5 Tips for Selling as a Trusted Advisor
By Kristen Hayer
I haven’t made a secret of the fact that I believe the person who is generally best positioned to sell things to existing customers is the Customer Success Manager. Not everyone agrees with me, but more and more CS professionals are being tasked with owning part or all the revenue generated by customers. While this is true, most CSMs have never had any kind of formal sales training and are concerned about how to sell while keeping a trusting relationship with their customers.
Here are 5 things you can do to make sure that as a CS professional you can both sell and keep that trusted advisor relationship firmly in place:
1. Build a Value-Based Relationship
Before you even start trying to sell, it is important to build a relationship with the customer that is based on concrete value they receive from your company. However, “value” can sound kind of nebulous. How do you quantify the value a customer has received? You create a success plan. A success plan is essentially a plan with goals that a customer hopes to achieve through your solution. Creating a formal success plan with your customers and measuring their results against the plan over time is step one in building a relationship built on value.
2. Ask Deep Questions
When you have calls or meetings with customers, use that precious time wisely by asking questions rather than presenting what you see as the situation. Questions help you to uncover selling opportunities, discover new customer needs, and understand pain points the customer is dealing with. Two types of questions that go deep are impact questions and value questions. Impact questions help you and your customer explore the impact the challenges are having on their business. Value questions help you to understand how the customer thinks about the positive value of a change.
3. Speak Your Customer’s Language
When talking about a potential solution to a customer’s problem, it is important to put it into terms they care about. If you did a good job of asking deep questions, you’ll know why a solution matters to the customer’s business, and you can position it in their terms. This elevates the conversation from a presentation of features and generic benefits to a consultative discussion about how your offering would specifically help the customer’s business. This greatly increases the success of your selling efforts and helps your customer position your solution more effectively as they discuss it internally.
4. Close for the Next Step
Sometimes CSMs get worried about selling because they think of it as a giant ask of the customer. It is easier to think of it as a series of small steps toward “yes”. The first step might be to have a discussion with someone above your primary point of contact. Make that your first “close” – you’re closing for that meeting, not for the entire sale. The next step might be to do a presentation for some department heads – close for that presentation. By taking the selling process step by step, it takes the pressure off and makes the whole process seem more intuitive.
5. Ask for the Deal
There will come a point where the next step is to close the deal. You’ve presented to everyone, you’ve discussed every advantage of the solution, you’ve negotiated pricing and the legal agreement. It’s time. The best thing to do at this stage is to ask for the deal. If you’ve done a good job of the other four steps, the customer might be asking you for the deal at this point! If not, a simple, “Are we ready to sign off on this?” is appropriate. You don’t want to waste more of your time by hesitating, and you need to understand if there are any additional requirements you need to fulfill. It is OK to directly ask for the customer’s decision at this stage.
By following these 5 tips, you’ll remain strongly aligned with your customer, maintain your trusted advisor status, and close more deals. In addition, your customer won’t even feel like they are being “sold”. They will appreciate that you’re helping to align your solutions with their real business needs. Ultimately, isn’t helping to meet your customers’ needs the very definition of success? Good luck in your revenue journey!
Does your CS team need Sales training? The Success League is a Customer Success consulting firm. We offer a CSM Selling training program that will teach you how to drive retention and expansion value. Find out more about this and our other offerings at TheSuccessLeague.io.
Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with scaling tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of 3 podcasts about the field. Kristen has served as a judge for the Customer Success Excellence awards, and is on the board of several early-stage tech companies. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.
