How do you fight churn?
In this customer webinar we dive into the remarkable story of how Forecastr significantly reduced churn by 50% through a strategic application of Custify’s insights.
In this engaging session, Steven Plappert, Co-Founder & CEO of Forecastr shows us :
- How they identified potential churn risks
- The strategies Forecastr used to execute powerful customer success initiatives
- Practical knowledge and actionable ideas to implement in your organization in order to better leverage your customer success tool.
Intro
Philipp 00:00
Today’s webinar is about enhancing your customer success experience. And we have Steven here, who’s going to share his experience. A brief introduction that we already did. So I’m Philipp. I’m the founder of Custify. And this is Stephen, he’s the founder and CEO of Forecastr. It’s not his first journey. Even more interesting, I think, is his experience. And just to give you guys kind of an outline of what we’re going to talk about today.
What are the challenges that Steven and the team face? What was happening there? This is particularly useful for this part of the audience who potentially faces similar challenges at this time. Then, how did the team adopt Custify, the customer success platform? And of course, last but not least, what were the results that they could achieve? Okay, Steven, let’s start with the challenges. And let’s give the audience a bit of a better idea of what you guys are doing. So can you tell us a bit more about Forecastr?
Steven 01:11
Yeah, Philip, I’d love to, and Thanks for that opportunity!
Forecastr is a company that is really trying to make the whole process of building and managing your financial model a lot easier, and a lot more useful. It’s a process that’s typically done in a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, or Google Sheets or something like that. And so we built an online integrated web application for it, the Forecastr platform. And that is your financial model. So it forecasts your revenue and budgets or expenses. It’s where you plan your hires. It’s where you understand your cash and your runway. It’s how you report to investors, anything that involves the financial health of the company.
And we’ve been doing it for three and a half years, we’ve got over 650 customers, and anything from a pre-revenue startup up to businesses doing 20-30 million in annual revenue. And we are very much a SaaS plus human company. We’ve got a software platform, which is Forecastr but then we wrap it in a lot of human support. So every single customer gets a 30-day white-glove onboarding with a financial modeling expert, just to make sure that they get a great financial model built for their company and they’ve got a really good understanding of their numbers and their levers and their financial health. And then if you want, we even will allow you to pay for a fractional analyst to just keep the model up for you. We even do fractional CFO services. So there’s a lot that we can offer as your business scales. And if anybody’s interested, we’d absolutely love to work with you at Forecastr.co. I put the URL in the chat.
Philipp 02:53
Yep, this, put it in the chat for everyone. And guys, if you also are looking to raise money, I think Steven, your tool makes this much easier because that’s what your board is going to expect anyway, a proper forecasting or financial reporting. So guys, head over to the URL Forecastr.co, as posted by Steven in the chat. Steven, now you mentioned three years in business. Let’s go over and let’s talk about the challenges that you had. I think you are with Custify, for like a year and a bit, if I remember correctly. So what were the challenges before that? What did you guys face?
Forecastr’s challenges
Steven 06:04
Yeah, it’s a great question and there were many challenges. I would say the biggest thing challenge that we face and really one of the biggest mistakes we made as an early-stage company. Forecastr had an annual subscription business model. So we charge annually that’s paid upfront, and our renewal cycles are annual as well. We launched the product in January of 2021. And so for the first year, we didn’t have any churn, right? We didn’t have any churn, nobody even had the ability to turn.
And one of the biggest mistakes that we made, was not really having great visibility into our customer activity and behavior. So the one that’s on the bottom of the screen there, it wasn’t until late in 2021, when I kind of woke up and I was like, oh, we’re about to start renewing customers. Are people even using this thing? And so we went in there to look, and we didn’t really have very much visibility into that. So we couldn’t really see it. When the renewal cycle started to occur in early 2022, our term was really high. And we realized that, in fact, a lot of our customers had a great onboarding, and they really loved it. And then the analyst was there, it was super easy. But then afterward, they were really having a hard time operationalizing the model and using it.
