CX Leaders: How to Help Sales Close Larger Deals?

Transcript

[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Contact Center Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. We have a very special guest today, Neelam Sandhu. Neelam is not only an enterprise expert in SaaS, but all things in the go-to-market, from marketing to customer success and sales. What we want to talk about today for all CX leaders is how to help sales close larger deals.

[00:00:32] Steve MacDonald: You actually have a perspective on this; a very clear point of view and working with eight-figure deals, working with multi-year deals in the enterprise space, that not only should sales change, but there should be a hyper-focus on the customer as the center of all of this. That might not be a bad place to start. If you wouldn’t mind just expanding a little bit on your background, then we’ll get into the conversation.

[00:01:00] Neelam Sandhu: Sure. Thanks for having me on the podcast. As you mentioned, I’m a data market executive. I’ve run customer success and sales teams, corporate marketing, and even sustainability, so I’ve had a whole host of different functions at the executive level and in the technology space. 

[00:01:20] Steve MacDonald: So, tell us a little bit more about your point of view on how sales need to change. The focus has to be hyper-focused for the enterprise on customers and their success. Tell us a little bit about that to start us off. 

[00:01:35] Neelam Sandhu: Yeah, it’s a great point. Over the last three or four years, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the maturing of the SaaS market, companies in the SAS space have actually started to reduce the size of their customer success teams.

[00:01:55] Neelam Sandhu: I would argue for the opposite. I think there needs to be a greater investment in customer success teams. We’ve talked a little bit before offline, Steve, about what the team should be called. You could call them customer success, customer experience, or even sales, but it really is about investing in those teams that are hyper-focused on the customer.

[00:02:16] Neelam Sandhu: The rest of the business should really revolve around those teams and ensuring that the customer is successful, very engaged, and very happy with the company. As I said, as the market matures and the market also right-sizes post-pandemic, customers are more thoughtful about how they’re spending their money.

[00:02:38] Neelam Sandhu: Customers also have a lot more choice in the market. There are so many technology vendors out there. I think we’ve probably all seen those maps of technology vendors and various sectors of the technology space, and they’re so full that you have to squint to make out the logos on the page. So customers have more choice.

[00:02:53] Neelam Sandhu: Customers are a lot more thoughtful and strategic about how they spend their money. In my opinion, it’s no longer just a purchase decision for them. It’s really an investment for them. They’re making a business investment in the technology that they’re acquiring or buying, and equally, the technology company that’s partnering with the technology provider needs to be making an investment in the customer.

[00:03:17] Neelam Sandhu: Companies need to be hyper-focused on the customer, and I think the business results speak for themselves in my experience. 

[00:03:24] Steve MacDonald: I love that word investment because if the customer feels like you’re vested or you’re making an investment in their success, that goes beyond the technology. It goes beyond product features that go beyond quality that goes beyond your focus on what they need to get done.

[00:03:42] Steve MacDonald: I’ve had the benefit of talking to all kinds of C-suite individuals, chief customer officers, and chief experience officers, and the one thing that they always want to know is that they want insights that come directly from the customer, directly into every different department inside of the company, and informing decision-making at the highest level. That’s what I kept thinking about as you’re talking here. 

[00:04:04] Steve MacDonald: I would love to have you talk about your unique brand of being a CX team that is a consultant to the rest of the company and how you think about that and how important that is at the bottom line. 

[00:04:21] Neelam Sandhu: Absolutely. I’ll answer this question in two parts.

[00:04:24] Neelam Sandhu: First, I’ll just touch on something you mentioned about features. Customers have so many choices in the market around the technology solutions that they adopt, and for the most part, I think that they’re looking for a product that works and meets their core needs. But from a feature perspective, I would say features matter.

[00:04:45] Neelam Sandhu: But every product has something that’s unique and every product is missing something. So, generally, customers are making a decision where there’s some sort of a trade off. As I mentioned, there’s a lot of choice, so features are only one part of their decision these days. I would say that the relationship that they have and the trust that they have with the vendor or the technology provider is also very important in their purchase decision, and that’s where customer success comes in building a relationship with a customer who feels that they are important.

[00:05:24] Neelam Sandhu: Every customer needs to feel important because they are important. They need to feel like they can reach their customer success manager or an executive within the company. If they have some sort of an emergency or if there’s something they urgently need to speak with their partner about, they need to feel like they can reach that individual immediately just by picking up the phone.

[00:05:42] Neelam Sandhu: Relationships are very important, and that builds loyalty. Features are relevant, but they’re one part of the equation. So, coming back to features, as you build a relationship with a customer that’s anchored around customer success, one of the things that I did as I built out my customer success team was really focused on hiring talent that was very technically astute.

