The Biggest Impact to Customer Loyalty

Just finished reading and studying Keenan’s book called Gap Selling and came across an interesting fact he mentions. Before I explain that, here are my views on the book. The book is a great read and perfect for lifelong learners. Keenan takes a very innovative approach to sales that I believe will be, if it’s not already the standard to use.

One of the things I like most about Gap Selling is how much the act of engaging in the sales process, as explained in the book, parallels customer success. The reason is because he approaches the sales process like we do customer success, namely, by focusing on customer outcomes. How about that, everything’s moving in this direction or so it seems. Doing so is very effective and beneficial in many ways.

Ace The Job Search

Another useful application is applying the techniques and strategies outlined in the book to improve a job search campaign to land a new job. I’ve found myself conducting job search activities more often than I’d like and one of the mysteries for me was answering the question, “What makes one candidate get hired over another?”

Originally, I would have thought that it’s who you know, what you know, or what you’ve done based on previous experience that makes the interview a success. When communicating experience, the format that is usually taught is to provide the interviewer with the problem, what you did fix it, and the results obtained by having done so. Now, I believe as great as those strategies are in determining who gets hired, they are no longer the best.

A better strategy would be to utilize Gap Selling techniques. By applying these techniques, you’ll get the job you want. I’ve taken expensive training and paid for some of the best coaching available and it has been extremely helpful. Even so, I benefited more from Keenan’s work, as everything started to fall into place. Keenan does a great job of detailing what needs to be done and how to do it. I got it and so will you.

So, there are many useful applications to the skills taught in this book. Read it.

Getting Sales To Customer Success

Shifting back to the similarities between sales and customer success, this book is the perfect tool to give to your sales organizations and encourage every sales professional to read. The reason is Keenan’s book provides the training our sales teams need to align themselves with customer success.

Most customer success leaders know if we want to be successful at our life’s work, we must get buy-in from our entire organization, including sales, product management, finance, support, marketing and so on, just to name a few. Every team within a company must know what to do and what their responsibilities are from a customer success perspective to make customer success work.

The beauty of this book is it provides the instruction our sales teams need to sell in a customer success centric way. I wondered, how do we train our sales teams to support, understand, and achieve a successful customer sales journey that executes to customer success principles? The answer is for them to read this book.

Keenan didn’t write Gap Selling for this purpose, he wrote it to help sales professionals understand the process of how to make sales in today’s business world. The byproduct is a formal training in customer success applied to sales, which wasn’t the planned intentions of Keenan for having written it. Thank goodness he did though. The sales team will be more successful at selling more and to new logos because they will be selling in an outcome driven way. And doing so ensures a great customer journey and successful partnership between our company and our customers. Just perfect.

The Impact Customer Success Has On Sales

Another interesting part of the book is where the question, “What’s the biggest impact to customer loyalty?”, is answered, which came as a complete surprise to me. According to a study released in the book The Challenger Sales by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson of CEB (now Gartner), 53% of customer loyalty was not a product of customer service as we might think, but instead based on the sales experience. The sales experience! I would have never thought that because the sales cycle is usually relatively short compared to the rest of the customer journey.

What does that mean? That means as customer success leaders, we can’t ignore the sales cycle and must make sure it performs in a way that customer success dominates it. Again, I struggled to come up with a great way to meet this critical need of how to instill customer success into a sales team, however Keenan solved this problem without even intentionally trying to. So that part is done for us. We just have to promote his teachings. It’s that simple. Now the solution to this problem has been revealed to us so we don’t have to ignore or put the problem on the back burner any longer.

Customer success and sales rely on each other beyond the handoff between the two and in minimizing the customer’s time to value. Sales and customer success can work harmoniously together by following Gap Selling recommendations.

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