Customer Success as a Culture—How Return Path Prioritizes Customer Success, Before a Contract
To succeed with 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 Wes Antrobus, Director of Commercial Sales at Return Path. 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 Wes’ full contribution and get access to other sales executive viewpoints. Missed last week’s edition? Check it out here.
About Return Path
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in New York, Return Path is the world’s leading email data solutions provider. Every minute of every day, their clients and partners trust their data and insights to help them build closer, safer, and smarter relationships with their own customers. Return Path’s solutions provide the insight companies need to build closer connections with their customers, defend their brand against threats, and make confident, forward-looking business decisions.
Providing Customer Feedback is a Priority
As Director of Commercial Sales, Wes makes it a priority for his team to provide feedback to the Return Path product team on what the customer needs and wants. In addition, Wes and his team do thorough discovery to ensure the right solution is sold, all while ensuring he and his sales team understand the customer value prior to signing a contract. Wes and his team put customer success first.
The Commercial Team Wes leads at Return Path is focused on bringing new business bookings to the organization. They accomplish that in two ways:
- Having a direct relationship with the end customer, and
- Working with the customer indirectly through one of their partners.
Set Proper Customer Expectations
Wes and his team have a big role in contributing to customer success as ultimately the expectations that they set throughout the sales process are critical to ensuring the customer gets off to a good start using their products or services. “If we provide them with the wrong technology or scope out the wrong service engagement, it can lead to an unhappy customer and get them off on the wrong foot which can take a lot of time to get them back on board as a happy customer,” explained Wes.
Active Participation in Customer Conversations
Wes actively participates in customer conversations, and in most cases his interactions with customers happen during the initial sales cycle. During an average week, Wes participates on 5-10 customer calls and is very active in more strategic sales pursuits to ensure the customer is always first throughout the process. While in those customer conversations, Wes’ goal is to make sure his sales team fully understands all aspects of the customer’s email program (campaigns they run, frequency, as well as how they monetize, etc.), the technology they use, and the resources they have available. “As we get the full understanding of these questions, it is then our goal to provide our customers with the right technology or services to gain more visibility into their email program, help them fix any current issues, and ultimately give them a bigger return on their email marketing campaigns… and make them more money!”, explained Wes.
Ensuring the customer is always first throughout the sales process can sometimes be a challenge, but Wes’ team overcomes this by making sure that they are properly scoping the needs of their customers and not just providing them with technology or services they don’t need. His team takes responsibility for providing the right solution to make the customer successful, regardless of motives they may have to hit a certain target.
Read Wes’ full contribution to the ebook entitled, “Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition” and learn from 6 other sales executives like Wes.
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.