Key Success Factors of the Hybrid Model

A hybrid model of customer engagement that involves the same employee covering the roles of account manager and customer success manager is becoming more and more popular in organizations — especially in the small and medium business (SMB) segments. Here at Wrike, we’ve been piloting this model for a couple of years already and in 2023 scaled it to the whole SMB segment. It proved to be very successful and efficient. And as we keep improving and scaling it we identified a number of success factors why it works so well with small and medium customers. In this article, I’m going to share these factors and provide examples from our team’s experience.

One-stop shop for the customer

One of the key success factors is obviously, convenience for the customer. Instead of engaging multiple people in the company on various questions — account manager, customer success manager, renewal manager, and more, the clients have a single point of contact to whom they can direct all sorts of questions. As a result, there’s less confusion for the clients and the average deal cycle becomes shorter. From the internal process perspective, the one-stop shop also has advantages: there’s no need to plan, collaborate, and take into account the schedules of other members of the account team — since the person is capable of handling any type of request coming from the customer, she can immediately share her availability and schedule the meeting at the earliest convenience.

However, obviously, in order to be able to effectively cover both the commercial and value sides of the business the hybrid professional needs to go through an extensive onboarding. Our experience tells us that training for that role requires about 20–30% more time than training a customer success manager. But given the amazing results the hybrid motion has shown I feel very confident that this is the time well spent.

Standard use cases

While this one may not be 100% applicable to every product in every industry, it’s very likely that the challenges customers in the SMB segment are facing are relatively simple and similar. At this point, the alternative to using the vendor’s product is using nothing. That said the use cases for the product are standard which makes them describable, transferable, and usable on scale. When it is very likely that almost any challenge a small or medium customer has the hybrid professional has already seen and knows how to deal with, the amount of time to address those challenges by sharing guidance and best practices is decreased. So he or she would have the time at the end of the meeting to ask discovery questions and identify upsell opportunities.

The leadership team, in due turn, can provide support to the hybrid team by creating a library of standard use cases that the team would be able to leverage both during the meetings and when sending follow-ups. It doesn’t necessarily need to be huge in the beginning — but as the SMB team learns more about the customers’ challenges, such a library would be updated and eventually the collection of common use cases would likely cover 80% or even 90% of the challenges the SMB customers are facing. Not only does this library need to be created, but the items in it should be easily searchable, so the customer-facing team would not spend time looking for a particular use case, but instead find it within a second using keywords.

Consultative sales

Customers are rarely engaged when a new sales rep reaches out to them with a message like “Hi, I’m your new account manager, let’s talk”. They might not yet be at the point where they are making the most of their current plan/subscription tier and ready to upgrade. When instead the rep reaches out to them and offers to maximize the value they’re getting from the product and share best practices, it’s unlikely there’s going to be a big pushback. It’s critical though that the hybrid professionals do indeed provide value to the clients before asking a single discovery question and not engage in any sneaky tactics. Such an approach leads to the clients trusting their main points of contact on the vendors’ side. Eventually, when a conversation regarding the potential upgrade is going to happen, they would feel confident that they’re being offered something that will indeed bring additional value to their organization and their rep would personally help them uncover that value.

I have to acknowledge that in many cases consultative selling would take more time than a standard upgrade conversation. But I strongly believe that the former allows us to successfully close many more deals in the long term, that said this time is going to be well spent.

Scalable business processes

One of the key characteristics of the SMB segment is a noticeably large volume of accounts compared to large and enterprise segments. This creates an additional challenge for hybrid professionals to effectively prioritize the list of accounts on a regular basis. This prioritization is quite complex. On the first level, a decision needs to be made on the proportion of time dedicated to sales activities versus customer success ones, and then on the second level, within these two major buckets — which particular customers to select to maximize the impact both from the perspective of closing as many deals as possible and to retain as much MRR/ARR as possible. However, as long as a process is established for such a prioritization (which includes giving team members clear criteria for prioritization and publishing them in the playbook), the continued growth of the volume of accounts no longer is an issue. Any recently acquired accounts get distributed among the existing team members (and the new ones are hired if needed) and they immediately fall into one or the other prioritization bucket. So as long as the process is enforced and followed, the hybrid model is effectively scalable in the SMB segment.

I only touched upon the major success factors of the hybrid model in this article. I will continue diving into details in the following ones.