Customer Success

Is Customer Success Part of the Funnel Process?

Can it be called a funnel if you want a 100% win rate?

Where does Customer Success fit in the funnel process? It’s not traditionally viewed in the context of a funnel, since you’re taking a list of current customers and trying to keep all of them.

The feedback and information provided by a CS team is highly valuable, however, and should be used to help feed the funnels of both marketing and sales. By understanding what current customers like and don’t like, by analyzing the usage of the product, and by talking with real users you can get a feel for why people buy and who buys. Bringing the data back to the social media marketing manager and SDR teams, as an example, will allow them to tailor specific messages with proven success and help them to be more successful in their own roles.

Typically, the handoff process from marketing to sales is quick and dirty – here’s a lead, take it and run with it. The marketing team did something well enough to attract the person to your company, whether it was through a webinar, social media ad, eBook, or other piece of content, and now it’s time for sales to get in touch to learn more. The quality of the lead is sometimes quantified (i.e. lead scoring) and will be reviewed at the end of the quarter to see if it turned into a prospect (along with all other leads in total). That’s the end of the story and it’s off to the next campaign for the marketing team.

The same happens with sales teams. With the caveat that it’s not always the case, most deals close and are shepherded into the hands of the CS team. Some information is passed along, with many of the details living in the CRM system including emails and contracts. Occasional check-in conversations happen: “How is X company doing, any problems?” This does not reflect the reality of the situation – someone new is using your product and their first weeks on the platform contain very useful data and details that can and should be used in the marketing and sales processes to find more customers to hand off.

What is the solution? There are the standard actions like post-mortems on deals won and lost – gathering together all teams and talking about individual deals with specific highlights into what the customer liked, what the prospect didn’t like, and other factors that led to the outcome. There are also high-level metrics like retention percentages and overall growth or decline. These focus on the one-off things that happened within a group of people, with point people talking about interactions they had specifically with buyers and / or customers.

The real way to get CS involved is to maintain regular conversation and dialogue with all other teams. As previously mentioned, everyone is busy doing their own roles. That’s a given. However, the ability to learn from others who are all focused on the same goal is key when running an agile go-to-market team. A feature that is loved by all customers in a certain vertical (i.e. “all of our fintech customers are power users when it comes to X part of our platform”) will help marketing and sales in their work. A line that works on the SDR side, long-forgotten because of the distance traveled in the sales process, may help keep a customer a customer.

While not traditionally a funnel, the CS team is a vital part of a company and team members hold important information for other teams. Coordination, understanding, and respect across all teams grows revenue and keeps all teams happy and cohesive – two of the most vital aspects of a successful business.