How Customer Success Drives Company Valuation

Customer Success is fast becoming one of the key drivers of company valuations. Having a clear, repeatable customer lifecycle, low gross churn, high customer net retention and a Customer Success strategy that maximises customer lifetime value are differentiators when VCs assess potential investments.

In this episode our host, Anika Zubair talks to Customer Success guru and now VC investor Rav Dhaliwal about how he has scaled Customer Success teams, how Venture Capitalists look at Customer Success strategies of their investments and his views on Customer Success leading indicators such as NPS and CSAT. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, Rav ran Customer Success at Slack in EMEA, and held senior Customer Success positions, managing key processes like Customer Onboarding and expansion at firms such as Zendesk, Microsoft and Salesforce.

Rav provides his perspective on key metrics for Customer Success executives to be monitoring, whether they are Customer Success metrics oriented around revenue such as Net Dollar Retention, or key SaaS usage and telemetry metrics. His view is that in younger companies, metrics such as time to first value are key, but as companies mature, Customer Success teams should be working actively to identify more commercial opportunities within their portfolio, and partnering with Sales to drive customer expansions.

In addition to Customer Success strategy, Rav gives his input on how a VC assesses company teams, including Customer Success teams, and how businesses can be managing the current unique scenarios created by Covid-19.

For Customer Success Managers managing the impact of Covid-19, he thinks Customer Success teams should use the opportunity to review their Customer segments and identify potential churn risk in different segments and adjust Customer healthscores accordingly. In addition they should be proactively communicating with Customers and thinking about how their own Customer Success initiatives are communicated internally to emphasise the value of Customer Success.

Looking ahead he sees a long term impact of Covid-19 on future Customer Success strategies, in particular around how CSMs will be expected to interact with customers through different technologies going forward.

Listen today to hear Rav’s highly experienced perspective on successful Customer Success!