Streamline sales team onboarding in IT architecture documentation

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[Music] hello and welcome i'm very excited to have you with us today um for a really interesting topic for today's webinar we all know that the handoff between your sales team and your customer success team can make or break your relationship with the customer um it also sets the stage for attention down the road and when done correctly it can result in an excited customer who's ready to get tons of value out of your product and maximize the solution with confidence but when done poorly we know that the customer can be left confused about next steps a poor handover or handoff leads your customer lacking the support and structure they need to realize your products full value we all know this but how do we solve for it in today's webinar uh we're gonna hear from myself darren chad i'm co-founder um and head of growth at hugo we have brit morgan um an account executive at hugo who runs our sales team and asha who heads up customer engagement and customer success for the team so a few great voices who do this stuff day in day out so what we're going to chat about today to help you solve this problem is firstly why the handoff from sales to customer success is so important a ton of tips and tricks to implement a much better handoff process that you can walk away with today and how hugo can help you in that successful handoff as part of your sas tech stack i might hand over to brit at this point to talk about why the handoff is so important [Music] thank you darren so in the world of sas customers have so many choices and and the power to choose many different options and so we really have to be really diligent around creating value early on and we do this by introducing the csm early on in the deal cycle and creating that relationship that adds value over um a longer period of time right because sometimes when we're closing deals we close a small fraction of a deal that might be might expand um to a larger one later and so it's incredibly important not just for the customer success role but also for sales um as we see that happening the handoff from sales to cs is incredibly important to retain those lifelong relationships between the customer and the company um and also for expansion like if we're working with um you know product led growth company here at hugo and so when we're when we're handing off that deal to see us like that's an incredibly important moment right we have to get it completely right and we have to create value from the get-go and um it's a really important process and if you get it wrong right you can have churn and lose a much bigger deal down the line as we expand into some of those companies i think also bri we talked a little bit about this um last week i think but like from a sales perspective also thinking about enablement and not just closing the deal right um and so having the sales team also have a bit of an enablement role during the sales cycle um so you're able to not just go from sell sell sell and here's like the onboarding and enablement it's actually part of the process and so you're getting customers in the door that are benefits they're already looking to grow and expand and they're getting a lot of value from the product in the early stages as part of your sales cycle and not just like this afterthought um so i think that's like an interesting thing as well it's not a real relationship like as a customer nothing annoys me more when you've finally got this relationship with an accounting executive the deal's ready to close you're spending a lot of money in many cases and then as soon as you sign the contract you hit that document but see you later you're over there usher on someone's success team i'm like dude we've been hanging out for three months trying to you know show me the value of this product and get it over the line and you've like flipped me over so having success involved during the sales process makes it feel like a much more genuine organic handover right because i already know my customer success manager um they've already been a part of it they're not uh just this new kid on the block the day the deal yeah and also that sales is adding extra value it's not just negotiation and contracts and the best deal possible but it's actually adding like how can we help you how can we improve your like time to value and things like that so it's pretty pretty interesting yeah there's no more golf courses and country clubs right that's like that's how can we actually add value to what your pain is and i think that sales has changed tremendously since i've been in um this career and i it's it's actually fun to see see the change and um i think cs has a big part of that right like and exactly what you said usher like creating that bridge early on and um or maybe darren you mentioned it where you're creating that relationship between the cs person and and the client like right off the bat so they can get a sense of who they're dealing with down the line and they're not like i had this great relationship with my account executive early on and now she won't answer my call because she's working on posting other deals right they already know usher they get the sense of what to expect and adding value right from the big thing yeah also one thing um we talk about customer experience but i also think we should touch on um team experience or internal experience um what's interesting as well about like traditional models or broken models is that it can create some tension internally um a sales person can then you know close a deal hand it off to success and the information might not necessarily all the information might not necessarily be there right and then it's a bad handoff and a bad kickoff and successes blaming sales and etc um and so like it can be kind of interesting when you start to build a more hybrid model or or be more thoughtful about the handoff process um and the onboarding process is it can actually improve some of that internal um challenges or reduce some of that tension dissolve some