5 ways to accelerate sales with customer success | Lincoln Murphy

This is a summary transcript of Lincoln
Murphy’s
great talk at a sales acceleration summit.

The 5 key points covered

Identifying your ideal customer

Learning their desired outcome

Entering the conversation

Cloning your best customers

Lincoln’s dirty little secret

1. Identify your ideal customer

First of all we need to identify your ideal customer now. The ideal customer
profile has several inputs: Ready, willing, able

Customers that are:

Ready to make a change

Willing to put in the effort

Able to put in the money

Most people stop here. We ask who’s your ideal customer? You tend to just say
anybody who’s ready and able and of course that’s oftentimes a huge
addressable market and ultimately not very targeted.

Before we go any further though I want to talk about something that’s really
important, it’s situational awareness.

Situational awareness

It’s not ‘hey who’s your ideal customer forever’, you know? Really this is
about a situation and the situation has a definition which is two-fold.

1. It has a goal.

2. It has a timeframe.

So if I’m going to develop an ideal customer I’m going to do so with a
particular goal in mind and for a particular time frame.

Maybe it’s for the next 90 days I want to get more more customers. You know I
want to get 10 new customers in the next 90 days. In the next six months I
want to add a hundred thousand dollars in ARR or I want to add a million
dollars in ARR or whatever. Maybe it’s in the next six months I want to add 10
new customer advocates right? People that’ll go out and speak on our behalf or
whatever. Whatever your goal is, be specific about it and then have a specific
time frame for it and that’s the situation.

Once you have the situation you come back and you say ‘okay well I’m going to
develop that ideal customer for the situation’ and just doing that changes
even the ready willing and able inputs. It changes who we might go after but
there’s also these other four inputs which are really important.

The four other inputs that are important

1. Success potential

2. Acquisition efficiency

3. Expansion potential

4. Advocacy potential

Success potential.

This is really simple. If you’re a product like Gainsight that is a Salesforce
native product it would be, I would say a little bit foolish, to go after
customers and market and try to sell to customers that don’t already use
Salesforce.

It doesn’t mean if somebody comes to us and says hey I use a different CRM I
would like to you know try to use your product. We might still talk to them
but there would be caveats and a lot of warnings and a lot of like ‘this is
not ideal’ but we wouldn’t spend a lot of time so we might end up working with
them if it’s a win-win for everybody but we’re probably not going to go out
and market directly to people and try to reach out to people that aren’t using
Salesforce.

That’s the ‘success potential’ at a technical level. We look back at our
data and some companies didn’t find success with our product. They just
weren’t a great fit for us so at the very least you we want to figure out
who isn’t our ideal customer.

We’ll also say these other customers were successful and here are the
characteristics they share and we want to go get more customers like those.

Acquisition efficiency.

We all know this there are some customers that are easier to reach and faster
to close so, if your situation is in the next 90 days we want to add 10 new
customers then don’t go after customers that have 120 day sale cycle right?

If you’re trying to get customers in the next 90 days we really have to
understand the acquisition efficiency as well and the way that you know
the weight applied to these inputs depends on what your situation is. Again,
if your board of directors want you know why your churns too high, we want
more customers with more success potential basically, then your gonna weight
that a lot heavier

If they say we don’t care about that, which is probably a bad way to do it,
(not too many boards of directors would say that these days and if they do you
should challenge them because that’s not cool) but they might say look I don’t
care about success I just want more paying customers of any kind then you know
acquisition efficiency might be one of the inputs that you weigh heavier.

Expansion potential.

Maybe a board says look, you know we have a departmental product here that you
can sell into the marketing department of companies of all shapes and sizes
but we know that to make us more valuable to acquisition targets we want to
have more customers that have expansion potential. You’ve sold into marketing
but other departments within the organization could could actually use it and
so we want more of those types of customers on the books because potential
acquirers might say that’s a lot more valuable, so that you know the ability
to sell more of your product internally whether upsells cross cells are just
expanding their use.

Advocacy potential.

