Totango Blog: Your Guide to Managing the Customer Journey

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Build a Flexible Customer Success Process with Totango SuccessFlows

Customers have countless interactions with your team. From onboarding to executive check-ins, each interaction guides a customer through a lifecycle stage or key event, and that can make all the difference between success or failure with your product. But many …

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How to Boost Slow Product Adoption After Onboarding

Onboarding is a crucial time to provide the training and resources that customers need to make the most out of your product. While many customers might be able to quickly ramp up after onboarding, there are some customers that are …

What’s Happening Behind Your Customer’s Walls?

Consider the traditional account management relationship. You call the key stakeholder at each of your accounts, you make sure things are going well, and you fix things if they’re not. Pretty simple, right? The problem with this approach is that …

Easy-to-miss customer success blunders that can cost you customers

In this guest blog, Niraj Rout, Founder at Hiver, shares some small, but costly blunders that companies make in managing customer success. If you have ever dealt with customers before, you have inevitably faced a situation which made you …

New Release: Automate customer communications with Customer Success Campaigns

Customer Success Campaigns is a simple, intuitive, and scalable way to automatically engage with every single user in your customer base with the right message at the right time based on their behavior and actions. This is something that traditional marketing systems are unable to do. Campaigns takes Totango’s powerful analytics capabilities and enables you to create precise user and account segments to target with messages and content that will drive desired business outcomes.

Customer Success: Play to Win

Part of the Customer Success Summit On-Demand Series Customer Success is taking off and has grown beyond being just a function within many organizations. For the last couple of years the industry has gone through several phases of understanding. First looking at why …

Inspiration for a Customer Centric Org

It is becoming more and more accepted that customer success has to be more than just a function, it needs to be a company wide mantra. Putting customers first is now a core tenant of almost any SaaS or subscription business today.…

The Loyalty Link: Marketing to Engage and Retain

Written by Lori Carr from Lori Carr & Associates. Customer engagement and retention marketing is an uncommon but very promising approach for creating customer value and enhanced profits while preserving existing revenues. Connecting with current customers using customer-centric, data-driven approaches …

Customer Success Predictions for 2015

2014 has come to an end and it’s amazing to look back and see the phenomenal growth we experienced in the customer success industry last year. Working with hundreds of SaaS companies, I personally saw customer success elevated as a …

4th Annual SaaS Metrics Report: Disconnect between intentions and reality?

We’re happy to release the results of our annual SaaS Metrics Survey. This year we received over 500 responses, a 100% increase from last year – in itself a sign that the topic of metrics and key performance indicators is …

Totango emerges as a veteran in new Forrester Report on Customer Success

With the growth of subscription revenue models in many industries, especially in the SaaS space, customer success is coming to the forefront of business conversations. Organizations realize that they must actively drive the success of their customers in order to …

Mend the Holes in Your Leaky Bucket: 10 Best Practices for Customer Retention

Written by Lori Carr from Lori Carr & Associates. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole. I remember singing that old German song as a child. Well, I’m …

The Customer Economy: How Customer Health Drives Success for Modern SaaS Businesses

If I start this blog by telling you that the world has changed, you are probably going to stop reading – in large part because it’s a well-known fact and hundreds, if not thousands, before me began their thoughts with …

Customer Success Orienteering 101: Map Your Customer Journey

As Customer Success Management emerges as it’s own field, the leaders and members of those organizations are charting new paths to success in their organization. According to the consensus definition from Wikipedia, they are orienteers – “navigating from point to …

5 Simple Steps to Boost Retention

As more and more businesses turn toward a subscription model the emphasis on customer retention has ballooned. The need to acquire customers still exists, but the stability of a business is increasingly reliant upon building a steady stream of revenue …

5 takeaways on how to run a smart SaaS company (webinar)

Today we held our “Run a smart SaaS company” webinar with thismoment hosted by SIIA. Our guest speaker, GM of thismoment, John Broady, shared his experience in understanding what the critical phases to a customer’s experience are, and what his customer …

5 Questions every Customer Success team should ask themselves

The Customer Success function has made its way into almost every other SaaS company, working its way up and carving its foothold on revenue. The new business model shows the growing importance of the Customer Success function and its ability …

Should there be a divide between proactive and reactive approaches with your customers?

In this recent article by Jason Lemkin he discusses that scaling your customer success team in $2 million ARR batches is the way to go. He illustrates how you can switchover from a reactive to proactive approach based on the …

Three Keys to Increasing Renewals

This happens to you more often than you’d like to admit. Your sales team lands a new customer with great potential. You work hard at the on-boarding process and hit all of the milestones. Roll-out is on schedule. Over the …

Could your CRM be sabotaging your sales team?

Many CRM systems out there are revenue and pipeline oriented. As a result, many sales reps are focused on meeting their projected close date for their boss (aka a quota reminder) and the projected revenue of the customer they’re trying …

Nobody owns the customer, but someone can always own the moment.