So that term was really high, and our visibility was really low. So our ability to fight churn was relatively low as well. So that was a really big problem for us. And because the term was so high, it was really kind of existential. So we were like, oh, you know, man, we really need to solve this problem. Like, we need to understand our customer behavior and their activity, and we need to understand our customer health. How healthy are our customers? How active and how much value are they getting, so that we can bring churn down? And that’s when we started looking for solutions. And that’s when we ended up, you know, going with Custify.
One of the benefits, I think of Custify which we’ll get to it a little bit later was it that you do have a lot of different systems these days that you use. We use Stripe for our payment processing, we use HubSpot as a CRM, of course, we’ve got data around our customer activity in our database as well. And so we really wanted to find a way to get like a single source of truth, that’s something that we care a lot about. So that you know this, it would be easy to manage. And so you’d be able to go to one place and see how things are going. Right?
Philipp 06:07
Steven, you mentioned churn was high when that kicked in or when you had the first renewals came in. Was that was there already kind of a team in place? A customer success team? I think this is also interesting for the audience. When did you start actually hiring a dedicated team to look into that? Was that before you started looking into Custify? Was that while you were actually realizing it? Or when did you actually look into hiring the first persons in the team?
Steven 06:41
And it’s a great question, I’d say it was really, so not from a hiring perspective, but from a responsibility perspective is really all at the same time. And so what I’ll unpack that by saying, you know, annual subscription business 30 Day White Glove onboarding. So like, we have a team of analysts doing the onboarding. So they were in charge of onboarding, they’re in charge of activation. They are in a sense, that customer success manager, their account manager, whatever you want to call it, they are representatives of the company that is there to assist the customer.
But the vast majority of our focus was on that first month on how our model is getting built. We weren’t really tracking, and we had no way to track their activity and behavior and health on a post-onboarding basis. We weren’t really doing anything there. We were just kind of letting them fly.
And so when we finally got some visibility into that we saw all the activity was low, the churn started coming in really high, we immediately said, “Okay, that onboarding team, they really need to be more of a customer success team.” We made the call to just have those analysts manage the relationship throughout the customers’ lifecycle. A conversation that we’re having about is if that’s really the right idea and if we shouldn’t have an onboarding team, in a success team, but I would say adding longer-term success as a responsibility, as well as setting up a really good system that they could work in. We’re really kind of done at the same time for us. And they were done. You know, when we started to see that churn was coming in so high, and we just didn’t really have a lot of understanding of why that was.
Philipp 08:23
Yeah. So we have extremely high or surprisingly high churn, which you also mentioned, of course, puts a lot of pressure on the sales team. If you guys have the same situation, keeping your NRR up, what can you do when you lose customers where you have to add even more? Then you also mentioned the single source of those. So data was distributed in many different systems. You named the CRM side as the billing system. I’m guessing email system, I guess you also have Gmail and Slack. And did you also have a ticketing system already? Or like a support ticketing system in place?
Steve 09:00
Intercom and Live Chat.
Philipp 09:05
Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. That’s already like five systems where data is hosted. And then the visibility was limited. When we had the conversation before there were also two more things you mentioned. So the CX team strategy, and the reporting. Now, reporting, I guess that wherever from your own customers that use your tool for reporting in a financial way, can you also speak a little bit about those two? About those two things? What were those challenges about?
Steven 09:34
Yeah, totally.
I mean on the CX team strategies of customer success, in the early days of when we started to see the high churn, we just started to say, “Okay, well, we got to do something to fight this problem. So we came up with a strategy, we started implementing it, while we were looking for a solution, while we ended up going with Custify.
And the initial strategy was to reach out to the customers and try to make sure they were having success. I mean, you’re doing that, and in a pretty kind of wild, wild west kind of way, where there’s not really a good system, where we’re tracking the interactions that we have, who is hitting what customer and when. We didn’t really have any kind of understanding of which customers we should hit up, we’re just kind of hitting up everybody in a blanket way, and not really saying, hey, we need to hit these medium-risk customers and get them active or hit these high-risk customers and turn the tide on them.
So they just kind of fly in blind, I think that’s the main thing there are good intentions, but just like didn’t, didn’t have the ability to really make the most impact. Then all that rolling up, we’re 33 person company now, the co-founder, Logan and I are at a higher level, and we wanted to get good visibility into how things are going on an employee-by-employee basis. And for the reps. Who’s doing the best? Who’s doing the worst? Not to shame anybody. But to say, whoever’s doing the best, maybe they could do a lunch and learn with everybody else, and how they can do better. Just a solid kind of reporting that we can make decisions based on and adjustments.
