Cambridge Business Association
Customer Success
Book

Customer Success

How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue

Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy
Wiley, 2016
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

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Recommendation

Consultants Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy describe customer service and retention with a passion and urgency that will have you racing to make changes. The new, dominant model in software – cloud-based delivery and subscription pricing – places heightened emphasis on customer care. Companies spend a lot to acquire customers and then often collect too little data from them, thus giving themselves a difficult path to achieving strong subscriber renewals and retention. Mehta, Steinman and Murphy offer 10 laws that your company can follow to help your customer service evolve into customer success, including how to heed what your consumers want and how to shift power to them. This guidebook speaks, with rare exception, only to “Software as a Service” (“SaaS”) businesses. getAbstract recommends it to any SaaS company seeking to find, gain and nurture clients – and to any entrepreneur who aims to build such a company.

Summary

Your Customer Defines Your Success

At the height of Salesforce’s success and growth as a cloud-based service in 2005 – after a blockbuster IPO the previous year – its leaders gathered for a triumphant off-site meeting. The mood was celebratory until David Dempsey, “Dr. Doom,” took the stage. Dempsey announced that the firm was in a “death spiral.” Every month, almost one in 10 customers was deciding not to renew Salesforce’s contract. On an annualized basis, this was the equivalent of losing nearly every customer. Salesforce was losing customers almost as fast as it was bringing in new ones.

“Before Cloud / After Cloud”

The cost of acquiring new customers makes keeping your existing ones critical for most companies, not only business-to-business (B2B) “Software as a Service” (SaaS) companies. Customer retention is vitally important for firms that rely on repeat subscriptions – namely, cloud-based, SaaS services. Before the cloud, software vendors made almost all their money on the initial sale. After that, maintenance and upgrades might account for a small amount of ongoing revenue. Now, after the cloud, the up-front...

About the Authors

CEO Nick Mehta and CCO Dan Steinman lead Gainsight, a cloud-based customer solutions business. Lincoln Murphy consults and writes about customer success.

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