Helping Sells Radio

This article originally appeared on the Customer Success Leadership Network blog. We are thinking about customer success all wrong. We think it’s a function. A department. A post-sales team. The enlightened among us think customer success is a philosophy or even an organizational design principle. That’s better, but still not quite right. I mean, what am I supposed to do with “customer success is a philosophy?” I have no idea. After spending two and a half years running a SaaS business as a general manager with P&L ownership, I have come to this realization in my thinking: customer success is a business model innovation.To understand what I mean by business model innovation, we must first define business model. According to Alex Osterwalder, “a business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.”Notice the three parts of this definition: create, deliver, and capture value. All three are required in order for a business mo