With these four business applications, all integrated, you can easily streamline your customer on-boarding process -- post sales. Leveraging a customer success monitoring solution like Totango, triggering emails and marketing automation with Marketo, customer training portals by KeyStone OnDemand, and social media engagement with HootSuite. These solutions tie it all together and will drive renewals to a whole new level.

When providing software-as-a-service the most important thing is customer retention. Sure it looks good to close a deal and bring on a new customer, but can you keep that customer? Here are 5 solutions that not only help you keep those customers, but turn them into evangelists.

There is a great article posted today on Mashable.com that details a few tips for building loyal customers that refer more business at the very least, or best, promote your services and brand on their own. The best example of a company that has built a loyal base of customer evangelists is Apple. Create great products and position them in a way that benefits the customer post sale is the basis for creating this type of movement.

This infographic by ClickSoftware is titled "The State of Customer Service," but it should really say customer success. What is the different between customer service and customer success? Are they two of the same? The infographic gives you a snapshot of the customer service industry today as it relates to enterprise software.

Last night was the first ever Customer Success Management Meet Up in San Mateo and it proved to be a very valuable experience.  Starting out with around the room introductions, we met the Customer Success Managers from companies like Yammer, Cloudwords, Salesforce, Zendesk, Zuora, Clarizen, Birst and more.  Many people attended looking to network and advance their knowledge and position in the industry.