Customer Success as a Culture — How Lesson.ly Delivers Customer Success
How Lesson.ly aligns sales and customer success around three focuses: a seamless handoff, the right customer profile, and the early expansion opportunity.
TL;DR
- Lesson.ly aligns sales and customer success around three focuses: a seamless sales-to-CS handoff, signing the right customer profile, and the early expansion opportunity.
- Conner Burt trains reps to over-communicate during the kickoff call so the handoff between sales and customer success is seamless on every deal.
- Lesson.ly avoids signing customers who are clearly a poor fit or likely to churn, because customer fit protects long-term success.
- Lesson.ly's sales team typically drives upsells in the first six months of the relationship before handing off to customer success.
To succeed with the customer success at your organization, it takes alignment and collaboration with Sales. We interviewed and asked 7 industry leading sales executives their advice on how they put customers first throughout the sales process at their particular companies. Today we’ll highlight Conner Burt, Head of Partnerships and Sales Strategy at Lesson.ly. In this post, we’ll briefly explore his approach to customer success alignment as it relates to his sales team.
Download a complimentary copy of the ebook “Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition” to see Conner’s full contribution and get access to other sales executive viewpoints. Missed last week’s edition? Check it out here.
About Lesson.ly
Based in Indianapolis, Indiana, Lesson.ly is easy learning software for smarter, more productive teams. Lesson.ly helps high growth companies transfer best practices and knowledge in measurable ways.
What Customer Success Means To Lesson.ly
As VP of Sales for Lesson.ly, Conner and his team care a lot about customer success and work to ensure the customer is always at the core. Because of the importance placed on customer success, Lesson.ly has identified 3 specific ways that Conner and his sales team are involved in customer success.
Three Customer Success and Sales Alignment Focuses
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**The Handoff - **The experience of signing up for the Lesson.ly product and moving to a new point of contact needs to be seamless in every deal. Conner trains his reps on how to handle the kickoff call to make sure they over-communicate between sales and customer success during the process.
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** The Customer Profile - **Who is Lesson.ly signing up? It’s clear, there are good and there are bad fits for any SaaS company. Conner and his team avoid, at all cost, signing up customers who they know will be short term or who have a good chance of churning out.
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** The Expansion Opportunity.** Typically in Lesson.ly’s business, the sales team continues to drive upsells in the first 6 months of the relationship before handing off to the customer success team.
Always Put Customers First
The customer always comes first throughout the sales process at Lesson.ly and Conner makes sure his team is trained well on this by using repetition. Conner explained that with a team of sales professionals, it comes down to training them well in controlled environments and using positive reinforcement when the customer is put first. Sharing things like one off compliments from prospects with the entire team helps to reinforce the value.
“Customers drive our product roadmap. They help align marketing and sales by helping us really better understand the challenges we’re solving for them, in their own world. Our sales and marketing teams often use messaging that comes directly from our customers, so meeting with them regularly and having a strong pulse on how our customers are doing is key to our company’s success.”** **
Advice to Succeed in Customer Success
When giving advice to other sales leaders about how to keep customers at the center of the sales process, Conner finds it important to tell stories of moments when sales reps go above and beyond for customers. “Public praise reinforces what is right, in the midst of pressure and quotas,” said Conner. “At the same time, giving reps autonomy to put customers as the hero is important. There’s no perfect blueprint and every rep will do it in their own way, if given the opportunity.”
Read Conner’s full contribution to the ebook entitled, “Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition” and learn from 6 other sales executives like Conner.
Download the full “Customer Success as a Culture” ebook collection:
Customer Success as a Culture: Product Leaders Edition
**Customer Success as a Culture: Marketing Leaders Edition **
Learn more about how ClientSuccess can help your company develop a strong customer success methodology and strategy with easy-to-use customer success software by requesting a 30-minute demo.
Frequently Asked Questions
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