The Customer Success Economy

26Technology: What System Do I Use?

Just as companies have invested in sales automation and enablement to drive sales productivity and in marketing automation to increase lead generation and brand awareness, hundreds of organizations have invested in Customer Success Management solutions to maximize client lifetime value and advocacy. In our benchmarking study of over a hundred Customer Success leaders (which we mentioned earlier in this book), we found a 33-percentage-point increase in Net Retention by optimizing Customer Success operations. If implementing a CSM solution can help you achieve this increase, anyone would be crazy not to do it.

In fact, we recently met one CEO of a large private equity–backed software company who connected CSM software with his company's strategy in the following way. This CEO had undertaken a massive transformation of his company from a traditional on-premises perpetual license model to launching a brand-new cloud offering. He had made significant changes in culture and leadership to embrace this new mindset. He felt that the last mile was “industrializing Customer Success.” In this CEO's mind, it wasn't enough to have the right people with the right culture. “Our customers are telling us that our people are great but they still aren't working off of a consistent and coordinated set of playbooks.”

And many companies are acting on this insight. Consulting firm Deloitte published a report, 2019 Enterprise Customer Success (CS) Study and Outlook ...