Philipp 11:20
So this is almost like a head of CS, basically understanding team performance, understanding who does what, what’s the portfolio of those guys looking like. That’s the primary reporting focus, right? A lot of challenges. And I’m sure that in the audience, because I guess most of the audience doesn’t have a CS platform. That means they probably share quite some of those challenges that you had, as well. Let’s look into solution mode.
The solution: Custify
Let’s see what you did and how Custify worked. And we can start with this challenge you had where you mentioned, all the data was in different systems. I can see here Intercom, Stripe, those two that we already talked about, Gmail and HubSpot, being your CRM, and then there’s your logo. So can you explain a little bit to the audience?
What kind of data is relevant for you as in customer success? What are the things that you are sending to Custify from your own product? From Intercom we get the support answers and questions, from Stripe we get all the renewal days the MRR, the revenue data, and the invoices. From Gmail, we get all the meetings and the emails, from HubSpot naturally all the conversations your sales team has. Quick question before we go to answer the previous one. Are you guys more of a sales-driven organization, product-led, or somewhere in the middle? Can people just go and sign up? Or do they go through a sales process, which is typically the case for Custify? People would talk first to a Sales rep and then they would kind of go and start with Custify. How was that for you?
Steven 13:05
Yeah, so we’re sales driven in that way as well. Marketing kind of drives the leads in so we do a lot of inbound lead gen. But then we run everybody through a sales demo. And that’s how folks get under an understanding of Forecastr.
Custify 13:23
Custify is a tool that can connect up to 25 different useful software applications, your CRM, Outlook or Gmail, so your email gateway and the place where you host your meetings, Stripe or Charge, all those that manage your revenue, and a lot of support tools, Intercom, Zendesk, etc. Now, I’m trying to get a little bit further. This is a real screenshot from your Custify and so into your health scores into what defines a healthy customer. And how did you set that up? And what’s the data that you are actually sending to Custify to make that possible?
Steven 14:06
Yeah, so the big one, as far as data from our database is event data and activity data. So we need to understand if the customer has a subscription and the interaction with sales and the communication stuff, but we need to understand the actual customer behavior and activity. Are they even getting into it? Are they even logging into Forecastr? Are they updating their financial model? Are they viewing their financials? Are they sharing that information with investors or other team members?
What are the critical behaviors that we believe we need to see in order to assume value creation? If someone’s not using the product, they’re not getting value. So if they are using the product, what are the key behaviors that they should do each month, which signal to us that they’re, in fact getting the value that we want to provide? We need to know which customers are actually doing that, and getting the value, and probably leave him alone. Then we need to know the customers that are not getting value because we need to change that. If we don’t change that they’re gonna churn. So customer behavior and customer activity are really critical.
Philipp 15:20
So the scores that we see here, the updated metrics, view financials, update assumptions, and update expense, are examples from your product, but I can do in your product in order to get value from your product. Is that right?
Steven 15:30
100%? You’re updating your expenses and assumptions. These are the things that drive the model, you’re taking a look at the financials to understand the impacts of that. Absolutely, these are the core things that we want folks to do every month to have good financial hygiene is what we call it.
Philipp 15:48
Now, Steven, the question that our team gets a lot throughout the sales process when we talk to CS teams is “How do I know what kind of data do I send?” And “in what format do I send it to you?” Do you remember the concierge onboarding? I know that you guys onboarded quite a while ago with Custify, but maybe you can tell me a little bit about your experience. How was this onboarding experience and what did the team like on the Custify side work with you in order to be sure that these are the metrics that make the most sense?
Onboarding with Custify
Steven 16:19
Yeah, I do remember.
The onboarding with Custify is great, it’s one of the things that really kind of pumped us up about the company because you guys take a very similar approach to the two of us in the sense that it’s a human approach. You’ve put a lot of love and care into the onboarding. And we really appreciated that.
