Reports indicate steady growth in CS functionality since 2013. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, this growth has substantially increased. In 2021, 76% of surveyed CS professionals said they had a team consisting of more than 10 people. With this expansion comes the development of CS as a discipline.

Welcome to the customer success era.

In this CS era, business focus is on customer experience. And when it comes to your product, this means to show and let your customer try your offering. That is, be product-oriented to drive product-led expansion.

In this Process Street article, we identify the 4 key customer success metrics you need to develop your CS functionality. These metrics will inform your product-led growth strategy by measuring acquisition, adoption, retention, and expansion. This article is structured as follows:

• Understanding product-led growth and its benefits
• 4 key product-led customer success metrics
• 3 bonus tips to rocket your expansion revenue

Let’s jump to it!
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Every decision in an M&A is dependent on a number of variables. Making the right decision in the moment may not be the right decision down the road, but making no decision at all is worse.

The most impactful decision, though, is how the two companies will integrate (or not) once the deal closes. To some extent, this will be determined by your motivation for starting the M&A process to begin with. The similarities and differences between your business model and the business model of the company you’re acquiring will play a large role as well.

In this Process Street post, I’ll do a quick rundown of the two primary strategies, tuck-in and bolt-on, as well as everything you need to know in order to determine which is the strategy for your business.

• Round 1: Tuck-in vs. bolt-on: Debrief
• Round 2: Tuck-in vs. bolt-on: Pros
• Round 3: Tuck-in vs. bolt-on: Cons

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Value capture is, in essence, the end-all, be-all of a company’s life-cycle. Yes, you likely have other motivations for starting your company, but without capturing any value, your company will have a very short lifespan.

When it comes to acquisitions, if you don’t have a good strategy to drive value capture, you’re not only wasting your time, but hobbling your future potential in the process. If you look at some notable examples like Daimler Chrysler and Sprint/Nextel, it’s pretty clear that a bad deal will stick to you for a long time.

You might even end up as a cautionary tale for future M&A executives. No one wants that. Aspire to be the Apple of acquisitions. You can do that by focusing on four distinct levers that drive 80% of value capture.

Four things. They’re not even difficult things.

So in this Process Street post, I give you the rundown of the four levers you need to prioritize during your acquisition, and exactly why they make such an impact:

• Pursuing the ever-elusive value capture
• Lever #1: Utilize your functional teams early in the acquisition process
• Lever #2: Complete your commercial & operational due diligence before closing
• Lever #3: Assess the revenue & cost synergy potential of the deal
• Lever #4: Develop a realistic strategic operating model design

Let’s get to it!
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Mike Nemeroff is the co-founder and CEO of RushOrderTees. An entrepreneur from an early age, Mike and his siblings started a small screen printing business in their garage as teens and RushOrderTees was born. Under Mike’s leadership, the business has grown into the $75 million dollar ecommerce company that it is today with more than 225 employees.

Everyone wants to have a successful business, but getting there can be a challenge. Your team can make or break a project. For that reason, you need to surround yourself with individuals who can provide an added boost to your production levels.

Who should you choose for your team?

It takes all personality types to successfully manage a team and pull them towards your objectives. You need to find the right people who can work together and motivate others to meet your business needs.

The best types of team members give your business the right momentum and direction while providing open communication. Running a business can be difficult, but finding the most qualified people to fill those vital roles is even more complicated. You need to choose individuals who are willing to support, guide, and even challenge your ideas.

This Process Street post will walk through the four best personalities that can help run a successful organization:

• Workplace personality #1: The Leader
• Workplace personality #2: The Task Manager
• Workplace personality #3: The Abstract Thinker
• Workplace personality #4: The Champion

Let’s dive in!
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79% of marketers state customer experience strategies need to focus on customer retention. Yet, according to McKinsey and Company, there’s too much focus on churn reduction with a lack of consideration on what the customer wants.

When thinking about common metrics used in customer success – e.g. customer health scores – these are in-the-moment snapshots designed to communicate the likelihood of churn. They do not consider what it is the customer wants to achieve and whether they are on track to achieve this. To do this, you need customer success vectors.

A customer success vector gives the here-to-here journey a customer has with you, detailing where they are at today, where they will be tomorrow, and where they want to go.

In this Process Street article, I’ll explain what a customer success vector is, and why you need to supplement your customer experience metrics with vector measurements. You’ll learn how to ensure your customer success vectors are actual vectors with my 5 top tips. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to leverage success vector results to drive growth from the customer’s perspective, and consequently, from the perspective of your bottom line.

• Customer health score: Moving from a customer success KPI to a KSI
• Customer success vectors describe the customer’s maturity and where they’re heading
• 5 tips to ensure your customer success vectors are actual vectors

Let’s jump to it!
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To excel at customer success you need to understand your customer health score. According to a study by Gartner, 88% of Account Managers (CSMs) think they can grow by delivering a great service, which is reflected in your customer health score measures.

A customer health score is a metric used to determine whether customers are healthy or at-risk of dropping off. Customers with high health scores are high-value, repeat customers – this comes hand-in-hand with business growth.

In this Process Street article, we give you 7 vital indicators you need for determining customer health. We then explain how you can use these indicators to calculate customer health score values, before looking at examples of customer health scoring in practice.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Our secret source: 7 indicators for calculating customer success
• Calculating your customer health score
• Customer health scoring in practice
• Moving from a startup to big business and how this alters customer health score measures

Let’s start scoring!
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When I was still teaching, the three main points of advice I found myself repeating were:

1. Take your time.
2. Keep it simple.
3. Don’t bite off more than you can chew.

As it turns out, those three statements apply to most things in life – including business. Especially business.

