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b2b sales, Best Practices, chief revenue officer, Customer Engagement, customer satisfaction, customer success, low touch sales model, vp customer success, zero touch sales model

Does your SaaS Business have a VP Customer Success?

By Guy Nirpaz October 20, 2011

Earlier this week, I spoke to Dave Rosenberg for his CNET Blog ‘Customer success’ VP role: To reduce SaaS churn.

At Totango, we care deeply about customer engagement and customer success. We agree with Dave that with SaaS “it might make just as much sense to focus on retaining (and garnering new revenue from) current customers as it would be to focus on gaining new customers”.

For companies with a zero-touch or low-touch sales model, customer engagement management is about much more than ensuring customer satisfaction. I wrote about that previously in my blog 4 Tips to Increase B2B Sales for example. It doesn’t matter who owns the customer engagement function and many modern sales leaders understand and implement customer success programs. Some B2B sales leaders have split their team into hunters and farmers, with the latter focused on customer success. Others now call themselves “Chief Revenue Officer” (as discussed in a recent blog by Phil Hernandez).

Still, the trend to assign a dedicated executive to manage customer engagement, is promising. Sometimes, you have to put your money (people) where your mouth is.

Some companies which already have a VP Customer Success include: ReputationDefender, Intacct (VP Sales and Customer Success), HubSpot, Salesforce.com, Sendori, Computer Associates, SAP, Marketo, InsideView, Zuberance, Success Factors, Zuora, JIVE Software, and Yammer (VP Customer Engagement).

On this blog, we plan to continue to monitor this trend.

For now, some appointments we have seen in recent months are below.

New VP Customer Success Appointments

Rudy Reyes, VP Customer Success at Alcove9

On October 17, 2011 Alcove9 appoints Rudy Reyes, Vice President of Customer Success.
On October 3, 2011 Xignite appoints Cameron Karr as VP Customer Success.
On September 14, 2011 Jump Technologies announced the appointment of Adam Jacobs as Vice President of Customer Success.
On August 23, 2011 AtHoc appointed Sanjay Saini as its vice president of global operations and customer success.
On August 2, 2011 Zenprise Inc. announced it has named Christopher Doell as vice president, customer success.

Congratulations to all!