MarketStar Blog | Customer Success (6)

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire world has had to change the way it conducts business virtually overnight. Shelter-in-place orders have been issued in states across the U.S., and businesses are encouraging their people to work from home. This is the time when your Customer Success team really needs to step up to reassure customers and keep the revenue coming in.

If you don’t already have a Customer Success team in place, then you should seriously consider creating one. Unlike customer support, which is reactive following a sale, the Customer Success team is proactive, working with customers to understand their business needs and help them to achieve their business goals.

Times are changing, and so is the way that B2B buyers source new business solutions. This means that you need to rethink your approach to building a sales team. Customers aren’t looking to buy specific products as much as they’re looking for ways to solve business problems. 

As a result, sales territories are fading in favor of selling using vertical market expertise. It’s a buyer’s world, and customers are better educated and want more value and better service, and so building a sales team that can offer better solutions requires a new strategy.

There has been a change in tone to the word outsourcing. What was once considered a controversial way of doing business is now a seamless blend into the typical buildout of a successful company. The biggest reason? Outsourcing, particularly in relation to the sales process, allows companies to focus on what they do best, and leave the rest to a trusted  outsourced sales partner. 

Besides allowing enterprises to maximize their operational efficiency, the Internet of Things also opens up a whole new world of interfaces across which enterprises can connect with their customers. The shift embodied by the IoT isn’t merely an opening up of new channels of marketing. Rather, it fundamentally restructures the entire relationship chain between the enterprise, its products and its customers.

Do you think of sales as a sprint or as a marathon? For today’s successful business, you have to be a marathon runner. The sales model has evolved from the old-fashioned quick close to a more substantive, solution-based strategy. Today’s successful sales model is committed to ongoing customer success, so closing the deal is just step one.

Every successful business is focused on promoting customer satisfaction and optimizing customer experience. Every organization that offers a product or service needs to offer training and customer support. However, too many fall short of supporting customer success.

Much of what’s been talked about so far seems, at first glance, to lie far off in the possible future. But, as most experts point out, the Internet of Things is already here. While adoption barriers may affect the pace with which widespread adoption of IoT technologies occurs, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the transition to a hyper-connected economy is inevitable. The question then is, how does an organization transition from where it stands today, with varying levels of integration with digital technologies, to this hyperconnected future?

The secret of knowing how happy your customers are is to ask them. Feedback from customers are invaluable to a business. For decades surveys have given organizations a tool to have an open and honest communication with their customers.

Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger strutted into a police station and said, “I’ll be back”? For many of us, that iconic movie, The Terminator, was our first brush with Artificial Intelligence. Then came The Matrix, A.I., and several others. Today, AI does not look anything like the Terminator. Leather-wearing, gun-toting-robots have been replaced by sleek self-driving cars, IBM’s Watson and Amazon’s Alexa.

What is Customer Success? 

Customer success simply means focusing on the results your customers get from using your product¹. The more successful outcomes your product generates, the likelier they are to continuing using it. This might seem like common-sense, but involves a basic shift in thinking – from products and features to outcomes and business benefits. That is, focusing on why customers bought your product and whether those needs are being satisfied.