Customer Enablement: 5 Ways You Need to Sell After Closing
- Dean Ara
- September 16, 2024
Congratulations, you made it! You created demand, nurtured your lead, and closed a deal. Now you can sit back and relax, knowing your work to create a new customer is done.
Wrong!
Getting the sale doesn’t mean your job is done. A sale is a mere milestone in a larger customer journey. What comes next? It’s time for customer enablement.
What is Customer Enablement?
Customer enablement ensures your buyers have everything they need to feel good about their purchase decision — enabled customers are happy and loyal. More importantly, customer enablement helps you make them invaluable advocates for your brand.
Gartner estimates over 60% of frontline sales enablement organizations will add more customer-facing roles to improve the customer journey beyond the initial sale by 2025.
If this sounds like a familiar concept, it should. Most companies leverage customer enablement in some form but under names like customer service or technical support. It’s all about maintaining the trust and goodwill you spent so much time carefully cultivating before the deal closed.
The Deal is Done. Why Should You Care?
Customers are the foundation of your business. Lose their loyalty, and you can lose it all. But how do you make sure buyers stick around once they’ve made a purchase? You keep them feeling like you care as much about them now as you did when you were trying to close the deal.
McKinsey reports that two-thirds of touch points during the active-evaluation phase of the buyer journey involve consumer-driven activities like online reviews or word-of-mouth recommendations.
Marketing and sales teams spend a lot of time talking about the funnel, but today’s buying journey isn’t finite. It’s a full circle that requires customer enablement and after-sales experiences to drive retention, upselling, and advocacy.
How to Build a Customer Enablement Strategy
Client enablement and empowerment can take many shapes. But before you get started on a program, you need to examine what buyers need from you after they sign on the dotted line (or initial that PDF).
Ask yourself these questions with your existing customers in mind:
- What do they still need?
- How can we assist them?
- Which questions are they asking?
- How can we provide more value?
- Do they feel important?
Now consider customers who bought from you but then went elsewhere:
- Why did they leave?
- Could you have changed their experience to make them stay?
You’re not looking for the level of detail you’d get in a win/loss analysis. This isn’t about hard data as much as it is about putting yourself in your buyers’ shoes and opening your eyes to opportunities to improve their experience.
What Level of Client Enablement is Right For You?
Your organization’s maturity will dictate what your customer enablement program looks like. It could be as simple as developing a post-sales marketing strategy or as complex as building full-blown cross-functional customer success enablement team.
It’s not about what you do, but how you make customers feel. 68% of customers will spend more with companies they feel understand them and treat them as unique.
Customer Enablement Maturity Scale
Low
Marketing team is largely responsible for creating customer enablement content.
Medium
Data-based customer enablement goals are in place.
High
Customer success teams work with sales, marketing, HR, and sales enablement to develop end-to-end enablement programs.
How to Deliver the Best Customer Experience
The ideal customer experience will look different for every business, but remember — even if your team doesn’t have the resources for a dedicated customer success team, you can deliver a superior experience by making buyers feel like they matter.
Salesforce research indicates that 80% of customers think the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services.
1. Ask for (and Encourage) Customer Feedback
Seeking feedback from your customers about their experience with you is step one in improving their experience. After all, you can’t know how they feel if you’re not listening to them. Hang out where your buyers are — social media, discussion boards, review sites — and see what they’re saying. Ask happy customers for testimonials and case studies to promote your business and capture your buyers’ success. (Don’t ignore unhappy customers — reach out to learn why they’re not satisfied and try to make it right.)
Measuring customer satisfaction can help validate the value of your offering. Start by defining the goals buyers want to achieve when they purchase from you — collect baseline numbers at closing and circle back in six to 12 months to measure the impact.
Pragmatic Institute recommends collecting customer feedback twice per sale — once right after a deal closes and again after onboarding or implementation — to see if their original feedback still holds true.
2. Create Customer Education Content
A customer education program can go a long way towards ensuring your customers feel they’ve received value. If you don’t have the resources to deliver a comprehensive customer enablement program or are struggling to scale your post-sale systems, education is the answer.
Develop content that helps existing customers use and find value in your product. Bonus: before a sale, customer education content teaches prospects about your product and its place in the market; after the sale, it helps users maximize the value of your offering.
| Customer Education Content | How It Helps |
|---|---|
|
Webinars (live or recorded) |
Provide a walk-through of a complex solution with a human touch |
|
Podcasts |
Keep customers engaged while providing insights about new features or updates |
|
Online academies or certification |
Help buyer feel more invested in using your solution (while also raising brand awareness) |
|
Knowledge base |
Enable customers to self-serve when they have questions |
|
Long-form articles, white papers, or ebooks |
Reinforce your reputation as a thought leader while providing valuable insights about the market or developing solutions |
3. Start (or Expand) a Customer Success Team
Being proactive is critical to customer enablement. You can’t just wait until a customer reaches out with a question or complaint — you need to provide them with helpful resources and reliable support before they experience issues. (Odds are good that you already have one or more of these positions on your team!)
Who is on Your Customer Success Team?
A customer success team can include several functional roles, depending on your organization’s maturity level:
- Customer success managers (CSMs)
- Customer support representatives
- Onboarding or implementation representatives
- Professional services experts
- Upselling and cross-selling representatives
4. Let Customers Serve Themselves
Customer enablement isn’t about hand-holding or helicoptering while buyers implement your solutions. There are many ways to empower buyers to find answers to their questions independently. (And research shows the majority of customers — 67% — prefer to self-serve.)
Advancements in AI technology have made self-service tools easier for customers to use (and more affordable for you.) HubSpot’s State of AI report indicates that 42% of customer service pros who use AI or automation tools say AI chatbots that respond to customer service requests are very effective.
Consider the following when setting up customer enablement self-service options:
- AI-powered chatbots can provide specific answers and point customers to other informational resources any time, regardless of whether your offices are open
- An up-to-date FAQ page can quickly answer common questions your customers have
- Customer portals can let users update settings, change permissions, or access educational and training materials in a single space
- Downloadable user guides and technical manuals let your customers quickly find answers to onboarding or technical questions — make sure your PDFs will display correctly on mobile screens as well as desktops
- Mobile apps can simplify the process of triggering a support action without forcing buyers to wait to connect with someone in person
Pro Tip: Knowledge bases can do double duty, serving as a way for customers to self-serve while also educating prospects on how your solution works. Optimize online client success resources with middle- to bottom-of-funnel keywords that help customers succeed.
5. Remind Customers of the Value You’ve Provided
It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, both for your team and your customers. Suddenly it’s been six months, even 12, and what did you accomplish? Reminding your customers that you’re the reason things have been running so smoothly that they nearly forgot you were there is never a bad idea.
Annual or project-based business reviews are the perfect opportunity to showcase the value you’ve added to their operations and help you transition from the role of vendor to the position of partner and advisor.
In a nutshell, this document says, “Look at all the goals we’ve achieved, the relationships we’ve built, and the scope of work we’ve completed together. We’ve come a long way — what an incredible journey it’s been!”
Ready to Turn Your Customers into Advocates?
The team at TPM understands the importance of customer enablement and how to make it work for your organization. Let us help you create buying experiences that will have your customers shouting from the rooftops and telling all their friends. Contact us today!
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