Customer Success as a Culture – How Tinderbox Aligns Sales with Customer Success
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 companies. Today we’ll highlight Adam Becker, Director, Sales & Account Management at TinderBox.
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 Adam’s full contribution and get access to other sales executive viewpoints.
About TinderBox
TinderBox was founded to provide sales teams a better way to create the assets they need to close deals. Since the company’s inception, the TinderBox team has led the industry by pioneering technologies that enable companies to use the information they have in CRM, CPQ, ERP and other systems to create, deliver and track sales materials online.
Focus on the Entire Customer Journey
Customer success is the focus of TinderBox’s entire business, and according to Adam, it should be for any SaaS organization. “Our customer’s success is the lifeblood that keeps this company afloat,” said Adam. “I spend my days understanding how we can improve our customer’s experience from the time they become a customer, through implementation of software to adoption of that software, and, ideally when we help them achieve the goals they originally set out with us. We affect the customer’s perception of success by going on that journey with them as a partner rather than simply a software vendor.”
Customer Success in the Middle
When you put customer success at the middle of your model, every other aspect of the company is geared toward the customers. Adam and the TinderBox team are responsible for representing the ‘voice of the customer’ to all different departments, which helps the company create alignment and ensure customer success is part of the company’s DNA.
What kind of questions do Adam and his team ask customers to understand how they engage with TinderBox’s products and services?
Know Your Customer’s Day-to-Day Lives
Adam explained that his team tries to ask questions that help them envision what the day-to-day lives of their customers look like. They ask questions such as, “What challenges do you meet on a daily basis that keep you from achieving your goals?”
How TinderBox Tracks Customer Success
Adam and his team track the success (or failure) of customer engagement with their products or services in 3 major categories across the customer journey.
1. First, throughout the implementation they track success by the timeliness of completing the project.
2. Second, once they have a successfully implemented project, they then focus heavily on adoption, and use individual user-by-user data to determine if the tool is being used to its potential.
3. Lastly, they measure success based upon their ability to help the customer meet their original objectives.
Voice of the Customer Matters
When it comes to ensuring the customer is always the hero for sales teams, Adam gives this advice: “Having a consistent (and loud) voice of the customer is critical. All areas of the business need to understand what’s working and what is not in order to change and adapt to the ever-evolving landscape. At TinderBox, we have small weekly meetings to talk about success and challenges across a number of segments of our business, then larger monthly meetings to dive into details and action items.”
Adam’s goals for 2016 include continued focused on adoption of TinderBox’s core products and aligning results to the business goals of customers. “But as we introduce new products into the market, I will also be spending more time adding value to our customers in new and exciting ways,” concluded Adam.
Read Adam’s full contribution to the ebook entitled, “Customer Success as a Culture: Sales Leaders Edition” and learn from 6 other sales executives like Adam.
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.