It wasn’t long ago that companies almost solely focused on new sales and did not pay much attention to customer retention, upselling, and turning customers into referrals or references.  When Salesforce broke the SaaS ceiling of $1B for the first time in SaaS history, it was not accomplished with new sales. It was achieved through upsells and finding customers where mutual extraction of value enhanced the relationship. This means being ready to lose customers that you probably shouldn’t have signed and be even more ready to delight the customers that get tremendous value from your product or service.  

Maximizing Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

The metric to focus on is Net Revenue Retention (NRR) and it’s calculated by taking all of the revenue from a cohorted year and comparing it to next year’s revenue from those same customers. Successful SaaS businesses achieve between 115% to 120% of NRR, because the customers they churn are offset by the upsell and cross-selling opportunities presented during the year.  Here’s a free calculator you can use to find your ceiling. To break the SaaS ceiling there are several best practices you can implement:

Labeling Accounts by Difficulty and Revenue

Labeling accounts by difficulty and revenue is essential during the prospecting and onboarding process. This allows the onboarding team to properly prepare the resources needed to make sure a new customer is onboarded quickly and efficiently, reducing time to value. While the implementation may be difficult, once it’s set up the client needs little to no support.  Do it during the buying process, not the onboarding process. You may find that the difficulty and revenue categories typically align and splitting this up doesn’t make a lot of sense.  

Every account doesn’t need this level of evaluation, but when a deal is larger or the prospect organization is deeply complex, then assigning a label early on in the process can potentially keep a bad customer fit from becoming a customer at all. Signing long-term customers that spend more each year is the path to a healthy NRR metric.

Balance Client Needs With Profitability 

Revenue complexity is based on the amount of work the account manager or customer success manager will need to do to keep the client happy. This is usually measured in how much time it takes to service and upsell a client. If you find this takes 2 or 3 account managers, then the account coverage needed would be 2x or 3x depending on the specific needs.  

Making sure this resourcing is profitable can be tricky because most clients will need a lot of help to get onboarded and ramp up adoption across their team. Once that initial period is over, the needs for the account will be highly specialized and depend on how many issues pop up in the software or service during their subscription. 

Even so, the best way to tackle this is to calculate the Average Cost of Service metric. This allocates all of Customer Success headcount and a portion of G&A, R&D, Hosting, Software cost to maintain customers (and a couple other costs depending on your business).  This essentially provides the cost to keep a customer versus acquire a customer. Using this, you can calculate payback period. You can also calculate your long-term value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC) ratio, which forecasts the amount of profit your company makes from each customer given acquisition and maintenance cost by using a Gross Margin estimate. 

Cross-sells and Upsells are Baked into the Account Management Process

Ensuring that cross-sells and upsells are part of your renewal process is easier said than done. To understand best practices, let’s look at Salesforce again. Their derivative pricing model allows them to start with a base price of access to the CRM system or Service cloud. But when you want a full sandbox, you pay per user and if you want full analytics, you pay a small amount per user. This allows Salesforce to constantly grow with their customers, extracting as much value as they are injecting into organizations.  

If you haven’t set a pricing model that is derivative based, consider other ways to diversify and increase your average selling price. There are not many ways to do this. The most straightforward way is to introduce new products and new functionality, which is the easiest option from a change management standpoint. You could also implement a different pricing model, but that could cause major business disruptions if not executed with great care. Nevertheless, if your company is selling one product or service with no add-ons from functions or support, then this lever will prove hard to utilize. You always want to plan to expand with great customers and be ready to cut your losses with customers that weren’t a fit. Design your business and offerings around this and you’ll achieve a desirable NRR.

Be sure to classify your cross-sells or upsells! Many organizations focus on customer acquisition cost alone and the GTM portion of the business ignores metrics like payback period. This leads to a huge focus on Expansion and Cross-Sells being classed as “new sales.” While that drives down CAC, it usually requires more customer success people to implement and maintain, so it drives up the average cost of service. And that drives up the payback period.  If you aren’t watching the payback period closely, this could look attractive, but that’s why it is important to make sure the cost to acquire and maintain a customer is profitable in the long run. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Monitoring 

NPS has become a central function of CS orgs. It’s how that team communicates to internal and external stakeholders that customers are happy. To ensure your NPS strategy is effective, avoid the following pitfalls.

Measure Different Personas Differently 

Economic buyers, project managers and end users are all different personas. These  different personas should stay segregated as they each measure the health of different areas of the business. The economic buyer will be able to provide feedback on the buying process and all of their interactions. The project manager can provide feedback on the implementation timeline and onboarding. Finally, the end user can provide feedback on the product or service itself.  Each of these are 3 feedback mechanisms that should provide data-based insights on pivoting to an improved prospect or customer experience in 3 unique areas of the business.  All of which will help improve Net Revenue Retention.

Commonly, NPS is sent out to the person(s) who signed the contract to ask how the implementation went and if they would recommend the company to a colleague. This is a good measure of implementation, but commonly the economic buyer knows if the implementation was successful (or not), but has no knowledge of the details. It’s better to send the NPS survey to the internal project manager and not the economic buyer.  This will give you a much more accurate assessment of the implementation. Survey the economic buyer on the sales and marketing process alone. Measure end users on the functionality and ease of use of the software.

Find the Right Way to Measure at the Right Time

Methods of surveying, such as via email or in-app can produce wildly different results.  Economic buyers don’t always log into the software so email is probably the best way to send a NPS survey.  Admin users are typically better off being surveyed through email as well and not in-app because they’re usually performing admin tasks and interrupting them could yield negative NPS results. 

Lastly, when surveying end users in a product, develop a consistent cadence and get the user’s consent.  Don’t ask for NPS when they hover over the logout button, as that’s plain annoying. And don’t ask an end user for NPS if they haven’t been using the software sufficiently to provide feedback (this goes for implementation as well; time this for at least several weeks after the implementation because the first couple of weeks could go smoothly and then turn out terribly. An early NPS would not show this).  

Consider showing a banner that asks if they’d like to participate in NPS after they have some decent usage. The banner could flash on their dashboard and you could give them the option to ignore it or exit without responding. This is a much better way to get authentic responses about your software and avoid bad NPS scores due to intrusive approaches.  

Useful Health Scoring of Each Account

Health scores on accounts are a nebulous topic. Some people have asked: “Why don’t health metric software companies offer health scoring out of the box?” The answer to this is quite easy.  It’s your organization’s responsibility to measure and find buying and churning signals. It can be as simple as making it easy to cancel as long as a reason is provided. That reason can be used to change current people, processes or systems to avoid churning more customers due to this in the future.  

How can you predict when current customers will churn before they actually go through the process? This requires setting up tracking in your software to see what users are doing when they churn. Software like Segment or HEAP can help narrow this down, but it’s a lot of work to set up all of the events you’d like to monitor and track.  With this technology, it’s possible to track all events that led to a customer churn.  

For example, perhaps a customer goes to a help article and then back into their account to make the changes suggested by the help article. That event is logged and a customer success person reaches out in 24 hours to make sure the customer’s issue was resolved. They do this because the tracking software found that customers who  visit a help page usually churn within 48 hours because they couldn’t find the solution.   

Health metric software is not going to know this or be able to analyze it to figure it out.  To be predictive, your company has to find the path to a customer buying and churning via software like Segment. These paths will contribute to the health score you implement using whichever health scoring software you choose.  If your company is only looking at customer behaviors such as last login, time logged in, or pages visited, you are far behind and probably having a hard time fixing churn issues before they happen. Without predictive churning capabilities, it will be difficult to save your most valuable accounts. Those accounts are the path to a healthy NRR and payback period.  

Don’t forget! Discover the top GTM strategies from B2B experts at RevCon: our must-attend annual conference on October 18-19, 2023! 

The post Next-Level Annual Customer Success Planning appeared first on RevGenius.

Optimal go-to-market (GTM) orchestration requires the alignment of roles and revenue responsibilities within and across departments. This coordination is more complex with SaaS companies as a subscription model has created additional revenue motions (scenarios) and heightened the importance of the Customer Success department.

In many SaaS businesses, there is organizational stress because of informal, incomplete, or incorrect revenue policies. Unfortunately, this is most visible with the interplay between Sales and Customer Success, which frequently turns into a tension-filled battleground.

It is essential that GTM leadership eliminates such tension and never leaves employees ill-equipped or poorly motivated to excel in their positions. This is important for overall business success for several reasons:

• Smooth GTM process (aka Let’s not look stupid in front of customers!)
• Talent management (aka Let’s hire and retain the right staff!)
• Growth performance (aka Let’s delight customers AND grow the business!)

Guiding Principles for Defining and Implementing an Effective Revenue Responsibility Policy

The following are guiding principles to successfully define and implement the best revenue responsibility policy:

Guiding Principle #1

Consider all relevant forms of SaaS revenue motions resulting in contractual commitments. See Figure 1. Avoid the rookie mistake of assuming there are only three motions: new business, renewal, and expansion. Failure to consider each scenario can lead to missed revenue opportunities and internal chaos.

Guiding Principle #2

Move beyond a simplistic owner/non-owner decision method and embrace a DACI-like structure that promotes collaboration rather than isolation. The goal is to have more people thinking about growth, not less.

Guiding Principle #3

Utilize your CRM system to measure and track the various revenue motions (aka deal types). Gain greater visibility into the volume and win ratio of each motion, enabling better decisioning and optimization with regards to revenue responsibilities.

