Sales and Support Handshaking Best Practices

We’ve re-evaluated the dynamics between sales and support, then created workflows that allow our teams to collaborate in ways that better serve our customers. We also acknowledge that our support team spends more time talking to customers than any other team, including sales. Companies regularly squander the knowledge their Customer Support Reps gain from the hundreds of hours of conversations they have in just a single week. We incorporate feedback from our support team not just into the product but also into our sales process. Here are a few things we’ve learned along the way.

Supporting the front lines

The conglomeration of Sales and Support forms the face of any company’s 1:1 communication with existing as well as potential customers. Demand generation drives people to your site, product marketing outlines the jobs your products do, and growth helps these people sign up. But the first human interaction people have with your company is with a member of the sales or support team. With so much on the line, these teams need clear workflows that remove any ambiguity about which team covers what.

Support will own the vast majority of these conversations because their directive is to be on the front lines providing real-time answers to leads and users who reach out via live chat, email, and social media. When the conversation strays out of the realm of a straightforward inquiry, the sales team steps in. Sales teams have to be selective about which conversations they jump into since the number of salespeople sourcing new opportunities is typically a lot smaller than the number of Customer Support Reps. In addition to providing customers with a speedy reply, having the majority of conversations owned by support, also preserves the bandwidth of the sales team by restricting conversations to topics where they can provide value.

Sales take the lead

One of the workflows we’re always trying to optimize and improve is the way we communicate with leads who initiate a conversation with our team. After running a few tests we established that our Sales team is the most appropriate starting point for all conversations with leads.

Management team found that leads place a huge premium on the speed of a response, but they are also more likely to have questions about which products are best suited to help them achieve their business goals, how much the product costs and how to schedule a live demo. However, some of the people that write in as leads have in-depth technical questions about how our integrations work, our API rate limits and other topics that are generally out of the area of expertise of our sales. At that point, our sales team member feels relieved to be able to pass the conversation over into the capable hands of a Customer Support Engineer.

Context is key

What does it feel like to be the lead or customer in the middle of this process? Do we risk alienating them by making them feel like they need to explain who they are and what their problem is over and over like a broken record? Nothing is more frustrating than being passed to yet another person who has no more power to help you than the last four people you spoke with. That’s why a key step in this process is to provide context to our colleague to whom we are passing the baton. We do a lot of this through customer attribute we’ve set up in GIFFY CRM with fields like “Account Owner”, “Monthly Spend”, and a breakdown of which products and features this account has access to. When sales is passing a conversation over to support this data should be paired with internal notes that help take away the guesswork behind who the customer is and what they need help with, as shown below.

Know when to escalate

Escalating a conversation to a salesperson allows us to work with the customer over a longer timespan to resolve the problem. This also ensures that our sales team doesn’t have to worry about customers fuming about issues they’re experiencing and these concerns never making their way back to them. Sales reps hate finding out that a customer has been unhappy at a later date (like during an annual renewal) when it’s too late to make a meaningful impact on these issues. When support shares this candid feedback with sales, we can ensure our sales team doesn’t lose touch with the end user.

Collaboration with support improves our sales process

Our support team improves our sales process similar to the way they improve our product, by providing feedback on where customers have expressed frustration or confusion around our product offering, pricing, or the value proposition of our products and services. Our sales team prepares for new product and key feature launches

We spend a lot of time crafting a playbook for how we plan to position and sell a new product or feature as well as train our sales team so that they can hit the ground running when we launch. However, anyone who works at a startup knows that a launch is just the beginning. Feedback from Support and insights our support team provides, allow us to avoid making the same mistakes more than once, and together we learn twice as fast.

The bottom line is this: When your largest customer-facing teams work together closely, your customers get more value from your products and your sales team is able to create a more effective sales process. The spike in the top line of your business is evident and even the bottom line gets a facelift. It’s simply better for business, isn’t it !!