At Totango, I have initiated a project to collect and share more best practices around low-touch selling, free-to-paid conversion, up-selling and customer retention. On this blog we will share what we learn from speaking to sales and customer success professionals in the field of open source and SaaS software.
Today, I had an opportunity to speak to Rudy Reyes, the newly appointed VP of Customer Success at Alcove9. Alcove9 is a young company with an open source search tool that looks into a company’s intranet and indexes all of its data and information for rapid retrieval. It is a subscription-based service, but not a cloud-based solution.
The basic indexing and search tool is a free, open source download called the a9 Hub. Then, Alcove9 offers support subscriptions and upgrades to premium features such as CAD visualization and markup (a9 CADViz) or application connectors (a9 AppConnect) to systems like PLM (Product Lifecycle Management), ECM (Enterprise Content Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Management), and more.
I asked Rudy about his priorities and customer success metrics for the company.
What are the priorities for the company today?
Alcove9 just went live on Monday, October 31; however, the foundation is based on a proven solution that has matured for over 7 years.
Our primary focus is on people who are looking for instant access to all of their corporate data that often resides in disparate systems. The core, open source download, a9 Hub, is the cornerstone of the entire suite of products and support services. Another important aspect of our sales and marketing activities is to work with partners such as AutoDesk and Aras to identify new product solutions in order to make organizations more efficient while eliminating the frustrations of trying to find vital, lost or legacy data.
What is the priority for the Customer Success team?
I work with the early adopters, translating customer requirements into product features. Then we help customers with successful on-boarding and implementation. It is really important to have someone who is focused on the total customer experience.
What are the key metrics you measure?
We are interested in adoption rates: who is downloading our application, who is installing it and then adoption metrics of different modules, such as which features they are using and finally retention rates (churn).
What are sales or up-selling signals?
Our sales are based on high-touch qualifying questions. For example, do they use CAD; do they have a PLM, ECM or ERP system. If they answer “yes,” then we will introduce them to the appropriate connector solutions. (AppConnect).
Thanks Rudy for the insights! I am keen to watch the progress of Alcove9 in the future!