Tag: All-in-one CRM platform

10X Your Operational Efficiency with All-in-one CRM ConvergeHub

According to the latest data, 43% of the CRM users only leverage half of the product’s features in their day-to-day operations. That’s unfortunate, but true in most cases, which results in reduced operational output. White the CRM adoption costs businesses a few hundred dollars a year, the lack of knowledge makes it the most underutilized asset. If leveraged correctly an all-in-one CRM like ConvergeHub could be your most reliable asset. 

As a productive CRM for startups, ConvergeHub is designed to take care of the end-to-end customer lifecycle for an organization. From sales, marketing support to billing this all-in one CRM can significantly deliver a productivity boost by automating your workflow. 

What are the Key Problem Areas in Day-to-Day Workflow

However, before we talk about how an all-in-one CRM minimizes your time spent on meaningless administrative tasks, it’s crucial to point out the bottlenecks many organizations are facing even today. These are even true for the startups and growing SMBs that are working on scale up strategies. 

  • Data Disorganization

Without a CRM, customer data can become scattered across emails, notes, spreadsheets, or even post-it notes. This disorganization means that valuable insights and information can be lost and overlooked. A CRM organizes all information in one place, making it easily accessible and actionable.

  • Inefficient Communication

Sales teams not utilizing CRMs often struggle to maintain consistent communication, both internally and with customers. There’s no shared platform to track interactions, which can lead to mixed messages or duplicated efforts. CRMs streamline communication and ensure that everyone has the most up-to-date information.

  • Lost Sales Opportunities

When customer information is not centralized, opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, or even timely follow-ups can be missed. A CRM helps in identifying these opportunities by analyzing customer data and past purchases, and it prompts salespeople when an opportunity arises.

How ConvergeHub Addresses the Operational Bottlenecks 

As a CRM for startups, ConvergeHub helps manage data, nurture leads, forecast sales and a lot more. As a centralized platform it establishes seamless connection with different operation modules, providing autonomy for the diverse business operations. The marketing module is directly connected with the sales module that can easily segregate and synchronize the hot leads in the Sales module. And there are a lot more. 

Contact management becomes easier

For a startup managing contacts often becomes a hassle. Especially when the contact base starts to grow, managing those in a spreadsheet manually requires a lot of effort. Moreover, there are chances of human error, which ultimately leads to contact data mismanagement. With a CRM, it’s easier to consolidate such data in a single platform.All the necessary information pertaining to the particular contact can be automatically updated in the CRMs. It helps in cross-team accessibility of the data without wasting time digging through several files and records to locate information. A lot of resource time is saved by this. 

Account-management becomes hassle-free

ConvergeHub Account Management module enables sales leaders, managers and other authorized personnel to access a complete history of each account from one common repository. They can create task, schedule event, and add comments and notes to the accounts. Reach out to the accounts through email, phone, FAX, and SMS. Attach files to the accounts from the computer or ConvergeHub Library. Keep track of accounts more elaborately by associating them with relevant leads, deals, and contacts. Refer to the past deals of the accounts to understand buying patterns; analyze up-selling and cross-selling opportunities and set up loyalty programs.

Elimination of manual data-entry 

As mentioned earlier, manual data-entry is error prone and tedious. Thanks to the automation features of ConvergeHub that makes 100% accurate data entry a breeze. Your reps no longer need to dig through emails, calls, meetings, and interactions to find data for manual keying. ConvergeHub captures the data and key it at the appropriate location, so that it can be retrieved anytime. 

Sending reminders and follow ups becomes seamless

This is one of the key reasons why CRM for startups are so high in demand. Growing SMBs do not have a big team for this job. Relying on the all-in-one CRm Software helps manage the same. Convergehub has tools to track all the prospect activity and reminds them to follow up. Thus, it’s easier to schedule meetings, send reminders and so on. It helps reps become more proactive , which further increases the chance of conversion.

Customer segmentation involves zero hassles 

All-in-one CRM software facilitates effortless customer segmentation. Often your reps might have the task of creating a list of contacts to reach out to based on specific criteria. CovergeHu helps perform customer sorting based on the data that you have collected over time. Believe it or not, the process takes a much shorter time when CRM software is used. This way it will be easier to keep things organized.

