DEAR STAGE 2: I run the Customer Success team for a Series B company. Our CS team members are divided into 2 core roles — onboarding specialists and Account Managers (upsell/renewal). We’ve been debating when the right time is to introduce new contacts to the customer. Right now, this process starts when the deal closes: The AE does a handoff to the CS team member leading onboarding, and then once the customer is live, we introduce an Account Manager to drive upsell and renewal. We’ve debated alternatives — introducing an AM contact in the final stages of the sales cycle, having the AE act as the main POC through onboarding, etc. What are the considerations when deciding? Any best practices you can share? ~EXPERIENCE ADVOCATE
DEAR EXPERIENCE ADVOCATE: This is a hot topic right now. Across our portfolio, we are having conversations about how to most effectively structure our post-sale team, minimize the amount of duplicate work (do we really need 3 people in that meeting?), and optimize for the customer experience. Parker Chase-Corwin, CEO & Principal Consultant at Xperience Alchemy and Stage 2 Capital Catalyst LP, has worked in many different SaaS companies and shares his learnings on this critical step in the customer journey:
Renewals and upsells start at onboarding, so it’s wise to inspect your processes at this critical stage of the customer journey.
The early transitions in the customer journey define the future experience that the customer will expect when working with your company. Done well, and customers will appreciate the consistency with which your teams manage their account, allowing them to be able to focus on adoption and possible expansion. Done poorly, and you’ll be in perpetual recovery mode.
To make sure you are streamlining the journey with minimal friction and maximum impact, consider the following three questions:
1) Is there a purposeful handoff at each stage of the journey that the customer has visibility into?
Any time a new team or team member is introduced to help the customer with the next stage of their journey, there should be a deliberate introduction and hand-off, with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. The goal is to demonstrate to the customer that the new team member has been fully briefed by the prior team member (customers don’t like to repeat themselves or lose momentum) and that the work that is underway can continue without additional effort or unnecessary friction.
This means that the Account Executive who closed the deal should be providing the relevant information learned during the sales cycle to the onboarding team, and in turn, the onboarding team should be providing that pre-sales context, PLUS, any additional information discovered during the deployment to the Account Manager. The Account Manager should have a thorough understanding of all relevant events that have occurred before they’ve gotten involved.
If your company has mature systems and disciplined processes in place to capture and distribute this information, much of this effort can be streamlined behind the scenes with technology. Often, Series B companies are still working out the kinks in their processes though, so let’s assume that aside from some existing mandatory fields in your CRM, there isn’t much that your current systems would do to help you here.
In this case, strive to design a streamlined journey to be transparent and visible to the customer when transitioning them, while minimizing the number of meetings that require multiple teams to be present. You’re looking for the “Goldilocks principle” — 1-2 customer-facing meetings at the beginning of onboarding with the AE should be sufficient to move them into the deployment stage. Likewise, as deployment begins wrapping up, add the AM to 1-2 customer-facing meetings to introduce them and build trust.
2) Is the appropriate team member working with the customer at the appropriate stage based on their responsibilities and expertise?
Each team member has their own primary responsibilities that they should be kept focused on. Keeping AEs involved too long in onboarding takes them away from new customer acquisition activities and perpetuates the customer's reliance upon them without building trust with the rest of the team. Introducing the Account Manager too soon can distract the deployment, and in some cases add scope-creep or even delay revenue recognition by trying to sell more features too quickly.
Typically, customers aren’t purchasing upsells in the early days of deployment anyway. They have their hands full with all the change management that comes along with deploying the technology into their business processes and managing the adoption of their end users. Upsells will come later, after the foundation has been built and after the customer has received value from their initial investment.
The onboarding team should be fully empowered to pick up the customer from sales, facilitate a deployment designed to 1) achieve rapid time-to-first-value (TTFV), 2) set the customer up for future success (i.e. training), and then 3) warm transfer them to the Account Manager to handle the future relationship. If the onboarding team isn’t able to successfully own that stage of the customer journey without the AE or the AM driving, then it’s time to inspect your processes and responsibility matrix.
3) Are you keeping the customer's deployment timelines on track in a way that also supports your capacity planning and available resources?
Depending on the length and complexity of the deployment, it may make sense to have the Account Manager lightly participate in the first transitional meeting from sales-to-onboarding to listen, learn and briefly introduce their role to the customer once they have gone live. In this situation, you want to be clear that the onboarding specialist is the primary contact during deployment, and that the AM will mostly be behind-the-scenes for continuity purposes. However, if the deployment takes a significant amount of time (more than a month), it’s probably best to introduce the Account Manager later in the process so as not to have too many cooks in the kitchen upfront.
Additionally, set up listening check-points during the deployment to give early signals of friction, and to determine if additional attention is needed by either the AE or the AM. Asking all main customer stakeholders (not just the primary user) to complete brief surveys during deployment can greatly enhance your ability to get in front of concerns before they fester into problems.
One way to accomplish all this coordination is to map out swim lanes. Each stage should have a primary owner (or lead), and identify the supporting functional team members. The primary owner is “in the driver’s seat”, while the contributors are in the “passenger seat” and helping when requested. A simple example could look like this:
Mapping out each of these stages and responsible parties helps to ensure that each team still has skin in the game (either through management expectations or incentives) when not in the driver’s seat, and ensures that they are facilitating a best-in-class journey for the customer.
