Strategic customer success: minimizing post-sale chaos with Tim Conder.

Designing a successful post-sale strategy requires choices, says CXology’s Tim Conder. Without making those choices upfront, you’ll find it hard to create a good customer experience and scale it, and you’ll easily fall into the chaotic trap of “doing what it takes”.

To make the right choices, however, you need a deep understanding of what your customers need and expect from you. In our webinar, Navigating post-sale chaos: Strategic customer success, Tim outlined a valuable exercise for identifying those customer needs quickly, and how to fulfil them in the “messy middle” of the customer journey when outcomes are created and relationships are built.

Here’s the webinar in full. For Tim’s answers to the questions in the Q&A session, scroll down.

Building a successful post-sales strategy: Q&A with Tim Conder

The webinar’s Q&A session covered topics including deciding which customer needs to prioritize and when, the right strategy for continuous customer engagement, building a resilient post-sales team, and how to tell a successful post-sale strategy from an ineffective one.

You can find even more of Tim’s answers on the CXology blog here.

Q: If your customer has more than one need, how do you decide which to prioritize first—or you do you address them all at the same time?

A: Try to narrow it down. However, the process never stops, so when there’s a customer need that you don’t get to the first time around, come back around and prioritize it the second time.

Maybe, just as our product teams create a roadmap of future product features, we should have a similar roadmap of improvements to our customer experience. But we can’t do it all. We can’t tackle building solutions for all needs in addition to fostering relationships that lead to renewal and growth, as well as doing the daily grind of what it takes to be a CS professional or CS leader.

Q: What’s the best way to know or measure if you’ve implemented an effective loyalty builder?

A: Sometimes, the best way to understand if it’s having an impact is to validate it directly with a customer who has that need.

Later, as you get into customer segmentation as well as health scoring, some of these loyalty builders and their adoption can be components of the way that you assess your clients. In this way, you can create some objective data that shows this pattern and trends across all accounts.

Q: Is there a proven strategy for engagement and continual alignment? For example, email, video calls, QBRs? What do you recommend?

A: Everything builds off the way that we start these relationships. In addition to your five customer needs, you also have key questions that help you develop a deep understanding of what your customer is trying to do, in a deeper way than your sales team has already discovered.

To build on that, you constantly iterate. I am a firm believer that the best approach to customer relationships is an iterative approach: identifying goals with our customers that lead to larger outcomes or reasons for purchase, monitoring and engaging on them, and achieving those goals with accountability.

Sharing insights is also something to get passionate about. Share them in such a way as to inspire action or get your customer to be so proud of the insight that they share it internally.

Finally, alignment meetings, in which you review these building blocks and insights, as well as going all the way back to the beginning and the conversations you had there.

This approach creates continuous engagement, in which you’re providing relevant help for your customers’ challenges, or recognizing their successes, and growing that relationship.

Q: How often are you reassessing the needs of the customer on their “why” for the purchase, versus their “why” for continuing partnership as time goes on?

A: Once or twice a year is incredibly valuable, and over time, you’ll see that there’s a pattern related to how your technology is built in the market in which you service.

In an expanded sense, however, change can happen. If you catch the moment that change happens because you’re engaged, it may be time to go back to the beginning and redo some of those initial questions and deepen your alignment with the customer because you’re no longer on the same reason for purchase. Maybe, because they were successful, the reason has matured into something else, which is when you go back and start digging deeper into what they’re going to do next.

Q: Would you recommend just ever asking the customer what their renewal blockers might be?

A: I have a poll out in which I’ve asked the community when we should start having renewal conversations. As a quick preview, the most popular answer is six months. But, if you wait six months, things can happen that might prevent you from having that conversation.

I’m leaning towards what a friend, a mentor and CS expert, helped persuade me to think: maybe day two is the right answer. Not asking for a renewal on day two, but asking the customer: based on your budget cycle, when would you like to have that first renewal discussion?

You can always propose, in that first conversation, that you discuss it in six months.

Q: Can you talk about strategies for building a resilient CS team that can effectively handle post-sale challenges?

A: First, it matters how you recruit. Second, desire for the role, or cultural fit, matters way more than skillset. Every time I’ve nailed cultural fit with some kind of core expectations or core skills, I’ve been able to turn those team members into superstars.

The way that we onboard our new employees also matters. A lot of us have had poor onboarding experiences and I’m passionate about not letting that happen to my teams. Don’t just train them on the product; maybe send them through a rite of passage where they have to solve some complex challenge that you’ve previously solved.

Then, think about leadership in general. The way I was taught was that we all have to have vision: vision for our roles, our teams, our function. Above vision is roles and responsibilities: who does what, and what are you accountable for? On top of that comes inclusion, and because we have the first two things, knowing how to effectively work together; knowing each other as human beings. Finally, all of that leads up to team trust.

Q: Our customers seem to be suffering from a failure-to-launch issue. How do you recommend balancing putting the burden on customers to put things into practice, and doing it for them?

A: I’ve found it to be very common that customers don’t know how to launch things, while, for us, these are pretty simple exercises to complete. So, as you go through the onboarding process, why not have a communication cadence in which customers are required—and maybe equipped with pre-written communications—to drive adoption in their organization?

I worked with one company that was a drag and drop mobile app configurator, and they serviced churches and tourism—so two widely different markets—but not everyone knew how to launch a mobile app, right? We created a launch kit, where their customers could put their logo on stuff and advertise it, which turned out to be a really successful tool in lessening the friction and effort that they had to make.

In general, people don’t do the things that they don’t know how to do, so look for ways to systematically create that expertise.

Q: In your experience, what are key elements that distinguish a successful post sale strategy from an ineffective one?

A: An effective strategy is one where you’re in control. You’ve laid the right foundation. You’re continuing to iterate on it.

An ineffective one is where you’re not. You don’t engage in the messy middle, or you’re not relevant to the customer. You let time go by.  Your key contact leaves and you don’t reach out to the customer for two months instead of doing it the next day. Doing the types of things where you give up control is the first sign of an ineffective post-sale strategy.

Thank you, Tim Conder, and everyone who joined this webinar! For more customer success webinars and resources, click here.