Sales transition and tools for collaboration between customer success and product | CS Leadership Office Hours

What % of churn happens because of over-selling or poor client onboarding, and what process/tools are used to solve this?

• Organizations need to incentivize looking for long term goals instead of short term revenue
• Potential ideas to help when working with sales:
  • For the good customer (within ICP), Pay more incentives; while for customers who are not within ICP, the Sales team gets fewer commissions.
  • Align compensation to milestones of the customer journey
  • Commission variable according to Customer adoption and LTV
  • Commission linked to the payments received from customers (cash in the bank account)
• Focus on business cases during the sales-to-success transition
• Are you really getting to the root cause of the churn? Find out and document the churn reasons within the CRM
  • Take it to the leadership level: All the departments, Be it marketing or sales should make their effort into the right direction.
• Do a Success Analysis: Find out which of the existing customers are churning and which ones are successful. What are those key differentiators between churn and success? That is where we need to focus time and energy.
• Aaron Thompson's presentation from Customer Success Network titled "Customer Success Sells"

What tools are used for collaboration between CS & Product to prioritize new feature requests during onboarding, renewal, and expansion?

• Aligning teams along with customers on the 'Path to Green' for adoption
• Tacking the feature requests. CSMs can sit together with relevant product managers to tell how many customers are looking for a particular feature.
• Sometimes customers don’t know what actually they need. CSMs and Product Managers can truly look at the use-case and find out the best way to do it.
  • We need to be training CSMs to be asking the right inquisitive questions so that they can uncover the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework
• Ideation Platform where customers can come and upvote, downvote for features. This platform is connected with a project management platform that dev can see.
• Jo Massie from Slido shared a presentation on how they collaborate around the product roadmap

-- This podcast is brought to you by Jay Nathan and Jeff Breunsbach of Customer Imperative, where we help B2B SaaS organizations build growth & retention strategies. Learn more at https://customerimperative.com/ Jay Nathan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaynathan/ Jeff Breunsbach: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreybreunsbach