Customer Success Management – abbreviated to CSM – is usually designed to retain existing customers and to exploit their entire revenue potential. The tasks of the Customer Success Managers can vary greatly depending on the company. This ranges from classic key account managers with a focus on contract renewal, to an upsell oriented CSM based on the American model, to a strong focus on smooth onboarding and a strong focus on technical support.
However, the potential of CSM for acquiring new top customers is often still ignored.
From existing customers to new top customers
The task of Customer Success Management is to identify customers with growth potential. And the insights you gain are extremely valuable. At least if there is a sufficiently large amount of data on the company in question. Because with these you can identify common features and patterns that make it easier for a customer to become a top customer for you:
- Based on the identified characteristics, your CSM is able to identify potential growth customers earlier and process them in a targeted manner.
- If you not only apply these findings to your existing customers, but also transfer them to marketing and sales, you can concentrate on companies with particularly high potential during the acquisition phase.
Successful CSM needs better data
How well you can identify patterns and predict the potential of existing and potential customers depends crucially on the data available to you. Implisense gives your CSM access to hundreds of new data points from the moment a new customer registers with you.
Top signs of customer growth
In practice, there are visible and rather implicit signs of growth in companies. You can quickly identify the good visible signs in the analysis in Implisense Pro and usually apply across several industries. The implicit signs are mostly industry-specific and require experience. Here are some examples of explicit and implicit signs of growth:
Explicit signs of growth
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- Mention of new locations on the website or in press releases
- Mention of “Growth” “Expansion” etc. in news
- Recruitment of additional persons as further managers
- Publication of a large number of new job offers
- Mention of new countries or regions, e.g. China, Asia
- Increased number of employees
- Increased number of customers
- Increase of web traffic
Implicit signs of future growth
- Digital business model with high scalability (SaaS, e-commerce, brokers, etc.)
- Intensive use of online advertising
- Hiring a large number of outbound sales staff
- Development of own platforms with lock-in effect
- Intensive use of recommendations
- Funding by international investors (or HTGF ; -)
- Registration of trade marks with new product classes
- Use of company models to facilitate the raising of capital (e. g. AGs in Germany)
However, Implisense not only provides you with the data basis to find out as much as possible about your growing customers. It also takes the work out of identifying commonalities between them. Simply enter your top customers and Implisense will automatically suggest other companies that are similar to this group. Optionally from the pool of your existing customers to identify new growth customers. Or from all companies listed in the German Commercial Register for the identification of interesting new customers.
In this way, you can use your customer success management as an important driving force for marketing and sales. And thus win extremely inexpensive new leads that have a high potential to become top customers.
