We may have seen the first baby steps in rethinking CS software with the announcement this week of the merger of Catalyst and Totango. Both are currently perceived and promote themselves as suppliers of CS platforms but I think this move has a bigger aim.

In the last ten years, companies have invested heavily in CS and the role of Customer Success Manager, which for a few years was the fastest growing role in SaaS according to LinkedIn job postings. The problem is that this massive investment in people and associated software has not returned proportionate improvements in key metrics.

Measuring the results the key customer roles you sell to and serve underpins acquisition, retention, growth and advocacy for a B2B SaaS company. This blog explores what it takes in the form of a Measurement Maturity Model.

Delivering measurable results to key customer roles is the key to retention and growth. If that is the case, and data shows it is, then products should be built around the process and contents that enables that. Chances are, yours isn’t. read on for more.

I have spoken to many CEOs, investors and quite a few CS leaders who agree that fundamental change is needed. Commenting on the challenges facing the tech industry in the last 18 months, David Kellog, serial entrepreneur and now Entrepreneur in Residence at Balderton Capital said; “While this bodes well for the customer success discipline, it does not automatically bode well for the customer success department.”

How do you measure customer-led growth? Well obviously, you start with tracking the measurable results your customers are achieving. This blog covers what to measure and provides a simple canvas to identify the measures and develop actions to improve them.

Thinking about new approaches in terms of old jobs constrains our ability to build effective solutions

Customer-Led Growth is garnering increasing interest.  My own interest goes back fifteen years, when eight years into my journey as founder and CEO of SaaS company Clicktools, I and my colleagues were looking to improve our growth, which could never be described as spectacular.  Our breakthrough came when we redesigned our entire customer lifecycle and ideal customer profile - the first steps on our journey to being truly customer-led.

Here’s what I learned and how I think some miss the point of CLG.

“Real Customer Success (CLG) takes a unified GTM (go-to-market) approach across sales, customer success, marketing, and product while leveraging data, insights, and customer outcomes to drive better business results for their customers. Resulting in: more Efficient Revenue Growth, not just Retention.”

Not my words, credit goes to Kevin Chiu, co-founder of Catalyst.

It’s a statement I agree fully with. My own definition of customer-led growth is: “Everything an organisation does to profitably win, satisfy, retain and grow their chosen customers better than the competition.”

There are many ways to build the high-level of customer focus and company-wide capabilities required to be successful at customer-led growth. I would be wrong and be doing you a great disservice to say - here’s the playbook, just go and implement it. What I think is helpful is to set out a number of principles and frameworks that, from first-hand experience, have been invaluable in building both my own B2B SaaS company and in helping others on their path.

Here’s the seven principles I use.

How do you keep GTM teams aligned without building detailed journeys that are never followed by customers? Enter the Customer Engagement Blueprint; a high level overview of the entire customer lifecycle that is used by GTM teams as the starting point for the design of their processes and interventions.

Customer value is a widely used phrase that hides what it really is. This blog unpacks its elements, shows how they inter-relate and how to use that knowledge to improve performance across the customer lifecycle.

Successful Customer Led Growth is built on five frameworks:

• V3 - Vision, Values and Value Prop

• ICP

• Engagement Blueprint

• Value framework

• Metrics

This blog provides an overview and explains their relationship.

A deep understanding of customers is a core principle of customer-led growth companies. The prime repository for much of this information is the Ideal Customer Profile. This blog explains its role and content.

Customer Led Growth and Product Led Growth: two phrases describing approaches used by B2B SaaS companies. What are the differences?

‘Customer value’ is part of the language of B2B SaaS industry but it’s a phrase that may have outlived its usefulness? Read on to find out why and what should replace it.

Customer Led Growth: A definition