How do you leverage your customer success team to drive revenue growth? Hook’s Head of Customer, Natasha Evans, took the stage at SaaStr Europa to discuss the three things leaders should focus on to fuel revenue growth.
- How do you create a predictable, repeatable renewal engine that provides a good jumping-off point for growth?
- How do you align your teams and resources in the right places and focus on the right customers to drive growth?
- How do you make your customers really successful and show them you’ve made them successful?
When you find the answer to these questions, you can expand an existing customer base and create cool data-driven case studies to help your sales team bring in net business. If those are your three objectives, how do you achieve them?
It All Starts With Data
If you take away anything from this post, it’s to fight for better data for your customer success teams. It will help drive revenue growth, which is the name of the game. Data is as necessary for revenue growth as water is essential for organic growth.
Historically, customer success teams have been pretty data-poor. They’ve made it by using basic adoption metrics and a gut feeling about where customers will land with renewals. That worked for a time, but not really anymore.
The world looks different now, and there are different expectations of a customer success team. They’re expected to back up forecasts and gut feelings with data. Let’s examine three ways to use data and how they relate to the above-mentioned questions.
You can use data in three ways.
- Build a value narrative
- A health score
- A forecast
Keep reading to learn how to achieve this if you have best-in-class data and how to do it if you’re not there yet.
#1: Build a Value Narrative
Value narratives have been around for some time in pre-sales motions. “Here is the value we bring to you, the pain we’ll solve, the use case, and how we will do it.” Often, that doesn’t feed through to post-sales.
How many of your customer success teams mirror that same value narrative in their QBRs and present their customers with metrics showing exactly how they delivered that value?
Today, it’s not good enough to say, “Hey, it looks like your team is using our platform.” You have to show a return on investment, so this value narrative is essential to secure renewals and build those business cases to expand into existing customers and go after net new customers, too.
Where to Start If You Have Access to This Data
Instead of starting with the data, you should start with a story. Get your sales, CS, and marketing team in a room to think about what you want say and how you want to tell it pre-and post-sales.
Then, think about all the data points you need to give your team access to so you can show that in a business review. You can partner with your engineering team to get that data in the hands of your CS team or, even better, in the hands of the customer.
This is key right now with how the market is going, yet not everyone has access to all this different data, so where do you start? What can you do right now?
If You Don’t Have Data
Efficiency is an easy way of inferring value. What data can you access from how your platform or product is used? Can you correlate a timesaver to any of those different data points and total it up so that when you’re in a QBR, you can say, “Here is how much time I’ve saved you by using our platform and how that converts into productive hours your team could spend elsewhere.”
If you’re in a renewal discussion, it’s likely too late to pitch them a value narrative. Another good last-ditch attempt is the cost of leaving. What is the time investment so far in implementing the software and training the team to get where it is?
What’s the cost if they have to go elsewhere? You want to aim for a best-in-class data-driven value narrative, but if you can’t do that, use what you have.
#2: A Health Score
The health score is the second place to use data. For every customer and your whole book of business, you want to see where your opportunities for growth and upsell are. Where is there risk? This comes back to aligning your resources and skills in the right place and with the right customers.
If you have access to all of this data, what should you do?
If You Have Data
You want to ingest data from different sources and understand which data points actually correlate to retention, growth, and upsell—not just what you think but what the data tells you. You’ll translate all of that into an easy-to-understand health score that your CS and sales team have access to. That’s how you drive alignment.
Here’s where we go after growth and upsell, and here’s where my team needs to go after and rally around risk. That should be visible from the customer level up to the full book of business so you have a good view of what’s happening and where.
If You Don’t Have Data
Where do you begin if you don’t have access to all the data or a platform to achieve this? So often, we rely on sentiment. I think that account is healthier. I think they’re in a good spot. Even without tons of data, we can do better than that.
Natasha used to have her team rate four key points.
- Pull whatever adoption and usage metrics and rate their health score.
- Are customers getting value? Have they been shown a value narrative? Are there any lagging indicators?
- What stakeholders or champions is the team engaging with?
- Rate the sentiment behind the relationship.
You want to map that information to help your team prioritize. On the CSM side, you’ll want to map ARR, so they know they’re spending time on high-risk, high-ARR accounts. On the upsell side, map health against whitespace so you know where the real upsell opportunities are.
#3: A Forecast
You want a data-driven forecast and to see your book of business for the whole year, not just the quarter, in terms of retention or churn and upsell, so net revenue retention. Look at the entire year to get ahead of things as proactively as possible.
It’s not good to look only in the quarter for upsell opportunities because you need to build towards them. Also, what risks does your team need to rally around? If you have access to great data, what are you going to do?
If You Have Access to Data
Your data-driven health score will dynamically inform your forecast. You want to see every single customer at an aggregated level for the entire year and the quarter. What’s the net retention forecast, and how does that compare to the plan that finance gave you?
This will help you fill the gap for the quarter and the year, and the health score for every customer will tell you how to chase down that gap. You’ll know exactly which accounts to rally around for upsell to hit that target at the end of the year.
If You Don’t Have Access to Data
CSMs should still manually input a forecast over a certain threshold for the entire year so you still get proactive visibility. But you don’t want them to go rogue, so put some structure behind it.
If you’re looking at any given account, 50% means they’re a confirmed risk, 80% means an upsell opportunity, and 100% means there is one in play or they’ve received verbal confirmation.
Again, you’re aiming for best-in-class data-driven forecasts that help you chase down your number and create a repeatable renewals engine. If you don’t have access to that, do your best with what you have.
Key Takeaways
Remember, if you take only one thing away from this, let it be to hunt down better data for your CS team. It will help you build a compelling value narrative, a health score, and forecast. We genuinely need those things to drive revenue growth through customer success teams.