Guiding Principle #4 

Establish a cross-functional SWAT team led by key Sales and Customer Success leaders to define and refine the revenue responsibility policy. Engage in discussions guided by critical decision factors for each revenue motion. Consider inclusion of other functions as decisions may impact legacy structures like incentive plans.

Guiding Principle #5

Allow for an exception process within the broader policy but ensure that the review process is clear and restricts exception requests to a minimum.

SaaS Revenue Motions for Customer Success Consideration 

Per Guiding Principle #1, it is crucial to consider all relevant forms of SaaS revenue motions across the customer journey. These motions can be mapped to the primary activities of Acquisition, Expansion, and Retention. I recommend reviewing at least the following eight primary revenue motions:

To decide upon the revenue responsibilities of Customer Success, let’s quickly define the possible motions and highlight typical ownership.

1. New Logo: Acquisition of new customers (new brands, new logos, etc.) where there is no existing relationship or connection. Traditional, textbook definition of a Sales responsibility.
2. New Entity: Acquisition of new “sub/child accounts” (divisions, line-of-business, departments, regions, etc.) that have a corporation connection to an existing customer. New stakeholders with a new decision but within a parent account family. Since requires building new relationships, biases towards Sales responsibility.
3. Win-Back: Re-acquisition of previously lost/churned accounts. Traditional, textbook definition of a Sales responsibility. May be a distraction for Customer Success.
4. Upsell: Expansion of current customer commitments to currently purchased products. More of the same product. This should be a core responsibility of Customer Success as if one can’t properly upsell, then can one properly drive the renewal?
5. Cross Sell: Expansion of current customer commitments with purchase of new products. More business but different products. This could be a core responsibility of Customer Success
6. Expansion Renewal: Expansion of current customer commitment, either by upsell and/or cross sell, to include renewal to co-term/unify relationship. A common use case is to use expansion to justify an early renewal. This could be a core responsibility of Customer Success.
7. Renewal: Extension of current customer commitment. Traditional textbook definition of Customer Success responsibility.
8. Re-Sell: Extension of current customer commitment that requires a “back to the start” approach. Efforts require a process that mimics New Logo motion either because of new stakeholders, unrealized impact, flawed adoption, merger/acquisition, or budget threats. This typically ends up being a responsibility of Customer Success – but more as an accidental consequence of renewal ownership. 

Key Decision Factors for Determining Customer Success Role in Revenue Motions When making purposeful decisions regarding the role of Customer Success in the primary revenue motions, it is important to at least consider the following key decision factors:

• Customer Success Commercial Skillset. It is important to assess the existing (or future) skillset of the Customer Success team in terms of commercial acumen, business knowledge, and sales expertise. Determine their comfort level and capability in establishing new relationships and driving growth.
• Market Complexity. Evaluate the market complexity of your solution based on factors such as the business segment, average deal size, category maturity, or buyer decision complexity. More complex solutions often require advanced commercial skills to navigate the revenue motions effectively.
• Expansion Growth Opportunity. Consider the growth opportunities associated with upsells and cross-sells within your business. If your organization operates with a heavy land and expand strategy and offers multiple expansion possibilities, it may necessitate a higher level of commercial expertise.

The following table provides guidelines for decision-making based on the critical decision factors:

Please note that other factors may be important to some businesses (e.g. overall budget, salary cap, etc..) and there may be a preferred order to process the factors within the broader decision workflow.

5 Steps to Attain Revenue Clarity for Customer Success

The following are simple steps to achieve revenue clarity for Customer Success:

Step 1: Identify Applicable Revenue Motions

Step 2: Build a DACI-Type Table

Step 3: Assemble the Right Group for Discussion

Step 4: Engage in discussion considering critical decision factors

Step 5: Volia! Achieve Revenue Clarity

By implementing these simple steps, you can establish a clear understanding of Customer Success’ revenue responsibilities, ensuring alignment across teams and promoting effective revenue generation throughout the customer journey.

Revenue Responsibilities for Customer Success: Case Study

SETUP: Customer Success organization is not designed or staffed for aggressive sales pursuit – but the team has solid commercial orientation. The market category is developed, and the average deal size is ~$50k. There is clear persona stakeholder, limited buying committee, and deal transactions are straightforward. Upsells are usage-based and easy to pursue. There are limited cross sells which are direct extensions of the base solution. No viable business case to distract the New Logo Sales team with expansion or hire dedicated Expansion Sales resources. Suggested  revenue responsibilities:

Conclusion: Customer Success owns Renewal and Expansion revenue motions. Sales takes the lead on anything that requires heavy “new relationship” pursuit.

Special Considerations for Defining Revenue Responsibilities

In addition to the steps outlined earlier, there are some special considerations that may come into play:

• Segmentation:

The process of defining revenue responsibilities may vary based on different business segments or groups within an organization. For example, Enterprise and SMB segments may have separate sales and customer success teams. In such cases, decisions regarding revenue responsibilities can be tailored to each segment (i.e. separate DACI deliverable for each). For instance, the SMB segment may have limited upsell and cross-sell opportunities, making it more suitable to enable those activities through the Customer Success team.

• Account Management and Renewal Management Extensions:

In this article, our discussion has been with a simple model of the primary departments of sales and customer success. In larger organizations, sub functions within those departments may also come into play.  For example, if one designates Sales to own a new logo, new sub account, upsell and cross-sell, one may consider distinct sub-teams for new business sales (Hunter) and expansion sales (Farmer). Another example, if one designates Customer Success to own renewal, upsell and cross-sell, one may consider adding a renewal management sub function within the broader Customer Success department.

Conclusion

A proper revenue responsibility framework is a critical element for organizations seeking to foster revenue growth, drive expansion, and achieve renewal success within the competitive SaaS industry. This framework serves as a guiding principle, ensuring that roles and responsibilities within Sales and Customer Success are clearly defined, well-understood, and effectively aligned. By doing so, organizations can foster a collaborative and cohesive working environment that maximizes revenue potential.

GTM (Go-To-Market) leadership plays a vital role in the successful implementation of this framework. It is their responsibility to ensure that each employee has the necessary tools, resources, and support to excel in their roles and contribute to the organization’s revenue goals. By stepping up and actively driving revenue responsibility clarity, GTM leaders can eliminate any ambiguity or confusion surrounding responsibilities, thereby empowering their teams to deliver exceptional results.

Learn more about mobilizing your ICP throghout the whole GTM from  our webinar.

Don’t forget! Discover the top GTM strategies from B2B experts at RevCon: our must-attend annual conference on October 18-19, 2023! 

The post Revenue Objectives of Customer Success appeared first on RevGenius.

Our numbers are likely low because the bad actors tend to be louder than the good ones. Still, we have to be honest: our industry is rife with self-centeredness. As a new leader years ago, I asked potential hires why they wanted to work in sales. Still an idealist, I sought answers that uncovered creativity and passion for the business and our customers. My mentor chastised me: “If they don’t say money first, you don’t want them.”

My mentor wasn’t wrong. The most successful salespeople I know are insatiably coin-operated. As leaders, we likely know that our salespeople know that, and — as the 3% number attests — so do our customers. 

For many of us, selling is a paradox. We know that we need to put the customer first, but we also know that our reason for being is to drive revenue for our company and, in turn, for ourselves.

The good news is that sellers can reap the benefits of consultative selling in a way that increases sales velocity by embracing the concept of genuine customer curiosity. Building a customer-centric sales culture means knowing your customer more intimately, responding to their needs more predictably, and adding mutual customer value with each interaction.

In this article we’ll present five key principles to help you build just such a culture. 

Adopt an Outside-In Focus

Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation with someone who manages to make every topic about themselves? “How was your weekend,” they might ask, only to jump at the first chance to mention their spontaneous trip to a five-star beach resort. 

While most of us likely avoid such self-centeredness in our personal interactions,our sales content and approaches are often riddled with it. As an example, most sales presentations I review for my customers look something like this: 

• An “introductions” slide where the seller introduces the company’s meeting participants.
• An “agenda” slide. 
• A single slide often titled “what we heard from you”.
• Finally, a series of slides includes a combination of the company’s perspective on their industry, history, notable customers, and solution pitch.

In a typical one-hour presentation, most sellers devote the first 20-25 minutes of content almost exclusively to their companies’ credentials and sales pitch. Similarly Gong.io’s analysis of more than 25,000 sales calls suggests that the average salesperson consumes 60-75% of the total talk time in meetings. The problem is that, in our efforts to differentiate and establish credibility, we leave little room to understand our customers’ business, ambitions, or challenges.

Improving customer-centricity means adopting an outside-in approach. In contrast to an inside-out approach — one that emphasizes your company’s internal strengths and differentiators — the outside-in approach focuses on the customer. It means taking the time to understand how your customer creates value for their own customers as well as their own business.

Adopting an outside-in focus means taking a consultative approach with your customers. An outside-in focus means creating a dialogue where the customer spends 60% of the time talking about their goals, strategies and challenges. In turn, the remaining 40% is spent confirming and clarifying your customer’s perspectives, making suggestions, and exploring opportunities for mutual value creation.

Be Customer-Obsessed

As a first-time sales and marketing manager, my leadership team and I attended an offsite meeting facilitated by Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Near the end of the meeting, Mr. Lencioni encouraged us to consider our mission, vision, and value statements. As we began brainstorming, one of our VPs exclaimed, “Employee development should be our first value!”

