Customer Success involvement does not start when the contract has been signed! It starts when the BDR picks up the phone to a potential lead.
It’s a critical customer meeting; one of the largest licence contracts in the company’s history is about to be signed. The Sales leadership have instructed the Service Engagement and Customer Success leads to attend so they can see the customer first hand, get to know them and instill confidence that they will be in the right hands once it comes to standing up the software/application/system and realising value.
What is wrong with this scenario?
Everything.
The contract is about to signed and this is the first time that Services will be involved? Sure, pre-sales will have done, or you hope so, their due diligence and run through use and value cases relevant to the customer; but are they the ones who will assist in the actual realisation once the ink is dry? No, they will turn to the next deal in the pipe, and they and product engineering will the ones Sales will turn to, as a last resort, when the deal starts to go south and they’re all pointing the finger at the “useless” Services’ folks who’ve never understood the customer, are not committed to them and have no clue how to keep them “green”.
This is a pretty common environment. I’ve been in many toxic environments where the driving focus of sales is to sell as much as they can. Just that. Not to sell the right services to the right customers, but just to keep up the appearance that sales are healthy and ticking over. The blame when the customer wants out is clearly downstream – those buggers in services have no idea what they’re doing. Everything handed on a plate to them and they can’t do one thing right.
How many times have you been in this situation?
Customer success starts with tight collaboration between Sales and Services, determining and agreeing on a market tested catalogue of services which can be wrapped around the licence and offered to customers. Each of those services will be built on capability and value and how that will be delivered. Each of these services will meet a customer need and requirement, in other words address a problem that the customer actively wants to resolve.
Having the right service portfolio reduces the friction between Sales and Services’ groups; they’re pulling in the same direction, which is to identify the right customers who will benefit from buying the right service.
For this to happen Service Engagement leads need to be involved actively in proposing, market testing, creating and launching services in step with the development of the software/applications/systems. They need to work with Sales and Pre-Sales to ensure that knowledge and collateral are shared, that the correct questions are asked, assessments made as to the suitability of the combined packages on the table.
Get involved as soon as your BDRs have identified a warm lead; begin the conversation with your sales’ teams, check out the customer, see what issues they have and start to build a roadmap that reflects how they will be catered for by your total service package.
Don’t wait until the Sales’ team contacts you. Be proactive and build relationships with the Sales leads and people. They may come across as arrogant and insulated, but underneath they are reasonable people, they want their recurring commissions, and they’d rather deal with a customer who at the end of the year comes asking for expansion than one who threatens to take them to court for mis-selling and setting the wrong expectations.
This is what I would recommend:
Know what deals are in the pipeline
Get close to the sales people and being collaborating early
Get early visibility of the customers’ current situation and their requirements
Position the services you know will meet the customers’ requirements
Validate with all teams that this is correct and appropriate
Tell Sales when you know something will not work for the customer
Be prepared to stand your ground – don’t reduce the services’ effort to implement and embed
Meeting sales’ targets is critical for a business – this is the life blood for any organisation – but delivering value and keeping customers happy are critical also in building the reputation of your business and expanding revenue and attracting new customers.
If there’s one thing you should take away from this post then this is the one – you all belong to one business, so get closer to your sales’ teams, know what drives them, work with them on a common goal – solving customer problems.
If you want to find out more on how to build a high performing Customer Success organisation then drop a note to info@sentinelsoftwaresystems.com