Creating intuitive sales reports becomes more streamlined

ConvergeHub comes with excellent analytics and reporting features. The CRM itself tracks every data and the progress that is made at every domain. Further it helps generate different intuitive reports based on the data without any manual intervention. Such reports come with a detailed view of the sales pipelines, deals, and contacts. Moreover, they can also evaluate their personal performance and keep track of their goals and other important work to reach their quotas. 

Sales forecasting becomes more data-driven

All-in-one CRM ConvergeHub helps business leaders to plan strategically and make informed decisions based on crucial sales data like monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and year-over-year (YOY) growth. It helps sales leaders identify trends and plan strategically. 

Scoring and nurturing leads becomes stress-free

ConvergeHub Deals Management module stores and manages every little information about the converted/to-be converted leads. Get a detailed outlook on each deal through fields like account name, assigned to, lead source, sales process, sales stage, deal type, deal value, expected close date and conversion probability. Import Deal opportunities from a spreadsheet or third-party business solution using Import Wizard and ConvergeHub API.

Ending note

For quite some time, future-forward organizations are focusing on the CRM adoption to carry out the day-to-day tasks. A lot of companies have also come forward to make substantial investment into these platforms, but lack proper knowledge to incorporate it for day-to-day use. At ConvergeHub, we emphasize on the proper hand holding by providing the much needed technical support even after onboarding. We make sure that our CRM product is aptly integrated with the daily workflow of the sales, marketing and the support teams, so that they can provide their best while leveraging the all-in-one features of the product. 

Need For Sales Automation CRM Tools – The Forerunners of Your Business

Before we begin discussing future-CRM solutions and Sales Automation CRM tools there is no denying the fact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the build-block for all industries which is absolutely data-driven to make lives better for entrepreneurs and the consumers of the modern times. Now, every CRM users across this planet shall agree to this fact irrespective of where they use an enterprise-level or a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution for their SMBs that nothing much has changed in the CRM space since the 1990s except for the fact that it had moved from on-premise framework to the cloud. Still today in most enterprises, customer data is still isolated, and therefore manually entered in the software.

Before we begin discussing future-CRM solutions and Sales Automation CRM tools there is no denying the fact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the build-block for all industries which is absolutely data-driven to make lives better for entrepreneurs and the consumers of the modern times.

63% of companies outgrowing their competitors are using automation. Online competition will always be tough, but with automation, study has shown that companies can have the edge. Click To Tweet

Now, every CRM users across this planet shall agree to this fact irrespective of where they use an enterprise-level or a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution for their SMBs that nothing much has changed in the CRM space since the 1990s except for the fact that it had moved from on-premise framework to the cloud.

Still today in most enterprises, customer data is still isolated, and therefore manually entered in the software.

Hence given the fact that this new “Experience Economy” is entirely becoming sales-driven where prioritizing the customer is becoming more tough and crucial every day –CRM software is still considered inefficient and there are ongoing researches which are trying to make the future-CRM of tomorrow relying more and more on AI, Big Data, Deep Learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and other bleed-edge technologies.

In other words, it might also imply that CRM has not been evolved or rather its total capabilities have not been yet explored and leveraged as of date.

Now undeniably easy to use CRM is a vital tool in sales and marketing which has already changed the perception of the consumer world.
This is because retailers now can analyze data and apply it in real-time in several areas, which has given rise to seamless and easy processes, which otherwise would have been really difficult to quantify and measure.

For example, finding purchasing behaviors and making market predictions are now within fingertips of the marketing executives using marketing CRM for their enterprise.

Financial organizations using CRM software for financial services industry are also able to pinpoint and stop fraudulent transactions in seconds.
Additionally, health care services are also using CRM to keep an effective track of their patients enabling easy treatment and diagnosis.

Nevertheless, in spite of its dynamic features and instant benefits that an easy to use CRM provide to various industries, the CRM software by large still remains ineffective as major tasks are done manually.