A lot of helpful team members could answer all our questions. We did a Slack channel connection, which is really nice. It’s kind of meet us where we were. And then you guys had a lot of good thoughts on kinda like forms to fill out or like frameworks for thinking about what types of information we would want to understand in order to track customer behavior, which then helped us work with our engineering team to make sure that we have access to that event data that we could send to Custify the answers to those questions.
So I do feel like there was a nice structure provided by Custify. And then the main thing I loved was a lot of points along that journey, where we just had questions and we’d ask those questions, and you guys would answer them really quickly. So I think, for me is like the catch-all. It’s like the frameworks and stuff are great, but at the end of the day, I’m setting up new software. I might have a lot of questions. I might have questions many times I might need an extra meeting. And you guys never kind of nickeled and dimed us on that and you’re always really speedy and responsive. And I think that that made a big difference for us.
Philipp 17:52
Steven, thanks so much! I appreciate that feedback. And this is also what we try to or if I have some sales conversations, which I’m still active a little bit and doing some of the demo calls myself just to stay in touch with the market.
It’s also what I tried to emphasize is there’s the software piece, but there’s also the human component, just as you described it. Meaning how well can I basically get support? Do I get strategy coaching? Do I understand what metrics should I send? Or is that all on me, an FAQ or a section in the product wouldn’t probably have, because it was very specific, I guess, to your use cases.
Another thing that I remember, you mentioned, is the insight into client adoption. And that can be seen here on the screen. Again, that’s a screen from your, from your Custify instance. And you also work with what we call life cycles. So these lifecycles, this is real data from your product. And I hope the audience can read it. I know the font is a little bit small. But can you speak a little bit about what that part does? So health scores are clear. Basically, we look into key metrics. If someone gets value, do they log in? Do they update the metrics? What are those life cycles doing?
Steven 19:14
Yeah, so the lifecycles for me are providing a structure that helps us understand if customers are reaching certain critical milestones in their customer journey. For us the onboarding lifecycle, the one on the top there, like in the first 30 days, and in order to kind of set the customer up for success or believe that this is going to be a successful engagement, there are certain behaviors that we want to see. We want to see customers do certain actions a certain number of times as we go through that 30 Day onboarding.
The lifecycle it just packages all that up and helps us aggregate those goals and say, “Hey, are customers succeeding in their onboarding or not? It provides a nice structure. And then after onboarding what are the actions that we want to see folks take and after how much time do they tend to really get a sense of adoption? They’ve operationalized, that at this point, they’re using it regularly, and they’re at lower risk for churn.
And so I think that’s where that lifecycle just kind of allows you to just bundle up certain kinds of milestones or areas in somebody’s customer journey, and understand how successfully they’re moving through that journey.
Philipp 20:36
So basically, project management if you want to say, “Hey, I need the customer to do certain things.” And I guess specifically the onboarding one, that was the part that you were missing before, when you said they did the 30 days, and then they said like, okay, should be all fine. And you had no visibility if they were actually adopting the product.
And I think one of the other things was important. Here we had to change the name. So we’re not going to frame anyone. But this is kind of the view that you have created to see how is the team doing, right? Like, what’s the portfolio health? What’s the number of notes people take the number of meetings and emails and it gives you just an easy way to kind of understand, have you implemented this solution? Like some people basically go for lunch with others? Or coach them on what they do? Or how do you currently organize the team?
Steven 21:30
Yeah, totally! So we have this kind of dashboard set up, which I personally love. We have a Director of Customer Success and Alex is his name and he manages now the team of analysts that are really kind of fighting the good fight in terms of making sure that we’re actually providing value for our customers, which is our goal. And so he is using dashboards like this to understand which analysts are doing the best, which analysts are struggling a little bit and need more of his help, to understand who’s kind of putting in the hours and doing the work so to speak.
And then I will sometimes come in and check this out as well. It just gives me a great kind of quick bird’s eye view. I don’t have enough time to go deep on it and don’t need to because Alex is but yeah, I’ll jump in quickly, just to get a quick read. Yeah, just to get a quick understanding usually before I meet with Alex during Manager Meeting.
How Forcastr decreased churn rate by 50%
Philipp 22:28
Great. Um, Steven, let’s talk a little bit about the results. This is something that is great to have here as well because when people look for a Success Platform, many of the times it’s the CS leader and the CS leader needs to fight for a budget.
