BC Startup Sales Podcast – Customer Success Driven Sales with Lincoln Murphy (Sixteen Ventures)

This week, the Bowery Capital team hosted Lincoln Murphy, Customer Success Consultant at Sixteen Ventures, to discuss “Customer Success Driven Sales.” Sixteen Ventures is a consulting agency focused on helping SaaS and Cloud vendors identify, acquire and keep more customers to bring about growth and profitability. Founded in 2008, The Company works with its clients to develop methods for recurring revenue generation across multiple revenue streams. Trusted by a wide ranging customer base, from the biggest SaaS and legacy software vendors to early-stage startups, Sixteen Ventures specializes in monetization strategies such as pricing, distribution and revenue modeling.

As a Customer Success Consultant at Sixteen Ventures, Lincoln Murphy brings over 15 years experience in on-demand software product development and Business Architecture, focusing exclusively on SaaS since 2004. Working with clients of all sizes, from startups to those at the top of the Fortune 100, Lincoln helps companies recognize and execute on opportunities to generate or enhance revenue through the SaaS Business Architecture. Prior to Sixteen Ventures, Murphy worked as a Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight and as a Business Architect at McKesson.

In today’s episode, Lincoln joins us in the studio to discuss why it’s essential for all companies to be using customer success driven sales. He explains that the idea of customer success driven sales came from seeing that churn was a byproduct of companies selling to customers who didn’t fit their customer profile and wouldn’t achieve success as a client. Murphy says that bringing on “bad fit” customers and sacrificing long term growth to hit short term numbers by signing customers who won’t achieve success in working with you will ultimately negatively impact your business. To start doing customer success driven sales, he says first a team must figure out what a bad fit customer looks like through five different inputs: technical fit, functional fit, competence fit, experience fit and cultural fit (read his blog post on this here). He’s seen companies go from struggling with sales to a 40x increase in account size by being deliberate in who to work with, and discusses how using “success milestones” can help your company do the same. Lincoln wrapped up by explaining that customer success driven sales, and customer success in general, are really the reasons companies exist in the marketplace and those who understand this and focus on it are the ones that will reach their desired outcomes.

If you liked “Customer Success Driven Sales” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog. If you haven’t already, subscribe to the podcast to get all our new content each week!