A world-class CS operation can’t be managed off a CRM.
Sure, Customer Relationship Management software can help you keep track of client relationships from a high level. But in order to build, scale, and measure truly sophisticated post-sales strategies, you need a Customer Success Platform (CSP).
CRMs were built for a sales-led world, and modifying one to behave like a CSP can only take you so far. With B2B companies moving towards product-led or user-driven growth models, the key features of a CRM have become less useful to CS teams who understand that the initial sale is the start of the relationship, not the end.
At a time when Customer Success is expected to have a greater influence on revenue growth, investment in a modern CSP is a requirement for driving impact both internally and externally.
We believe in these 6 truths:
Out-of-the-box CRMs only allow you to do the “note-taker” version of CS.
If all your CS team does is show up to standing meetings with each customer and check in on the relationship, you can get by with a CRM and some automated reminders. But that’s a low-impact and inefficient version of Customer Success, and our industry has already evolved past it. (Reactive CS is so 2019.)
The key advantage of a CSP is its ability to provide a complete picture of customer engagement. By centralizing and surfacing all company data that touches the customer, CSPs help Customer Success teams produce critical business insights for the rest of the organization to make strategic decisions with and automate engagement workflows that create world-class customer moments.
In other words: CRMs help you monitor customer relationships, but CSPs help you optimize them.
The most critical elements of Customer Success aren’t pre-built into CRM software.
Your clients spend more time as customers than prospects. So why do so many companies limit their CS teams with tools built around prospecting instead of continuous growth?
As a Customer Success team, your job is to expand and protect the financial relationship with each of your customers. CSPs support that through tailored health score monitoring, churn risk indicators, identification of expansion opportunities, product usage insights, customer adoption, automated workflows, and personalized CS at scale.
None of those foundational features are native to CRM solutions, which have limited utility for managing post-sale activities unless you build them out yourself. By comparison, a CSP is all about what happens after the initial sale. CS teams are responsible for nurturing relationships over time, and they need software built for that purpose.
CRM add-ons for Customer Success aren’t always a bargain when you consider the total cost of ownership.
Wiring up a CRM to perform the basic functions of a CSP requires technical work, integrations, and additional tooling that can eat up a significant chunk of your budget and your team’s time. (There’s also the opportunity cost of missed renewals and expansions that teams risk when they lack the right tools for capturing them; more on that later.)
CRM add-ons canIt also slows down your CSMs, who will be stuck doing inefficient manual work in their CRM to replicate the project management and customer data analytics functions that CSPs perform natively. Low team morale hurts productivity, which hurts your bottom line, so be sure to arm your CSMs with tools that help them get things done faster.
Project management allows modern CSPs to support truly collaborative relationships internally and with customers.
Your Customer Success team and clients should be working together towards the common goal of value realization. A CSP’s project management features help triage your most critical and time-sensitive customer-facing work while allowing your team to create unified, scalable processes. Shared workspaces turn the customer into a true partner in the relationship and keep internal and external stakeholders aligned at every step.
Out-of-the-box CRMs are primarily designed to store customer information and track new sales opportunities. Any collaborative efforts have to be managed outside of the platform, and the lack of project management leads to disjointed customer projects and misalignment.
Using the wrong software tools for Customer Success can block your company from reaching its business goals.
Not investing in the right tools for Customer Success handicaps a proven source of revenue growth that’s critical to growing SaaS companies. According to the 2022 KeyBanc Capital Markets SaaS Survey, it costs SaaS companies $1.78 to acquire a dollar in ACV from new customers, compared to just $0.61 to acquire a dollar in ACV from upsells and expansions of existing customers. Investing in managing your customers well is the most efficient spend to drive revenue and grow your business.
Without the ability to quickly identify and tackle expansion opportunities or churn risks, big opportunities are lost and money flies out the window. In other words, an inadequate tech stack doesn’t only impact your Customer Success team, it negatively affects the entire business.
Teams that use CSPs are armed with the insights to understand how to generate more revenue and how much revenue they’re generating (all of which helps their CROs sleep at night).
CSPs are designed by people who actually understand the needs of Customer Success teams.
CRMs were invented in the 1990s to give B2B sales reps the tools to manage their contacts and opportunities. Since they weren't built by or for CS professionals, they don’t capture the nuances of the Customer Success function, or how CS can best collaborate with team members in other departments or contribute to the organization as a whole.
By contrast, CSPs are built around the guidance of countless Customer Success professionals who live and breathe Customer Success. Many CSPs even come with built-in thought leadership to empower their users with the skills and insights required to protect and expand revenue in the modern era.
Luckily, it's not an either/or decision. Any B2B company with a formalized sales operation likely has a CRM already — and that’s okay! Customer Success teams should look for a full-featured, simple-to-use CSP that’s capable of integrating with their existing CRM. Let your sales team keep using their CRM, while your CS team invests in a software platform that helps you reach your goals.
Out-of-the-box CRMs only allow you to do the “note-taker” version of CS.
The most critical elements of Customer Success aren’t pre-built into CRM software.
CRM add-ons for Customer Success aren’t always a bargain when you consider the total cost of ownership.
Project management allows modern CSPs to support truly collaborative relationships internally and with customers.
Using the wrong software tools for Customer Success can block your company from reaching its business goals.
CSPs are designed by people who actually understand the needs of Customer Success teams.
Ready to see the CSP difference?
Demo CenterCustomer Success leaders have spoken
CRMs are not optimized to be a Customer Success Platform. You can hack them to get somewhat close, but health score tracking and project management and sentiment analysis…[CRMs are] just not optimized for these purposes.
Ben Francis
We can surface data and trends in Vitally so much more than we could in our old CRM platform.
G2 Reviewer
CRMs will give you a snapshot of a customer, which can be helpful, but it doesn't give you an ongoing perspective of a relationship with a customer, like how health scores or ARR have changed over time. That’s the type of data that leads to strategic decision-making and gives you a seat at the table.
Ian Russell
