Totango Blog: Your Guide to Managing the Customer Journey

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Map Customer Success To Your Global Organization With SuccessTeams

Every company, especially a large enterprise, builds an organizational structure around their customer operations. Whether by region, product, vertical, or any other business parameter they define, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are broken into teams to give them focus, tailored processes,…

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The Vital Role of Customer Success Operations

Today’s customer success executives are being challenged to use unprecedented amounts of customer data to build more predictable revenue outcomes and run more efficient operations. That’s on top of their existing efforts to manage an entire customer base. If you …

How Zendesk Invested in Customer Success from a Product-First Perspective

Zendesk is a family of products that helps companies manage the entire customer lifecycle in different ways. They are on a scale that is uncommon for B2B companies, with a $350M run rate, 90K paying customers, and an additional 50-100K …

How to Nurture Customers During the Long Growth Stage

After new customers are fully onboarded, they move along the customer journey into the growth stage (nurture or adoption stage). For most recurring revenue companies, this stage is the longest. Looking at the representation below, customers typically spend 30 days …

Customer Success Summit ‘17: Marketing Leaders Edition

Calling all customer-centric marketers. We hope that #CSSummit17 is on your radar for must-attend events this year. More than ever there is a growing need for marketers and customer success teams to collaborate to retain and grow customers. Here are …

Who’s in customer success?

The focus in growth and attention of customer success within an organization is definitely a very positive trend. Many companies, including very large enterprises, are remodeling their businesses to support customer centric organizational structures. They actively fund, staff and resource …

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 …

3 Popular 80’s Songs Written About Customer Success

Industry experts agree that the practice of customer success has made it big time as companies continue the transition to the subscription business model. What they don’t know is that 30 years ago, many top music performers were already singing …

How to Segment Your Customers For Customer Success

Life is easy when you only have a few customers. You know every customer situation very well and can react quickly whenever any customer needs your attention. But what happens when you have hundreds? Or thousands? Or millions? Once you …

What Are The Customer Lifecycle Stages?

Customer success professionals can – and have – written thousands of articles about the customer lifecycle. From best practices to lessons learned, we are constantly challenging ourselves to deliver value throughout the customer lifecycle with more efficiently, scale, etc. But …

Don’t be the Next Leader in Customer Success to Get Fired

Professionals around the world are often told to “under promise and over deliver,” but it seems that so far in 2016 and in 2015 many customer success leaders chose to ignore that popular advice. Based on Totango’s industry insights from …

Enterprise Customer Success is Complex – And You Should Solve It Now

Totango recently hosted a webinar featuring Catherine Blackmore, GVP Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud and Guy Nirpaz, CEO and co-founder at Totango where they discussed the different complexities enterprise organizations face regarding customer success. Beyond identifying the specific complexities,…

3 Ways to Correct a Bad Customer Onboarding Experience

Few things are more troubling for a business than losing a new customer because of a bad onboarding experience. If you identify that a customer is unhappy with their onboarding process, it is important to move quickly to turn the …

How to Structure Your CSM Compensation

If your company is struggling with creating an effective customer success compensation strategy, you are not alone. Based on the results from Totango’s 2016 Customer Success Salary Survey, companies are continuing to shift more revenue responsibility to customer success. Individual …

Understanding Early Warning Systems for Customer Success

Early warning systems are at the heart of any modern Customer Success platform. An Early Warning System (EWS) is comprised of four different components: sensors, event detection, decision support, and customer engagement. With an EWS, customer success teams can use low-level …

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 …

2016 Customer Success Salary Survey & State of the Profession Report

Customer success is no longer a new revenue opportunity, it has become a requirement for any subscription business looking to remain competitive. As new teams are built and programs are scaled, we also see more established teams maturing their practices …

Growth Hacking with User Behavior

The subscription economy has exploded over the last decade. Top SaaS companies with flexible, innovative technologies are in high demand. The lower barrier to entry however, has created a myriad of competitive pressures on SaaS providers. To dominate their markets,…

Totango Wins SIIA CODiE Awards for Best CRM and CRM Mobile App

We’re excited to share that Totango was honored as a double winner for the 2016 CODiE Awards in the categories of Best Customer Relationship Management Solution and Best CRM Mobile Application. The awards are presented by Software & Information Industry …

How To Tell If Your Customer Success Manager Is The One

Hiring the right customer success manager can significantly impact your business. The right customer success managers gracefully balance their own goals and customer relationships. It’s in their nature to be proactive and sensitive, but also to develop deep understanding for …

Global Capacity – Breaking The SaaS Monopoly On Customer Success

Customer success is typically associated with SaaS businesses, helping companies grow and retain a customer base that can cancel and switch providers easily. But, SaaS companies are not the only ones using the subscription business model. Take Global Capacity, a …

How To Get Customers Up and Running In 9 Easy Steps

You’ve heard it over and over again: the first 90 days can make or break the relationship. If your onboarding program only includes product integration and training, you are missing out on a special opportunity. You need to take onboarding …

Customer Success – The Farming Paradigm (With Gifs!)

