Categories: Sales Leadership | Differentiation | Customer Success | Selling Technology
Customer Success (CS) is a critical component of a successful customer engagement process. Growing revenue requires your organization to be cross-functionally aligned on buyer value and solution differentiation before and after the sale. Capturing that value after the initial deal is essential for driving recurring revenue and expansion opportunities within accounts. Fostering alignment between the traditional sales organizations and your CS team is one way today’s top B2B SaaS and Tech firms gain an advantage in a competitive marketplace.
When CS is able to maintain continuity through handoffs and convey value through the post-sale stages of the customer relationship, organizations reap the benefits of high renewal rates, reduced churn, and increases in Net Retention Revenue.
For revenue team leaders selling HiTech solutions, we’ve designed this leader playbook for improving CS execution. Dig in for more strategies and thought leadership from leaders who’ve built and leveraged elite CS teams.
The Customer Journey
The shift to subscription and consumption models has reshaped the buying and selling game, and customers are holding all the cards. Fostering usage and building the business case for renewals requires skills and behaviors beyond the basic help desk. Effective CS means navigating handoffs with consistency, leveraging the post-sale relationship, and culminating success into a great value story.
Truly successful CS teams adopt the core values and strategies of a value-based sales motion to maintain consistency and ROI across the customer lifecycle. Here’s what alignment can look like when Sales and Customer Success both execute these core activities:
Activity |
Sales |
Customer Success |
Value-Based Messaging |
Execute profound discovery on specific pain points, business outcomes, and solution requirements. |
Throughout implementation, maintain the “why” behind features and functions. Gather KPIs that demonstrate positive business outcomes. |
Consistent Qualification |
Ensure managers and sellers are aligned on qualification criteria, how it informs/enacts other selling actions. |
Apply qualification process to cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Monitor changes in the client org, identify new champions or stakeholders, and cultivate advocates. |
Universal Negotiation |
Shape solution requirements by negotiating early and often. Leverage anchors to influence decisions. |
Deliver on agreements and give/gets in ways that preserve value and hold client accountable to their end of the deal. Leverage market changes and feature/function updates and speak to client’s (new) current state and shifted priorities. |
Alignment is the forcing function for all critical areas of your go-to-market teams. Create agreement on the fundamental components of the value-based sales conversation and the strategies that support a unified selling effort. Arm your CS team with tools that maintain the value-based messaging, negotiation approach, and renewal qualification strategy consistent with your customer-facing teams that landed the initial deal.
Building CS Proficiency
Shifting the conversation beyond “What we said we’d do and how that’s working out,” creates countless opportunities upstream. Engaging your client in ways that say, “We’re going to be with you,” creates an environment where the vendor becomes a trusted partner.
Your Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) reviews should be leveraged to ensure you’re capturing and conveying value with the post-implementation client team. Your CS team must be able to maintain a finger on the pulse as changes occur within the client organization and new stakeholders join the renewal conversation.
Help your CS team elevate QBR sessions into business-level conversations that connect KPIs to the larger problems your solution is addressing. Train your team to use discovery questions that reveal how your client is progressing toward the desired outcomes, identify new priorities, and gather information necessary for qualifying the renewal. Role-plays are excellent for improving your team’s ability to ask the right questions during these sessions.
Effective CS discovery uncovers new stakeholders, additional champions, untapped differentiation, and additional opportunities. Work with managers to build CS proficiency around leveraging discovery questions at QBR meetings to identify expansion opportunities and aid renewals.
CS discovery questions might include:
• “What are your business priorities in the next six months?”
• “Walk me through what’s happening in your organization.”
• “What challenges are you seeing in our partnership?”
• “Who else is involved in your company that I should be supporting?”
Carrying the same tenets of deep discovery and qualification into the post-sale stages of customer engagement builds advocacy, opens the door for account expansion, and elevates the relationship to that of a trusted business partner.
Drive Outcomes with an Elite Approach to Customer Success
When CS can maintain the value-driven messaging and qualifying methods that helped land the initial sale, the alignment propels your ability to secure renewals and expand accounts. Read this Case Study on how Sysdig leveraged CS alignment into doubled conversion rates and “skyrocketed NRR” in selling their SaaS platform.
Learn more leader strategies for elevating CS performance and driving cross-functional alignment by reading our Customer Success Playbook for leaders.