[00:06:08] Neelam Sandhu: They had a background in product development or sales engineering, for example, but also that business mind could translate the relationship with the customer into a sale, but more organically, as opposed to pushing a 50-slide PowerPoint deck about a product onto a customer and asking for the PO the next day. 

[00:06:36] Neelam Sandhu: Building a technology consultant type of relationship with the customer where you understand their strategy and you understand their strategy beyond just the products that you could offer them, but you understand their objectives end to end. Then, you can pepper in the solutions that you have as a company into the conversation to help them achieve their objectives. It feels like a much more organic relationship, as the customer doesn’t feel like you’re pushing product on them, but you’re helping them achieve their objectives.

[00:06:58] Neelam Sandhu: Then, vice versa with the main point of contact with the customer being someone who’s very technically astute and understands the customer strategy very well. When you’re feeding that information back to the customer, your colleagues in your company in different functions could be product. For example, the product development team, because you understand the technology and you can also understand the customer very well.

[00:07:21] Neelam Sandhu: I’ll give you one example in terms of feature enhancement requests. Customers often throw out feature enhancement requests and generally, on quite a regular basis, they have an idea that pops into their mind. They’ll send an email, and it’ll pop it into a form on a portal. Normally, a sales team would just pass all of those requests straight to the product team.

[00:07:42] Neelam Sandhu: The product team is inundated with thousands and thousands of requests from different customers. As I said, every customer needs to feel like they’re important. So, if their feature requests are not getting a rapid response, they begin to get frustrated, especially over an extended period of time. But at the same time, the product team has thousands of feature requests to even just filter through, let alone deliver on, and it’s not a scalable model.

[00:08:10] Neelam Sandhu: So, what I found was building a customer success team that was very technically astute, they could partner with the customer to really understand what the customer needs. If they were asking for something to work with the customer to determine if that request was really needed, or if there was a different way to deliver on it, or if they even really needed that feature.

[00:08:31] Neelam Sandhu: If they did, the list of features would be drastically reduced from 100 down to maybe even 5 key features. Then, really understanding the ins and outs of those feature requests would be necessary before passing them on to the product team. When you do pass, you have enough detail in the request for the product team to understand the request, and then they would respond to it more quickly.

[00:08:56] Neelam Sandhu: It would be much more of a partnership as opposed to the product team feeling overwhelmed with the constant stream of requests coming into them. They would get excited as well about delivering new features there when they could understand the need for it and understand the details of it, and we would bring them into the conversation with the customer.

[00:09:15] Neelam Sandhu: So, they felt like they were getting customer FaceTime too, and helping to deliver on a renewal or a happy customer. It brings the whole equation together. Everyone feels like one team, the product team, the customer success team, and the customer as well. 

[00:09:31] Steve MacDonald: You know, what’s amazing is just what a much better use of resources internally. What a much better way to work with the customers so that all of them feel like you’re consulting with them before you ever come back, and you reflect this into the company to make sure that you’re not just passing through but you’re helping them establish what the priorities are so they do feel heard.

[00:09:56] Steve MacDonald: Those are the priorities that the product team is now going to be working on. They’re happier, the customer is happier, and ultimately, you’re meeting their needs and making the product better, which is a competitive advantage in the marketplace as well. But one of the areas that you touched on first was that working with the customer and their success allows you to pepper in what you do, what the product is, and how you could help them. 

[00:10:21] Steve MacDonald: That doesn’t mean that you’re starting from the point of view that the world is our product. So, this is how we’re going to help you. You’re starting from the perspective of what you need to do to be successful. If there’s a way that we can help you, we will pepper that in, but that’s not the only way.

[00:10:42] Steve MacDonald: So, what is that balance? Because we hear all the time from a company in general that we need to be focused on the success of our customers, we then turn around and find that success is basically what we have to sell. What’s the balance there? 

[00:10:57] Neelam Sandhu: That’s a great point. I always tell customers that I won’t claim to be able to solve all of their problems or all of their needs because that would not be true, but I can certainly make their lives easier, help them along the path to progressing on their objectives, and be a partner to them.

 Neelam Sandhu: I think there are companies who say they can solve all the problems out there in the world for a CIO but it isn’t true. So, being transparent with a customer, number one, is important. Secondly, achieving that balance is actually very natural when you have a team that is interfacing with a customer that understands technology because then they can have a conversation with the customer, the team that’s actually going to be using the technology in a way that is much more fluent in the language that the customer is speaking.

