Aligning Sales & Success

Customer Success, a department that technically did not exist 10 years back. Then why do we need it now and why does this particular department matter in today's businesses? Especially SaaS, also, why is Sales and Customer Success a power couple?

Let's further dive into these aspects of Customer Success!

What is Customer Success? - Promise to Reality

Customer Success is an aim, which is further departmentalized. We can further define, Customer Success as a set of processes created by highly empathetic people to make sure, a customer gets the best out of your product.

In order to dive deeper into Customer Success, we will need to define "Success", which does differ from organization to organization. But, in general, there are two bifurcations to Success which can be a metric to the usability of the product.

1> Proactive Success

2> Reactive Success (Support)

We will mainly talk about proactive success in this article.

If the proactiveness towards customer success is increased then the reactiveness drops effectively, making the product more adaptive to a user or a customer. This is achieved by laying down the correct roadmap for a customer wherein he/she can get the best out of a product.

Hence we can surely say that customer success is the bridge that connects promise to reality, wherein a promise was made by the Sales team and reality is where this promise is kept by the success team

Customer Success Management, as a career has a great upward trend and is logically required with product complexity rising. Here's what Google Trends has to say when we search for Customer Success Manager.

As we can see in the above image, the term Customer Success Manager is picking up from 2014 onwards.

The hunter and the farmer theory

Currently, the products have become much complex than they were in the past, and with products becoming complex, Customer Success is a lead player. But if we talk about the past then the Sales department was generally divided into two parts, namely➖

1> The Hunters or the Inside/ Outbound Sales team whose main duty was to turn a lead into a sale.

2> The Farmers now known as the Customer Success Managers, whose main duty is to make sure that a customer is delighted, gives referrals, is not churning and provides enough data for case studies.

With this department, the Sales team can focus more on closing deals (hunting), and the Success team can focus on growing and keep the churn levels low to moderate (farming).

Why is Customer Success Important?

I think we are convinced about how pivotal is Customer Success to a product based company. Here are some more pointers on why is Customer Success important especially in the SaaS industry where competition is fierce!

1> Customer Success team is a bridge between the promise made by the Sales team and the actual product usability.

2> Successful customers will not churn!

A customer expects the onboarding process to be easy once the payment is made and we should consider this an actual "Day 1" and with payments coming in each month, typically in a SaaS monthly billing, a customer always has an option to click on the cancel subscription button. This activity is reduced if the Customer Success Team is in place with the correct processes to follow.

Does everyone need to have a Customer Success Team in place?

A company always works on keeping the monthly costs as lean as possible and this becomes crucial for SaaS startups. So, here's a graph that defines if, at all you need a Success Team as I said earlier, a Success team is required where the complexity of the product increases as the touchpoints go up along with the costs to a company in employing a Success team to work with.

Today, if we had to give a name to the SaaS product onboarding process then we can call it 'Concierge Onboarding'.

Let me explain, if we type "Concierge" on Google then this is what it means - "A concierge is an employee of a multi-tenant building, such as a hotel or apartment building, who receives guests." The goal of a concierge is simple, to make a guest's stay as pleasant as possible and earn an excellent recommendation out of it.

Now, what if we combine the above-mentioned theory with onboarding? In the age of Sales Automation and the onboarding process being the most crucial point in customer satisfaction and retention, it is always acknowledged if a customer gets a personalized onboarding. Where all the queries are resolved and proper guidance is provided to using the product effectively.

Here's the source of this image

Storytime: A thriving tribe's tale!

Once upon a time, there was a thriving tribe. Let's call them "T" for now. The members of this tribe were living a great and healthy life with food being served on time. The tribe had 5 hunters and 5 farmers. Both these groups were thriving at their best pace!

As the tribe was growing, the demand for meat grew alongside, as there were only 5 hunters, working at full efficiency, meat was limited in the given hunting area per hunter. This is when farmers compensated for the low inventory of meat with wheat for the time being until the hunters explore a new area to hunt where there are more animals.

What did this do?

• This strategy made sure, everyone is eating well.
• It keeps up the balance between hunting and farming.
• It does not let either of the two groups burn out.

We can very well relate to this story with today's products where SaaS is becoming tough to sell day by day! Here's is where a Customer Success Manager and a Sales Manager can work closely to make sure the growth is optimal.

I'll be soon posting about the metrics to be followed in SaaS Sales.

Until then, as always,

Happy Selling! 🙌