Gain Grow Retain

This week, Karessa Parish, Growth Marketing Manager at ClassTag joins Jeff to talk about the connection between scaled CS and marketing.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• Look for ways to automate things that you do over and over
• Evaluate your content to align with customer self-service needs
• CSMs should be facilitators rather than information keepers
• Give a space for customers to talk to each other
• Examples of scaled ways to grab your customer's attention

Connect with Karessa here

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

QBRs are a topic of conversation almost any place that CS professionals gather. That is because they are a vital tool in helping customers understand how your product aligns with their business goals.

The problem is these meetings have become another task, and one that many customers are skipping.

So how do you move from the old way to a new, more engaging way of talking to customers?

• Make it more about them instead of you
• Share metrics and slides ahead of time - bonus points for recording a video companion!
• Share info about what stakeholders will be interested in specific information
• Open actual call with a chance for the customer to get clarification, but spend the majority of the time asking open-ended questions
• Identify scheduled meetings that you can join and share
• Create a 1-page document with post-meeting action items

What are some ways you are shifting into a new QBR framework?

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Going above and beyond for your customers seems like a no-brainer, but is it really?

Data shows that performing 'Hail Mary's' for your customer doesn't have any greater impact than simply meeting their needs.

Matt Dixon shares some tips on what you should be focusing on, and the good news is it is relatively inexpensive in terms of money, time, and resources.

We need to move our customers from signature to value as quickly and efficiently as possible. Allowing your CS team to focus on making the customer journey as painless as possible results in a bigger impact on customers and your bottom line.

Connect with Matt here

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

It seems intuitive: you increase retention by delighting your customers.

However, data exposes the fact that something that takes a lot of effort and often the increased expense doesn't bring the results you are looking for in terms of loyalty, retention, or even advocacy.

Instead, strong value and ROI come when companies look for ways to reduce the effort our customer have to expend to be our customers.

Jay takes a look at how teams can work to make reductions in efforts that equip our customers for success by making our companies easier to do business with.

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Jay is joined by Christina Lock, Founder and CEO of Catch Talent. We talked about trends in the labor market and what she’s seeing across the tech companies her team works with.

Here are the questions we went over:

• What are the trends you see in both the job market and the labor market?
• How are employers responding to shifts in the labor market?
• What roles are most in demand right now from your perspective?
• How have the requirements changed over the past several quarters?
• There is a downward trend in candidate experience in tech, even when labor is in peak demand. Candidates being “ghosted,” lengthy and indeterminant processes, excessive assignments, etc. Why is this happening?
  • How can hiring managers make the best decisions possible while streamlining these processes?
• If you’ve recently been let go, what are the top two or three things you can do to make yourself the most marketable?

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

We need our CSM's to become more "strategic". (What that really means, no one will ever know) BUT, here's an easy way to *start*... Coaching your CSMs to get better at asking open-ended questions AND listening. Open-ended questions often begin with words such as "Why" and "How." Or they can use phrases such as "Tell me about..." 💩 Did you accomplish your goals in Q1 2020? ➡️ Tell me more about your goals from Q1 2020... 💩 Has your business been affected by the recent recession concerns? ➡️ What adjustments have been made to your business due to the recent recession concerns? 💩 Do you have an executive sponsor for this project? ➡️ How are you engaging with your leadership team around this project? This is a small change. But you need to start small and build momentum. What other open-ended questions should we be asking our customers?

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Today we are joined by Michael Tuso of Callypso as he brings his experience from sales and account management to share practices that customer success leaders can use:

• Building account maps can help you identify the right people
• Sets the stage for consistent account practices
• Finding ways to build maps at scale and community-driven techniques

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Make your champion the hero of the story when dealing with their finance partners. Here are 3 ways you can do that: 1) Help prepare them around how to defend the ROI of your product - remember to think about inputs and variables to the model. Think like a lawyer - you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. 2) Beyond ROI, help them understand the downside of not using your tool. Think in terms of cost (particularly labor) and lost efficiency - the story/narrative is important here. 3) Make sure to highlight beyond your product, the other benefits that they would be missing - access to community/peers, industry expertise, integration/data that flows to other systems. Make it about the ecosystem, not your product. Numbers. Story. Ecosystem. You have to be solid on all three fronts. My guess is you have 1/3 today - if you can nail 3/3 it helps you going into your renewals this year. What else can you do to prepare your champion for the CFO conversation?

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

This week, Jon Johnson, Principle Customer Success Manager at UserTesting joined Gain Grow Retain to talk about how to scale in an enterprise environment.

Building trust and showing value is a foundational part of the process but segmentation becomes the key to success.

• Create buckets to segment
• Get specific
• Simplify

Scale can help you identify the right conversation with the right person at the right time.

Connect with Jon

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Jeff and Jay come together to talk about three possibilities for leveraging ChatGPT in scaling your Customer Success program:

1. Customer Discovery
2. Key Contact Insights
3. Strengthen Content

Learn how using ChatGPT can help speed up some of the processes your team is doing, increasing the value of the time they have to spend with the customers.

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Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.

We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.

GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.