Here’s the problem: our company was a terrible place to work! The pay wasn’t great, the work wasn’t particularly exciting, and the company’s vision was stale. I had been hired as part of an effort to revitalize their brand and business, so I offered a rebuttal: “What have we done to put employees first?”  If you’re curious about my method, Google “career limiting move.”

Just as every company wants to believe that they put their employees first, every revenue team wants to believe that they are customer-obsessed. And while our ambitions toward customer obsession may be genuine, our customers often fail to taste the fruit of our efforts. Our efforts to demonstrate customer obsession can be summarized in a single phrase: “genuine customer curiosity.” 

In my experience, most sales processes iterate on two primary customer-facing events: discovery and presentations. Each of these events presents an opportunity to demonstrate genuine customer curiosity. For illustration, let’s assume they’re distinct events. 

In our discovery, we should break their questions into Value Selling, Issue Selling, and Tactical Selling components. Value Selling seeks to understand the executive-level goals, strategies, and obstacles that the company faces. With Issue Selling, we understand how the LOB plans to achieve those goals, and Tactical Selling enables us to scope the fit for our solution. 

As you proceed:

• Ask open-ended questions that inspire dialogue, rather than solely relying on more specific, diagnostic types of questions.
• Probe the answers to each of those questions. We encourage clients to look at the financial, customer experience, operational, and organizational aspects of those answers. 
• And finally, confirm your understanding of their answers.

Armed with a more in-depth understanding of our customers, practicing genuine customer curiosity allows us to change the way we present to our customers. Instead of delivering your company or product pitch, genuine customer curiosity means presenting your hypothesis about how the company can best achieve its goals from the Value, Issue, and Tactical perspectives. This means that your presentation becomes an opportunity for the customer to challenge your hypothesis so that you can get closer to delivering mutual customer value.

Personalize Every Experience

Several years ago, I was on the sales team pitching a business transformation opportunity for Office Depot. We meticulously researched their company, finely honed our messaging, and developed a compelling “art of the possible” video that helped our customers to visualize how our solution would enable the experience they wanted to create for their customers.

Near the end of the presentation, my salesperson went off script. He wanted to assure our audience — primarily mid-level brand marketing and e-commerce leaders — that our solution would be easy to implement. “Our goal is to give you the Easy Button,” the salesperson proceeded to riff, “Remember the Easy Button? From those ads?” 

Do you remember the Easy Button? From Staples? Office Depot’s biggest competitor at the time?

At a glance, our presentation was personalized to the extreme. We used their branding in our deck. We built an e-commerce demo site that looked and acted exactly like they said they wanted it to. We understood their upselling and cross-selling strategy and demonstrated it flawlessly.

Despite all that, we made two mistakes: we spent valuable customer airtime talking about implementation and extolled their most contentious competitor to make our point. Competitive faux pas aside, our in-meeting adjustment failed to resonate with our audience.

As sellers, we often think of “personalization” along somewhat corporate and surface-level lines. Almost every sales methodology encourages us to know our audience and their place in an influence map. Most would go on to suggest tailoring our presentation content to our audience. Far fewer sellers, however, go so far as to develop a strategy for tailoring their message so that it resonates with their audience members’ individual roles, interests, and even personality types.

As you plan your presentation, consider what you want your audience members to do or believe differently, how you plan to address them, and how each of your selling team members fits into that objective. Some teams even go so far as to develop executive profiles of their most important audience members, assigning internal team members to those profiles and dividing their presentation into chapters that will resonate with each profile to support their overall value message.

From a discovery perspective, sellers can develop a deeper understanding of their customer’s motivations by asking about the audience member’s personal goals and ambitions alongside their corporate goals. Then, as you proceed, what else are you learning about the audience member’s personality?  Are they a visionary? Are they risk-averse? Are they new to an executive role and need to make a name for themselves? Using discovery to better understand your audience members’ psyche and motivations will help you ensure a more personalized and successful outcome in your next presentation.

Blur the Lines

We’ve outlined the importance of turning your discovery and presentation efforts into a customer-centric and highly personalized dialogue that aligns with your customer’s goals, strategies, and challenges. Part of that paradigm shift means blurring the lines between discovery and presentations. If we view both processes as opportunities to collect and respond to customer feedback, sellers are more likely to be perceived as consultants bent on solving the customer’s problems. This results in more engaged customers and greater trust and access. 

I recommended approaching your presentations with a clear plan for how you wanted the customer to think or behave differently. When we blur the lines, this means doing the same thing with every meeting: always staying aware of our objective. Just as we should always seek to learn more about our customers during presentations, we should also see the discovery as an opportunity to advance our solution.

Have you ever asked your customer for a follow-up discovery call, only to be met with resistance and frustration? Often that frustration means that the customer didn’t find mutual value in the prior session. As a result, our customers often see our discovery calls as one-sided interrogations.

How would it impact your business if you framed each discovery session around a point of view? What if, instead of an interrogation, your next discovery call was a mutual dialogue where you shared your perspective and even suggestions as you explored your customer’s objectives, strategies, and challenges? 

For discovery sessions and presentation chapters alike, consider the following:

• What does the customer need from our business?
• How are we uniquely positioned to meet that need?
• What more must we learn to better align our solution to their ambitions and challenges?

Adopting this approach takes a tremendous amount of pressure off the shoulders of the selling team. While sellers should always work toward the ultimate goal of closed business, this approach views each meeting as an opportunity to draw closer to realizing customer value. Instead of living and dying by your sales pitch, your engagements are simply opportunities to mutually test a hypothesized solution with your customer.

Be Proactive

As a salesperson, which is better? A customer who just called you with a clearly defined list of requirements and a request for a product demonstration, or a customer who took your cold call but is an otherwise blank slate? The answer likely depends on your product, your pipeline, your quota attainment, and how long you’ve been selling. Simply put, sellers with greater time pressure prefer the more defined customer. 

Years ago, as a sales engineer, I was once near the proverbial finish line with a customer. We checked all of our customer’s boxes on her list of requirements (literally: there were actual checkboxes). Our champion, clearly in our camp, would often interject during the demo with sales messaging of our own. We were sure this deal was ours to win until she asked me to show a feature that was an element of my competitor’s product. Despite the positive regard she held for my salesperson and me, my customer saw no differentiation in our product.

Simply put, competing on known needs is a “race to the bottom.” Our only differentiator becomes the lowest price, and our likelihood of winning drops along with it.

As a result, our customer-centric sales culture should include more than just knowing our customers, personalizing their experience, and delivering a top-notch sales message. Operating within genuine customer curiosity also requires developing and testing a hypothesis around the customer’s unconsidered needs.

To understand the customer’s unconsidered needs, I advise sellers to consider their customer’s goals and strategies across four perspectives: 

• Financial
• Customer experience
• Operational
• Organizational (people and technology). 

Suppose a seller can make connections between the customer’s initiatives, goals, and strategies. In that case, they can arrive at an informed hypothesis for how their solution will help the customer to transform their business. 

The most common objection I hear is that most sellers don’t have the time or the skills to engage in deep strategic analysis. The good news is that a seller doesn’t need deep expertise in strategic analysis to shift their approach to a proactive and strategic one. Instead, many sellers find that simply probing the customer’s responses in discovery around the four perspectives above is enough to form a hypothesis. 

While this strategy is likely the most challenging to implement, it is also the apex of the five strategies:

• Adopting and demonstrating an outside-in focus based on genuine customer curiosity opens the door to customer centricity.
• Personalizing every engagement and turning each into a mutually beneficial dialogue helps you to put your customer-centricity into practice
• Ultimately, when you know your customer well enough to anticipate and respond to the needs they didn’t even expressly articulate, you will likely find that your customers respond with greater trust, loyalty, and lifetime value.

The post How to Build a Customer-Centric Sales Culture appeared first on RevGenius.

Too often and for too long, businesses have thrown the full weight of their attention and resources behind the left side of the funnel (i.e. sales and marketing).  Marketing comes up with a bright, shiny object to attract the customer, sales polishes it up and makes it pretty enough to sell, and then, well, that’s often the end.  Businesses will track leads, deals, and accounts through the marketing and sales portion of the funnel, but what they have not traditionally done is continue this type of tracking through the customer success side (right side) of the funnel.  And that’s a shame.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that getting as many customers as possible is the key to long-term success.  Neglecting customer success can lead to a significant impact on revenue, which is why RevOps and Customer Success are crucial for the health of any business.

How Customer Success Creates a Customer-Centric RevOps Approach

The customer journey is a complex process.  However, businesses can get around this by adopting a customer-centric RevOps approach which revolves around enhancing the customer experience.  It’s worth noting that most businesses feel they already do a good job of this, while their customers may disagree.  According to a survey by Acquia, while 87% of marketers say they are delivering engaging customer experiences, two-thirds of customers could not recall when a brand exceeded expectations.

What Does a Customer-Centric Approach Look Like?

When a business places the customer at the center of what they do, they tailor their operations to improve customer experience by understanding and addressing their pain points, leading to a more personalized experience for each customer and increased satisfaction and loyalty.  The benefits flow both ways though, as the business itself will also benefit from this customer-centric RevOps approach as a focus on the customer’s experience can help identify areas where a business can improve their products or services, leading to increased sales and revenue.

