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Here’s something we see everyday – sales cycle was 12-18-24 months long. 100+ meetings, demos and calls involving scores of stakeholders.

Deal gets signed...and there’s a 30 min handover call to transfer all that history from AEs to Account Managers and CS. 30 mins to cover literally hundreds of decisions, interactions and expectations. Impossible. 

 

Handover is a massive Revenue Leak moment. 

 

  • PEOPLE
    The AE knows the key players on the buyer side, especially highlighting who has power, who will be getting the actual value, and any detractors. If the AM doesn’t know these relationships, they’ll blunder, or at best lose valuable weeks learning who’s who.
     
  • PROBLEMS
    If CS doesn’t know what buyer business problems Sales promised to solve, then they’re not going to optimize the rollout, and the buyer’s going to get frustrated that they’re not getting the value that was promised.
     
  • TIMELINE
    The buyer probably told the AE about key dates driving their decision. If the AM/CS doesn’t know those dates, then they end up having to rush at the last minute, or even worse, miss committed deadlines.


What happens today is the AE and AM have a perfunctory handover call, then the AM has a kickoff call with the customer, where the buyer has to rehash all the info they already gave to the AE. The buyer feels like they’re wasting their time with duplicative effort. The AM is only getting one side of the story from a biased narrator. And at the end of it all, time to value is delayed, which hurts the chances for expansion. 

 

The fix: Collaborate on your first QBR agenda right out of the gate.

  • AE and AM/CS discuss who from both buyer and seller side should attend the first QBR. Include the higher level power on the invite. They’re more likely to say yes while the decision to move forward is still fresh
     
  • AE and AM/CS agree what metrics you’ll be reviewing at QBR. This will force PS and CS to prioritize feature enablement and config for those metrics that the buyer already said was important. It will also boost your credibility that you’re thinking in terms of business impact
     
  • AE and AM/CS schedule out the milestones from today to QBR. Dates drive decisions, so make sure everyone is on the same page
     
  • AM/CS reviews the draft agenda with Buyer You’re starting from a good place. Shows the customer you thought about it and you’re buttoned up. Get them to validate the metrics and people now 
     
  • AM/CS use this doc to work through the quarter both internally and externally so there are zero surprises at QBR


 

PRO TIP – Use Align to manage the deal, and all these targets should already be captured as part of pre-sale. Then use Align to manage these expectations with a nice 3 or 6 month timeline snippet covering the time from Closed-Won or Go-Live to first QBR.

 

SUPER PRO TIP -  the AE should stay connected throughout the time-to-value window. It’ll reassure the buyer, forestall any misappropriated efforts and make it super easy to be there at “Thank God I Gave you Money Day”. The AE can ask for a reference and the AM can start talking cross-sell and upsell. 

 

AE and AM/CS agree what metrics you’ll be reviewing at QBR. This will force PS and CS to prioritize feature enablement and config for those metrics that the buyer already said was important. It will also boost your credibility that you’re thinking in terms of business impact

 

I really appreciate the way you articulated this, Tom, because I think it touches on 2 such important points:

  • First, that you need alignment amongst Sales, CS, PS, and often even other teams like Product on what is important to your customers (and therefore where your teams/services/products need to go).
  • Second that metrics need to speak to what the buyer already told you is important in order to be meaningful to them!

I’ve seen it make such a big difference when the CSM and AM (or AE) make sure that the metrics they’re reviewing at QBR speak to their impact on the key business initiatives that the customer revealed during the handoff process (hopefully you’re also talking about these things during the buying process, and after the handoff!).

At Clari, we’ve even used templates (i.e. slide decks) in the past to make sure that the customer’s key business initiatives (or strategic growth initiatives, as we sometimes like to call them) are part of the QBR/EBR. 

Is anyone else using templates to incorporate the customer’s business initiatives into your QBR or EBR deck? What do they look like for you?

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