Many business owners ask about the best aspect of their business to focus on: is it sales or customer success? Sales happen if customers make transactions and the business makes profits. Customer success, on the other hand, is a practice wherein businesses try to cultivate deep and lasting customer relationships. Customer success is capable of unlocking lasting customer lifetime value for any business. But, here’s the catch—a business won’t thrive if it doesn’t make sales to new customers. With that said, how can business owners know which of the two to devote more of their resources to?
The truth is that every business should target sales and customer success with equal emphasis. That’s because they’re two primary business objectives. When pursued simultaneously and when they work together, both sales and customer success offer more benefits, such as increased customer retention, greater revenue, and higher customer satisfaction rates, among others. Simply saying, sales and customer success augment each other’s progress because of their closely linked nature. You won’t receive both sales’ and customer success’s full value if your firm isn’t pursuing both of them together fully.
This post tries to take a look at the very close relationship existing between sales and customer success. The discussion below will also explore ways to merge the two and enhance them both.
A Lucrative Coin’s Two Sides
The marketing and sales team of your business spends so much time and effort to find customers and to get them through the sales funnel. The ultimate goal, of course, is to carry the customers over the finish line. What happens next? The marketing and sales team will go through the same process again, while the team assigned for customer success works on cultivating a strong relationship to retain that customer.
Focusing on the efforts of your customer success team is important if you have one in place. Ideally, you should contact the customer after making the sale, thank them for doing business with you, and kick off the onboarding process. Sales should be notified long before the renewal takes place, that’s why properly handling the hand-off between the customer success and sales team is important.
Monitoring the customer’s use of the product your business offers is essential so that you can send communications periodically and teach them how to use and adopt your product fully. By doing so, you can understand the pain points that the customer wants to be solved. In other words, you’ll know exactly what value every customer wants to gain. Your customer success team should treat every customer-initiated contact as an important opportunity for understanding the customer journey better. It puts your business on the path to establishing a lasting bond because you’ve already built a strong customer relationship.
Try using a platform for customer success if you’re struggling with retaining new customers. There are software tools out there that can go a long way in helping your business become more customer-centric. These software programs can also improve your ability to present and respond to any roadblocks proactively along the path leading to customer success. Along with a high-quality platform for customer success, you can also seek help from experts, like Winning By Design, in designing your business’s go-to market model.
You’ll start to see more and more benefits as time goes on. That’s when the customer has adopted your product fully. Customers who need more services or products will be more likely to purchase from you. Note, however, that it doesn’t end there yet. You win the loyalty and trust of the customer by demonstrating attentive value and service. As a result, they may start recommending you to their peers as they begin to talk and post about your brand. They can provide free marketing for you by sharing your posts or letting people know that you have new products or features to offer. These things can naturally generate new leads for you because they raise the reputation and prestige of your brand in the eyes of potential clients.
Communication between sales and customer success should be open, and you’ll need to ensure that it stays that way. For instance, the sales team of your business will want to have an idea about events, such as escalations, high usage rates, and when will renewal be happening. Both teams can, then, continue to collaboratively work this way.
Boosting Customer Success And Sales
Bring your goals in terms of both customer success and sales into alignment to get started. Encouraging greater communication and collaboration between the customer success and sales teams of your business is the key.
Members of your sales team work like hunters who search for potential customers and close sales through cold emails, social media, and other digital marketing channels. On the other hand, your customer specialists are like farmers as they’re the ones who engage customers to not only nurture but also grow relationships overtime after the sale. These two roles should keep the same goal in mind overall even if they use different strategies. Both of them should work towards customer retention.
A one-time sale shouldn’t be the focus of salespeople; they should, rather, think about helping every customer achieve whatever long-term goals they have and present the product of your business as one resource they could utilize daily. Without hammering home upsells or cross-sells, the customer success specialists of your business should nurture the relationship, too. In fact, an upsell should only be encouraged if you know for real that it’s something that will be truly valuable for a specific customer.
Final Thoughts: Merging Remote Sales And Customer Success
It’s essential to note that neither one is actually better than the other when it comes to sales or customer success. That being said, neither one should also be your only area of focus. Your business should aim to simultaneously advance them both instead. By doing so, you’ll be able to attract even more customers, increase revenue, and raise customer lifetime value.
Together, both customer success and sales can catapult your business to new heights. So, make sure that your business is enhancing efforts for both of them.