[00:11:55] Neelam Sandhu: It’s more of a conversation like you and I are having or like a CIO would have with their CTO, for example, or technology colleague or technology peer. So, it’s much more of an organic conversation, and the customer is actually feeding you more information as well so you can understand what the gaps are in their portfolio or in how they are operating their technologies.

[00:12:20] Neelam Sandhu: You’re getting more information from the customer, but it’s much more organic as opposed to having to extract the information from the customer when they actually do often shut down when they feel like you’re trying to extract information from them, or you’re going to have a conversation with them.

[00:12:34] Neelam Sandhu: That’s more helpful to you than to them. They’re so busy, especially tech teams today. Everybody’s swamped with security threats, technology issues, and so many technology solutions to manage. Everyone’s very busy. They don’t have time for a conversation that just gives you information. You want to make the conversation feel like it’s helping them, but it’s also helping you do your job.

[00:12:58] Neelam Sandhu: Then when you understand tech, as I said, bring in at the right time and for the right reasons, your solutions, or even sometimes suggest noncompetitive other solutions that you might be aware of in the market. As I said, really act as a consultant and a partner to the customer. My team found that we did not have to chase customers to set up meetings with them or have to make too much effort to get a meeting in the books with a customer.

[00:13:26] Neelam Sandhu: They were actually calling us. Some of our top customers were calling us every day, sometimes even on the weekends, but every day without a time schedule, they’d just pick up the phone and call because they wanted to bounce some ideas off of us. So, we had very high engagement from many of our customers that we were responsible for.

[00:13:44] Neelam Sandhu: Over time, that translated into multi-year eight-figure deals, which we were really seeing in other parts of the company. So, the proof was in the deals and the customers calling us to bounce ideas off of us. 

[00:13:59] Steve MacDonald: This is what you meant upfront. When we talked about how sales need to change, you were not seen as a salesperson.

[00:14:08] Steve MacDonald: You were seen as that expert, that consultant, that trusted advisor who cared. You built trust. The conversations you’re going to have with them shouldn’t feel like they just benefit you. They have to be focused on them, and if they get that over time, you build that trust.

[00:14:28] Steve MacDonald: But you have to be that expert in their business and that’s the difference. We become experts in our own babies, our own tech. I’m a SaaS founder myself. It’s very easy to get into this kind of mindset as long as they just know this is what we can do for them. Look at this. Nobody else does this. This is incredible.

[00:14:45] Steve MacDonald: You must first prove that you’re focused on their success. That’s what I’m taking away from this. 

[00:14:50] Neelam Sandhu: Yeah, exactly. The customer has to feel like you care about them and that they are getting value from conversing with you, and it’s worthwhile for their very limited time. Honestly, we actually did care about it as a team.

[00:15:04] Neelam Sandhu: We genuinely cared about our customers and our own business, too, and we were able to translate that into success for both sides because customer success is business success. 

[00:15:15] Steve MacDonald: Absolutely. This goes into another area that we want to cover in terms of what you’re talking about as a competitive advantage for the company.

[00:15:25] Steve MacDonald: There are all kinds of studies from Deloitte, McKinsey, Gartner, and Forrester. They’re all talking about how CX is the new competitive advantage. You can’t compete just on product or quality. But to do that, you created an entirely new benefit solution for the client,

[00:15:48] Steve MacDonald: You haven’t given lip service to understanding, supporting, and consulting with the client. You made a regular practice out of it. I almost think of you as the internal McKinsey. So, for everyone who’s listening here, tell us a little bit about the hard work that it takes to do that.

[00:16:06] Steve MacDonald: You’re actually creating something that sets the table, the setting in order to sell. You talked about getting eight-figure deals, multi-year deals that the company wasn’t ever getting before. So, if we’re hearing this as other CX leaders, other support leaders, customer support leaders, and success leaders, how does one go about doing that? I’m sure it doesn’t just happen by accident. 

[00:16:30] Neelam Sandhu: Yeah, it definitely doesn’t happen by accident. The team that I was running was definitely set up differently in the company. It was an experiment at first, and as it did well, it was growing. I built the team from scratch, and I built the team with a lot of technical expertise.

[00:16:49] Neelam Sandhu: That was the number one priority for me as I was building the team. If you hire technical experts, you can train them and mentor them on business and commercial acumen, but the vice versa is very hard to do. So, I hired people with 10, 15, or 20 years of technical experience to be the customer success managers, customer success, and senior managers, the different levels they were at, and be the key interface with the customer. 

[00:17:15] Neelam Sandhu: Then, their relationship with the customer became the anchor point around which everything else in the business related to that customer revolved. So, number one, and I can’t emphasize this enough, is having a team with enough technical expertise. Many of them have the ability to bring the commercial aspects into a conversation.

