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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.
There are all kinds of benefits to instrumenting and capturing success signifiers. But you can’t forget to reflect this customer success information back to the customers themselves. That might sound a little weird—if they’re having success, you’d think they’d know, right? No! Customers are super busy, use dozens of tools, and have all kinds of competing vendors whispering in their ears that their software would provide a better, faster, smarter solution than yours. You need to do a good job of documenting and reflecting back the success your customers are having, so it’s super clear that they’re getting that all-important ROI.
If you’re proactive about sharing this ROI information, great things happen. You’ll be top of mind with users and decision-makers, who will understand why this was a great investment of their time and budget. And if there are other potential users of your solution in the organization, it’ll be that much easier for you to sell more seats. These decision-makers and users also interact with friends and colleagues that share their business challenges. Making sure your ROI proof is readily available will arm them to be great promoters to others. And it helps cement their existing commitment bias ( aren’t they smart for choosing you?), which is very helpful if competitors and alternative solutions show up in their inboxes. Why would you open an email about a competing solution when you know that you’re getting great value from the one you’re using?
cautionIf you don’t do a good job reminding customers of their successes, the opposite can happen. You’ll miss out on upsell opportunities, as no one is clear on why your solution is a great investment. You’ll miss out on word of mouth because your decision-makers and users aren’t armed to advance those arguments for you. And you’ll leave yourself wide open for competitors to come in, making a case that their solutions can provide more value. Not good.
The best way to achieve scenario A, and to effectively share success data with your customers, is to implement quarterly business reviews (QBRs). Oddly named—probably better to call them something like success reviews—these are formal quarterly checkpoints between a vendor and a client to document progress against joint business goals. This is the means by which a vendor can present formally the value that has been delivered to the client so the customer can say, “Wow. This is great. I’m so glad that I’m doing business with you. I’m totally going to renew when the time comes around. In the meantime, I’m going to think about how I can maybe reallocate some budget from the other solutions I’m using, since clearly yours is working so well. Oh, while I’m at it, I’ll tell all my peers at different organizations about this next time we have cocktails.” At least, that’s the best-case scenario!
Quarterly business reviews should generally include the same participants who were involved in the selling process, with a particular focus on the decision-maker who spent his budget on your solution. A decision-maker who is a seasoned software purchaser will typically expect this sort of thing—and, in part, expects you to do his homework for him vis-à-vis the ROI that has been generated to date. I know that sounds a little weird. You clearly have an incentive to demonstrate substantial ROI, so why would customers leave that up to you to prove? Well, again, your customers are busy people dealing with the day-to-day of their jobs, so if you can do this for them, they’ll love you for it. Plus, they’d love for you to make them look smart for choosing your solution.
Involving users may make sense, but if there are too many to be practical, better to focus on the primary decision-maker. So too if there are problems in adoption or usage in parts of the user base that need to be addressed candidly with the decision-maker—you don’t want users in the room for that discussion.
As with many of these things, a nice slide deck template that outlines the information you want to transmit is a great start. This example of a QBR deck for a solution provider helps telesales organizations do a better job handling their inbound calls.
Your template should include a place to list the shared goals that drove the purchase of the solution—an opportunity to do rediscovery and ensure that the same business pains continue to be priorities. Start with something like this:
example“When you first purchased TalentBin, it was because you had five open headcount for Ruby on Rails engineers and were looking at this tool as a means to help with that. Is that still the primary technical hiring challenge you’re facing?” This rediscovery should be paired with the KPIs for the key business process that you were looking to improve, both before and after the solution was implemented.
If things are going great, and you can demonstrate that substantial value is being captured, then you should feel empowered to note opportunities for more ROI with more adoption. Say only five recruiters are using your fancy software, and you can show that they’ve saved 50 hours per recruiter per month over the previous quarter, aligning to ~$30K in saved salary expense. If you know there are 20 other recruiters in the account, they’re clearly wasting ~$120K in salary expense across the rest of the recruiting team for each quarter those others aren’t users. What are we waiting for?!
Below is a slide that focuses on how much key performance indicators have improved as a result of implementing a solution.
Source: IRMC
If there are issues, you should know this ahead of time from your success instrumentation, and address them in the presentation. Are seven of the account’s users adopting well, and gaining ROI, but three aren’t? Present this, along with the opportunity cost of non-adoption, and come with a proposal of how you’d like to address this issue to ensure maximum ROI for the decision-maker. Again, you’re being proactive and doing a bit of her job for her, which will be welcome. Also, if there are issues, attempts at upsell and cross sell in a QBR will probably be looked at as pretty lame. So don’t do that until you’re delivering on your promise for the existing folks.
Ultimately, the goal of the QBR is to assess the state of the relationships and sell the next steps that are most beneficial to you and the client. If that means retraining for problematic users, then you should be selling that. If everything is great, you should be selling participation in customer-success marketing collateral, like videos, slides, and case studies, and such, wherein the success metrics that you just reviewed and everyone gave each other high fives over can be documented in an easily shareable format to get in front of potential customers, and in so doing, make your client look like the brilliant thought leader she is for being so forward thinking!
These recommendations should be the conclusion of the QBR, along with discussion and buy-in by the decision-maker that these are the right next steps and a proposed action plan to achieve them.
Depending on the size of the customer and the amount of revenue that you’re looking to preserve, this QBR could be done on-site or digitally. If you’re going to do it on-site, you can often add in some user-facing activities, like retraining, a live Q&A session, or even just a customer appreciation thing like pizza, cookies, schwag, and so on. If the QBR is delivered over a digital presentation, you should ideally record it so it’s available for reference after the fact.
Lastly, if your solution isn’t revenue intensive enough to justify the staff time to execute a QBR of the type described above, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be explicitly sharing success information on a cadenced basis. Your goal remains the same: getting a customer excited about the value they’re getting out of your solution. If your product is particularly low cost, consider how you might develop an automated QBR that delivers all the same metrics and proof that you would cover in a face-to-face or digital presentation, but does so via email and potentially in the product.
Coming out of the QBR, guess what: you need to implement those next actions. So whatever the plan of action, summarize it in a follow-up email to the relevant participants. Then the responsible party should start cranking on that, as the clock is ticking on execution of that ahead of the next QBR.
Just as you report on your deal pipeline, you want some sort of method to report on QBR execution. Early on, this could be a Google Sheet that simply lists each QBR in its own row, which you populate when you first onboard the customer. Eventually, of course, this should live in your CRM—a standard way to approach this is to have an event of type QBR with a completion state field that you can set to To Be Scheduled, Scheduled, or Completed. And when an opportunity is closed-won, set that QBR field to automatically populate at quarterly intervals such that you can easily run a report to see the To Be Scheduled QBRs in the next 60 days that you need to schedule and prepare materials for.