Last week I kicked off a new series of blog posts about customer success for SaaS companies by answering the question ‘what is customer success?‘. This week, we’re going deeper and examining why it’s important for SaaS companies.

Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, says customer success is ‘equal in importance to sales and marketing and engineering and product within SaaS companies‘. But why? Technically, it didn’t exist 10 years ago, so why do we need it?

We need it because products are developing faster than our capacity to understand them, we need it because competition in the SaaS world is harsh and we need it in place to reduce churn and keep users sticking around for the long haul.

Let’s take a closer look at these points.

– As a free bonus, check out our podcast episode talking about customer success.

Customer Success connects promise to reality

Here’s a theoretical situation to explain.

Pretend I just signed up for an analytics product because I know I need to start tracking user activity in my mobile app. The landing page copy told me that’s what I can do with the app, so I bought it. I go in, and within 2 minutes I’m confused and wondering exactly how I can load it up with my app’s data or set conversion goals.

In an ideal world, the platform’s customer success manager should have been on the phone to me the same day of purchase, guiding me through the steps to get it set up and teaching me everything I need to know.

Analytics platforms and CRMs are just two examples of complex products that can be configured in numerous different ways — for these products, a user guide or support ticket system isn’t always the best thing to offer.

You don’t want your customer having to work harder to get what was promised by the sales team because your product should be easy to implement for all customers and deliver value from day one.

Your product’s initial setup, or even basic use, won’t be obvious to everyone. Not to mention how businesses grow and their needs change over time — every time the monthly bill for your product comes through, the customer is questioning whether they really need it.
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When you sell a coat or a bar of chocolate, customer success isn’t necessary.

Those are simple, self-explanatory products that everyone knows how to use.

Even with things like a new vacuum cleaner, customer success isn’t required. A user manual and a hotline is as far as most things go.

With your SaaS product, however, it’s not going to be so easy. Complex analytics platforms, SEO tools, and landing page creators can be set up and used in a variety of ways, solving different problems for customers from marketing agencies, e-commerce stores, factories, and farms.

For software companies, the golden days of unbreakable contracts and technical lock-ins are gone. The industry has diversified, and there are a lot of companies your customers could be choosing over yours, with more attractive branding, master salespeople or better customer success.

When your product needs follow-up and guidance to ensure the customer gets full value, that’s when customer success becomes a must-have.

This is because a customer who speaks to your sales team or reads your landing page is sold on the benefits, not the features.

The customer knows your product can solve their problem, but not exactly how to get that value.

(Click here to skip ahead and get a full high-touch customer onboarding process for SaaS companies)
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A content marketing process turns research, creation, review, publishing, and promotion into repeatable work with clear owners and approvals. A look inside Bolton Remote’s experience shows why that matters: the remote staffing company replaced Word documents that people read once and then executed from memory with a visible, trackable content workflow.

Process Street spoke with Edsel Mendoza about the marketing team’s approach in 2015. The story captures Bolton Remote at that point in its history; SupportNinja acquired Bolton Remote in 2022. The lesson still holds: a documented process helps a distributed team complete every step without a manager checking each action.

In light of a recent study from IZEA commissioned by Halverson Group which revealed that the lifespan of a blog post is 24 times longer than first thought, it’s time to re-evaluate the other reasons why not blogging is a mistake in the current marketing climate.

Contradictory data floods businesses daily. It’s understandable some need hard facts to justify the investment in a blog. That’s just good business sense. Yet, researchers bury vital statistics in 60-page white papers which don’t always reach the audiences that need them.

Thanks to several new studies, the benefits of blogging are out in the open.

Here’s a compilation of recent findings showing the contrasting success of companies that blog versus those that don’t.

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How often do you manage to read everything you save for later? I mean email, bookmarks, PDFs… everything.

When I first started working as a Process Street content writer, I had to improve my content creation process instantly or start falling behind deadlines.

I don’t want to remember how slow and disorganized I used to be before Pocket. It’s only been a few months, but I’ve already repressed memories of my sluggish content creation process. For the purposes of this post, I racked my brain and dredged up the process for you all to laugh at. Here’s what it looked like:

My day-to-day tasks include research, reading, writing, and keeping our social platforms updated with fresh, relevant content. As far as research goes, I lost most of it or had no way of organizing it properly. PDFs got lost in my overflowing and overlooked Downloads folder, and anything pasted from Gmail to Notepad wasn’t worth looking at because of the formatting issues.

