You know that feeling when your entire organization is firing on all cylinders? When customers have seamless experiences from marketing to sales and on to delivery?
As those who have experienced that feeling know, this doesn’t happen without hard work, training, and continuous improvement.
One powerful way to inspire, inform, and motivate your organization to reach this next level of customer satisfaction is with deeper integration of sales staff with your organization’s customer success program.
Here’s how you can lay the foundation and get these two functions rowing in the same direction and build the momentum you need for sustained growth.
Form a holistic view of the customer experience.
An old adage says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
In other words, how confident are you that your customers are having the experience that you want them to have?
Instead of relying on a gut feeling or the feedback from just your most vocal customers, identify a method to track and monitor metrics that capture the customer experience from their first contact to the end of the sale. Once in place, you can better understand—and make data-driven decisions to improve—your customers’ journeys, drivers, and hurdles so your team can better address them.
For example, the data can reveal that your sales process doesn’t naturally align with your existing service delivery timelines and capabilities. In response, your customer success tool can help your team to organize and better coordinate stakeholder engagement messages and resources that support sales teams’ efforts and more smoothly link your customer insights into specific calls to action.
Identify opportunities to enhance the customer experience.
The handoff from your sales team to your client delivery team is a big step in the customer journey. Understandably, you will want to ensure that your team is doing everything that it can do to make the transition smooth and seamless. However, in practice, this transition can be inconsistent and full of opportunities to make a bad first impression.
This is another way a customer success platform can confirm that the processes and tools that your teams have in place are actually performing as they should. For example, you can use data compiled from your enterprise tools to reveal how teams are working together, what sort of touchpoints and support customers are receiving during this period, and what potential pain points and inefficiencies mar the process.
This can lead to a bigger lead conversion rate and a bigger return for your sales, marketing, and business development investments.
Make data-driven decisions to drive sales and revenue growth.
Once a lead turns into a customer, we all know that the sales process doesn’t stop. There are plenty of ways to identify opportunities to cross-sell, upsell, leverage customers as advocates, and identify the potential warning signs of churn before it is too late.
Having all of your customer-related data in your customer success platform, compiled from across your enterprise, can dramatically help with each of these actions. For example, this compiled data can be used during customer-specific joint success planning sessions to help form key insights into your customer’s behaviors and needs, fuel objective decision making, and create detailed strategic customer accounts plans. And, for each customer, you can track progress toward your objectives and more directly show the links between your customer engagement plans and follow-on revenue in data-rich dashboards.
Empower your sales team with Gainsight.
In a time that has been dubbed the “Age of the Customer,” arming your sales team with every piece of data and tools available to maximize their reach and personalize their outreach will be the difference between good and great businesses in the years ahead.
So if your organization wants to learn more about how to use customer success best practices and industry-leading tools to make your sales team better and your operations more productive, the team at Gainsight would welcome the opportunity to speak with you.
Click here to schedule your free personalized demo and, if you want to learn more about how to select the right customer success platform for your business, make sure to check out our free resource, “Gainsight’s Buyer’s Guide to Customer Success Solutions.”
