Every (for profit) business is focused on driving revenue with some companies being better at it than others.
If your organization operates using revenue as the primary focus to increase revenue, then ironically the company is not performing as effectively as it could be to drive revenue.
When post sales plays (i.e. execution) to further retention and expansion are all about the renewal and expansion itself, it usually causes a customer experience dissonance which makes the task at hand more onerous than it needs to be, and opens up the possibility of introducing poor experiences for the customer.
You know the plays that I am talking about - the 120-day renewal plans which reverse engineer account clean-up 120 days prior to the renewal so the customer will say yes, or the expansion play that highlights new products or features irrespective of whether they align to the customer’s business needs or readiness.
Those ones.
To effectively drive revenue the customer should adopt seamlessly, realize value and be ready and willing to do more with the product.
In other words, driving revenue is the result of effective customer success, not the focus of it.
The former is a customer centric, versus vendor centric, approach to realizing results and ultimately much more efficient.
How to drive revenue effectively.
Peter Drucker famously said “The purpose of a business is to create and keep customers”.
When companies do this efficiently and profitably they are rewarded with the money required to keep them going and growing.
In the early days of Software-as-a-Service, subscription business, Salesforce accurately identified that retaining customers is critical for the requisite profit, and the profession of Customer Success was born.
Although still nascent as an industry in its operational practices, the objective of Customer Success is to make sure customers successfully adopt the technology as efficiently as possible so that they quickly realize the business benefits of the application.
When Customer Success focuses on customers achieving business value, executes in a manner that makes it easy and enjoyable for the customer to do so, and they are able to demonstrate to the customer the return on investment of the purchase, the risk of the customer leaving is significantly reduced.
In fact, expansion revenue out of the customer base is also notably increased.
The point is, when done well, customer retention and expansion is an exercise in effective product adoption and value realization, not in advanced sales methodologies.
When a business understands how to effectively deliver customer success, it is, as a result, effectively driving revenue.