It’s often thought that the role of the Customer Success Representative is simply to take care of customer support and reply to any questions. However, just like the SDR (Sales Development Representative), who is in charge of pre-sales care, the Customer Success representative has a vital commercial role to play after the sale.
The role of the Customer Success Representative
In a specialized commercial team, the Customer Success Representative is the last link in the chain. They come into play just after the sale, which was made by the Account Executive. Ideally, the latter could even introduce the Customer Success Representative by telling the new customer that a dedicated person from the support team would be getting in touch with them in order to support them in implementing the tool.
Indeed, part of the Customer Success Representative’s role is to answer the customer’s questions and make sure that the tool is configured correctly according to their needs, but that’s not all. A good FAQ section and some video tutorials would be all that is needed. Actually, the Customer Success Representative must also ensure there is a high customer satisfaction rate in order to avoid them churning. Their second task leads on naturally from the first one: they gather contacts from your customer corresponding to your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), and feed your SDRs with new leads.
The Thank You Call
The Thank You Call is to the Customer Success Representative what a Welcome Call is to an SDR: the perfect approach. Indeed at the time of the call the customer is normally well predisposed following its transaction. The perfect timing is within a few hours, even if it is difficult to find, and within a few days. Beyond that, there is the risk that the sales euphoria has been lost.
During this Thank You Call, the aim is to use the good work carried out by the Account Executive to guide the conversation and to make use of the new customer’s address book. If your solution has perfectly met their needs, there’s a strong chance that this solution also meets the needs of some of the customer’s contacts who have a similar profile.
The virtuous loop of the sales cycle
Unfortunately, we often notice that several sales teams overlook the Customer Success Representative. Their tasks are based above all on a long term relationship with customers and it’s often their daily work that allows the necessary confidence to be established for a customer to accept putting them in touch with some of their contacts.
Some commercial organizations therefore prefer the short term, which is easily measurable in terms of turnover, rather than mutual growth over time.
That is why we are convinced that by ensuring your customers’ satisfaction, the Customer Success Representative is the best contact in order to acquire qualified leads.
The motto ‘the customer is king’ is all the more true nowadays since your customer has the power of making extraordinary recommendations. We will offer you ways to industrialize your contacts in a further article.