by Chris Pilbeam | Dec 14, 2023 | Operations
Barbershops are as American as baseball and apple pie. It’s also a line of business that hasn’t changed much in decades, observed Dave Salvant when he co-founded Squire. As a young man growing up in Brooklyn, NY, he would do odd jobs at a hair salon run by his aunt....
by Chris Pilbeam | Dec 8, 2023 | ChurnHero Award Winners, Onboarding, Product Adoption
From living and breathing innovation, to questioning the status quo, to relentlessly pursuing customer value and breakthrough results, it takes a lot to become a ChurnHero Award winner. This year, five spectacular customer success teams have joined the list. Each...
by Heather Philbin | Dec 1, 2023 | Management
The essential handbook for building the modern SaaS customer success program Looking to elevate your SaaS business with a proven customer success framework? The updated Ultimate Guide to Customer Success shows how to build and scale a revenue-owning SaaS customer...
by Chris Pilbeam | Nov 30, 2023 | AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long sparked the human imagination, often in the form of science fiction. Movies about AI becoming sentient and moving to destroy its human makers are plentiful, and mostly follow a familiar storytelling format in which the humans...
by Emily Nesterick | Nov 21, 2023 | Retention
Quick summary: Renewals are no longer won on ROI alone—CSMs need to “reverse engineer” how finance, procurement, and budgeting decisions actually get made, then start renewal work earlier based on the customer’s calendar and buying process. Use clear pricing/terms...
by Emily Nesterick | Nov 17, 2023 | Engagement
This is a guest post by Shauna McClemens, community strategist, Higher Logic Vanilla. Online communities are great places for customers to forge connections, seek support from their peers, and share new ideas. However, keeping the energy high and the conversations...
by Emily Nesterick | Nov 1, 2023 | Engagement
There’s an old United Airlines television commercial from 1989 that underscores the importance of meeting customers face-to-face. A boss is telling a roomful of employees that their company’s oldest customer fired them that morning. Why? Because business had become...
by Emily Nesterick | Oct 31, 2023 | Onboarding
Just three weeks into a new job as a project manager, Jeff Kushmerek noticed his first assignment was going sideways. He was tasked with getting a SaaS implementation that was eight months behind back on schedule. The customer was understandably unhappy. Clearly, they...
by Emily Nesterick | Oct 30, 2023 | Management
About one-third (36%) of customer success teams have veto power over bad-fit customers, according to our recent annual Customer Success Leadership Survey. That means for better or worse, the remaining 64% have to find a way to manage those customer relationships...
by Emily Nesterick | Oct 30, 2023 | Engagement
Is storytelling a legitimate persuasion tactic? In 2009, authors Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn devised a social experiment to find out. The pair purchased 200 small figurines for an average price of $1.25—and a grand total of around $250. Next, they hired authors to...
by Emily Nesterick | Oct 26, 2023 | Management, Retention
This is a guest article by Kristen Hayer, CEO and co-founder of The Success League. Negotiation: a word that can strike fear into the hearts of CSMs. For me, the term brings to mind car dealerships, aggressive salespeople, and shouting. It can feel like a situation...
by Emily Nesterick | Oct 20, 2023 | Digital CS, Engagement
This is a guest post by Shauna McClemens, community strategist, Higher Logic Vanilla. As a community strategist for a community platform, I’ve seen firsthand how a customer community can shore up a scaled customer success team and make a positive impact on their work...
