Customer Success Platform Lift Relations takes off with €2.6 million from SEED Capital

Founded in Denmark in 2015, Lift Relations (Lift), is on a mission to make companies more profitable by understanding their customer relationships better and faster. The startup has just raised an additional €2.6 million from SEED Capital to boost its customer success platform for the professional services industry. 

Reducing client churn and maximizing client upselling are crucial parts of any B2B company, and “Customer Success” has been gaining traction as a fundamental part of business operations. To succeed in this, businesses need to analyze and be aware of proper and accurate metrics. Traditionally, the Net Promoter Score has been the leading customer health metric. 

Lift is on a mission to disrupt this approach and wants to establish their ‘Lift Score’ as the new standard to measure, predict and improve customer health. NPS has been criticized for neglecting to consider the complexity of  B2B relationships with multiple stakeholders and their different needs. To get insights, companies who can afford it, engage with large consultancies like PWC to get a yearly report on customer sentiment and suggested actions. But, in a rapidly moving world, yearly input does not cut it.

Lift is changing the game by predicting risk and opportunities in client relationships and thereby reducing churn significantly better than any other system or methodology. The company has already successfully built a real-time prediction system for the Marketing and Advertising vertical and will soon expand into other Professional Services industries where the market potential is huge and untapped within Customer Success platforms. Whilst the innovative startup was founded in Denmark, they also operate in the US, where the customer success momentum has really taken off. 

Founder & CEO, Dan Hestbaek, said: “When we launched Lift, the majority of “client health metrics” in B2B were too simple in nature and didn’t really move the needle, especially in B2B. NPS was the standard many companies had adopted without really noticing whether it made a difference or not. Again and again, we realized that NPS just doesn’t work in B2B if your goal is to reduce client churn or organically grow existing clients. So we co-created a methodology with some of the most forward-thinking companies in the US, building a unique methodology that predicts what will happen with your client relationships in the next 3 months, and thereby you have an opportunity to affect the relationship in time before it’s too late to manage”. 

Lift has already proven itself with successful results. After 5 years of tracking data, companies that followed the Lift methodology and recommended actions reduced their client churn by 30% on average year-on-year. The company serves several Fortune 500 customers such as Omnicom and Interpublic Group.

Until this fresh funding boost, the company had bootstrapped with 95% of its revenue already in the US. Seed Capital joins the journey to make sure that Lift truly can ‘’Lift off’’ within professional services. The plan for 2022 is to scale customer acquisition rapidly to fully own the US as well as enter the global market. This requires an additional 40+ new hires to the team in both the US & Denmark.

– Patricia Allen, Head of Content at EU-Startups