Customer Success Framework for B2B SaaS

In the complex terrain of B2B SaaS businesses, establishing a compelling customer success strategy is not merely an operational choice—it is a critical survival strategy. For example, Salesforce, ground zero of Customer Success, employs a data science team dedicated solely to customer success. Their innovative data driven approach underscores the significance of a sophisticated customer success framework to not only predict but also to actively mitigate risks and enhance customer retention.

Few B2B SaaS organizations recognize the importance of a client strategy early in their growth journey, and even fewer are able to deploy an effective framework. Founders are usually more preoccupied with getting the company off the ground than defining how customers will be serviced. It’s highly uncommon for early-stage leaders to possess the mental bandwidth required to cut through the noise and find the inputs necessary to build a tailored framework that fulfills the needs of the organization. Even if client strategy is top of mind, finding the right resources, with the right skillset, to build out the infrastructure can feel daunting or nearly impossible. This is why customer success usually takes a back seat until it becomes obviously necessary. At which point companies reactively attempt to deploy a CS organization - and anyone that truly knows customer success understands that reactive behavior to anything client related is a one way ticket to failure.

Having the right partner to build and deploy an effective client strategy in the early stages of growth can be the differentiator that sets a company apart from its competitors.

The following sections outline a generally accepted high level framework for the deployment of an effective customer success strategy for SaaS organizations. Disclaimer: though this outlines a methodology, it is not a one size fits all. These concepts should be thoroughly distilled and tailored to fit your organization, clientele, and product.

The Framework

An effective Customer Success framework can be described using 2 sets of attributes:

1. The first is the toolbox that every CS organization should have in their arsenal to be both proactive and impactful. These ten tools should be meticulously crafted and carefully mapped to each of the seven phases of the client lifecycle.

2. The second set of attributes is the stages of the customer lifecycle, which can be broken out into seven phases - commonly known as the seven pillars of customer success. Each of these chasms represents a sliver of the journey that every customer takes with an organization. It doesn't matter the industry or product, every B2B SaaS customer will go through each of these phases one way or another.

The Toolbox

This section outlines the 10 basic tools that every customer success team in a SaaS organization should consider investing into in order to maximize their performance.

T1: Moments of Truth

These are key moments in your customers life cycle where you can have the opportunity to take meaningful action and increase the lifetime value of a client. Every customer interaction with a company presents a chance to make a positive impression. These moments are incredibly important and should not only be owned by customer success. In a true client centric organization, everyone should be looking out for these moments. One of the most successful client value generation thought leaders, Walt Disney, said, “No one owns the customer, but someone can always own the moment for that customer."

These compelling moments can be identified by capturing and monitoring the right triggers. Some sample triggers are Life-cycle Stage Triggers (progression from onboarding to adoption to retention) and Customer Event Triggers (usage declines, sponsor changes, low NPS).

T2: Success Runbooks

Success Runbooks are collections of instructions and best practices tailored to specific customer journey stages. This set of prescriptive guidelines allow you to script your processes to improve predictability and reduce improvisation. If applied correctly they will ultimately yield sustainable results and accelerate revenue growth.

T3: Customer Health

Customer health is a metric that most companies either pull out of thin air based on intuition or are calculated using incorrect inputs. Client health is often derived using a single aspect of the customer, such as product usage. Customer health is a tricky multivariable computation that should account for many aspects of the customer engagement.

If calculated correctly, the health score should result in a score that accurately predicts the state of the customer. Allowing the customer success teams to trigger relevant playbooks and proactively mitigate risk or drive value in accounts.

T4: Customer Risk Framework

One of the most important aspects of a good customer success strategy is being proactive. A key parameter to being proactive is having the ability to assess potential risks a few miles down the road. To perform and scale risk assessment effectively, organizations need to craft a risk framework. Having these risk areas clearly defined and mitigation plans ready will allow your teams to identify issues and deploy the appropriate Success Runbooks proactively to mitigate any risks.

A sample recurring risks that customers face along with their journey are:

• Readiness risk. This is the readiness of the customer to plan, deploy, and gain value from your product.

• Relationship risk is about losing key champions, advocates, or sponsors.

• Non-controllable risks, which are those you have little to no control over (ie. a global pandemic)

T5: Customer Success Plans

A Customer Success Plan is a clear statement of how you will deliver value at every stage of the customer’s journey with your company. It provides an agreed-upon set of business and technical success criteria to drive value. A success plan is essentially a menu which outlines how your teams should measure and articulate proven value at every step of the customer lifecycle. Success Plans are highly tailored to your company and speak to the specific business challenges that your product addresses. Many organizations have loosely defined success plans for their onboarding stages, but forget how imperative it is to have a well defined plan for every other stage of the process.

T6: Segmentation

Not every client is the same. They each have their own specific challenges, nuances, and complexities. Needless to mention that they also tend to have a different level of engagement and importance to your business. Because of this, the harsh reality is that not all clients should be treated equally by your customer teams. To improve long term scalability, customer success teams should look to segment their books of business early on by applying a set of rules specific to your organization. Many companies segment solely based on contract size. However, customer segmentation should be looked at as a multivariable equation; Accounting for all value driving streams of the account and not just deal size.

