Inside Sales to Customer Success
Hello everyone,
The title is no brainer and I am going to talk about pivoting from a Product Specialist role to a Customer Success Manager. Both positions are well-known in SaaS businesses. But, the roles are very different and we will understand that from the sales and marketing funnel.
As soon as the lead is sales qualified by inside sales representative this lead becomes a prospect followed by checkpoints to verify the deal size and the business use case. Most of the inside sales folks work on “ BANT” — budget, need, authority and timeline to estimate a deal size along with product specialist who would do a first-order assessment of the use case. In the previous organization where I worked as a Sr Product Specialist for a Business Process Management software — KiSSFLOW. One person will be doing an end-to-end sales closure. I would do a deal size assessment following “BANT” and qualify the lead for a product demonstration followed by doing proof of concept while the customer got onboarded on a 14-day trial account followed by the chase of taking it to the closure. The product is customizable for any business use case and allows business users to customize some of their workflows. That makes the job of getting to closure a little tricky if one comes around an edge case and we require integrations to trigger certain stages of the workflow. The concept of an application was as simple as a digital form but triggers from external systems were also captured on the fields of the forms. Hence, this was a heavily consultative profile. One was required to work on business process maps and come out with simplified rules to recreate the same scenario in the product. While working in KiSSFLOW as part of inside sales there were monthly targets in MRR. It was fun to be challenged and aim for the goal. But sometimes, it leads to massive burn-out if there was a delay in proof of concept stage itself. Showing product demonstration with the right kind of demo applications reduced deal closure time. The customer would be more than half-way in testing the product on his own and even would prefer to start with a minimum subscription if required so in a way one would be able to put a foot in the door. Once those, deal numbers will show up on the dashboard there will be a sigh of relief. A proud moment if you are used to working with some big logos.
As a salesperson, I will narrate success stories of how-to convenience or crack the ugliest of all deals because some of the major brands came from APAC and this market, in particular, is sensitive to pricing and need trust which makes relationship-building a key aspect. But you can either go home or win BIG!
Being good at maintaining customer relationships, delivering promises on time made APAC a cake-walk. I never had thought that being empathetic to deadlines of your customer within their company will do a value add to the work, I was doing. Generally, people mention that a good sales representative can not be a good customer success. Maybe, I was not the absolute best at sales realizing my strengths were bigger on being more empathetic and humane to my customers. Keeping them first, the best move I could think of was “Customer Success”.
Customer Success is called different names- post-sales operations, relationship management, portfolio management, or happiness index manager, or a customer champion there are so many interesting titles within organizations and one thing stands out is — Customer satisfaction is the keystone. I would take a detour and rather than calling it a function would prefer to mention this as a philosophy. I will cover this in my next post and will hyperlink for your reference.
How different are the two profiles?
Honestly, I was hooked to being a salesperson in the beginning and it was hard to shift the focus from selling mode to planning mode. These two profiles have different KPIs and if you can refer to the image above they both are part of two different stages in the funnel itself. There is a clear demarcation when sales take a back-seat and CSM takes the front-wheel.
What are the differences in KPIs?
In sales, your KPI revolves around target achievement based on that you get to take your incentives home. There is a soft target and there is a hard target. Depends, how much influx you create there could be an option for additional incentive compensation. The lifecycle of receiving this target depends upon the deal’s closing month. In a SaaS business, customers have free-hand in modifying or cancelling their subscription at any time without any obligation, hence CSMs role becomes more competitive to stay on top of every moment in their accounts.
Whereas in Customer Success the targets are aligned on three parameters:
- Retention: Hands-down this is a key player and lifecycle is based on the current month/quarter/year renewal date. There can be further events which attribute to retention factor — Deletion MRR & Downgrade MRR which causes the contraction of the revenue.
- Growth: Any cross-sell or up-sell created because of the CSMs relationship or spotting of opportunity which goes to closure in the current month formulates to expansion revenue or the growth MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
- Advocacy: Getting case-studies or interviews to be featured on your company website is a way of showcasing your loyal customer base. This is the revenue that is going to stay with the brand for a lifetime and hence contribute effectively to the LTV of the customer.
Now, that we know about various KPIs we can move further in understanding how everyday planning at an account level differs.
Planning & Strategising
Product Specialist: I need to deliver an amazing demo that gets me their buying intent.
In this phase, we are still working towards creating stickiness with the buying intent. The prospect has not yet tuned into a paying customer. We actively, look at our deal pipeline to move it from proof of concept stage to the ready to buy stage. The deal has to keep moving forward on the deals board.
A month start planning begins with sorting your pipeline — low hanging fruits, make-it-work leads, gone stale leads, come back later leads. We need to have an idea where do I need to place my efforts and drive the engagement for the next month if the sales cycle will be more than 2–3 months especially in case of enterprise deals ( sales cycle can go up to 6 months as well)
Strategies could be made based on inputs from the proof of concept activity or one can think about re-working on bulk leads which have a similar lead score to pulse their in-product engagement.
Getting in touch with the marketing team to deliver collaterals required for a presentation in a board meeting or getting a feature request built from scratch for your bling-bling zazzy logo, should be worth the MRR fetched if you ask product managers to prioritize a feature for your deal.
Customer Success Manager: I need to sort my account-book
Every month begins with getting a connect established with new logos joining us followed by keeping a steady-state of premium accounts. Most of the time, one can say losing account from a higher MRR bucket just gives a heart-attack. Sweeping nearly 20% of your sweet variable pay. Before, you think about losing an account due to a lack of features or bad support experience or downgrade your pocket burns.
A month start planning strictly begins with segmenting the account book based on Mrr and last engagement status. Your ability to make your customer feel comfortable can help you predict their next move of churn or downgrade. A CSM can not do anything about a business shutdown but still, they can save the rest of the accounts by being proactively engaged. Before, any accounts moved to At-Risk status, you should get in full swing with your first-aid box and procedure for open-heart surgery. Odds are that you can be in a tricky and messy situation with little time at hand. If you have been vigilant then the same time frame to ward off the messy situation could have worked to your advantage.
CSMs collaborate with multiple teams and in Freshworks when a single CSM is mapped to 10 products then you need to know every nook and corner of the internal teams & people who can help you sort things quicker. If an escalation comes from the support then you can jump right in and get the discussion done with product manager as well. Ensuring customer that they are heard and you are working to sort this. Winning trust of your customers is necessary but teammates or cross-functional team is also necessary because you can’t blame someone and walk-off. You need to bring people and make them huddle. Most interesting, is you turn into an encyclopedia of business segments and all features that do a value add for that very segment. You are always growing with the role, you becoming steady with your delivery but speed matters a lot. If you exhaust, a customer’s patience then they can pull the plug and go airplane mode in no time.
I am not trying to scare you peeps, this song is stuck in my head literally.
Airplane mode — Listen!
