During the current pandemic, retaining customers has been a top priority for SaaS customer success leaders. Cost and resource constraints have probably put a marginal brake on your customer acquisition and expansion strategies. As the world begins to return to normal, it’s time for companies to begin exploring growth opportunities again. 

What are some strategies that will drive growth?

SaaS companies must look towards customer referrals, global enterprises, global markets, and adjacent verticals for restoring their growth trajectory. Enterprise customers can be an attractive path to grow. They churn less often and often use the downturn as an opportunity to explore new solutions to set themselves for the future. The current crisis has forced many leading Fortune 5000 companies to adopt digital transformation rather quickly, increasing demand for cloud-based services and products. SaaS companies should take advantage of this.

Large enterprise companies often have remote software development operations to leverage great talent at a low OPEX. These remote development centers provide easy routes to land-and-expand to US customers. Currently, your CS teams may not be fully engaged with these remote centers.

This exact expansion strategy has helped me deliver over 20% growth for successful Silicon Valley startups via remote customer success teams in India. Let me show you how:

• Cloud migration, SaaS applications, DevOps functions have emerged as the latest major factors in driving growth in remote software development centers. India continues to be a preferred destination of remote operation for global enterprises and US startups since it is home to the second largest IT talent pool, a thriving startup ecosystem, and a growing economy.
• Remote centers play a key role in resource intensive application development. These large teams provide bigger adoption and expansion opportunities.
• Workforces are mostly young and excited to explore, learn and adopt new solutions. They want to demonstrate value to their US counterparts through better solutions, and can be potential advocates for your products.
• Your local customer success personnel can engage with domestic enterprise customer contacts, who will do initial due diligence, and help connect your account team to US decision makers.
• Many remote centers are headed by expats who are familiar with culture and business practices of US and India. They mostly report into executive leadership team in US. In relationship oriented culture of India, it is easier to connect with them and through them access to US decision makers.
• Many of the enterprise deals are global in nature and requires well-orchestrated campaigns across global CS and Sales teams. Remote teams conduct POCs, play a major role in technical due-diligence while US teams are solely responsible for T&Cs.

Under the right leadership, remote customer success team build from the ground up and operating as extended CS team has the potential to be “The Most Profitable Center”. It can dramatically increase high-touch customer engagements, offer an economical option to focus on low/tech touch customers, enable 24X7 support, and accelerate customer onboarding, implementation, and adoption. Such teams embedded in company DNA, hardened by best practices can deliver great customer experience at every step of your customer journey! Know more about the formula to become a “Centre of Excellence” through our winning customer success strategies.

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