B2B Sales teams spend a lot of time, resources and effort to bag customers and especially, to nurture them through the typical B2B sales cycle in order to ensure there’s a win and end result that moves them from the prospect to customer stage.
While the first part of a successful sale lies in winning a deal with a successful closure, the next steps lie in proper execution of service / requirements and ensuring a better customer success and even onboarding experience: all with the aim of building better end to end customer journeys.
With competition so strife in B2B tech (there’s a new tool that gets introduced in the marketplace all the time!), sales people and their associated counterparts like customer success teams need to build stronger after-sales formats and customer success initiatives to prevent churn.
To ensure a new level of after sales service and better customer success: here’s what B2B sales teams can keep in mind:
Define a Framework / Customer Success Model: But Keep Room for Customization
Without an action plan, any marketing-sales or customer success model can be ridden with disjointed efforts and flaws in the customer / prospect journey.
Marketing leaders, sales leaders and customer success managers should come together to initiate a framework that can help identify how they want their customer success model to look like and what purpose it needs to achieve.
Defining the execution steps together with clear cut emphasis on which team should be responsible for what after sales aspect is crucial in also ensuring an above par delivery and service.
While B2B leaders work on this framework, there should definitely be enough scope for customization where needed to cater to today’s B2B customer’s desire to have more meaningful and relevant service from the brand they interact with.
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Building And Assigning Responsibility Areas in Advance to Avoid Unnecessary Delays or Digital Queues
Customers will need to reach out for a variety of things, depending on what your business model, this could differ. For an eCommerce business, customers may need to reach out to change product delivery timings or complaint about faulty products for instance.
For a B2B SaaS / tool based business, they may need to constantly need access to support for payment doubts, features enhancement, etc. (like, how to use new enhancements).
For smaller /lean times or sometimes even larger brands in telecom, customer support initiatives might merge with customer success: with the two services being offered through a central contact number or virtual chatbot – the onus lies on the customer who is calling to get to the right team or person (usually through automated chats or IVRs).
This is where B2B brands especially can take a cue or two and prevent longer queues or response times. Setting up the right tools that can allow brands to respond to their customer query while also quickly and instantly assigning them to the right team that can handle their issue without delay is crucial on the whole.
Poor customer success or for that poor customer support can increase churn and lead to a lot of customer dissatisfaction in the journey.
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Pre-Empting Customer Needs and Queries in Advance
For the most part, brands can identify what their typical B2B customer journey is going to look like. Which means, they will also know what type of usual queries/difficulties customers may face along their journey.
Once a sale is made, using an integrated CRM and notification system to get the brand’s team itself to reach out at certain stages of the journey can drive a better success model.
For instance, if a B2B sales person has just managed to get a prospect to sign on the dotted line, logging in these details into the centralized automation system that is used by sales/marketing and other customer facing teams can allow customer success managers to know where the customer is along their journey and reach out in time to keep proactively assisting them along the way.
Conclusion: Customer Success is Important to Customer Retention
Winning new deals can take time and current market conditions or the threat of economic downturns can affect this pace. Ensuring the execution of a well thought-out customer success model is key to boosting customer retention, something that can help a brand tide over times when there are fewer sales or other conditions impacting brand growth and ROI.
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