One Secret Customer Success Hack From Steli Efti CEO Close.io
Steli Efti is the CEO and co-founder of Close.io, a sales software that has communication at its core.
Over the years, Steli has become Silicon Valley’s most prominent sales hustler and grew a 7 digit business with a team of only 6.
He shared with us one of his great sales hacks:
Act like a picky girl on a date.
This sounds somewhat counter-intuitive. What does it mean? And more importantly how does Steli do it?
Don’t wait for your prospects to become customers
Customer success is now a key part of any SaaS startup’s strategy. Indeed, the very model of a Software-as-a-Service business includes a constant renewal process.
Thus, SaaS startups must prove outstanding value overtime and keep driving their customers towards success using their software.
However, customer success starts even before someone is a customer. It starts the minute a potential customer contacts you or signs up for a free trial.
Use your free trial to select the right customers for you
According to Steli, “customer success means caring about making your customers successful. It starts with you selling to people you think you can make successful instead of selling to everybody.”
Free trials are supposed to help your potential customers try your product out and decide whether they like it or not, right? Well, at Close.io, it’s just the opposite. The sales team filters and selects the customers they want to have. Just like you would assess a potential fit during a date
Their go/no go criteria: are we a good fit for this customer? And are they a good fit for us?
“At Close.io, our sales team gets a fair amount of inbound leads and free trials signups, coming mostly from referrals and inbound marketing. Once somebody makes that first step towards us, we make it our responsibility to make sure that only people and companies than can get an insane amount of value out of Close.io become our customers.”
By selecting the customers they can actually drive to success, Close.io’s sales team can keep a clean funnel and spend more time with real prospects to help them get value out of the software as quickly as possible. And for bad fits, they save them some time and point them to the right direction.
But how do they sort and select their customers? By calling each and every one of them.
“Do things that don’t scale: call all your free trialers within 5 minutes of signup (and do it even when you scale up)”
Steli shared his lesser known tips about how he calls customers and makes sure he gets in-depth information. Click here to read more…
