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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 most of the things we’ve discussed have been one-off actions that are either proactive or reactive in nature, asynchronous support materials are also a powerful way to drive more and better success with your customers. Much like we look for places where we can templatize and collateralize our sales message—with email templates, slides, videos, PDFs, and so forth—we can do the same in customer success.
And the benefits are the same: you can make sure that the information that you’re providing is correct, since you wrote it once and double- and triple-checked it. But even more importantly, customers usually just want to solve their problem and get on their merry way. If they can do that by reading a success note or watching a quick video, that can often be more satisfying than having to file a support request or engage in a chat conversation with an agent—not to mention that by letting customers answer their own questions, when appropriate, your success staff can spend their time on implementations, QBRs, and thornier support issues.
The traditional way to do this is via a support site. Most support software like Zendesk, Desk, Freshdesk, and so forth have lightweight content management systems that allow you to create a dedicated page for a given topic (usually in the form of a how-to answer) with text, embedded images and screenshots, and even videos, that lives on a hyperlink. Moreover, they typically let you embed links to these pages in support response macros/canned responses to let support staff quickly respond to inbound requests with the relevant answers.
Most support software also provides functionality that allows users to search across the support articles, or suggests support articles that match the initial input a user puts into a form. Lastly, they provide analytics on these documents to show how frequently users are reading them, which helps you understand the benefits they’re providing and also where there might be confusion about the product.
As you build your support site, you can definitely start basic and work your way up. Support materials have a tendency to accrete over time, and that’s a good thing. To start, one valuable item to house on your support site is a fully recorded kickoff call—Loom, Camtasia, and ScreenFlow are great tools for this—to which customers can refer if they get confused later. Even better is a kickoff call that is broken into its constituent parts, like, “This section is how we set up our account” and, “This section is where we learn how to use basic search” and, “This section is where we learn how to use advanced search,” and so on.
Like with your sales deck slides, it helps to break these up so they’re not so monolithic. Take that same work you did to record the entire implementation video and slice it up into individual snippets that address key parts of using the product. Each of these can later be used to create a specific support article that is focused on that topic.
Another great thing to house in a support site are new-product announcements. Frequently the marketing and sales org will make video, screenshot, and text materials to explain new features when they’re launched. These can easily be repurposed in a pinch as support materials (though typically your marketing demo videos will focus more on benefits and value than how to use the features). But until you have the time to make support-specific versions that are more detailed in nature, by all means, use what you have! Either way, a dedicated support article that documents the goals of a new feature and how to use it can be a great resource to email to your existing users, and for merchandising in the product if you have a means by which to do so.
Beyond core workflows and new features, it can be hard to know when to spin up a support article. On the one hand, they can be really helpful in reducing time spent answering support queries. On the other hand, they can be time consuming to produce, so you don’t want to go off the deep end creating one for every edge case. The rule of thumb I like to use is similar to the one I mentioned in Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics for creating appendix slides for your sales deck: if a question comes up more than once, it’s probably worth the time to spin up a support note addressing it and a macro to answer the question.
It might seem like a pain to take an hour out of your day, but if you’re using good support software, you’ll create all sorts of great benefits. First, you’ll make it possible for users to self-serve support on yet another topic. Beyond that, for the queries that still make it into your support queue, support software will often recommend the right article and macro to use—you’ll be setting future-you up for success, because your past hard work will be resurfaced to you magically. And you’ll be well set up for when you start hiring support personnel to help out too. Lastly, you’ll have that nice note available to shoot over to the customer rather than having to retype it again and again.
One note on notes. While many of the benefits of support notes flow from time efficiency, you don’t want to lose the opportunity to make a customer feel loved. So when responding to inquiries with a support note, first make it clear that you have a hunch that this support note will answer their question. (I like to bake this caveat into the macro text so I’m less likely to forget it.) Moreover, make sure to articulate that you’re simply sending the note in the interest of perhaps expediting the solution for them and that if they would prefer to get on the phone to address things in more detail, that of course you’d be happy to do that.
