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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.
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.