For example sales executives who are relentlessly monitoring their high-volume deals in their sales CRM solutions pipeline have to invest extra hours to enter a large volume of data manually.

Clearly, it is a cry for help, a stark indication to the future of CRM software- more Sales Automation CRM functionalities is the need of the hour now.

How Will Sales Automation Help?

With CRM software, sales management is still a burden, as far as time and energy are concerned. Thus, Sales Automation CRM can generate a process where a salesperson can connect with potential customers and accelerate the journey throughout the sales pipeline.

Prioritizing customers will be the sole purpose to drive growth while the sales automation will take care of the administrative task.

Hence Sales Automation in CRM is all about removing the barriers for human contact and make sales a more integrated process. Thus, the benefit is two-fold.

The future is digital and the future is now – so there is no better time for the need of CRM automation like the present.

The features of the sales automation in CRM perfectly fit the need as it should be more directed towards the broader concept where the data must serve an organization and not the otherwise.

This is because it is important for easy to use CRM to shift to the more focused and human side of selling where more data and algorithms should be working for people.

Enterprise workflow needs to be smart and easy. This would allow the sales reps to use the automated CRM more often and leverage its complete set of features.

Some of the necessary features of the automation include customer-targeted recommendations based on, personalized communications, activity records, and much more. This would even ease the tricky job of lead generation for the sales representatives.

Predictive analytics is another helpful feature that can be used in the process of sales.

We say this as research shows that higher customer retention depends on the right customer information and their habits – which ultimately even drives the sales. Hence predictive analytics can have a big role to play in giving the valuable customer information that the sales reps can use to their benefit.

It can also be said that the future of CRM is also determined by the ability of software to determine, which steps to take.

The future holds great potential for CRM software with the specific knowledge and understanding of each industry and the business process is crucial for functioning and workflow.

As the aim of every company remains the same- to get and keep customers, all-in-one CRM software with such smart features will readily be accepted by the industry, which will be the key to customer retention as it is the returning customers that mostly spend more money than the new customers.

Wondering what is the role of predictive data and artificial intelligence in the future of CRM?

They are helpful when the CRM requires data-driven solutions to influence the productivity of the sales representatives, whereby the salesperson will get more time for the crucial tasks while automating repetitive tasks that can be taken care of by AI and predictive data.

With the right Sales Automation CRM salesperson can now invest more time in other definitive work processes like studying customer behavior and build a relationship with them. This will also help to reveal the more humane side of their business.

Conclusion

Thus, the future of CRM software lies in customer relationship automation, which can take customer experience and support to a new level.

The sales reps can leverage the future CRM’s potential by compiling different data from disparate sources allowing them to have all the information about the customer while approaching them. The approach will also be more personalized than formal.

And the right approach at the right time will help the sales surge potential increase exponentially.

This is the reason, features like artificial intelligence and predictive analytics will give the sales reps a crucial understanding of customer information to work with by creating a business CRM software, which is more proactive and so helps in saving time and increase productivity.

Hence the future of easy to use CRM is the need of the hour, since it will not only simplify the sales process and but it will also make customer relationship management a much more exciting and humane job.

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How To Use Intent Data Effectively To Become A Sales Rock Star

Most lead generation rock stars in every organization have their own secret recipes when it comes to developing and executing their lead generation campaigns using easy to use CRM software. Whether it is the use of Big Data, Predictive Analysis, Creative Persona Development, Use Case Study or Voodoo, every rocking sales lead generating person has an under-covered thing that makes their perfect campaign recipe. In fact, the Internet is filled with ticks, trips, methodologies and numerous how-to guides on what it takes to make leads and prospects ‘sing’ your pipeline tunes.

Most lead generation rock stars in every organization have their own secret recipes when it comes to developing and executing their lead generation campaigns using easy to use CRM software .
Whether it is the use of Big Data, Predictive Analysis, Creative Persona Development, Use Case Study or Voodoo, every rocking sales lead generating person has an under-covered thing that makes their perfect campaign recipe.

