For most CX teams in SaaS, the implementation process is a one-way street. Your team directs their attention outward to focus on the customer, their needs, their data, their stakeholders, and their timetable. And, really, that’s how it should be—with one exception.
To the customer, implementation handoffs are almost a formality. An introduction from their sales rep to the implementation team starts the process, and a handoff from implementation to their CSM concludes it.
For your CX team, however, each handoff point is an opportunity to build and transfer customer knowledge to benefit your customer, their strategic goals, and your team’s operational effectiveness too.
Because of this, as ChurnZero’s implementation leader, I like to put an extreme focus on sharing as much customer information as possible. The goal is to equip every department to learn as much as they can, as efficiently as possible.
Here’s how we turned ChurnZero’s sales-to-implementation handoffs into a strategic asset for our CX and other go-to-market teams—and how you can too.
Our “Readiness for Implementation” loop, and how to use it.
Your company begins learning about a future customer from the moment they become a prospect and move into the sales cycle.
The more you know, the smoother your implementations go, the better your customers are set up for success, and the more you can improve your processes. That translates to smoother product adoption, faster value realization, and a lower risk of churn.
This makes it essential to ensure a solid transfer of knowledge from your sales team to your CX team when they close the deal and officially become a customer.
At ChurnZero, we call this process the Readiness for Implementation feedback loop. It benefits our CSMs and CX leaders as well as our implementation team, and it benefits our sales and product teams too.
Step 1: Perfect your sales-to-implementation knowledge transfer.
This step is where you transfer all knowledge from the customer’s sales rep to the implementation or onboarding team who will support them.
A sales rep learns so much about a customer during the prospecting cycle, which presents a documentation challenge. I highly recommend a 15-minute, in-person (or Zoom) sync with your sales rep to transfer as much knowledge as possible.
At a minimum, this should include:
- The customer’s goals, and motivation to purchase.
- The customer’s tech stack to be integrated.
- Other competitors considered by the customer.
- Timelines for the customer to meet (go-live or transition off another tool).
- Points of contact involved in purchasing decision
You could also include….
- Detailed notes from technical sales conversations about deployment.
- History of customer’s use of competitors’ systems.
- Points of contact to be involved in rollout of the tool.
- Nuances to be aware of (personnel or organization wise).
- Anticipated roadblocks to successful adoption of the system.
For efficient documentation, ensure that your CRM has fields that feed into your customer success platform, enabling your sales team to input the details for your implementation/onboarding team to use later down the line.
Step 2: Create a readiness dashboard.
At ChurnZero, our Implementation team scores a customer on the “Readiness for Implementation scale” to open another level of the feedback loop. Rather than scoring by ICP (Ideal customer persona) attributes, our scale scores each customer from 1 to 5 using a multi-selection list of readiness factors that reflect how our teams prepared them for implementation. Factors include:
- Does the customer have the right POCs ready to implement?
- Is the customer’s tech stack ready to go, with basic implementation needs met?
- Is the customer’s team prepped for change management with a new system coming?
Accounts and revenue (redacted) segmented by readiness.in ChurnZero’s Readiness Dashboard.
Step 3: Distribute your dashboard to fuel operational insights.
To improve our process, we set up a ChurnZero custom dashboard that pulls in these scores. This dashboard is sent to sales and CS leadership bi-weekly. This helps us identify areas where we may not be qualifying customers and prepare them appropriately for the implementation process.
For example, are we struggling with customers in a certain industry? Is there a certain sales rep who needs help, or a tech stack item that is more nebulous than others?
Bonus feature: determining team capacity
As an implementation leader, the readiness dashboard also helps me determine team capacity appropriately.
If I have someone with five “not ready” customers in their book of business, they are probably expending more time and effort chipping away at those than their colleagues with more “ready” customers. I’ll use that knowledge to tailor their next few assignments.
Step 4: Lead a recurring, cross-departmental readiness dashboard review.
Once a month, our CX, sales, and product leaders meet to review the readiness dashboard and identify actionable themes. For example:
- Are specific sales reps struggling to qualify ICP customers?
- Are specific team members knocking it out of the park in bringing the most qualified customers?
- If we’re seeing non-ICP customers, is there something that product can identify as an area to build or improve upon to satisfy these customers?
- Do we need to zoom out and re-assess something about our handoff process to work together?
The alignment we’re achieving here at the leadership level should be your goal too. By operationalizing your sales-implementation handoff into an informational asset, you can influence these teams towards the same goals. In turn, every member of these teams will feel the impact of this positive collaboration between their leaders.
Related: The customer success leader’s guide to cross-functional alignment (free guide).
One more thing: get your leadership on the same page.
It’s important for your leadership to be on the same page to encourage cross-collaboration as it will trickle down into your teams. This is extremely important for Sales + CS teams to be in alignment in supporting your customers. When leaders demonstrate the value of this approach, and hold their teams accountable for doing the same, your insight-sharing initiative will be on a faster track to everyday adoption.
In the next article of this series, we’ll explore how to build a feedback loop for your implementation team, CS, and support teams to share insights at the time of implementation launch.
