How do you build a culture of customer satisfaction that keeps solving customers’ challenges at its core? Oliver Sharp, our co-founder and Chief Solution Architect, sat down with Tim Porter, Managing Director at Highspot investor Madrona Venture Group, to discuss this topic. Their conversation not only details our approach to customer success, but offers lessons for other businesses that want to deliver elevated customer experiences.
Product and customer alignment is more important than ever as the subscription business model becomes increasingly common in the B2B space. Oliver explains, “The SaaS business model is explicitly based on this notion of renewing a service. One of the things that it does, which is really cool, is that it aligns your business need of getting that renewal with the goal of wanting your customers to be hugely successful and hugely enthusiastic about your product.”
Revenue Requires Customer Retention
If customers succeed with your product, they’ll likely continue using your product. Listening to feedback and staying true to customers’ needs in your product roadmap is critical to retaining customers for the long haul. Retention is paramount to SaaS success, because when you factor in the cost to acquire new customers (CAC), the majority of revenue from a given customer happens after the initial sale. Your customer’s success improves your chances of earning more business through cross-selling, upselling, and overall account expansion.
When a passion for customer success is baked into company culture, each individual knows they play an important role in delighting customers. According to Oliver, the best way to satisfy and retain customers is to listen and learn from them: “We receive tons of feedback from our customers, and we listen to it very, very hard. It deeply guides where our product priorities are.”
Aligning customer feedback with your product roadmap is essential to developing a long-term relationship. However, this alone is not enough. You must understand your customers’ definitions of success to ensure they realize real value. Goals and objectives change, which makes routinely checking in — and listening — imperative to enabling your customers’ success. These check-ins are a great opportunity to examine adoption and usage, plan near- and long-term initiatives, and receive candid feedback.
Start with “Why” for Customer Success
For Highspot, our “why” is empowering companies to elevate customer conversations that drive strategic growth. We do this by delivering context and intelligence alongside content to help every customer-facing team know what to say, show, and do in a customer conversation. Highspot gives salespeople guidance across content, data, and applications so they can have effective buyer engagements, while marketing gains visibility into content’s impact. Our belief is that compelling conversations are the foundation of great customer experience, and our goal is to make every one of our customers a trusted advisor who delivers real value to their customers.
“We chose Highspot because of the ability to provide our sales team with market context, the why, and the tools to go out and win business in one place. Our sellers can take the core content my team builds and customize it depending on their prospect and where they are in the funnel. The best part about the platform for me is the sense of pride that I get when I see all of the work from my team reflected in one place.”
-Kelly Christensen, Director of Marketing, Equity Research, PitchBook Data
Businesses have a multitude of product options. Finding a new solution is as simple as a Google search and, as SaaS ascends to become the dominant B2B technology model, customers are in control. Every business must consistently strive to delight their customers by deeply committing to their success.
To listen to the full episode of Founded and Funded with Tim Porter and Oliver Sharp, visit here. To learn about how the Highspot platform can enable your company’s strategic growth, read about our industry-first SmartPage™ technology and its many extensible capabilities.
