FOUNDER’S GUIDE TO B2B SALES The customer success function, its role, and how it collaborates with sales. THE GOAL OF CUSTOMER SUCCESS The point of customer success is to maximise the value of existing customers. I.e. • Keep them happy – Deployment, adoption, engagement, surveys, quarterly reviews • Keep them renewing – Renewal intent, renewal process • Keep them expanding – Incidental “fries with your burger” expansion (e.g. editions, users) – Major expansion (e.g. cross-sell new product or division) SHOULD CUSTOMER SUCCESS EXIST AS A SEPARATE FUNCTION? There are arguments on both sides. For most SaaS companies, in particular, the answer to whether customer success should exist as a separate function to sales is typically ‘yes.’ However, in reality, the answer comes down to how you define your sales model and, once that model is defined, what the CS role is, relative to sales. Yes! No! “For us, of the things that “We don’t believe were important were, companies should have number one, customer a separate customer success. Nothing is success function. The more important to us first thing we did when than making sure every Frank joined Snowflake customer is successful was we blew up what was in our service.” (We even the customer success called our customer function. You are either success organization, going to do support, sales, Customers for Life.) or professional services. Customer success is not accountable for anything.” Marc Benioff, Frank Slootman Salesforce.com (via Mike Scarapelli), Snowflake SPRING 2023 .32