Farm Don't Hunt
The Definitive Guide to Customer Success
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4.6 • 11 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Across entire verticals of the economy the new normal is the recurring revenue business. Charging customers on a monthly basis, firms with this model have to play by an entirely new set of rules, rules which generally favor the customer over the seller. But this new model also opens up fantastic opportunities to provide and extract more value from the relationship as well. To create that value business needs to move away from a hunting mindset to a farming mindset. That change is the new paradigm of Customer Success.
Many business leaders have heard of Customer Success but few understand what it really means to run their business from the Customer Success standpoint. Even fewer have the experience to build the Customer Success function and optimize its performance.
As a pioneer in the field of Customer Success, Guy Nirpaz is acknowledged as one of the earliest proponents of this business realignment.
In “Farm Don’t Hunt” Guy breaks down the intellectual underpinnings of Customer Success as a theory and quickly moves to providing pragmatic, actionable advice for orienting your business around this new model.
Customer Reviews
Winner of The Best In Customer Success 2016 Content award
The Best In Customer Success 2016 award in the Content category goes to Guy Nirpaz, CEO of Totango, for his book: Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success.
“Until recently, the prevailing perception of the customer relationship was most akin to a hunt. Highly commissioned salespeople were incentivized to bring down large or numerous accounts. … The entire company as well as the sales staff was oriented around the sale, not the ongoing relationship.”
When the profits-realization strategy of the technology industry —and not just the technology sector — was front-loaded to the moment of the initial sale, the way to win was the getting of as many new customers as possible. As Guy points out, those days have passed. In the subscription / recurring revenue model of today, the sale is never final. "Customers … are like plants that must be encouraged to take root and nurtured through their lifecycle, their yield gathered over time."
What does it mean to be the farmers of this new industry? What will the fields, the portfolios of customers look like? What is the Strategy, the Process, the People and the Technology of Customer Success that will be required for the new role to be effective? Step by step, Guy takes the reader through the various aspects of the challenge. How should the team and its role be defined? Where is it to be active during the customer journey? How does it align with other functional groups of the company? What are the interactions with the customers? Desired outcomes?
As more and more companies worldwide set out to create and improve their programs and teams for long-term profitability, Farm Don’t Hunt is a working guidebook for every Sr Mgmt team and Customer Success executive. What to do. Why it matters, How to measure it. Action plans. Baselines. Success plays. It’s an indispensable consultant-in-a-book that will be tapped many times through the first couple of years of your customer success journey.
Mikael Blaisdell is the Executive Director of The Customer Success Association, an international professional community of customer success executives and practitioners at all levels.