This document outlines SignupLab's Growhow Customer Success Framework for B2B SaaS companies. It discusses the history of customer success and how it has evolved from focusing on new customer acquisition to reducing churn. It then details key aspects of the framework, including defining value concepts to focus product strategy and development, integrating customer success best practices across functions like product, support, sales and marketing, and using metrics and feedback to continuously improve customer objectives. The framework provides a holistic approach to improving customer success for B2B SaaS companies.

1. SignupLab’s Growhow
Customer Success Framework
for B2B SaaS companies
http://signuplab.com/growhow/

2. History of Customer Success
• Early B2B software industry enjoyed a vendor trap phenomenon: Customers made large
upfront investments and it was difficult to change the vendor. During those days vendors were
more interested about new customer acquisition than existing customers.
• SaaS changed the game; no upfront investments; easier to change the vendor.
Customer retention become more serious challenge for vendors.
• Around 2005 companies such as Salesforce launched their first official
Customer Success programs to reduce churn.
1990 2000 2010
SaaS
early adopters
“After cloud”:
Subscription economy
Customer success
best practices
“Before cloud”: vendor trap

3. Customer Success in Brief
• Why should we care?
Customer Success focuses on recurring revenue: 90% of B2B SaaS
revenue is generated by renewals and upgrades after initial sales.
• How can we do it?
Customer Success is based on simple goal: Make your customers
succeed in their business with your products or services.
• What can we do to reach this goal?
Customer Success can be enabled with a set of best practices,
working cross-functionally to grow (upsell) and fight churn.
Initial Revenue Recurring Revenue

4. Subscription company that
focuses on Customer Success
can grow even without making
a single new customer.

5. • Customer Success is related to customer’s journey inside and outside
your application. The most important goals are renewals and upsells.
• Customer journey inside application is
fairly easy to define, but what is
commonly forgotten are
concepts and services
that are connected
to this journey
outside your
product.
Scope of Customer Success
Onboard
Deploy
Adopt
Grow
Renew
Upsell
Learn
Services
Manual work
Competitors
Support

6. Functions of Customer Success
• Technical enablement provides a solution to customer’s need,
typically during on-boarding or new feature adoption.
• On-going support makes proactively sure
that the solution matches customer’s
requirements during whole lifecycle.
• Knowledge enablement educates the
customer to make sure that full
potential of the services can be used.
• Business relations identifies
new opportunities and
development areas
CEO
Marketing
Engineering IT
Product
Services
Customer
Success
Sales
Finance

7. No matter do you hire a dedicated
Customer Success Manager or assign
the CS activities among your current
people, Customer Success is always
cross-functional process and
cross-organizational mindset.

8. Growhow approach
Strategy
OperationsMetrics
Value
Concepts
Key
Features
Customer
Objectives
A cross-functional approach to improve Customer Success for B2B SaaS.

9. Strategy
How to add Customer Success
into product strategy

10. Challenge 1/3: Change
Customer’s requirements evolve constantly.
Strategy cannot be written in stone – it must
evolve among customer’s needs.

11. Challenge 2/3: Isolation
There shouldn’t be any isolated Customer
Success plans, only one product strategy that
follows the discipline of Customer Success.

12. Challenge 3/3: Scope
Customer Success affects almost everywhere.
It’s important to choose the right hotspots
where current focus must be targeted.

13. Solution: Value Concept
• Value Concept is a mandatory
milestone or hotspot in your
customer’s journey where
significant value is created.
• It can be inside or outside your product,
consisting of features, services, manual
work or external services.
• List of Value Concepts is a constantly
evolving addition to your product
strategy.
Value
Concept

14. How to define Value Concepts?
Objective hierarchy is a simple way to define value concepts.
Customer’s
Objective
Value
Proposition
Value
Proposition
Value
Proposition
Value
Concept
Value
Concept
Value
Concept

15. Value Concept example
Execute projects
on time
Make task
tracking easier
Make resourcing
more effective
Milestones
Calendar
To-do
List
Resource
Timeline
Possible hotspots for a simple Project Management App.
Value
Concepts
Value
Propositions
Customer’s
Objective

16. Value Proposition Canvas
Gain
Creators
Pain
relievers
Products
& Services
Pains
Gains
Customer
jobs
Value
Propositions
Customer
Segments
Business Model Canvas provides
tools for strategic planning. It can
be extended With Value Proposition
Canvas. After value propositions are
explained, it’s fairly easy to define
Value Concepts.
Read more from http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas/vpc

17. Keep the list of Value Concepts always available
and make sure everyone in your organization
understands what they are and why they are in
the core of your products and services.

18. Production
How to add Customer Success
into SaaS production

19. B2B SaaS production – core elements
Product
Development
Customer
Service
Marketing
& Sales
Business
Development

20. Product Development

21. Software developers are in cross-fire:
Sales people ask features for demos, customer
support asks features for specific customers,
product managers ask features for new concepts.
Too often the one who is loudest defines what is
selected to the next development sprint.

22. Agile, and goal-driven
• Scrum, Agile, DevOps etc. are designed to
improve software development, but they do
not guarantee Customer Success as a goal
• To fix this, we can connect Value Concepts
through the production process. This gives
better focus to sprint planning.
• Otherwise it’s easy to
end up into ”One More
Feature” syndrome:
Wildly growing backlog

23. Value Concepts in issue tracking
• By keeping Value Concepts visible in GitHub, Jira, Trello and
other issue tracking tools it’s easier to keep the focus on
strategic aims. This connects your product strategy into
development sprints.
• Aim is to achieve better focus: If a feature cannot be
connected to Value Concept, it’s not crucial and can be
kept on second priority. With this approach developers
understand better what is important and what is not.
• Simply use labels or categories to show that a feature
relates to Value Concept:
VC: Milestones Calendar VC: To-do List VC: Resource Timeline

24. Outcome: Key Feature
Value
Concept
Product
Roadmap
Key
Feature
Development
Backlog
Key Feature is a product feature or service that implements
the Value Concept. It’s planned on product roadmap and
delivered to implementation via development backlog.

