Sales, like Customer Success, has a job to do and the job has to be done well. Remember that a job well done for Sales means surpassing their numbers while the major goal of customer success is to ensure customers achieve their desired business outcome using the product.
Establish the Sales-Customer Success Handover
As a customer Success manager when do you engage with the sales manager. Remember the sales manager has a job to bring in customers, to acquire customers, and your job is to onboard them, retain them, and upsell them. So what has to be that hand-off between sales and success? It can be an email, a phone call that includes you, your Sales Manager, and the customer.
What is the effective way?
Is it the sales call where you, the sales manager, and the customer are part of the call or just a CRM note from the sales guy which you are supposed to read and proceed with? The most effective is a handoff call initiated by the sales manager where both you and the customer are a part of it. The sales guy introduces you to the customer and you take it up from there.
As a customer success manager, you need to jump in and ensure that all the things promised during the sales process are delivered to the customer. The manager can start off by understanding what are those first 90 days goals that the customer has and how can you as the CSM help the customer to achieve them in the first 90 days. The CSM needs to sit with the customer to prioritize those goals and handhold them in their journey of achieving those.
If you cannot do it over a live call, then the second-best approach is to do the exact same thing as part of your notes over an email, essentially ensuring that the handoff between sales and success is complete.
Remember, at the time of purchase, your customers are at their peak of excitement about the technology that they’re buying. We don’t want to take any chance of not showing them or not reciprocating with the same excitement. Make sure that the onboarding goes smoothly and you handhold them on their journey to achieving their first milestone. Remember that period that can also be termed as the valley of death, to avoid, make sure you do the onboarding right and reciprocate with that excitement and give them the same confidence that they have at the time of purchase.
How Customer Success can build Dynamic Relationships with Sales
Aligning the Sales and Customer Success departments is now more important than ever in order to ensure that your entire company is working together with the major motive to deliver a remarkable customer experience and reduce churn. To know more about churn, check – 3 most effective ways to measure churn
Although Customer Success is usually thought of as a post-sales role, sometimes it’s vital to get Customer Success involved pre-contract. This way, they can start to develop a trusted relationship with the customer. After all, Customer Success isn’t just a department in a company. It’s the functioning mindset of your company.
Additional Read: The effective way to Sales, implementation handoff
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
