Full Funnel Account Based Marketing: How the Post-Sale Team Helps Drive Revenue

Sirius Decisions’ Megan Heuer wrote about five myths in account based marketing, including the myth that the sales team already knows everything about their accounts. We assume our sales team has a full understanding of their accounts, yet we often overlook the amount of knowledge owned by our post-sale customer success teams. I’m encouraging you to take a full funnel approach to ABM. Consider aligning your post-sale customer success team as an integral part of any successful ABM strategy. Here’s why:

• Show off your post-sale team in the pre-sales stage to help clinch a deal with key accounts. Especially when you are selling software, you can position your post-sale team as a differentiator to set you apart from the crowd.
• The post-sale team understands common pitfalls, common support tickets and can help fix the problems higher in the funnel. Resolve those pain points to improve your product, and include them in your messaging and value proposition.
• Authentic relationships with prospects and customers. The customer success team is in the unique position of helping your customers every day. This means they have a unique and trusted customer relationship that no one else in your organization has.
• Reduce the sales friction. Because the customer success team has a different kind of relationship, often viewed as more of a partner than vendor, it can be very natural for them to ask for referrals and introductions.
• Share content and thought leadership messages, and engage on social networks. The customer success team has a network too! If you’re hiring right, your customer success team will also have deep relationships in the industry. Encourage and incent them to make introductions to sales.
• Listen for buy prompts with existing customers, and bring in the account management team for upsell. Again, when you hire the right customer success team, they have the advantage of talking with customers every day. Train them to hear buying signals, by catching pain points and frustrations that can be turned into sales opportunities.

It may be time to revisit the role of the post-sale customer success team in your full funnel account based marketing strategy.