Deleting the Handoff | TDSU Ep. 12

Dillon: What's up, Lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're

serving up fresh idea biscuits every day

to help you in your CS journey. Got my man JP with us. JP, do you

want to say hi?

JP: Top of the morning, people.

Dillon: Rob's here. Rob, do

you want to say hi?

Rob: What's up Lifers and

what's up to your dog, Dillon, that just appeared in the background?

Yeah,

Dillon: She's probably in between nap sessions. That's what.

We've got Matt here. Matt,

do you want to say hi?

Matt: I do. Hey, y'all.

Dillon: And I'm your host,

Dillon Young. Thank you all for being here. Matt, do you want to introduce yourself?

Matt: Yeah. Happy to. I'm Matt Evans,

founder of Prescriptive Outcomes, a consulting firm that works with B2B SaaS tech startups and founders, so I'm very passionate about driving revenue growth and making change with CS and revenue teams.

That's really the basis of it. Love to work with early stage startups and revenue leaders.

Dillon: Very cool. Very cool. Well, so give us the topic on which you are the most passionate right now as it relates to customer success.

And I want to feel it, Matt.

Matt: I'll feel it and then I'll give it to you. I think the biggest thing

that I am just hot button topic is the sales to CS handoff.

And you hear this everywhere.

Right?

Lots and lots of people are, "Oh, I got to fix my sales

to CS handoff." And my problem is that you don't need to fix it, you need to remove it and eliminate it entirely. Get rid of these hand me down situations entirely in a SaaS environment.

And that's, that's my hot button topic for today that I can rant on for a hot minute.

Dillon: I'm gonna play the fool here, but I wasn't ready for you to say, get rid of it entirely, because I don't know what the alternative looks like. Can you lay that out for us?

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So, think of the typical SaaS situation, right? Where

you've got salesperson closing the deal, going through the motion, going through their sales funnel. Working tirelessly, they hit that closed won button in Salesforce or

HubSpot and everyone, shouts, "Hooray, Hurrah." And then

they toss it over the fence.

That's the term you hear constantly, right? The

toss over the fence.

That's the typical motion, and CS picks up, figures out what do we need to do on the kickoff call? Is it scheduled?

What do I need to learn with this person? That's

like your typical handoff motion.

And my opinion is:

there shouldn't be a handoff at all.

Remove the handoff entirely. And in my opinion, the easiest and best way to do that is you create a team, a revenue pod.

Most tech companies that I work with,

they have a CRO in place. Most of the newer ones that I'm working with, right? You've got a CRO- revenue.

Which is marketing, sales, customer success, it's pre and post sales.

So why on earth do we have this weird

siloed disconnect? When we're all

reporting up to a revenue function?

And so, sales and CS, I'm just going to call those two out

when you can expand it to like marketing, SDR, BDR, operations, product support, et cetera. But keeping things simple here,

create a revenue pod.

The simplest example of this is that you've got a pod of a

salesperson and a customer success manager. And they work together. So a salesperson sells a deal, they automatically know who that deal is going to get assigned to. The customer success manager knows that when a person is

working on a deal, they're soon to be assigned to that deal.

So

think of any type of overlap where that customer success

manager then can actually help the salesperson join like a closing call or a call to help get the onboarding call set up.

Customer success manager can

sell the expertise that the customer's going to get in onboarding.

Help close the deal, but also align on the results that matter most.

And my whole problem with handoffs

is it is a hand me down

situation, right? I'm getting handed down from big brother to younger brother here. And so much is lost in translation. We're not aligning on what matters most to our customers.

What results, what outcomes, what are we, what are we helping them achieve by using our products and services?

And when we align in sales and CS and create these pods, you can then have that alignment so, so much better,

right? You've got an alignment

from start.

You jump on a-- we call them pod meetings and you can call them whatever you want, but a revenue pod meeting on a

weekly basis where they get on and they

do a pipeline review.

"Hey, here are the deals that I've got in my sales

funnel that are going to be coming to your book of business soon."

CSM can then help join, but also the opposite is true

after it's closed. It's "Hey, here's our kickoff

call. Salesperson, you're going to join for

the first five

minutes," just to drive that

continuity and make sure that

the alignment on the outcomes and the results

that we drove in the sales process is still the same alignment. There's accountability on both sides

matter. Again, I can talk your ears off. I'm probably rambling

at you at this point. But the whole point is having a handoff doesn't matter how sophisticated or operationally sound it is.

There's always an opportunity for accountability to be lost, time wasted. And we're not aligning on what matters most, which is the outcomes we're helping our customers achieve.

Dillon: Yeah, Matt, it sounds like maybe you've thought about this before.

Matt: Sorry. I just kind of unloaded on you. Didn't I?

Dillon: No, no, it's perfectly fine.

Gentlemen, who wants to jump in?

I would love to. Matt, that was a-- You got my brain going.

Rob: As I was hearing you say that. Um,

can I, can I pick that apart with an example? I want to

run an example your way. I certainly, let me start by saying I certainly see the benefits

and I think this is a really,

really provocative idea.

