CSM team and Sales Team Collaboration Form/Questions?

Hi All,
I'm Stella and I'm excited to be part of this community! Today marks my second week as a customer success advocate. I was a Special Education teacher for 10 years before transitioning to the field. I've been following the posts on LinkedIn and through here as well!

I'm wondering about the collaboration between CSMs and Sales. Is there a form your organization uses or questions the customer success managers ask sales team to understand client goals, reason for purchasing the product, etc.

Thank you in advance for the support!

Thanks,
Stella

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Stella Ikhnana

Thanks Daniel for the information and the article with specific questions to learn more about customer goals/needs. I'm compiling a list of these questions and then I plan to create a universal form that I can use with customers. Thanks for the help!

Stella Ikhnana

Thanks Andrew for welcoming me to the community! Yes, I'm currently learning about Salesforce and there's lots of great information that it captures about the customer and ways in which they utilize the program. Thank you for all the insight!

Daniel Hoesing

Hi Stella,

Below is a link to an article with questions I recommend CS ask during the onboarding process even if sales captures the same information. You are each using them for different purposes but ultimately it's to determine Customer value. There should be a collaborative effort to develop these questions with sales and have a common definition for both teams and agreement. Then during the OB process, CS should confirm the information captured from sales or capture it if it's missing.

Yes, the Customer may have to repeat themselves, but I would recommend positioning it like this: "I know you've already spoken to sales, but I want to make sure I understand it in your words..." and then confirm. Best practice is to have a "confirm" process in your CRM so you can report on how accurate the information is received and both teams can get better at capturing it. Many of the answers help determine the value to the Customer both personally and professionally. They form the basis for the ongoing relationship and you wouldn't want to leave that up for interpretation from sales. It's the worst example of the telephone game. A year later when you look for the renewal and the information you had is incorrect, sales won't remember and you'll wished you had taken the extra seconds to confirm! The article below is on LinkedIn. I don't think I'm violating any GGR rules! Enjoy!

92% More Value from Customer Onboarding

Thank you in advance for the support!

Thanks,
Stella

Andrew Marks

Hi Stella! Welcome to the community.

If your sales team is capturing the information that they SHOULD be capturing during the sales cycle in some sort of CRM system (e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot, etc..) a lot of that information already exists somewhere and you should get access to it. Regardless your CS team should have a good understanding of your customer, why they purchased, and what they are expecting to get out of your solution. That's core to the sales process and there MUST be a transfer of knowledge to the CS team. What the actual form looks like, what information is shared, how it is handled, is something your team needs to figure out.

But the worst thing you can do at the start of a relationship with a new customer is to find yourself in a position where you're asking the same questions that the customer has already answered. There is nothing that looks worse from a customer perspective than having answered all of those questions with the team that made a whole bunch of promises during the sales cycle, and then be handed over to the team responsible for making the promises a reality, and that group not knowing what the customer is there for.

Focus on the information that you need to know in order to best serve your customer and get them to their desired outcome. If that's NOT being captured in the sales process, maybe it should be? If so, then collaborate with your sales counterparts and let them know what you need in order to be successful. In the subscription economy, getting the customer in the door is only a small part of the effort. Helping them achieve their desired outcome and keeping them around for an extended period of time is the greater and more important effort required to drive the increase in Customer Lifetime Value that companies must have in order to maintain the unit economics required to sustain the business.

Andrew