6. Managing Sales and Customer Success Handoffs
- Nishith Rastogi Founder and CEO, Locus
Nishith underscores the need for coordinated efforts across various functions as deal sizes increase.
You should not build a large direct sales team if your ACV is under 50k USD. It will make your product dirty.
If you're above 100k ACV, most of your success will depend on how you handle the handover KPIs between four teams: the Pre-Sales team, Sales team, Go-Live team, and Customer Success team.
Imagine how expensive it is to bring in a customer. I can assure you that everyone loses it between these four. And they will keep evolving.
But please, on day one, have a clear structure for these. For example, you can debate it to the end, but still, there is no great answer as to whether the pre-sales team and the go-live team should be the same or not and at what stage.
You will need a plus 2, minus 2 strategy as you get higher in the ACV league. You need a VP who can talk to their VP, a CS person who can talk to their CS people, and a CTO who can talk to their technical head while you do the CEO-to-CEO conversations.
Whenever you’re hiring, hire folks who are inspired. You need to be talking to multiple folks in enterprise deals at all times.
A lot of this comes from our philosophy at Locus. We always put Team and Customers at the forefront of our work. As I see it, a CEO’s job is managing only four sets of stakeholders: team, investors, media, and clients.
You can decide the order of these based on your company. We have gone with the team, customers, investors, and media. This is also because we are B2B over B2C, If you are B2C, you might want to go with media first and then investors. And between Team and Customers, which comes first is also unique to each founder.