A company-wide commitment to customer success is essential for your business. But remember: it starts with you. 

In this solocast, Jim Barnish gets into actionable strategies for growth-stage companies building their first customer success team. 

Some of what Jim gets into: 

• When A Company Scales, Sometimes Customers Get Left Behind: Problematically, many growth-stage companies prioritize acquiring new customers over customer success. They invest heavily in marketing and sales, yet overlook their legacy customers. While initially fruitful, this approach often overlooks the long term value of nurturing and retaining your customers. 
• Hire Someone Who Knows Their Sh!t: To start building your customer success team right, be sure to hire a leader who knows the distinctions between the following: customer success, customer support, and sales. These functions seem similar, yet they have vastly different goals. 
• Customer Metrics Are Your Roadmap to Success: It’s crucial that you track metrics such as Net Revenue Retention (NRR), Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). These metrics are vital in understanding if your product/service is resonating with customers, and if your customers are satisfied. 

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The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

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Website: https://www.orchid.black 

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Hey everyone, Jim Barnes here. Welcome back to the dirt we discuss actionable strategies to grow and maximize the value of your business. All right, so today we're taking a deep dive into a topic that growth stage companies often overlook when initially scaling and that topic is building your first customer success team. So consider this reminder to get your good deed of the week in if you know a fellow founder, CEO, or really any other business professional who would benefit from a better understanding of customer success. Hit the pause button, take 10 seconds to copy the episode link and send it their way. Alright, so why do so many growth stage companies get customer success wrong? Companies often overlook customer success when initially scaling due to a hyper focus on acquiring new customers and expanding market share. In this rush to innovate and capture new territories, and resources, this attention that we put on our company just gets disproportionately allocated towards marketing and sales, which leaves customer success and taking care of your customers on the back burner. This approach, though initially fruitful may overlook the long term value of nurturing existing customers. Customer Success isn't merely about retaining clients, but also about turning them into advocates and expanding within accounts, which can lead to more sustainable and cost effective growth. Understanding the subtle yet vital distinction is a maturation point many growing tech companies only recognize after the initial scaling phase. That's not great. So with that background in mind, here are three key tips when it comes to hiring your first customer success team. Number one hire a leader who distinguishes between customer success, customer support, and sales and all the distinct goals of all three functions within let's look at Slack as an example slacks customer success team focused on helping customers achieve their desired outcomes using the product. This included onboarding assistance, educational content, and guidance on best practices. The goal here was to ensure that customers were not only using slack, but thriving with it, making it a absolute need not just a vitamin, but a absolute need a pain pill, a painkiller, whatever you want to call it, fully integrating it into their workflows and deriving real value. The customer support team at Slack handled technical issues, bug reports and immediate problem solving. Unlike the customer success, team support was much more reactive stepping in when something went wrong. To quickly restore normal service. This was critical for maintaining trust and satisfaction, especially given the real time nature of the platform. Sales of slack were about attracting new customers and expanding relationships with existing ones. The sales team had the responsibility of conveying the value proposition of slack to potential clients and identifying upsell opportunities within the current customer base. They worked closely with both Customer Success and support to ensure a seamless transition and continuous alignment with customer needs and expectations. So slacks distinction between these three functions allowed them to create a comprehensive customer lifecycle where each team had a specialized focus. Alright, so key number two metrics are your roadmap to success. You'll hear me drill into this all of the time, but it is so important on customer success. So for your first customer success team, they need to know what they're measuring and why behind it, like what they're doing and how that connects to the broader view of driving the company forward from a metrics perspective. So we're going to look at three key parts of metrics as it relates to customer success. Number one, expansion and upsell revenue. Think of this as unlocking the hidden treasures within your existing customer base. By focusing on how much current customers are willing to spend more with your customers you are or more with your company. Rather, you're tapping into a goldmine, that's often more rewarding than prospecting new clients. It's about maximizing the value of each relationship and in turn, boosting your bottom line. Now that's smart growth. Number two, net revenue retention and gross revenue retention or nr and gr for short. So these are two metrics that are basically the compass of your business or your compass of your customer success team at the very least, and R gives you a full picture of your revenue landscape, including growth within existing accounts, while GRR Z arrows in on holding on to what you've already got. Both are vital because they tell you how well your product is resonating with customers, depending on the goals and go to market strategy if your business, one of them often matters more than the other, but both are important critical actually, to understand. If these numbers are high, you're not just keeping customers, you're captivating customers setting the stage for long term success. So what is high, you may ask? Well, you're cooking with best in class gas, if your gr is at least 95%. And your NRR is at least 110%. Some companies have a GRR upwards of 99%, it's impossible to go over 100 and NRS upwards of 125% plus, but best in class at least 95 and 110. Alright, so next one Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction score. These are more commonly called either and PS or CSAT met. But imagine basically having a direct phone number that tells you how your customers are overall and how they feel about your service at a specific instance or point in time. That'd be a pretty valuable number, right? Well, that's really what NPS and CSAT offer NPS is about the big picture revealing who's going to shout your praises from the rooftops over time, while CSAT really zooms in offering a snapshot of how satisfied customers are at specific moments after an interaction. Together, these scores act as the pulse of your customer relationships pointing the way up to higher retention and influential referrals. All right, last one. Number three, our last key cultivate a team that will make customer success not just a function in the business, but a mindset across the organization. Fire them quickly also, if they do not embody this mindset, which is part of the cultivation. So that means that your customer success team should be giving feedback to the product team on common issues that customers are having. They should be providing sales with pain points that they're seeing once the product has been implemented there QBR, or quarterly business reviews with customers, those findings from them should be shared with leadership to help guide strategic decision making. For example, one of orky blacks clients, our sponsor of this podcast that helps tech companies grow and become the most valuable versions of themselves built an entirely new company out of feedback from their customers on what they wanted, as it was completely missing from the market. They were initially selling into large brands for a product that helped them sell their inventory across different channels. But after talking with customers, they saw this giant gap in the market for a social media offering that would allow the same brands to post their content across different channels through their retailer network on their local retail pages. Okay, so what started as an ancillary add on product has since transformed into a business worth more than $50 million a few years later. So that's incredible, right? Like, not just building and retaining and growing, but also new products, new opportunities that can come out of it. So that's what I've got for you today. And just to reiterate one more time, the three keys to building your first best customer success team are number one hire a leader who distinguishes between customer success, customer support and sales and the distinct goals that the three functions have. Number two, embrace the metrics that matter like expansion or upsell revenue, and our GRR ends, and NPS and CSAT using them as tools for growth. And thirdly, cultivate a company wide commitment to customer success, turning feedback into what I would consider strategic gold. So these are more than just strategies. They are the building blocks for Sustainable Smart Growth. Thanks for joining me on this journey and your customers will thank you ahead of time for getting this area of your business right. If these insights have inspired you please share the episode with a friend or whoever that you that you see that might need this. This This is meant for you guys. This is meant to build growth and drive sustainable business value. So let us know how we're doing and until next time JV out. I hope you all enjoyed this episode of the dirt. I want to invite you to listen to our other episodes where every week I am interviewing business leaders who are crushing it in their field and finding out exactly what makes them successful. We will see you next time on the dirt