At Lately, we pride ourselves on building strong relationships with our customers. And now, we’re here to teach you with expert insights and customer success tips.
A lot of businesses don’t know how to tackle customer success, or don’t realize how important it actually is. Honestly, if you aren’t hyper-focused on bettering your customer success… you aren’t going to reach your full potential (or even half of it). At Lately, we pride ourselves on building strong relationships with our customers and now we’re here to teach you. Because who doesn’t want a churn rate at 3% or less?
Lately’s Head of Growth Lauren Turow sat down with John Moore on Linkedin to spread her massive amount of knowledge about how to create happy, long term customers.
Well existentially, that’s probably a pretty hard question to answer. But to put it simply, Lauren keeps Lately afloat. Seriously, this woman is brilliant. If you’re doubting her ability as a marketing expert (first of all… how dare you), let's just say when Lately brought in sales professionals, she outsold them 3 to 1. As a customer success manager!
Her position as the Head of Growth breaks down to a combination of sales, customer success, leadgen, products, OPs, and CEO Kate Bradley Chernis’s counselor. She keeps the wheels on the bus… and fuels the bus... and also drives it.
The fact that we’re even letting people get a peek into her brain for FREE is an act of charity. You better be taking notes!
The Four Primary Functions of Customer Success
There are four primary functions of customer success in a business:
This magical cocktail is necessary for customer success. Here’s why and how to make sure each variable is working at its peak function.
Onboarding. Individual onboarding sessions are uh-MAZING. It allows customers to really ask questions and develop a strong relationship with them. Even if you have unlimited videos, help chat, and are always available through social media like Team Lately is, people are still shy to ask questions. So if you’re a customer, DON’T DO THAT. Between Slack channels and DM’s, you’re always able to reach out… and you should!
Adoption. Even though our business is all about “futuristic” things like A.I., we’re still old school. Lauren personally has a meeting with every single customer to be able to have conversations and just check in! THAT is what gets us a 3% churn or less. That also ties into onboarding, because we are always available and want to help!
Business Goal Achievement. The key to ROI is education. School is back in session, kids! Over the years, we have found that it’s not just teaching people how to use the product but teaching them how to understand marketing in general. We have to provide education WITH the functionality. Between our shows like Master Class, Lately 101, and How To Position Anything, you get a well rounded understanding of how to use the product and how to navigate the marketing world. That’s what helps our customers get that insane ROI.
Renewals, Cross-sell, and up-sell. Let’s sound it out: IN-FOR-MA-TION. Having information about the customer and keeping up with them on social media is sooooo important. We are always in conversations with our customers. We recently launched a Slack channel to be able to participate in even more conversations and we are able to tailor our reach outs based on what we are seeing in REAL TIME.
What you may not know is that customer success starts even before onboarding. It starts in marketing and sales. Customer success is a part of Lead Generation. With our experience, we’ve discovered that big sales guns can’t do what Lauren does. Being able to get into conversations and make yourself available is so massively important and valuable, it has led to our success.
On a smaller scale, TAKE NOTES. Take notes of everything, detailed notes. Notes, notes, notes. Did we say notes? It saves your sanity and the sanity of teammates (and your customers) who don’t want to be asked the same questions over and over and over.
When looking at the big picture, companies are already starting to merge these teams. Truth is, enablement CAN NOT live without customer success and vice versa. The third piece to this puzzle is marketing. This third piece cinches the deal and really ties these things together with a pretty bow. These three things are inextricably linked.
Each member of our team is enablement, customer success, and marketing-focused. A perfect triangle. This really empowers team members with knowledge (and autonomy) and empowers our CEO with data in which the dots are always connected. It makes us nimble and effective. To the tune of 83% qualified leads, 62% more leads than we can even handle, 87% sales conversion, and a 3% churn. We had to toot our own horns for just a second.
For a little engine that could, we are a powerhouse.
While we are aware that your brain is probably pulsating at the sheer amount of how much amazing new information we just pumped into it, we aren’t done just yet. One of the main things we pride ourselves on is the ability to turn our customers into FANS.
How do we do this? We know all of their names, we follow them all on social media. Why? So we can see how they use Lately AND so that we know them and are friends! A fan will shout your praise from the rooftops, while a customer will just quietly smile and wave. This is a new way to scale, to turn customers into evangelists.
So what are you waiting for? Take those notes you were taking while reading this (you were taking notes, right?) and use them to make yourself great. And if you ever need anything, you know who to call. Hint: Her name starts with Laur and ends in en. Clear enough?