In order to do that they have to create some kind of business case, they have to come up with “Why would I give money to you?” That’s typically what I would also ask for if someone from my team comes and says “Hey, I want this software.” And I’m going to ask what’s the ROI. What are we going to do with this? Let’s talk a little bit about the ROI and about the things that you have achieved. And this is, again, like the numbers you provide. So it’s not something that we just made up. Churn, you mentioned was a big problem when it kicked in. Can you tell us or can you tell the audience a bit more like what is the situation now? How did this develop?
Steven 23:24
Yeah, totally. So, before Custify, we have these annual numbers. So basically, we do annual renewals annual churn 70% of your customers churning over the course of a year. This is completely unsustainable, right? That is an existential crisis for a company. So in terms of things that we felt like could be in our ability to create a better company driving retention, minimizing churn was number one, right?
So we needed to find a solution for this. And as you said, it’s been a little bit over a year. So we’ve been a little bit over a year with Custify and getting our house in order on the customer success side, and we cut it down a lot. I mean, it’s down to 33% annually, in the first year, it’s actually even lower than that, when it comes to customers renewing in their second year, it’s actually below 20%.
We’ve been thrilled with that, but that, I’ll be honest, that wasn’t all Custify, right? It’s a lot of hard work on our team, it’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, right? There’s a lot that goes into customer success. But you know, I have no problem saying it because it’s true, and Philipp didn’t pay me to say this – Custify was a huge, huge help in that.
I think if we didn’t have good software for getting an understanding of our customer’s behavior and health and managing the process of actually like, trying to turn the tides on the one that needs it, I think we would be very much still sitting here at 50%, or probably more. I mean, it’s like, I think we still would have had gains because we would have been putting into structures that weren’t in place before. But there’s just no way we would have been as effective. Because we would have been mostly falling and flying blind.
I think data is such a powerful thing. So it’s been a big difference for us, I would say, in some ways, you can say really kind of saved our business right? Like, we could not run this business on 70% annual churn. 33% in the first year, and 20%, in the second year. There’s still room to grow there, there’s still room to improve, but we can build a business on that. So yeah, it’s been a huge difference-maker for us.
Philipp 25:38
But Steven, first of all, congrats on that! You guys turned around so quickly. This is definitely a significant improvement. And as you say, 70% annual churn, that’s really tough to build something sustainable, because you more or less lose exactly what you add there and it’s just eating up all the growth. I think the underlying justification for that, for this reduction of churn, is also the health scores that they were in the beginning, and they improved. And do you know why they improved so significantly? Do you feel that this is because you were able to speak to the customers that didn’t adopt the product correctly? And can you also tell the audience a bit about what you guys are doing then with them?
If there’s someone and they struggle with onboarding and they’re struggling with product adoption, what’s your team then doing? Do they proactively reach out? Or how do they do that? They have built playbooks in Custify that notify them about that, or how do they know which customer to talk to?
Steven 26:38
Yeah, great question. So I think in terms of improving customer health starts with understanding it, right? It starts with just getting a read of what is your customer health and which customers are in poor health, and which of those is in good health. That was a big start, is just kind of pointing our efforts. And then what we do, it’s a mixture of kind of proactive and reactive movements, so one of the things we implemented since working with Custify, isn’t just like quarterly model check-in. So on the front end and onboarding, we tell customers “Hey, we are going to meet with you once a quarter to check in on your model and make sure your model is updated and relevant.”
We bake that in an onboarding, we spend that time each quarter and just knowing that customers love it, and it’s a forcing function like they want to keep the model up to date and that kind of stuff. So that was a really nice one. And that’s our pro-reactive native and just baking in a cadence of interacting with the customer over the course of their annual subscription. And then the reactive stuff is using Custify to understand customers and based on their health. Our analysts, on a weekly basis use Custify to get in, and look at the list of the customers that they’re a CSM for, look at the health of that customer, the last time they use Forecastr or their activity, etc. And they’ll reach out to say “Hey, I see you haven’t used Forecastr in a few months. I’d love to help make sure your model is updated. So you have a good beat on your cash. Here’s how much cash your model is saying you have right now, is that accurate? They’ll do things like that to just try to get on a call with the customer and get that activity up.
