Having worked in a number of organizations, there has always seemed to be one underlying issue, this issue being the sales-to-customer success handover. This process in most cases has always been a bit messy and unstructured. A salesperson will naturally try to keep hold of their customers in order to possibly get a bigger deal out of them and customer success always wants to hand over these newly acquired customers as soon as possible in order to kick off the onboarding process. Or when the handoff happens there seems to always be some sort of data that is missing or there are important facts about the customer that are lost in the handover process. In my opinion, the quicker the handover process happens the more successful the customer is likely to be with your product. Over the years I have come up with a few tips on how to make this process easier. I’ve also learned that aligning sales and customer success teams is the key to increasing sales while keeping retention high. Here are my top 3 takeaways for all sales to customer success teams.
Play 20 Questions with your sales team
It is important to transfer knowledge early and often. When a company is still in the startup phase or early growth stages knowledge transfer is usually shared over a cup of coffee. However, as your business starts to scale it is very important to have a list of questions documented so that these insights are not lost or forgotten. In the early days, a spreadsheet works fine as long as it is systematic and rules are followed when capturing data, but as you grow I would recommend a CSM like Salesforce that have required fields in order to ensure the best and most accurate data about the deal and the customer are captured and passed on. In order for the handover to be successful it is not only up to sales to provide the information. Customer Success teams need to provide Sales teams with a knowledge transfer framework that captures all the information that was gathered during the buying process. These questions should then be recorded in your CRM or customer success platform in order to refer back to this knowledge at a later date for onboarding or quarterly business reviews. Creating this seamless handoff process will continue to build on the foundation of trust and it all starts with this knowledge transfer.
Involve Customer Success from the Pre-Sales process
Sales teams have weekly meetings where the sales reps are focused on bringing in new business for the company. That is what makes them successful, speaking about these opportunities and how to close them is the main focus of these meetings. The key to making sure a customer is happy during the sales cycle and also for years to come is to make sure you align with your sales team. In order to make sure that the sales team is not promising where the customer success team will deliver it is important to remind the sales team of what is achievable and what is not before the deal closes. Don’t fault sales, they are always going to be smooth talkers and going to make everything about your product sound perfect to close the deal, but you need to find that happy median with sales and that comes with making sure you are aligned before a deal closes. Sales reps are 100% focused on bringing in new business for the company. That sort of unwavering focus makes them successful. Now your job as a CSM is to go and make sure you are involved early and often to be a part of the unwavering focus to make not only your customer successful but the overall company successful by aligning expectations before a deal is closed. Adopting this strategy can also help the sales team by giving them the ability to speak knowledgeably about the customer success handoff once they’ve closed a new customer.
Align Sales and Customer Success goals
The goal for the customer success department is to achieve world domination, but until that happens it is important that the sales and customer success are totally in lockstep. This tip is directly related to the tip above, you need to get involved with the sales team early and often in the sales cycle, but how do you do that? Getting sales more involved in customer retention is relatively easy when sales and customers’ success OKRs and goals are aligned. Get your sales team onboard by getting them more invested in customer retention. Customer success goals should include the sales team’s new business targets, and sales targets must include the customer service team’s retention goals. This is one of the key ways that you can make sure both teams will always keep each other in mind when either closing a deal or working towards the net retention of a customer. Some examples of alignment are ensuring that the sales team is not only hitting sales quotas but they are held accountable for NRR (Net Revenue Retention) as well and if you want to have a CSM involved in the sales cycle ensure that they are held responsible for new logo retention just as much as they are looking after overall retention.
These 3 tips are quick wins in order to make sure your sales and customer success teams are aligned. With any initiative, you are bringing into your organization take little steps early and often to make change happy. At first, these changes might not be well received, but strive for progress, not perfection and make sure each small step forward is always keeping the customer in mind while you are revamping the sales to CS process. Do you have any other quick tips on how to align your sales and customer success teams? Leave a comment down below sharing your thoughts!