Lincoln Murphy

Lincoln Murphy is a world-renowned Growth Architect, Consultant, Author, and Keynote Speaker, and one of the earliest evangelists for Customer Success.

As founder of Sixteen Ventures, he’s used Customer Success to drive growth across the entire customer lifecycle for more than 400 SaaS and enterprise software companies around the world.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Lincoln’s success

Customer success-driven business growth

Result if you follow the steps in Lincoln’s session

Drive your business growth through customer success

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So customer success, I gave the definition. I actually, I talked about customer success in a little bit different way than just sort of playing customer success. I call it customer success driven growth.

And the reason I call it that is, I really want the emphasis to be on the fact that this is a growth driver. This is really something that if you apply this to your company, you can see substantial growth. And what does that mean?

Well, it means we can get our customers to stay longer. Okay? That makes sense, reduce churn. But also we can get our customers to buy more, to invite us into other parts of their business, so sort of land and expand. And, of course, get them to advocate for us.

And those are the four things that we all, every company I’ve ever talked to, wants, right? We want these things from our customers. But most of the time, we just leave it up to chance. We hope they spread the word. We hope they bring us into other parts of their business, we hope you know that they buy more, we frankly hope they stay longer.

But we don’t really understand what it means to operationalize that. So Customer Success driven growth is taking a look at the customer, understanding what it’s going to take for them to be successful, like literally what do they have to do, both in the product but also outside the product in order to be successful.

And we come up with a list of success milestones that would indicate if they keep meeting or hitting those successes, milestones. That they’re on the right track. That they are doing the things necessary to achieve that desired outcome.

We know that there are going to be some success milestones along the way, and have a logical advocacy. In other words, they hit the success milestone, it makes sense for us to reach out and get them to leave us a testimonial or go out and leave a review on one of the review sites, or maybe give us or be reference for us. The same thing applies to upsells, and cross sells and other land and expand type of situations.

There are going to be points in time where a customer achieves a success milestone where it makes sense for them to move up, you know, maybe take some training and then that training will get them ready for the next pricing tier right to move up and start consuming more.

So logical expansion tied to the customer success, that’s Customer Success driven growth, rather than saying we have to hit some internal quota and just trying to shove offers of products on customers when they don’t need it. That doesn’t make any sense.

And so the same thing sort of applies as you start to back out into new business acquisition, sales and marketing. If we can understand what the desired outcome is of the customer, what they need to achieve and how they need to achieve it, then we can frame our messaging in those Facebook ads, in what in whatever modality we’re using to get in front of them, we’re going to be able to speak directly to what to their desired outcome.

And if we can do that, we can really break through all the noise out there and get their attention. And that’s the kind of thing, if we can resonate with them in a meaningful way we can shorten sales cycles and we can get them to not just take action, but we can get the best customers to take action. Right?

We can figure out what our ideal customers maybe based on those that are most successful, figure out what their desired outcome is and get in front of them with the right message, right time, right modality. Oh, we’re now cooking with evil gas.