Tag Archives: sales

What else do you measure when customer retention is good?

I am always asked this question by my peers –

The customer retention is organically good and the churn is below industry standards. What other KPIs can I set for my team to keep them motivated? 

Interesting question, isn’t it?

My immediate response was an applause! A loud one!

Achieving organic customer retention is definitely AWESOME! It shows the team is performing as per the customer’s expectations and the customer objectives are MET.

What further excites me is their willingness to go the extra mile and improve their performance so that they can be exceptional and continue their winning streak!

We always hear people quoting “make hay while the sun shines”. This question is the perfect example of being proactive – the key to becoming a valued Customer Success Manager 

Being proactive is the key to becoming a valued Customer Success Manager

As an answer, I have a consolidated approach –

  1. Create ideal customer profiles – 

Define your best customer! Find the behavioral patterns. Note down the product features or services utilized extensively. Include company size, industry, MRR, the workforce needed. Also include the duration required to achieve certain customer journey milestones like Onboarding, Product Adoption, Upsells/Upgrades, etc.

Once you consolidate all this information, share the ideal profile with your Marketing, Sales, and Executive team. This will help them generate quality leads, increase prospect conversions, and sales closures.

  1. Check customer’s product usage and adoption with a fine comb

Any lack of understanding/usage/inconvenience about the product at the customer’s end is an opportunity to upsell/cross-sell the customer. This can be done in the form of feature upgrades, paid team-trainings, etc. 

For this, proactively interacting with each happy customer on a regular basis is the key. 

  1. Review customer touchpoints post-sale

Check the communication that is sent to the customer during the entire customer journey on all the channels. Make sure the communication emphasizes more about meeting the customer’s objective rather than boosting your company.

Customer communication should emphasize more about meeting the customer’s objective rather than boosting your company.

  1. A Customer Advisory Board

Your happy customers are an asset. They not just love your product/service but will also help you with the information about why they love it. 

Form a customer advisory board and involve as many customers as you can. Collaborate with these champions when launching a new product, fine-tuning your existing products or services, beta-testing new features, or even for initial discussions regarding product roadmaps or customer journey maps. 

  1. Customer Advocacy

Every happy customer has the potential to be your brand promoter! And if requested politely they will happily oblige! Get lots of success stories, case studies, testimonials, video interviews ready with your successful customers. You can utilize these in your sales pitch, marketing collaterals, social media channels, customer onboarding pitch etc.

  1. Search for opportunities to delight the customer

Going a step ahead, check the processes at the customer’s end BEFORE and AFTER they use your product/service and search for opportunities to innovate, digitize, or simplify them.

For instance, if your product requires uploading files in certain format, provide the customers an option to

a. download a sample file in the required format

b. help them convert their file into the required format.

In short, putting yourself into the customer’s shoes and thinking from their perspective.

To conclude, customer retention if done wisely can perform as a separate profit centre for the company. It is essential to continue the retention efforts even when the times are good to maintain the loyalty in the minds of the customers.

With these approaches, I am sure you will stay one step ahead in your pursuit of being an exceptional customer success manager!

Do drop your feedback and let me know if you have any more different strategies that we can add to the above list!

Newsletters – A doorway to the treasure of knowledge.

Pregnancy is tough! Clogging of full spectrum of emotions – doubts, fear, and anxiety! It’s a hell of a ride. But all reduces to nothing when you hold your baby in your arms. That moment surpasses everything you went through.

Being a social media professional and an expecting mother, I always kept looking for answers to many stupid but mind wrecking questions online. And as soon as your family finds out they are having a baby, suggestions and advises start POURING and POUNDING in, making you confused, nervous and TIRED…yeah that’s the word!!!

Tips, precautions, milestones, symptoms, immunizations, medical tests, physical and mental well-being, maternity leave, birth plan…. phew!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Giving birth is hard!

I was saved and all the credit goes to BabyCenter LLC!

BabyCenter is an excellent example of a targeted pro-active Newsletter program. These newsletters are a fantastic resource that emails you at each and every milestone to help reassure, give you a ‘heads up’ on what is to come, and to answer your questions. From what your baby looks like at Week 16, to what to expect when he/she starts crawling, it is very informative and is a great example of a good, interactive newsletter.

Every user who subscribes, receives a tailor-made Newsletter as per her due date schedule and I feel that it’s an incredible way to keep an expecting mother on her toes and brace her up for a full throttle ride called Pregnancy!

Newsletter serves the most important tasks for a business which is to maintain contact with its customers. It is the most active way to target the customer based on his last visit/purchase or any inquiry done through the website, by directly landing up in his mailbox.

BabyCenter here grabbed the emotional thread of a pregnant woman who is always curious, confused and doubtful about her actions while carrying a baby. By sending a weekly newsletter giving a sneak peek of the developing baby inside her womb and answering all her stupid questions religiously, without asking, BabyCenter does create an everlasting bond with the mother.

With my constant rendezvous with BabyCenter Newsletters, I tried to figure out their secret to success –

1. To increase awareness – providing users with enough information and make them aware about your brand and its offerings. The information should be unique, exclusive and well presented compelling the user to navigate to your website to KNOW MORE!

exclusivity

 

2. Position your brand – Newsletter must create the best first impression about your business. Sharing the knowledge with the customers is the best way to position your brand as an expert in your domain.

To increase awareness, traffic

3. Educating the prospects – Every expecting mother passes through different phases during her pregnancy. It’s bliss to find out that you have the same symptoms in your 25th week as listed in the newsletter. A newsletter which provides customers with valuable information, assists them in making better decisions, demonstrates your expertise and guides the customers to navigate to the right page of the website to get more information is appreciated more.

to educate

4. Increase traffic to your website – Newsletter can drive traffic to your website or blog. Thus it provides another in-direct way of generating traffic to your website.

extra

5. Increase social media page visits – By placing the easy-to-notice social media links in your newsletter, traffic to your social media pages can be also increased.

Social MEdia links

6. To get more sales from a current client – A newsletter can be also utilized to let your existing clients know about your other services and guide them how they can benefit from those services, without being to “pushy”.

more sales frm current clients

7. To generate more referrals through word-of-mouth – If your customers are happy with your newsletters, they will definitely forward it to few of their friends and relatives. Also the ancient marketing tool “word-of-mouth” will definitely play its part in your success story.

8. Cut the sales process short – People who respond to the Newsletters are more informed and by far already convinced enough to buy your products/services in contrast to the people who contact you via advertising.

9. Using it as a Networking tool – Newsletter can be also utilized to conduct a survey, to request a review or permission to add them to your mailing list. Thus it can help nurture your leads.

Networking

10. Advertisements – Brands whose products are relevant to your content can be also showcased in your Newsletters. Thus creating another channel for revenue generation.

Ads

Being an avid reader and a loyal BabyCenter fan, I was in love with their newsletters.

Managing mass email campaigns with high converting rate is hard. Continue reading →