The buying process has evolved into a more collective effort, and selling organizations are adapting to instill value at each stage of the customer lifecycle.
Continuity in your team’s ability to convey value throughout the post-sale stages of customer engagement (right side of the diagram) is often the difference between renewals and a high churn rate that hinders growth. Drive outcomes by navigating these handoffs, leveraging the post-sale relationship, and culminating the success into a great value story. That pathway builds healthy, long-term client relationships.
Consider your organization's message and philosophy across each touchpoint in the customer engagement journey as illustrated in the right graphic.
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.
Sysdig included its CS team in its Force Management engagement to address challenges that SaaS companies with highly technical products often experience. The customized engagement included Command of the Message, the MEDDICC qualification method, and an eLearning component that reinforces and drives consistency. Results for Sysdig included a reduction in churn and a significant uptick in securing renewals.
Learn more about how Sysdig doubled conversion rates, cut ramp-up times in half, and improved retention rates in this Case Study and video interview with Keegan Riley, the Sysdig CRO in place when Force rolled out its engagement.
