Is it finally our time?
With the current economic downturn, is it finally the opportunity Customer Success has been waiting for?
If you are in technology these days, the world can be very daunting. Clients are tightening their budgets. Hiring has all but ground to a halt for many companies and layoffs are rampant. Company perks and travel have been cut. It’s bleak out there but there may be a silver lining for Customer Success.
Rewinding back to the mortgage crisis of 2007 and 2008, I was in a unique situation as I was part of the Customer Success team at Eloqua that was building a new category for B2B marketers. As the economy started to recover and the US climbed out of one of the worst economic crises in its history, we were finally starting to see a greater acceptance and adoption of marketing automation software and other innovative marketing technology. Technology was being leveraged to scale up approaches to compensate for reduced budgets and the need to modernize marketing strategies.
Several marketing automation players had jumped into the fray besides Eloqua: Marketo, Hubspot and Pardot to name a few. B2B marketing wasn’t just focused on branding but more so on measurable results. We started to see newer marketing terminology such as demand generation, content marketing and MQLs (marketing qualified leads) go mainstream. This was a new dawn for B2B marketers and the data below from Google Trends backs up the growth in popularity of marketing automation vendors:
Even if we look back just a few years ago, the immediate reaction to the COVID crisis was a large jump in consumers buying online. We can see this reflected in the percentages of searches for “ecommerce” in May 2022 from the Google Trends data. We know that we’re seeing consumer purchasing behaviors revert to the pre-COVID days but there is definitely a lasting change that will increase the overall percentage of consumer spend online.
What does this mean for Customer Success?
Is the current economic mess we’re in finally the turning point that will push Customer Success over the threshold of being an accepted and respected function that will be a permanent component of organizations? I believe that this will be the case. As we see companies struggle to fill their sales pipelines and sign new deals, a greater focus will be placed on retaining and growing customers.
This will demand that the innovative approaches to CS that have emerged in the last five years to finally start to take off. This includes scaled approaches to onboarding, retaining, and growing customers, leveraging technology that was built specifically for this purpose and a greater focus on operations. While Customer Success Managers will be part of this strategy, there will be a greater focus on leveraging data, automating processes, and maximizing scarce resources.
This won’t happen in a month or even a year. It will take a few years still for this new Customer Success renaissance to emerge, but it will. The bigger question is if you have the right skillset and mindset that will allow you to thrive in this new world? Will you be like the previous generation of B2B marketers that didn’t adapt to the innovative technologies and strategies that were required? What are you doing to prepare yourself for the next phase of Customer Success? We are in a new phase of Customer Success - are you ready for it?