Customers don’t buy your product---they buy the post-sale experience. Far too often sales reps focus on the bells and whistles of their solution, without illuminating the post-sales experience. One of the best ways to make that post-sale experience real for your customer is to utilize your Customer Success Manager (CSM) or an equivalent person in your organization. By giving your prospect a glimpse of what their world will be like after becoming a customer, you will increase customer happiness and your close-rate.
When utilizing your CSM as part of the sales process, the first step is to ensure that your prospect is properly qualified. Poor qualification can lead to you the sales rep wasting time with someone who is not a serious buyer. Poor qualification only magnifies the wasted time issue if you bring your CSM to a meeting too early. It’s one thing to waste your own time; it’s another to waste your own AND your CSM’s. Qualify your prospects correctly.
Assuming that you’ve done proper qualification, you’ll then want to think about introducing your CSM early in the sales process. This doesn’t mean bringing the CSM on the second call per se. However, you might introduce the role of the CSM in your organization, the way they work with customers, the outcomes they have helped provide. Independent of having your CSM on a call, you may also introduce the idea of them working in the background by doing things like building a custom demo, reviewing data that your prospect has shared with you, and providing overall guidance based on their experience of working with their prospects.
Finally, after qualifying your prospect and introducing the CSM organization and role in some capacity, you are now ready to bring them into a sales call with you, the rep. The key at this third step is preparation. Normally CSMs are focused on post-sale activities, but not pre-sale conversations. In order for you and the prospect to get the most value out of the meeting, it is incumbent upon you to fully prepare your CSM on what they can and cannot say in your meeting. Moreover, pre-sales calls often have different dynamics from post-sales. Sometimes your CSM will be nervous when speaking with a potential customer---because they don’t want to “screw-up the deal.” Just like a good manager would do, you as the sales rep must inspire confidence in your CSM and help remove those butterflies so that they meeting will be successful.
The power of utilizing post-sale resources for pre-sales activites hit home for me in a highly competitive deal a couple of years back. After a lengthy evaluation, it came down to a head-to-head evaluation with me and another vendor. Even though we were at a higher price-point and didn’t have all the features of the competitor’s product, the Director of Marketing chose us. After the deal was closed and I was getting her feedback on the sales-cycle, she told me: “I really liked speaking with your CSM. That is what sold me on the deal--knowing whom I would be working with after this deal closed.”
Illustrating the post-sale experience is a powerful tool for sales reps. It helps show your prospective customers what life will be like once they become a paying customer. By leveraging post-sale assets like a CSM, you can help create that reality in your customer's mind and inspire them to move through the sales cycle quickly.