What should my post-sale team look like?
Maximizing Customer Experience: Expert Tips for Your Team
DEAR STAGE 2: I’m making the transition away from founder-led sales and hired a great first seller to join the team. Now that I’ve seen what she can do, I’m turning my attention to the post-sale process. How should I think about Customer Success v. Account Management? Who do you need and when? What are the considerations? ~Starting the post-sale journey
DEAR STARTING THE POST-SALE JOURNEY: 2023 is the year of CS! In an environment where funding is scarce and growth plans are being revised down, all eyes are on CS. Retention and upsells are more important than ever, and I’m excited to see this renewed focus on customer satisfaction.
Optimizing the post-sale customer experience starts with a strong understanding of your customer and their buyer journey (more on mapping the buyer journey here — thank you, Lexi!). To help me answer this question, I called on Jeff Kushmerek, CEO and Founder of Infinite Renewals.
TL;DR
Place the customer at the center of decision-making and reduce friction by minimizing the number of handoffs.
Introduce a single point of contact to quarterback post-sale activities, maintain continuity and build stronger relationships.
Don’t hire ahead of plan/needs. As much as possible, focus on tech, processes, and systems to maximize efficiency before expanding the team.
Avoid assigning junior team members to high-ARR customers who require C-Level conversations. Ensure that your team members have the appropriate skills and experience to engage with customers effectively.
Early Stage: All Hands on Deck
In the early stages of your company, it's common for everyone to be involved in various post-sale activities. Your founding team is the first line of defense. Jeff advises “Your CTO may act as a tech lead during product implementation, and your developers may gather requirements for new features. The goal is to ensure your initial customers are 100% reference-able.” Your first dedicated post-sale hire is often a generalist helping to fill the gaps, address different tasks, and help define what the post-sale experience should look like.
The Pangea Effect: Moving Towards Specialization
As your company matures, specialization becomes more important, particularly in the post-sale process. Jeff calls this specialization “The Pangea Effect”. You have one generalist role, and as the customer base grows, the time requirements and relative impact require new investment. The generalist role gets broken into continents, usually in the areas of Implementation, Customer Success, Support, and Renewal/Upsell. Some B2B enterprise products with a heavy tech lift may need a Professional Services team, or even a partner network, to support this.
So how can you best manage this transition from generalist to specialists?
Start by creating a comprehensive list of post-sale tasks (the jobs to be done!) specific to your company. These may differ based on the industry, average selling price (ASP), buyer personas, and the technical complexity of your product. This list includes jobs like implementation, integration, product adoption, training, relationship touch points, renewal processes, upselling, cross-selling, customer advocacy, customer marketing, support, bug reports, documentation, and enhancement requests. Quantify the volume and impact of each task to prioritize resource allocation and consider:
Revenue protection and expansion opportunities: Will these critical responsibilities be living in the Sales or Post-Sales organization? Everyone should know, and there should be no confusion on who is driving renewal and expansion. Ask yourself — will customers be more likely to buy from the original AE that cultivated the relationship? Will you fracture that relationship that's built pre-sale by handing over to an AM to upsell them? A good general rule of thumb — if you have a land-and-expand motion, you need a revenue-focused seller to maintain a relationship (that can be the original AE or an AM, as long as that person is intro’d quickly and there is one clear relationship owner).
Cost structure and efficiency: As your product matures, the cost of goods sold should decrease on a per-customer basis. For certain business models, you may need to consider partnerships, or leveraging a professional services team for cost efficiency and subject matter expertise. We’re also seeing a trend evolve where CSMs are more technical, and need to look more like Sales Engineers or Solution Architects. This can allow for role consolidation and simplifies the number of touch points for the customer.
Segmentation: Segment your customers based on factors such as company size, industry, and region. Not all customers require the same level of service. Consider implementing low-touch or no-touch models for lower-tier customers to reduce costs and ensure high-touch services for higher-revenue customers.
Long-term vision: Define your organization's long-term vision for the post-sale process. Consider how you want it to evolve over the next two years. This vision will help you shape your organizational structure and resource allocation accordingly.
Sample Organization Chart Evolution
Jeff shared some sample org charts that help to visualize the roles and responsibilities across different post-sale functions. Your first post-sale ninja CSM likely evolves to a few generalists as your customer base grows:
From here we start to see specialization. Generally dedicated implementation or support functions are the first additions. Jeff advises that adding Support reduces the CSM team’s “reactive/crisis” mode around support tickets and allows them to focus on driving value and outcomes. Similarly you may hire an implementation resource if there are some complicated tasks and the work interferes with CSM value activities — this may make sense in either a high-volume onboarding environment OR in more long-term complex/technical implementations.
As you continue to grow and specialize, additional functions are added. It’s easy to add people, but you need to be conscious of ballooning costs — this is where a focus on efficiency is key. Constantly push your team to solve capacity constraints with automation, product and systems instead of additional FTEs. For example, invest in building out a knowledge base before hiring another support person. Or, review options for more self-serve onboarding for segments of your customers base before hiring another implementation specialist. As you look to the future, an end-stage post-sale organization could look something like this:
Measuring Customer Success
With each specialization and team member addition, we encourage you to reflect on 2 things:
Is the role impactful? Make sure that each member of the team has clear goals and quantitative metrics to point to. Bonus points if those metrics (no more than 3!) are tied to compensation. Examples:
Support: Support Case time to resolution,
CS: NRR, NPS, # of accounts engaged in last X days
AM: NRR, upsell target
Is the customer happy and engaged? Data trumps qualitative feedback. It might seem helpful to have your CS team mark accounts as red/yellow/green, but this is rarely accurate and hard to validate. Instead, focus on identifying your leading indicators of retention and ensure you have clear product usage metrics that the entire company can rally around to drive adoption and engagement over time.
Excited to see how your team evolves. Until next week!