These are some of my favorite books, videos, articles and other resources about Customer Success. Each one has influenced my own, and in turn Linode’s approach to Customer Success.
Books
Building a Customer Success Team
- How To Build and Scale a Customer Success Team from Scratch
- How to Start a Customer Success Program from Scratch
- How Your SaaS Company Should Be Thinking About Customer Success
- 5 Steps to Building a Strong Customer Success Team
- Building Out Your Customer Success Department: 3 Do’s and 3 Don’ts
- Customer Success Best Practices: The Ultimate Guide
- An honest and open discussion about how and why we evolved our approach to customer success – Interview with Eva Klein of Hubspot
Strategy and KPIs
- Why Customer Lifetime Value Matters (and How to Calculate It for Your Business)
- 7 Simple But Powerful Ways to Lower SaaS Customer Churn
- How & When To Survey Your Customers for NPS Feedback
- 6 Customer Success Strategies You’ve Already Implemented
- An Investigation of Customer Churn
- Leading Change
- Peter Fader speaks about CLV
- Important SaaS Metrics
Misc Articles, podcasts and guides
This is my running to-read list.
- Health scores:
- Linux and technology:
- Sales, partners and Customer Success:
- Handoff – https://app.hubspot.com/academy/2165147/lessons/451/2473
- Sales and CS alignment – https://sixteenventures.com/sales-customer-success-alignment
- Channel partners – https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2013/09/channel-partner-program.html
- Tackling bad fit customers – https://keepthecustomer.com/2020/04/02/tackling-bad-fit-customers-with-success-sales/
- Feedback and product-led CS:
- Customer feedback at scale – http://www6.uservoice.com/l/17202/2016-04-26/4cdp31
- Product-Led Customer Success – https://thecustomer.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Product-led-CS-Thoughts-for-B2B-SaaS-CEOs.pdf
- Why Customer Success should own more of your Product Roadmap – https://www.savio.io/blog/why-customer-success-is-influencing-product-roadmaps/
- Metrics and Finance:
- Revenue retention fundamentals – https://www.saas-capital.com/blog-posts/essential-saas-metrics-revenue-retention-fundamentals/
- Cloudways SaaS metrics – https://www.cloudways.com/blog/saas-metrics/
- CS leader metrics – https://openviewpartners.com/blog/customer-success-leader-metrics/#.XmpG5pNKh27
- CS for startups – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/customer-success-tech-start-ups-start-early-go-fast-sales-mccarthy-1c/
- CS during a downturn – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-reasons-why-customer-success-existential-during-downturn-nick-mehta/
- Podcasts, interviews and webinars:
- SaaStr 262 – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-official-saastr-podcast-saas-founders-investors/id1089973241?i=1000448348911
- Company-wide CS – https://www.customerexperienceupdate.com/edition/weekly-call-recording-marketing-2019-11-09?open-article-id=12058560&article-title=how-to-achieve-company-wide-customer-success-with-guy-nirpaz&blog-domain=customerbliss.com&blog-title=customer-bliss
- Operators – https://delian.substack.com/p/operators-ep-1-kelly-wright
- Rick Myers Support interview – https://www.tfir.io/how-linode-built-an-apple-like-support-qa-with-richard-myers-of-linode/
- Fireside chat with Yancey Spruill – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-SqU7ZyLxw&feature=youtu.be
- Pivot, don’t panic – https://www.facebook.com/LincolnMurphyShares/videos/673074936786248/
- Management, career and communication:
- Pinterest EIR – https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/how-pinterest-supercharged-its-growth-team-with-experiment-idea-review-fd6571a02fb8
- Decker communication training – https://decker.com/
- 5 meeting ideas – https://blog.lucidmeetings.com/blog/the-5-best-meetings-for-distributed-customer-support-teams
- How Basecamp communicates – https://basecamp.com/guides/how-we-communicate
- 10X Culture – https://www.hugo.team/10x
- Personalities – https://www.promptworks.com/blog/archetypes-personalities-in-your-meetings
- CSM Hiring Traits – https://www.customersuccessfieldguide.com/fieldguide/csm-hiring-traits
- Rebuilding motivation – https://thriveglobal.com/stories/how-to-recommit-rebuild-motivation-goal-setting-tips/
- CSM hero to specialist – https://successcoaching.co/blog/moving-from-csm-hero-to-specialization