Mastering the Art of Customer Success with Allison Pickens

Your existing customer base is a vital part of your future sales
pipeline. Today’s conversation with Allison Pickens explores how
to reduce churn and ensure that your retention revenue pipeline
stays full. Allison is an experienced investor, board director,
and customer success expert. She joins John Kaplan and John
McMahon today to discuss the importance of viewing customer
success not as a separate activity from sales, but as an integral
part of the sales process and, ultimately, the value of your
solution. Allison shares strategies for assessing customer health
during economic uncertainty, harnessing the power of AI for
customer success, and aligning customer success with your overall
sales objectives.



Here are some key sections to check out: 


00:56 Introducing Allison Pickens: Investor, board director, and
CS expert


01:48 Why has customer success become so important?


06:43 Why are companies slow to adopt customer success?


10:48 Importance of understanding the customer’s ROI


15:18 How do you monitor and manage customer health?


25:55 How do you measure customer success?


29:38 The importance of strong product documentation and user
support


35:33 Understanding the root cause of churn


42:25 How can CEOs and founders learn from churn?


48:53 Injecting CS into the business



Additional Resources:


Connect with Allison Pickens:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-pickens/

Get Allison’s book The Customer Success Economy:
https://www.amazon.com/Customer-Obsessed-Company-Competitive-Advantage/dp/1119572762

Make QBRs more valuable for your customers:
https://forc.mx/3Ukt7Pb

Taking care of customers in a down economy:
https://forc.mx/43esCuc



 


QUOTES


Allison - You need to invest in supporting your customers:
“The revenue model has shifted and because you can't just sell a
customer and ignore them after the fact, you actually need to pay
attention to them in order to generate revenue for them later.
You now need to invest in actually supporting them. So I think
that, you know, we go where the revenue goes.”


Allison - Not taking customer success seriously will cost you
getting left behind: “Nowadays, I would say that we're in the
late majority stage of the adoption curve of customer success
that, actually, if a company hasn't really started taking
customer success seriously, they will probably be left behind in
pretty short order.”


Allison - Documentation is a product itself: “I think the
best companies think of documentation as a type of product in
itself where they release updates to documentation in a
structured way. They think about the impact of a new release on
past documentation and past documentation that was written and
ensure that it's kept up to date.”


 


Check out John McMahon’s book here:
https://www.amazon.com/Qualified-Sales-Leader-Proven-Lessons/dp/0578895064