How Can SaaS Organizations Up Their Customer Success Game By Letting Agency Client Leaders Inside The Gates?

The reason for this article is that overwhelmingly there seems to be a sentiment at SaaS organizations that primarily SaaS Customer Success veterans are the only candidates qualified for these types of roles and that candidates with Customer Success experience from non-SaaS organizations aren’t worth considering. This is by no means universal but it’s there and I’ve witnessed either first or second-hand numerous times. The why of it is what I can’t wrap my head around. I’ve had a number of former ad agency colleagues over the past couple of years attempt to move over to SaaS companies with pretty low success rates. In order to explore this subject a bit, let’s put a definition on Customer Success. Let’s say that this group sits at the intersection of the promise your company or technology makes and the desired business outcome that the customer is trying to achieve. Your customer is making a decision to believe that you will help them solve problems that they can’t easily solve without you. Customer Success then is about helping these customers achieve their desired outcomes as a result of working with you and/or your technology. It’s the Customer Success team’s job to ensure that the customer is always moving in the direction of meeting their goals. Defining the basic parts of Customer Success might go something like this:

Onboarding: Different models seek to start with adoption but it’s my belief that Onboarding is actually different from adoption. A client decision-maker(s) has signed on the dotted line and agreed to use your company or technology. Oftentimes, the people who will really be working with you or your product are not the purchase decision-makers so you need to almost sell them separately while holding a pep rally (because you’re excited to have won the contract) and getting them set up to begin work. These people come to you in one of several ways. They may have never worked with a company or technology platform like yours. They may be coming from one of your competitors whom they didn’t love. Or they may be coming to you kicking and screaming because they liked how things were going prior. You need to understand this and work to manage them all a bit differently but always with the decision-maker’s desired outcome in mind.

Adoption: Whether you are a product or service, like an agency, you need the customer to engage and make use of your offering. There are 3 flavors of adoption:

1. Low adoption — Your customers aren’t engaging much or at all and therefore not seeing the benefits. If you can’t drive engagement you’ve got a real problem.
2. High Adoption, Low Effectiveness — The customers are using your product or services but for whatever reason be it on your end or theirs, it’s not leading to the outcomes that they are looking for. These could be organization issues, process issues, or even execution issues but if they can’t realize the full power of what you offer, the wheels will eventually come off of the bus and you will lose them.
3. Effective Adoption — The customers are working with you and/or your products, moving toward their desired outcomes and seeing results. Customers at this level of adoption are the most likely to expand their relationship with you and renew contracts, so it’s critical that your teams focus on getting all the customer team members headed here, quickly. Pro Tip: Just because you get a customer to this level of adoption, doesn’t mean they will stay here. People come in and out, find bugs in the system, or see greener pastures elsewhere, so it’s imperative that the team works hard to keep customers at this level.

Expansion: If things are going well and your clients are seeing the benefits of working with you, opportunities will present for adding products or services. At this point, a collaboration between the Customer Success team and the Sales team is natural. It’s important to showcase a balance between customer empathy and salesmanship here because the reason for expansion must be directly correlated to the outcomes that your customer is trying to achieve and not just expansion for revenue’s sake.

Renewal: You work all year to drive and maintain effective adoption, prove the benefits of your product or service as they related to the customer’s desired outcome so that you can renew get the contract renewed. While not as laborious in the second year and beyond, Customer Success teams can never take their eye off the ball because competitors are always out there singing the siren song of better tools, processes, and results for the same or less investment.

Advocacy: If you can really tie your product or services to the achievements of key client outcomes and make it enjoyable along the way, you’ll likely have an advocate on your hands. These customers can do more to help your company land new business than any marketing or sales efforts you can put together, and best of all it’s FREE!

Now that we’ve talked about the component parts of Customer Success, it’s time to realize that what I just described is the same whether you’re a SaaS or an agency. So now let’s discuss what’s different:

The Agency — An agency is selling people’s time to create a strategy, develop ideas and concepts, execute tactical plans, and report on results. The product is most often intangible and is reviewed in a largely subjective way through direct feedback and verbatims. While QBRs and annual reviews are common, there isn’t much data to present other than how people on the agency side are adding value, whether the client feels good about the processes, and whether they “like” the work that’s being created and executed. There is no data on customer behavior other than the accounts of interactions derived from the Account teams. Customer Success teams spend much, if not all of their time, managing personalities, priorities, processes, timelines, and deliverables.

The SaaS — Here the customer is engaging an actual product with support from the Customer Success team. There is data on how much and what type of engagement there is with the product and by what members of the customer organization. This allows you to head off problems, often before a customer knows that they exist or at least through QBRs. The opportunity exists to understand platform feature friction points and help solve them tangibly through a collaboration between Customer Success and Product teams. There are even other SaaS technologies that the company can tap into that allow them to get signals of adoption & retention risk like Gainsight, ChurnZero, etc. The role of CSMs on the SaaS side isn’t easy for sure but it is guided by a good bit of data about a tangible product that is either working for a client or not. With this information, Customer Success teams can make decisions about how to engage, train, assist, upsell, or escalate signals to help save customers before they go “Red”.

So now that we’ve talked about the discipline of Customer Success and how it applies to both types of companies, it seems that there could be real benefits for SaaS companies to allow agency Client Management candidates to come and add complementary skills to the Customer Success organization. High levels of client contact, empathy for outcomes, the ability to defend an abstract product from largely subjective feedback, and an ability to engage other departments fluidly. In the end, for both groups, it’s about making clients successful, keeping them around a long time, and gaining insight that helps make the product even better for your next wave of customers.

I raise a toast to both SaaS Customer Success teams and their agency counterparts for the effort and enthusiasm it takes to always focus on helping customers be successful. Cheers to you all!