Each year, 70% of businesses state they plan to increase spending on technology. The figure remains the same in 2019. Click To Tweet

In fact, the Internet is filled with ticks, trips, methodologies and numerous how-to guides on what it takes to make leads and prospects ‘sing’ your pipeline tunes.

Big Data, Intent Data, and Predictive Analysis

If you are into business and especially into marketing you must have observed that every other year there seems to be a novel marketing “flavor of the year” that will try to throw light on the lead generating business.

Even as of now, Big Data seems to turn out well as databanks are stuffed to the gills with volumes of external and internal contacts that are available in every imaginable shapes and size.
Predictive Analysis also found a big recognition in the modern time, as it promised that it will help innovative marketers to “guess” which leads are going to most valuable even for the most ambitious sales pipelines in their easy to use CRM software.

Now, marketers who are more cynical among others may be tempted to ask: “Is intent data marketing just another fad?”
Well, this is definitely an intelligent question, as we must know what makes intent data different from other lead generation tools.

Now, modern-day marketers always look for ways to make data available in their CRM database more actionable and scalable so that it can better target prospects at their various stages in the sales pipeline in their buyer’s journey.

Well, in a gist, that is exactly what intent data promises and delivers to the marketers, guaranteeing success in their deals.

Therefore, intent data quite simply hones in the stealthy signals which indicate that a person is particularly looking for your brand’s offerings in the marketplace, which helps in targeting users that have demonstrated their intents through website visits, product searches, white paper downloads, and others.
In other words, intent data is the ‘work-horse’ for modern-day marketers in the lead generation world.

This is because intent data can help boost engagements across several use cases which mostly works for ABM (Account Based Marketing) ad targeting, lead scoring, sales data and account managing, lead generation activities and more.

Is there any guarantee for marketers working with intent data?

Well apparently stating it is not.

Nevertheless, as no strategy in marketing remains constant let us now explore how intent data when used with easy to use CRM can help increase your businesses’ bottom line.

TEN COMMANDMENTS FOR INTENT DATA-INFUSED LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGNS

  1. Know your prospect

For intent-based marketing, primarily begin by developing buyer persons for your offerings.

Get inputs from all major stakeholders on both marketing and sales sides in your company, and thereafter when you conduct research, make sure that you answer these following questions that include:

  • What issues do your targeted prospects must care about?
  • What are the present hot topics in their industry?
  • Which keywords your targeted prospects use when they search for solutions pertaining to your business?
  • Which events do your targeted prospects visits and attend?
  • Which publications do your targeted prospects read and trust?
  • Which are the influencers that your targeted prospects turn to for enhancing their skills?
  • Who are your top competitors in your line of business?
  • What technology stack your targeted prospects use and whether they are complementary to your offerings?
  1. Understand the marketing metrics

Marketing metrics and indicators may vary to reflect business priorities; however, measurements in your easy to use CRM will surely identify specifications, such as:

  • Lead conversion rates
  • ROI on lead generation spent
  • Sales cycle timings
  • Boost in increasing your brand offering’s footprint within key accounts
  • Progress in your ABM programs
  1. Know the customer

Maximize your businesses’ revenue goals by understanding specific criteria if the customers, which include:

  • Least and most profitable customers by geography, industry, product line or any other variables that are critical for your ABM email campaigns
  • Best cross-selling/up-selling opportunities
  • Best time to grab additional revenue from existing customers in your CRM database
  • Outcomes of specific engagements of the customers as an indicator for your future ABM initiatives
  1. Know the platforms

Based on your lead generation requirements, you may need many systems, which can include plain vanilla CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, demand generation automation tools, business intelligence dashboard, or rather to say an all-in-one CRM platform (which includes all these tools) and is compatible to your mar-tech stack.

  1. Honor your content marketing strategy

A good content marketing strategy (after a degree of diversity and experimentation) can be the biggest growth opportunity for your business.

Therefore use infographics, videos, micro-site blogging, corresponding email assets, testimonials and reviews, research reports by which you can refine your ABM lead generation over time.

