Let’s start this out with a shout-out to our account management and customer success teams: According to Bian & Company, increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. That’s a big increase!
Because we know that customer success directly impacts revenue, we’re going to focus today’s performance tips on their role. We recently brought you 55 Pro Tips for Scaling Sales. Here are some great pieces of expert advice we uncovered specifically for customer success and account management reps. (These tips are useful for your sales team, too!)
Expert Performance Tips for Customer Success Teams
- “A company can’t put all its energy for growth into sales. It’s got to continue to devote time and effort to the products and services it sells. Truly think about customer success, and your retention and expansion rates will climb.” – Alan Wille, Co-Founder, Klipfolio [Source]
- “What I’ve found is that many times, your front-line staff aren’t always attuned to the signs of customer dissatisfaction. You’ve got to train them to spot an unhappy customer from a mile away so that, at the first sign of even the mildest dissatisfaction, they know how to act upon it. Whether that means offering a free upgrade, having management send them an apology or just flagging them for some extra love and care, you have to have a playbook for these situations.” TJ Waldorf, Director of Inside Sales, SingleHop [Source]
- “Customer success is not just the role. It’s the teams together, working together.” – Aaron Ross, Author, Predictable Revenue [Source]
- “Ideally, customer success will share with sales (and marketing) the types of customers that are the most successful (so they’ll go get more like those) and the types of customers that are a bad fit so they’ll stop selling to (or otherwise attracting) customers like them.” – Lincoln Murphy, Founder, Sixteen Ventures [Source]
- “If we want to grow, we have to make sure the number of customers we bring in and retain is greater than the number of customers cancelling the service. No surprise there, but as you grow this simple math can unravel an otherwise solid company. From that perspective, keeping existing customers is as important as getting new ones.” – Alan Wille, Co-Founder, Klipfolio [Source]
- “Both internally and with the customer, it’s important to over-communicate progress and resolution. When a customer is having trouble, the best thing you can do is make sure they know you are there and that you truly care about their issue. The more they know you care, the more flexible and understanding they will be even when you mess up. When you say you’re going to do something, do it and do it on time. Continue to communicate even after you believe everything is back in good standing. This is how you create loyal customers.” – TJ Waldorf, Director of Inside Sales, SingleHop [Source]
Ready to take your account management strategy to the next level? Grab a copy of our brand new KPI guide just for customer success teams!
