The hidden impact of investing in customers

This is a guest post by Todd Busler, CEO of Champify. 

When companies think about investing in their customer base, they are usually thinking about driving product adoption, reducing churn, or even delivering expansion revenue. 

Rarely are teams thinking about the impact on new logo pipeline. This is a missed opportunity.  

TrustRadius found that 72% of buyers use their past experiences to inform their buying decisions. Customer success is one of the most impactful teams on the post-sale experience.

At Champify, we wanted to understand how previous experience impacted conversion rates across the sales funnel. The results are clear – former customers are more than 5x more likely to become customers again than prospects targeted by cold outbound (full report here). 

Here’s how your customer success team can help maximize the influence of previous experience on repeat buyers: 

1: Drive key stakeholder engagement.

When former customer success contacts are involved in an opportunity, the opportunity on average has a 44% win-rate. By multi-threading into an account, regularly meeting with stakeholders, and ensuring key contacts are aware of the value CS teams can cultivate future champions who are more than 2x likely to go closed won then the B2B SaaS average. 

2: Increase product adoption.

Customer success teams play a strategic role in driving product adoption. Whether it is through product tours, onboarding plans, customer nurtures, or more face time with their CSMs – the more people getting value the better. End users can be your biggest champions and often change jobs for promotions.  By encouraging broad adoption CSMs widen the opportunities for boomerang customers. 

3: Ensure customer wins are shared out at companies.

One role a CSM can play is acting as an internal marketer for your stakeholders and their successes. Make it easy to broadly share wins across the company so more teams are familiar and want to use your product. This helps create more champions.

4: Maintain relationships as customers grow their careers.

Keeping a relationship alive with a customer is a great way to influence boomerang customers. Not only can your previous customers continue to serve as referrals or customer references, but your CSM. After all, former customers turn into customers (again) 3x more frequently than cold outbound. 

TLDR: if you deliver value to your customers, as they grow their careers, they will help you grow your business. Invest in your customers and stay close to them as they mature in their careers across companies.