Satisfied customers can be a huge asset to your sales team

[nishat@264]

The reverse is also true: Unhappy customers can be a major roadblock for your sales team. So be sure to design your sales process in a way that closes the deal and turns customers into advocates for your company. When thinking about exit criteria for each stage, don’t just focus on the actions that will help your reps close the deal. Focus on the actions that will turn your prospects into long-term customers. To do this, you may need to consider post-closing steps.

“I asked other sales operations people in Austin, and they henan cell phone number list all told me the same thing: There are steps after you close a deal: There are steps after you close the deal. For us, there are eight steps that lead to getting the deal. Then step nine, which is where we hand it off to the implementation team. Step 10, which is the implementation in progress, and then step 11, which is the go-live. This company is now fully online with us, and we can track all of the steps. We know how long it takes for the customer success team to respond to the deal that we closed, how long it takes for the implementation period, anywhere from a few days to a month. And then the deal that we closed is now live.

So we can think of it as a closed deal without it being stuck in the implementation phase, which has been a problem for us for a while. Once our account manager closes a deal, it goes to an implementation team and a customer success team member. We actually have very defined responsibilities, who leads the conversation, who is responsible for scheduling the next conversation - that kind of thing. The account manager plays a secondary role.