This awesome quote comes from Scott Hudgins, VP of Global Customer Managed Relationships at the Walt Disney Company. They recently announced their “MagicBand” wristband to understand/track visitors’ behaviors at the park. I think this is a great example of how …

5 key building blocks of a successful RUCE strategy (Aberdeen)

Aberdeen’s latest research “Real-time Unified Customer Engagement: how to delight empowered users” confirms what is core to our beliefs: the importance of reaching the right customer at the right time with the right message. Customers today are more empowered than …

3 Tips to Make Your Leads More Engaged Using Lifecycle Marketing

So you have a database full of leads that might potentially buy your product – now what? You COULD nurture them to death (or in email terms “unsubscribe”), telling them all about your product, convincing them to buy, OR you …

Keys to the Customer Kingdom (a joint webinar with Marketo)

The explosion of cloud, social, and mobile has given the buyer an abundance of information, shifting the balance of power. Customers today learn about a product long before opening their wallet to buy. This paradigm shift requires a change in how …

The big sales and marketing divide, tools to bridge the gap

I wanted to share this great infographic that just came out this morning from our friends at KnowledgeTree on sales and marketing friction points. It all started when their CEO Daniel Chalef wrote about why sales and marketing are more divided …

Jeff Bezos is the new and improved Steve Jobs

Where Steve Jobs was fanatical about product design, Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon, is fanatical about customer experience. I was really inspired by Jeff’s recent letter to his shareholders. He stresses more than ever before that business should …

Nurturing the customers through their lifecycle

Just because we don’t have the reporting over time, this does not prevent us from making efforts to move customers from a “poor” health category to a better one, irrespective of the age of the account. We measure the percentage …

5 questions to consider: The Power of Customer Retention (infographic)

Really cool infographic from Kapow though I think it shouldn’t be a debate of which is better: retaining current customers or acquiring new ones. It should be more like realizing the value of existing customers and how much revenue they …

Guest Blog: The Transition from Account Management to Customer Success Management

Since its founding in 2007, Ooyala has been focused on pursuing products and strategies that deliver enhanced customer and market value. We have always been passionate about serving our customers. Customer Service is not just a department but an attitude …

What are your customer engagement efforts supposed to accomplish?

KarmaCRM says proactive listening has several goals throughout the customer engagement cycle: To remain in contact with customers–following through on issues is part of the customer service process, even outside of any concrete gains to the system To improve the …

New with the Totango platform: contract info, attributes, and redesigned knowledgebase

Here’s a quick announcement on what’s new with Totango on both the platform and our website: Contract information: At a glance you can see how much money is at risk (aka the account value), when contract renewal dates are, How does …

Infusing Customer Success into your executives’ DNA

I came across this video about Adobe’s Customer Immersion Program that made me wonder what other approaches companies with customer success executives at the C-level are taking to really “bring the customer voice to the board”. It’s not enough to …

2013 Predictions: from SaaS evolution to NBA Champs to the big metric of 2013

Companies on the race to be more customer centric, fast The Customer Era is really here. Salesforce calls it the Customer Revolution. If even the original SaaS juggernaut is realizing something big is happening, you know it’s true and imminent.…

3 Tips for Creating Your Lean Mean Marketing Automation & Sales Machine

Marketing automation, or revenue performance optimization as some call it, is used by an increasing number of SaaS companies in different stages of the marketing and sales funnel. Its goal is to move leads from the top of the funnel,…

Managing and prioritizing your at-risk accounts and growth opportunities

As a customer success manager, you always have to consider an account’s contractual state in conjunction to their level of engagement with the product. High paying accounts that aren’t engaged with the product they’re paying for is bad news. An …

Engaged Employees Do The Right Thing Because It’s The Right Thing To Do

I love the title and content of this great blog post. “Europcar focused on creating a customer-centric culture because the company can’t script every interaction. Therefore employees need to be able to make the right judgment calls on their own …

3 steps to push your customers to engage with new product features: segment, communicate, analyze

Releasing a new feature is always a challenge, much of the feature success is dependent on its release process. When will it be released? To which users? How should we communicate the release? How can we measure success? We all …

Customer Success Chronicles: Enterasys empowers every touchpoint with the opportunity to delight and deliver value

We spoke to Vala Afshar, CMO and Chief Customer Officer of Enterasys, before – but briefly – at a conference. We are excited to catch some more of his time to discuss his view on customer success best practices. Like …

Customer Journey Mapping For SaaS Companies: New Strategy To Drive Growth

Totango announces research into customer marketing practices, a new version of its customer engagement platform and Customer Journey Mapping for SaaS workshops Dec 06, 2012 – Palo Alto, CA — Totango surveyed 75 marketing executives during Marketo’s Marketing Nation Virtual …

5 statistics on customer marketing that may surprise you (and infographic)

At the Good to Great Marketing Nation event last week with Marketo, we conducted a survey with 75 marketers regarding their customer marketing initiatives. It was a pretty successful event and marketers were drawn in by our messaging on listening-understanding-engaging.…