Sales: The Matchmaker between Customer Success & the Client

Adam Joseph, Founder, CustomerSuccessManager.com

When I was at primary school back in the early ‘80s, my class put on a production of “Fiddler on the Roof”. I was terribly under-cast as the “Villager” during a scene that involved me mostly standing at the back of the stage, wearing a fake beard and looking earnest. Post show, my parents raved that I was a wild success and the “star of the show” (it’s amazing what you believe as a kid). My only other involvement in the show was to join the chorus in the singing of the production’s big number: “Matchmaker”, a song I can still modestly sing the main verse to – it goes like this:
   
    Matchmaker, Matchmaker, 
    Make me a match,
    Find me a find,
    Catch me a catch
    Matchmaker, Matchmaker
    Look through your book,
    And make me a perfect match

The role of “Matchmaker” in history is well established and although in “Fiddler on the Roof” it was about marriage, all of us deal with different types of matchmakers in our everyday personal and professional lives:

• Recruiters match job vacancies to potential candidates
• Estate agents match houses to potential buyers
• Advertisers match their products to specific members of the public/businesses
• Food apps (e.g. JustEat) matches hungry people to restaurants of their choice
• Sales people match their product/solution to their prospects

In bringing the client and the Customer Success Manager together, the Sales Executive in this case is the “Matchmaker” attempting to make the “perfect match”. Whether the relationship has a chance of blossoming into a long-standing love affair (think Scarlett O'Hara & Rhett Butler) or hits the rocks immediately (think Jordan and…well almost everyone) will be in large part down to how good a job the Sales Matchmaker does in the pre-sales process.

Get it right and your chances of a successful launch, long-term user adoption, first-year renewal and future growth prospects are all high. Screw it up and you have a customer looking for the exit door before the ink of their contract has hardly dried. In reality, it’s rarely a binary choice between a perfect customer who ticks every box and a terrible one who ticks none – more often they typically sit somewhere in the middle.

Here are my top tips about how you can help ensure that Sales become the best possible matchmakers and set up a long-standing love affair between the client and the Customer Success Management team:

• It starts at the top:
  • Customer Success and Sales Leadership need to be closely aligned to help ensure that their respective teams are working together cohesively. They need to ensure that there is no “them and us” culture and critically, that each group sees each other as a major stakeholder in each other’s success.
• No-one likes nasty surprises:
  • When a deal that the Sales Team have been cultivating for months gets pushed back from Customer Success execs at the last moment due to concerns about customer suitability it will lead inevitably lead to resentment and hostility. Today several systems (e.g. Salesforce.com) contain a huge amount of information about the upcoming deal pipeline. Take the time to review it – both online and through regular meetings – and ask questions or raise potential pit-falls early on.
• Be positive:
  • It’s vital that Customer Success Managers maintain a positive attitude and disposition from the outset of a new engagement. As stated previously, it is extremely rare to have a “perfect” customer and typically there are always challenges to overcome. Whilst issues with genuinely poor-fit customers should be raised, having a “can-do” attitude is vital in trying to overcome these challenges and move forward.
• Make yourself available:
  • Be proactive in approaching the Sales team and share your experiences about what you have learned from your customers and how they have been successful in using your solutions. Whether this is done formally (i.e. setting up educational awareness sessions) or informally by the water cooler, your experiences will be greatly appreciated and help shape their sales discussions.
• Understand what a “good customer” looks like:
  • Use your own customer data to your advantage. Look at all the customers who have successfully renewed their subscription to your solutions and grown verses those that have churned or downgraded. Are there some common characteristics that you can see in each segment (e.g. size of business, industry, geography, technical, etc)? Sharing this insight with Sales will be critical in making sure that they are investing their resources in the right areas.
• Ensure that Customer Success and Sales goals are aligned:
  • Ensuring that the Sales Executive is partly incentivised when a new customer successfully renews at the end of their first year is a great way of ensuring that long-term customer health will be top of their mind. Similarly, Customer Success Managers should be rewarded for passing on qualified leads to the Sales Team after they have successfully closed.
• Get your leads from your existing happy customers:
  • One of the best way of ensuring that your future customers are a great fit for your solutions is to get referrals from your existing client base (who already know what it takes to be successful). Although being a Customer Success Manager will mean you are not typically a front-line sales person, you should still possess commercial “nous” to identify these opportunities when they arise, qualify them and then pass onto the Sales team.
• Arrange the “handover” meeting:
  • Once the Sales process has been completed the relevant key stakeholders (i.e. customer, Sales Exec, Customer Success Manager) should be involved in a customer meeting/call to ensure a smooth hand-over from Sales to Customer Success. Several critical items should be discussed and agreed (e.g. commitments made during pre-sales, customers expectations, key milestones to be achieved, training/user adoption, etc.) and progress monitored at future check-in meetings.

Although the matchmaking process (for marriage at least) seems archaic to many people in the modern world, it may come back into fashion. According to a 2012 study by “Statistic Brain”, the global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6% (compared to the 55% of non-arranged marriages). Just imagine how good a 6% churn rate (or even lower) would be for your business?  That’s definitely something that we can all sing to - with or without the fake beard.