Turn your Customers into Sales Reps

By focusing on success within your existing customer base, you inadvertently, unless you read this article, create additional sales reps.  Whether they are good or bad reps however depends on how you care for them.

How many times have you had a customer issue that may have been endemic to your organization that you push to resolve, but have trouble with?  How many times during those tough customer facing conversations have you heard from your main poc that vendor XYZ, your competitor, does it better?

Think of how they would talk to fellow companies and leadership in that same situation.  What if customer A is frustrated with a process or service from you and speaks to Customer B about the problem?  What if Customer B uses XYZ corporation instead of you?  Customer B will most likely say to customer A, "I feel your pain, that is why we use XYZ"  The initial BD rep work is now complete and it took zero time from XYZ's sales organization and will only increase the amount of work from YOUR sales and support organization in order to save this customer!

Enter Customer (pick your favorite descriptor) :experience, success, value, service, etc.  Regardless of what you call it, the group focused primarily on the care and feeding of your existing customer base is the one that should be looking into these types of scenarios.  I will use Customer Care for this example as ultimately I think it is caring for your customers that is the most holistic view, and by Care I am not inferring that you feel good about them, but that you TAKE care of them.

In a strong Customer Care organization, the lines of demarcation between other departments are not present.  In order for any Customer Care organization to succeed it must have insight and influence over Sales, Marketing, Support, Training, Billing, and the Executive Suite.  Any group that ultimately impacts the customer needs to not only understand their level of involvement in Customer Success, but also needs to ensure that they are organization their business processes to align with other departments toward that success.

In the example above if a Customer Care/Success organization is in communication with your customers, meaning ALL of your customers, they should be able to see any signs of weakness and be able to act on those with whatever organization is responsible.

If for example you have a sales team who will not listen to the customer and only wants to push licenses, the CS organization should be able to escalate internally within Sales Management the customer concerns so that a solution can be put in place before it is too late.  This does 2 things; first it shows the customer that you are listening across the enterprise and able to work together and second it shows that you care.  In my experience I have seen this  happen and the ultimate escalation, by a CS professional very familiar with the account was able to get a new sales team engaged that was more aware of the specific customer's situation.  This customer has since continued to invest and also become a very big reference in their industry.  And this is the type of Customer Sales Rep you want to build.

Above I picked on Sales, but this same situation could play out with:

• Marketing - constant barrage of emails/calls during a time when the customer may be going through internal troubles or making major organizational changes and needs some time to get back on track.
• Support - the IT director is constantly hearing from their team that your company is not getting back to them on time and/or not taking the necessary time to understand their problems, thus delaying resolution of key issues.
• Training - user adoption is low due to the fact that your training department is not providing relevant training for your customer's industry or business process.
• Billing - delays in invoicing or miscommunicated requests for payment due to a lack of communicating internally can leave a bad taste in the mouth of the procurement person..ultimately responsible for buying your product
• Executives - Especially with larger clients, access to executives ensure that your customer feels that they are valued at the level commensurate with their investment.

When you focus on the needs of your customers, across the spectrum, you build rapport which in turn builds references which are in essence additional field sales personnel.

So when determining how best to setup your Customer Care/Success/Experience/Etc organization, make sure you take into account the indirect benefits of adding to your Sales organization through your customers.