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