I know. We’ve been in an era of calculated risk, mainlining entrepreneurial spirit, and the pervasive (-ly annoying) go-big-or-go-home philosophy for so long that “going above and beyond” isn’t even status quo; it’s bare minimum requirements.

Hear me out.

No matter what else you’re doing with your company, you have to take care of your customers. You have to understand them: what they want, what they need, and what they will need down the road.

That understanding of your customer and their relationship with your product is a crucial aspect of becoming a successful product-oriented business.

So you’ve read our previous post on product-led growth (PLG) and now know all the nuts and bolts of a PLG go-to-market strategy. It’s a super-exciting concept and exactly the direction you’ve wanted to take your company in.

But. (There’s always a “but.”)

Your business – the entire customer lifecycle every user of your product goes through – revolves around the traditional sales-led approach of painstakingly coaxing every customer through each step of the sales cycle from demo to trial to paying user.

You can’t go in tomorrow morning, clear out all your established processes, and tell your sales team: Right, we’re totally changing everything right this second. Even if your sales team doesn’t laugh you out of the office, it’s not going to work.

So how do you navigate that transition and maintain your success?

I didn’t know the answer to that, so for this Process Street post, I went straight to the horse’s mouth (🐴) and asked PLG champ, author, and founder Wes Bush about how to make PLG work and become a successful, product-oriented company.

• Wes Bush, PLG Champion
• Product-led growth: Where it all began
• The end-user era: Software for the people
• PLG: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
• What goes up, must come down
• Essential metrics to measure product-oriented success
• A final word on the product-oriented evolution

Let’s get started!
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Seema is a Product Expert at Revv, a leading document management software and eSignature company that provides business document templates that help run your business. She believes in the power of words and storytelling and loves spending her time creating exciting and knowledgeable content of the SaaS world. When not working, you can often find her watching adorable pups videos, or experimenting with recipes!

“Ok, so you sell things.”

Well, honestly, I wasn’t surprised or peeved at the half-baked knowledge of my friend’s father when he made a snap judgment and conveniently labeled my marketing profession as sales.

After all, this wasn’t my first time when someone tagged me as a salesperson. So, I took a deep breath and explained to him how sales are different from marketing.

We, humans, dwell in a herd mentality and hone our word skills from our surroundings. Sometimes, we are simply careless, sometimes oblivious, but most of the time, we actually don’t know that the word has a different meaning.

This can be ignored in a casual conversation, but using the wrong words in a business space can change the implied meaning and lead to miscommunication. For example, cost vs. price, digitization vs. digitalization, warranty vs. guarantee, machine learning vs. artificial intelligence, etc.

“Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” – C. S. Lewis

This Process Street guest post untangles the confusion between two crucial terms – business plan and business proposal. These are used interchangeably in the business world, but their meaning and application are pretty different.

Words are the building blocks of communication. There is a French phrase for using the right word – le mot juste.

Let us strive for le mot juste!

Hop on and be a part of this fantabulous journey.

• What is a business plan?
• What is a business proposal?
• Difference between a business plan and a business proposal
• Bonus: How to make ‘wow’ business plans and business proposals?
• Winding-up: Key takeaways

Here we go! 🚀
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Every 20 seconds, $1 million is wasted globally through poor investments that don’t align well with a given organization’s goals and strategy.

This is according to a 2018 Pulse of Profession (PMI) report. The report also indicated that organizations waste 9.9% for every dollar invested due to poor strategic goal delivery.

Yet, as a solution to these business woes, 89% of executives say BizOps could significantly improve strategic decision-making by improving collaboration between IT and business teams.

The startup bizOps buzz is reimagining older, already pioneered bizOp practices used by the likes of Yahoo, Google, and LinkedIn. Startups are using bizOps (otherwise knowns as business operations) in a more generalist role demanding rapid execution and a larger scope of responsibilities.

Tech startups such as Slack, Dropbox, Ziprecruiter, and (of course) Process Street, are recruiting for and building out their Bizop teams.

But what exactly do we mean by bizOps in this modern world, and how has the concept been reimagined for the startup culture and mentality?

In this article, you’ll learn what bizOps is, from the day-to-day operations to the core activities. We’ll then discuss the importance of bizOps, using real-world examples to display the role in action. Find out how to apply BizOps as a startup or as a large enterprise to significantly improve strategic decision-making in your business.

Sound good?

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say:

• What is bizOps?
• Key concepts in bizOps
• BizOps activities: Maximizing profit, performance, and growth (with free templates)
• The importance of bizOps (+ business operations examples)

Let’s jump straight to it!
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I’m writing a post about Airbnb, from an Airbnb.

Ironic yes, but not unlikely.

In 2019, Airbnb hosted 272 million bookings globally. And, in 2020, despite a global pandemic restricting travel, Airbnb suffered relatively minimal losses of only 22%.

2020 was also the year Airbnb decided to go IPO, despite the global pandemic, a significant drop in revenue, and global travel restrictions.

How did they manage it? A growth strategy like no other, that’s how.

This Process Street blog post takes a deep dive into Airbnb’s growth strategy, how they got where they are today, and where they could be going. To skip to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below:

• The history of Airbnb: From Obama O’s to turning over $3.4B in revenue
• Airbnb’s growth startegy: Product breakdown
• Airbnb’s growth strategy: Overcoming “stranger equals danger”
• Airbnb’s growth strategy: The sharing economy
• Airbnb’s growth strategy: Promise & deliver on value for everyone
• The future of Airbnb

Let’s start with where it all began, with 3 air beds.🛌
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