of the silos there that you see like with historical or traditional approaches so i think like we think of it in two buckets like customer experience and then also like internal experience as well one thing that i've seen happen um out there which is which has been really great is to think about sales and success as having the exact same job um but what makes them different are to focus on different parts of the pipeline so sales is focused on the top end of the pipeline success is focused on the next stage in the pipeline really what they're doing is trying to create customer value which is measured in revenue in many cases for many many businesses um but moving away from this idea of sales is for closing deals customer successes for keeping them because that then drives that behavior of the tick and flick right where my deal's closed that's how i'm incentivized that's how i'm motivated as a salesperson um i'm out and success not wanting to spend any time until we have a live customer to retain so think about incentives i think that's one way that can be done quite quite easily maybe it's moving away from a very traditional commission model looking at um you know kick like certain kickers and things like that for retention or delaying when sales folks earn their commission but bringing the success incentives earlier on um the traditional sales up here and success down there i don't think it works in modern stats particularly when you when customers have the flexibility to to choose something else next month or next year it's no longer those big multi-year contracts yeah i think um some tactics and and maybe going a level down um just some tactics that i've seen teams do and some of the things that we implement as well what i find one tactic that's interesting as you said about bringing the timelines closer down is introducing cs earlier in the in the sales cycle and not just an after sort of closed one thought and it can take a lot of different forms i've seen it in different ways one of them for example is um to be involved in some of the later stage meetings maybe it's to discuss the customer success roadmap what is what is the team going to do for this business how are we going to support you over the next 30 60 90 days for example um or going into a two-year contract like what does that relationship look like um so that's kind of interesting brit we've done this as well i've joined some of your conversations to talk a little bit about how cs is going to be supporting the team moving forward um and it has a lot of interesting benefits um one from a from a process perspective um but also from an experienced perspective as we talked about it makes the customer feel um more it feels more seamless that process less of a stage and more of like a continual relationship and also as we talked about it reduces some of those silos so when the team starts when you have a big cs team and a big sales team a lot of that information and handoffs and things like that can gets kind of silent and so having that alignment together um reduces that um also what i've seen uh it's a little nugget as well sometimes that call with success and sales together with the prospect actually creates an opportunity to align on some of the goals and challenges um and sometimes things can come up which is kind of interesting like something that we may not have spotted earlier or a new um development that the prospect is talking about and so it creates an additional opportunity to provide value and align on how we can support the team going forward yeah you're reminding me actually talking about silos one of the things that's worked really well for us as a business as we've scoured out our sales and success functions is this idea of continuous handover instead of you know closing a deal and even if you've got the best checklists and agendas and process for handing things over rather thinking about um how we can have that going the whole through the whole deal cycle so for us we share meeting notes via our slack integration so as soon as anyone takes notes on hugo um it goes into a slack channel so others in the team get that um get that exposure to the conversations that are already happening so it's not this big surprise that's dropped on the success team they know what's coming down their pipe they know the sorts of conversations that are happening they're across the development of these deals again making a much more seamless handover when it's time for them to pick up exactly and also creating a template right like with hugo and having all the the whole thing that osher would need or the cs team would need um right there within hugo and pushing that to the crm pushing it to slack so that osher is notified and and has all the information that he needs for his um kickoff call [Music] yeah actually it's a um perfect segue because i wanted to talk a little bit about some of the ways that you can improve your handoff process and i think that was one of the first things i wanted to touch on is having a standardized internal handoff meeting um and so we talked a little bit about this but cs and sales should agree on what's needed in order to launch an account and also what is like um an onboarded customer having a definition and a shared definition of what that is um is really really important and when you have a formalized meeting template um just make sure that everyone's aligned and um the transition is smooth um if you're doing it haphazardly or like ad hoc sinks on on a deal that's closed and a handoff it can be a little bit messy and things can fall through the cracks so what's really important and things that we've seen really effective sort of processes here is one including the basic information things that you have in your crm and your customer info like um objectives red flags things like that um uh some some of the tech stack that they're using implementation needs all those sort of important basic information but then also adding in some some other things um on top of that so some additional context like what's the sentiment like um has there been any issues that we