3 ways to completely ruin your sales handoff
I just bought a tool, sales was great, then things apart.
I recently had a genuinely good sales experience, shopping for a tool we needed at Accoil.
This was a bit of an urgent buy, something I wanted us to have sooner than later. Sales was friendly, accessible, smooth, and matched my urgency really well.
Signed an agreement, made a payment, and then it felt like I hit a wall.
You’ve probably felt this same thing before. Frustration and even confusion about what just happened, what went wrong.
It even got to the point where I considered canceling the agreement. But instead of doing that, I thought, why not reflect on this a little bit more and try to learn something from the situation?
So here they are:
Three ways to completely ruin your sales handoff to customer success
Do not match your customer’s urgency. If your customer is keen and ready to go, ignore it. Tell them you can meet next week if you have time. After all, you’re busy and your calendar fills up fast.
Surprise your customer with unexpected contracts and new teammates to meet. Just because heaps of well-established SaaS businesses let customers enter a credit card and click purchase doesn’t mean that you have to do that (even though it looks like customers can do that). And when asked about it, make sure that you bring in legal.
Don’t clarify who is responsible for fulfillment. Say things like “That’s not my job” and don’t offer a name of someone who can help. If really pressed on things, send links to onboarding documentation.
Making handoff an opportunity to squash buyer’s remorse
I seriously considered going back on this agreement. That’s how much I was questioning my decision to buy this particular tool.
A great friend who happens to be a great salesman reminds me often that “time kills all deals.” That rule applies even after the ink has dried.
So if instead you want to run a better business:
you can match urgency
you can have a clear process where appropriate
with a real person owning your customers’ success.
This is one of those little areas of improvement that can have an outsized impact on recurring revenue businesses.
Match their urgency. Not every customer is in a rush, but when they are, match their urgency. Shorten that time to value, help them hit activation milestones and the outcomes that they’re chasing.
Be easy to buy from. The companies I most enjoy being a customer of are the companies that are crystal clear about how to buy from them and how to keep working with them.
We haven’t worked with Fletch, but I know exactly what I’d get if we did.Make it clear who’s involved and why. If a customer meets your criteria for high-touch customer success, make sure they know who they’re going to work with and what that relationship looks like.
It’s nice knowing who I should reach out to or where I should look for answers to my questions.
No more dropped relationships
If you’ve ever done sales, if you’ve ever built a business, you’ve done this. I certainly have. There’s no perfect process for this, and sometimes tools don’t make it easy.
But hopefully, by looking at what bad sales-to-success handoffs can look like, it will make it easier to make them better.
Now off you go, write out your sales-to-success process so your next customer can see just how easy it is to buy from you.
Peter