Lesson 48 - Maintain Your Relationships

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Building strong, ongoing relationships with your clients will help you to network, prevent churn, and ensure future opportunities and renewals. In this lesson, you’ll learn strategies for staying connected and adding value after the deal closes. Your assignment will involve drafting a client follow-up plan, including regular check-ins and value-add activities.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you'll develop a strategy for maintaining long term relationships with your customers once a deal is closed. Now it can be incredibly easy to think, Okay, I've closed the deal. I'm done with this opportunity, and I'm going to move on to the next one, but that mindset can actually cost you a lot, and the most successful salespeople know that maintaining long term relationships with their champions, with their contacts, at accounts, even after the deal is complete, can be crucial to long term success. So even if you have a CSM, don't just walk away. There are a couple of ways that you can maintain long term relationships. The first is keep close ties with your champion. Your champion was crucial in getting the deal across the line, and they will continue to be your best ally when it comes to driving adoption within an organization, driving expansion opportunities and preventing churn. So the first thing that you can do is check in with your champion a week or two after the deal is closed, and then again, maybe 30 or 40 days after the deal is closed, and just check and see how their onboarding experience is going. Are they getting what you promised? Are you delivering on, on what was contracted, right? How is their ramping and training and adoption going just checking in can let them know, Hey, I didn't, I didn't walk away, right? And that can build a lot of trust. The second thing that you can do is start to attend some of the meetings that your CSM, your customer success manager, is having with these customers. So a perfect example of that would be a QBR, right? A quarterly business review. That's something that they normally attend once a quarter, and they're going to be going over adoption metrics and ROI and all of these great things with your customer. Now this may look different at your solution, at your organization, but chances are you'll have someone doing something like this. So one easy way that you can maintain long term relationships is to attend those even if it's normally run by the CSM. Having you there as a presence will let the customer know, like, Hey, I am still in your corner. I am still fighting for you. I still want to make sure that things are going well for you. The goal here is to let them know that you're not just someone that shows up when it's time to sell something. You're someone that shows up for them over and over again. Now there are a couple of other ways that you can quickly and easily provide long term value after the sale is complete. So let's take a look at a few of them. One you should be informing them about new product updates. So if there's a new solution, update that you know matches their industry, their function, their team. Send it their way. Let them know that you were thinking about them. Share relevant industry insights. So if you're selling into pharmaceuticals, and you see that there have been some, you know, really new political updates in the pharmaceutical industry, or maybe, like a new study that just came out that's really interesting to those in that industry, that could be something that you that you send their way, new insights, new consulting insights can can all be good offer introductions to other members of your network. So if you're selling into the financial services industry, and then you meet someone else that's in the financial services industry, you can offer to connect the two individuals, and maybe they can learn from one another and and, you know, start talking to one another as well. At the end of the day, you should show them that you are regularly giving value, and as your customer begins to get value, then I would highly recommend doing an internal case study. This is something that's worked very well for salespeople at organizations that I've taught at an internal case study is basically a way that you would document formally the success that you've had within an organization, and the goal of documenting that success is to then evangelize that success to other parts of the organization. So you might be more familiar with an external case study, something that you put on your website where you go out and you get customer testimonials and you get them to record a video for you. But that's actually pretty tricky, because you have to work with their brand team, their marketing team, their legal team. You have to make sure it's okay for you to use their logo, and in which instances, an internal case study has far less red tape, because all you're doing is talking to their own individual people, tying that case study up into a little with a bow, and then evangelizing it to other teams or other departments within the organization. So less red tape, right? So the way that you do this is talk to the people that are getting value at the organization from your solution today, ask them to tell you how they use it, what value they've received from it. Quantify that value, if possible, wherever possible, build out an. ROI, if you can record that call, or if they're willing to provide a video testimonial, even better, let them know, Hey, I'm not planning to use this information externally. I'm not going to be showing this to other customers. This is just something because I want to celebrate the success of what we've done here with other members of your org. Honestly, it can make them look good to their boss and their boss's boss. And I have personally seen examples that organizations I've worked at where this internal case study got all the way up to the board of directors, and it's really, really cool to see that. But the goal here is to market your existing success across the business, and that's going to be your way in to talking to other regions, other departments, or going all the way up the chain to the person in charge of standardizing the solution globally. All in all, it's going to be a great thing to do so do an internal case study that is a great, a great exercise, other than expanding to new teams or departments, there are some other ways that you can look for opportunities to expand. So let's talk about those now. One, you should be looking for additional use cases. So talk to your customer. How are they using your product today, and what are some of the other workflows that they have for what your product might meet a need. Two keep an eye out for organizational changes. So be aware of any changes within your customer's organization, mergers, new product launches, hiring sprees. These changes could create new needs that your solution can address. And then finally, look for new business initiatives. So keep an eye on the accounts changing priorities, right? What are their initiatives for the new fiscal year, the new quarter? Are they going after new verticals? Are they focusing on cost reductions or risk mitigation, or toll consolidation? Do they have a new CEO? What are their priorities? Have they just had a new call with the board? What did they say in that call? Any changes can lead to opportunity. So keep an eye on what these customers are doing and look for things that you can leverage there. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. You're going to create a strategy to stay in touch with a recent closed one account post sale. You're going to plan how you'll maintain contact with your champion. You're going to schedule your involvement in the next QBR, if that's already on the books. And you'll identify ways that you can continue adding value. These will be practical, tangible things that you can immediately start looking for work with your mentor, manager or new hire buddy. Actually, in this case, I would probably connect with a CSM or two and ask them, you know, what are things that you've done to stay in touch with with customers and to provide value, and what are some ways that I can interact with them without interfering with what you're doing? Could be a good question to ask your study guide will help you along the way, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time you.