One of the most critical components of a successful customer success organization is communication with sales.
The sales team spends a lot of time building relationships, and they don’t ride off into the sunset with the customer after contracts are finalized. Customer success and account managers need visibility into everything about a customer, at the time of handoff and as the customer enters renewals and upsells.
For example, in a recent episode of Clari’s The Forecast, Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight, shared how the SaaS subscription model has ignited a major shift from customer service to customer success.
“Customer success acknowledges that customers aren’t bound to your company.” Mehta says, “If they aren’t happy, they can end their subscription—and the revenue they send your way. That’s why growth-minded companies invest heavily in the customer success category and place the buyer at the center of the business.”
To achieve this, customer success, account managers, and sales engineers need to track key data points like an account’s or opportunity’s activity engagement in order to prioritize their time and foster long term loyalty with the right key contacts. They need to know what’s happening in their business to forecast confidently.
At Clari, we use this real-time visibility to populate our own type of forecast:
Customer Renewals + Upsells - Churn = Net Retention
But how can you do this without spending hours reporting?
In this episode of the Clari Playbook, I share how you can see the data you need in Clari without having to spend time on complex reporting or manual data entry. You’ll learn how the customer success organization can get real-time visibility into who is doing what in the accounts and opportunities—and take action on those insights. From updating opportunities to forecasting, and reporting, with these tips, sales and CSMs can save one to two hours a week.
Clari Playbook is a video series featuring revenue experts who share their best practices around mastering pipeline visibility, winning renewals and reducing churn, aligning go-to-market teams, and much more.
Check out past episodes of our Clari Playbook series:
- How Finance Leaders Can Be Strategic Business Partners with Kevin Yao, Director of Financial Planning and Analysis
- Account Engagement, the Key to Winning Customers and Growing Revenue with Stephanie Glass
View more revenue tips from our recent series, Clari from Home:
- Deal Updates, Micromanagement Free with Diana Cappello, Sales Engineering Manager
- Clari from Home: De-Risking in the Time of Coronavirus with Michael Kenney, Director of Sales
- Managing Renewals and Churn, Spreadsheet Free with Jessica Starr, Director Customer Success Operations
- Identify At-Risk Deals Before They Slip with Vernon Bubb, Managing Director, EMEA
- Save Time Inspecting Deals on the Fly with Kyle Rutter, Senior Sales Director
- Benchmark Rep Performance with Real-Time Data with Maya Connet, Enterprise Sales Director
- Get a pulse on account health in a digital world with Holly Procter, Vice President of Sales