Um, I see the benefits of the pod model.

I haven't

seen it work

in practice in--

I've seen it work sort of like, you know, on one off cases, but the reason I haven't seen it work in practice is often because the sales segmentation strategy differs from that

of customer success.

So an example would be sales segments based on geography, right?

Like you've got this salesperson who's

responsible for the east coast, this person who's

responsible for the west coast and then CS often segments by

risk,

growth potential, or more often than not revenue, right? So you have

your,

you know, your high revenue CSMs, your low

revenue CSMs. Um,

so I'm curious, how would you reconcile a pod in that type of example?

When the CS segmentation

strategy is different from sales. Do you change the segment

out segmentation strategy entirely, or what do you do?

Matt: You can. So my, my opinion is

why do we have the segmentation

for the sales in the first place? A lot of times it's to help centralize. focus on like a funnel, right? Your

funnel is this,

you don't branch outside of that funnel.

So in CS, if we're segmenting on

ARR or other things, do we have salespersons that can sell into those specific segments only?

So the way that I've done it before, it's like,

Hey, this salesperson only sells to

enterprise deals. It

doesn't matter if

they're in this market or not,

this geographical segment. They only sell to enterprise deals.

That means that they're going to get all of their deals are going to

flow through Jenny, the CSM or whatever it is. And so you, you can

have separate

segmentation in sales and CS. But you can still create pods and pairings based on who the person is going to be going to in the end.

Now you,

at the simplest level,

you can get super complex with this, right?

We've done this with a

company that had, I think, 90 CSMs and over 200 salespersons and created some really fun, complex pods.

It sounds a lot more complex and rocket science-esque than it really

is because you can create those. You can keep those exact same pods and pairings.

I sell to North America, but

when I sell to an enterprise account, I know my CSM is this person. When I sell to a mid market person, I know my CSM is this person.

In my opinion, that's still a little more complex

than it should be. And I honestly would recreate the pods or the segmentation if possible,

because again, everything should be

tied back to what outcomes and results are we driving for our customers and why.

how are we

aligning those results with those customers in the sales process and continuing to measure and drive those results in customer success?

If our segmentation is set up to help us sell easier, then how are we still aligning on the outcomes?

Outcomes that matter most to

those customers and continuing it in customer success.

So

you can keep the segmentation, how it is.

Adds a layer of complexity. My vote is to always create segments that benefit the results that we drive for our customers first and foremost. Because that's what drives long term retention.

JP: I heard a lot about,

first of all, Rob

took all the words out of my mouth. So I'm gonna blame him, but I heard a lot about pairings

and my mind, of course, went straight to like wine and cheese, which is a pretty good pairing because

oil and water, not

as good of a pairing, right? So CS and sales always having this friction between them, not being able to meld.

And instead having--

Dillon: Says the sober

guy, by the way.

JP: Yeah, yeah, I don't, you know, there's non alcoholic wine too, by the way. Okay.

Rob: It's called

grape

Matt: juice, right?

JP: Yeah, yeah, yeah, grape

juice, you know.

Um,

so, you know, you, got your, hey, I think I'm all for

trying something different and seeing how that comes about. I'll just say quickly in my current role,

I work very close--

I work very closely with sales. I mean, if I turn around to wipe, I gotta

see who's, You know, whose hand is right there. Cause

it's like, we're working so close together, you know what I mean? I sneeze and it's

like, "Oh God, did I get any on you?" So it's a different experience for me, but I know that my company

did switch from a pods model previously, but I think it was different than what you're saying, Matt. It was...

I think it was more like a bona fide silo,

um, just like an entrenched silo, as opposed to what you're saying, which is putting CS and sales in the same pod. So

Matt: Yeah.

And the whole point is just to benefit the customer, right?

If, if we understand what we're for as a company, why we exist as a company, what are the results that we drive for our customers? And it's a finite list. There's not an infinite number of things that we do for our customers. But if we can truly understand the results that we impact and how we can measure those, the earlier we can align on that in the customer's journey, the better it's going to be.

So in marketing, let's message around the results that we drive for our customers. Let's sell the results that we're going to help them accomplish, right? And so, if we can pair those two pre and post sales so that there is zero handoff experience.

Even if you don't have

"pairings" , the whole point is to increase the overlap between sales and CS as much as possible.

So that from a customer standpoint, it's

"I know what I was sold on. I know what results I'm going to get. And in customer success, they're going to help me achieve those results as quickly as possible by helping me make the right behavior changes that I need to do in onboarding and going forward."

And so

you can accomplish this thing without revenue pods.

You absolutely can. And there's some companies that do it so, so well,

but there are also companies that

have a brick wall silo between sales and CS. And that is what we need to remove entirely.

Dillon: I love it, Matt. That's our time. Thank you so much for sharing this. It's a super refreshing idea. And we hope to have you back on the pod soon.

Matt: Great meeting you guys. This was fun.

Dillon: Thanks, Matt.