So we customer success doesn’t sell the initial deal right, it’s been that myself. I think that as a company grows and matures and when you have a strong customer success organization, they can affect and work together with sales, but I’ve seen many cases, again, it happens, natural salespeople want to sell.
Obviously, they want to sell to good fit customers but sometimes, even if it’s not 100% Right, they have a quota, they have a lot of pressure. I get it. What they want to sell at any cost and make sense because, you know, they’re sharks, they see the blood in the water, and they come to close the deal. That’s fine, that’s what’s expected out of them.
I think of it as a company. Companies mature and you see it mostly with, you know, more experienced salespeople. They understand that if you’re not just closing a deal and then moving on but building a relationship and keeping in touch with your prospect even after he becomes a customer right and help him become successful. It will enable you to sell even more and sometimes, double, or triple or even 10 times more than the initial deal. By helping sales identify and listen.
These are the customers that really see the value of the product. These are the use cases where we are shy. Let’s avoid these cases you know we’ve tried this a couple of times, it didn’t work, you know, either the customer doesn’t have resources, or his use case is not exactly what we’re selling and there are other cheaper solutions that do the same, then you know we don’t have any unique value proposition.
So, if we can prevent selling to benefit customers we will prevent what most likely will end with churn, and most SaaS companies that I worked with, not that many, but the ones I know, usually start seeing profit out of the customer, some around the second-year right like after a year and a half a year in a couple of months, right, the first year there’s a lot of effort, you know marketing lead generation sales bonuses to be paid just to bring in the customer so usually, the customer acquisition cost is much higher than initial contract cost, right, and if we’re selling to a bad customer that will not redo, you know, we’re just spending too much time and money too much effort, you know, Customer Success support supporting him.
Just to eventually get to a point where he churns. So, work with the salespeople, it’s not. It’s not about telling them you can’t do it, but you know trying to convince them and show them. These are the customers we’re setting is going to be easier for you to generate upsells and expansion down the road and focus on those customers and these segments and let go of the benefits customers.
So, again, it’s hard. It happens more for mature companies, but if people can do it right from the get-go, it will save a lot of hassle.