This is the fifth post in a series called “Lifecycle Management – what’s in it for me?” , which shows how to audit and transform your process at every stage of the sales cycle.
Link to the first article – Introduction
Link to the second article – Prospect or Suspect Stage
Link to the third article – Lead Stage
Link to the fourth article – Opportunity Stage
Closed-Won Opportunities ????
New Accounts
Congratulations on a job well done! For most companies, a Closed-Won Opportunity necessitates the creation of a new customer Account. That Account must be set up in your various systems and may require a credit check and additional information from other departments.
Do you still have to manually send files and requests to your in-house teams?
And is there typically a delay between an Opportunity being won and the right teams being notified to issue onboarding documents?
Does this delay when a product is accessible or a business is brought onboard? And does this unnecessarily delay when you can start invoicing your customer?
Your process is the first step in many customers’ first experiences working with your organization. A gap or delay may negatively affect the relationship with your new customer and will certainly postpone the receipt of real dollars into your coffers. Automation can help here.
Opportunity Number 4 for Automation: Closed-Won & New Accounts
Figure 6 – Selecting Close/Won in the CRM can initiate several workflows to enhance the customer’s onboarding experience as well as prepare internal departments to establish the account in order to invoice for business sooner.
It’s now time to provide the product or service and get paid for your efforts. Do you have a specific customer onboarding process? Having customers complete onboarding forms online will greatly reduce transcribing errors and how long it takes to complete onboarding steps.
You’ll also need to notify internal teams to prepare for upcoming work. Marketing Automation can initiate the onboarding process and issue a credit request based on a status set in the Opportunity form in your CRM.
If your onboarding process takes a few days, initiate it before the opportunity is officially won. The sooner you complete your onboarding process, the quicker you can invoice and start to receive payments. Initiate your onboarding process at a stage during the Opportunity phase where you have a degree of certainty that the customer will close the deal with you.
A nice touch would be to include a note from a senior executive acknowledging the business win with the customer. A simple, personalized ‘Thank You’ to all the people involved in closing the deal acknowledges the trust the customer has placed in your organization, and it can all be done automatically using the information already in your CRM.
Opportunity Number 5 for Automation – Automated Customer Welcome Pack
It’s easy to create a customer welcome packet and set it up to send programmatically. Include a list of key contact information, an overview of what the customer can expect in the coming days and weeks, and links to any immediately useful introduction videos or resources. If possible, also include an onboarding review that asks the customer to rate their onboarding and startup process. You can use this information to recognize trends and continuously improve to get ever closer to the perfect onboarding user experience.
After your customer is onboarded, is successfully using your products, and providing positive feedback through your regular connections, now it’s time to learn more about their business’s opportunity areas. While you could use your Business Development team for this work, there are opportunities for automation to handle the initial renewal steps.
Opportunity Number 6 for Automation – Cross-Selling and Renewals
Figure 7 – Introducing complementary products and services is a natural action for automation, but what about renewals? Current customers are 5-7 times less costly to renew than finding and onboarding a new customer – automate the process to increase the likelihood of the customer renewing before your competitors can court them.
Any time you can use automation to communicate, you should leverage it. Cross-selling additional products or services is one of those times. Based on the study of previous customer buying patterns and behaviors, you may have a degree of certainty that a customer purchasing product or service A typically benefits from product or service B. So, initiate that discussion automatically and engage your BDRs when your customer shows interest.
Similar Lead Scoring qualification parameters used early on in the Sales Pipeline can be adapted here to save BDRs’ time for when it matters most — when the consultative sell is required. HubSpot conducted a study that found companies using marketing automation see a 53% higher conversion rate compared to companies that don’t.
In addition to these automation opportunities, here are some other examples of technology or processes that are a good fit for records in the Closed-Won stage
- Use an online fulfillment company integrated with your CRM to send company swag or a small gift.
- Send an automated welcome email from their new CSM or AM, with pictures and brief bio.
- Personalized video creation apps your team can use to create one-off video introductions to send with their outreach.
- If you have a customer community, you can use automation to set them up in the correct groups, automate an invitation to login, and even pose some initial questions that they can answer through the community.
- Customer success software to help drive product adoption and reduce churn. This can also be used to identify interest in new products or features that lead to a happier customer and more revenue.
In the next post, we will cover the Opportunity: Closed Lost stage.
Measured Results Marketing has experience with transforming your sales processes for B2B companies like yours. If you want to chat about your needs, reach out , call us at 571-606-3106, or leave a comment on LinkedIn. Click here to learn more about MRM’s Revenue Operations Ecosystem™ and see if it is a good fit for your goals.
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