Closing a SaaS sales deal could take a hefty time depending upon a lot of factors. But Once you have marked a deal and you have a brand new customer, your next big step kicks in here. ‘The Post Sales Process’. Post-Sales refers to a collection of processes that you need to perform after a customer purchases your service. Especially in the SaaS industry, where customer retention is the lifeblood of the SaaS business, you need to make sure that you provide an outstanding experience to your customers by planning a smoother post-sales process with a clear-cut checklist. While all of these activities could be performed using a Post-sales CRM.
Let us look at the various ways in which a post-sales CRM could help make the process easier and better.
Why does your SaaS business need a post-sales CRM?
Post-sales customer data is often disconnected and includes inconsistent account and contact information, products purchased, contracts, entitlements, tenants, tickets, case escalations, feature requisitions, etc.
The investments these B2B SaaS companies are making in customer data is therefore not only about the acquisition of new customers, but retention too. It is because they want:
- Higher renewal rates.
- Uncover more opportunities for expansion and for more of those deals to close.
- Increase the lifetime value (LTV) of their customer relationships.
- Use their data as a strategic advantage.
Their goal is to create a frictionless customer experience based on a real-time understanding of their customer relationship and to gain more reliable and actionable insights about their business.
Benefits of having a post-sales CRM
Better handoff from sales to customer success
The very first interaction of your customer post-sales happens during the onboarding time. Sometimes, moving from a clearly defined, automated sales process that a CRM can provide to a less-regimented onboarding process can throw customers off track. If your team is experiencing any bumps in the sales-to-customer success handoff process, then a post-sales CRM platform can help you efficiently and effectively fill these holes.
Seamless customer journey mapping
Most SaaS businesses prefer to have a customer journey map in place to have a visual representation of the process a customer or prospect goes through to achieve a goal with your company. But sometimes defining a customer journey map could be a cumbersome process. Therefore, having a dedicated post-sales CRM could be a great tool to help manage this process. Having a tool in place will actually enable a collaborative work environment, combing sales, marketing, finance, product teams, etc.
CustomerSuccessBox advanced onboarding playbook monitors product adoption automatically and moves the account forward in the onboarding journey.
Having a tool that is custom-built for Customer success
In this data-driven customer-focused world, to conduct all the post-sales activities and customer success workflows, a business must have a post-sales CRM platform. That is specifically designed to help onboard, retain, and grow customers is key. The tool will make the life of a CSM much easier by helping with post-sales customer activities from meeting notes to customer sentiment to growth forecasting is available in a single location for easy access and organization.
Easy to identify customer milestones
Having an overview of your customer’s journey and the different touchpoints is just the preliminary step. The major task relies upon analyzing your customer’s expectations at every stage of their customer journey. Like, what are the key milestones they must hit in order to achieve their desired goals? Etc
This is where you need the assistance of a post-sales CRM tool.
Easy monitoring of a single account by multiple members
One of the most crucial benefits of having a post-sales CRM platform is the ability to assign, view, and follow open tasks across different teams and people. This will ensure transparency of tasks across different team members within the organization and functions. For instance, If there are multiple team members working on a single account, everyone can visualize who is responsible for what and follow up when necessary. This will dramatically reduce the risk of missed deadlines and due dates. As a Customer Success Manager, you can even track all of these deadlines. Reach out to those responsible without unnecessary back-and-forth hustle via connective channels.
What are various post-sales CRM tools?
So know that we have understood how a post-sales CRM tool can help us achieve our desired outcome. Let us look at the various post-sales CRM available in the market. All the post-sales CRM could be distinguished into the above major category-
1. Customer Analytics Tool
Customer analytics tools and software give teams the tools to understand how to acquire and retain more customers. Teams can measure user behaviors, sentiments, and journeys to understand the factors that influence LTV(Customer Lifetime Value) and adjust their product to keep more of those customers for more of their lifetime.
To simplify their customer analytics software stack, most teams select one primary analytics tool with lots of integrated partners and add additional tools as needed in a hub-and-spoke model.
Example of Customer Analytics Tool- Mixpanel, Amplitude.
2. Customer Onboarding Tool
Customer onboarding software helps customers learn about the different features of your product and derive maximum value out of it, fast. Different customer onboarding tools help you welcome and educate customers in different ways. A few of these include- Email onboarding series to welcome customers, product walkthroughs, videos on how to use tools, etc. Examples of Customer Onboarding Tool- Walkme, UserGuiding, Userpilot, Appcues
3. Customer Success Tools
Customer Success platforms help you onboard, retain and upsell your accounts. Some of this would be never possible with just a basic product analytics tool.
A Customer Success Platform works the data-driven way. It analyzes all of the data compiled by the different components of your product. When you have a data-driven Customer Success approach, platforms like CustomerSuccessBox allow you to access important information like Customer health, 360-degree customer views, Product usage, Deeper customer segmentation, Lifecycle tracking.
Some of the customer success platforms you could look at are CustomerSuccessBox, Gainsight, and Totango.
4. Subscription Management Tool
In a general scenario, A CRM can double up as a billing management tool to check the renewal timelines of customers. But ideally, you should have a subscription management tool as early as 10 customers. So that you never miss on renewals and invoices, especially when you have a monthly subscription.
Some of the subscription management tools you could look at are Chargebee, Chargify, Invoiced, Recurly, Stripe, and Zuora.
5. Customer Satisfaction Tool
Measuring customer satisfaction helps you find out what your customers like. Maybe even discover what they don’t like and what leads to dissatisfaction. Basically, the Customer Satisfaction Tool helps you measure whether your product, service, and overall experience exceeds the customer’s expectations or fall short. It may seem obvious that having happy customers is a good thing. Understanding just how important it really is may be difficult to articulate what that really means for a business.
There are various Customer Satisfaction tools that a SaaS business could adopt to measure metrics like Net Promotor Score(NPS). An NPS software lets you run a Net Promoter Score survey according to the parameters you want – especially if you have zeroed in on the demographics you want to target with the NPS survey.
Example of NPS tool is Delighted, Survey Sparrow, Wootric, etc.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
