Work Prioritization for the Hybrid Role
As our account development team keeps growing, I conduct more and more interviews with candidates interested in working in a role that combines functions of sales and customer success. Every time a candidate asks me what is the biggest challenge this role presents, my answer remains the same — work prioritization. Even within account manager and customer success roles separately prioritizing the book of business may be an uneasy task. And when one needs to juggle even more priorities, the situation can easily get out of control. I would not call the recommendations I’m going to share today a comprehensive guide — my goal is to provide a starting point for the teams beginning to work in the hybrid format. Using these guidelines they would be able to take initial steps. And then based on the experience of their team members, instructions could be developed that would take into account the specifics of the product, market, and industry.
When the work for the hybrid team is being prioritized, the process is happening on two levels. On the first level, we’re deciding what proportion of time should be spent on sales activities and what — on those associated with customer retention. On the second level, the goal is to prioritize activities within each of those two buckets. While this logic seems pretty straightforward and we used it as a starting point when building the processes in the hybrid team, I can not say that I fully agree with it at this point. The reason is that the very purpose of the inception of the hybrid role was to create a one-stop-shop type of rep for the customer who could truly serve as a strategic advisor and cover both value-focused and commercial questions. I strongly believe that an experienced hybrid professional should not make this division but instead make every customer engagement count in order for both sales and retention targets would be hit. Consultative selling is not yet another nice phrase — this is something that is at the core of the hybrid motion. We start by helping the clients to uncover more value from the product and achieve their goals and earn the right to ask discovery questions and identify upsell opportunities. I do understand though that from the work tracking standpoint a certain line dividing the time spent on sales and CS needs to be drawn. I do not have a universal recipe here, but equalizing that or making it just slightly disproportional (e.g. 55%/45%) may be a good starting point. But the more experience team members are going to get with the hybrid format of work, the less frequently they will need to make a choice on what direction of work to spend the time on.
Let’s review how the book of business can be prioritized within Sales and Customer success buckets. When it comes to sales we’re usually looking at the following criteria:
The larger the size of the organization, the higher the probability that a company-wide rollout would eventually be a possibility and as a result, a major upgrade opportunity would be involved. Obviously, this would not be the case for all products and solutions since many of them focus on particular job functions. But generally speaking, large company size means bigger growth opportunities
It’s not very likely that a customer who’s not getting much value from the product (or any value at all) would be interested in increasing their spending on the solution. That said, companies that have a higher product usage are more likely to upgrade and increase the value received by getting access to new capabilities available on higher subscription tiers. The good news here is that since we’re talking about the hybrid role here even the clients with low usage would not be hopeless from the upgrade perspective. It’s just the case that with them it would be a two-step exercise. In the first step, the hybrid professional would deliver value to the company’s organization by helping them get the most out of the product, and in the second step — identify upsell opportunities
While this is not always a defining parameter, clients who already spend a noticeable budget on the product are often more likely to purchase more seats/upgrade to a higher plan/purchase an addon. The fact that they already committed to significant spending on the product is an indicator that they see (or plan to see) a return on investment (ROI) from the solution and as long as a reasonable justification is provided on how an even better ROI can be achieved they would be open to upsell conversation.
Even relatively small accounts that pay a lot per user are a great group for prospecting. The high price per user (PPU) guarantees that even a small expansion would result in a noticeable delta ARR which would be very helpful for the rep from the quota attainment perspective
Now what criteria can be taken into account for work prioritization from the customer success standpoint?
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Obviously, all clients in the book of business regardless of their product usage do not have the same churn risk at any given moment since their renewal dates are spread across the months and quarters of the year. That said, as a starting point I recommend prioritizing clients that have renewal dates this and the next quarter. I would like to stress that I’m not saying that clients renewing in more than 6 months should be completely ignored — not at all. But when making immediate decisions that are data-driven, customers with renewal dates that are closer should get more attention.
Yes, it’s the same criteria as for the sales prioritization, but the reasoning behind it is different. The more a client is spending on the product, the bigger would be the negative impact of a potential churn of such an account. So customers with higher spending should always be a top priority.
Different solutions available on the market offer different plans — with monthly, quarterly, annual, or multi-year billing. Obviously, clients with shorter contract duration are a higher risk from the retention standpoint. While this recommendation may seem counter-intuitive, I recommend prioritizing customers with annual contracts and longer. Given the fact that they already made a longer commitment to the product, it’s mission-critical to ensure that they get sufficient value from the solution and keep renewing moving forward. Clients on monthly contracts may churn any month regardless of how much value they’re getting. So some good incentives need to be offered to them from the sales side to convert their contracts to annual.
Another criterion that intersects with sales prioritization is product usage. While the usage itself doesn’t guarantee the renewal, statistically clients with higher usage are much less likely to cancel their subscription. So I recommend establishing a certain usage threshold above which the usage would be considered “healthy” and prioritizing clients from the CS perspective that are below that threshold.
As I mentioned previously, the concept of the hybrid model implies that every customer interaction should ideally contribute to achieving both sales and retention goals. However, there are two edge-case scenarios where it’s important to have a meeting with particular accounts even though such a meeting would not contribute to one or the other goal.
The first scenario is an account with small spending but large growth potential. We already discussed that from the customer success perspective, it would not make sense to prioritize such an account since its churn would not make a noticeable impact on the retention result. But since we’re talking about an account that for various reasons may grow dramatically in the foreseeable future, it would make sense to contradict the standard practice and invest the time into working with them. Once the account is going to grow and the spending increases, it will be served in a standard hybrid format and will no longer fall into the exception category.
The second scenario is an account that has a very high spending on the product but a very low growth potential. For example, we may be talking about a customer with whom the product has already been rolled out wall to wall (every employee in the department/whole company is already using the product) and the highest subscription tier has been purchased. So from the sales perspective, it would not make a lot of sense to spend the time with the client. However, since the spending is high, a churn of such an account would make a noticeable impact on the retention result, and a reasonable time needs to be dedicated to serving this customer.
I hope the recommendations provided above will be helpful for account prioritization in your hybrid team. Make sure that the criteria you choose are communicated to the team members and the why behind each of them is explained. Then hybrid reps would find it easier to juggle a lot of balls and achieve amazing results hitting both upsell and retention targets.