From Impossible To Inevitable

Chapter 5Seeds—Customer Success

Seeds are many-to-many campaigns; they're based on word of mouth and relationships. Some companies, like Dropbox, Box, and Slack, have been able to take off by creating products that spread like wildfire through word of mouth. But for most companies, seeds will mostly come through systematizing how you ensure your customers stay happy and get value from your service, and who then generate more referrals and lower attrition rates.

Figure 5.1 Customer Success is a beautiful way to fertilize growth.

All the great work you do to help others succeed, while building relationships and networks, is “planting seeds”—whether they're with employees, partners, investors, or customers.

It's getting what you want by helping them get what they want. In so doing, you can succeed and feel good at the same time. The results look like this:

• Happy customers telling others about your service.
• Getting customers or partners through your own friends, networks, and relationships.
• Launching a product, post, or video that goes viral and creates results beyond views, such as increasing active users or sales.

Seeds in many ways are the best type of lead, but they aren't perfect.

• Pros: Highly profitable—word-of-mouth leads are the fastest to close and have the highest win rates.
• Cons: You have much less control over how fast they grow.

How to Grow Seeds Predictably ...