T7: Customer Delight

Seems trivial, but it's often overlooked, customer delight is the ability to make a client feel special. Having a set of simple but effective runbooks to drive satisfaction in the relationship with your customers will generate advocacy for your product and business. People buy things that make them happy, and happiness isn’t always factual ROI metrics on a slide deck. Companies should consider every aspect of the engagement and analyze every interaction to strengthen the relationship. Some of these aspects can be as simple as responsiveness or listening to feedback.

T8: Voice of the Customer

Making sure that the customer is heard not only strengthens the relationship but also serves as a golden source for insight into their sentiment about your service and product. Voice of the Customer (VoC) isn’t just an NPS score or a feedback funnel for the product team. It should be meticulously crafted and strategically deployed to gain actionable feedback directly from the customer. If done effectively, a VoC process can feed into your risk frameworks and help drive your success plans

T9: QBRs and EBRs

A Quarterly Business Review (QBR) is a crucial opportunity to evaluate and discuss the health and progress of a customer's engagement with your products or services. These check-ins allow both the client and the service provider to align on expectations, review achievements and challenges, and recalibrate goals. QBRs foster effective communication, enable proactive strategy adjustment, and help build trust in the relationship by demonstrating your commitment to the customer's success. Moreover, QBRs can also help your customer team identify new revenue opportunities, contributing to growth while ensuring that the customer's needs are met effectively.

T10: Metrics

Looking back at the Salesforce mentioned from above, the most successful client strategies are always data backed, not intuition driven. Operationalizing and tracking the right metrics will give your team the right indicators to cut through the noise and invest their efforts where they can drive the most value. Customer Success metrics tend to fall into two categories, success metrics and business metrics. Success metrics are external measures that your teams can use to demonstrate and articulate value and ROI to your customers. Business metrics are internal metrics used to measure the performance of your client organization and their books of business. Though most business metrics are industry standard, value metrics are often specific to your business and need to be carefully defined.

The Seven Phases of the Customer Lifecycle

1. Operationalizing Customer Success

A robust operational framework is essential for scaling customer success. Key tools such as Moments of Truth, Playbooks, and Customer Health Scores are integral to maintaining a proactive stance on customer interactions and interventions.

2. Onboarding

Effective onboarding sets the stage for customer engagement and satisfaction. It ensures alignment between customer expectations and service delivery, setting a clear trajectory for value realization.

3. Adoption

Adoption goes beyond mere usage; it involves deep integration of the SaaS product into the customer's daily operations and workflows. Strategies to enhance adoption include regular "ride-alongs" and office hours to ensure customers fully leverage the product's features and functionalities.

4. Retention

Customer retention is influenced by continuous engagement and the ongoing delivery of value. It's about painting a vision for the future for the customer, showing them the continuing benefits of their investment in the product.

5. Expansion

Expansion involves identifying and realizing opportunities to increase the scope of engagement through up-selling and cross-selling. It's crucial for customer success teams to foster environments that naturally lead to expansion.

6. Advocacy

Turning customers into advocates is a powerful strategy for organic growth. By developing assets like case studies and testimonials, companies can enhance their market credibility and attract new customers.

7. Strategic Advisor

The role of a strategic advisor is to guide customers through their journey, offering deep industry insights and proactive support to ensure they achieve their desired outcomes.

Why Partner with SanSigma?

SanSigma Consulting specializes in taking some of the aforementioned frameworks for effective customer success and transforming them into tailored, actionable strategies that align with your business objectives. Partnering with SanSigma can significantly enhance your customer success outcomes and maximize the growth of your business - Here is why:

• Expertise & Experience: Our team brings decades of first hand experience in early stage B2B SaaS. We’ve experienced many stages of business growth and bring deep insights from many industries. We are equipped with countless best practices that bridge the gap between theoretical strategies and practical execution.

• Customization: We understand that each business is unique. Our approach involves engineering your Customer Ecosystem and crafting customized Success Runbooks that represent your business needs.

• Technology: We bring powerful insights to develop the right technology stack that enhances your customer success operations, ensuring you have the tools to monitor, analyze, and act on customer data effectively.

• Proactive Strategy Development: Our methodologies are designed not just to solve current problems but to foresee and mitigate future challenges, keeping your business scalable and competitive.

• Outcome-Focused: Every strategy we develop is geared towards tangible business outcomes, enhancing customer health scores, and driving growth through retention and expansion.

Conclusion

In today’s competitive landscape, B2B SaaS companies cannot afford to view customer success as an optional add-on or something they can figure out reactively down the line. It is a critical, strategic function that drives customer retention, satisfaction, and expansion. The above framework provides a comprehensive guide of concepts to consider when developing a winning customer success strategy. By partnering with SanSigma, you gain access to specialized expertise and tailored strategies that ensure your customer success operations are not just functional but truly are a growth engine for your organization.

For more information on how to implement these strategies effectively and transform your customer success operations, partner with us. Together, let's turn your customer success into your competitive advantage.