In today’s unpredictable market, delivering value quickly throughout the customer journey is not only imperative for customer success, retention, and satisfaction; it's also the only path to sustainable growth. Customers define what “value” means to them, and the market winners are the ones who deliver that value day in and day out—not necessarily perfectly, but consistently.
As Chief Customer Officer at Clari, with over two decades of experience in customer success, I’ve had the privilege of partnering with some of the world’s leading enterprises to drive sustainable revenue growth. I’ve witnessed the transformative power, both relationally and financially, of putting customers and their goals at the center of every business decision.
The Customer-Centric Approach
A critical industry shift is happening right now in the enterprise space as companies are moving away from the "growth at all costs" mindset to a more balanced (e.g., profitable and sustainable) approach to scaling. Every business exists to create and deliver value to its customers. When organizations align their efforts around the needs of their customers, they unlock growth opportunities, reduce customer churn, and build lasting trust and loyalty.
At Clari, our customer-first approach prioritizes customer objectives, use-case alignment, and adoption motions that drive specific outcomes. This approach helps our enterprise customers, like Zoom, Workday, and Adobe achieve their revenue objectives faster with predictability and confidence.
“Before going public, our board advised that we had a few years of accurate, predictable revenue results. We brought on Clari to instrument that process and have since successfully gone public with repeatable revenue execution cadences.”
Today’s customers demand more than a product, they expect an exceptional customer experience, fast time-to-value, and solutions that evolve with their business needs. To meet these expectations, we must go beyond transactional relationships and deeply understand our customers, their objectives, their challenges, their metrics: this is what fosters true partnerships and drives mutual success.
Why Customer Success Drives Revenue Growth
Retention is the backbone of revenue growth. But how do you retain customers?
It’s simple: deliver outcomes that customers value, deeply understand their objectives, and evolve with them as their business grows. By helping customers achieve their business goals and revenue objectives consistently, predictably, and quickly, customers become advocates and are excited to renew their business and grow the partnership. Customer success at Clari drives:
- Profitable Revenue Growth: Retaining current customers and generating recurring revenue is an excellent source of profitable, predictable growth compared to the higher cost of acquisition for a new customer.
- Reduced Churn: Customers who have realized value from your product are less likely to churn and more likely to be your best source of future revenue growth.
- Opportunity for Expansion: A satisfied customer who is meeting their business goals with help from your products is more likely to expand their investment, leading to profitable growth via increased upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
- Customer Advocacy: Customers who feel valued by your teams and have realized value through your products often become advocates and champions, driving referrals and enhancing the brand’s trust and reputation.
“At 6sense, customer success is central to generating recurring revenue. To drive smooth renewals, we needed the visibility, predictability, and alignment that Clari provides. Today, we can better deliver mutual value to our company and customers.”
At Clari, we embed customer success into our revenue cadence, ensuring alignment, predictability, and satisfaction with our broader company revenue objectives. This approach enables us to build lasting partnerships, spot and stop revenue leaks before they occur, and deliver measurable revenue growth.
Aligning Customer Success with Revenue Objectives
Our team sees customer success as the foundation of our revenue platform. It’s aligning on revenue objectives, delivering value specifically for those objectives, driving outcomes, building relationships, and acting with a sense of urgency. Here’s our approach:
- Adopt a Value-Based Mindset: At Clari, we focus on ensuring that every customer's experience exceeds the expectations they anticipated when they partnered with us. Whether it’s through faster time-to-value or deeper adoption, we tailor our efforts to deliver on their Revenue Objectives.
- Leverage Key Metrics and AI: We analyze leading indicators of customer success and retention within Clari so we can quickly and proactively address challenges and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences: Customers expect seamless experiences throughout their journey, whether through AI-driven self-service or personalized interactions. By offering multiple engagement options, we ensure we’re meeting customers where they are, in the ways they prefer and at their convenience.
- Optimize Early Lifecycle Moments: The first 30-60 days (maybe more depending on company size, complexity and implementation timeline) of a customer’s journey are critical for building trust and establishing a strong working partnership. The customer experience in the early days of the post-sales journey can be correlated to future renewal (or churn). Delivering a delightful, personalized, simplified onboarding experience helps deliver a quick win around early adoption and value and establishes a strong foundation for long-term success and partnership.
“Clari's support team is one of the best support experiences I've had with a vendor with no back and forth – I can always get in touch with a real person.”
How to Measure Customer Health
As the business adage goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” And customer health is no different.
Measuring this is crucial for understanding how well Clari is delivering outcomes aligned to customers’ revenue objectives, meeting (or even better, exceeding) customer expectations, and creating value–especially at the moments that matter in the customer lifecycle.
Here are the key metrics to focus on:
- Retention Metrics: Gross Retention Rate (GRR), Net Retention Rate (NRR), and Net Dollar Retention (NDR) highlight how well you’re retaining (GRR) and expanding your customer base (NRR/NDR). Careful to not mask a “leaky bucky” (e.g. declining GRR) with a strong cross-sell/upsell motion (e.g. strong NRR/NDR).
