Can Customer Success Sell?

Wohooo @Ahunt making waves 

Hi @aiprakash thanks for your question! In my case I am thinking about CSM finding more opportunities when I think about ‘sales conversations.” I have a couple recommendations that will make you a better CSM in general but also facilitate you in sales conversations. 

• Don’t forget as a CSM you are an expert problem solver and problems present opportunities! Understand your clients pain points and challenges in general not just specific to your product. This broader understanding will allow you to find new problems to solve and surface potential opportunities. Do this by asking more open ended questions like “How do you solve this today?” “If you could solve X today what would that mean for your team?” “What could get in the way of you achieving X?” If you are the only person talking on your customers calls you are not doing it right. Watch your talk ratio! 
• Make sure you are talking to the right people (decision makers, execs). If you only engage with ops or your admins those may personas not be as likely to be thinking more broadly about company challenges and are typically engaging with you to solve a specific thing. They are also less likely to have any influence over making decisions. This is something you should operationalize by tracking personas or roles at the contact level so you can report off who you are doing this well with and who you need to form more relationships with. You must be multi-threaded. 
• Know the customer tech stack. This is something you should ideally be tracking somewhere (an attribute section on the C360). This will allow you to understand how to best integrate your products, see gaps in their solutions or understand what competitive solutions they may be using. 
• Be curious and get to know your sales partners. Maybe you typically pass off a lead to sales or account management. Have you ever asked to join the next discovery call or follow up demo and why not? Seeing sales in action and partnering more with them will help you see what types of questions clients ask and pain points your products are solving for, and getting better at discovery is key to finding higher quality leads for your sales counterparts. If you can’t make the call watch the recording or check out the transcript summary.