What is Customer Success Selling?

You want to improve your sales results, and you'd like to achieve this with happier customers.

Of course, you do!

That's presumably why you're interested in this "Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Selling".

In this guide, you'll learn about:

1. Outdated Approaches - Why conventional approaches to selling and customer success are increasingly outdated and counter-productive.

2. Measurable Customer Success - Why you should be interested in the hugely challenging task of defining unique, measurable customer success in every significant selling situation.

3. New Role Definitions - The new definitions that are required for both selling and customer success roles.

4. Implications & Accountabilities - Some of the hugely significant implications of these new definitions.

5. Sales Reset Mastery - The key skills you'll need for effective Customer Success Selling.

6. Free Self-Assessment - How to use our free self-assessment to benchmark your current customer success selling skills.

7. Effective Sales Team Leadership - How people in customer success selling sales roles can work most effectively with their sales team leaders and colleagues.

8. Deliberate Practice - The pivotal role of sustained and deliberate practice to improve your customer success selling continuously.

9. Community of Practice - The resources and support you can access within our Sales Reset Community of Practice.

10. Your Learning & Earning Plan - What you can do next to improve your customer success selling and to achieve your Sales Reset.

1. Outdated Approaches

Why conventional approaches to selling and customer success are increasingly outdated and counter-productive.

You want to improve your sales results and you've searched online for sales training and customer success resources. You quickly realise that the worlds of selling and customer success are currently very different based on some key assumptions.

Outdated Selling Roles

• It's the job of salespeople to win orders from customers by persuading them to buy

• Salespeople are trained to overcome customers' objections and close the sale.

• Salespeople are targeted and held accountable almost exclusively based on how much they sell.

Outdated Customer Success Roles

• It's the job of salespeople's colleagues in customer success to take over the customer relationship after the sale has been made.

• Especially in subscription-based businesses, the principal goal of customer success is to minimise churn.

• If the customer is retained, customer success managers are targeted to cross-sell and upsell.

It's hardly a surprise that most customers prefer to minimise their contact with "pushy salespeople".

When new customers get a call from their "customer success manager" (CSM), they know from experience that the primary focus of the CSM is to retain the customers' business and try to sell them more products and services.

At Sales Reset, we're convinced that genuine customer success starts with fundamentally different and better selling conversations.

This means people in selling roles must learn to focus conversations with their customers on the outcomes that customers are seeking to achieve from their potential investment.

The bigger the proposed investment, the more valuable it will be for customer success colleagues to be active stakeholders in the sales process BEFORE buying decisions are made. In this way, customers' expectations will be managed most effectively and everybody will be clear about who is accountable for delivering each element of measurable customer success.

2. Measurable Customer Success

Why you should be interested in the hugely challenging task of defining unique, measurable customer success in every significant selling situation.

Ideally, the proposed outcomes of any potential investment by a customer will be defined in terms of unique and measurable customer success.

In all of our experience training salespeople over the last 45 years, we have rarely seen such "measurable customer success" in the proposals developed by the salespeople and teams before we work with them.

Instead, conversations between salespeople and customers are typically about generic features and benefits that may or may not be achieved.

With this new focus on key performance indicators of success, everybody can plan to report these customer outcomes and compare actual achievements with the projections that were made during the selling and buying process.

However, it can by HUGELY challenging to develop measurable success criteria with customers. Here are some of the key challenges:

• Lack of Knowledge - Especially with anything related to technology, customers are unlikely to know all of the implications of a potential investment. In these circumstances, how can they hope to define measurable success criteria?

• More Stakeholders - We all know from experience that more stakeholders are involved in every significant buying decision. Each of these stakeholders is likely to have a different perspective on relative priorities regarding outcomes.

• Predicting the future is HARD! - It's simply impossible to foresee every way that things might pan out.

• Time Investment - It can be hard to justify the time required to undertake the quality of analysis and planning required to develop high quality and unique measurable success criteria.

• Required Skills - The level of skill and expertise required to lead these conversations is MUCH higher than is typically required in current selling roles.

However, even with all of these challenges, it's DEFINITELY worth the effort to prioritise measurable customer success!

3. New Role Definitions

The new definitions that are required for both selling and customer success roles.

• At Sales Reset, we believe that it's time to redefine the roles of people in selling and customer success roles. Here are our current definitions of best practice.

• (If you can help us to improve these definitions, we'll be VERY happy to hear your observations and suggestions!)

Sales Reset Selling Roles

• People in selling roles should enable their customers to define more accurately the outcomes they're seeking from a proposed investment.

• Increasingly compelling proposals can then be developed that will achieve these measurable customer success outcomes using the products and services being sold.

• All stakeholders can then hold each other accountable for the extent to which everybody had played their roles effectively in achieving these carefully articulated outcomes.