Customer success should not be an island, though.  Here’s how good customer success teams work in a cross-functional manner:

• Collaboration:  By working closely with sales and marketing, CS teams can help  ensure a unified customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle, from the initial contact through to onboarding and beyond.
• Insights: CS teams can share valuable customer feedback to drive product enhancements, marketing campaigns, and sales strategies, all aimed at optimizing revenue generation.
• Analysis:  CS teams review customer data to identify trends, opportunities, and pain points.

Customer Onboarding:  A Real Life Instruction Manual

Most people are unaware of the amazing things their iPhone can do.  Why?  Because there’s no training or onboarding for it.  Sure, they could watch hours of tutorials on YouTube, but most people won’t.  However, the Apple powers that be probably aren’t going to lose much sleep over this because their product is so awesome that a person can only utilize about 5% of its capabilities and still be supremely satisfied.  Chances are, your product is not as good as an iPhone though, and that’s why customer onboarding is so crucial.   

Effective customer onboarding helps customers become more engaged with your product or service, which can enhance their experience, provide them with the resources they need to succeed, and lead to loyalty and retention. Customers have become more aware of the positive effects of onboarding as a recent survey by HubSpot notes that 88% of survey respondents agree that customers have higher expectations than they did in previous years.  Here are a few ways to create a successful customer onboarding process:

• Keep it Simple:  It should be very easy for your customers to understand what they can expect from your business.  Make this happen by having a clear and concise message about what your product or service does. 
• Be Informative:  Provide your customers with an easy to use, step-by-step guide on how to use your product or service. This could take the form of videos, tutorials, or a live chat feature to answer any questions they may have.  The key is to reduce time-to-value.
• Great Service:  Make sure your customers have a way to contact you if they have any issues or concerns.  The easiest way to make customers feel valued is to respond to inquiries in a timely manner.
• Make it Fun:  Offer incentives for customers who complete the entire onboarding process, such as discounts, free trials, or exclusive access to certain features.

The ultimate goal, or true north, for a product should be adoption.  Amazing features are meaningless if the product is not being widely utilized by those who purchased it.  Customer onboarding is critical here as a well-designed onboarding process ensures a smooth transition, reducing confusion and frustration, ultimately accelerating adoption.  Here’s how:

• Understanding Value: Onboarding provides an opportunity to clearly communicate the value of the product and how it addresses the customer’s pain points. By understanding the value, customers are more likely to embrace and fully utilize the product.
• Building Confidence:  Customer onboarding offers training, tutorials, and educational materials to enhance their competence and confidence in using the product’s features. When customers feel comfortable, they are more likely to adopt the product and incorporate it into their workflows.
• Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value:  Customers who have a positive onboarding experience are more likely to continue using the product over the long term, maximizing their lifetime value to the business. They may also become advocates, or evangelists, sharing their positive experiences and influencing others to adopt the product.

If not already in place, implement the following:

Develop a Comprehensive Onboarding Program

• Create an onboarding playbook with clear steps and timelines.
• Assign dedicated onboarding specialists to provide personalized support.

Establish Ongoing Communication Channels

• To address challenges and provide guidance, schedule regular check-ins.
• Provide ongoing training and resources to help ensure optimal product usage.

Retention Strategies:  How to Hold on to What You Have

Retaining customers should be a top priority for any business, and here’s why: acquiring new customers is often more expensive than retaining existing ones.  Now, here’s how to do it:

• Make it Personal:  Personalization can be achieved through various means, such as email marketing campaigns that target specific customer segments, or by providing tailored recommendations based on their purchase history or browsing behavior. If you make customers feel understood and valued, they are more likely to remain loyal to your brand.  
• Exceptional Service:  Customers who feel heard and understood are more likely to stick with a brand, even if they encounter issues with their purchases. When a business is able to consistently offer quick solutions to problems, they create a positive customer experience that will encourage repeat purchases.  
• Provide Exclusive Content:  Customers want to feel special, and businesses should do everything they can to make it happen.  By giving customers educational resources, behind-the-scenes access, or early access to new products, businesses can create a sense of exclusivity and loyalty among their customers.  In fact, according to Accenture, 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands who provide relevant offers and recommendations.
• Be Proactive:  Customer success teams should monitor customer health, identify at-risk accounts, and intervene to resolve any issues or challenges before they escalate.

Customer success is at its best when it’s not complicated.  Retaining customers is really just an exercise in active monitoring and problem solving.  For example, if a customer success team notices a decline in product usage by a long-term customer, they should reach out, identify the problem, and provide personalized assistance to re-engage them.  A simple action like this could save a customer from churning and prevent the company from losing (potentially) hundreds of thousands of dollars over that customer’s lifetime.

If not already in place, implement the following:

Proactive Relationship Management

• Consistently communicate with customers to help in understanding their needs and challenges.
• When a customer has a concern, offer personalized solutions and proactive support.

Customer Success Programs

• Develop customer success programs that provide ongoing value and engagement.
• To foster loyalty and long-term commitment, offer exclusive benefits, such as training, webinars, or loyalty rewards.

Upselling and Cross-Selling: Extend the Sale

For businesses to maximize revenue, they need to take advantage of every opportunity to increase their customer’s lifetime value. Hello, upselling and cross-selling!  Whether it’s encouraging customers to upgrade their current products or services to a higher-end version (upselling), or offering complementary products or services that enhance the customer’s experience (cross-selling), anytime you can help customers recognize the full potential of the product or service they’re already using and increase their level of satisfaction, it’s a win-win for both company and customer. 

To avoid coming off as too “sales-y” or pressuring, companies should approach these additional sales from the perspective of offering the customer value and aligning customer needs and goals with relevant offerings.

Why is Upselling so Important?

Beyond generating additional revenue, upselling can give businesses a competitive advantage by providing customers with additional options and demonstrating expertise in understanding their needs.  This allows a company to differentiate themselves from competitors and stand out in the marketplace.

Also, the upselling process can provide valuable insights into customer preferences, buying patterns, and behavior.  This information can then be used by businesses to inform decisions about product development, marketing strategies, and customer segmentation.

Why is Cross-Selling so Important?

When the average dollar amount of sales is low, it becomes difficult for businesses to increase their revenue and profitability, but cross-selling increases average order value and also is key to expanding customer reach.  When customers are introduced to a wider range of offerings within a business’s portfolio, this can expose them to products or services they may not have considered initially, expanding their perception of the brand and its offerings.

If not already in place, implement the following:

Personalized Recommendations

• Utilize data and customer insights to identify relevant upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
• Tailor recommendations based on customer preferences and needs to increase the likelihood of conversion.

Strategic Communication and Education

• Proactively communicate the value and benefits of upsell and cross-sell options to customers.
• Provide educational resources and demonstrations to showcase how these additional offerings enhance their existing experience.

Key Takeaways

• Doing RevOps well and maximizing revenue growth is a team effort.  Customer success plays a vital role on the team by focusing on maximizing customer value throughout their journey.
• A customer-centric RevOps approach prioritizes the needs of the customer, delivers on personalization, and drives long-term value for both the customer and the business.
• Good customer onboarding sets clear expectations and establishes a strong foundation for long-term product adoption and success.
• Retention strategies are crucial for reducing churn, fostering customer loyalty, and driving revenue growth.
• Effective upselling and cross-selling are vital to increasing customer value and driving revenue growth.

The post If You’re Neglecting Customer Success and RevOps, You’re Doing It Wrong appeared first on RevGenius.

There are fewer targets. More nuance. Higher stakes—for both the buyer and you. The deal isn’t done until there’s proof of retention.

But there’s a key to unlocking a straighter, smoother, and easier road to winning deals and keeping customers: your day-to-day functional relationship with Product.

Product shapes what the product can do and how everyone experiences value from it—including buyers.

Join forces with Product on these seven tactics—each you can execute in under a day and get value from in under a week—to accelerate new customer acquisition, improve buyer satisfaction, and increase customer retention.

Driving New Customer Acquisition

Product turns business vision into solutions that create meaningful value for customers profitably for the business.

But for Product, ‘customer’ usually means users, not buyers.

Translating user experience into the value story for the buyer, then, often falls to you.

But part of Product’s job should be helping everyone in the customer journey—buyers, admins, and users—recognize the product’s value. Sales has a unique position to help Product fill this role.

1. Ideal Customer Profiles

Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) give Product insight into what buyers value and how they might view the product differently than users.

To create an ICP, write a two-page document that outlines the common attributes of your most successful customers and the opportunities and challenges of the buyer.

Include details on industry, market, size, maturity, and assets and gaps in the sales motion. Outline the buyer’s functional positioning relative to operations and users. Also, capture the buyer’s top 10 priorities and problems and map all functions involved in the buying decision and the buyer’s relationships with them.

Write this document in less than an hour. (Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good—you will refine it regularly with lessons learned.)

Then, review with Product the extent to which roadmaps aligned to buyer needs and priorities captured in the ICP.

Will buyers get meaningful value from what we’re planning to do?

Are we prioritizing enough to grow buyer interest?

If not, you now have actionable feedback to drive re-prioritization.

Once you have alignment, you’ll have greater confidence that your buyer will feel the Product will produce more and more value for them over time.

The ICP keeps the product team focused on meeting buyer priorities and gives Sales and Product a meaningful platform for shifting roadmaps as buyer priorities evolve.

2. Dedicated Buyer Experiences

Many B2B products are simple user experiences built on a small mountain of back-end capabilities: rules engines, integrations, configurations, AI, etc.

Demos show what the product can do, but how it works remains a mystery. That mystery creates doubt with the buyer team—6 to 10 independent decision makers, according to Gartner—about whether your product will work specifically for them.