  1. B2B Marketers own the top of the funnel

It has always remained a topic of heated dispute whether sales or marketing owns the funnel. Nevertheless, in the modern marketplace, both sales and marketing are held responsible for generating specific sales goals, as no longer the sales teams are the only proprietor for nurturing leads from awareness to purchase.

  1. Sales Reps must follow-up speedily with prospects

Providing a fast response at times can boost the odds of converting the eager prospect into a customer of your brand exponentially.
Therefore your sales reps should follow up immediately by emailing contents designed to advance the conversation forward after making sure that the content is “mapped” appropriately in context to the buyer’s persona, industry, and the stage they are in of the buying cycle, before making a follow up with a phone call.

  1. Focus on solving problems instead of hard selling

Marketers must work in tandem with the sales reps to make them avoid any hard pitching of their offerings.

Therefore the most effective way to open up a conversation after the initial intro of your brand is to make your prospects understand why you have called or how your offering(s) can help to solve their issue.

  1. Do not hand off leads to the sales reps right away

Primarily before you pass-on a lead to the sales team make sure that they are properly scored.

For this define the lead stages and make sure both your marketers and sales reps are crystal clear on terms like “MQL”, “SQL”, Raw Leads, “SAL” and others. Since these terms do not mean anything unless everyone in your company understands what is required to meet these criteria.

  1. Be persistent in developing reporting to measure success and improve programs

Finally, look into metrics like ‘sales accepted leads’ or ‘conversion to opportunity’ or if your lead scoring system is functioning optimally and where you need to make changes for finding business growth .

Remember to adjust your lead-scoring process once every quarter, until you feel it is right.

Takeaway

Therefore irrespective of whether it is internal, external or behavioral, intent data is designed to identify your prospective leads who are interested in your offering right now.

Hence pairing intent data with other signals that are found in Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM software platforms especially created for small businesses truly helps in leveraging and understanding your prospective customer’s insights for more lead generation opportunities, sales and thereby aid in finding rapid business growth.

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Lessons That Your CRM Software May Not Teach You

The propensity to accumulate a colossal amount of data indeed represented a big leap in customer support and communications when easy to use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions first hit the business world as marketing, sales, and contact data management tool. Nevertheless, CRM software solutions were not a holy grail. This is because, managing information in the CRM database is one thing, and using that data to understand the customer’s need (not what you think but what they do) and how to get them engaged with your brand is another.

The propensity to accumulate a colossal amount of data indeed represented a big leap in customer support and communications when easy to use CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions first hit the business world as marketing, sales, and contact data management tool.

Nevertheless, CRM software solutions were not a holy grail.

This is because, managing information in the CRM database is one thing, and using that data to understand the customer’s need (not what you think but what they do) and how to get them engaged with your brand is another.

You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship if you want to build a long-term, successful enterprise.- Patricia Fripp Click To Tweet

Easy to use CRM platforms were not built to be nimble. Rather these business tools were created to work with changing expectations of the customers and technology over time.

Currently, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and predictive analysis promise the prospective potential to revolutionize easy to use CRM software of the modern times in a truly meaningful way, however rather than being hyperbolic, it is important to be practical- and that is never the same as being pessimistic or negative.

Certainly, applying AI to enterprise level CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM software essentially meant for startups and small businesses can make personalization more effective and efficient; however, it will really work only if the CRM solution’s most innate characteristics are apprehending the customer’s needs that have been driving the Artificial Intelligence revolution so far.

More to say, in their present state easy to use CRM software solutions have not excelled at the uncanny propensity to shine a light on information that must be prioritized (which are based on the organization’s top line goals), vis-à-vis that which might not be relevant in specific applications- which they should.

Apart from this, we would also like to go far to say that CRM solutions are essentially still broken, owing to multiple misunderstandings or misapplication of fundamental principles that apply to sales, marketing, customer service- and data management itself.

Siloed data is YET an issue

The truth behind this matter is that although easy to use CRM technologies are always demanding when it comes to aggregating data, but nevertheless not when it comes to sharing it.
Now, this is not a new issue, but still, it persists almost everywhere across all industries, and not just in organizational functions like marketing and sales.

