Thoughts from my journey

Today I’ve interviewed Zack Urlocker, Chief Operating Officer at Zendesk.
Zendesk, is the leading cloud based help desk customer service software which uses a low touch sales model.

Low touch sales model companies usually keep small and focus sales teams, which saves a lot of money for their organizations, but can naturally contact fewer customers. How would these sales teams know where to focus on?

Zendesk, for example, have 10,000 customers and many new prospects are signing up for their service every day and they still very successful SaaS company as it intelligently using tools to help them figure out which users are more likely to buy. Those users are being referred to their sales team and the rest are being pushed for their self-service model which doesn’t require human resources.

Watch the full interview with Zack below to also learn what Zendesk use to keep their subscription customers using their service (hint: customer engagement)

“For the first time, we have visibility into what our users are doing on our platform and can interact with them based on usage.”
Sacha Labourey, CEO, CloudBees Inc.

Those of you who’ve read my posts before probably know how I preach for customer success and customer value, especially in the zero-touch and low-touch sales models, where your success is actually your user’s success.

This week I’ve interviewed Sacha Labourey, the CEO of CloudBees Inc. Cloudbees is running a freemium business model with zero-low touch sales which is based on pure customer success and is using Totango for their performance measurement and level of engagement with their service.

Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Sacha Labourey and I am the founder and CEO of CloudBees. CloudBees provides a Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) for enterprises and software developers.

What is your business model?
Our business model is based on the usage of our platform for the building and running of Java applications. We also utilize a freemium business model to enable developers to try our platform for free while they become familiar with many of our core platform services and their value.

What is your sales model?
We strive for a zero touch or a very low touch selling model.

What problem or problems are you solving with Totango?
We are using Totango to gain visibility into user activities and to automate customer engagement, especially via e-mail for now. Instead of nurturing our user database based on a fixed timeline, we personalize content based on their actual usage of our product. Depending on how they are (or are not) using specific features we may be able to offer helpful tips via e-mail.

How did you do this?
We monitor how developers are using our platform. Based on their actual usage of the product, we send helpful e-mails. We have integrated Totango with Salesforce.com and our e-mail marketing system to automatically send the right e-mail to the right users at the right time. The goal is to make our users more successful with the CloudBees Platform. If our trial users are successful they will hit the paid tier of our service at some point. In this sense the interests of the customer and of CloudBees are completely aligned.

What results did you achieve so far?
We have been able to see how our users are using our platform and engage with our trial users providing them with information to ensure their success with CloudBees.

Who was responsible for the Totango implementation and how long did it take?
This integration was all very easy to perform. It took us a few days of work (over a few weeks time) to establish an initial monitoring of our platform and an integration with Salesforce.com. It took us a few more weeks of ramp-up to define how we wanted to best leverage the collected information to automate our interaction with our users and customers.”

Did you look at other, similar, services? If so, what did you like about Totango?
We considered building some of these capabilities into our platform, but decided against it. We know our requirements in this area will continuously grow and strategically prefer to rely on a partner like Totango for ongoing enhancements, as well as industry best practices.

Do you know how to measure your Customer Engagement?
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Today I talked to Dave Boyce, the CEO of Fundly to hear his angle about Customer Success.

Fundly is a social fund raising business which help people rase money for causes they care about. Fundly don’t charge anything to get started and rewarded only based on customer success, meaning it only get paid if the fund has been successfully raised and that makes customer success the main metric Fundly measures and analyses.

In order to push for customer success, Fundly set up the “Social Ninja” Program which is basically a collection of Social Media Marketing experts that their sole goal is to bring to their customers success and by that to increase company revenue.

In today SaaS and web application world, customer success become more and more popular as the customers are in the center and they decide which service give them value and help in “relieving their pains”. Of course customers will choose to only pay for what truly give them value and this is where customer success becomes the goal of any successful SaaS business.

What about you? do you know how to measure you Customer Success?

Do you know how to measure your Customer Engagement?
Our SaaS Dashboard can easily do that for you!
Try it now for FREE

Today I’m going to share another interview with Tracey Kaufman, VP of Customer Experience at cloud9.

Tracey was watching the Totango demo and then answered some questions about what she thinks of the application from a Customer Experience point of view.

Tracey believes that anyone who has trial period in the SaaS business or has the need, like herself, to understand users activities and prevent churn, would want to actively know what customers are doing in their application during that trial period.

It is very important to understand users behavior – especially at the trial period in order to proactively prioritize customers to refer to during that time. This way you could know who is potentially at risk because they’re not using the product or – the opposite – you can spot customers who are using the product well and you can use them as a reference or a case study.