Philipp 28:26
Basically getting visibility again. Excellent. Steven, you mentioned already, so we can probably go over that quite accurately. So you mentioned you look into those statistics. Your Head of Customer Success uses statistics and performance monitoring in their data-driven decision-making. This is something I guess we could even do an extra podcast about data in customer success. I can’t also emphasize enough how important data-driven decisions are, in general, in a business, but that includes also customer success. How do you feel about that? Was it very difficult for the team to send these data points to Custify? How long did your onboarding take? This is something that typically people also are scared of, “it will take me a year to send all the data”. Do you remember how this was for you guys from start to finish, until everything was set up? Or at least set up in a way that you guys started working on it.
Steve 29:26
Yeah, I do remember. I think it took us it’s probably a month to have things set up and everything. And I’m not gonna lie, it did take a few months to really set everything up. This is partially because Custify exposed that we had work that we needed to do on our end. For instance, sending the right data that we wanted in Custify.
It was a nice kind of forcing function for us to get our data in order. That it wasn’t a very painful process, I would certainly say within the first 30 days, we had our good solid kind of data in the platform to start making better decisions. And then it probably took us three months to get it operationalized. We got all of our systems connected to it, our team has ramped up on it, and that’s when we really started to see the gains.
Philipp 30:20
And one of the things that also I think is very good for the audience from the learnings during implementation. Is there something you could recommend for teams that basically are about to implement Custify as a customer success plan? What would you say? Are the learnings retrospectively where you might be even having prepared better? If you would have known what you know now, is there something that you would have prepared differently?
Steven 30:51
Yeah, one of the big things that I would have made sure we had on the front end was just a specific ID that is a unique identifier for a customer. You have a customer that’s in HubSpot and a customer that’s in Stripe, a customer that’s in your database, right? Those are the same customers, but those systems don’t always know you need a singular ID that represents that customer and all systems that Custify inherits, we ended up getting there with Stripe ID and that kind of stuff and that made our life a lot easier.
But we had to spin our wheels for a while trying to just make sure that everything was all lining up and consistent. You know what I mean? And so that was something that really took us extra time. And we could have sped things up on the front end quite a bit.
Otherwise, I think one of the things that we did do well when it came to implementing was using the frameworks that you guys offered. But we had a good idea of what behavior we wanted to track and what activity we wanted to see and what we wanted to get done so that allowed us to really speed things up because we weren’t coming in saying “I don’t really know, we just think we want something”. We’re coming in knowing we want to be able to track these events and we want to be able to understand it in these ways. We were pretty particular and that was just good. I think you should know what you want to get out of it. Know the activity and behavior you want to track and then make sure you do have a good clean, kind of data that you know because you’re going to have these customers in multiple systems. Make sure you have a unique identifier for them so that everything can all get plugged up and be consistent.
Q&A
Philipp 32:35
Excellent! Guys, if you listen to that, that’s something that eventually you have time before you start with the subscription. Anything else I would say I invite you to get in touch again with your Custify work specialist. Get in touch, I’m going to also have my email address in the chat in a second. Get in touch with me directly, if you have any specific questions.
And again, shout out to Steven for providing the data and being willing to share this kind of data. Not everyone is so open about also the challenges that the team has with high churn and everything. So Steven, I really appreciate that you shared this today with us and with the audience.
I see a couple of questions already. Let’s hop over to the questions.
Steven, one of the things I see here in the questions is you have Mixpanel. Why didn’t you just use Mixpanel to build the health scores? What was the thing missing there that you say “I can’t run just Mixpanel, I need a CS platform on top?
Steven 33:45
Yeah, totally. So yeah, we did have Mixpanel. I think it’s good for aggregated data and seeing how many customers, in general, are logging in or how many customers are updating an expense, etc. I think it is pretty good for that. I liked the visuals, I liked the reporting. I liked the charting, I really liked the UI and the platform.
