How Marketers Can Create A Customer Success Tool To Fuel Sales Enablement

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Very few B2B sales organizations are creating their own customer success tools – resources designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solutions they provide in real-life customer scenarios. There’s really no better way to do it than to display your customer success results alongside those of your competition to enable your salespeople to make the claim with the evidence to prove it. It’s even more powerful when the details of the comparison are provided by an independent 3rd party.

John Ryan is CMO of Crossfuze, a company that comes alongside organizations looking to maximize their use of ServiceNow, a digital workflow platform that is changing the way organizations work and serve their clients. Listen to hear how John took an observation from his CEO about the high rankings their company received from ServiceNow and created a Customer Success Index for compelling differentiation. Crossfuze’s CSI is used inside his company to communicate their success with customers, as well as a tool for sales enablement.

The Best Response To A Complaint Is to Create A Solution

Last year, John’s CEO – Chris Howard was lamenting the fact that it was difficult to differentiate their company from their competitors with the raw C-SAT score ServiceNow used to rank their company. Many of their competitors had the same raw score they did, but it wasn’t an apples to apples comparison. That’s because each company ServiceNow ranked had its own unique number of customer responses. That got John thinking…

The more responses to customer surveys you have from which to create a score, the bigger the sample size and the more meaningful the answers typically are because you’re drawing from a bigger data set. His company – Crossfuze – had received many more responses than their competitors. So, John came up with ways to display their Customer Success Index by showing both the raw score AND the sample size in a quadrant format. The two together call attention to the validity AND the strength of their CSI as compared to their competitors.

How could your team use similar resources to develop a sales enablement tool that displays the customer success you provide?

When Salespeople Can Get Past Numbers On A Page, They Do The Buyer A Favor

Of course, John was interested in demonstrating how his company is providing a greater level of success for their customers than their competitors. In fact, that was the primary point his CEO had expressed about the issue. But John had another goal for his Customer Success Index as well – he wanted it to be of value to buyers. That’s because he knew that raw numbers alone wouldn’t necessarily convince a prospect to go with Crossfuze. They needed to see the unique role his company could play in their success.

The Way To A Buyer’s Heart Is Through Education

John makes a compelling point by saying that B2B buyers usually don’t make a lot of buying decisions each year, but when they do it’s for important projects that must succeed. He sees the role of the salesperson who is trying to win the buyer’s business to be an educator. They should be focused on providing as much great information as possible to buyers so they are well informed and able to make the right decisions.

That’s the reason John’s company provides a number of resources to buyers who are researching their options – best practices, tutorials, ebooks, webinars and videos, and blog posts – all for the purpose of educating buyers. He loves being a marketer, and he knows that the more he can help salespeople communicate Crossfuze’s value on every sales call, the more successful the company will be.

The Job Of The Modern Salesperson Is To Help The Buyer

There’s an old maxim, “Nobody likes to be sold.” True, but everybody likes to be helped. That’s a good thing because modern selling is more about helping than it is convincing and persuading. When buyers are helped to make the best decision for their situation, everybody wins – and revenue generation is a natural result.

John is a great example of a modern marketing leader who understands that the sales team can’t help buyers make buying decisions if they aren’t provided tools that can help them. That’s why he took it upon himself to formulate the Customer Success Index in a visual format that salespeople can use and then trained them how to use it.

That’s right – the CMO stepped into the sales enablement role because both the sales team and their buyers value from it. His quadrant-oriented customer success tool has become a visual indicator of his company’s effectiveness at bringing about customer success – and his sales team loves it.

Join Bernie and John for this episode. You’ll find yourself thinking more deeply about how you can use the data showing your organization’s success in ways that can enable sales and help buyers.

Featured on This Episode

• John Ryan on LinkedIn
• BOOK: Buyer Steps – John Ryan’s book
• Crossfuze
• Crossfuze on LinkedIn

Outline of This Episode

• [1:35] The story of how John and Bernie worked together in the past
• [2:45] CrossFuze, John’s company and his role as CMO
• [8:32] How John uses his Customer Success Index for sales enablement
• [12:31] Training salespeople to use the CSI at the right time
• [17:19] What’s on the horizon for the Customer Success Index?

Resources & People Mentioned

• How to get access to the replay of our webinar: The Impact of You Phrasing On Customer Conversations
• Service Now
• Accenture
• Soapbox
• Wistia
• The Selling With Social Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr

Connect With Bernie and Modern Marketing Engine

• https://www.facebook.com/modernmarketingengine
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernieborges/
• https://twitter.com/bernieborges
• https://instagram.com/bernieborges
• https://twitter.com/mmenginepodcast

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