Source: TSIA.
Over the decades, this approach to the customer life cycle has worked extremely well for product companies. It is hard to argue with the top-line revenue growth and bottom-line profitability delivered by this industry. However, as more technology market segments embrace technology-as-a-service consumption models, the requirements of success shift. For a host of reasons, profitability in technology-as-a-service markets requires technology providers to excel at the entire customer life cycle. Suddenly, the areas of adoption and expansion become critical to economic growth. This is an argument we detailed in the books Consumption Economics1 and B4B2. Customer success is the organizational response to this reality.