4 Reasons to Shift to Hybrid Model in SMB Segment

One of the growing trends in the small and medium business (SMB) segment in SaaS solutions is to introduce the hybrid role that combines the responsibilities of account managers and customer success managers. A common title for this role hasn’t been established yet across the industry, and here at Wrike, we call such hybrid professionals Account Development Managers (ADMs). We started experimenting with the hybrid format of work back in 2019 and over the course of the first several years through trial and error managed to get a number of valuable insights on what’s working and what’s not, as well as develop best practices for this role. In many ways 2023 became a turning point for the motion — the ADM format of work was scaled to the whole SMB segment of Wrike customers and proved very successful on that scale.

Every account development manager is responsible for 2 targets: sales quota and retention target, which are equally important. So, e.g. we would not be okay if a person demonstrates superstar results in sales while the churn rate is extreme and visa versa. However, the very approach of work that we implemented enables every ADM to consistently hit both targets. Since ADMs start with bringing value to the client’s organizations and only then identify any upsell opportunities, many upgrades come naturally and there’s much less pushback from the client’s side. I like to call it “consultative selling at its best”. When we were planning the hybrid format of work, launching, and scaling it, it became apparent that a certain number of benefits were associated with it. Let’s discuss some of them and review why the hybrid format is such a great fit for the SMB segment of customers.

Cost-effectiveness

The first and probably the most obvious benefit for organizations is cost-effectiveness. In our uneasy times in tech these days, companies are pushed to optimize their budgets and reduce all unnecessary costs. So basically, any non-revenue generating team can be at risk. The hybrid format of work combines both revenue-generating and revenue-retaining functions with both of them performed by a single individual. As long as the processes are set up well, guidelines on work prioritization are clearly communicated to the team, and the books of business are balanced, hybrid professionals are enabled to effectively cover both functions with no negative impact on the result. I would like to emphasize here that the hybrid format only works well up to a certain MRR threshold. Large customers with high spending on the product usually require more attention and having a noticeable number of such customers in the book would result in either a higher churn rate or not hitting the sales target.

Convenience for the customers

The one-stop-shop format is most definitely something that small and medium customers enjoy. In a way, the whole idea of ADM motion was partially born from questions that our CSM team heard frequently: “We’re a 5-employee organization. Do we really need to talk to a separate sales rep, CSM, support agent, and renewals manager?”. Enabling the team members to cover both value-based questions and commercial ones improves the customer experience. Clients count on their reps to be able to cover all types of questions — from industry best practices to the cost of an upgrade and terms of the next renewal. It’s important to note though that the hybrid team needs to have a good process in place to cover for team members who are out of the office — otherwise, the clients would be left entirely without the attention they need.

Quick deal closing cycle

The SMB segment is often characterized as highly transactional. Since in many cases, very large budgets are not involved (there are exceptions, of course), the time between an effective demo and the willingness of customers to upgrade could be minimal. A hybrid professional is capable of covering all parts of the deal — from initial discovery questions to demos to handling price negotiation and sending the paperwork for signature. There’s no need to spend time on internal collaboration and alignment among different customer-facing teams — the person who is the closest to the customer makes quick and effective decisions. Yes, as always, in certain scenarios the leadership team would need to be involved — but only one leadership team, not members of 3 or more different teams. While I’m a strong believer in the value of collaborating with other teams, when we were building the hybrid motion I quickly realized that the lack of need to collaborate with anyone enables ADMs to deliver outcomes faster and efficiently.

Standard use cases make enablement scalable

Another reason why I strongly believe that the hybrid format of work is a great fit, particularly for the SMB segment, is because the challenges the clients are facing are usually pretty standard and in many cases can be characterized as “entry-level”. At this point, the alternative to using the product is basically not using anything at all and the initial goals set for the product are pretty straightforward and not too complex. That said, it would not be such a challenging exercise to describe all these common problems as well as the solutions the product offers to address them. Then this information would become a part of the onboarding process for the new hybrid specialists as well as published in the playbook. As a result, with the necessary preparation performed by the leadership team and pioneers in the hybrid role, scaling the team would not become a problem. Obviously, every product is unique and the borderline beyond which the use cases shift from standard to custom is different. Also, the leadership team needs to be prepared to do much legwork in the beginning if they want to hybrid motion to work well and be scaled to the whole SMB customer segment.

The list of benefits provided above is not essential — I could’ve easily named more. However, my goal was to cover the ones that would resonate with almost any SaaS product — not only those in the work management and collaboration category. I strongly believe that we will soon see more and more hybrid teams emerging in organizations and would be thrilled to learn about their successes.