So we all know farmers. Source: thehappiestdonut.tumblr.com No, not that type of farmer…. the kind that grows trees. For thousands of years, they have been mastering a very simple, repetitive process – prep the soil, plant the seeds,…

Top Executives Weigh In On Lessons Learned In Customer Success

At Customer Success Summit 2016, executives from Oracle Marketing Cloud, Hubspot, and Eventbrite shared some of the most valuable lessons they learned through the evolution of customer success in their careers and at their companies. Watch the two recorded sessions …

3 Things Customer Success Management Is NOT

What is the best way to manage your customers? It’s the billion dollar question that subscription businesses want to know. As customer success continues to grow, it is important to take a critical look at common management frameworks and evaluate …

When Is The Right Time For a Customer Success Solution?

You know the fastest growing SaaS companies have the best record on churn and upsell. You’ve heard the success stories. You attended the Customer Success Summit. You’ve even heard how customer success solutions have evolved to manage complex hierarchies and …

Totango Named a Finalist in Three Categories for 2016 CODiE Awards

The SIIA recently announced that Totango has been named a finalist for the 2016 SIIA CODiE Award in the following categories: Best Customer Success Management Solution, Best Customer Relationship Management Solution, and Best CRM Mobile Application. Totango is incredibly honored …

Introducing “Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success”

I am very proud to share more on the publication of my new book, Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success. I’ve written this book as a very practical guide to business and team leaders who deal with …

Reimagining Customer Success and the New Totango Logo

Back in 2010, Totango was founded on a simple, yet powerful premise: companies today need a new paradigm to manage their customer relationships. CRM is critical, but no longer enough. The Fitbit Paradigm for B2B Relationships Our founders recognized that …

New Totango Enterprise Edition Transforms Business by Managing Customer Success at Every Level

Recently, we announced Totango Enterprise Edition, tailored for all companies, regardless of company size, selling into accounts with multiple teams, divisions, and subsidiaries; as well as large companies with multiple products and more complex channel sales organizations. If you are …

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 …

Explore the Customer Success Summit 2016 Agenda – Live Now!

Customer Success Summit is fast approaching. This year’s conference will be the biggest yet, featuring over 80 industry-leading speakers and more than 65 sessions in just two days. No matter where you are on your customer success journey, make sure …

Putting customer success in the hands of your customers with SuccessBeat reflection tool

Enterprise SaaS solutions have borrowed heavily from popular consumer apps and services. Old-school, stodgy account management practices are out. Personalized, interactive user engagement is in. Learning from the pioneers Ten years ago, Salesforce was probably the first enterprise software vendor …

Nominations for the 2016 Customer Success Hero Awards Are Now Open!

We are excited to announce that nominations for the 3rd Annual Customer Success Hero Awards are now open! The Customer Success Hero Awards recognize individuals and teams that are raising the bar for customer success. Awards are presented at the …

6 Things you should know about Customer Success

There has been a positive shift in the Customer Success market over the past few years which is exciting and encouraging for teams that have decided to support a “Customer First Approach.” Many companies are now realizing the importance of retaining customers and have publicly committed to invest in customer success.

The Business of Customer Success

Customer Success is a brand new profession. Its origin is based on the need for subscription and lifetime focused business to retain and grow their existing customers (customer base). I would like to offer a business perspective to organizations and …

Building a culture of customer success through process and alignment – talking shop in Boston

We had a great time getting to meet Customer Success teams in Boston last week. Lindsay White from Swipely, Mike Provenzano from InsightSquared, and Anaal Patel from Totango presented about creating a culture of customer success through process and alignment. Click through to see their presentations and learn more about the event.

Introducing the definitive guide to buying a Customer Success Platform

Thinking of buying a Customer Success Platform? If so, you’ll want to read this guide. The right platform will provide unprecedented visibility into your customers, opening up new opportunities – and smarter ways – to understand them.

However, not all customer success platforms are created equally. Use this buyer’s guide to fully equip yourself with the information you need to make the right decision.

Goals, Metrics, and How to Succeed in Customer Success

We had a great turn out at last night’s Customer Success Meetup. In addition to networking, we had sessions led by Kristen Hayer, CEO at The Success League and Guy Nirpaz, CEO at Totango. Each presentation was followed by great questions from the audience and a lively discussion.