Tracey especially likes the integration Totango has with salesforce and the fact that sales people are exposed to information that shows the level of customer engagement. This will allow them to determine the priority of their calls – for example they can first contact the users who are actually evaluating the service and try and move them up in the sales cycle.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

Video Transcription:

Q: Hello, who am i speaking with here today?

A: Hi, my name is Tracey Kaufman, I’m the a VP of customer experience for cloud 9.

Q: Since we just went through the demo of Totango, can you give me your first reaction and who do you think should look at the Totango product and what’s cool about it?

A: So i think, actually, you know, certainly any one in the SaaS business who has recurring revenue or has trials, whereas anything to do where they need to understand the activities of their users and really try to chart from the time that you say OK, we’re going and we’re deploying and I’ve launched you, then what happens?

If you have a trial it’s absolutely critical to understand what is your leave conversion? Right who using this trial. Because what are you going to do? You’re going to call. You’re going to say, here you go, have this 30-day trial. And then you sit and you call them 30 days later so if you are a sales VP or a marketing VP and you actually want to know what happens, and you want to get a proactive look at some key trick so that you know when to call them or when to send off an email.

You know, if you’re like me and your running customer experience and you want to understand churn, and you want to understand who is potentially at risk because they’re not using the product or on the other side, obviously, people who are really using the product and gang busters and you can use them as a reference or case study think, you know, marketing, sales, customer experience, i mean, product, what part of the product you’re using. So i think it’s widespread usage, actually.

Q: That’s great. What do you think is the most sticky feature of the product?

A: So, i really love the fact that, of course you’ve got these great analytics and you’ve got people who are individuals in executive positions who love numbers. But what I think is the best thing you talked to me about, was how you’re actually going to put the information back in sales force and that way your sales reps can go in and figure out “Oh wow, I have this trial customer and I don’t know whether they’re using it, but wow now I can find out who’s actually using the product. So now I know I’m going to call them, because they’re going to be hot. Because I’ve got these ten people who’ve started and tried using my product and I can call them and now maybe move them down the sales cycle. I just think that’s great.

In today video post, Tracey Kaufman, VP of Customer Experience for Cloud9, speaks about how a business should aspire to its customer’s success in order to become successful itself.

I agree with that saying. Furthermore, I think that if a business is constantly supplying an added value to its customers and focusing on the quality of its service rather than on sales (read: How NOT to Sell in SaaS and Increase Paid Conversions), that would lead to a win-win situation as both the users will get added value and the business will gain loyal customers.

Tracey is also talking about how to count active paying customers, referring to Jeanne Bliss book: “Chief Customer Officer“. How do you measure how many customers you have? Do you count your customer accounts? buy do you include cancelled account in this amount? and did you count how many of them have actually succeeded and how many are going to renew?

In this blog I mention the importance of the measurement of the key metrics that any successful SaaS business should have. There are measurements which sometimes look simple but takes several metrics to calculate. Also should also keep in mind, that measuring is just the first step – the second step, which is just as important, is to interpret these numbers into customer behavior and make the right decisions by them.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

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Video Transcription:
Hi, my name is Tracey Kaufman, I’m the a VP of Customer Experience for Cloud9. In a lot of times, I think people look at, when they look at their customers, they say, “OK, well how do we know we’re done and if you have a product you know are they using that product? Have you deployed that product? Have you gotten them implemented?” But really you have to ask yourself–the question is, “What is the greater vision for that product?” Are you telling this customer that they’re gonna grow their business or they’re gonna gain more revenues or they’re gonna gain more forecast accuracy like we talk about.

And so I really believe at the beginning of an engagement with a customer, you have to dream. You have to figure out, what is it that they really want so it isn’t just the tactical, and then gauge success and come up like with a little success curve so you have key metrics along the way and you can have, you know, individual wins along the way but at the end of the day you’re really reaching high up, and that’s when you’re successful, when they’re increasing revenues, when they’re growing their company because of using your application.

Jeanne Bliss wrote a book called, “Chief Customer Officer”. And it’s really the Bible that I use for if you’re trying to do a customer success. disorganization. You really should read that book. It’s asking yourself the very basic questions of, how do you count your customers.

So many companies You ask them how many customers they have. And they look at their active paying customers and that’s their customer account. But you also have to know other questions like how many customer did you have now many of them actually cancelled? And how many of them are successful? And how many of them are going to renew?

So you have to be a lot more granular and segment your customer base and understand what your patterns are. If you had a hundred customers and now you have fifty customers, well that’s a problem. Because now you have a fifty percent turn rate. So it’s really being much more honest with yourself.