Telling and showing the product is not enough to guarantee escape from the B2B sales valley of death. You need buyers to experience the solution.

Pilots are an option, but we know their pitfalls.

A more effective approach is to have Product and Engineering allocate dedicated capacity to building mock product experiences for buyers.

These people work directly on the sales team with salespeople as their customers. They participate in sales calls and build fluency in the buyer journey.

Their role is to translate actual product capabilities into mock experiences with a controlled set of configurations and a designed set of success and failure scenarios that buyers can see, touch, and share.

They bring clarity to how the product works and build buyer confidence that their specific inputs—integrations, configurations, workflows—can be activated successfully in the product before signing the contract.

These experiences are not pilots. They do not implement actual configurations. But with significantly less effort and time, they demonstrate that the product can manage the nuances and complexity of the customer’s requirements.

Even better? These experiences are reusable across buyers. All sales cycles benefit when the team applies lessons from past sales cycles to these experiences. They make lessons learned by Sales additive rather than siloed.

Adding product and engineering capacity to your sales team will become your secret selling superpower, creating differentiated sales experiences that wow your customers.

Improving Buyer Satisfaction

In B2B SaaS sales, the riskiest time for a deal isn’t always before the contract is signed—it’s often after the contract is signed but before the product launches. In this phase, the buyer believes in—but has not yet realized—the ROI of the product. That transition is critical to customer retention.

While implementations usually lead this phase, RevOps can play a crucial role here in sustaining buyer engagement and satisfaction.

3. Product Launch Issue Resolution Burn-down Chart

No one—the buyer or your team—wants to cast doubt on the quality of the product. But anyone who’s ever launched B2B SaaS software knows that even with thorough testing, unknown unknowns at product launch will emerge.

The most impactful thing RevOps can do with the buyer during implementation is to make it super easy for the buyer—who is typically not involved in the day-to-day of implementation—to see that your team identifies and closes issues effectively.

A simple burn-down chart of issues opened per day, issues closed per day, and average completion time is enough to show that you’re navigating the launch to success. Internally, the team should also set aggressive goals for issue resolution.

Ideally, there are no issues at launch, and the buyer never sees this capability. But it’s much better to have this capability and not use it than to need it and not have it.

B2B SaaS buyers are accountable for generating ROI from their purchase. Even if they do not own the operational use of the product, they will hear about launch pains. But only you will know how well your team manages them.

Don’t just be good at managing issues—be great at showing that to the buyer. Make it as obvious and open as possible for the buyer to believe “you got this” for whatever issues emerge at launch—for this product and others they might purchase in the future.

4. Embed Testimonial Collection

Utilization data and ROI math help build a case, but stories, social proof, and emotional connection make the sale.

Typically, collecting product sentiment takes time and manual effort, time your teams would rather spend making and selling the actual product.

Skip that effort by embedding lightweight feedback collection points directly in the product at the “Aha” moments when your customers are experiencing the value of your product.

Many customers are more than willing to tell you what they love about your product when it’s working for them. So as they are experiencing value from the product, ask them about it. Let them speak in their own words.

For example, when a user completes five straight workflows faster than average, prompt them with a pop-up that says:

“You’re crushing these workflows. Would you mind sharing one thing you love most about how this product helps your work?”

Or, you can engage users to drive funnel conversion:

• “It seems you’ve potentially saved many hours using this product. Would you like to recommend this product to someone who might benefit from it?”
• “You’re one of our top product users. Would you be willing to be a reference for others considering buying the product?”

Embedding this data collection right in the app eliminates the up-front effort to collect it and makes it much easier to mine for patterns. Every testimonial is now associated directly with users and organizations and their specific attributes, which you can filter to build your ‘like for like’ story for prospects and to source potential referrals.

Increasing Customer Retention

Product launch is just the beginning of the customer journey. Sustainable customer relationships and profitable customer growth happen when you can clearly show the customer you understand what’s important to them and evidence that you are moving the needle for them.

5. Product Goal Setting

When you and Product understand how the product drives buyer value, set specific goals for product utilization that map directly to buyer value drivers. Then, align most, if not all, net-new feature development to these goals until achieved (or you identify objectively more important buyer goals).

Often, product goal setting works the opposite way: Product or business leaders start with business goals (e.g., grow revenue) and come up with product ideas that will meet them. Then, they try to figure out how those ideas will be valuable for customers.

This process is precisely backward. Customers don’t care about our ideas or about our business goals. Instead, they care about solving their problems as fast, easily, and cost-effectively as possible.

Everyone creates value for both sides when your company reflects your customer’s goals in your product goals. Starting the prioritization and ideation exercises aligned to clear objectives for generating customer value makes everything remarkably more manageable and more productive, from sales to implementation to activation to maintenance to expansion.

6. Onboarding Success Milestones

Enough product utilization data will reveal trends that differentiate strong customers from weak ones. Ramli John in Product-Led Onboarding describes these inflection points as the Onboarding Success Milestone.

For Slack, customers that send more than 2,000 messages in their first 30 days stick with the product. For much of Facebook’s growth, they observed that users who connected with seven friends in their first ten days were unlikely to churn. And with Dropbox, uploading ten documents from two or more devices signaled a fully activated user.

Uncovering this milestone is a mix of art and science. Doing so requires fluid collaboration between Product and Customer Success to understand:

• The buyer’s use cases the product can service
• How often those use cases emerge
• What success looks like for navigating those use cases
• How the product’s utilization compares to other alternatives in their workflow

While great Product people have direct contact with customers, buyers, and users, there are only so many product people with so many hours in the day. Pairing Customer Success and Product puts more brain power and focus towards understanding how much utilization is ‘enough’ to produce a stable customer.

By observing each activated customer relative to their Onboarding Success Milestone, Customer Success can drive tactics to generate greater adoption and sustained engagement. They can also provide unique insights into points of friction that Product should address in the solution to unblock adoption and drive retention.

7. Utilization Alerting

If you know what a successful customer looks like and inspect actual product utilization to evaluate customer health, congratulations, you are way ahead of your competitors!

But why stop there?

You should set up automated alerts to notify your team of unexpected variances in utilization to drive customer engagement activities.

Did your customer suddenly go a week or two without product utilization after a long stretch of consistent use? Maybe they’re on vacation. Or perhaps they’re trying out another product!

Or did your customer suddenly have an unexpected spike in utilization? They may have shifted their operations to drive greater adoption of the product.

In either case, sudden shifts in utilization—lower or higher—should trigger a desire to learn about how the product is working (or not) in the wild to inform sales and customer success motions.

The less time between when these trends happen and when you’re aware of them, the greater chance you have to maximize your learning from them and your impact by acting on them. And, the more you can prove to your buyer that you are able to generate consistent value for them over time.

The Path to Success

The seven tactics outlined here are simple, but their execution is uncommon and often complicated by competing interests and poor culture.

You can maximize the success of these tactics by building on—or creating—a culture that values three things:

• Competition through collaboration: fight for the good of the team, not to look better than everyone else. Winning over buyers is a team sport—embrace your team.
• Discipline and focus: your business can do anything but can’t do everything. Once you—as a team—decide on goals and a course of action, commit fully. Be open to changes in direction, but make those changes thoughtfully and as a team.
• Inspection without blame: people game metrics they think will be used against them, rendering them meaningless. Inspection only works if done in the spirit of improvement. Learning together leads to winning together.

Selling is hard, but hopefully these tactics make it that much easier to do that hard work well. If you want to hear more, let’s discover the top GTM strategies from B2B experts at RevCon: our must-attend annual conference on October 18-19, 2023!

 If you’re interested in the rise and fall of b2b SaaS startups, Revmag previously explored the concept of ‘Unicorns Dying’ and the factors behind their decline.

Brian Gibson is a product leader, startup advisor, and Founder of b26n.com, a product consultancy that makes the hard work of startup scaling easier. Brian’s experience in multiple industries and on all sides of a business, from Sales to Operations to Product, has shown him that tech companies are most successful when makers and sellers work together.

The post Top 7 Product Marketing Strategies in B2B SaaS appeared first on RevGenius.

It’s what I expect from my team and hope for the whole CS community – and why I started ValueCSwithEmily.com.

Value is a word often used but not always defined. As a CSM and customer advocate, you want to drive and deliver value for your customers, but you may be unclear on how or what that looks like.

While not exhaustive, I’ve included some examples below to provide guidance on adding value to your customer.

First, let’s acknowledge that value is defined in the eye of the beholder.

Have you read the story where someone tried to sell an old car and received an offer for pennies on the dollar from the dealership, but a huge offer from a buyer at the car club?

People’s perspective and expectations drive how and where they see value and this can evolve as situations change.

When I think about value, I look at providing information that provides insight or an opportunity that provides access the person may not have without you.

An area that often gets confusing around the value conversation is the conflation of the value-driven activity and the delivery method.

It isn’t fair to say universally “QBRs are valuable” (or not valuable). Quarterly business reviews are a method of communicating and delivering information. The determination of value is based on what information is shared and how relevant it is to your contact’s needs and goals.

(Do you have a contact pushing back against having a business review? It is a good indication that they haven’t seen value from them.)

To best align, a value conversation should be held upfront. Ideally, this happens during the sales cycle (either with the seller or seller+CSM) and the CSM confirms it during onboarding or transition.

