The Startup’s Guide to Nailing Customer Success

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Blog Post Thought Leadership Growth Insights

The Startup’s Guide to Nailing Customer Success

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June 15, 2021

Table of contents

The Startup’s Guide to Nailing Customer Success

The global software as a service (SaaS) market reached $157 billion in 2020, more than doubling the market size in 2014. As the number of SaaS companies exploded, delivering exceptional customer experiences has become a top priority for these businesses.

The pandemic further heightened the need and urgency to understand and build strong relationships with customers. During times of uncertainty, new customers can be difficult to win and existing customers easier to lose, especially if there isn’t a strong focus on Customer Success (CS). It’s those companies that have nurtured customer relationships, validated business value and enabled strong product adoption that have been able to maintain and even grow customer accounts during one of the most unusual periods in recent history.

While the customer journey is enabled through collaboration with sales, support and product teams, CS has emerged as a critical function responsible for ensuring a smooth onboarding, continuous education, customer satisfaction and net dollar retention through understanding and effectively serving the customer, proactively reducing churn and identifying upsell opportunities. Furthermore, customer retention and expansion is one of the most efficient ways for SaaS businesses to grow. Acquiring a new customer can be up to 25x more expensive than selling to an existing one, which is why nailing CS is critical for every SaaS company.

With CS becoming an increasingly important function in every company, we are excited to share with the startup community the The Startup’s Guide to Nailing Customer Success on how to build, scale and succeed with a CS team.

We’ve gathered insights from over 20 executives from companies such as Box, Monday.com, Pendo, LinkedIn and Okta with the goal of helping startups think strategically and enabling them to execute tactically in building a world class CS organization.

Download the Playbook

Attend the Webinar

We’re also hosting a webinar on June 22nd at 10am PT on the topic: The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success. CS leaders from monday.com, Pendo and SmartRecuiters will discuss how they built their teams, what they wish they could do differently, and tips and tricks for success.

Legal disclaimer

Disclaimer: Nothing presented within this article is intended to constitute investment advice, and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures (“Sapphire”). Information provided reflects Sapphires’ views as of a time, whereby such views are subject to change at any point and Sapphire shall not be obligated to provide notice of any change. Companies mentioned in this article are a representative sample of portfolio companies in which Sapphire has invested in which the author believes such companies fit the objective criteria stated in commentary, which do not reflect all investments made by Sapphire. A complete alphabetical list of Sapphire’s investments made by its direct growth and sports investing strategies is available here. No assumptions should be made that investments listed above were or will be profitable. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events, results or the actual experience may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in these statements. Nothing contained in this article may be relied upon as a guarantee or assurance as to the future success of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

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