Category Archives: SaaS

The Implications of the “Perpetual Campaign” of Customer Success Management

In the political world, there’s lots of talk of the “perpetual campaign”—the unceasing cycle of fundraising, speech giving, and vote soliciting. The reality is that for SaaS companies, the state of being should likewise be understood as a perpetual campaign. This is because with SaaS, every moment using the application represents a customer touchpoint that influences customer decisions—about whether to expand utilization, about whether to upgrade to a more advanced version, about whether to invest in additional services.

For this reason, it is vital that a marketing mindset and marketing capabilities be an organic part of the CSM organization. Specifically, successful CSM needs to:

  • Understand Customer Behavior. It is vital to the success of a CSM organization to understand customer behavior and attitudes. Market research into customer satisfaction, customer decision-making, propensity to recommend, and segmentation can all contribute significantly to building a CSM team that delivers measurable value to the organization.
  • Influence Customer Behavior. Core to the CSM function is influencing customer behavior towards activities that result in successful utilization of the application. To execute this successfully requires customer data analytics skills and the ability to draw conclusions, make predictions, and act to compel the desired activity—all of which should already be part of the marketing function.
  • Test and Learn. Because understanding and then influencing customer behavior is an iterative process, a systematic testing and learning approach to CSM activity is important to optimize efficiency and effectiveness. Whether pre-contract, during onboarding, over the course of ramp-up and utilization, or triggered by specific milestones or activities, the opportunities for communications to boost CLV (Customer Lifetime Value delivered through conversion, retention, up/cross-sell)—and therefore, the opportunities for testing and improving communications—are limited only by resource availability.

To distinguish itself from traditional customer service, the CSM team needs to take a proactive approach to customer communications, rather than being reactive to customer problems. As the organizational function most responsible for proactive customer communications, marketing (whether in the form of shared resources or in the form of dedicated CSM staff with marketing training) needs to be a part of the CSM effort.

When Engineers Speak: 4 Key Cloud Marketing Implications

For marketers, almost nothing is as valuable as hearing the unvarnished, unfiltered point-of-view of buyers. At last week’s Massachusetts Tech Leadership Council’s “Cloud Seminar: Choosing the Right Cloud for Your Business,” marketers would have had a lot to listen to.

Speaking to a sophisticated, engineer-centric audience with over 20 years’ experience in development and operations, GitHub’s Mark Imbriaco didn’t pull any punches in presenting his perspective on the myths and realities of the benefits of the cloud.

  • Cost savings? Myth.
  • Means of avoiding IT bottlenecks? Myth.
  • Driver of increased agility and speed to market? Definite reality.

From a value proposition perspective, the implications are clear: be wary of emphasizing cost and operational advantages of your cloud solution because they’ll like meet with skepticism.

A panel discussion featuring engineering executives from Carbonite, Ipswitch, Acquia, and Scribe built on Mr. Imbriaco’s perspective. In responding to questions about their infrastructure evolution, they said that decisions about when and how to deploy IaaS, PaaS, and S(torage)aaS would always be based on the strategic business needs for a given initiative or project: when time-to-market is critical or in which utilization is highly unpredictable, cloud is attractive; in a scenario with consistent demands and a need to control variable costs, cloud is a poor choice.

This nuanced view of the application of cloud services should point marketers towards the development of materials and campaigns that enable the customer to drive the buying process based on specific requirements for specific projects. Specifically, the following would likely be effective:

  • Inbound marketing to allow prospective customers to pursue the information most useful to them
  • Web-based self-diagnostics to help prospective customers learn which cloud solution may be the right one for them
  • Sales enablement tools to facilitate sales’ role as a partner and helpful guide
  • Cross/up-sell marketing based on utilization data to take advantage of natural evolution of needs

Where online sale of lip gloss and B2B software customer retention converge

Sometimes marketing inspiration and confirmation of instincts comes from places you wouldn’t normally look. This recent blog post on getelastic.com is case in point: http://www.getelastic.com/the-easiest-way-to-increase-conversion-by-20/. On the face of it, this post would seem to be quite far afield from the world of customer retention in B2B software, or any of the other B2B industries in which EMI works for that matter. And indeed there isn’t much that links lip gloss and software; but there is a link in the approach to solving marketing challenges.

The getelastic blog post starts off with a research-based data point: ecommerce customers are 20% more likely to purchase a product that has at least one customer review. Then, based on that data point, it presents several reasonable ways to obtain that key *first* review. The ways to do this are only important if you’re interested in driving web purchases. What’s important outside that context – and especially in a B2B context like CSM strategy for SaaS – is the way in which marketing research and analytics have identified an operational measure which becomes the strategic focus. Increasing web sales is obviously the business goal, but it’s so broad and influenced by so many factors that it’s unwieldy as an operational focus. By isolating one key factor that has a significant impact on the objective, exploration and testing of tactical options becomes significantly easier. In mathematical terms, you solve for “reviews” because you know that it will drive conversions.

Take this approach out of the world of online sales of lip gloss and into the world of B2B software customer retention and it is still just as effective. Retention is impacted by a multitude of factors –satisfaction, perceived value, switching costs, depth and breadth of utilization – each of which can be affected by a set of strategies and tactics. To optimize retention, you must first sift through all the potential factors to identify those that actually have the greatest impact. Once you have effectively ranked the factors based on their likely impact, then you can develop retention marketing strategies – new communications approaches, new messaging, testing – that specifically and precisely aim to drive improvement in that factor.