[00:17:40] Neelam Sandhu: But if they don’t, you can easily mentor them. Also, building a team that genuinely cares about the company and genuinely cares about the success of the customer and being customer obsessed. I’m sure that phrase has been maybe a little bit cliche that’s been thrown around a little bit in the market, but genuinely being customer obsessed.

[00:18:01] Neelam Sandhu: If the customer calls you while you’re busy with something else, which could be in the evening or on the weekend, you pick up the phone and want to pick up the phone them because you are genuinely interested in making sure that they’re successful so that your company is successful and has a high amount of engagement with them and that engagement can be in different ways.

[00:18:20] Neelam Sandhu: As I mentioned, face-to-face meetings are really important. I know the number of face-to-face meetings has declined, and maybe it’s starting to increase again over the last couple of years, but I can’t emphasize enough how important they are periodically.

[00:18:37] Neelam Sandhu: I wouldn’t say that needs to be the norm, but definitely periodically and then engaging through other channels as well. From a marketing perspective, having very personalized account-based marketing, AI plays a role, but knowing your customer inside out is also key to delivering strong account-based marketing that the customer wants to engage with and feels is relevant to them.

[00:19:04] Neelam Sandhu: Rather than just constantly pushing out every single email to them and using the customer success manager as a resource in functions across the company. So, understanding that they are the expert on the customer. They know the customer inside out and use them as a resource before reaching out to the customer in many cases, whether it’s the marketing team, the product team, or another team in the company, having that collaboration across groups so that when you do reach out to the customer, they’re not having to re-explain something to you, or they don’t feel like that you’re reaching out to them with something that isn’t as relevant to them or isn’t as.

[00:19:41] Neelam Sandhu: Detailing how it is molded for them is really important, but just building that customer-obsessed team with the right culture in terms of being customer-obsessed, being a good collaborator with other teams, being focused on making the business successful, and really having that technical expertise is also important.

[00:20:02] Steve MacDonald: A lot of what you said there, one of the previous conversations that we had, you talked about three different levels you spoke of. Level one is traditional agents that are interfacing with customers regularly. Level two was a new, higher quality agent, especially as AI is taking a lot of easy customer questions these days in funneling them.

[00:20:24] Steve MacDonald: You have to have higher-quality agents who understand their clients and have technical expertise, for example. Then, level three was the internal consulting group. Tell us a little bit about what you meant by higher-quality agents. Does a lot of what you just talked about apply to the higher-quality agents, or is that a different level of support for the customer that you’re talking about?

[00:20:49] Neelam Sandhu: So, at least from my experience in the model that I think works well, having a customer support team that augments the customer relationship is important in addition to customer success. However, customer support needs to work tightly with the customer success team to make sure that both sides are aware of any customer escalations and who those issues are impacting.

[00:21:14] Neelam Sandhu: So, if it’s impacting an executive, for example, at the customer, then making the right teams internally aware of that as that has a different impact on all of the teams on the customer side than it would if it was not impacting an executive. So, having a customer support team that is tightly interlocked with customer success is important.

[00:21:33] Neelam Sandhu: Secondly, you mentioned AI. AI certainly plays a role today in supporting customer support teams. You mentioned the easier types of questions. Being able to answer those for a customer so that they can type something into a self-service portal and get the answer within a second rather than having to make a call.

[00:21:52] Neelam Sandhu: But not at the expense of the human interaction with the customer. So, I’ve experienced this in some of my consumer interactions. You type something into an AI bot, and you’ve taught to go around in circles. You quickly want to be able to reach a human instead. So, making it easy for the customer to get a human is important so customer support teams remain relevant.

[00:22:10] Neelam Sandhu: The other difference, I would say, is that, in my way of thinking, many customer support teams are focused on reducing average handle time and the number of tickets with a customer. However, I used to track a metric that had several components that I would call customer stickiness.

[00:22:33] Neelam Sandhu: One of the things that I would look at is how many tickets a customer raises over a period of time. It’s the number of tickets that should be dramatically declining or generally low. I would actually see that as a red flag. I don’t think that’s a good thing. I know that means the supporting costs are reduced, but it means the customer is less engaged.

[00:22:52] Neelam Sandhu: They’re less engaged with your product because if they’re finding fewer issues with it, they’re less engaged with it. If they’re asking fewer questions about it, they’re less engaged with it. So that, for me, is actually a red flag. I did see that translating to renewal risk often. So, that’s one thing that I would say is slightly different from a customer support perspective, as well as the average handle time for a ticket.

