Welcome to this week’s edition of the newsletter.
This week we talk about how for early stage start-ups, the Customer Success team will handle nearly everything post-sale.
Let’s get into it…
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Customer Success is of course, post-sales
We had a conversation recently that was talking about different levels of post-sales maturity at start-ups and where Customer Success fits within that. One observation was that for early stage companies, customer success represents everything after the sale has been closed. This would include:
Technical support
Onboarding
Training
Adoption
Solutions
And this accurately reflects some of my own experiences. Whilst at a Series C company, my initial tittle was Account Director where I would find myself acting as First Line support managing tickets in SugarCRM but also flying around Europe joining the sales AE to run prospect demo’s and then back to London to help an account setup their API integrations. In those days, I was wearing many hats.
But not for too long, as our team was renamed to Customer Success and I became a Customer Success Director with a separate Customer Support team. No more ticket handling. And not too much later, one of my CSMs moved to become a Solutions Engineer. No more sales demo’s. And at an even later point, we created a Projects team, that handled all of the initial technical onboarding for new accounts. No more gantt charts.
I went on to hone my skills as a Customer Success practitioner. Becoming solely focused on deliver the goals and objectives that the customer had signed up for. Ensuring that they got value from the product, resulting in renewed contracts.
But back to those early days. Did it matter what my title was? Did it matter what my team was called? Probably not. Certainly I don’t think any customer would care. The important point was that there was someone on point that was responsible for making sure everything got done once a new customer was contracted.
So call your early stage team Customer Success if you want, or don’t, it doesn’t matter. Just make sure that all elements of the post-sales journey are being covered.
That’s all for this week, see you again next Tuesday.