The Customer Success Economy

23Monetization: Should I Charge for Customer Success to Boost Profitability?

You've heard from us in this book—over and over again—how much CS drives growth. But let's come back to Phil Nanus from TSIA, who was featured in the previous chapter. If you asked Nanus about how large companies measure the ROI of CS, he won't point to growth as his first answer.

The first way that I see companies proving ROI is by monetizing Customer Success. They're charging a fee for their adoption capability. We see about half of our member companies, which are typically large organizations, doing this today. The impact is significant. It's the clearest way to demonstrate an ROI, because if you get a dollar in the door, you can walk up to your CFO and tell her, can I spend 40, 50, 60 cents on that dollar? You may have a margin target just like other service capabilities.

For Nanus, charging for CS is the fastest and easiest way to demonstrate ROI and protect the budget for your team.

Other CS leaders choose to charge for CS because it allows them to spend more to get their clients to value. Eduarda Camacho is executive vice president of Customer Operations at PTC, a global software company that enables industrial digital transformation. “We're charging for CS not because we want to run it as a P&L,” she explains, “but rather because it helps us to secure the budget and grow the CSM team. The primary measure of the success of our paid program is whether we're protecting PTC's recurring ...