I think where Mixpanel really falls down is on that discrete customer behavior, that individual customer behavior. Mixpanel does not do a very good job of telling me, this is how this customer is behaving and this is how healthy this customer is and that was really what we were looking for. We wanted to understand on a customer-by-customer basis. How much success are they having in the platform? We weren’t able to get that with Mixpanel. And I think that’s ultimately what we ended up getting from Custify – a platform that allowed us to understand on a customer-by-customer basis how healthy is the customer and then a lot of helpful structures like these life cycles and other stuff built around that to just supercharge that.
Philipp 34:50
Got it! One question I see and we actually hear this a lot: I have HubSpot. I can build that out in HubSpot. Totally understand and it makes sense for Mixpanel. What were the reasons for you saying well, HubSpot is not enough?
HubSpot as a sales CRM or as a CRM was already in place when you decided to use Custify. What were the reasons that you said “HubSpot doesn’t do the trick for my CS team?”
Steven 35:16
Yeah, great question.
So first of all, I never even really considered HubSpot as a potential solution for this. They may have a bunch of functionality that I’m unaware of. But I think when we realized that this was a big problem, we said: “We want a platform that does this, and this is the heart and soul of what they do”. This isn’t like me shoehorning this big company problem into this other system. The way we did the math on it is if we can cut our churn rate even down by 10 or 20%, the ROI on this is going to be massive. We need a dedicated solution with a dedicated focus and they’ve built a whole company around just solving this problem. You know what I mean? And I think that we didn’t even look at other things like that. We just said, look, let’s do a Google search. And let’s do a search on what is the best platform for managing customer success and retention. Full transparency, we found Churn Zero and Custify, we evaluated both options we went with Custify, and we’re happy we did. So that was how the process went for us.
Philipp 36:29
Excellent, Steven, that answered already another question I saw here from Vic, which is regarding the ROI of the tool. You mentioned even 10% and then it’s already kind of a no-brainer not to do it from the ROI perspective?
Imagine there’s a Head of Customer Success who needs to fight for this tool. What would you do? How would you build a business case around Custify now that you know that? What would you recommend putting in a presentation to the board to their CEO to fight for a tool like Custify?
Steven 39:26
Yeah, easy one. I think there are two things. It’s churn and expansion. The difference for every business model, whatever, but it’s keeping customers here and it’s getting more money out of them, right?
I mean, from a business case, the more successful your customers are, the more they stick around, and the more successful you are. The more you know about that, the better you can upsell them and provide even more value to them. So it’s a very easy business case, in my opinion. It’s a business case of mitigating churn, it’s a business case of increasing expansion revenue. And I think it’s very easy to get this calculus like that. IGo to your finance team and you can ask them for the forecast at the end of the year, and say: “If we reduce churn by 10% and if we increase these expansion revenue streams by 10%, what revenue does that generate by the end of the year on an annual basis?”. I can almost guarantee you that number is gonna be way bigger than the cost of Custify.
Philipp 38:14
And what we typically also recommend is looking at the hirings or at the team. Let’s say the plan is to double the number of customers next year, what would you do in the CS team? Do you double the team or do you have a tool in place? Maybe you add one or two, but you don’t have to double the entire team. The team you said you had right now is how big? 3 CSMs?
Steven 38:36
We have nine financial analysts and they all do that kind of work. So I guess nine? Yep. and we have two managers on top of them.
Philipp 38:44
Huge team. Steven, thank you so much for being here today. I think we went through all the questions. Thank you to the audience for dropping the questions. I have also dropped my email address in the chat. So feel free to reach out to me or to anyone that you have already had contact with in Custify.
Steven thank you again, for being there. How can people reach you if they want to connect with you?
Steven 29:05
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having me here. It’s a pleasure. And I’m putting my email in the chat. steven@forecastr.co is my personal email. If I can be helpful in any way or answer any additional questions as you evaluate Custify, I am happy to do that. I’m a very happy customer. Yeah, I just hope everybody has a rest good rest of morning, afternoon, or evening, depending on where you are.
Philipp 39:31
There you go, guys. You have Steven’s email address there or hit them up on LinkedIn. I guess the same goes for my email addresses. Yeah. Hit me up on LinkedIn as well. Steven, thanks again! Thank you for everyone joining. As Steven said, Have a great rest of your evening, morning, or day!
Steven 49:48
See you later guys!
