Customer Success Is Key

Staring an Enterprise SaaS company? Don’t forget Success
Founding an enterprise-facing startup SaaS company? Hire an experienced or talented customer success person early on. You may ask, “But we don’t even have a product. Are you crazy?” Success is built-in to product design. It’s not an after thought.
Time to Market is Short
Let’s get specific. The time to market, even for an enterprise-facing startup, is months, not years. Most startups these days are leveraging SaaS solutions to develop and deliver their products. You can get an alpha product to your design partners or early customers in a matter of weeks. But what are you delivering?
Product = Code + Information + Service
The product should be one seamless environment where the user does work, learns or gets help when necessary, and provides feedback. Customer’s don’t want multiple accounts to use your product, learn about it, and file bugs. With solutions like Uservoice and Zendesk and a host of others, they don’t need to. A customer success owner will design success requirements so your engineers can easily integrate basic services like documentation, ticket management, and feedback, all within the product.

Dashboarding for and Growing Success
One of the greatest benefits of being a SaaS business is the insight you have to usage and adoption. While you may not need a CS professional to design your adoption dashboard,you absolutely want someone to own the action plan that results from the monitoring. If your customer isn’t logging in or meeting usage expectations, your CS person needs to get on the phone, send e-mail, or drive to the customer to find out why.
It’s Not Just the Renewal
While the seminal event in a CS pro’s life is the renewal of a customer, at the earliest stages, each customer shouldn’t just renew, they should be vocal advocates of you and your service. A customer is more likely to be referencable if they not only like your product, but also value and respect your team. Creating a deeper relationship with the customer is the foundation of customer success and you should expect your CS pro to be able to deliver this.
Customer Success is a Swiss Army Knife
Having CS in early means that product knowledge is deep on the front lines. A seasoned CS pro can be part of the product and QA teams early on so she is an expert when the beta launches. She can then train and support the first customers while you build out Support and Education. Of course, the risk here is that your CS person gets buried in the transnational activities of support and not the strategic aspect of success. With a good plan, metrics, and experienced leadership, you should be able to avoid this.
Seasoned Investors Like Success Baked In
Our CEO closed a big seed round on the strength of his record, the engineering talent he recruited, and the fact that he had a strong story for customer success as part of his pitch. He wasn’t just selling an idea, he presented a solution to a larger problem that includes a software and service delivery (customer success). Seasoned investors recognized this as experience and responded very favorably.
Bottom Line
Simply put, a seasoned customer success professional who is a strong generalist can save you money in the short-term and significantly increase your chances customers are successful in the long term.