A good salesperson will want to make sure the value a person seeks is something the company can support. This means truly understanding the business challenge they are looking to solve and confirming the solution you offer will meet those needs.

The CSM needs to align expectations around timing and participation to achieve that value, as well as continually understanding value drivers and when they change.

Ready to show value, but not sure where to start? Here are some ways my team has driven customer value.

Providing a comprehensive (and collaboratively designed) ROI calculation specific to the customer’s use case

Being able to tie the impact your offering has had to a core business driver or KPI (think: increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, improving efficiency, etc) helps showcase that the investment of money and time in working with you is warranted.

Work with your main contact to gather the internal details or data and share with the executive buyer. If done right, this also puts your contact in a positive light with their leadership.

Sharing industry trends or comparisons that they individually don’t have access to

Companies often want to know how they stack up against their peer group.

Even if you can’t share direct comparisons for confidentiality reasons, being able to give insight into trends or additional use cases to consider can be viewed as helpful.

By understanding your customer’s industry and comparative group, the information shared can be much more tailored and impactful.

Aligning roadmaps to allow your company and theirs to build together

Reviewing the product roadmap is a common action during business reviews.

While you can’t do it with every customer, being able to share roadmaps from both companies’ perspectives and determine intersection points to build towards can be extremely powerful.

If you are able to identify core business projects that your customer has on the horizon that an upcoming product build could integrate with, your relationship could become much more strategic.

Clearly understanding product need and impact to communicate to product and get built

Even if you can’t strategically integrate, understanding your customer deeply to be able to advocate for specific feature enhancements internally can be valuable.

If a new feature could unlock additional capabilities for your customer’s projects, helping to get this on the roadmap (or delivered sooner), could impact their business.

Connecting various business units across the customer

In large corporations, sometimes business units operate in silos and aren’t clear of other group’s initiatives.

As the CSM, you are responsible for creating relationships across the company.

If you see commonalities in  goals or initiatives in different organizations, you can broker an internal introduction within your account to share ideas and learnings.

Connecting your contact with a peer contact to discuss common challenges

While LinkedIn has lowered the barriers to networking and connecting, sometimes having a personalized introduction creates a stronger connection.

If you have contacts at different companies who are working to solve a similar problem, you can connect them to brainstorm and share.

Similarly, if you have a contact who has gone through a process and one who is looking to embark on that effort, you can connect for mentorship and guidance (assuming both parties are interested and willing).

Providing a conference speaking opportunity for someone trying to build their brand

If you have a company conference, webinar or other speaking opportunity, this could provide an opportunity for visibility for a company or contact.

If a contact is trying to build their personal brand or a company is looking to promote a new innovation they’ve been working on by using your product, this opportunity for ‘free public relations’ could be extremely beneficial.

Driving Customer Value: Final Thoughts

While value means different things given the scenario, the best Customer Success Managers are constantly seeking ways to create value opportunities for their accounts.

Look for opportunities that align both at an individual contact level and at a company level.

By providing business value, you help solidify your offering as one that continues to get renewed (and grown) over time.  

The post 7 Ways to Increase Customer Value as a Customer Success Team appeared first on RevGenius.

Immersa’s vision is to democratize the use of data intelligence for all users in the business. To better understand how employees consume data intelligence, we turned to users considered some of the most voracious consumers of data – sales teams at B2B companies.

We started by asking sales executives how they can access the data they need to run their business. While several sales executives explained that they depend on teams across the company – data analysts, data engineers, business intelligence teams – nearly every sales leader called out their Revenue Operations (Revops) team as the most dependable source of data intelligence.

To learn more about the role of the RevOps team we interviewed over 50 sales executives, sales professionals, and revenue operations specialists at companies that are engaged in business-facing sales. We started by asking what do sales reps need from their revenue operations team. We then asked the revenue operations teams how they spend their time in various functional areas, supporting their sales team and the company leadership with their data needs. We also identified the frequently desired use cases that Revops must enable for their sales teams.

The difference between expectations of sales leaders from the revenue operations team and where the RevOps team invested their time was illuminating. Here is what we learned.

What is Revenue Operations?

Simply put, revenue operations make the revenue producing teams more efficient and create a system for selling. Revops is a broad and data-heavy role that provides accurate forecasting, accelerates growth, improves cross-departmental alignment, and enables sales teams to scale efficiently.

While most leadership teams expect revenue operations to provide them with sales forecasts, customer data for quarterly business reviews, or data to support quarterly and annual performance and planning cycles. It seldom recognizes that revenue operations teams are on the hook for a lot more.

Image Credit: Mikael Blomkvist provided by Pexels
Traditionally, this role has been conducted by different teams across sales operations, customer service ops, finance ops or marketing ops. However, as companies move towards providing a more integrated experience across all customer touch points, revenue operations is rapidly evolving to represent operations capabilities across sales, service, marketing and finance as an integrated function.

In fact, the rapid growth of communities like RevGenius and AdaptivOps in bringing together like minded operations professionals exemplifies this accelerating trend.

What do Sales Reps need from Revenue Operations?

Sales reps and revenue operations teams both have the same goal – to increase revenue for the company. However, expectations between sales teams and revops on how they bring in revenue goals differ.

Image Credit: RODNAE Productions provided by Pexels

We found that what sales reps want most from their sales operations team is to provide them with more qualified leads. This, of course, is a no-brainer! However, in a further discussion, we also learned that sales teams also need the following from their revops team:

• Define the Ideal Account Profile: One of the critical reasons sales teams fail to meet their targets is that their sales efforts are targeted at a customer that their product is not designed for. Defining the ideal account profile is no trivial task. It requires gathering information from various internal and external data sources about your accounts, determining which of these data points are relevant to identify target accounts, and experimenting with account segmentation strategies to map the right value proposition, product, and pricing to these accounts segments.
• Map Customers’ Role to Your Target Persona. The process of selling to businesses usually requires a group of users, budget owners, and decision-makers to align around a standard solution. Understanding the role and objective of each person in the decision process, having ‘access to power,’ and leveraging the right resources and relationships at the right time in the sales process are critical to the success of closing any B2B deal.
• Qualify Customers Based on Their Requirements: Customer needs differ significantly from one to another. Often, customers struggle to articulate their business requirements clearly. The ability to ask meaningful qualifying questions, understand customers’ value points, and design a solution at a price point that meets their needs is as much art as it is science. The process is just as often informed by experience as it is by data. Art and science meet in the revenue operations process by distilling these requirements to create a repeatable sales process where art and science meet the revenue operations process.
• Position and Differentiate Products and Services: At most B2B selling organizations, product marketing or product management teams spend significant time positioning and competitively differentiate their products compared to others in the market. However, this content must be packaged and delivered as enablement programs by operations teams to briefly provide the sales reps the information they need to be successful.

In most cases, the content for supporting sales reps with these issues sits in different teams – product marketing, pricing, competitive intelligence, to name a few. However, revenue operations play a critical role in bringing all of this information together and organizing it in a way that allows sales reps to access and consume this content when they need it.

While it may not be as apparent to a sales team, a well-structured and robust enablement program does improve the sales rep’s productivity. This level of support leads to increased conversion rates and greater upsells.

9 Essential Functions of Revenue Operations

Now that we understand what sales teams need from their operations team, let’s look at how they spend their time and resources.

• Data Management and Analytics: Revenue Operations is a data-driven function at its core. Data is the foundation of many of its functions, whether that be strategic or tactical. The Revops team collaborates with data analysts, BI teams, and IT organizations to integrate and access the correct data. Through analytics, revenue operations can shape successful sales strategies and turn sales and customer data insights into action. These actionable, quantifiable insights drive growth and increase sales rep productivity.
• Develop Sales Strategy: Sales strategy outlines how the business is going to sell the product or service. Sales operations collaborate with leadership, finance, product, and marketing teams to create a sales strategy and a set target revenue that is ambitious but still attainable. The sales forecasting, territory structuring, compensation planning, processes optimization, technology implementation, and reporting carried out by RevOps directly shapes and executes the organization’s overall strategy.
• Sales Forecasting: This is both a science and an art. It requires both descriptive and predictive analytics. Descriptive analytics gives insight into historical trends but falls short of providing the bigger picture. It is critical to examine why there was or lack of growth and how those factors may change moving forward. Accurate sales forecasting is essential as it affects the entire business. It impacts the budget, hiring, and production planning. Without it, there is a risk of a supply-demand imbalance which can be incredibly costly to a business.
• Structure Sales Territories: Sales territory planning and management optimize sales resources geographically to improve sales efficiency and sales performance. A substantial territory strategy increased sales, improved customer coverage, and reduced costs. It is critical to get it right early, as frequent changes can hinder productivity and hurt relationships.

