In today’s landscape, growth at all costs is a thing of the past. Limitless funding rounds are no longer available, and buyers do not have unrestricted budgets. By this time in 2024, everyone is in on what Catalyst has been saying all along: customers need to be the foundation for growth.

We are now in a customer-led world.

However, today's go-to-market strategies are not designed to drive customer-led growth. They come from the era of looser budgets and straightforward software renewals. They have been institutionalized with tools that have not kept up with the realities of today. Since 2022, industry-wide declines in retention and expansion rates indicate that times have changed. 

This means customer success practices must evolve, and yesterday’s tools don’t solve today’s problems. You need more to succeed, and businesses can no longer survive if they don’t deliver customer value quickly and on a recurring basis.

Welcome to the next generation of customer success: The revenue revolution.

We couldn’t think of a better way to mark this change in the industry than to announce that we have joined forces with Totango, category creators who have long been a leader in the space and work with some of the largest organizations in the world to power customer-led growth. 

Together, we are on a mission to keep companies in business and help them thrive. 

• Catalyst is an innovative thought leader—As co-founders, Kevin and I saw the turn toward revenue and post-sale lifecycle management—so together, we built a modern, intuitive product to power positive business outcomes for fast-growing companies.
• Totango is a category creator—their founder literally wrote the book on customer success—and their software is used by some of the largest CS teams in the world. 

Together, we empower not only customer success teams but the entire post-sale revenue organization to thrive by investing in their most valuable asset: customers. 

A CRM is not enough.

Despite the name, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools do not center around the customer. Built at a time when outbound sales were the primary source of revenue, CRMs left the post-sale relationship as an afterthought. In a recurring revenue world, today's customers demand and deserve more—a personalized, connected experience that aligns with their individual goals and values. A CRM offers a fragmented approach to growth over a customer’s lifetime, discouraging cross-departmental collaboration. 

The result: stunted customer growth running on ineffective initiatives.

Traditional CSPs miss the mark for CRO and CFO forecast needs

Customer Success Platforms (CSPs) address these limitations to some extent, but they also have their drawbacks. Often, they are built to focus on a narrow scope of customer success and present an incomplete picture, leaving the broader enterprise out of the loop on vital customer interactions and opportunities. CSPs, traditionally aligned with the customer success team, can struggle to disseminate crucial customer insights to other areas of the business where they also hold relevance. A limited platform can only show a partial view of the customer’s engagement with the enterprise, failing to capture the entire spectrum of the relationship and areas of growth potential.

The need for a unified solution and CS revolution

By unifying the capabilities of a CRM and those of a customer success platform, we can bridge the gap to create a unified customer-centric solution—an enterprise customer growth platform. This innovative approach enables businesses to address customer needs and opportunities in a manner that is both comprehensive and cohesive.

What does this mean for you, our customers?

While we are fueled by leading this revenue revolution, we are focused on maintaining continuity and commitments to current customers. In short, nothing changes today. We have two great products that will continue to benefit from upgrades and enhanced experiences. With our combined roster of features, we will deliver our customers the best of both worlds. Our roadmap will provide immediate feature upgrades while simultaneously building the leading revenue revolution with a unified product. 

Alistair Rennie and I will lead the unified organization as co-CEOs to champion this shift, and we are aligned in our belief that businesses need more than traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems or a standalone customer success platform (CSP) to thrive in this new era. I will lead our GTM functions while Alistair guides our product, design, and engineering teams. Together, we will ensure that our organization innovates quickly and delivers on our vision as an enterprise customer growth platform—a holistic solution designed to truly manage customer relationships, driven by a methodology that enables recurring value across the post-sale journey. 

1. Cohesive customer experience

We have always offered a powerful 360-degree view of the customer, ensuring that all engagements and interactions are connected, coherent, and aligned with delivering on customers’ desired outcomes. Combined with Totango, we plan to offer AI capabilities that allow your teams to more easily pull insights from disparate data points into a coherent story able to be shared quickly with stakeholders.

2. Enterprise scale and data democratization

Catalyst has made it easy to share customer data across the entire GTM organization, encouraging a collaborative effort focused on mutual customer outcomes rather than individual departmental goals. We plan to offer open APIs to pull in more data and, conversely, pull this data out to share across your entire business.

3. Workflows to streamline retention and expansion

By leveraging detailed customer insights and predictive analytics, our customers have achieved significant growth through targeted retention and expansion initiatives that are tailor-made for their customer base. Together, we plan to augment our powerful playbook capabilities with additional capabilities, including designed campaign building and more.

The revolution is here. Your customers are calling

The future of business is customer-led, and a robust enterprise customer growth platform will be critical for organizations looking not just to survive, but thrive. With this conviction, we extend our hand to enterprises, ready to guide them into this new era of growth where the customer is paramount. With a unified, customer-focused approach, the possibilities for revenue growth are limitless. And we hope your expertise will help guide us on this breakthrough journey. 

Read more from my co-CEO, Alistair Rennie, and stay tuned for exclusive opportunities to connect with our team on the product roadmap and market-leading opportunities ahead.