Introducing Outreach for customer success managers

Posted May 8, 2018

By Chelsey Feldman

Product Marketing at Outreach

Drive adoption, retention, and expansion with Outreach

Many salespeople think closing the deal is the hard part of the sales cycle. However, this is where the work truly begins. When your prospect makes the transition to becoming a customer, you have to ensure that your product or service lives up to their expectations and then some, as well as plan how to nurture and grow their account.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are the unsung superheroes of the revenue team. Account Executives might close flashy new logos, but who ensures those customers stay loyal and satisfied rather than moving onto the next best thing? CSMs are responsible for driving retention and expansion across a large book of business, while ensuring every single one of those customers feels like the company’s number one priority.

At Unleash, we’re focusing on how your entire customer facing team can become as wildly productive as your reps who are already using our Sales Engagement Platform. We’re excited to share the ways your CSM team can leverage the customer success management aspects of Outreach to drive engagement, growth, and revenue through consistent, personalized communication with customers.

Onboarding: Start the customer experience right

Outreach helps CSMs start off on the right foot with a new account from day 1 by providing both the personalization to give every customer the VIP treatment and the automation to ensure onboarding happens seamlessly. CSM teams can create standardized onboarding follow-up sequences to ensure every new customer is taking the right steps to start out successfully. With this powerful automation, CSMs don’t have to worry about remembering which emails were sent to which of the 50 different accounts they manage.

As the Account Executive hands off their recently closed business to a customer success manager, it’s critical to ensure the customer experience is flawless and no information falls through the cracks. Outreach provides a collaborative experience so that information moves with the customer, as they move through the buying funnel. Notes, account history, key contacts, and more are easily shared across teams.

Retain every customer with insights and proactive engagement

Getting your new customer onboarded is only the first step in what will hopefully be a longstanding partnership. It’s critical to ensure that a CSM is up to date on what their customers are experiencing, but with so many accounts to manage, it can be hard to stay on top of every account.

There are certain checkpoints that a CSM will have with every one of their accounts, like regular check ins and quarterly business reviews. Sequences allow CSMs to automate these engagements at the right time, and the ability to schedule follow up tasks right from the inbox ensures that CSMs stay on top of the next steps that come out of each meeting. With Outreach Meetings, customers can schedule these events in one click without the back and forth of working across five busy schedules.

“Outreach Meetings saves a lot of time that is otherwise wasted on tasks like setting up meetings and pulling together invites. I would estimate that it saves us an hour or more a week per user. That's over a week of productivity per person we’re getting back over the course of a year!”
TAYLOR CUNNINGHAM, CUSTOMER SUCCESS MANAGER, JITTERBIT

Proactive monitoring is also key to ensure that when it comes time for renewal, your customers are happy and excited. Outreach helps CSM teams keep every account on track by automatically triggering education or adoption sequences if an account health score dips below a defined threshold. Teams can also create deeper customer engagement with tailored education sequences that introduce new features and best practices based on current usage patterns. Revenue Attribution helps ensure these actions are driving the optimal lift when it comes time to talk about renewals.

With the release of Outreach Amplify, our machine learning for sales program, teams have vastly more data about which interactions generate the right reactions. CSM teams can use Outreach to create success plans with machine-learning insights that tell them which activities and engagements drive the highest levels of retention.

Operationalize your expansion playbook

Renewals are critical to running a strong business, but Outreach can help you go even beyond the renewal and provide the resources needed to grow and expand your accounts. Soon with Outreach, CSM teams will be able to monitor opportunities from Outreach and tie activities back to those opportunities. Opportunities are where your CSM teams are growing your company’s bottom line, so it’s critical they have access to that information as they work an account. CSMs can monitor key expansion indicators from any Salesforce field, like max potential revenue and usage against contract limits, and automate outreach the moment an opportunity arises.

Additionally, the power of automated sequences lets CSMs capitalize on upsell opportunities with customizable campaigns into their customer base when a new feature, product or package is launched. Again, with Revenue Attribution, every upsell or expansion effort is tracked, and its impact on revenue lift is measured.

We’re just getting started

We want to make it fast and simple for every member of your customer-facing team to unlock the power of Outreach. Today, we also announced role-specific onboarding to ensure that regardless of role, as your company grows and scales, your new Outreach users have a perfectly tailored experience to get them a lightning fast time to value.

At Unleash, we are sharing our vision for features across all workflows – emails, calls, Meetings, and more -- that will help CSMs engage and grow accounts. We’re excited to unleash the power of our customer engagement platform to support deeper collaboration across every member of your customer facing team.

By ensuring that every member of your team is wildly successful and productive, we can help you ensure that your customers are too.


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