need to to go through together very clear sort of important information but having that standardized process makes the meeting run more efficiently and also again alignment we've talked a lot about this but having that alignment as well when there's a standardized set process and lastly just the actions nothing falling through the cracks we know exactly how we run our meetings um and once you've done this a couple times and you run through the process a few times you'll see you'll have better meetings more effective meetings and a much smoother handoff process absolutely in the in that expectation setting whether it be internally or externally with the customer is incredibly important right they they want to know how often and when they're going to be meeting with their csm to oftentimes on board hundreds of folks in the company who may not even interacted with with the the tool or the platform and so having these expectations set and so they know exactly when you're gonna be meeting with them and and they can get you the information that you need as the customer success person is incredibly important to make sure it goes successfully so that you can can add the value so that we do enable the whole team and that we keep the customer for years to come and we have this reoccurring um revenue stream right so those are really important pieces that um are obviously like incredibly important to assass platforms such as hugo that's product led and um so yeah it's definitely something to to think about [Music] yeah you um you're reading my mind because the other thing that i wanted to talk about was actually preparing and aligning with the customer or the or the prospect um before the call so in this case it's a customer if it's a handoff but what's interesting from my user research what we see teams and people that actually one just prepare for meetings obviously have more um better meetings and more efficient meetings right but if you go a step further and you actually involve the guest or the attendee and in this case the customer it can really uh do some awesome things and have some really high impact uh on your sales and success process um so we see this in a few different ways as well but some some quick tips and tactics here um sharing the proposed agenda before the meeting with the option to add or edit or change is is really really helpful and i'll talk a little bit about it or another one is like a checklist of what to bring or prepare to the meeting having that up front preparation and sort of transparency with the customer with the with the client with the prospect uh it creates higher morale more sort of efficiency as well um and really shows the sort of professionalism that you're bringing to the table and um creates like a really really helpful way to kick off like a customer onboarding session um so i would highly recommend doing not just the internal prep but also the external prep exposing that to the to the prospect or to the customer in this case um and leaving your customers feeling really aligned really valued and really stimulated from the get-go yeah that makes me real like reminds me actually i'll share like deals that we've worked on where the more that we can get them to invest and the more that we can get them to interact the more enabled they become so it's actually you know sometimes i think sales people especially and cs folks as well they're like okay let's just make this as easy as possible for them which is great like we want to we want to add value we want to make it easy we also want to get them to engage early on and i think exactly what you said creating those that checklist and getting them to engage as early as even before the kickoff call we've seen in our experience that can be those can be better enabled and more successful companies with the product so not a bad idea another tip that i wanted to share with everyone um and with our listeners is around context and i sort of call this um context is key right for effective uh transitions and handoffs so nothing is more frustrating for a customer to repeat what they have to say during a sales cycle right or what they've discussed in the past it's a really big no-no um i'm sure everyone can attest to it or appreciate or understand like having to repeat things is not a nice experience and from a sales perspective it can majorly impact the start of a customer relationship um when i say sales perspective i mean just in the whole the whole organization and team and so what's really important is that we know that you need to take notes obviously um and store that information retain that but most importantly recall it that's like the really key bit here it's easy to take notes um but in order to recall that to cs and to the other parts of the organization before the kickoff call is hugely hugely important um we don't want to have to ask the same sort of questions again do discovery calls again miss key information for implementations and technical things that we need to know about so having that um retained and recalled is is super super important i think as well the the customization of your success flows depends on having that context right so if i'm a csm who takes an account and i'm learning these things on the fly there's only so much i can personalize the experience if i've got a really good understanding of the pain points that brought you to the product um what made you know what helped the deal close the stack you're using the politics and dynamics of your organization i'm gonna head straight into a killer onboarding session or whatever the first touch may be so much easier to do your job and customers way happier too for context one of the reasons in our view why this doesn't happen all the time why it is the norm that custom success in their handoff jumps in and redoes half the sales folks work from the beginning of the sales cycle is because we don't have centralization of these customer insights you might have sales living in the crm your success living across a bunch of different tools and everyone else in the business uh obviously not having access to even those