Siloed data and information in disparate business software applications build walls that prevent anyone from truly finding a complete image of the opportunities and processes needed for boosting efficiency or finding an idea of the customer experience from the beginning to the end of a customer’s journey with the brand.

Therefore even nowadays at times; it becomes almost incomprehensible to understand the real value of a complete dataset since the information that is generally encountered is mostly found in fractured form.

For example, it is impossible to optimize a sales funnel, when you do not really know why or where your prospects fall off their path to conversion unless you are using an all-in-one CRM platform like ConvergeHub.

 Extra content is NEVER better

CRM solutions have put forth a notion in the mind of the users of the tool that creating more contents is not only imperative but also beneficial for any organization.

However, this is not true.

This is because, generating contents for the sake of creating contents has been the status quo since long which most people believes that is needed to be done, without probing any deeper questions.

Nevertheless, in reality, creating contents and generating ‘useful’ contents are two different fundamental ideas.
Prospects, leads, and the customer wants high-quality contents because they want to educate themselves by learning how to solve persistent issues that impede their progress and generic contents are never good enough for doing that.

This has happened because, after years of being conned by fluffs and click-bait verbiages that provides no value, consumers have become more selective about where and how they choose to consume contents.
In fact, in the modern time, individuals have become more tolerant of long-form content pieces (so long as they provide useful info and have substance), as consumers nowadays yearn for practical and insightful data.

Not everyone uses technology the same way

It is convenient to make assumptions about how the information in the CRM database might be used. However, in reality, there can be an infinite number of needs and usage for the data that easy to use CRM software platform provides, which can never be predicted.

Therefore, although the possibilities to utilize technology are limitless, nevertheless, on a case-to-case basis, the real need for data is always very specific.

Moreover, the supposition that everyone has the same level of technological literacy to be able to use even an easy to use CRM, for any specific requirement overlooks the big segment of the market that does not meet this threshold.

Hence, for truly understanding what information in the CRM database is actually useful for creating personalized and most essentially useful content easy to use CRM software solutions have to find a better solution for incorporating customer feedbacks and thereafter infer the customer’s own processes.

Hence, appreciating how processes unfold, and viewing the connections between all the operational elements and their corresponding data, is the only means to assure the users that they have implemented the right technology in a manner that they require to fulfill their business goals.

Not talking, listening is the most crucial step in understanding data needs

Neil Rackham (founder and former president of Huthwaite, Inc.) rebuts the clichéd rhetoric “Successful people in sales ask more questions during calls than do their less triumphant colleagues” by stating that “these less successful salespeople are those that tend to do the most talking.”

In fact, successful salespersons have been using and implementing personalization techniques in sales for a longer time, even before it became a buzzword.

This is because, it is no longer hard to understand, that personalization is one of the most productive methods for lead nurturing and persuasion.

Since it is only by asking the right questions effective sales reps can position their products and themselves in the best possible way.

Hence listening to your prospects and customers is one of the most beneficial advices for communicating with your audience, which allows you to have a dialogue after knowing what they need.

Moreover, the ability to listen to the pain-pints and challenges faced by your prospective customers also helps in creating substantive contents that provide value to your target consumers and therefore increases your content’s efficacy in the long haul.

Conclusion

Hence, easy to use CRM solutions in the present time, must begin with look at providing a holistic customer experience with complete data sets, and should be willing to find and utilize better feedback mechanisms to meet the customer’s needs, which you can find in award-winning CRM software applications like ConvergeHub that provides an all-in-one 360-degree view of its leads, prospects, and customers.

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The Definition Of Customer Success In This Era Of Big Data

Even though the realm of customer success is an explored territory for more than a decade, however, it is only in the recent years the technology-based industry has recognized the value of CSM (Customer Success Methodology) initiatives. This is because the combination of SaaS (Software as a Service) and Big Data has created a perfect breeding place for maximizing customer relationships with the help of customer success programs, which has nowadays become analytics-driven and quantifiable that makes predictive modeling of customers possible using an easy to use CRM software.

