Software AG, one of the biggest software businesses in Europe, recently faced a huge transformation that shook up its 10,000 enterprise customers in over 70 countries and almost 5,000 employees. To talk about the massive Helix Project we talked to Andrew Cutler, Strategy, Transformation, and Customer Success Leader at Software AG. Andrew shares his experience transitioning from a perpetual licensed business model to a subscription one, and how customer success played a strategic role in this change. As Andrew points out, customer success in a proper subscription model is completely vital. Listen now and learn how AG made this huge transformation and what CS strategies helped them bring everyone on board.

Jump straight into:

(00:56) - Andrew’s background and his role in Project Helix’s big transformation - “I spend a lot of time rolling out customer success and running that here at Software AG.”

(05:37) - Going from a perpetual licensed business model to a subscription one - “You cannot expect too much of a variance between what your goals are as a company commercially, and what your customers are getting from the software.”

(09:14) - How to make a case for customer success - “You need to be able to show what is the incremental impact to some kind of financial metric.”

(11:39) - Andrew’s learnings from Project Helix - “We're on all fronts pretty far ahead of where we thought we would be right now, we did a lot of comparisons looking at other companies that have made this shift before.” 

(13:59) - The importance of customer success in this big transformation - “Our ability to help our customers with the adoption data that they want to see in our business lines has reached full coverage of our cloud customers.”

(17:31) - How product-led customer success can optimize your processes - “The realization over the last year is that through product-led customer success and a partnership between the teams, we actually don't need heavy-duty CSM engagement on free trials.”

Resources

Connect with Andrew through LinkedIn

Hosted by Adam Joseph, The Gamechanger Podcast is a show brought to you by Gainsight. For more information about all of our episodes, please visit https://www.gainsight.com/podcasts.

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