If I wasn’t using a combination of Twitter, Pocket, Evernote and Trello for content creation, I might as well be shoving a load of links into Untitled.txt and forgetting about them forever.

Here’s how I make sense of the research process I go through when creating new content for the Process Street blog.

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Life before Evernote

When my husband told me I should use Evernote (for the millionth time), I stubbornly refused and argued that it’s confusing and wouldn’t help one bit.

Why would it? How can doing extra tasks improve my writing workflow?

And, to be fair – English isn’t my first language, nor is tech talk. I was scared I wouldn’t understand what it tells me to do, I would probably end up breaking the internet and using Word again.

The last push was joining Process Street. Compared to my fast, techy co-workers I was the slowest. So, once again, I was advised to give Evernote a try. Who am I to argue? … Right?

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The Problem Small Businesses Don’t Want to Admit

Every small business owner is an entrepreneur and a technician, but not everyone’s a manager.

Most people start a small business after working a job that involves ‘making’. Programming, graphic design, SEO, you name it – small business owners usually get their idea when they realize that they could be doing the same thing as they’re doing now and getting rid of their boss.

Motivated by the mythical entrepreneurial drive and true technical experts in their field, founders don’t realize that they can’t just get rid of the boss — they have to be the boss.

Being the boss involves management of time, people and money. While this can be possible if it’s your only responsibility, on top of everything else it will be overwhelming.

Unfortunately, in starting a small business, suddenly you have a boss again – your customers, the amount of hours in the day and your revenue.

This idea, from Michael E. Gerber‘s The E-Myth is key to understanding why small businesses face the problems they do, especially when growing fast.

Don’t worry: that’s where productivity tools come in.

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Have you ever been asked for your email address to see extra blog content? It looks something like this:

That’s a content upgrade. I’ve written pretty extensively about them in this blog post on lead generation, so if you need an in-depth look at the topic (plus the psychology of why it works), that’s the place to start.

They’re great tools for blogs connected to businesses because they capture the contact info of people who are likely to want your product or service. They get the valuable content, you get another email on your list of subscribers plus a free pass to market to them. The best part is that it’s not just any old email address, owned by someone who doesn’t care what you’re saying. It’s the email address of someone who is:

1. Interested enough in what you’ve got to say to give away their email address

2. The perfect fit for your product

It’s doubtful you’re the sort of person who turns down leads, so if you aren’t already using a way to capture emails with content upgrades (or you’re doing it in an awkward way), you’ll want to check out these four tools.

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Hooray! We’re pleased to announce a major integration for Process Street. This time, it’s Zapier. At launch, it connected Process Street with more than 400 services, including Salesforce, Mailchimp, Wufoo, and the Google Apps suite. With over 1,000 apps, announcing our Zapier integration opened far more ways to connect recurring work.

If Zapier were a physical object, it would look a bit like a universal remote connected to an unmanageable tangle of wires, with ends that slot into every kind of machine. Thankfully, it’s a clean-cut, user-friendly SaaS app with huge potential for creativity and workflow streamlining. It makes it easy for non-developers to connect web services together, saving time and improving productivity.

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I was a busy guy.

Between work, family, trying to keep fit, and fitting in a little relaxation, there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to get things done. I’d get to the office at 7am, wouldn’t leave until 6pm, ate lunch while processing email, and rushed home to eat dinner with my family so my son had at least a small chance to remember who I was.

That was life until I got serious about managing my time more effectively.

Like a lot of people, I was trapped in a mentality that equated more work with more productivity. I believed the more time I spent at my desk, the greater the rewards would be. I was also sure that sacrificing some things in the short-term — family time, fitness, even health in general — would pay off in the long-term with a higher salary and more free time to do the things I wanted to do instead of the things I had to do.

Boy, was I wrong.

I managed to break out of that mental state and today I am more relaxed than ever, fitter than ever, have a great work/life balance, and spend more time with my family.

How did I do it?

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