Even though the realm of customer success is an explored territory for more than a decade, however, it is only in the recent years the technology-based industry has recognized the value of CSM (Customer Success Methodology) initiatives along with the growth in adoption of easy to use CRM software.

2% increase in upselling leads to a 28% increase in valuation - Goldman Sachs Click To Tweet

This is because the combination of SaaS (Software as a Service) and Big Data has created a perfect breeding place for maximizing customer relationships with the help of customer success programs, which has nowadays become analytics-driven and quantifiable that makes predictive modeling of customers possible using an easy to use CRM software.

Moreover, in the SaaS space which is presently flourishing with enterprises and consumers, CSM has become most essential, since SaaS businesses model can only work if their customers are times and again attaining their business objectives successfully.

This is because, in the old software world, the cost of acquiring a customer was recovered over a single transaction when a contract was signed, and so vendors of software solutions were not concerned whether their offering(s) was making the customers successful and hence as long as organizations kept signing deals, ‘shelfware’ (software) kept on being sold, irrespective of how customers react on the shelfware solution once it is out of their hands.

But in modern times, shelfware(s) does no longer exist in this fast-paced SaaS world.

Therefore, if a company is not finding value from its SaaS purchases today, it can (and certainly will) terminate that contract at the end of the billing period- irrespective of whether the billing cycle is of a year, quarter or a month.

Hence today in the SaaS space while happy customers mean a growth in business, unhappy customers can similarly lead to corporate collapse which makes CSM extremely important for SaaS businesses.

Now what does customer success look like in the SaaS space and what are the factors that signal a data-driven, and successful CSM program?

Well, the answer to this question is right below:

Low Churn Rates

Customer Churn is almost a killer in the SaaS space, and therefore customer success programs must address this cursed phenomenon first and foremost for finding business growth.

This is because even a small reduction in the churn rate for any SaaS business can lead to exorbitantly high returns.

For example, even just a 2% reduction in churn can lead to 20% higher multiples in valuation.

Therefore, after implementing a CSM program the clearest indicator of its success and effectiveness can be measured by viewing lower churn rates which can be easily monitored using an easy to use CRM software.

High Upsell/Recurring Revenue

The very opposite of customer churn is not acquisition, but its ‘retention’ for SaaS businesses.

This is because it is a well-accepted fact that the cost of acquiring a new customer (especially an enterprise-level customer) can take around 18 months to recoup, and therefore existing customers in SaaS businesses become more and more profitable once you have overcome their acquisition costs.

Therefore to become successful in SaaS, the recurring revenue from your existing customers must be of greater value than any new customer for finding rapid business growth.

Moreover, CSM programs should also aim at up-selling and cross-selling to their existing customers, which will also translate to increased revenue in the long haul.

According to a report published by Goldman Sachs:

“2% increase in upselling leads to a 28% increase in valuation.” – Which is just one more reason why SaaS companies those that excel in customer success should focus on retention of their customer base and hence use easy to use CRM to aid in their CSM programs.

Change from “Firefighting Mode”

Although this is not a quantifiable metric, nevertheless this is an indicator of CSM done right which can usher a shift from “firefighting mode” to proactive customer management in the company.

Even though most CSM programs are conducted to fight some form of churn, but real customer success, when it is done correctly, does not just douse the fire, it also acts as a proactive department in the organization that squashes customer-facing problems before they escalate and loops the VOC (Voice of the Customer) into the organization in a meaningful way.

Shift in Organizational Behavior

Perhaps the biggest and the most important of impeccable CSM program is a radical change in the behaviors of the employees in any organization.

This is because customer success is not the domain of any single department in any company since it can impact other aspects as well of the organization, which includes lowering the cost of acquiring customers through advocacy.

According to certain studies just a 12% increase in brand advocacy can easily double an organization’s revenue and growth rate.

Conclusion

Therefore in a gist, companies that are seeking to attain true customer success for their businesses must adopt CSM throughout their establishment, since irrespective of whether any department is directly involved with the customers, in the end, everyone in your business benefits when customers continue to do business with your brand.

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