- Engagement Metrics: These leading indicators to the retention metrics include adoption rates, active use of workflows (at Clari, we track how many days/week our platform is used), and participation in quarterly or executive business reviews. Our data shows strong correlation between value/growth and days per week our platform is used and by whom.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): A direct measure of how satisfied customers are with specific interactions or experiences–typically a technical support metric.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): A reflection of customer loyalty and advocacy—showing how likely customers are to recommend your products (and company) to others. NPS encompasses the product experience as well as your digital, go-to-market, and post-sales experience. No one expects perfection, so pay close attention to your detractors and follow-up with them quickly (within hours of receiving their feedback). Listening to them, demonstrating a desire to improve, and funneling detractor feedback into your company for improvement can turn detractors into promoters. Remember, speed of response can be a strong differentiator.
These customer-health metrics will help you identify strengths, reveal blindspots, uncover expansion opportunities, and guide you with a framework to continuously improve the customer experience (and your products). Incorporating these metrics into your rhythm of business will help you accelerate continuous improvement (think robust, fast flywheel) and drive meaningful impact (think creating value tightly aligned to your customers’ wants and needs).
Building a Culture of Customer Success
Creating a company culture that prioritizes customer success means aligning every team around a shared objective: delivering value to customers quickly and continuously.
Clari’s unified Revenue Orchestration Platform connects our entire Go-to-Market (GTM) team, enabling us to proactively identify revenue risk and immediately outline a win strategy (including leveraging our Groove product to sequence outreach to our customers). On the flip side, our Platform flags growing customers and indicates next-best products/actions enabling us to immediately outline an expansion plan. Our platform leverages AI and multiple sources of data to surface these insights so our teams can jointly surround the customer and ensure their success. We say to each other at Clari about our customers “when they win, we win.” It’s true, and it’s our culture.
How Clari Helps Prevent Churn and Boost Renewals
Customer success teams are on the frontline of preventing churn, securing renewals, identifying expansion opportunities, and increasingly owning the quota for expansion. With Clari, we surface critical, timely insights so your GTM teams can expertly manage their book of business (sales) and accelerate customer adoption, usage and value (customer success):
- Spot Churn Risk Early: Leveraging AI to combine the customer health score, activity analytics, stakeholder engagement, and opportunity scoring, Clari helps GTM teams quickly and easily identify accounts that need immediate action due to churn risk. Specifically, Clari uses inputs like conversational intelligence (our Copilot product that can be used to automatically reveal insights from customer calls, emails and interactions), email activity and open-rates, customer-meeting frequency, and adoption indicators to identify at-risk accounts for you. Groove, our sales engagement platform helps your teams seamlessly take action directly from our platform (while leveraging Salesforce and LinkedIn data).
- Focus on the Right Accounts: Clari enables GTM teams to expertly manage their revenue by tracking and surfacing churn risk, overall engagement trends, and expansion opportunities across their book of business (current quarter and out quarters). This enables GTM teams to prioritize their time and resources appropriately on the accounts that are most impactful to your business.
- Accurate, predictable Forecasting: Clari provides GTM teams with real-time forecasting for renewals, expansions, and churn across different revenue models. Clari’s predictable, accurate forecasting is one of the reasons we have repeat business from CROs. Many have made Clari a part of their contract when joining a new company.
Accurate, predictable forecasting is critical for any Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)–especially those at public companies whose outlooks must be accurate or the market could punish them for undisciplined, inaccurate revenue forecasting. Experienced CROs know that consistently achieving their forecast and establishing revenue-predictability is the foundation of their role. Equally, Chief Customer Officers (CCO) need forecasting accuracy of renewals and expansion given the bulk of a company’s revenue sits in their customer base, and increasingly CCOs have commercial responsibilities (e.g. owning a renewal and expansion quota).
“Clari is a critical component in my deal management. With a seamless CRM integration, only one place is required for superb deal progression, updates, and forecasting. Clari helps me avoid churn via the CRM integration with superb visibility and structure. I cannot imagine running my business without it!”
Customer success teams using Clari can increase renewals, reduce churn, drive revenue growth, and stop Revenue Leak.
Clari helps you expertly Run your Revenue
Customer success is more than a department—it’s one of our core Clari values that we call “One with Customer.” At Clari, we keep the customer at the center of our decisions, and we’re committed to helping customers predictably run revenue, accelerate growth, and achieve their business objectives. We empower organizations to thrive in any market condition through predictive AI and analytics, forecasting, data quality, account and opportunity management, and more. We love our customers, and we delight in our customers’ wins and successes (when you win, we win)!
We’d love to show you how Clari’s Revenue Orchestration Platform can help your company deliver predictable revenue growth, expertly manage your revenue pipeline, and achieve your revenue objectives. Request a demo today, or explore our product with a self-paced virtual tour.