Scaling Business Development Through Customer Success

Patrick McNeillFebruary 2015

Startup or Early Stage Companies

• Your using inbound marketing and social selling strategies to attract new customers

• Can’t afford high-priced sales people to sell small monthly subscriptions

• Engagement gap

Customer Success

• Definition of CS is murky at best

• Inbound team

• Focused only on retention

• Non-commissioned

How I’m Defining Customer Success:

“Provide proactive and world-class customer support, while at the same time delivering a big fat envelop of cash to the organization.”

• This is not sales 2.0, this is next generation sales

• Our progress in onboarding and monetizing our inbound leads through Customer Success affords us the opportunity to create a more traditional sales organization to scale business development

The Formula:

• Use people to conduct activities that don’t scale

• Measure your results • Automate the winners

• Measure again and again

Example:• You decide to call all

registrations and provide a demo

• You learn that demos result in 3X conversion rate

• Turn your demo into a weekly/daily webinar and promote it to all registrants

• Measure the results

A Few More Tests

• Work on small victories

• The Coach vs. Sales or Account Rep

• The Vertical Hug

• Encourage the key activities that promote engagement and lead to product adoption

• Product extensions

The Andiamo’sExperiment

• Teach service & sales through the fine dining experience

• Write up your experience and relate it to how you currently work with customers

• How did they qualify

their customer?

Qualification:• They called day of to

confirm the time and number of people

• On arrival they were asked if it was their first time at Andiamo’s?; Did they have any constraints on their time?; Was this a special occasion for them?

How Does OurQualification

Process Stack up?

• The process

• Registration form/tools were solid

• Qualification call was lacking

• So we brainstormed and fixed it

Results:

• Almost instantly we’re better at identifying high value customers

• We created a sales acceleration process for identified high value customers

• The current cohort we are tracking spent 28% more over the same period

Hiring For Startups

• Learn what startups are doing to break through the noise

• Using data as part of the hiring process

• Clone your best sales people • Webinar on March 5th to learn how

• Email me patrick@clearfit.com for info