By Ejieme Eromosele
There’s been a lot of talk in the CS community in the past few months about the pressure for CS to own revenue and for CSMs to own more commercial responsibility. Posts like Jan Young’s and Rav Dhaliwal's make compelling cases for CSMs and CS teams to be more directly accountable to revenue. As economic pressure hits all businesses, large and small, Saas is being asked to do more to preserve cash which means trying to squeeze more revenue out of its existing customer base.
Whatever side of this debate you’re on, it doesn’t hurt for a CSM to have a greater appreciation and understanding of how to sell. At most, it will help them support their companies and preserve their roles. And at minimum it will help garner more empathy for the Sales team.
And while there’s a lot of talk about why and whether CSMs should sell, there is very little on the practical application of how CSMs sell.
I’ve spent the past 3 years as a CS leader with a sales quota. I’ve owned renewals but also expansion revenue through upsell and cross-sell. So I’m qualified to share what it takes as a CSM / CS leader to start learning how to sell.
Notice that I wrote “start learning how to sell” and not “selling”. If organizations expect CSMs to sell, they need to train and enable CSMs to sell. The assumption that because CS has greater access to existing customers and deeper relationships, means that they can just print money from customer upsells is inherently flawed. Selling is a learned process.
Let’s dig in…Here’s 4 steps to learn how to sell as a CSM / CS Leader:
Deeply understand your customer’s business challenge
Understand what’s needed to solve that challenge
Confirm the “buyer”
Project Manage the close process
1. Understand the core business challenge (or missed opportunity): The first step in selling is knowing the problem you’re solving for. Our customers buy our products to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. If you do not have a grasp on why your customer has purchased your product, even as a CSM, you’re in trouble. This should be table stakes.
Companies buy things to help them grow revenue (ex: increase website conversion rates), save costs (ex: reduce their contact center costs), or run their business more efficiently (ex: hiring talent or collecting outstanding invoices). Talk to your customer about their business challenges or their business goals and understand what problems you could help them solve or what missed opportunities you could help them take advantage of.
Tie that problem or goal to a quantifiable value (costs saved, revenue generated) and you’re on your way to be printing upsell and cross-sell dollars.
2. Understand what’s needed to help solve the customer’s challenge: If you’re a CSM in a selling position, you most likely already have first hand insight into the challenges and opportunities that your customer is facing. And you may already have recommendations on how they can improve. Those recommendations are what’s required to help the customer solve their problem (or at least some of it).
A note that your solution (product or service) may not be the only thing to help fully address your customer’s challenges, and that’s ok. The important thing in selling into your customer is that you’ll want to focus on how your solution is uniquely positioned to help. And don’t exaggerate or make promises that you won’t be able to keep. Continue to keep your trusted advisor hat on and be honest about what your solution can or cannot do to help. When sales quotas get introduced to CSMs, it can also introduce mis-aligned incentives.
3. Confirm the “buyer”: First rule of selling, you can’t sell to someone who can’t buy. For CS folks, we often have direct and frequent contact with various people at our customers’ teams but we need to understand who has the influence and/or authority to actually make a purchase decision. It’s not always the people we deal with day-to-day.
When someone has influence and authority to buy, they can either dedicate a part of their own budget for the purchase, or influence others (either a boss or a peer) to allocate part of their budget.
There are a few ways to get to this:
Check for who signed your current agreement. Is it the same person you speak to? Great. But watch out for this red herring
Ask directly! “Are you the budget owner for this purchase?” Or “Who would we need to get approval from to make this happen?”
4. PM the close process: As I mentioned earlier, sales is a process and there are often various steps to close a deal, even when you have a clear understanding of the challenge, know how your solution can help and have confirmed the actual buyer. You may have to show a demo, sell into other teams, negotiate pricing, gather requirements for a scope of work, draft new / additional paperwork for an agreement or change order, get legal, finance or procurement approval, etc.
Depending on the product you’re selling, there can be plenty of logistics to keep track of in order to close the deal and part of your role as seller is to own that process to completion. Think of it as a “success plan”. Immediate success is getting the deal done and getting the booking. Longer term success is getting your customer more value and making them stickier.
*Bonus step: Understand your internal process around sales: Every company has their own internal process, documentation and roles around the sales process. Get familiar with those components so you’re set up for success.
Wrapping up
If you are being asked to take on revenue responsibility, hopefully the 4 steps above will bring more clarity to the sales process.
Even if you don’t have a sales quota, if you start to think like a seller, you may start to become a better CSM as well. Uncovering the problem you’re solving and how your solution directly plays into that value creation will help you drive more strategic and value-added conversations.
The last thing I’ll leave here is that in order to operationalize CSMs owning sales quotas, organizations need to start to do a few things:
Train CSMs to sell. This one’s pretty self-explanatory. If you’re training sellers, provide the same level of training, support and enablement to CSMs.
Understand that not every existing customer is ready to be sold into. Sometimes “selling” a customer more of your solution means getting them to their current full value, which is ok. Focus on the ones that are ready to expand.
Adjust compensation to account for the new responsibility and incentives. This could mean paying CSMs more and/or adjusting the makeup of their compensation (i.e. base salary and bonus, targets, etc).
Decide what you’re going to take off of the CSMs plate to make space for sales activities.
Happy value delivery and selling!
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers a CSM Certification program that includes classes that focus on selling, including Managing the Selling Cycle and Objections & Negotiation. For our full list of offerings, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io
Ejieme Eromosele - Ejieme is a career customer advocate and advises companies on customer-led growth. As VP of Customer Success & Account Management at Quiq, she helps the world’s best brands grow awareness, increase sales and lower customer support costs through conversational AI and messaging. Prior to Quiq, she was Managing Director of Customer Experience at The New York Times and spent over 8 years in management consulting at PwC and Accenture. She has a BA in Economics and an MBA from NYU.