25. Whenever there’s an issue or bug reported,
project manager or developer can confirm
does it relate to Key Features and Value
Concepts. If it does, then it should be
solved on higher priority.

26. Customer Support

27. Support vs. Success
Customer Success Customer Support
Financial Revenue driven Cost Center
Action Proactive Reactive
Metrics Success-oriented Efficiency-oriented
Model Analytics focused People-intensive
Goal Predictive Responsive
Customer Success and Customer Support are two different things, but they
do relate closely to each other. A good customer support team can improve
Customer Success by taking steps beyond a simple support:
Table is from the book “Customer Success”:
http://www.gainsight.com/book/

28. The aim of customer support is to serve
customer’s better. But to transform this into
Customer Success you need tighter focus:
Customer support team must be aware how
to prioritize work relating to Key Features and
Value Concepts that are set in product strategy.

29. Sales & Marketing

30. Get 360° overview
• SaaS app can provide amazing amount of data that can
be pushed directly into a sales CRM
– Company or user details
– User’s sessions and usage log
– Locations, time zones - per each user
– Customer support tickets and conversations
– Used features, interests
– Notification tracking: Sent, read, bounced, clicked.
– Use your imagination …

31. Focus on right customers
• B2B SaaS sales is based on highly collaborative
relationship with customers
• Feature requests and roadmapping with customers
is part of everyday work
• There is a pitfall - not all customer related
work is right for you:
A demanding customer can poison
the whole product development with
requests that are not related to your
value concepts nor key features.

32. For Customer Success driven company it’s
crucial to define customer profiles and stick
in them. This profiling begins from sales.

33. Importance of Value Concepts
• Salespeople are constantly seeking for product/customer fit, therefore
focusing on:
– Product’s features and value propositions
– Customer’s needs and requirements
• Too often this means that salespeople send small requests to
developers based on instant demand
• Much more solid way to affect on product development is strategical:
Instead of simple feature requests, get the concepts aligned in product
strategy and that way push the changes into development
• It’s sales team’s duty to focus, sharpen and define
Value Concepts via product strategy, thus improving
Customer Success permanently

34. Business development

35. It’s time to get nerdy
• CEO and the team of key business developers are in the main
role when improving Customer Success
• The role of CEO has changed in B2B software companies: Instead
of giving all attention on largest customers through negotiations
and face to face meetings, in B2B SaaS it’s important to give
bigger focus on analytical data and signals coming directly from
product users.
• B2B SaaS is more and more about sales automation – Everyone
must focus on a scalable “SaaS sales machine”, which often
means that even the CEO must understand the smallest details of
the product.

36. Metrics
How to measure and improve Customer
Success

37. Automation is the key
• Customers improve their processes and
business all the time. This defines that
also vendor must evolve and renew
services regularly.
• Annual, quarterly or even monthly
evaluations are too scarce. Proactive
development is possible only if metrics
and improvement management is automated.
• Following slides describe the most important Customer
Success metrics for B2B SaaS

38. Conversions
• The most obvious conversion
rate is from free to paid
customer, typically used in
free trials or freemium products.
• To take more out of conversion rates,
it’s recommended to build a conversion
funnel with Key Features. This allows you
to follow how far your users really get, how
much value they get before churning away.
• Conversion funnels can be configured
and measured in CRM or other available
customer success tools, such as Intercom.io

39. Recurring revenue
• Renewals
• Upgrades
• Churned dollars
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Churn and Life Time Value (LTV) forms
the core of the SaaS business. With these meters you can measure how
healthy your SaaS business is and is it able to scale. If CAC gets too high
compared to LTV, it’s time to seriously reduce churn.
Get your automated SaaS metrics dashboard rolling
with SignupLab.com today.

40. User activity
• Inside application
– How many times user has
started session
– How many times user has
used the key feature
• Outside application
– Emails sent, opened, clicked, replied etc.
– Mobile notifications received, reacted
– Call center contacts
– Interactions with your consultants

41. Churn
• Churn meter = Number of customers leaving your product in
defined time
• Churn is probably the most important figure for SaaS company.
Signups can be improved with bigger marketing budget,
conversions
can be improved with better onboarding
processes and value propositions, but
fight against churn requires real value
creation relating to your product and
services

42. Direct Feedback
Customer surveys are not the only way to ask direct feedback.
B2B SaaS companies have a possibility to integrate continuous
feedback channels within products and services, such as:
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
– Measures the willingness of customers to recommend
your product to others
– Excellent tool to measure NPS: delighted.com
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
– Measure customer satisfaction with one simple question:
• How much effort did you needed to get this information?
– Assigns ratings from 1 to 5, with 5 representing very high effort
• Other tools that can be integrated inside your product …

43. Customer Success Software
• Totango
• Gainsight
• Evergage
• Preact
• Clientsuccess
• Bluenose
• Mindtouch
SignupLab
Track sign-ups, automate
onboarding, drive conversions
and manage recurring revenue
on one dashboard:
https://signuplab.com

44. Goal: Identify Customer’s Objectives
• The first and last component in
Growhow framework is Customer
Objective: A goal that customer needs
to achieve.
• From meters and feedback we can
learn which features are important and
what needs to be changed.
• Use systematically the automated
information from your meters to
improve your Customer Objectives
Customer
Objectives

45. SignupLab’s Growhow
Strategy
OperationsMetrics
Value
Concepts
Key
Features
Customer
Objectives

46. http://signuplab.com/growhow/