Field Notes, Challenges & more

In many cases, the customer onboarding process is about getting your new customers up and running as fast as possible. This often results in a ton of work only to leave the customer's true goals unfulfilled. But the best customer onboarding process guides the customers in getting the most out of your company's product or service. Doing so builds customer confidence and trust. But building this kind of relationship requires your team to be open and candid about the highest risk factors within your customer onboarding process. Once these risk factors are identified, you can build an customer onboarding checklist allowing you to kill problems earlier and faster while creating mutual accountability between your team and your new client.

As much as we like to think of complex sales and customer onboarding as different silos of the business, the become crucial to each other once a deal is closed. During the complex sales process, discussions take place on areas of potential improvement and how your product or service could best help. This information is critical in managing the direction of the customer onboarding process. A gap in this area could put your organization at risk of losing the customer your team worked so hard to get. So how can you manage this handoff between the complex sales team and the customer onboarding team effectively to ensure a smooth customer onboarding process for the client?

We've been speaking with revenue and account leaders on the challenge of getting customers to show up to customer success review meetings. Many are adopting this blended strategy of Strategic Account Reviews/Renewals. This unique and scalable approach creates an environment for stakeholders to review historical value and identify future opportunities. We help optimize account and renewal teams by increasing their ability to execute processes and engage with customers to build relationships, reduce churn, and drive new opportunities. To address this, many are adopting a blended strategy called SARNEW, which combines Strategic Account Reviews (SARs) with customer renewals.

Companies need to understand that customer renewals are never guaranteed, you have to earn them. Companies often forget that the work doesn’t stop after you sign a new customer. What often happens is that the “work” of the customer renewal is not well defined. A disjointed process makes these “to-dos” difficult to keep track of and execute well. This causes engagement to fall by the wayside. When engagement goes, so do your chances of renewing that customer. Clarifying ownership in customer renewals is crucial for maintaining recurring revenue. This field note summarizes our discussions with revenue leaders on building and executing consistent customer renewal processes that are engaging, collaborative, relationship-building, and effective in reducing churn.

As a customer success or account team leader, your goal is to have your team actively engaging with customers. But what recipe will work? Successful account growth strategies have a great balance of mutual accountability driven by strategic plans, quarterly business reviews (QBRs), and mutual action plans (MAPs) with associated responsibilities and tasks. Every great customer meeting ends with a clear next step, a mutual plan, and a road for follow up.

For many companies, landing & expanding customers is the only path to profitability. With the rise of SaaS and reoccurring revenue complex sales modules, pressure is now placed on the organizations (complex sales, customer onboarding and customer success teams) to get, keep, and grow revenue on their customers. This modern and continuous model is a challenge for many of these teams and will be the difference between success and failure.

B2B complex sales are getting harder every day and this is only being amplified by the number of people required to be part of the complex sales process. This consensus-based approach is a challenge to complex sales leaders because many are required to sell and align the solutions multiple times in order to win. Good news, if you are working in regulated industries, this could be even higher:)

Many complex sales leaders struggle when 90% of complex sales are done without one of their team members in the room. Prospects now have access to so much information during the qualification process and are only looping your team in towards the end of the complex sales process. The last 10% now requires a more collaborative approach to centralize and align stakeholders to win the business.