The Beauty of Just Letting Go
Check any top 40 chart from almost any era or any genre and you’re bound to come across a bunch of it’s so hard to let you go-themed songs. A few with titles or choruses that strike a familiar refrain: Boys to Men “It’s so Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday;” Bon Jovi’s “It’s Hard Letting You Go;” Najee’s “So Hard to Let Go;” or Rascal Flats more animus: “I Won’t Let Go.” The thing is that in business as in life, knowing when and how to let go is a survival skill best learned early. The Sales & Marketing machine in obviously the catalyst for getting business in the door. But the trouble with so many businesses is either 1) they haven’t structured their operations to help Sales to appreciate the value of letting go once the deal is inked. or 2) they don’t have mechanisms for Sales to periodically tune into the client status – missing potential upsell opportunities. When there’s no process in place that allows for the seamless transition of ownership of the Client Relationship to the appropriate Resource and competency throughout the Customer life cycle, businesses set themselves up for failure and churn – or to borrow from another prolific creative: “The Root of Suffering is attachment.” The Buddah
Whether or not you fully agree with The Buddah, if you want your customer relationships to start off on the right foot, it’s essential to align internal teams so that Sales is equipped to expertly release ownership of the Client relationship to the Success Team – whether thats Product, Account, Project, or some less ideal mutant version. Without a clearly articulated transition roadmap, client interactions are likely to quickly degrade into confusion, missteps, missed opportunities, and frustrated clients.
Sales & Customer Success Symbiosis
Why is it so important to get Sales and Marketing synchronized with Customer Success? Because Customer Success is in the business of what I call perpetual customer discovery – continuously learning the client base: their patterns, features, limitations, pain points, etc. Customer Success becomes a valuable resource for obtaining trend data, insights and information on the types of customers that are most compatible with the business, as well as those more likely to churn. Armed with intel that advances successful prospect matchmaking, Sales can adjust lead strategies, and minimize, or altogether eliminate efforts which equate to chasing “bad money” down a rabbit hole.
A partnership that has Sales focused on targeting productive, right-fit accounts, while Success teams are preoccupied with maintaining healthy client relationships and securing retention, is one that creates the right conditions for seamless post-sales transitions and interactions. Limited turbulence during the early stages of the Client relationship goes a long way toward laying the groundwork for customer trust, and confidence, And it creates a buffer of satisfaction that can insulate against customer unhappiness when some future outcome is predictably less than ideal. So pretend it’s opposite day and do the reverse of this article’s title.