3 things BD & CS can do collaboratively to increase Customer Success
Last week, I was asked to do pre-mortem for a delivery(critical success factors for a delivery) that can be presented to one of our customers. This got me thinking and I sat down to retrospect all the projects we delivered this year. Interestingly, I could see a pattern emerge.
Here, I am going to present the top 3.
Customers feel they repeat the same story across different people in the organization.
It takes anywhere between 45 days & 6 months to close a deal based on the deal size. During this period the BD team meets with the customers multiple times, convinces them that our product/solution will best suit their needs. Hence the energy levels and expectations are sky high during delivery kick off. If the hand off process between BD & CS are not methodical, it will lead to a rough start for the CSMs and a bad on-boarding experience for the customer.
Starting this year, we worked with the Solutions Design team to create a more formal hand-off process after every deal closure. This is typically an hour long kick-off meeting between CSM, BD, Solutions consultant and other key representatives from internal teams.
This meeting primarily focuses on
- Who the customer is
- What problems/challenges are we solving for the customer
- Why this solution/product will work for the customer
- Deep dive into the key deliverable and execution plan
By the end of this meeting. the teams involved in the delivery should be aligned and the final version of the KT/Context document should be available.
Lack of clarity in roles & responsibilites AND the delivery process
Now that the CSMs have clarity in the delivery, it is important to introduce the CSMs to the customers as the single point of contact w.r.t delivery. Similarly understand the stakeholders from the customer side and their roles in the delivery. Since most of our CSMs work remotely with the customers with less face time, customers fall back to BD in case of issues. Solve problems collaboratively, so that the next time an issue comes up the customers know whom to reach out to.
Sometimes, I get 3–5 calls in a day from a customer on “What next”?
Each company will have pre-defined delivery processes. It is important to present a high level overview of the delivery processes to the customers so that they understand what’s coming. For a CSM, the first meeting with the customer is always F2F either physical/virtual.
The objectives of this meeting are to:
Identify stakeholders and their role in the delivery
Provide a walk-through of the events that will unfold in the weeks to come until go-live.
Identify the customer’s expectation and their definition of success.
The meeting flow is as follows:
- CSM Introduction
- Delivery goals with RACI matrix.
- Project plan with key milestones
- Q&A
- Sample demo account that they can fiddle with.
Typically this meeting helps to calm down an anxious customer and to partner with them as one SINGLE team
Mismatch in customer’s expectation between pre and post-sales
Like I mentioned before, we take about 45 days to 6 months to close a deal and during this time, the customers would have been approached with various demos, solutions & promises. Once the deal is closed, it is the CSM’s responsibility to set a realistic expectation on what’s possible based on timelines, pricing and resources. It’s a good idea to have the BD part of this meeting to weed out any gap in understanding the customer’s expectation.
I believe, these 3 key points are quintessential for a delivery to be successful. What are some of your observations in the delivery process? Leave your comments
