By Colleen St. John
As a Customer Success Leader, the transition from Sales to Customer Success is a critical moment in your customer journey because it’s your opportunity to make a first impression and to build momentum, focus and excitement with your new client.
When all goes well, it’s smooth sailing - but the devil is in the details.
As you are building your team and processes from the ground up it’s important to just start where you are, while also not losing sight of where you want to go. Over the past year I have focused on three key areas as it relates to this transition:
1. Buy-in from Sales Leadership
In the beginning I prioritized a strong, collaborative working relationship with our Sales Leadership. We discussed and debated workflows until we agreed on a starting point. What has worked well is this foundation for a team-based approach rather than what can sometimes be a clunky, toss the closed deal ‘over the fence’ approach seen in other organizations. These regular open lines of communication have allowed us to stay aligned, even as we are growing and evolving. Having the buy-in of Sales Leadership is key because without it the ever evolving process would not be reinforced and this handoff would be inconsistent across the team. We’ve also implemented time for the Sales team to highlight what’s coming for CS to prepare as well as a meeting time for the CS team to highlight what is happening on the customer side, especially highlighting newly launched customers. This has continued to reinforce that our Sales Reps and CSMs are all on the same team and we all have the same objective of ensuring our clients are supported and successful. It is not always perfect, especially as our team continues to grow but we have a foundation anchored in alignment which helps us navigate even the trickiest of waters.
If you’re having difficulty getting Sales Leadership on your side of improving the handoff, I believe a pitch highlighting how these processes will benefit everyone might help. For example, underscore that, “our focus is to ensure we have all of the relevant information for a client to get started and our goal is to make sure sales never receives a call with a complaint. In order to do that, here’s what we need to do … “ Get specific with the steps you need their buy-in on. A collaborative approach getting their feedback can help you better understand their workflows as well.
2. Internal Transition Meeting
In the very early days, we did not have a CRM yet so we needed to establish some best practices as it related to gathering customer information and getting that information transferred over to the CSM.
As a starting point, we established a sales to cs slack channel so the sales reps could notify our CS team that we had a new client. From here we scheduled an internal transition meeting including sales and cs leadership, sales rep, csm and other project team members as needed.
Through these conversations we were able to templatize the information that needed to be transferred over to CS from Sales as an early step to add some repeatability into the process. We were then able to agree upon the kick off strategy for the new client and then begin working directly with the new customer.
As we started to grow, it was no longer scalable to have all of these team members, including leadership in every internal transition meeting but the standardized template allowed everyone to have full visibility into what was going on with new customers. Some challenges and inconsistencies also came with this growth. For example, a few times the sales rep was waiting on the csm to schedule the internal meeting and the csm was waiting on the sales rep which in turn, delayed the kickoff. To remedy this, we have now assigned the sales rep as the manager of this step. Once the internal transition meeting is complete and everyone is on the same page, the sales rep introduces the csm and now the csm takes the lead. Another inconsistency was that we didn’t establish a cadence for evaluating if the information in the template was evolving with us as we grew. New CSMs didn’t always find the onboarding questionnaire relevant so they began to build their own processes for gathering and managing information. To rectify this we have established committees to evaluate our processes to ensure we have buy-in from the team, highlighting the importance of improving our core processes rather than creating spin-off processes. This has been key as we have begun to transfer historical data over to our CRM. Throughout this work we have seen how critical it is to nail down the information gathering during the handoff, utilize the same system and then leverage a system for visibility across all teams which will allow us to make informed decisions rooted in data down the line. This has also helped guide how we want to utilize our CRM because we have been continuously testing workflows, so now we are clear on how to operationalize the sequence of many of the steps described above.
3. Customer Facing Kickoff
The Kickoff Meeting has been an area where we have spent a lot of time fine-tuning. Understanding the audience, their goals and what would need to be covered during the first Kickoff has sometimes been a moving target. As a first step, we worked through our deck and then we worked through it some more. Establishing a standardized deck for the team allowed the CSMs to utilize a core set of slides for all customers. This allowed us to standardize the content that all new customers would see, while also allowing CSMs to tailor the deck to the specific customer based on information gathered during our internal transition meeting. In the beginning, because we are a fast growing startup and we have various models for how our customers use our products and services, we ended up with many different Kickoff decks and that led to versioning problems. To resolve this confusion, we created a library of slides that the CSMs, in collaboration with associated project team members, maintain to ensure the decks are up to date. The CSM will then create a copy for the new customer and edit the slides accordingly. This is often a collaborative effort among the project team in preparation for the Kickoff meeting. We’ve also established open lines of communication if any team members have feedback on adjusting specific slides, updating content covered and even tweaking the order of how information is presented.
Through these processes we are also starting to see two customer segments emerging, one group that wants to dive straight into the technical and tactical elements of the implementation and the other group that may need us to assist in reinforcing the sale to additional stakeholders in their own organization. These two customer groups need very different content covered during this initial meeting which often leads to a different implementation approach. Our team has coined the two implementation approaches as the Fast Track and the Scenic Route. As we are learning more and more about our customers’ needs during the kickoff process we are building a customer journey that complements their needs in a more customized way.
The Sales to CS handoff is a key element to ensure you start out on the right foot with customers and it’s inevitable that there will be an evolution to this process as you grow. In the beginning I’d recommend keeping open, productive lines of communication with your cross functional partners on the sales team and be open and willing to fine tune the process on an ongoing basis. Your company will grow, your product will change, your customer profile will likely evolve so you should always be focused on keeping a pulse on this progression to ensure the processes you develop continue to complement this growth.
Want to help your team understand and work with sales more effectively? The Success League is a consulting firm that offers a CSM Certification Training Program that includes selling-focused classes like Uncovering Opportunities and Managing a Selling Cycle. For more information on these classes and our other offerings, please visit TheSuccessLeague.io
Colleen St. John - As Director of Client Services, Colleen leads the implementation, support, and customer success teams at Littera Education. Colleen is an experienced customer success and professional services leader. She relies on her extensive corporate background in customer success and project management as well as her academic Masters in education, to design effective strategies for clients to follow from initial rollout to long-term adoption and expansion. A licensed teacher, Colleen holds an MA in Education Administration from Notre Dame de Namur University and a BA in Liberal Studies from San Diego State University. Originally from California, Colleen now lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children.