What do you don’t want—especially early on—is a situation where a fantastic, high-satisfaction interaction with a customer is spoiled by them thinking that you’re just trying to get rid of them. There will be many customers who are ecstatic to get that well-documented support note and use it to solve their problem. They likely have a busy schedule, and the notion of trying to calendar something with you seems not so exciting to them. However, there will be a class of customer (the same one who might use your inbound phone line!) who really wants to talk to a human. If it looks like you’re stiff-arming them with a macro and support note, with no offer to talk live, they’re not going to be happy campers.
It sounds obvious, but one of the biggest missed opportunities in early-stage customer success is insufficient investment in the documentation, announcement, and adoption of new features. In early-stage software, the reality is that you’re likely iterating your product pretty substantially as you go, adding new features and extending existing ones. The funny thing is that while new features get incorporated fairly regularly into prospect-facing materials—like demos, slide decks, and so on—folks forget about the customers who have already bought a version of the product that didn’t yet have these magical enhancements.
That’s a problem. If your customers are not being kept up-to-date on your advancements, but are being wooed with the latest and greatest versions of your competitors’ products, you’re missing out. And if your evolved features are addressing pain points that were surfaced via support channels, well, all your customers likely have those pain points. If you aren’t communicating that they’ve been solved, they’re likely still being frustrated by them. Further, while customers primarily buy your solution, as is, to solve an immediate problem, there’s a part of them that is buying into the belief that you will continue to get better at solving this problem for them, with better and better technology. If you are indeed iterating your product and shipping new features, you need to show it to your customers and get credit for that momentum. You want them to say to themselves, “You know, it was a really great idea that I bet on these folks. They’re always coming out with great new things for us.” Lastly, appropriate communication of new features and functionality is a fantastic way to re-engage disengaged customers who are at risk of churning.
What materials should you use for this? Well, as noted above, creating a support site note as part of your release process will help ensure that you at least have the key information readily available: what the goal of the feature is, why it’s helpful, and how to use it.
Source: TalentBin
Recording a lightweight demo video to show this off in a visual fashion is also good. This animated gif demonstrates the automatic personalization referred to in that support note.
Source: TalentBin
Of course, having this information available is great, but merchandising it solely on the support site isn’t nearly as good as bringing it to your user—in the product, in their inbox, and on your various other properties. Use your support note and associated screenshots and videos in customer-facing emails, or even webinars, about the new features. (If you record those webinars, you now have yet another great support asset.) You can also merchandise announcements in your product using new-feature announcement banners that can be dismissed. Some support solutions like Intercom include banners or fly-ins as part of their customer communication features.
Source: TalentBin
Finally, once you’ve taken the time to create new-feature notes and announcements, get as much mileage as you can out of them. Even after the initial announcement period, this sort of material can be used for email campaigns to introduce users to features over the first few months of their onboarding.
You might think that you need to be sharing this information only with your users. On the contrary, you want to share new features with anyone in your accounts who has a stake in the successful deployment of your solution. So while non-user decision-makers likely won’t need a demo, you definitely want to have them on the distribution list for these email announcements. You want them to be glad that they made the decision to buy your solution. And if you are doing a good job staying top of mind—with a drumbeat of ongoing releases and customer success support—that can be a great source of upsell opportunities.
Be mindful of adding those users and their email addresses to your CRM in such a way that you can easily execute these communications. Extra credit if you have various stakeholders modeled in a way that allows you to execute different reporting for different communications. Do you want to execute a webinar on ROI calculation for your solution, which would be appropriate for decision-makers but not for end users? Having a type field in your CRM that can be set to User or Manager can help you with that.
Communication of a new feature isn’t where responsibility ends, though. As noted above, customers have to actually adopt those new features to get value from your ongoing product improvement. So what does this mean? Well, often you’ll have new features that require substantial implementation effort.
exampleTake TalentBin’s automated follow-up campaigns feature. At one point, TalentBin shipped the ability for recruiters to automatically send follow-up emails to candidates that they discovered in the TalentBin database—drip marketing functionality that substantially raises response rates from candidates. To make it easier for recruiters to adopt this feature, we actually provided a bunch of canned campaign email templates on various topics that would be relevant to candidates. Still, a number of these templates needed customization to be specific to the customer before they could be truly usable. Which is why, when we released the new feature, the TalentBin customer success team went through their assigned accounts and engaged the relevant stakeholders to get on a new implementation call. That way, we could walk them through the new feature and get those templates customized so they would be ready for use. It was worth the time investment, because customers using campaigns would get much more value out of the solution than those just sending one-and-done emails. Of course, as soon as the feature went live, it became part of our onboarding training—but we had to loop back to hundreds of existing customers to make sure that they could access the new functionality in an impactful fashion too.
