016: Customer Success with Lincoln Murphy The SaaS (Software as a Service) Business Podcast

Lincoln Murphy’s focus is customer success. He’s currently the growth architect at Winning by Design, where he creates blueprints and playbooks for customer success managers and leaders. In the past, he founded Sixteen Ventures and led customer success at Gainsight. Using customer success to drive growth across the entire customer lifecycle, he has helped over four hundred SaaS and enterprise software companies accelerate growth and retain valuable customers.
Contents On the website, click any timestamp to start listening to the episode at the noted location.
Resources Mentioned in Episode Episode Transcript [00:00] Intro [Read] [02:27] Pre-SaaS Career in Supply Chain Management [Read] [04:14] Early SaaS Company for Mail Center Management [Read] [07:55] Early Days of SaaS [Read] [11:12] Before SaaS Was SaaS [Read] [12:56] Resistance to SaaS Adoption [Read] [14:08] Role of Corporate IT in SaaS Adoption [Read] [15:18] SaaS Business Model [Read] [16:27] Business Architecture [Read] [17:18] SaaS as a Business Architecture and SaaS Revenue Models [Read] [19:13] Recent Career [Read] [20:27] Sixteen Ventures [Read] [21:44] “The SaaS Guy” [Read] [22:16] Contrarian Views [Read] [23:57] Freemium in SaaS [Read] [25:10] Thought Leadership (or Getting Things Out of Your Head and Moving On)[Read] [26:06] Facts and the Contrarian Point-of-View [Read] [27:48] Customer Success Management [Read] [28:37] Customer’s Desired Outcome [Read] [29:01] Customer’s Required Outcome [Read] [30:06] Customer’s Appropriate Experience [Read] [31:39] Appropriate SaaS Experience [Read] [33:26] Solve for Success Not Happiness [Read] [33:59] Successful Customers Advocate But Want More [Read] [34:49] Happy Customers May Not Be Getting Value and Then Churn [Read] [35:15] The Appropriate Success Vector [Read] [36:21] Customer Success and Company Valuation [Read] [37:15] Churn [Read] [37:50] Customers to Save and Customers to Let Go [Read] [39:41] When Churn Becomes a Non-Issue [Read] [42:03] Individual Contributions to the Customer’s Desired Outcome [Read] [45:05] Personal Recommendations [Read] [46:34] Make Your Customers Powerful [Read] [47:20] Operationalize Customers Making you Powerful [Read] [48:16] Proactively Convert on Success Milestones [Read] [49:31] Customer Lifecycle Success [Read] [50:07] Tools to Monitor Customer Progress [Read] [51:01] Understand Desired Outcome Before You Operationalize [Read] [51:31] Start with the Customers and Tools Will Become Apparent [Read] [52:22] Saas Networking Recommendations [Read] Disclosure concerning affiliate links [Contents]
Resources Mentioned in Episode Please see Disclosure* (below transcript) concerning affiliate links on this page.
7 Ways Customer Success Drives Company Valuation – This blog post by Lincoln Murphy on Sixteen Ventures discusses how Customer Success can impact the valuation of your company. Listen or read at [36:21]. ClientSuccess –Customer success management app mentioned by Lincoln Murphy as an alternative to Gainsight to measure customer success milestones. Listen or read at[50:18]. Customer Success: How Innovative Companies are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue* – Book by Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman, and Lincoln Murphy. Lincoln did not mention the book during the interview. I recommend you digest the information in this podcast episode, read Lincoln’s Customer Success: The Definitive Guide, and then read the book. The book is broken down into three parts: (1) Customer Success: The History, Organization, and Imperative; (2) The Ten Laws of Customer Success; and (3) Chief Customer Officer, Technology, and Future. Each of the Ten Laws is covered in a chapter. Customer Success: The Definitive Guide – This is a 2016 update to Lincoln’s original post The Definitive Guide to Customer Success. A PDF of the guide is available from the site. If this podcast episode interests you, I would recommend you read this next. I brought t