Dominique Levin - The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers (Sales Blueprints Book 6)

The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers (Sales Blueprints Book 6) — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers (Sales Blueprints Book 6)" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...15

Copyright 2018. Published by Winning By Design LLC, a Delaware company

All rights reserved as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this book may be reproduced, used or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or archive, without the expressed written consent of the publisher.

The contents of this book were created in the United States of America.

Edited by Fernando Pizarro and Dan Smith

Revision 5.0

Winning by Design LLC

San Francisco, California

United States of America

For more information, visit www.winningbydesign.com

More from Winning by Design

The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers is part of Winning by Designs Sales Blueprints series. Other books in the series include:

The SaaS Sales Method: The Science and Process of Sales

Blueprints for a SaaS Sales Organization: How to Design, Build and Scale a Customer-Centric Sales Organization

The SaaS Sales Method Fundamentals: How to Have Customer Conversations

The SaaS Sales Method for Sales Development Representatives: How to Prospect for Customers

The SaaS Sales Method for Account Executives: How to Win Customers

Contents

CUSTOMER SUCCESS: GROWING THE BUSINESS TOGETHER

The real measure of customer success isnt landing more and more customers. It isnt even keeping those customers through improved retention efforts. The best companies are able to keep their customer churn below 5 percent per year, which only comes from focusing on creating Impact for the customer across the entire customer lifecycle. Despite this, retaining customers is not the focus of the best companies.

Static customers are no longer good enough. The top companies grow customers along a logically orchestrated customer journey, leading to positive Net Revenue Retention (NRR).

Companies with a customer success operating model often have Net Revenue Retention (NRR) defined as expansion revenue minus revenue churn in a given time frame for your existing customer base that is greater than 130 percent.

Figure 1. The SaaS Sales Method - A journey of experiences, shows how expanding revenue from existing customers has become more important than ever before

Selling has become a team sport. Customer success has become a team sport as well. Everybody, from marketing, to sales, to post-sales personnel, is responsible for customer success. If you sold to a bad-fit customer, the customer will not be successful. If you dont have a plan to impact the customers business over the next year, the customer will not be successful. Seneca famously said, if you dont know where youre going, no wind is favorable. So it is with customers you need a plan, which is the whole point of The SaaS Sales Method.

Figure 2. Outline of the key customer success activities

Key processes during the growth phase of a customer journey are:

• Preboarding: In some situations, it might help to introduce your customer success team even before the customer has committed to your solution.
• Handoff: In this meeting, sales will introduce the customer success team to the client. For larger clients, there will be an internal pre-handoff meeting in which sales coordinates with other functions, including customer success, product, and marketing as appropriate.
• Orchestration and technical kickoff: Whereas most companies organize a technical kickoff, many forget a business orchestration meeting in which you (re-)affirm a clients one-year goals.
• Delivering value: Ultimately, a client bought your solution for a reason. If the customer isnt seeing results, renewal and expansion are highly unlikely.
• Monitor and respond: It is not usually necessary to meet your client frequently. However, it is always necessary to monitor the health of a customer and to respond to signals, good and bad.
• Review results: Not too long before your clients renewal or expansion conversation, it is important to remind them of the results you have been able to achieve based on the goals set during the orchestration meeting.
• Renew and expand: If orchestration goes well, renewal and expansion conversations flow very naturally out of your mutual interest in growing the customers business together.

Since impact and Critical Event play such important role in The Saas Sales Method, we will review our SPICED framework here. More details can be found in The SaaS Sales Method for Sales Development Representatives: How to Prospect for Customers, and The SaaS Sales Method Fundamentals: How to Have Customer Conversations.

The entire customer-facing team should be made aware of the customers situation. You might recognize the topics covered in the meeting from the SPICED framework we developed in The SaaS Sales Method Fundamentals: How to Have Customer Conversations.

S ituation	Any facts or circumstances relevant to your deployment at this particular customer.
P ain	The issue(s) that brought the customer your way in the first place.
I mpact	The ways in which you can improve the customers business.
C ritical Event	Any particular deadline to achieve impact.
D ecision Criteria	Any considerations that made the customer choose your solution over others.

IMPACT DEFINED

Definition of Need: Something that is required. Needs are about inputs.

Definition of Impact: Something that has a strong effect. Impact is about output.

In the figure below, notice on the left a traditional focus on the customers need, translating their requirements into features and benefits. On the right, you see that, in order to have an impact, you must peel away layers of needs, much like an onion. This impact can only be peeled by asking questions all the way to the core. It is often only after 6-7 layers of need (6-7 questions deep!) that a salesperson can find the underlying impact.

Ultimately, you are trying to achieve outcomes for your customers business, not line up inputs with product features!

Figure 3. The SaaS Sales Method - Impact

This impact determines the difference between nice-to-have and must-have. The impact of a service is best found by talking to customers.

IMPORTANT!

Use the information your AEs gather during the sales process and try to unpeel more layers by asking questions based on their priorities.

Below we review the key stages in The SaaS Sales Method , but have renamed each stage in the sales funnel to describe its relationship to delivering impact on the customers business.

Next page

1234567...15

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers (Sales Blueprints Book 6)»

Look at similar books to The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers (Sales Blueprints Book 6). We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Becky Carroll

The Hidden Power of Your Customers: 4 Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers

Karen Mangia

Listen Up!: How to Tune In to Customers and Turn Down the Noise

Bob Vasquez

Sales, Marketing, And Customer Service: A Nuts and Bolts Handbook Guide for Success

Uche Akeeb

The Impact Of Excellent Customer Service On Business Growth

Daniel Quick

The Customer Education Playbook: How Leading Companies Engage, Convert, and Retain Customers

Jacco Van Der Kooij

The SaaS Sales Method Fundamentals: How to Have Customer Conversations (Sales Blueprints)

Mante Kvedare

The Virtual Sales Handbook: A Hands-on Approach to Engaging Customers

Monty

Trust-based selling: finding and keeping customers for life

Vaidyanathan Ashvin

The Customer Success Professional’s Handbook

Miss Chloe Thomas

Customer Manipulation: How to Influence your Customers to Buy More and why an Ethical Approach will Always Win

Michael A Aun

Its the Customer, Stupid!: 34 Wake-up Calls to Help You Stay Client-Focused

Mark A. Peck

Integrated Account Management: How Business-to-Business Marketers Maximize Customer Loyalty and Profitability

Discussion, reviews of the book The SaaS Sales Method for Customer Success & Account Managers: How to Grow Customers (Sales Blueprints Book 6) and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.