Sales territory planning involves:

• Defining the market
• Assessing account quality
• Assessing territory quality
• Assessing sales reps to establish territory alignment

• Define Compensation Plans: Compensation plans are strategically designed to drive the right sales and behavior of sales reps in alignment with sales objectives. Sales compensation plans are one of the most significant financial investments of the organization, so they merit thoughtful construction. It’s critical to strike the right balance of incentives, and plans must be easy to understand. Each compensation plan needs to be tailored to each unique role and set of responsibilities. Revenue operations typically collaborate with finance and business teams to define compensation plans that account for budget constraints, business goals and incent the proper behavior among sales teams.
• Sales Process Optimization: Optimizing the sales process is a continuous effort to identify what is going well and correct what is not. Sales operations identify trends, bottlenecks, and inefficiencies to improve the hit rate and build and maintain a healthy sales pipeline. Sales process optimization involves pinpointing leaks and blockages in the pipeline; automating as much as possible; identifying opportunities to reduce churn rate; aligning sales and marketing goals; looking for ways to shorten the sales cycle; prioritizing the highest-earning sales opportunities; improving communications; upgrading technologies; monitoring essential metrics and KPIs.
• Technology Adoption and Implementation: Since sales teams are primarily responsible for driving revenue, new sales productivity tools pop up frequently to support them. Recent advancements in data warehousing, analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, natural language processing have led to an explosion in the tools available for sales reps to improve productivity and close rates. Revenue operations keep track of new sales technology and vets tools to identify which align with the organization’s needs and increase sales productivity. Once revenue operations have deemed a new technology is worth adopting, they are responsible for training the sales team on how to use it and ensuring the team is using it effectively.
• Reporting: Revenue operations is responsible for reporting on sales metrics across the organization. They create dashboards, metrics, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to provide updates and guide decision-making. Reports can be high-level or highly detailed, depending on the need. They are heavily used to form a sales strategy and assess whether the team is hitting established benchmarks and other KPIs.
• Lead Generation and Management: Revenue operations generate and manage sales leads so salespeople can focus on what they do best: sell! They ensure strong alignment between sales and marketing and ensure that the leads generated by the marketing team effectively routes to the correct sales team and rep. This may involve working with product marketing to establish clear value propositions and buyer personas. Leads must not only be routed effectively but also actioned quickly. The longer a lead ages, the less likely it is to close. Focusing on providing sales reps with quality leads versus quantity improves the chances of closing deals. Developing a strong sales strategy and accurate and actionable data results in quality lead generation.

The Untapped Potential of Revenue Operations at B2B SaaS Companies

Revenue operations teams may wear multiple hats to collaborate with several teams to ensure the correct information is available to their sales teams. However, at their heart, revenue operations teams are data gurus focused on driving growth. Data management and analytics are at the core of all functions that they support. We learned from our interviews that they spend a significant portion of their time building dashboards for forecasting meetings, management reviews, and quarterly business reviews (QBRs). These dashboards, metrics, and insights are tailored to the needs of executives and are rarely available to everyone on the sales team.

Image Credit: Karolina Grabowska provided by Pexels

There is a significant opportunity for revenue operations teams to provide live insights to sales reps that accelerate deal close and, at the same time, provide better service to customers. How can sales operations use data intelligence to improve the effectiveness of everyone on the sales team and not just the privileged few? There is an effective service to customers. By providing actionable insights to all users, revenue operations can increase rep productivity leading to higher conversion rates and greater upselling.

There is a Better Way

We learned that there is a huge opportunity to change the game and provide operations teams with tools to use data intelligence that drive growth for their business. BI tools go only so far in providing data intelligence for planning purposes. Immersa takes it a step further – providing data intelligence to every user to drive actions.

We’d love to talk to you about how Immersa can help accelerate your SaaS revenue!

The post The Essential Guide to How Revenue Operations Empowers a B2B Business appeared first on RevGenius.

You’ve handled the good, bad and ugly, living to tell the tale and often forming both a business and friendly relationship.

Accounts may need to be transitioned for various reasons, including realignments of books of businesses, or people changing roles.

Change is always hard and if not executed correctly, can set your company’s relationship with the customer back.

In order to create an effective transition, minimizing friction internally and externally, you need to consider internal preparation and transition as well as the external transition call.

Internal Preparation for CSM-to-CSM Account Transition

Providing information through an internal transition creates the smoothest customer experience. Connecting internally prior to sharing the news of change with the customer allows for a discussion of current and upcoming projects, sensitive subjects and transition approach.

Similar to a customer call, the transitioning CSM should be prepared with an agenda, data, and clear expectations.

Depending on how long you’ve supported the account, you may have a lot of background  – but not all of that is always needed.

As the transitioning CSM, you should think through how to share information in the most streamlined way, highlighting relevant background, key current projects, and how/when to make an official transition.

When it is time to make the shift, the transitioning CSM can use the following steps to level up a teammate:

Consolidate and share your documents

Having all of your documents in one easy to access location as a one-stop shop for notes, contracts, presentations, and internal documents allows the new CSM to have all relevant details at their fingertips.

This provides them the ability to reference documents after the transition call, as they won’t be able to absorb the full amount of information in one sitting and may need to refer back to these details.

Ideally, leveraging this organization as you manage the account makes it less of an uplift as a transition activity and more of just sharing of what has already been created.

Develop a cohesive narrative

The new CSM doesn’t always need the play by play from a conversation two years ago (unless it impacts a current project or sentiment). If you’ve supported the account for a while, it can be easy to get off track with anecdotes that may be interesting, but not relevant.

Prior to the meeting, think through how to best convey the history and current status in a digestible way.

Consider questions such as:

• Who are the relevant contacts?
• What is the customer sentiment (and why)?
• What were the last few new product or feature discussions and how did they go?
• What is the preferred communication cadence and method?
• Are there any concerns leading into the next renewal?

Hold the internal discussion

Share all the details you’ve gathered, making sure to highlight key items that may need more context or discussion. During this call, review the appropriate method and timing to share the news with the customer.

Some customers may expect or need you to work together in parallel as a project completes while others may be able to transition on your next cadence call.

Plan who will own which pieces of the customer transition so nothing gets dropped.

From the new CSM perspective, the most important action is to come to the meeting with curiosity.

Assuming the transitioning CSM isn’t leaving the company, you can still leverage them for future questions, but take the opportunity to absorb as much as possible upfront.

This includes clarifying items and validating assumptions.

External Account Hand-Off Steps

Depending on your interaction with the customer, news of transitioning CSMs may be communicated via email, phone call or scheduled meeting.

No matter the medium, it should be clearly communicated that information about key projects has been shared and provide the customer all needed contact information for their new CSM.

When planning for the customer communication, the transitioning CSM should schedule time to share this specific messaging. Ideally, this is a call or video chat with the transition being the primary focus, so it doesn’t get lost in other updates.

Within this meeting, the transitioning CSM owns:

Clearly communicating the change and impact

Be direct in sharing that the customer’s CSM contact is changing and let the customer know if there is anything that they should expect to change as part of that transition. (This may be applicable if moving up/down engagement models or if the new CSM works different hours).

Sharing details around internal alignment done

Let the customer know the key topics you’ve reviewed with the incoming CSM, to preemptively address questions such as “do you have any background on my account?”.

Thanking the customer for their relationship

Even if they are not your favorite contact to work with, being appreciative of the customer choosing to do business with your company (and spend time meeting with you) is a classy way to leave the relationship.

How to Run the Account Transition Meeting

During the meeting, the new CSM should have an opportunity to share and begin forming a relationship.

The new CSM should offer a short introduction, which should include an overview of themselves (background and experience) and a highlight of projects they are excited to partner on together.

After the meeting, the new CSM should send the follow up email. This communication helps finalize the transition that they are now the CSM to engage with.

The recap should include notes from the transition call, next steps the CSM will own regarding current projects, and contact information/expectations.

While a company should make efforts to minimize changing CSMs on an account, there are times when it cannot be helped.

By approaching the process with structure, curiosity, and empathy, each CSM can help create the best customer experience possible.  

The post How to Transition an Account within the Customer Success Team appeared first on RevGenius.

Pair compensation with the emerging SaaS darling that is Customer Success and headlines like “CS Careers and Compensation Skyrocket in 2021”, one can quickly start to feel the pressure. But how do you start to build your first CSM compensation plan or what should you think about when you need to redevelop an existing plan?

I’m going to share what questions revenue leaders should ask themselves as they’re designing a fit for purpose plan based on monetary payouts ($$$ and not “total compensation” in the form of benefits and potential equity). I also won’t go into what’s market rate compensation for Customer Success Managers and how to determine it. There are many other sources for that like here, here, here and more here.

The three questions you should ask yourself:

• Are CSMs responsible for revenue?
• What behaviors am I trying to reward or incentivize?
• What issues am I trying to mitigate?

Going through these questions will give you a head start in designing a great compensation structure. When you answer these questions, you’ll be able to find clarity and can then fill in the details of the main components of your future structure.

So let’s get started with the first question you should ask yourself.

Are our CSMs Responsible for Revenue?

You’ll want to start with a solid understanding of the role and responsibilities of the CSM. The role of the CSM is still very highly varied across tech. The most important role distinction for compensation is whether CSMs own revenue.

This important question is a much debated topic. But I’m not here to debate you on this. That can be a topic for another day. Either way, you should have a point-of-view and an aligned organizational structure that fits that POV. Why?

Revenue ownership impacts how to structure the variable component and whether to make it MBO, bonus or commission based. If the answer is no revenue ownership, then an MBO or bonus structure would be the default choice. In choosing to pick between both of those options, I’d steer revenue leaders away from MBOs – they are less objective and can sometimes be harder to tie back to outcomes that directly impact the business. A deep understanding of what the CSMs role and responsibilities are, can help clarify whether to focus on MBO or bonus.

If the answer is yes, that CSMs do own revenue, you should steer towards a bonus or commission-based structure. You’ll also want to clarify which type of revenue they own – renewal revenue, expansion and upsell revenue or both.

This further clarification can help you make a call on how to split focus on renewals vs new revenue. And how you split renewal vs new upsell or expansion revenue really depends on the company’s maturity and focus.

