Paul Henderson is an authority on customer success programs for IT Vendors and IT Departments. And interest in customer success has exploded! For IT Vendors, his focus is protecting and growing revenue, particularly recurring revenue. He addresses a major challenge facing SaaS vendors – if their customers aren’t successful, they lose revenue. Lots of revenue. It’s a much bigger issue for SaaS vendors than it ever was for traditional software companies.
The threat to revenue has accelerated interest in customer success programs over the past two years. Check Amazon – the 6 or 8 books available on customer success were all published since 2016. Check LinkedIn – lots of companies are appointing VP’s of Customer Success and re-organising around the customer success approach. Because the field is new, companies seek guidance. They want to know what type of customer success program they should adopt and how to implement it. Henderson provides that insight. For IT Departments, they face the challenge of maintaining relevance (as vendors such as Salesforce bypass them), alignment with the business and its strategies, and driving digital innovation. An internal customer success program enables all three.
Authority
Henderson spent over five years designing and implementing customer success programs across the Asia Pacific region. He did so as the Asia Pacific head of an enterprise software (ERP) company with over 200 staff in nine countries supporting 800 customers.
He’s written two books –
- Authority Paul Henderson The Chief Capability Officer – Delivering the Capability to Execute
- Generation 3 Customer Success – Protecting and growing Revenue for IT Vendors (to be published late 2017)
And he’s used the principles of generation 3 customer success to win million-dollar cloud deals across the region.
Key Presentation Topics
- Customer Success Programs
- Henderson discusses who’s adopting customer success programs, new organisation structures, the focus of programs and new software packages. He discusses the journey for implementing customer success. Finally, he explains how customer success programs often focus more on vendor success than customer success, and how to move past this trap.
- Generation 3 Customer Success
- Henderson introduces the audience to generation 3 customer success. He explains how generation 3 vendors have moved past solving current customer problems and now focus on enabling future outcomes. They distinguish between product outcomes (the direct benefit of a product or service) and success outcomes (the outcome the customer really cares about). He shows how their focus on success outcomes protects and grows revenue, provides differentiation and identifies new sources of growth. And he provides a six-step process for implementing a Generation 3 Customer Success program.
- He then shows how a similar approach can be used by IT Departments to serve their internal customers. He explains how to focus on a limited number of success outcomes which provides clear alignment with the user departments.
- Testimonial
“Henderson does a good job in challenging traditional thinking in product development and marketing and offers an effective approach to aligning product and company strategy to what drives customer buying behaviour.” – Daniel Lender, CFO, QAD Inc