Objective customer Value in Sales
Objective customer Value in Sales
When product and sales are fighting each other
Stop relying on your sales and product sense. Bring objectivity into both silos to leverage both. But how do you...
Objectively measure customer value when you have sales and few accounts?
Align Sales and Product to work together instead of against?
We suck at estimations and relying on our senses but we fall for them constantly in all silos. It's nice to realize that but doing something about it is tricky.
Product is somewhat kept in check in their domain because they need to measure everything
Sales are really good at getting a grip on their acquisition funnel. After all, they are the experts when it comes to closing
They traditionally don't 'really' believe in the expertise of the other or why it would matter.
Just closing is not the name of the game anymore. It's about net retention. Not every revenue is good revenue and we have 2 silo experts here that don't understand what the other ones are doing.
The magic happens if we create alignment between both silos:
Rewarding and enabling Sales to onboard the client rather than just "close and forget"
Rewarding Product to enable Sales to do the above and make it extremely easy for them to onboard the product
Time to Value
A great metric for this that unifies both is Time to Value (start above 50k ACV). The reality of a customer is oftentimes in multiple silos
A customer most likely started on our website, maybe even used the product, or scoured our documentation if we have it... Then they talk to sales... do a little more on the product/website. Maybe they have to onboard to an API.
Did you ever map this flow properly across silos? You probably should have but the goals were hard to align… and there’s never time. Let’s do it anyways.
This gives you very good initial visibility about opportunities and allows you to target problem zones. But only where it makes sense. We can measure the time it takes to use the product for the first time after sales have sent them the access data
The product can easily enable this tracking and then expose it to sales. This helps them to close better. That's qualification and insights that actually help sales. They love actionable data
Bringing visibility into the darkness
Did the customer use us already? Did they look at the API? If sales have to constantly ask an engineer to look into these questions you're doing it wrong. -> TTV goes up invariably because it all takes time
How long did it take for these accounts to ask for an expansion? Usually, Product is completely in the dark about this. If sales are incentivized for expansion to hit they will make each other care
What do we consider for an individual account to have reached "habit"? What kind of engagement in which timeframe is a signal that they love our product?
For Slack, an example habit moment is reached if they use the product more than 2000 times (messages sent) within 30 days. This is obviously very different for you, but getting this time down is a direct effect from great product work.
The magic of getting it right
But will we know if they start to ramp up usage? Are dashboards in place? Notification systems? If you do…
…all of this leads to the magic:
We should know about outages before the customer does. -> This turns a negative experience into a very valuable experience initiated by our sales.
We know about expansion interest before the customer does. -> The conversation shifts from convincing to helping.
It is the first foundation for PQAs (Product Qualified Accounts) and anything that leads to better close rates
Sales close. Product retains.
Together... they create magic.
A guide is coming to address all of it in more detail. Subscribe to not miss it.
