Turn CSMs into salespeople (no, don't)
Someone asked, “I'm building a new CS team. Who should be doing the upgrade, Customer Success or Sales?”
Oooh... this is one of my favorite topics (as you know if you follow me on LinkedIn).
I believe that CS should be a growth mechanism in your company. CS should be a (the?) significant contributor of new revenue.
But turning CSMs into salespeople or having them act as SDRs (Sales Development Reps) with a quota of CSQLs (CS Qualified Leads) to uncover and turnover to Sales is NOT the right way to do this.
Johan and I do a deep-dive on this topic in this week's episode of our Impact Weekly podcast that just dropped today.
In this episode we discuss how you should approach this question, specifically:
- The importance of capacity planning in carving out specialist roles
- The pros and cons of having account managers handle upselling opportunities
- The right strategies to approach expansion sales
- And a LOT more.
I rarely say this, but this episode is really good and you should definitely listen.
~Lincoln
BTW: Our next Head of CS training starts next Monday, 8-May.
We'll cover Expansion Sales, Capacity Planning, and so much more. If you want to lead a World-class CS org, this is the training you need.
While the training is virtual - a mix of recorded content and live Zoom sessions - it's very interactive and hands-on so space is necessarily limited.
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Lincoln Murphy
I help SaaS companies Maximize LTV through Customer-centric Upselling
Don’t worry about upsells until churn is below 10%? Really? No, this mindset limits growth and stifles potential. Unless your environment is overtly customer-negative and you have massive churn across your entire customer base, you don’t need to hit some mythical churn threshold before upselling. Yes, address churn where it’s an issue, but also recognize that some customers are progressing and ready for expansion NOW. Here’s the truth: Even with higher churn in some cohorts, you have other...
Our 2-week Retention training and certificate program starts on Monday, June 17, 2024. Our first live session is on Tuesday. This program is so unique because we take a different approach to Customer and Revenue retention. We focus on the differences between Proactive and Reactive Retention, how to move from the latter to the former through better prioritization, orchestration, and directing limited resources to higher-percentage activities. This program is practical in every sense of the...
This week's Impact Weekly podcast episode is up (Listen here or on Spotify or Apple) and in it, Johan and I answer a variety of questions about Churn, including: What are the key indicators for predicting churn in advance? How to prevent churn when you have no control over price rises (set by head office) Is there a particular NRR %, or threshold below 100% NRR that would be a particular alarm bell for you? Is there a tolerance that you'd expect to see in B2B SaaS? And more! We give some VERY...