Increase Revenue and Reduce Churn Through Internal Partnership
Given the current macro-economic climate, rapid pace of technological and regulatory change, and uncertain political landscape, service providers and vendors must be laser-focused on helping their customers achieve their desired outcomes. Otherwise, long-term success will be elusive at best. A key element to ensuring your organization is aligned with this vision is to evaluate how well your Sales, Customer Success and Product teams work together. Strong partnership between these teams will drive growth, reduce churn and increase revenue. These buzzwords are not really the focus, they are the byproduct of creating a seamless customer experience that drives customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
What is your Sales team focused on doing? What are they rewarded on? If the answer is signing new deals, expanding into new territories or increasing average deal size, then you are very much on the wrong path. Sales-focused measures are indicative of exactly that, a sales focus, not a customer focus. Re-aligning the sales mission to be one focused on establishing a strong customer relationship, understanding their business goals, matching those goals to your current and future capabilities and setting the customer up for success is the real long-term play. Incentives need to be aligned to this model. Front-loaded commissions reward getting the deal, rather than setting the stage for a long-term relationship. If your company is measuring itself on recurring or realized revenue, then your Sales team should be rewarded on a similar manner. However, your Sales team cannot simply keep a long-term level of deep engagement with each customer, they need to be finding the next client. The natural answer is to handoff to Customer Success, but this cannot be an afterthought. Done well, this transition enables a seamless and continuous process of value-add conversations and increases your customers level of trust in your organization.?
When your CSM begins interacting with a new customer, where are they starting? If they are coming in blind and cold, what message are you giving your customer? When a CSM takes some feature feedback from a customer, what happens to that information? How does the CSM follow-up with the customer and provide insight into what happened with the feedback they offered? From these questions, it is obvious that a customer success team cannot really deliver on their mandate to foster and grow the customer relationship if they are working in a vacuum. The CSM should be coming to the customer very much informed about what the customer is trying to achieve, what we are doing to help them achieve those goals and how our products may need to evolve in order to truly deliver customer ROI. Likewise, if a customer is engaged enough to offer product feedback, the CSM has to be able to be able to get that information to the people that can do something useful with it and be able to close the loop back with the customer, otherwise, why would the customer both to make future suggestions?
The ever-brilliant allure of the new and the prospect of spending your day engaged in solving interesting problems. This is what brings people into the tech space and keeps them engaged. It is all to easy for Product teams to get wrapped up in their vision and roadmap, and end up building cool things that do not actually help solve customer problems or deliver the right set of capabilities. Product teams can certainly do market surveys and customer observation visits, but these point-in-time exercises are, by their very nature, limited in scope and limited in how broadly applicable any finds might be against the overall market. Building in-app feedback mechanisms is also helpful, but again limited by the self-selecting nature of those whom choose to leave feedback. Leaning entirely the other direction is also problematic; becoming reactive may help address customer concerns but leads you vulnerable to the next service to come along with a more strategic viewpoint and feature-list. Finding a way for the Product teams to leverage the relationships and on-going interactions that the Sales and CS teams live and breath is a more scalable model, but it will not happen on it's own. Establishing a close working model has to be a bedrock element of your organizational model.
By collaborating across these teams, companies can create a cohesive strategy that focuses on the entire customer journey, from acquisition to retention to advocacy. These strong partnerships also enable your organization to deliver meaningful value at every stage of the lifecycle. How do you build that level of coordination and cooperation across the teams?
- Align on shared goals and metrics across the Sales, Customer Success, and Product Management teams
- Establish regular communication channels to facilitate open and transparent communication between teams
- Encourage these teams to visit customers together to gain a deeper and shared understanding of their needs, goals, and pain points
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- Foster a culture of collaborative problem-solving by encouraging team members to work together to identify and solve customer issues
Let's dive deeper into each of these techniques:
a) Align on shared goals and metrics: Establishing a clear understanding of what a successful customer looks like is the key first step in aligning on shared goals and metrics. Are you focused on broad-based adoption across the customer user base? Do you view feature usage targets as a key measure? How much do you focus on customer outcomes as your target? Whatever the right goals are for your organization and however you agree to measure them, if these three teams are not equally focused on them, then how will you have a viable and consistent engagement model?
b) Establish regular communication channels: Regular communication channels between the teams are going to be a key element in creating lasting partnership, especially as you grow and scale. Key elements to consider: frequency and forum, fostering open and transparent discussion - especially when addressing customer feedback, how to balance discussion and action, following-up and ensuring accountability for agreed actions.
c) Encourage joint customer visits: If all the legal dramas on TV are to be believed, eye-witness testimony can be unreliable. People naturally filter what they see through the lens of their own experiences and points of view. If your organization views customer visits as key opportunities to gain valuable insight into how your products are being used, what functions are liked and which are hated or ignored, what it is painful or confusing for customers, then having multiple points of view is critical. Getting your Sales, CS, and Prod teams to visit customers together - and debriefing as group - can vastly improve the quality of intelligence you gain from these efforts. Such visits and discussions help to build empathy and create a shared understanding of the customer journey. This can help everyone better understand customer needs and pain points, which can inform product development, customer success strategies and sales playbooks.
d) Foster a culture of collaborative problem-solving: By encouraging team members to work together to identify and solve customer issues, companies can break down silos and promote a shared sense of ownership over the customer experience. This can help create a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. When combined with a shared understanding of your goals and how you are driving customer benefits, a collaborative approach can move you from simply solving a problem to uncovering increased value.
What do you think? What's missing from this list? How are you driving closer collaboration in your organization?