Using Customer Success to Grow and Expand in 2024

The current sales landscape is complex, to say the least. Not only is there more competition in virtually every market today, but buyer behaviours and preferences are changing at an alarming rate. Companies and consumers that used to make purchasing decisions based on factors like features, functionality, and pricing are looking for more. 

They want guaranteed exceptional experiences and need your business to ensure they’re seeing a return on their investment, otherwise they’ll simply switch to another provider. In fact, according to G2, 47% of B2B now expect to see evidence of ROI within 6 months or less. 

For companies planning effective Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies in 2024, this means it’s time to upgrade your efforts with a focus on not just promising ROI with your marketing and sales strategies, but delivering it through your customer success team. 

Here’s what you need to know about using customer success to grow and expand in 2024. 

Why Customer Success is a GTM Priority in 2024

Let’s look at the facts. Earning consistent sales, converting prospects into loyal customers, and increasing customer lifetime value has never been simple. However, in recent years, the complex landscape, influenced by economic uncertainty, rising competition, and changing customer expectations has led to an increase in challenges for GTM teams. 

In 2023, less than 30% of all salespeople expected to actually hit their sales quotas by the end of the year. As of 2024, it’s not just initially converting a customer that’s an issue but getting the most value out of each conversion. Churn rates are increasing, as buyers look for ways to consolidate their solutions, reduce their spending, and increase their ROI. 

There’s only one way to sustainably address the problem: focusing on customer success. Studies show that companies focusing on customer success and powerful relationships earn three times the returns of their competitors. 

In 2024, rising customer acquisition costs and complexities will mean GTM teams will need to shift their focus towards nurturing smaller deals into more significant engagements, driving net revenue retention, and increasing customer loyalty. That’s where the customer success team steps in.

How to Expand and Thrive with Customer Success

We’ve always advocated for a “holistic” approach to the go-to-market team. GTM strategies shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of your marketing experts, or sales reps. The most effective strategies unify your entire company around a customer-focused approach to success. 

If you want to ensure you’re driving the best results by giving companies the ROI they crave in 2024, you need to ensure you’re integrating your customer success team into the full GTM strategy. Bridge the gaps between your employees, and ensure that service, onboarding, and support specialists can work closely with sales and marketing to provide a seamless end-to-end customer experience. 

Beyond simply ensuring strategic alignment between your teams, there are a few steps you can take to improve your chances of driving sustainable growth with customer success:

1. Empower and Support your Customer Success Teams

If you look at your customer success experts as a core part of your GTM strategy, you’ll see that optimising their performance starts with ensuring they can actually focus on the tasks that matter most. Today, customer success teams are often overwhelmed with tasks and processes that actually prevent them from nurturing relationships with customers. 

According to one report, 63% of experts say up to half of their Customer Success team’s time is spent on administrative tasks like data entry, or internal meetings. When your employees are focusing all of their attention on these tasks, they can’t concentrate on delivering excellent customer outcomes. 

Look for ways to reposition your customer success team’s focus on the relationship-building tasks that really matter, by cutting down unnecessary meetings, and automating repetitive tasks. There are plenty of tools that can help with things like system update management and meeting preparation, giving your CS experts more control over their day.

2. Hyper Focus on Customer Retention and Satisfaction

Sometimes, companies make the mistake of using their customer success team as a “firefighting group” responsible for simply “reacting” to issues that customers have, and addressing technical problems. While offering support and troubleshooting guidance is important, it takes more effort to ensure you can retain your customers and earn their loyalty. 

Your customer success team should be looking for ways to strengthen the relationships between your customers and your company, by finding ways to improve their experiences. This could mean:

• Creating content that helps customers accelerate their time to value, with step-by-step how-to guides, instruction manuals, and tips for how to use new products or services. 
• Addressing common user pain points, such as complex interfaces or difficult features that require extensive training by working with the product development team. 
• Investing in discovery conversations with customers to learn more about the goals they want to achieve, and the hurdles they need to overcome to reach them. 

3. Find Ways to Build Customer Lifetime Value

Your customer success team isn’t just there to ensure your customers are “happy” with their service or solution (although this is important). They also need to be constantly searching for ways to increase the value of your target accounts and lengthen the relationships they have with your business. 

Giving your customer success team similar training to your sales team can help them discover new ways of increasing customer lifetime value. For instance, you could provide CS experts with analytical tools that help them identify the most valuable accounts in your contact list, so they can reach out to them with exclusive offers, discounts, or loyalty program options. 

You might train your customer success team on how to identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities, working in conjunction with a sales or account management team, or even independently. 

4. Upgrade Your Onboarding and Training Strategy

In an environment where today’s companies want to see evidence of a return on investment faster than ever, effective onboarding is crucial. Over 90% of customers say they believe companies could deliver a better onboarding experience. This means if you implement a strategy that allows your customer success team to effectively train new customers, and help them adopt innovative tools, you can differentiate yourself from the competition. 

What’s more, an effective onboarding and training strategy can improve product adoption and usage. The more people adopt and leverage your solutions, the less likely they are to want to give up your tools, and the faster they’ll see results. 

Encourage customer success teams to talk to consumers about their goals, and leverage discoveries from your sales team to build tailor-made onboarding strategies that accelerate the path to success. Go beyond initial “onboarding courses”, to offer new forms of education, from webinars, to online courses, community training experiences, and more.

5. Become More Data Driven 

Finally, if you want to expand and grow with the help of your customer success team, you need to be able to effectively monitor which strategies are leading to customer satisfaction, and driving real ROI for your customers. This means rethinking your approach to data monitoring, with a focus on finding insights that help you to increase customer lifetime value and retention. 

Dive into your Customer Success analytics to find the root causes behind customer churn and retention. Leverage direct feedback from customers for insights into how you can improve the overall user experience of your product or service, or help them minimise pain points. 

Ensure your entire GTM team works cohesively to understand customer behaviour, identify trends, and use data to make decisions that lead to consistent growth. 

Prioritise Customer Success in your GTM Strategy

As churn rates continue to increase, marketplaces become more competitive, and customer acquisition costs skyrocket, companies need to take a new approach to GTM success. It’s not enough to simply focus exclusively on “converting” customers anymore. Organisations need to find ways of strengthening their relationships with critical accounts and growing their lifetime value. 

By using the strategies above to empower and enhance your customer success team, you can boost your chances of greater brand loyalty, and revenue in a complex sales landscape.