places so when i want to understand everything about a customer i literally have to start digging around through tools and tapping everyone on the shoulder um centralized meaning productivity and and and having a central place for meeting nodes is obviously what we do at hugo um the shameless plug there makes sense in this context because um being able to take notes connected to your calendar means that all of the notes all the meeting preparation all the actions all the tasks everything relates to that prospect now customer is stored in one spot um that that allows you right to go and have everything you need as the csm from all the previous interactions even without that hand that you know formal handover um so we highly recommend that obviously as a nice solution here that's worth checking out um and to ash's point the recall piece is super easy because um automatically when i jump into my meeting i've got all of this information all of this knowledge all of these tasks actions and so on and everything else uh brought up right in front of me um so hugo is a great solution for handover because the power of hugo is obviously across the organization yeah yeah and on that um what was interesting i you know talking to a recent team that we that we just um boarded um one of their challenges was around they were massively growing and scaling and hiring a lot of new people with lots of different experience experience levels within the organization and also onboarding a lot of customers at the same time and information was sort of in a bunch of slack threads in a bunch of different places in crm as you mentioned and other docs docs as well um so what one of the tips that i wanted to share too is around um once you have that sort of centralization and accessibility also like building a bit more structure right um we kind of talked a little bit about it too but one of the tips that i wanted to share is like having some structured forms structured checklist um structured templates that you use for meetings because even if you do have it centralized it can still be hard to glean insights and information for your handoff or for the the stuff that you need um so i would really recommend thinking about um you know being thoughtful about the process and the structure and how you're taking notes and also how you're surfacing them as well to make it really easy you don't have to dig all the time so that would be my my other tip there once you've sort of centralized things also think about the structure and i'm building a process around that i might add a shameless plug as well with hugo i mean obviously we have templates right and we have a template library and we have some incredible templates already there for for the cs handoff and from exactly what we're doing so if you're not already using hugo and you know you're interested you should go check it out go check out the library and um and and see what you think but i think asher i completely agree like we already have these concepts of repositories of information for the sales cycle right they live in the crm but it's incredibly hard to surface that data if it's not structured and what hugo does like i think the magic and the beauty of hugo is that you you create that you create that structure that process within the templates within the docs and it's a total game changer right you can dig through and i'm sure you've done it in your career right through the notes of salesforce and like piecing together this picture where when you can when you can have it already structured exactly how you want to receive it or or work with the sales department um it's just such a game changer and it's why um hugo especially is like so useful for the customer success role and the sales role right um and and every role in the company but you you you guys know like as well as i do like we really do see it being effective in those two roles and so yeah that go to the library and hugo templates and check out some of the um relevant templates to to you guys to the whoever's viewing this and i think it's a great place to get started yeah um conscious conscious of time we've covered a ton um some war stories and some more formal tips um so i might just leave with one one thought that i i heard at a custom success conference that i was speaking at imagine if you've got one goal through all of this if you were to delete your email signatures as your account executive as your customer success manager and whatever other role you play in this process the customer shouldn't know when you've handed off right they may be building relationships with different people at different times in their relationship but they should not know at which point you're no longer the responsibility of sales and at which point you're a responsibility of customer success that's a seamless handle where i'm my relationship the organization's developing as i've got different needs but i can't see the the um you know the kaching of the commission being triggered in one sense before i start talking to the next person who's focused on activation and retention and so on um so i think that's the big takeaway there seamless handoffs will pay off now and obviously well into the future um sales is now an ongoing process customer success doesn't just get and enlivened the deal's closed and hopefully through those ways of thinking um and obviously encouraging you to check out hugo too this is a key use case for us that we've been very focused on from a product standpoint hopefully we can help you create more customer advocates and and all while reducing churn so with all that in mind uh we appreciate you joining us today hopefully you've got some something to take away um to go and help the way you think about sales and customer success in your organization um thanks so much for joining us britt thanks so much for joining us asha great hearing about these things from your perspectives um in sales and customer success respectively and we look really we look forward to continuing the conversation and we'll see you next time thanks very much thank you thank you thanks [Music]