Rethinking your Customer Success for the overcrowded Talent Acquisition software market.
77% of the CEO’s see lack of availability of key skills as a threat to their business according to PWC’s 20th edition of its annual CEO survey and Strengthening Human Capital, Innovation and Digital capabilities are their top business priorities for the coming years.
The market is now flooded with thousands of companies (old and new) trying to solve this “Talent Acquisition” problem and grab a piece of the 200 Billion Dollar recruiting industry.
Below are some of my observations and learnings after spending a little more than 3 years in the incredibly competitive TA Tech space.
The Talent Acquisition (TA) landscape can be broadly divided into four categories:
Of the 4 categories, the ‘Source and Hire’ is incredibly saturated and very difficult to crack.
So why is it so difficult to crack?
This is because when your end user, the recruiter starts his day, he has on more than 6+ tools at his disposal to help him hire talent :
Unlike other SaaS products where it is rare for customers to have access to more than one similar solution at the same time, multiple hiring solutions/products co-exist and are vying for a user’s attention.
This is equivalent to FreshDesk and ZenDesk OR Salesforce and MS Dynamics OR Dropbox and Box co-existing in a customers environment!
So, in order to increase the mindshare for their software and show value to the users, companies are increasingly investing in Customer Success teams. The Customer Success teams, however, are set up with playbooks that are more suited to regular SaaS products and doesn’t take into account the unique case of the TA tech landscape.
Most of the Customer Success teams are still focused on Product Onboarding and Education, Driving product Adoption and conducting Business Reviews.
The rationale is as follows:
- Product Onboarding and Education leads to adoption.
- Increased product adoption leads to value/success.
- Success leads to renewal/up-sell.
But this is, in my opinion, a very flawed concept.
1. Product Training and Driving adoption don’t by itself create value.
Instead…
To show value, it’s imperative for you to change the way your customers work.
The Customer Success Manager has to take ownership of your customer’s business process and make them adapt their process to take advantage of the way your solution works.
It’s important to understand how the customer works, why they do things in a certain way — dig deeper and understand their process.
As Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box rightfully mentions in this tweet:
This could mean introducing a completely new process to your customer. It is imperative that you evangelize and reinforce the process, to truly make your product sticky, increase your product’s mindshare and ultimately ensure that your customers see success.
2. Broad product adoption is the outcome of Success, not the cause.
Obviously, it’s impossible to see success with zero adoption, but for your product to truly become viral within an organization and drive broad adoption across multiple users, it’s imperative that they see quick success.
So it helps to concentrate on a small group of recruiters (early adopters) to show them quick success on the product and let the magic of social proof kick in and watch your product’s adoption spread within your customer’s organization.
Additionally, below are 2 other things you can do to gain an edge in this space.
1. Understand your customer’s customer.
Although recruiters are your customers and the end users of your product, it’s imperative to connect with their customers ie. the business and the hiring managers and understand their pain points and help solve them.
By bringing business into the mix and driving closer alignment with Talent Acquisition, you’re not only increasing your leverage in an account but also elevating Talent Acquisition to a more strategic function within the organization — by doing this, your status gets bumped up from a ‘vendor’ to a ‘partner’ in the eyes of your customer.
2. Avoid being benchmarked against your competitors by setting the right expectations and agreeing on success metrics.
With a customer having access to multiple solutions, it’s common to be pitted and benchmarked against them.
It’s imperative that you set the right expectations, your product’s niche could be a quicker time to hire, higher quality of hire, the volume of hire, etc, but make sure that your product is judged against the correct metric.
It’s not uncommon for multiple customers to have multiple definitions of success. So you need to engage in deeper discussion with your customer and understand their definition of success.
In conclusion, TA tech is an incredibly competitive space and selecting the right customer success strategy is crucial for the long term growth of your business.
If you found the article useful, do share it and share your thoughts in the comments. Please note that the views are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the company I’m working for.
