SaaS Sales and Customer Success with LinkedIn's Julie Federman

What is customer success? Is it customer support? Glorified training? A precise definition doesn’t exist, but Julie Federman describes customer success as a resource that helps customers align with core business objectives and priorities through measurable results.

As a customer success manager at LinkedIn, she would know. Julie shares tips and tactics on combining software as a service (SaaS) sales and customer success. Her tagline on LinkedIn is: “Driving success and a love of learning through leadership consulting and education.”

Topics Include:

• Customer Success Manager Role and Responsibilities: Consulting, change management, deployment, enablement, and training 
• Account Manager Role and Responsibilities: Maintains commercial relationships to renew, upsell, and cross-sell current customers
• Buying Committee: Opportunities for collaboration between sales and customer success
• Who does what when making a decision? RAPID Decision Making Model: Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide 
• How much time and energy should you invest in upselling clients to bring in additional revenue? Pareto Principle: 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers
• Success Criteria: What does success mean to your customer?
• LinkedIn’s customer success support varies across business-to-business (B2B) lines 
• Reasons for Conflict: How to have meaningful and productive work relationships
• Show Benefits of Service: Stories, surveys, measurable metrics, and other options 
• Structured Communication: Create deliverables that succinctly resonate with certain populations and audiences
• What metrics make a healthy account? Existing internal metrics that indicate success to motivate team and help customers
• Change Happens: Maintain and mitigate churn, rotation, and retention
• LinkedIn’s Levels of Merit: Leadership, leverage, and results from performance reviews
• Potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to predict churn
• Client-facing Community: Chat, connect, and comment to provide feedback on products

Links and resources:

Julie Federman

LinkedIn

How to Work Well With Others

Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning

Microsoft buys LinkedIn

RAPID Decision Making Model

Pareto Principle

Lemonade Insurance Company

Salesforce

IBM Watson