True customer-led growth requires a lot of post-purchase insight. That means technology investments must go beyond pre-purchase information (CRM) to empower revenue teams to proactively identify customer behavior, manage engagement, and deliver recurring value. 

In short, you need to invest in a Customer Success Platform (CSP), recognizing that other systems like CRMs are powerful pre-acquisition tools, but not post-acquisition tools. 

You might be thinking… another platform to manage? 

The reality is, as highlighted by Gartner, CS platforms are crucial for recurring revenue organizations. Businesses still underestimate the fundamental need to unify post-sale data across their disparate systems and diverse, growing set of customers. And now, as the pace of acquisition growth continues to slow, investing into this technology has never been more critical. 

Investing in Technology is a Growing CX Mandate

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How technology empowers customer-led growth

When post-sale data and processes are optimized with the right technology, several benefits will be realized across your organization—and your bottom line. Below are the 10 predominant benefits that B2Bs can expect from their CSP investment, using Catalyst as the technology benchmark. And, the benefits are certainly not limited to this list alone.

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The 10 Benefits of a CS Platform Investment

Using Catalyst as the Technology Benchmark

1. Centralize and unify customer data: Integrated across your pre-sale (CRM) and post-sale (usage, events, support) platforms—Catalyst centralizes mission-critical customer data into a single platform to fuel your recurring revenue workflows.
2. Proactive, efficient post-sale productivity: Combined with Catalyst’s market-leading UI for adoption and actionability, empower your team to easily locate the data they need to make the right decisions faster while being able to document critical information and update Salesforce fields in real-time that connect your post-sale to pre-sale growth engine.
3. Scale performance with powerful automation: With advanced workflow automations (including multi-step sequencing) powered by your integrated customer data, enable your team to automatically monitor and execute the outcomes needed to move from adoption to revenue growth through customer expansion, retention, and advocacy.
4. Informative customer health scores: Aggregate customer insights into a single metric, as formulated by your business and customized to specific segments, to easily maintain a pulse check on customer health across all accounts at all times. 

5. Enterprise customer data modeling and analytics: Leverage intuitive, easy-to-use reporting and dashboards—including custom formulas and arithmetic—across data sources within Catalyst to avoid manual data modeling and efficiently identify post-sale performance metrics with the option of visualizing them into a trend graph.

6. Outcome-based customer journey management: Focus your team on outcomes instead of tasks at each step of the customer journey with Catalyst’s Journey Builder which drives value at every maturity stage based on clear goals. Enjoy the flexibility of building multiple journeys tailored to customer segments, with the ability to automate progression upon goals being met (tech-touch) or allow your team to decide when a customer has met their next stage of maturity (high-touch). 

7. Identification and execution of new revenue streams: Activate an entirely new revenue hub by using Catalyst’s Journey Builder and Playbook automations to streamline the identification and management of customer growth opportunities.

8. Customer impact and attribution tracking: With cross-platform customer data and workflows, allow your business to deeply understand customer sentiments, trends, and leading health indicators that measure the impact of your decisions on customer outcomes. 

9. Standardize post-sale best practices, including account management: Build and automate guided workflows that enable post-sale teams to follow the right course of action specific to your unique customer behavior and data (that can be automated for scale) to ensure account management workflows (such as customer adoption, upsells and renewals) are flawlessly executed. 
10. Elevate cross-functional collaboration: Multiple team members, from Sales to Marketing and Product, can enjoy the benefits of accessing centralized customer data in a single place to better inform campaigns, roadmap prioritization, prospecting, and more. 

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All of this leads to more top- and bottom-line performance. For example, investing in Catalyst’s CS platform helped RippleMatch achieve a 200% increase in upsell and cross-sell leads. Moreover, Teachers Pay Teachers achieved a 16% boost in retention using post-sale tech-touch automation with Catalyst.

How each team works with a CSP

Despite the name Customer Success Platform, every team interacts with a CSP in different ways—all with the goal of leveraging customer insights to inform making better decisions across their roles and departments—that ultimately lead to more business growth. 

In Customer Success: Implement and adopt a CSP as your central source of truth for all customer data, adoption and revenue growth. 

In Sales: Integrate your CSP into your sales tech stack, to achieve a unified revenue engine from prospect to customer advocate to revenue expansion.

In Marketing: Leverage your CSP as a data hub to track customer references, referrals, reviews, case studies, and other customer-generated content—while leveraging these insights to better inform your new business ICP (ideal customer profile) targeting.

In Product: Institutionalize your CSP as a critical source for product feedback, customer meeting notes, NPS sentiments, and analyze trends across your customer base. Ensure CS feedback is captured (and escalated as required) on feature requests, launch processes, at-risk accounts and other product-related feedback that can influence the roadmap.

In Ops: Operations needs to use CSP data to better refine the company’s overall revenue reporting from pre-sales to post-sales while ensuring the right workflows are set up to drive cross-functional efficiency. 

In the C-Suite: Leadership must set the tone for using a CSP to power customer-led growth and embrace focusing more efforts on driving customer revenue over new business in this new era.

The Power of Turning Customer 360 Insights into New Sales

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The right customer-led technology leads to faster growth 

Your Customer Success Platform is where all data lives to make decisions around your recurring revenue—from scaled adoption, revenue management, and enterprise data modeling—to inform customer retention, advocacy and growth. 

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