Driving Modern Sales Through Customer Success and Implementation, Episode #127

This article originally appeared here

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The creation of a Customer Success Program is a powerful approach to delivering results for customers. On this episode of #SellingWithSocial, I invited the Vengreso Customer Success Team – Ivonne Ribeiro, Mike O’Brien, and Wendy Gertridge to walk us through the customer success program we implement at Vengreso, and that they’ve been instrumental in developing. It’s the process our team uses to understand our customer’s goals, anticipate their challenges, and proactively provide solutions and answers to those issues to drive their success.

Listen to learn how our CS program includes team-wide training to ensure that the new skills and concepts we’re teaching are implemented consistently across the board. If you build your customer success team guided by the ideas you hear on this episode, you’ll boost customer happiness and retention AND increase revenue and customer loyalty.

What Is The Goal Of A Customer Success Team?

Customer success has one goal: Making the customer’s hopes and dreams about using your product or service a reality. If they are super happy with the results you deliver, they’ll be back – and they will tell others about the incredible results they achieved using your services. At Vengreso we take that seriously, so we’ve created an entire customer success team to ensure it happens for every customer.

In this 4-way conversation, Mike points out that the customer success process often begins with educating or re-educating the customer on best practices, resources available, and how our expertise can empower them to accomplish their goals. It’s the process of passing along the experience your team has as you advise and guide your customer. Wendy points out that on a deeper level, we’re always working with the customer toward 3 goals:

1 – Sales behavioral change

2 – More sales conversations, and

3 – Increased sales win rates. 

Ivonne stresses that it’s vital to keep the customer’s end goals in mind, from the beginning. What is the end outcome your customer wants and needs? What is your Customer Success Team going to do to create those outcomes?

Listen to hear how we’ve answered those questions at Vengreso – then use our experience to fuel your own approach to a customer success program.

Before You Implement A Customer Success Plan, You Have To Assess Everything

One of the mantras we’ve developed at Vengreso is that we don’t want to teach our customers how to fish until we’ve provided them with the right bait. In digital sales, the bait is content.

What does that mean on a practical basis? It means we have to analyze both the client’s current resources and approach AND their target customer to determine if they have the right bait to catch their ideal customers.

This involves reviewing the customer’s website and those of competitors to see what’s working and what isn’t. We also analyze their existing social media strategy including the images, hashtags, and gated and ungated content they offer. We assess their landing pages and forms, their user experience and interface, keywords, topics that are driving traffic, and much more. This careful research is what enables us to create a content strategy that demonstrates our customer’s expertise and ability to solve the problems their prospects have.

Don’t Put Your Strategy In Motion Without Training Your Customer

Once we’ve created a data-driven strategy for our customers we want to ensure that they can implement it successfully. That means we often have to re-train our customer’s sales team in doing digital sales the right way. The right connection strategy, implemented properly will make a huge difference in the results they get.

One of the first things we do is to help each salesperson with a LinkedIn profile makeover. Why? Because the profiles of our customer’s employees are mini-websites for the company, and they are more important than people think. The most recent LinkedIn State of Sales report says that 62% of buyers look at a salesperson’s LinkedIn profile before considering their company as a partner. That makes employee LinkedIn profiles a powerful piece of digital real estate that can serve as a significant touchpoint in the prospect’s buying journey.

The Vengreso approach to this LinkedIn profile makeover takes 8 weeks to implement because our customer’s sales teams typically won’t implement these changes on their own. So we guide them, step by step – to see the importance of what we’re doing and to put the changes into place.

How Will You Make Learning Stick For Your Customers?

Most companies train their customers to use their product or service and expect the customer to remember everything from the training. That seldom happens. Your customers need help when it comes to getting the learning to stick, and it’s your responsibility to see that it does.

One of the most important aspects of the Vengreso “make the learning stick” philosophy is the way we go about our 15 week-long “Selling With LinkedIn” course. Every member of our customer’s sales teams must work their way through this data-driven, best-practice course to help them break bad habits and establish new ones. Our goal is to help students learn over the course of time in small chunks – and we approach it in three stages:

1 – Learn on their own

2 – Learn through hands-on practical experience

3 – Receive coaching to help reinforce what they’ve learned and practiced

This 3-pronged approach enables us to do the hand-holding that ensures our customers embrace and implement the training we provide. But we go beyond that by providing detailed reporting to the leaders of our customer’s sales teams so they can keep their teams accountable for the learning and implementation as well.

Key to driving true customer success is measuring the Key Performance Indicators of how a customer WANTS to measure the success of the digital selling training program. When we track and provide those metrics, our customer success program is truly successful. Listen to learn how it works for us and to begin coming up with your own ideas about implementing a customer success team in your company.

Outline of This Episode

• [1:51] Three special guests on this episode: The Vengreso Customer Success and Implementation team – Wendy, Mike, and Ivonne
• [9:11] Building our customer success team from scratch: How it happened
• [15:57] Providing clients with the right bait (so they can catch the right fish)
• [21:31] The right distribution strategy is vital for company-wide positions, including sales
• [31:11] What goes into a LinkedIn profile makeover?
• [35:57] How Customer Success drives an awesome experience
• [45:65] Why the closeout is as important as anything else

Resources Mentioned

• Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn
• Connect with Mike on LinkedIn
• Connect with Ivonne on LinkedIn
• LinkedIn State of Sales Report
• The Vengreso On Demand Platform
• Ivonne’s all-time favorite movie: Empire of The Sun
• Mike’s all-time favorite movie: The Godfather Part Two
• Wendy’s all-time favorite movie: Green Book
• Modern Marketing Engine Podcast – Bernie Borges

Connect with Mario!

• www.vengreso.com
• On Facebook
• On Twitter
• On YouTube
• On LinkedIn

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