If you had to sum up conversion, customer success and retention into one phrase, that phrase might be “customer development.” Customer development doesn’t have a succinct and pithy definition – it’s just too complex of a concept to smush into a neat sentence. The best definition I’ve come across is from Patrick Vlaskovitz in The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development:
“Customer Development is a four-step framework to discover and validate that you have identified the market for your product, built the right product features that solve customers’ needs, tested the correct methods for acquiring and converting customers, and deployed the right resources to scale the business.”
Clear as mud, easy as an appendectomy.
Which is to say, it’s not easy at all. So let’s break it down in terms that lend themselves more to concision: Conversion, customer success and retention.
It’s like the circle of life. They’re all connected and flow into each other. To eliminate churn and increase customer success, you should constantly optimize your conversion process (hello retention!).
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