There it is. Another sale closed and added to the board for the month. Great. After spending two weeks working with the decision maker to have them buy-in to your product, it’s time to get the team onboarded and set-up for ongoing success. You enter in your notes and mark the deal as closed in your CRM. Looking to continue closing more deals, you move along to the next lead you had on your radar.
A week or so down the road, you receive an email and angry phone call wondering where the follow-up has been for onboarding and account set-up from said decision-maker. You were sure after marking the deal as done, the CS team would jump in to handle the next steps in the customer journey. But it looks like reality did not meet expectations, and this certainly isn’t a first!
I think every sales team will have experienced a similar story of communication breakdowns leading to issues with customer onboarding, which can be frustrating after all the work invested prior to closing the deal.
On the flip side, every CS team has probably experienced situations where they have struggled to obtain the correct information from the sales team about the account they are assigned to onboard. With important notes missing, the CSM will need to go on a “fact finding” mission or worse, ask the clients things they should already know. This can cause the onboarding to start on the wrong foot, which might affect overall customer experience.
When it comes to providing value, it can be difficult to hit on all cylinders and deliver the utmost customer experience, especially when it depends upon the execution and collaboration of multiple teams. Plainly stated, poor execution of onboarding can lead to loss in customer trust and satisfaction, and we all know first impressions count. This can impact churn which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid by having an onboarding process to begin with.
But it’s definitely not impossible to achieve a smooth handover from sales to CS and continuous collaboration between the teams. At the core of any cross-team collaboration is a well-structured and thoughtfully designed process. Having a tool which promotes this can prevent the scenarios described above arising.
Have one central place to pass account information from Sales to CS and without delay
In monday.com, building a board for Sales Handoff will ensure the free flow of information between the sales and CS teams, from the point of closing a sale to starting onboarding. All of the key information about an account, which the sales agent has gathered throughout the sales process, will be stored in one place, giving the Customer Success Manager an understanding of who they are dealing with, what the account is looking for and other key information before introducing themselves and starting the onboarding.
To ensure that onboarding can begin straight away and that new accounts will never be left hanging, automations can be added to the board. The CS team will then be automatically notified for every new deal closed. The account should then be distributed to the CSM who will lead the onboarding. Using the Chart View, the manager gets a visual picture of which CSMs have capacity to take on a new account, allowing for efficient resource management!
By integrating the board with Gmail or Outlook, an email can be sent in just a few clicks to the contact at the account, introducing their CSM and kicking off the process.
Of course, when dealing with clients, it’s important to have a reference point to your CRM. If you’re using monday.com to manage your CRM, you can easily link your onboarding board and CRM board for quick reference to client contact details. If you use an external CRM, you can easily integrate this with your monday.com boards via native integrations or via monday.com’s API and third party sites, like Zapier or Integromat.
Very important as well is the communication between CS and Sales throughout the onboarding process. Any important updates can be discussed directly on the board with full context of the customer involved, cutting down on internal emails and sync meetings.
Keep Onboarding Consistent and Collaborate Directly with Clients
To ensure that each CSM is managing their accounts’ onboarding consistently, build a robust onboarding process on a template board, which can be easily duplicated and used for each new account. You can use this type of board to define key steps in the onboarding process and to visually (and quickly) see which stage each account has reached.
For streamlined efficiency, you can make the board shareable and invite the client being onboarded as a guest in the board. The Timeline View, which can indicate major milestones in any onboarding, helps keep everyone on task and accountable throughout the journey.
Adding automations for upcoming due dates, helps to ensure everyone shows up to meetings and calls. It would also make sense to invite the sales agent in charge of the account, to this board so they can review important notes at any time and stay up to date in terms of the onboarding of their account—visibility with context has never been easier to accomplish!
Understanding Resource Management, Team Performance, and Identifying Ways to Improve
When looking to provide value to your customers, it’s important to be able to drill down on insights from your sales and CS teams and look at data such as how many accounts were passed per month, how many accounts each CSM looks after, account segmentations per industry, and the average time for completion of an onboarding, to name a few.
The Dashboards give managers of both teams the ability to get such insights and can help them achieve better resource management, review of team performance and to identify weak spots to improve upon!
Make cross-team collaboration easier and your customers’ journey seamless
Building and implementing cross-team processes within one tool which promotes visibility and transparency for all, is crucial for any successful organization to provide the best support and customer experience.
monday.com’s visualization helps tell the story of every account, automations (and integrations) create efficiency and accountability, and the ability to communicate in context and in one place, ensures nothing slips through the cracks. Start taking steps towards better cross-team collaboration today!
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