Totango Blog: Your Guide to Managing the Customer Journey

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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 …

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Customer Success the Next Generation: What is the Final Frontier?

Part of the Customer Success Summit On-Demand Series Over the past 5 years, Customer Success has become a recognized philosophy in almost all SaaS and subscription businesses today. Now that we’ve moved from infancy towards maturity, how will the industry …

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 …

Top 3 lessons learned from building today’s best in class customer success

At Totango we’ve worked with over 200 customers of all sizes to help design, build and deploy best-in-class customer success management programs for their organization. Customer success management enables them to reduce churn, encourage upsells and promote evangelism. Through working …

It’s Time for the 4th Annual SaaS Metrics Survey

That’s right, as 2014 comes to a close it’s time to look back at the state of the SaaS market and see what metrics have become top of mind for the industry. We’ve just released our 4th Annual Saas Metrics …

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 …

Customer Success and the SaaS Time Warp

Last month, I presented in a webinar hosted by CMSWire titled “Making the Customer Journey Work.” You can view the replay here. During Q&A, one participant asked a simple, yet thought-provoking, question that I think everyone in the Customer Success profession …

Announcing New Integration Hub: Driving Customer Success with richer data

We live in the age where businesses are striving to be customer companies – organizations centered completely around success of their clients. Building new products, educating, implementing, selling and supporting – all these efforts come together around one single business …

Totango Wins a “Stevie” at the 2014 American Business Awards

Since their inception in 2002, the Stevie’s have become the world’s premier business awards and a coveted prize for companies around the globe. So we’re thrilled that Totango has won the silver “Stevie” at the 2014 American Business Awards for …

Customer Success: A broad-brushed approach with a stencil

Customer Success is not a one-size-fits-all discipline. Each customer is different – and so are their needs and expectations. In the world of land-and-expand where upsell and recurring revenue is the critical metric, a SaaS company can struggle dealing with …

Guest blog: A KPI Dashboard for early stage SaaS startups

Note from Guy Nirpaz, Totango CEO: Helping SaaS companies figure out the key metrics that matter is something we at Totango consider part of our mission. Over the last couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know …

Why I think the “Internet of Customers” resonates better than Benioff’s previous “Customer Company”

The holy grail of the “internet of customers” is knowing which customer needs your attention and why. Back in March during Salesforce’s Customer Company Tour, I had posted that Marc Benioff got it wrong, it’s not a customer company. This week,…

Top Tweets from #subscribed13 Day 1

Here are some of my favorite tweets from Day ONE of today’s events. “Lines between #B2C and #B2B are blurred. We live in a world of #B2Any” @tientzuo #subscribed13 — Nate Gemberling (@ngemberling) September 19, 2013 @tientzuo at #subscribed13: in …

Pro Customer Company is all about value

The SaaS industry is going through a revolution that has to do with placing the customer at the heart of the company. We call it the Pro-Customer revolution. Pro-Customer companies see their customers first and invest a lot of energy …

From CMO to Chief Customer Experience Officer – shifting gears to meet customer needs

HP recently announced that they were transitioning their latest CMO, Marty Homlish, and fitting him into a new role of “Chief Customer Experience Officer”. This role will focus on driving more consistent and high-value interactions with customers across all business …

5 things you need to know if you have a subscription based company

These days, where the customers have been crowned as kings and set the “rules of the game”, we see many companies that have adjusted towards reality and offer their services not only as a free trial (and sometimes for free,…

4 ways companies have implemented customer success into their business

Not all Customer Success teams start off fully organized before they are implemented. It would be nice to have a plan all laid out but sometimes it’s better to just get started. At the Customer Success Summit I interviewed customer success …

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 …

5 reasons to attend the Totango Pro Customer Playbook training course

What is the Pro Customer Playbook Course? It’s a 4-part training webinar series on how to become a Pro-Customer Company, a company that is customer centric and maximizes revenues from new and existing customers. The training course sessions include: April …

Top 10 Tweets From Marketo User Summit Day 2 #mus13

Caught between catching up on Sales 2.0 Conference tweets and Marketo User Summit tweets? Check out our recap from yesterday on the Sales 2.0 conference – loads of great insight! Today, we put a focus on the top tweets from …

