Before you can build a great customer experience, you must have a strong Sales <> Success handoff. If Sales oversells the product or sets the wrong expectations around implementation and support, you’re setting the customer up for an uphill battle from the start.
You can’t provide an impactful customer experience if the customer purchases the product with the wrong expectations.
But the problem isn’t just on Sales—it’s more often due to a lack of regular communication and a strong partnership between Sales and Success. To solve this, identify the main points of friction in the handoff and then work with your peers in Sals to resolve those.
Here are the four most common points of friction between the two departments, and how to overcome them:
There’s misalignment around what you’re selling and how Success delivers on that promise. Too often, the way Sales and Customer Success go through training is very different. So the result is what Sales is selling and what Success is delivering are two very different experiences. You have to get alignment at the top around what the product delivers for customers and how Success is delivering it first, and then you can begin training Sales and CS and regularly reinforcing those messages in a variety of channels. The answers to “what the product delivers” and “how Success delivers it” can be written in the statement of work, and it should also be incorporated in weekly meetings between Sales and CS. Team members from Success should attend the weekly Sales meeting to understand how they’re selling the product and give updates on how Success is delivering. (Sales should be part of the weekly CS meeting, too.)
This week's newsletter features posts on:
WORKFLOW
Insist on Focus - Keith Rabois (Video)
“Most people tend to substitute A+ problems, which are problems that are very difficult to solve, with B+ problems—problems you know a solution to. So if you imagine a daily checklist; most people have an A+ problem but they don’t know the solution so they procrastinate and work on their B+ problems. The problem is if your entire organization is always solving the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th most important things, you never solve the 1st. So [Peter Thiel’s] technique of forcing people to only work on one thing at a time meant everyone had to work on the A+ problems.”
Listen to the 3-Minute Audio Clip
PROCESS
Five Step Formula for Strategic Account Plans for Customers
Here’s Megan Bowen (CCO at Refine Labs) with a simple framework for creating a strategic account plan for customers.
LEADERSHIP
The Antiracist Leader: Education
“One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist.’” – Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
In Part 1 of a series on antiracist actions for leaders, Jill Wetzler, Head of Engineering at Pilot, offers ways to educate yourself to better understand Black employees’ experiences.
COMMUNICATION
Uncovering Your Customer's Business Outcomes
This post shares a list of ways CSMs can get customers to answer the question, “What goals are you looking to achieve with this product?” without directly asking them. The questions Chad Horenfeldt (Director of Customer Success at Kustomer) offers in this post may also shed light on future opportunities for additional use cases (and upsells) beyond their current objectives.