Anything you'd like to know from a VP of Customer Success?
Daniel Craig
5 replies
Hi PH'ers, I'm getting more active here a few months ahead of a launch I'm working on, so I thought I'd offer a little of my time up front to the community.
I've spent close to 20 years inside Seed > Late Series SaaS organisations, going through almost every post sale role and level you can imagine of in the process, so I'd be happy to lend some of that experience if you could use it.
Happy to cover questions about Services, CSMs, Support or Operations, how to partner with a CS org, the critical financial and operational metrics you should be thinking about, or just what goes on inside the world of Customer Success.
If there's something you'd like to know, ask away!
Replies
Tej Garikapati@tej_sai
Hey! Thanks for doing this.
Just really curious about customer success.
What's the first metric you ask a company to know where its standing in regards to customer success and why?
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@daniel_craig Awesome! Thanks for sharing this🙌
@tej_sai it depends a lot on the stage and type of company and I personally get really worried when somebody asks for / obsesses over one metric as it usually means they don't know what they're taking about.
That said, here's a bit of an expanded answer to get you started:
Early Stage - Gross Revenue Retention & Churn (#/$)
Mid - Net Revenue Retention
Late - Earned Growth
I then personally layer in NPS, eNPS and Gross Margin.
- GRR and Churn tell you whether a company has been able to keep it's customers.
- NRR tells you if they've been able to grow them.
- Earned Growth tells you if their customers have become a sales channel for them.
- NPS is the indicator for Earned Growth
- Gross Margin tells you whether they can do all of that in a way that isn't destroying revenue.
- eNPS is the canary in the coalmine. If the CS team have low eNPS scores it's worth looking at.
Those are all lagging metrics, but if they're good, it's worth continuing the conversation.
Investors will usually want to know additional things like Customer Lifetime Value and LTV:CAC ratios and then there are a whole suite of operational metrics to understand how different functions within CS are performing, and how your customers are performing with your products (both of which are the 'leading' success measures).
So yeah there isn't one magic number, but if you consider the age, business model, and type of business, you'll usually find a couple from the list above to hone in on.