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Updated August 22, 2022You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.
While all of the above activities are key to getting customers to success, and eventually renewing their contracts, an effective customer success function can and should play a larger role in your organization. Because it’s uniquely positioned to have meaningful, ongoing interactions with your customers, customer success can often pass on a wealth of information to sales and marketing, product development, and other key functions.
An outcome of all of your customer success activities—rigorous onboarding, inbound support request capture, and proactive monitoring—will be a wealth of information on what customers like about the product, and what they don’t. Customer success uses this information to resolve issues and enable success, but it’s also important to feed this intelligence back to the product development organization. If certain features are hard to use, and create a large amount of inbound support requests, product and engineering can prioritize refactoring those features. That will in turn not only reduce the support resources needed to paper over that issue, but will ideally enable more success, creating happier customers who are less likely to churn (and more likely to generate positive word of mouth).
Your customer success team will also be the first people to know that a user or decision-maker is departing from one organization to join another. This is a prime opportunity to follow them to the next company as well, as typically the settling-in period in a new role is accompanied by setting up new tooling. Handing this information off to sales to execute on in a timely fashion is paramount.
Customer success can also be extremely helpful in surfacing customers willing to do customer reference calls with prospects. Connecting prospects with customers who are rabid fans due to their success is a great way to get deals across the line, and your customer success staff can help you achieve that.
As your company matures, your pitch should too. You no longer have to speak about hypothetical success—now you can point to real-world examples of how your solution is changing how your users do business. Customer success plays a key role in finding valuable usage data and product evangelists and passing that information back into your marketing and media outreach.
Earlier in the chapter, we talked about the importance of capturing successful outcomes in your CRM so you can report that information back to the client. Equally important, though, is having the ability to report those outcomes across all users, or particular subsets of accounts. As customers reach their goals, customer success can harvest this information and provide it to marketing for use in proof of success collateral like slides, videos, and so on, as discussed in Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics.
Customer success will be best positioned to identify cheerleaders and advocates who can be helpful in the context of conferences, speaking opportunities, and customer feedback on new products.
If customer success is going to help all these other parts of the organization, the first step is to make them aware that these are activities that they should be engaging in. The second, more advanced, step, especially as you start establishing a specialized customer success function, is to provide compensation inducements to them. Offer a ~$50 bonus for each upsell or new opportunity (again, contingent on the size of your typical deals) identified by customer success that ends up getting sold.
As discussed in the previous chapter, as you start to have more responsibilities that occupy your time—but before you bring on staff to hand those off to—you’ll have to be mindful of splitting your calendar to achieve them.
Previously, you had to find time for prospecting, initial pitches, and down-funnel follow-up meetings; now, you’re adding implementation meetings, monitoring success KPIs, QBRs, and renewals! It’s a lot, so it’s vital that you be vigilant about blocking segments of time on your calendar, or those activities won’t get done.
The first step is to make sure that meetings for customer success activities—implementation calls, kickoffs, check-ins, and QBRs—get on the calendar as soon as deals are closed, so your future time is burdened appropriately. The second step is to start tracking these activities in your CRM. The same way you may have a Demo event activity or Follow Up meeting activity, you should track Implementation Meetings and QBRs such that, with a simple report, you can see, for example, all accounts that have a closed-won opportunity but have not yet had an implementation meeting.