Sales Reset Customer Success Roles

• The more significant the opportunity, the more important it is that people in customer success roles should play a proactive role in shaping expectations BEFORE proposals are agreed with customers.

• Ideally, Customer Success Managers will formally sign off on behalf of all their operational colleagues regarding the deliverability of proposals. (This sign-off is different from the related but different commercial sign-off that is often required, and should not unduly delay the sales process.)

• Having played this proactive role in shaping expectations, Customer Success Managers can then take responsibility AFTER customers have purchased to ensure the achievement of planned and measurable customer success.

4. Implications & Accountabilities

Some of the hugely significant implications of these new definitions.

Implications for salespeople

• At Sales Reset, we believe that salespeople should be accountable not just for achieving their sales targets, but for managing customers' expectations increasingly accurately.

• In the early days of a Sales Reset, this means that salespeople will become increasingly engaged with measurable customer success. Over time, a growing percentage of a salesperson's commission might be related not simply to what they have sold, but to the evidence of the success that customers have actually achieved.

• Ultimately, for a wide range of reasons, the accountability for whether or not customers achieve the measurable success they thought they were buying must remain with customers.

• The evidence of our experience is that this focus on significantly greater awareness of measurable customer success leads to much greater care taken by salespeople.

• Instead of simply repeating product presentations to customers regardless of unique circumstances, salespeople are required to engage much more effectively with:

  • The reality of business cases and financial justifications.

  • The management of risks.

  • Communication plans.

  • Implementation project planning and stakeholder accountabilities.

  • The processes required to report measurable outcomes of proposed investments.

Implications for Customer Success Colleagues

• When salespeople take MUCH greater care to manage the expectations of all key stakeholders, it is MUCH more likely that their colleagues in customer success will be able to work more effectively with their customers to enable them to achieve required  outcomes.

• As previously stated, one highly practical implication of this strategy is the likely value of customer success colleagues being required to "sign-off" significant sales proposals as being deliverable, BEFORE the proposal is offered to the customer.

5. Sales Reset Mastery

The key skills you'll need for effective Customer Success Selling.

• It's time to get into the practicalities of mastering customer success selling.

• Here's the model we have developed that identifies that wide range of competencies that are required.

Here's the summary of what we mean by each of the segments:

• PRIORITISE

  • Deliver Customers' Outcomes - instead of simply prioritising the achievement of sales targets.

• PREPARE

  • Choose Values and Mindsets - Deliberately putting outdated sales values and mindsets aside and choosing collaborative sales processes.

  • Plan for Success - Developing clear and effective plans for personal success that are based in the centrality of the need to deliver measurable customer success.

  • Prospect Constantly - Everybody with experience of the world of business knows the pivotal importance of retaining a continuing flow of new opportunities, either from brand new customers or within existing relationships.

• 3CSELL

  • Coach Customers - Enabling all the key stakeholders within customers to develop greater awareness of what is achievable and to define the outcomes they're seeking more accurately.

  • Co-Create Proposals - Working collaboratively with all stakeholders to develop increasingly effective proposals through an iterative process of incremental improvement from first draft to compelling proposal.

  • Conclude Next Actions - Planning carefully throughout every discussion so that every conversation ends with great clarity about "who is going to what and by when".

• ALIGN

  • Engage Stakeholders - Seek to identify and successfully engage ALL significant stakeholders to enable everybody's hopes and expectations to be identified and prioritised.

  • Negotiate Win/Win - Proactively manage the process of identifying and trading the wide range of negotiating variables so that risk and reward are shared equitably.

• CLOSE

  • Manage Pipeline - Maintain a full and balanced pipeline of opportunities that can be prioritised and managed to deploy limited selling resources accurately and effectively.

  • Achieve Forecast Sales - For all of our focus on measurable customer success, people in selling roles MUST achieve their forecasted sales reliably.

6. Free Self-Assessment

How to use our free self-assessment to benchmark your current customer success selling skills.

• We have developed a FREE online self-assessment based on our Sales Reset Mastery competencies.

• If you or your colleagues have not yet completed the assessment, you can click here to learn more.

• Your assessment will give you a benchmark of how you compare to the best salespeople in the world who prioritise customer success selling.

• You can complete the assessment as often as you choose and your PDF report will show you your most recent two results, compared with your original baseline report. 

7. Effective Sales Team Leadership

How people in customer success selling roles can work most effectively with their sales team leaders and colleagues.

• The culture of a sales team is set by the sales team leader. If the sales team leader is a passionate advocate for customer success selling, this will be a priority in every aspect of how the team works.

• However, customer success selling is a relatively new way of working. Comparatively few sales team leaders will have worked as salespeople themselves in sales teams that have been wholly focused on measurable customer success. It's much more likely that they have worked in more conventional sales teams where the top priority has been simply to achieve sales targets.