I want more customer that can be brand advocates for me and that go out and do
testimonials and speak at my events and stuff, well I probably also going to
weight the success potential kind of heavy because people who aren’t
successful with your product aren’t achieving their desired outcome probably.
They’re not going to be your advocate for you but I also want to make sure
that these types of companies have the ability to be advocates. Maybe a good
sanity check here is, you know don’t if this is an input that’s really
important to you then don’t go after customers that can’t be advocates like
government contractors that can’t even admit that they exist right? They’re
probably not going to be an advocate for you.

So the proper order of all of this just so you have an understanding is:

A. We want to develop that ideal customer profile

B. Then you start doing things like persona development empathy mapping

C. Then figuring out happening to what types of distribution and what types of
outreach to use.

A lot of times we start with personas and marketing and in sales will say “I
am going to sell to the CMO” or something but the CMO of a fortune 500 company
is very different than the CMO of a start-up and so you have to first start
with that ideal customer profile.

I believe this to be true, this is basically the thesis for everything that
I’m saying today you **can’t really know what pitch pricing or messaging or
really lots of other things to use until you are clear on your ideal customer
profile. **Ultimately this is what’s going to help you qualify the company,
not the contact that you know in sales. We oftentimes will talk to somebody
they say ‘no they don’t have Bant’ or whatever it is and they were kind of
like ‘okay we’ll move on’ but if we know that this company that is in our
ideal customer profile, they fit that profile, then we’re going to go find
somebody else there because we know that they are in fact qualified. They are
ideal customer it’s just that person is sort of standing in our way.

2. Learn their desired outcome

The next thing is is we have to understand their desired outcome. I know this
is really ‘how does customer success help you really accelerate your sales’
well, customer success is helping your customers achieve their desired outcome
through the use of your product which it is.

The desired outcome by the way consists of two parts:

1. Required outcome.

2. Appropriate experience.

My example is always flying commercially in the US. I want to get someplace
fast and safe, I can do that with just about every carrier but my experience,
my appropriate experience, is with Virgin America. Somebody else’s might be
Spirit airlines I’m probably not going to feel like I was successful if I flew
on Spirit Airlines right? I’m not going to have that great feeling of success.

Desired outcome is really important to understand. It has both required
outcome and appropriate experience and that’s critical to understand. It’s
also critical to understand that bringing together your ideal customer profile
and there it is and their desired outcome is sales rocket fuel, it absolutely
is, and one of the reasons why it is, is because it allows you to enter the
conversation

3. Enter the conversation.

Enter the conversation already taking place in your customers mind. A great
salesman, one of the best ever said that. He happened to say that in 1937 and
it was mostly in his experience from the early nineteen hundreds in late
eighteen hundreds. It’s still and actually I think even more true today and if
we say that success is really their desired outcome then the topic of the
conversation, that’s in their mind, is their desired outcome.

That’s the main thing but it’s good to understand that there’s a desired
outcome for the company and a desired outcome for the personas and they might
not be the same.

The desired outcome for the company you know is ROI or success, monetary
success, market share or whatever. In a small business the people might share
that and you can talk about those things in your outreach emails, in your
sales conversations, in a more emotionally charged way that ties directly to
the success of the company. In a larger company the people you’re talking to
may be disconnected from the success of the company in those types of ways and
so you have to be aware of that.

4. Clone your best customers.

This is really simple. Go into your customer success product like Gainsight
and figure out who your most successful customers are, the ones with the
highest customer health score, highest customer lifetime value, or the
companies that grew their lifetime value the most over their time with you. Go
find more customers just like them, that’s the simplest way you can use
customer success to accelerate sales. All this other stuff notwithstanding
that’s amazing.

5. My dirty little secret.

Ugly designs and bad sales copy in your emails and a poor sales processes and
all of that stuff? The dirty little secret is this, if you understand your
ideal customer profile and you understand what their desired outcome is,
you’re not going to have to do things as polished and as buttoned up as as you
might. You will still find a lot of success and that’s kind of the dirty
little secret.

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We hope you enjoyed our summary of the video ?