George Brontén and Britta Lorenz break down why customer success is important for sales and the empathetic approaches companies should use when communicating with existing customers to secure lasting relationships.
In the wake of the current pandemic, some companies have realized they might not know enough about their customers.Brontén advises that customer success teams take a more empathetic and human approach to selling, in order to build meaningful connections that can withstand uncertainty and turbulence.
Possible Methodologies in Customer Success
Customer success is a young field and is still in the process of building concrete methodologies. However, companies should try to build a structured process that proactively delivers on the promises made to customers and identify new ways to help them grow and improve.
The new subscription economy has shifted buying behavior to short-term contracts. You have to ensure customers are happy and renew their contract, so customer success should be a new and important focus for companies to achieve this.
The Mindset to Help Grow Accounts
Take on the mindset that ‘selling is helping your customer’, which will reinforce the importance of providing value to them. The reward of this approach is strong customer relationships that your company can rely on. It is proven to be significantly more expensive to find new logos compared to nurturing ties with existing customers. Stay human and grow an organic connection that is mutually beneficial.
Trust-Align-Grow: A Strategy to Help Build Warm and Lasting Customer Relationships
Trust: Gain the trust of the customer by understanding their situation andonly making promises that you can deliver.
Align: Ask specifically how you can provide value to their company and define their expectations. Also, align internally and identify what solutions you can realistically provide.
Grow: Deliver according to their expectations and search for other ways that you can help your customer succeed in reaching their goals. Don’t take any shortcuts!
How Can Sales Enablement Help the Customer Success Team?
Using an Account Planning Methodology can help grow your business by leveraging the untapped potential of your best accounts. Leaders need to encourage customer-facing teams to identify and reach out to these accounts, and the best way to do this is through sales enablement.
The handover from the sales team to the customer success team can be seamless if all the relevant information about a particular customer is easily accessible. The promises made to a customer should be clearly defined and handed over for a customer success employee to continue providing value in the long run. Incorporating this person into the sales process can further smoothen out the handover.
Sales enablement can help to produce a structured customer success process. This will ensure that all team members are aware of their tasks, with whom they are supposed to collaborate, and when to collect feedback from clients to make sure their expectations have been met.
All content about a client should be available at the fingertips of each customer success employee. This allows them to fully understand the current status of the relationship and the remaining tasks that need to be executed. Tools can also help with understanding by providing an overview of the customer relationship and sales cycle.
About George Brontén
George Brontén is the founder and CEO of Membrain, a company that helps B2B companies to codify their way of selling onto a platform. Membrain has partnered up with sales and marketing experts for the past 8 years to build upon their methodologies and ways of selling. Their sales enablement platform aims to increase sales effectiveness.
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