• If you are a sales team leader, one of the very best ways to develop the culture of customer success selling is for you to focus your coaching with team members on "measurable success criteria" in their most significant current opportunities.

• If you are a team member, it is wholly appropriate for you to seek help and support from your sales team leader to enable you to practice and develop your customer success selling skills.

8. Deliberate Practice

The pivotal role of sustained and deliberate practice to improve your customer success selling continuously.

Customer success selling requires people in selling roles to lead fundamentally different conversations with their customers.

It is all but impossible to learn and develop the skills to lead these fundamentally different and better conversations without deliberate practice.

The very best way to learn and practice these skills is with role-play exercises. Ideally, this focus on role-play will between a sales team leader and the members of their team. But role-play can be just as effective when undertaken by colleagues who choose to help each other to sharpen their skills.

Here are some key ideas about using role-play to improve your customer success selling skills:

• Keep it fun! - Everybody learns better when the experience is fun. If people are laughing at aspects of how the role-play developed, it's a great sign that you're doing it right!

• Keep it short! - We recommend that you role-play isolated parts of each selling conversation instead of trying to role-play an entire conversation in one go. This will give you the opportunity to review key moments while they are fresh in your memory. It's almost always better to keep role-plays to no more than 3-4 minutes at the maximum and plan to repeat sections before moving on.

• Keep it small! - We're not big fans of role-play in larger groups. These situations can easily become too highly pressured for many reasons. It's almost always better to do role-play in small groups. Two people can role play very effectively. You can add a third person in the role of observer.

• Keep it up! - Plan to do lots of role-play. You should certainly aim to role-play at least weekly, if not daily! Role play is brilliantly valuable for ALL aspects of selling:

  • Preparing for significant conversations

  • Improving skills

  • Debriefing meetings to review ways of improving next time

Deliberate practice, especially through role-play, will enable you to make customer success selling increasingly habitual and unconscious.

When you achieve this level of skill, all of your conscious thought will then be available to focus on each customers' unique circumstance and needs. You'll be able to help them to define more accurately the success they're seeking from a potential investment in your products and services.

9. Community of Practice

The resources and support you can access within our Sales Reset Community of Practice.

Well done for making it this far through our guide!

We now that Customer Success Selling is not for everybody. For all sorts of reasons, you might conclude that this approach is not for you at this time.

However, if you like what you've read, you might like to learn more about our growing Community of Practice. Here's what is available:

• LinkedIn Group - FREE

  • Join our LinkedIn Group, "World-Class Customer Success Selling".

  • Receive updates about new resources and events.

  • Ask your questions and share your observations.

  • It will be great to hear from you!

• Sales Reset Weekly Newsletters - £10/month

  • Weekly Sales Reset - Fresh ideas with highly practical recommendations every Sunday afternoon in a weekly newsletter delivered to your inbox.

  • Sales Reset Leaders - Companion weekly newsletter to enable sales team leaders to provide the most effective support each week for team members who subscribe to Weekly Sales Reset.

• Sales Reset Together - £100/month paid quarterly

  • Online community with LIVE! events to learn, practice and share experience.

  • Learn Faster Together - Join our community members who are most committed to customer success selling.

  • Group Coaching - Join our group coaching sessions to get personal support for your specific priorities from our experienced coaches and community members

  • Confidential Proposal Reviews - Get specific feedback on your sales proposals to achieve your targets faster and more reliably.

10. Your Learning & Earning Plan

What will you do next to improve your customer success selling and to achieve your Sales Reset?

Phew - you've made it to the end of our Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Selling!

What will you do next?

We'd love to help you develop your personal learning and earning plan. Our goal will be to help you develop your bespoke strategy and plan to achieve Sales Reset Mastery and to put customer success selling at the heart of every business opportunity.

Here are our recommendations:

1. If you haven't completed your FREE Sales Reset Mastery self-assessment yet, this is the very next thing you should do.

2. Join our LinkedIn Group - World-Class Customer Success Selling.

3. If you conclude that you want to become knowledgeable in Customer Success Selling, the next thing you might do is subscribe to our Weekly Sales Reset Newsletter.

4. If you're prepared to commit to a sufficiently high level of engagement, it will be great to see you in our Sales Reset Together Community of Practice.

5. And if you're a sales team leader or senior business leader, you might like to check out our Sales Reset Accelerator Programme where we develop a bespoke programme uniquely for you and your team.

Whatever you choose to do next, we hope you've found our Ultimate Guide to Customer Success Selling valuable.

If you have any suggestions about how we can make this guide better and more effective, we'd love to hear from you. Just click the chat button in the bottom right of the screen to let us know.

Thanks again for your time and interest!