Existing Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) methodologies fail to provide businesses with effective tools to successfully manage customer relationships.

But if there’s so much material on the subject… why reinvent the wheel? 

There are a couple problems with existing CLM frameworks that I want to address.

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Pitfall 1: Heavy Sales Focus

Most customer lifecycle management frameworks focus too much on customer acquisition and customer expansion. They dive deep into the marketing and sales process, mentioning traditional approaches to driving awareness and achieving purchase. They fail to acknowledge that Sales and Marketing are only key stages in the customer’s lifecycle and struggle when not integrated well with your company’s R&D and Customer Success operations. 

Pitfall 2: Lack of Product Focus

Most customer lifecycle management frameworks exclude R&D as a core CLM function. They fail to understand that delivering value to customers means that you are successfully solving their problems and addressing their needs. Given that customer needs change over time, it is important that R&D play an important role in ensuring that new product offerings and services are created in order to continue to address evolving customer demands.

Pitfall 3: Shallow Customer Success

Most CLM frameworks provide a shallow approach to Customer Success. They lightly touch upon providing customer service and supporting your customers, but they usually approach it from an efficiency perspective. In a long-term SaaS relationship with a B2B customer, Customer Success is the key player throughout the majority of the customer lifecycle.

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By addressing these specific gaps in existing CLM frameworks, businesses will be able to effectively manage and nurture their customer’s relationship throughout its engagement with their organization.