February 2022

Did you know there are now over 30 dedicated Customer Success platforms! This makes the challenge of evaluating your options quite daunting. If you don’t want to juggle a ton of discovery calls with vendors just to find out what you can or can't afford, this post is for you.

The following is a list of the Customer Success software platforms that publish their FULL pricing online, so you know what you’re getting into when you reach out to them (included is an overview of their pricing and links to their pricing pages).

We recently deployed some exciting improvements to Customer Success Playbooks and Tasks in Akita that will help your team create scalable, repeatable processes and provide better value to your customers.

[Update 7th February 2022 - If you are a quota carrying CSM, check out our FREE tool to help you figure out how to achieve your sales target].

CSMs from over 90 SaaS firms participated in our 2016 Customer Success Managers Survey. Over the next few weeks I will be reflecting on some of the results and asking how the Customer Success community might deal with some of the challenges and issues identified in the survey.

Let’s look at the results that deal with sales commissions and the Customer Success manager.

Here are some of the facts:

tl;dr - In this article we share a FREE tool to help you hit your expansion quota.

There are strongly held views about whether Customer Success Managers should be selling to their customers. Whatever side of the argument you stand on, the fact remains that a lot of companies set their CSMs a sales target. A survey we ran back in 2016 found that over 70% of CSMs have commission as part of their compensation package.

Standing at the start line with a sales quota can be daunting, even for sales veterans, never mind CSMs who may not have huge experience in selling.

tl;dr - You can put together an NPS survey tool with analytics using Google Forms and Google Workspace. Here's the form. Here's the results.

Many SaaS businesses measure their customers’ experiences by sending Net Promoter Score™ surveys. Even if you haven’t heard of an NPS™ survey before, you have likely seen one:

“How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague on a scale from 0 to 10?”

Answer 9 or 10 and you are a “Promoter”. Answer 6 or less and you are a “Detractor”. Subtract the % of responses that are Detractors from the % that are Promoters (that’s the ‘net’ part) and you have your NPS score:

NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors

Or:

NPS = (# Promoters - # Detractors) / # Responses

NPS has its own detractors but it can be a useful tool for quickly gauging customer sentiment. Easy to collect. Easy to interpret.

There are a bunch of great services that allow you to collect and analyze NPS surveys. Delighted, Survey Monkey and our newest integration Beamer are just some of the services that allow you to collect and analyze NPS surveys.

But what if you want to do it yourself?