Pre-Sales for Customer Success | Sumant Pal - Totango, Veritas
Pre-Sales for Customer Success | Sumant Pal - Totango, Veritas
Sumant Pal, Ex-Totango, asserts that pre-sales & post-sales exist in a sustained and continual continuum from a customer perspective, any breakage leads to churn.
TL/DR - Post Sales teams are going to see more and more revenue demands as the customers continue to buy more during the expansion phase. This is setting up a major culture change for the post-sales team on straddling competitive objectives - i.e., making customers successful and selling to them. Likewise, Pre-sales teams will need to think like post-sales to nurture and sell to prospects simultaneously.
Alok Shukla, in a conversation with Sumant Pal, Ex-SVP of Sales Engineering at Totango, Ex-Veritas, on why the presales and customer success are converging and why post-sales is the main revenue driver for most SaaS businesses.
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Chapters
0:00 Introduction
6:16 Customer Value
9:45 Should CS be selling?
15:11 Are there CS tools for mid-market?
17:41 Are pre-sales systems different than CS systems?
21:04 Which activity to automate - Human or Product?
27:01 Should Product Managers be incentivized?
A summary transcript follows.
Introduction
I started off as a technical software engineer. I spent five years writing code at Digital way back in Boston. I realized that I enjoyed a lot more talking to customers. So I moved from Digital to what was then Anderson Consulting and became Accenture and spent five years as a consultant. And I really enjoyed being at that intersection of sales, technology, and customer and understanding their problems and how to solve them.
Why Pre-sales and customer success are a continuum?
In my view, connecting pre-sales and post-sales is crucial for the success of a company, and there should be a smooth handoff between the two areas.
I believe customer success’s ability to carry the value promised during pre-sales through to post-sales is vital to retention and renewal.
Why is post-sales the new fulcrum of enterprise revenue?
A large amount of sales is now happening in the expand phase rather than the land phase, and customer success is now responsible for more sales than pre-sales.
However, I also believe that most Customer Success Managers and other folks in post-sale roles lack the sales gene, which makes it challenging for them to talk to the customer and drive the expansion of revenue. As a solution, CSM brings pre-sales engineers into that post-sales role for large deals.
Why can't you just have a product have a conversation directly with the users rather than a human mediation being required? My question is in reference to pre-sales and product adoption.
I agree totally.
What you have to do is to map the customer journey through your product in the pre-sales and in the post-sales and automate as much of that as you can.
Look at a non-automation scenario. Let us say the customer has been dealing with the sales engineer, and when the product crashes, he's probably gonna call the sales engineer or write an email to the sales engineer.
If you have automation and you set up your process correctly, the customer should interact with the product how you expect them to; the customers can be trained to complain and expect a response from the product system.
It's all a matter of expectation setting and the right process.
Should the Product Manager have sales incentives to design a product with good GTM features?
Yes, Absolutely.
I say that because, you know, in an ideal product, it should be easy to install such a product. It should be easy to manage. It should be easy to use. I mean, those should be the primary considerations when you design the product. So, from my point of view, in a frictionless ideal product, you don't even need CS, you don't even need support, and you definitely don't need pre-sales.