InnerVentures

  • Role of marketing in customer success

    I attended a customer success meetup last Friday which produced some excellent conversation. I’ve been thinking about the topic of this post for a while so added it to the list of discussion topics in the meetup. From the link above you’ll see it amongst a bunch of Post It notes. It was bundled alongside…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Update on As a Service Trends

    When Ikea considers changing its business model then you know something is afoot. The big news this last week was Ikea thinking about making certain items available on a subscription basis. Good article on that here where the screenshot at left is from. It’s looking at doing so on a trial basis so this will…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • The role of innovation in customer success

    Customer Success activities are maturing. I have been doing the job since at least 2012 and have seen the profession go through fundamental changes to the point where, to succeed now, you need to be innovating. I started writing about the role of customer success in relation to customer experience and the subscription economy almost…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Update on As a Service trends

    In my new eBook / trend report I will cover the As a Service trend (see point 9 here for more on that) and the role customer success plays in it. This post and others that follow will document examples of where I see companies exhibiting behaviours of this trend. I first wrote about them…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Considering buying a new technology platform, ask this about their customer success

    I’ve been on both the receiving and offering end of efforts so can speak to both. In the Software as a Service business especially, if that is how the platform is offered, the vendor should have a team supporting how the platform is deployed, adopted and maintained. Moreover, the team should be focused on helping…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • What good data looks like

    This last week I attended a meetup and workshop in London organised by Customer Success Network, a European based not-for-profit community for customer success managers. It had the same title as this post. An excellent session which started off with a few minutes of talking by Dan Steinman, GM Gainsight EMEA. I then facilitated one of the…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • What business are you in?

    The question in the title derives from the classic marketing thought piece by Theodore Levitt entitled Marketing Myopia. At the time it rocked not just the marketing world but the business world in general and has shaped business thinking ever since. Published in the Harvard Business Review in July/August 1960, it is no less relevant…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • State of Customer Success 2018

    I attended Pulse Europe (the 4th) on the 8-9th November, an event run by Gainsight, a Customer Success (CS) technology vendor. They run the larger, main event in the US and I had the pleasure of attending last year where I captured the State of Customer Success 2017. So this is a timely update with…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Enabling Usage Insights for Office 365 Customers

    This post provides first some simple context for whom and why it is important to understand usage of enterprise technology platforms and then how we enable it at Microsoft for the Office 365 suite of products. You can skip the context and head straight to the enabling part if you like. It’s important for Customer Success…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • SaaS beyond Software – Automakers

    The auto industry needs Customer Success managers. Geoffrey Moore, famed author of Crossing the Chasm and father of Moore’s law is writing a new book on Customer Success. This slide above comes from a talk where he is quoted applying the concept of customer success to manufacturing. I applied the same thinking in this blog…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Agile in nature not just by name

    Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft where I work) recently shared his thoughts on how organisations need to embrace “tech intensity” to innovate and grow in today’s high-intensity digital economy. He didn’t specifically call out speed but its implicit in everything he said. I’m surrounded in the work I do at Microsoft, by IT teams that…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Role of Self Service in Customer Success

    Customer success teams were put in place in technology SaaS and subscription companies to ensure that customers are successful in their use of the technology they invested in. They have become a core part of ensuring the customer derives long-term value and ultimately stays with the vendor (in other words renews the subscription). But has…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Role of Sales in Customer Success and 6 rules to guide you

    How many times in your role as a customer success manager working with customers, have you struggled with the solution you are trying to implement where it has not been sold right? By solution I mean what is constituted in the solution selling process (products and services, solving problems or needs and/or delivering specific business…

    Stephen Danelutti

  • Why customer experience and success share the same roof

    There is a fundamental premise I make in the new eBook / trend report I am working on captured in the title. Yet I’ve taken part in debates on LinkedIn that show there are divisions in opinion. Separatist thinking even. Some think that customer success (CS) is the new kid on the block and muscling…

    Stephen Danelutti