Introduction Phone Call

Hailey Murphy

Looking for ideas on what sort of information to discuss or questions to ask during an introduction phone call. This call is not scheduled and is mostly to introduce myself and gain a little more insight. Our client-base is harder to schedule dedicated time for a call or meeting, this is after I've sent an intro email.

Ideas I've started with:

• What are your overall expectations with our software
• 6 months from now how would you measure your satisfaction and success

Brian Hansen

Great question, Hailey. This is something I coach my team on regularly. The intro call is a chance to ask some precedent-setting questions. As you say, your clients are tough to get a hold of, so you have to bring value to the conversation. That means the CSM (or whomever is making the call) should be ready with two things to say on the call: "Clients like you..." and "I noticed that...". If you can bring insight to the client, there will be value that they did not have before. 

Separately for questions, we talk on my team about OME and Why. OME stands for: Outcomes, Measurements, and Expectations. 
- What are the outcomes you're seeking by using this product? And Why are those important to the company and to you personally?
- How are you measuring those outcomes? (Notes: The important thing is to get to how THEY are measuring success because that will allow a conversation about whether that's the right measurement. If the client does not know how to measure the success of the outcomes, that's no problem, you can prescribe how to do so. For example, if they're using a product to increase their number of leads, you can prescribe to look at number of leads per rep per week and analyze how it increases with product adoption.)
- Are we meeting your expectations, at this point in time? This can be a tricky question to ask, but it gives the CSM the chance to show vulnerability, which makes them more human and real to the client. Sometimes the client will say Yes when they mean No, but this sets the scene that you will asking tough questions to make sure you can get ahead of scenarios where their renewal is not secure. 

I listen to my team's Gong recordings and coach to these three main types of questions for intro calls. In subsequent calls, the CSMs can build upon and come back to these baselines. 

Glad to talk through this more, if this is helpful.

Nicholas Ciambrello

Hey Hailey

We struggled with this for awhile at Semrush, we created our own frameworks to help guide our discovery for the Onboarding team. We tried something called What How Why. What does your customer want to do, how do they want to do it and why do they want to do it.

That left too many gaps and holes in the discovery process and gave too much room for interpretation. But then we found a sales qualification framework coined by Hubspot called GPCT C&I.

This framework completely changed our discovery process. While you may be thinking how can a sales framework help a CS professional? Well GPCT CI stands for  Goals, Plans, Challenges, TImelines, Negative Consequences and Positive Implications.

This gives a CSM everything they need to be able to pull the strings for a customer in order to drive adoption of the software theyre servicing. We have seen talk to listen ratios go from 75% to under 60% for 45 min training sessions, we saw avg time before going into a demo from less then 5 mins to over 15 mins, and we have seen adoption of our software increase dramatically afterwards. 

This framework allowed us to make the customer feel heard and understood while giving us all the information needed for us to leverage throughout our entire 90 day onboarding process that allows us to comfortably hold customer accountable to take action inside of our tools in order to fully adopt Semrush.

Read this article by Hubspot its very easy concept to understand and wouldnt mind showing you how we were able to implement it into our Onboaridng Teams processes.

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/gpct-sales-qualification