It bears repeating: the goal of customer success is to ensure that customers get the value they were promised when purchasing, so they will continue to be customers. In a SaaS world, if they don’t get value, they won’t renew. Everything we’ve covered has been in support of that goal. So by the time a year has passed (the typical length of a SaaS contract), it should be just an absolute no-brainer for the customer to renew. After all, you’ve done such a good job helping them capture tons of business value from your solution, in a way that was fully documented. So first things first: to ensure renewals, make sure that folks get to value.
But even if you’ve done all those things right, you still need to capitalize on it by executing a good renewal process. These are some ways to do that.
First, in your order form and master service agreement, you need to have an automatic renewal clause. Customers may seek to negotiate it out, but most will never consider it, and this way, your solution just default renews. When the time to renew comes around, you just run the credit card on file using something like Recurly, Zuora, or Aria Systems. With automatic renewals, it can also be nice to provide a courtesy email note a month or so out. This doesn’t mean that you can skimp on getting customers to success, but it can help in some edge-case scenarios where implementations have taken far longer than they should, stakeholders have left a company (resulting in a new sales cycle simply to get adoption of what has already been paid for), and so on. Further, automatic renewal at existing pricing can be a boon to a customer if you raise your pricing as you add new functionality and the product gets more robust.
If you don’t have automatic renewals, then you’ll have to have whoever is in charge of your renewals process—either you as a founder when you’re small, or a Customer Success Manager or Account Manager when you’re bigger—execute a renewal call. This is very similar to the quarterly business reviews that we discussed earlier in this chapter, where the goal is to summarize success to date as compared to promised goals, and to discuss customer business goals for the period ahead. But in this case, the goal is to summarize the customer’s success across the entire term and to discuss organizational goals for the year ahead—a sort of jumbo QBR.
Renewal calls should be close enough to renewal that you can immediately send a renewal contract to be signed, but far enough out that if there seems to be a snag, there’s enough time to help remediate and get to a renewal. If your final QBR is three months from the end of the contract, then a renewal call six weeks from the end of the term can be a good compromise. Calendar that renewal call as soon as the final QBR is executed.
If you’re doing a good job in your QBRs, by that second-to-last QBR, you should have a sense if the account is going to renew; if it looks like there are issues, start a plan to fix that as soon as possible. However, if for whatever reason you get to your renewal call only to find out that there are showstoppers, there’s always the option of adding some more time to the end of the contract to resolve those issues. This is to say, you can often extend a contract a month or two without requiring payment in order to resolve those issues.
As with QBRs, come to the renewal call prepared with all the success metrics that the account has accrued over the contract term; you’ll want to have all the proof necessary to show that they have gotten value for their investment. All the success metrics that your CS staff has been counting up and logging in the CRM?—bring them to the fore for the call, in what amounts to a grand finale QBR deck.
As with pitching itself, it’s important during the renewals process to actually ask for the business, again. Even if you have an auto-renew clause in your agreement, you want to validate that the customer is indeed bought-into a renewal. In that scenario, that might sound something like, “Fantastic. Well, I’m glad that we got to review all of this and that we’re helping you [busoness goal your solution solves]. Your contract will be renewing on [date], and we’re looking forward to working together in the year ahead.”
Part of the renewal call discussion should be focused on the business goals of the customer organization for the year ahead, and that’s where potential opportunities for upsell can be unearthed. Are they planning on hiring 30 more salespeople, each of whom could potentially be a user of your product? Now is the time to discuss whether it would make sense for them to buy those additional seats now so they can get a volume discount, rather than adding them one at a time over the year.
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).