3 Ways to Align Pre-Sales Strategy with Post-Sales Goals

Senior Solutions Consultant, Niki Simonutti, tells us how she sets CS teams up for success.

As teams who are both focused on customers, sales and customer success should theoretically work hand in hand. However, the reality is that there’s some degree of disconnect between the worlds of sales and customer success at every company. One of my first jobs in the SaaS industry was on a support team, so years later I’m still sensitive to the discrepancies between the way pre and post-sales teams communicate about a product. Most importantly, I’m aware of how these discrepancies impact customer happiness. 

Now that I’m on the pre-sales side at a company doing a great job of bridging the gap between sales and customer success, I want to share 3 things my team and organization do to keep both sides aligned.

1. Sell Responsibly
   Sales teams deliver shiny, optimistic demos that can sometimes highlight a level of functionality few customers implement in reality. It’s important to find a middle ground between this perfect demo scenario and how our customers are actually using the product, which we can do by exercising some moderation.

   It’s fine to show off your product and highlight cool features, but find some balance by leveraging real examples from customers who are using these features with success. Similarly, mentioning that in a “crawl, walk, run” approach, the feature you are showing is a great example of what you can do once you’re at the “run” phase is a great way to temper expectations.

   Most importantly, you can never go wrong by exercising honesty and integrity when you talk about your product’s capabilities. Renewals are driven by trust in your organization’s product and people, and the short term contract signature isn’t worth the churn risk for your customer success team a year down the line.
   

2. Don’t Default to “Yes”
   It’s tempting to say you can handle any use case out of the fear that if you say “no”, you’ll lose a customer’s business. Often, this results in throwing yourself into finding a solution no matter how tricky it is to implement and maintain. Instead of defaulting to “yes” and presenting that tricky solution, try to strike a balance. Show the customer you did the legwork to find the complicated solution they were looking for, but use your influence as a trusted product expert to explain why a different solution will serve them better in the long run.

   Saying “no” builds a lot of trust with both your customer and your organization’s post-sales team. It shows them two things: 1) Your end goal isn’t just to get a signature on a contract, and 2) You’re thinking forward to the customer’s long term success and retention.
   

3. Communicate Consistently
   At the end of the day, the single best thing you can do to ensure you’re aligned with the needs of your post-sales team is to talk to them. While it seems obvious, it’s truly the most effective way to drive process changes that benefit your organization and its customers in the long run. I’ll share a couple examples of how my team has been working on this.

   Over the course of a quarter, one of my team members worked closely with our professional services team to understand the key pieces of information they needed to properly scope the risk and level of effort of each implementation. With these findings in mind, he was able to modify our sales process to ensure we gathered the necessary information to better prevent common implementation challenges

   Communication improvements can be made at an individual level, too. Whenever I have a question about how current customers are handling a certain use case, I run it by our customer success team. Additionally, if I’m proposing a complex solution to a prospect, I validate it with customer success managers before sharing it externally. This consistent communication helps me align myself with our post-sales teams during the sales process.
   

The above isn’t breaking news. We all know, at some level, that being honest with our customers and communicating effectively with our peers are foundational elements of having a successful customer-facing organization. The hard part is executing these things consistently.

Long-term customer retention starts being built before a contract is ever signed. It’s up to sales teams to be aware of this and work towards making sure the foundation for success is laid before a customer is transitioned to post-sales. I’m proud to be part of an organization that keeps this in mind, and I hope the insights I’ve shared on our approach help to spark some ideas on how your organization can better align pre and post-sales teams.

• Niki Simonutti is a Senior Solutions Consultant at Iterable.