Generally, CSMs without revenue responsibility have an 80 / 20 split for base vs variable. Some teams go as high as 70 / 30. But once you start to move base as a smaller percentage, you get into sales-led roles like Account Management.

Designing compensation is all about rewarding and incentivizing performance so you should be clear on the behaviors and outcomes you want to drive.

What behaviors am I trying to reward and incentivize?

The difference between a reward and an incentive is a small but important one. A reward is something that is given to an employee. In terms of compensation, it’s money given for performance achieved. Whereas an incentive is a motivating factor. The idea of a reward can be a motivating factor within itself, so the lines do blur a bit here. Either way, rewards and incentives are interesting considerations when designing compensation.

For my team, I wanted to reward CSMs on gross revenue retention. I don’t think CSMs should own the closing out of a renewal, but I do believe that the work they do, day in and day out, makes our renewals easier to achieve. They are responsible, although not fully accountable, and hence the reward is in the form of their bonus. Another reason why I chose a revenue retention goal is to tie CSM compensation to a measurable and impactful company goal. I could have based it on other metrics like our customer NPS or time to launch, but revenue retention is the ultimate business outcome.

As for behaviors that I want to incentivize, this was tied to the “upside” of the great work a CSM can do, which translates to expansion revenue.

I wanted to incentivize CSMs to look for and assist with new dollar revenue on their accounts through expansion. I don’t want to turn them into sellers, however, so this incentive is not a part of their bonus, but instead, sits on top of it, like extra frosting on top of an already delicious cake. This incentive is structured as a commission for every dollar expanded on their accounts.

Since compensation structures can drive behaviors, rewards and incentives, they can and should also be designed to mitigate certain issues.

The final question you’ll want to ask yourself is – what potential issues am I trying to mitigate?

We’d been evolving our CSM compensation plan and a few issues emerged that I wanted to design for. One issue was that since CSMs weren’t responsible for the renewal, they started to feel distanced from the actual outcome. Of course our CSMs felt bad when a customer churned. That’s months and oftentimes years of hard work and effort that essentially gets wiped away. It’s also the loss of a business and personal relationship.

So yes, CSMs “feel the churn” but they were distanced from the impact as they had little skin in the game in terms of compensation. So I designed the compensation plan to have CSMs have more in it. I wanted a better way to tie pay and performance so I tied bonus to revenue retention with a sliding scale to determine their payout. For 90% revenue retention they get paid out 100%. Below 90% and there’s a sliding scale of 0-100%. If we get 90-100% rev retention the payout is 100-120%.

Now CSMs still focus on the customer’s outcomes but they will also have to focus on our company’s financial outcome as well.

The other issue that I wanted to proactively address was the issue of big expansions on a CSM’s account. We commission our sellers on every dollar in ARR that they sell, and that includes on existing accounts. Often those large expansions happen in part to the CSM successfully showing value and building a bigger vision with our customer. In our old compensation structure if a seller expanded a $50k deal, the seller got their commission and the CSM got a pat on the back. Now we commission CSMs on every dollar expanded or upsold as well.

Bringing it all together

These three questions are important in helping you design a great compensation structure and plan.

• Are CSMs responsible for revenue?
• What behaviors am I trying to reward or incentivize?
• What issues am I trying to mitigate?

Once these questions are answered you can now start to fill in the details and build out the main components of the CSM compensation plan.

To simplify, there’s a list of the components that matter most:

• Base Structure: Options here are Base Salary only vs Base Salary + Variable
• If you choose Base + Variable, The Split: Options here are generally in the range of 70 / 40 to 90 / 10 with a median of 80 / 20
• Variable Structure: Lots of options here from MBO (management by objectives), bonus to commissions; and schedules tied to determining dollar payouts
• Additional Incentives: Lots of short term, longer term and cross team incentives to drive specific behaviors and outcomes
• Frequency: Tied to fiscal quarters or some other time frame (monthly, half year, etc)

You could just jump in head first and start to put details to each of these bullets, but that would be less strategic and comprehensive. Instead, use the 3 questions to thoughtfully craft a compensation plan that accounts for the organization you’ve designed and to encourage the behaviors and outcomes you want your CSMs to exhibit.

The post 3 questions for CSM (Customer Success) compensation structure appeared first on RevGenius.

It’s big, flashy, and often gets all the credit for moving an account forward.

Because of this, the cadence call is often viewed as being a less important filler meeting. But, if done correctly, this meeting can be the key to unlocking your account.

In this post, we’ll take a look at how Customer Success teams can utilize the cadence meeting format to their advantage.

Let’s dive in.

What is a Cadence Meeting?

For those who are unfamiliar, a cadence meeting is a recurring scheduled time between a customer account and their primary day-to-day contact(s), traditionally focused on tactical execution and alignment.

Why Should You Hold Cadence Meetings?

First, let’s acknowledge that no one likes to have a meeting to just have a meeting. Especially throughout the pandemic, as people’s calendars have become impossibly more time-crunched, receiving meeting time is a gift.

Meetings have to add value, be relevant, and be concise. Often, a cadence meeting is treated as ‘just a check-in,” and this lack of formality can create a lack of value.

Holding a cadence meeting can be incredibly helpful for the following reasons.

Cadence Meetings Provide Consistent Exposure

By having a set interaction with your customer contact, it allows you to stay top of mind, so you can remain aware of active and upcoming projects as they develop.

Think about a friendship you have where you talk to someone weekly compared to one where you catch up every few months.

The person you connect with more often hears the minutiae of life rather than the filtered headlines you may share after a few months.

Cadence Calls Allow for Relationship Building

When you don’t meet with any frequency, the meetings you do have often have so much to cover you can miss out on time to develop the relational aspect. You can’t cram “relationship building” into the first five minutes of a QBR and consider that goal complete.

Relationships take time to build, requiring consistency and more than an ice breaker question.

Regular Cadence Meetings Help You Gain Deeper Insight

If you only have a limited opportunity for discussion, trying to maximize gathering information from the customer can feel like a game of 20 questions.

If you set an objective to learn one new thing about the business each cadence call, you start to accumulate helpful information in a more conversational flow, without the customer feeling like they are being interrogated.

These Discussions Can Be Used to Test the Waters on a New Idea

Rather than introducing a completely new idea at a QBR where it could fall flat in front of a larger audience or the executive buyer, use the cadence meeting as a testing ground to get early insight and feedback.

The cadence meeting is a great place to bring up new topics or product suggestions and provide a high-level overview to better get a sense of whether it makes sense to advance the conversation and to bring in a specialist for a deeper dive.

As an added bonus, having you bring up the suggestion in a cadence meeting gets you comfortable with an elevator pitch while building stronger internal rapport.

That way, you only bring in additional resources when required.  

How to Structure Your Customer Success Cadence Meetings

Once you’ve aligned with your customer on the value of a cadence meeting, you need to create a structure that allows you to maximize this time together.

While a cadence meeting may not require the formalized approval of the agenda a week before the meeting, maintaining a format that allows both sides to understand expectations and topics is helpful.  

Here is a suggested cadence meeting agenda:

1. Outstanding project status, next steps, and ownership
2. Company updates (from both sides, as relevant)
3. Review any recent tickets and feedback for you/your team
4. Align on upcoming meetings, projects or goals
5. Agree on key milestones to accomplish prior to next cadence call  

Business Reviews vs. Cadence Meetings – Why You Need Both

I’m not advocating that the cadence meeting replace the QBR –  each has its own time and place.

Some limitations of the cadence meeting (and why you should continue to hold business reviews) include:

No Executives Will Be Present

Typically, the cadence meeting is a great connection point to your main contacts or champion, but often doesn’t include the executive buyer.

This relationship is also one that needs to be established and developed, but the cadence meeting is often not the right level of detail for them.

Additionally, without time or insight from the executive buyer, you may lack hearing about a strategic company direction, as your main contact may not be involved in those conversations.

Short-Term vs. Longer-Term

The cadence meeting is often focused on the here and now – current projects, timelines, and actions. This is helpful to keep momentum but doesn’t provide the opportunity to look six months or more in the future to begin laying the groundwork for longer-term alignment.

Remote vs. In-person

With a QBR having a bit more pomp and circumstance, there is (as we begin to return to a more normal world) the ability to hold these meetings in person.

This may include traveling to the customer’s office for the discussion and even extending the interaction through lunch or dinner. This face time, especially beyond the meeting, can help drive a more personal and authentic relationship.

Introducing the Cadence Meeting to Your Organization

If you don’t have cadence meetings set up with your customers today (and it makes sense given your segment and structure), how can you introduce them?

In bringing the idea up with a customer, you need to provide context on why you are looking to connect more frequently (hint: look at the reasons above and determine what is most relevant to your situation).

One question that has provided insight to me in the past is asking how they work with their top/favorite vendor. This provides guidance into what structure may work for them.

Then, determine what cadence makes sense – weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Look at the projects or potential projects, ticket flow, and the relationship or communication gap to help determine how often it makes sense.

You don’t want to over ask for meeting time and struggle to fill it with content (which means it probably won’t be a valuable meeting).

If the customer sees value in the discussion and a project ramps up that requires more frequent connections, there is the opportunity to adjust the cadence.

Once you have the customer’s buy-in to meet, be sure to maximize the time together by focusing on consistently providing value!

The post How to Run Effective Customer Success Cadence Meetings appeared first on RevGenius.