Customer Retention Guest Blog: Three Loyalty Moments

I spent my formative years at Hewlett-Packard, an engineering-driven company that believed great products sell themselves. But after several years running operations in the hypercompetitive luxury travel industry I learned this isn’t entirely true; people buy from people they know,…

Customer Growth Lessons for SaaS Companies Visualized (infographic)

Customer analytics help software companies see better retention rates and easily identify at-risk accounts. Totango partnered with Aberdeen to give you 10 recommendations and some interesting stats that compare typical SaaS companies with their best-in-class counterparts. Get the full complimentary …

Value is the currency of customer retention

Are you “locking in” customer retention instead of fueling it with value? I found myself nodding to this article about why customer retention should be about value. You definitely don’t want your customers to “stay” only because they can’t leave …

EXCLUSIVE REPORT: Customer Intelligence for Software Companies

We wrote earlier about Aberdeen’s groundbreaking research into the value of customer intelligence: companies which use customer analytics in their customer facing business processes see 3x greater customer retention and 20x greater account value growth year over year. Read our …

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 …

Improving the Customer Experience: The Processes and Emotional Aspects

The answers lie in cold hard data, but the execution requires a more human touch. For businesses to improve the customer experience, two dimensions must be considered: the business processes and the emotional aspect. The data driven methodology This process …

How many customers can (should) a customer success manager be responsible for?

We’ve been asked a lot how many accounts a customer success manager (CSM) should handle and what is the right number of customer success managers to have? There have been discussions on LinkedIn trying to figure out the ratio between the …

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 …

Customer Health Score and Your Salesforce Dashboard (video)

Here’s a real-life example of how Clarizen combines Totango customer health insights and their Salesforce dashboard to create a 360-degree view of their customers. Yes you can pull data from Totango into Salesforce just as easily with your accounts too …

3 revenue resources to optimize for SaaS companies to maximize growth

During the early stages of SaaS companies, their primary focus is to grow the user base and start building revenue momentum from there. This is only sustainably profitable if those customers stay, renewal after renewal or upgrade. Obtaining new customers …

4 Tips For Better Engagement and Customer Growth

There were many takeaways from last week’s Aberdeen webinar with Omer Minkar, here’s what you missed. Today’s customers are very savvy, they want more customization and products that meet their exact needs, therefore it’s important to engage and understand them.…

3 tips to create an active and engaged user base (and why it matters)

It’s simple really, these companies have found customer success by including customer engagement as a part of their overall strategy to understand their users and how their products are (or aren’t) being used so they can improve and enhance based …

2nd Annual SaaS Metrics Survey Results

See the full infographic here. Get the 2012 SaaS Metrics report here. Today we are announcing the results of the second annual SaaS metrics survey results. Because it’s the second year that we are doing this survey, we were able to …

Dreamforce 2012 Exhibitor List (courtesy Totango)

I was frustrated that I couldn’t find a simple, alphabetical list of exhibitors to help me prepare for Dreamforce 2012. So I created one and thought others might benefit from it also. If you find it useful, please share with …

Retaining customers in baseball, higher education and secure networking

Across industries attention is shifting from customer acquisition to customer retention. In this blog three stories about how to retain and grow customers: one from baseball, a second from higher education and lastly a story about networking gear that can tell its vendor which customers may not be getting the most out of their purchase.

Amy’s Six Secrets For Customer Success Professionals

Over the past week we released a series of short clips from an interview with Amy Friedman, a four time customer success professional with over fifteen years of experience in the SaaS industry. She has worked in customer success for …

Amy’s Customer Success Manifesto – Part4:Lucidera Case Study

This is the last part of our interview with Amy Friedman a four time customer success pro. In this last version Amy speaks about Customer Success done right – of the four companies where she ran or was involved with …

Amy’s Customer Success Manifesto – Part3:Metrics

In the third part of our four part interview with Amy Friedman, a passionate customer success pro, she talks about metrics for customer success. Top metrics: – Number of logins (proxy for usage) – What features are getting used (to …

Amy’s Customer Success Management Manifesto – Part2:Challenges

Amy Friedman, an experienced customer success management professional on the front line speaks candidly about the challenges and solutions of a customer success manager as well as what it takes to be successful in this field.