Upon returning from the Sales Enablement Society annual conference and hosting our Vendor Neutral Sales Tech Experience Zone last week in San Antonio, TX,  We were able to reflect on the feedback from so many buyers of sales technology, surrounding their success or lack of it when it came to the onboarding of their staff.

Sales Technology Vendors, how important is your customer’s success? Or maybe a better question would be, how important is your companys growth or even the longevity of your business?

Customer Success

Many sales tech solutions offer buyers to participate in a free trial or to start with POC that represents a reduced number of licenses. The buyers’ objective is to determine if there is a potential for return on investment (ROI). This is a crucial point in the buyers’ journey and the greatest opportunity for the vendor to shine.

A vendor who is focused on their customers’ success will almost immediately move to better understand their customers desired outcomes. Vendors with this focus know that without this understanding that the likelihood of conversion or an increase in the overall scope of licenses is highly unlikely. 

What Questions To Ask?

There are two types of questions, those that you should be asking the vendor and those that you should be asking yourself as you evolve through an onboarding or customer success strategy. These questions include but are not limited to; does your vendor understand your desired outcome before offering a solution?

How does the vendor define their own success? And does your vendors’ solution outcomes match your organizations’ objectives?

A vendor has accountability to its customers and if they are not able to demonstrate their willingness to align with their clients’ objectives, how successful could the buyers’ journey actually be? 

Milestones

What milestones are important to the customer? Vendors who integrate milestones into their onboarding or customer success strategies show continued progress and demonstrate their ability to help a buyer achieve their personal or organizational goals and objectives. A vendor may want to better understand a buyers’ most important milestone representing early success. For example, the migration of data into the vendors’ technology may be the buyers’ most important first step or maybe it’s the creation of certain fields that are unique to the buyer’s needs. Either way, each milestone represents a point in which each buyer associates value with your brand.

Your Goals and Objectives

If the goal of the sales technology vendor is to establish a long term relationship with a customer, they must focus on the steps that the buyer believes are required to achieve their objectives. Each of these steps should always be reflected in the milestones defined by the vendor within their individually customized customer onboarding or success strategy.

No buyer or customer is alike and you should never believe what works with one will work for another. What success means from one customer to another is the differentiator for a successful onboarding or customer success strategy. Vendor Neutral’s sales technology identification and selection resources including our Sales Tech Selector, Buyers Roadmap, and Questions To Ask are some of the free resources available through Vendor Neutral for buyers looking to simplify their sales tech selection process.