[00:23:16] Neelam Sandhu: If it’s one minute or five minutes or an hour, that’s pretty good. It’s probably something that could be handled by an AI agent. It’s the more intricate issues that the customer needs space and time with you, and that might take a little bit longer to address, but as long as you’re highly engaged with the customer on those issues, both on the support side and the customer success side, so that they feel like they’re getting the right level of attention, that really is key.

[00:23:39] Neelam Sandhu: The only time I would think a long average handle time is a red flag is if it’s going on for a period of days, that would be what I would watch out for. 

[00:23:48] Steve MacDonald: That’s one of the things that I think is just the most important thing for any company, and you have a very unique point of view on it. The highest authority in any company is the customer, and if you are not regularly involved in conversations, you rely on what I call familiarity, right? Because all companies were in meetings all day, talking about the customer, what product, what feature, how do we sell? How do we get them into the pipeline? We talk about the customer so often that we think we know the customer, and as soon as we think we know the customer is the moment we start to slide. 

[00:24:21] Neelam Sandhu: Yeah. A hundred percent. 

[00:24:23] Steve MacDonald: So, that’s what I love. I love looking at customer support as an opportunity to be in conversation. That’s a very different conversation than what sales has. The conversation with sales has a shield that’s up in the middle of the conversation because I’m being sold to; I’m not being helped traditionally. That’s when you said the traditional sales has to change. That’s what you meant anyway, right?

[00:24:50] Steve MacDonald: You can’t just sell; you have to support, and if you do that, then you are selling, right? They’re going to buy from somebody they trust as an expert, and guess what? Experts make better products, too. 

[00:25:00] Neelam Sandhu: That is 100 percent true. Yeah, it just changes the game and makes the sale seamless. You don’t have to fight with procurement.

[00:25:09] Neelam Sandhu: There’s none of that because the CIO’s team has said they need this procurement process, and it just becomes an administrative step as opposed to a contract negotiation. That totally changes the game, and you get bigger deals, multi-year deals. The customer, as I said, was calling us every day, as opposed to us having to try and get time for the calendar. It totally shifts the conversation.

[00:25:32] Steve MacDonald: Everybody’s very aware inside of the company, up to the board level, of the importance of the product itself. What you’ve created as a service, but could you productize it? It is equally, if not more important than the product itself in terms of the company’s success. 

[00:25:48] Neelam Sandhu: Maybe you trust the professional services model where you say, if you want a customer success manager, you pay X amount a year, but you get just a wildly different relationship with the company.

[00:25:59] Steve MacDonald: I don’t know how many people would want to pay that upfront. But they’ll benefit from it, and the company will benefit from those eight-figure deals, multi-year deals, right? It’s that investment. Don’t ask your customers and prospects to pay for that. Deliver it, and you’ll reap those rewards. 

[00:26:16] Neelam Sandhu: Yes. Like the individuals on my team, the general productivity per salesperson in the company was 200,000 or 300,000 per salesperson.

[00:26:24] Neelam Sandhu: If you averaged it out across the sales team, the productivity per person on my team was at 21 million per person a year. It’s wildly different. Let’s say 300k, which is the higher end of the range I mentioned. 300k versus 21 million per person on my team. 

[00:26:41] Steve MacDonald: You were able to track that to direct new revenue gained. That’s the night and day difference. 

[00:26:47] Neelam Sandhu: Even if the gap is smaller, it still goes to show that customer success requires building a totally different relationship with the customer. It’s a whole different way of running a business, and the results of the world are different, too.

[00:26:59] Steve MacDonald: We talked up front that there’s probably more than one podcast we could do here, and we covered a lot of territory already, but I want to ask you one final question. If there was just one thing that you wanted the audience to take away from everything that we’ve talked about here today, what would that one thing be?

[00:27:18] Neelam Sandhu: Customers are increasingly making business investments when making a purchase decision. We see so many companies in different industries now calling themselves technology companies. The banking industry, for example, is increasingly referring to itself as a technology company and investing billions of dollars.

[00:27:38] Neelam Sandhu: For most companies nowadays, spending on technology is an investment decision, not just a purchase decision. So, technology providers need to invest in their customers and scale back their customer success teams. They should invest in them, evolving them to be much more of the core of the company and responsible for an engaged customer, and an engaged customer translates to a higher revenue number as well. So, being responsible for engagement and revenue. 

[00:28:13] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all of this wisdom. If people had follow-up questions, would it be appropriate to give them a link to your LinkedIn profile so they could reach out to you? 

[00:28:27] Neelam Sandhu: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to hear from the audience. 

[00:28:30] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Thank you for coming on and sharing everything that you did. I know there will be questions coming, so thank you very much. 

[00:28:36] Neelam Sandhu: Thanks very much. It’s great to speak with you.