The objective of customer success at a SaaS company is just that—to keep customers successful. It’s all about knowing the customer’s goals, objectives, and expectations clearly so you can ensure your product helps them get there. Of course, customer success is about keeping the customer happy, but when it’s done strategically, it can go far beyond that. 

Especially as many organizations work towards cutting costs, time, and resources during an economic downturn, customer success should be the driving force behind so much more than customer satisfaction. When customer expectations and acquisition costs are increasingly high, SaaS companies must also enable their customer success teams to drive revenue. So how can SaaS companies build a revenue-driven customer success team to strategically meet their own (and their customers’) goals, year after year?

Have a clear customer success strategy

As mentioned above, customer success is absolutely crucial to an organization, especially one that is focused on retention instead of acquisition as its main source of recurring revenue. In order to make sure your customer success team is revenue-focused, it’s important to strategize and build strong relationships throughout the customer journey, not just at renewal. Be sure to create a roadmap that guides your team through key points in the customer lifecycle, and deliver strategic insights and data points that strengthen customer health along the way.

Your customer success team should also be using data behind the scenes throughout the customer journey to gain a deeper understanding of how customers are doing across the board. By using multiple data points to develop a customer health score for each account, CS teams can gain a better understanding of which accounts are near upsell or near churn. From there, account owners can more easily strategize a path forward based on customer health, and implement a strategy based on that.

As you’re building the strategy, make sure you have an understanding of what types of content and insights resonate most with your customers. Consider doing some research to uncover which of these have (and have not) worked in the past, and lean on the ones that work most consistently. Are your customers more likely to stay on board when they see in-depth product usage insights? Do they expect thorough visualization of their progress toward goals during a quarterly business review meeting? Are there some customers that require more touchpoints than others? Know which content formats your customers prefer, ask them what you can do to help them be successful, then help your customer success team deliver on those promises. 

Ultimately, your customers need more than just a renewal conversation with obscure data to stick around. They need to not only hear about, but know the value of your product even before they start using it, and throughout their experience using it. When a SaaS company can consistently deliver a compelling, data-driven story throughout the customer lifecycle and respond proactively to customer needs, it’s much easier to keep those customers around—which in turn saves money for the entire company.

Emphasize the voice of the customer

When building a revenue-driven customer success team, feedback is essential—not only from customers, but also from cross-functional departments like sales, marketing, and product. Feedback gives a SaaS organization a clear understanding of customers and their pain points, and helps them understand how their product is uniquely positioned to achieve the customer’s goals. With this in mind, it’s important to establish a feedback loop within your organization to make sure the voice of the customer is heard and reacted upon.

Make sure your organization has a simple way for customers to share straightforward feedback, whether that be through periodic surveys, social media, reviews, phone conversations, or online chat. Once this data is collected, your customer success and operations teams can use it to draw conclusions around areas for improvement within the product, and enable the rest of the team to make those improvements.

By then sifting through and sharing customer feedback throughout the company, customer success teams can deliver crucial insights that indicate gaps in the product or customer experience. They can work cross-functionally to improve these issues, which can ultimately increase customer satisfaction and decrease the rate of churn. A revenue-driven customer success team is all about being proactive—and in order to do this, they must be able to fix their customers’ potential problems even before they happen. When feedback is used in conjunction with customer usage and health data, CS teams can gain a better understanding of their customers, which results in a higher likelihood of retention. 

Bring data to the forefront

To drive home the value of your product, it’s important for customer success teams to leverage data-driven content. Telling your customers why they need your product simply isn’t enough when it comes to retention. They need to see and clearly understand the concrete ways your product helps them achieve their goals. Data is the main element that will turn your customer success team into a revenue-driving operation—in fact, according to a Forrester report, customers who see ROI-quantifying data for a particular solution are more likely to upsell.

Consider using on-brand, well-designed data visualizations like bar graphs, charts, and eye-catching statistics to communicate key insights with your customers. By doing this, your customers can more easily understand the value of your product at-a-glance and can share these insights with other stakeholders.

Your team should also be using data internally to look for signs and trends—this enables your customer success professionals to be prepared for potential churn or upsell opportunities. Use data to gain insights on customer health, product usage, and opportunities for improvement, then share them cross-departmentally and work together toward solutions. 

Make sure CS has the resources they need

While data is the motor that drives customer success teams, it can get very complicated and time consuming. For this reason, it’s important to make sure your team has access to reliable sources of truth and can easily pare down numerous data points into digestible data stories without relying on other teams. Consider automating this process to make sure your customer success team can spend most of their time building relationships with customers rather than sifting through data. Create on-brand, templated resources that your team can easily edit and update, such as QBR presentation slides, so they don’t have to worry about reinventing the wheel. Also, make sure they have tools in their tech stack that make their lives easier. As mentioned above, streamlined feedback loops are crucial—your customer success team must have the tools necessary to collect and draw insights from feedback, whether that be a chat platform or a survey builder.

Beyond automation and tech, it’s important to make sure your customer success team can easily collaborate with other departments so that everyone is on the same page about goals and areas for improvement. Make sure customer success is well-integrated with your sales, marketing, IT, product, operations, and finance teams so they can deliver key insights, and consider hosting monthly cross-departmental check-ins. The more your team is equipped to share customer feedback and data with other departments, the more quickly your company will be able to thwart any potential issues.

Finally, it’s important to make sure your customer success team is diverse with a wide range of experience, and that they have access to training and educational opportunities. By hiring individuals with different backgrounds, your team can provide new perspectives and connect with customers in different ways. And by enabling your team to learn new things and think outside the box, your team will be more likely to develop new tactics that can give your company a competitive advantage. 

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