DAN STEINMAN

Chief Operating Officer at Gainsight and author of ‘Customer Success – How innovative companies are reducing churn and growing recurring revenue’

Ensuring a customer-led approach to business has been the focus of my career for 30 years. We've called it a lot of different things – Account Management, Customer Relationship Management (yes, CRM), Customer Experience, Customer Advocacy, and most recently, Customer Success. The meaning of the term has morphed a bit but its fundamental essence and purpose has not. However, in the mid-2000's, something major did change – the urgency. The urgency changed dramatically when the subscription pricing model became popular and industries became increasingly digitised. For all the prior years in the history of many industries, vendors had largely been in charge. For example, in the technology sector, purchases for business were usually big-ticket items, implementations literally took years, companies had to buy hardware and data centres in order to run software systems, and the cost of the software was paid up front. In most cases, the customer's money was in the vendor's bank account for 2+ years before a user ever saw the application on their screen. However, the subscription model changed all of that and ushered in a secondary movement called Customer Success. I've been fortunate to be at the forefront of that movement in my roles at Gainsight over the past seven years.

So the Subscription Economy created the need for Customer Success which has become a very large marketplace of its own. All that is interesting and wonderful from the standpoint of vendors, but the most important element hidden behind all of the product development and organisational change is that the power in the vendor-customer relationship has shifted to the customer. This power shift was inevitable simply because the availability of information drastically altered the buying process. Regardless of what percentage you might put on it, it's inarguable that much of the sales process these days is completed before the vendor and customer actually speak. Not only that but some of the most valuable content about a vendor and about their products no longer comes from the vendor – it comes from other customers! Talk about a loss of control. Third-party review sites (both reviewing your products and services as well as your company) are common. Every customer has a voice through various social media channels. LinkedIn makes it so easy to find someone you know who is already using the product or service which you are evaluating. For me in the technology sector, almost none of our customers have data centres or buy hardware anymore because the vendors take on all of that pain and risk. Then we took this evolution one step further and put those customers on a subscription so they can walk away from us without a backward glance. The Customer Economy that we now live in is not a wave, it's a tsunami! And it's turning companies upside down. Every single organisation is being impacted and new ones are being created as we speak.

When it comes to describing the ultimate goal of any organisation today, I think Chris and Daniel have really nailed it in this book with the simple term Customer Growth. After all, the bottom line has to be the bottom line. No CEO or Board is going to agree to invest in something that doesn't drive either growth or profitability. If customers hold all of the power, as we claim they now do, then they also hold the keys to our growth and our success. Those running recurring revenue businesses today already know this because they see 50, 60, 70, and even 80% of their revenue coming from existing customers. This message can apply to non-recurring revenue models too. Getting this message out, alongside the practical advice on how to execute on it is critical, and that's why I'm proud and privileged to play a very small part in Chris and Daniel's bold vision for not just a book but a C-change to help organisations become customer-led in everything they do to drive sustainable growth.

Geoffrey Moore, author of ‘Crossing the Chasm’, states that customers today are the scarce commodity, not the product or service. If that's true, then we should be learning everything we can from the companies disrupting their industries by putting customers first. You'll get some of these inside stories about Starling Bank, Slack, Ritz Carlton, Signify, formerly Philips Lighting and many more in this book. In my opinion, it's critical that this book has not been written by academics sitting in their ivory tower but by those who have been in the trenches strategically and operationally dealing with this seismic shift. Some will ignore this massive business shift – but at their own peril. The fact that you are reading this says that you are not ignoring it but attempting to understand it. I commend you for taking this first step. So – embrace The Customer Catalyst spirit and apply the C-change growth engine to your organisation. I know it will pay you great dividends. Enjoy!