Ecosystem business models are generating significant buzz these days. Beyond a trending business term, an ecosystem describes the range of interconnected systems, products, and services that intersect with other companies’ offerings.
Leading companies are building out hubs of related, interconnected sets of services that keep customers not just coming back but engrossed in their—you guessed it—ecosystem (remind you of customer success, anyone?).
Think Amazon, where, by design, consumption of one kind of their products or services motivates the use of their other products and services. In essence, their ecosystem has become the product.
Given global players’ massive success with ecosystems (such as Apple, Google, and Meta), and with ecosystems’ promise to become value-generating hubs that keep customers not just coming back but tethered to your brand, you’re wise to take a deeper look.
Whether you’ve identified or articulated it, you’re likely already participating in at least one ecosystem, and it’s surely impacting your business. For example, customer success, with its holistic, proactive, ingrained approach to delighting and retaining customers throughout their relationship with you, is an ecosystem that hasn’t had a category—until now.
Applied strategically and intentionally, customer success has the ability to interconnect your business from front to back and systemically fuel revenue growth. If you’re looking at an ecosystem strategy, customer success should surely be a priority part of it.
“The appeal of ecosystems—interconnected sets of services through which users can fulfill a variety of cross-sectoral needs in one integrated experience—has only grown as the global pandemic accelerated consumers’ migration to digital.” [McKinsey & Company]
The Ecosystem Opportunity
The ecosystem model arose organically from the dissolving boundaries between digital and physical realms that, expedited by COVID, are forever transforming how we live, interact, and buy. Consumers are ready to embrace the change. A recent McKinsey survey found that 71 percent of consumers are ready for integrated, ecosystem offerings.
And for B2B companies, the growth opportunity looms large. McKinsey predicts the integrated network economy, or the emerging economic order within the information society, could represent a global revenue pool of $60 trillion in 2025, with a potential increase in total economy share from about 1 to 2 percent today to approximately 30 percent by 2025.
With so much at stake and a looming recession making time of the essence, it may make more sense for you to outsource your customer success function. An outsourced team can augment your current customer success motions to more accounts in just a few weeks and help you gain the more immediate benefits of customer retention and growth.
The Outsourcing Imperative
Consider these five significantly positive ways that outsourcing customer success to a full-service managed sales organization can be an indispensable asset to your growth and revenue goals:
Reduced costs. With all the tasks involved in creating a top-performing customer success practice, going it alone doesn’t usually make sense.
Applying the necessary recruiting capabilities to find the right talent… building a customer success methodology process map… developing digital training content… selecting, integrating, and using correct technology… managing benefits, assets, and payroll tax requirements: That’s a lot to handle! Outsourcing your team can be tremendously cost effective.
At MarketSource, we continually improve processes by removing wasteful steps, using lean techniques, and increasing the quality of work output with Six Sigma methodologies. Therefore, all our services are delivered efficiently, resulting in lower costs for your organization. Companies can benefit from a variable cost model through customer success outsourcing, which helps to free up capital for investments in your core business.
Focus on your business. Turning over non-core business processes to a managed sales provider allows you to focus time and talent on your organization’s core competencies. These key features of your service, software, or product differentiate you from your customers.
Access to state-of-the-art sales processes and tech resources. You can avoid the high costs associated with installing software platforms, upgrading your digital capabilities, and training customer success staff by relying on a managed sales provider like MarketSource to keep you current on customer success best practices, methodologies, technology, and innovation.
Our cost-efficient, turnkey approach provides you with process engineers, curriculum designers, video rooms, digital playbooks, and much more. We designed our continuous improvement workshops to fully optimize our people, processes, and technology throughout the life of your contract.
Ramp up or size down quickly and painlessly. It’s difficult to recruit for a team at scale with the right talent for customer success. It can be even tougher when business conditions require you to size down your workforce. One benefit to outsourcing is the ability to shift those responsibilities to a managed customer success provider when you need to.
Improve the experience for all your customers. Your solution, software, or product may be sold nationally or even globally, but your business is based in a location where finding multilingual, tech-savvy staff to support your customers is difficult.
It’s expensive to ramp up your customer success center with all the facility space, equipment, and software platforms required for handling proactive customer success.
MarketSource is extensively practiced in all these areas and can implement a winning omnichannel program to handle your customer success for silver accounts, channel partners, and/or renewals so that you can focus on developing your software, product, or service.
Here’s a deeper dive into the other key benefits you’ll reap from outsourcing.
A Healthy Customer Success Ecosystem
A highly functioning customer success ecosystem takes time to design. While it’s a new term, we’ve been building a customer success ecosystem for years, and we can help you leverage it not only to steady your business and persist through shaky economic times but generate long-term customer value and sustainable revenue growth.
Our Customer Success ecosystem hosts and delivers the customer-facing specialists, technology, and operational excellence that drive your sales initiatives. You can leverage our ecosystem to create new revenue streams through deeper current customer adoption, increased customer retention, expansion of your portfolio to new markets, and ongoing, fruitful customer advocacy [watch this video to see how we leverage these practice areas in our customer success methodology to empower our customers].
We’ve built a robust sales tech stack, which we can either weave into your existing environment or offer as a stand-alone component. We also provide sales talent professionals to recruit outperformers and business analysts to drive the intellectual property, knowledge ownership, and insights that inform your sales goals and strategies.
Whether you have a start-up or fully fledged customer success practice, we can plug in to your existing function—either to augment or to BE your team. If your practice is nascent, our blog, Scaling Your Customer Success Department, describes how we would apply our turnkey solution to help you gain momentum. If your practice is more fully formed, we can help you optimize it to achieve your sales goals. No matter the maturity level of your customer success practice, putting MarketSource’s revenue engine to work can help you merge seamlessly onto the customer success highway to drive massive value for your business.
Ready to talk?
Want a partner who has the chops to turn your customer success program into a thriving ecosystem that keeps your customers obsessed?
Author: Jeff Heckler
Jeff is Director of Customer Success Solutions at MarketSource. He is a leader with over 20 years of running customer-facing revenue teams for such organizations as SAP, Accenture, and Stanford. Jeff is an author, advisor, and speaker, and recipient of numerous industry awards. Most recently, Jeff was recognized as a Top 25 Global Customer Success Influencer, 2021, and named One to Watch in SaaS, 2022. Jeff serves on the Board of Advisors for The Customer Success Performance Index™, the Product Advisory Board for Cast.app, and is the Principal Thought Leader–Digital CS for Practical CSM.
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