The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers: Sales Blueprints, #6
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About this ebook
Customer Success Managers and Account Managers are the newest addition to the sales team, whether they and their organizations know it or not. Building on the ideas in The SaaS Sales Method, which discusses how fundamental sales skills must be applied by every customer-facing employee, The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers goes deep on the fundamental skills of CSMs and Account Managers. It also goes beyond, to discussing in detail how CSMs and AMs must interact with other sales teams in order to truly maintain an consistent customer experience and maximize revenues from existing customers.
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Reviews for The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very straightforward approach to managing CS. There are some interesting insights on how to do things more methodological when working with people, which is the bottom line.
And when working with people is all about being prepared.
Book preview
The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers - Dominique Levin
Copyright ©2018. Published by Winning By Design LLC, a Delaware company
All rights reserved as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this book may be reproduced, used or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or archive, without the expressed written consent of the publisher.
The contents of this book were created in the United States of America.
Edited by Fernando Pizarro and Dan Smith
Revision 5.0
Winning by Design LLC
San Francisco, California
United States of America
For more information, visit www.winningbydesign.com
More from Winning by Design
The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers is part of Winning by Design’s Sales Blueprints series. Other books in the series include:
The SaaS Sales Method: The Science and Process of Sales
Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization: How to Design, Build and Scale a Customer-Centric Sales Organization
The SaaS Sales Method Fundamentals: How to Have Customer Conversations
The SaaS Sales Method for Sales Development Representatives: How to Prospect for Customers
The SaaS Sales Method for Account Executives: How to Win Customers
Contents
CUSTOMER SUCCESS: GROWING THE BUSINESS TOGETHER
1 Onboarding
1.1 HandOff
1.2 Onboarding
2 Use
2.1 Achieving First Value
2.2 Usage and Recurring Value
2.3 Customer Contact Cadence
2.4 Customer Health Score
2.5 Handling Frustration - The Golden Sequence
3 Expansion
3.1 Blueprint of an Impact Review
3.2 Account Management
3.3 Organizational Selling
CONCLUSION
SUMMARY: KEYCHARTS
About Winning By Design
CUSTOMER SUCCESS: GROWING THE BUSINESS TOGETHER
The real measure of customer success isn’t landing more and more customers. It isn’t even keeping those customers through improved retention efforts. The best companies are able to keep their customer churn below 5 percent per year, which only comes from focusing on creating Impact for the customer across the entire customer lifecycle. Despite this, retaining customers is not the focus of the best companies.
Static customers are no longer good enough. The top companies grow customers along a logically orchestrated customer journey, leading to positive Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
Companies with a customer success operating model often have Net Revenue Retention (NRR) – defined as expansion revenue minus revenue churn in a given time frame for your existing customer base – that is greater than 130 percent.
Figure 1. The SaaS Sales Method - A journey of experiences, shows how expanding revenue from existing customers has become more important than ever before
Selling has become a team sport. Customer success has become a team sport as well. Everybody, from marketing, to sales, to post-sales personnel, is responsible for customer success. If you sold to a bad-fit customer, the customer will not be successful. If you don’t have a plan to impact the customer’s business over the next year, the customer will not be successful. Seneca famously said, if you don’t know where you’re going, no wind is favorable.
So it is with customers – you need a plan, which is the whole point of The SaaS Sales Method.
Figure 2. Outline of the key customer success activities
Key processes during the growth phase of a customer journey are:
Preboarding:In some situations, it might help to introduce your customer success team even before the customer has committed to your solution.
Handoff: In this meeting, sales will introduce the customer success team to the client. For larger clients, there will be an internal pre-handoff meeting in which sales coordinates with other functions, including customer success, product, and marketing as appropriate.
Orchestration and technical kickoff: Whereas most companies organize a technical kickoff, many forget a business orchestration meeting in which you (re-)affirm a client’s one-year goals.
Delivering value: Ultimately, a client bought your solution for a reason. If the customer isn’t seeing results, renewal and expansion are highly unlikely.
Monitor and respond: It is not usually necessary to meet your client frequently. However, it is always necessary to monitor the health of a customer and to respond to signals, good and bad.
Review results: Not too long before your client’s renewal or expansion conversation, it is important to remind them of the results you have been able to achieve based on the goals set during the orchestration meeting.
Renew and expand: If orchestration goes well, renewal and expansion conversations flow very naturally out of your mutual interest in growing the customer’s business together.
Since impact and Critical Event play such important role in The Saas Sales Method, we will review our SPICED framework here. More