check-ins, we want them to be structured. We wanna make sure that it's not, Hey, I'm just checking in.. I recommend a full business review that starts with them. Has anything changed since the last time we talked? Any new personnel we should meet? What kind of goals and objectives do you have for this quarter, this next year, whatever. Find out what success looks like to them. Then look at how you can help them reach that. And this isn't an upsell play. It might not necessarily be stuff that you have, but what if one of your partners could help them so you can weave into that Some partner work. You know, I love me, some partner work. You're also gonna look for those new personnel. You know, the quickest way for a new manager to make a splash in their new job, it's replace a vendor and bring in their buddy. So you are always at risk if a new manager comes in and you gotta meet them and cozy up to them as soon as possible. You're gonna work with your partners, y partners, you're gonna align with their goals. And the overall arching theme of this is to remember the courting that you did when they were a prospect and give them more of that love. And also to show up regularly. Asking about them, asking about their goals, introducing partners that can help if necessary. And you're positioning yourself kind of as a partner to your client instead of just a vendor. And where I envision this in a perfect world is they get all this extra stuff from you, the support, the alignment with goals. When your competitor calls and says, I can save you some money, they're gonna be like, Hmm, but can you do all this other stuff outside of just producing the goods or services that my current supplier does? And we want them to think, no, I can't afford to get rid of this relationship. It's worth so much more than just the goods and services that they provide. So that's the vision. So you have your strategy with your goals. You have your person, you have your customer health score check. You also have your business reviews, and it would not be me talking to you about this if we didn't talk about referrals and social proof. So when you're on the business review with somebody and they give you a good vibe. This is your opportunity to ask every single time. Is there anyone else that you know who might like to get the kind of results that you are experiencing? And then if they give you a compliment, you can ask like, can you email that to me so that we can put it on our website? I am also a big fan of. Taking away some of the fear that people might have putting theirselves out there. I will tell people you could be as anonymous as you want. I let people change their name. I let people anonymize their industry a little bit more, um, just to make them feel comfortable.'cause sometimes they don't feel like they wanna put their name out there, but if the testimonial is valid. Who cares if Bob sent it or Bill, right? No one knows that but you and that's it. Companies of all sizes can run a customer success play and strategy within their organizations, and I hope I have shown you today that it is worth your time and effort. Customer success, especially in a weird climate like this, it's not a nice to have anymore. It's not a, when we start having trouble with retention, we'll do something about it. It's not when we get bigger, we'll do something about it. This is absolutely something that I think companies of all sizes should be focusing on in whatever way that you can. And if you happen to need help with that or you wanna talk a little bit more about what it could look like in your organization, I happen to be somebody who does this for a living. And if you book a free 15 minute strategy session with me, I will give you one free actionable takeaway. Just an observation of mine. I can't help the way my brain works. You will get something out of it. Alright, well let's wrap this up. I appreciate the listen. If you heard anything in here that was insightful or inspiring to you, I would appreciate a share with your network or a review on growing my Reach too. If you have a story you'd love to tell. Come on the podcast and guest with me. There's information on my website. You can find me at the rise of us.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I am summer. Polli rhymes with spaghetti, and I will see you next week.