Thanks to companies like Gainsight and Mindtouch, and people like Lincoln Murphy, Brian Solis, and Bill Cushard – more people than ever finally beginning to give the customer success teams the regard it deserves.

Customer success is a critical component to any business, but until somewhat recently it’s been considered “fluffy” and even difficult to understand or quantify. However, with the emergence of the SaaS, people are now able to comprehend the impact of churn/retention on business.

Look it up on Wikipedia, and you’ll see that “Customer Success” is defined as: “Customer Success is the function at a company responsible for managing the relationship between a vendor and its customers.”

However, anybody who is in customer success understands that definition is technically correct from a business perspective, but it’s not the full picture. Customer success is made up of a lot more than that.

Customer success is a combination of many variables, of many weights including hard metrics like product adoption/usage, LTV,  MRR, upgrades as well as some more soft metrics like experience, happiness, education. When I say education, I mean comprehension and knowledge of the industry, topics and software/service you provide. For HubSpot, it’s a person’s understanding of marketing, inbound marketing as a philosophy and approach, and the software. For HubSpot, it’s also this same education applied to the sales world as we’re now a full-stack, growth stack software.

It’s an exciting time to be in customer success because it’s still being defined. A new graphic Brian Solis shared in an email in which the subject line was “Customer Experience is the New Marketing and Customer Experiences are the New Brand”. In the email he included three graphics with this one being the final one, and the last line of the email said, “Experiences become memories…good or bad.” I consider that a fine example of a healthy mic drop.

 

The graphic above illustrates that there are other considerations a person should think about when helping a customer to success.

I write this today because I’m excited to share a huge honor – I was selected by Mindtouch to be one of the top 100 customer success influencers.

The list of folks is incredible, and I’m honored to be on this list with the likes of Tom Tunguz, Bill Cushard, David Skok, Ari Hoffman, April Underwood, David Cancel, Sam Brennand, and Sarah E. Brown.

Want to see all 100? You can download the list here.