Many salespeople and companies focus on what Alec Baldwin hammers in the classic movie, Glengarry Glen Ross…
‘Always Be Closing’
Well, If that’s your only focus as a company, you will have to ABC to outsell attrition.
Let’s be real. Sales is hard, actually cold calling or warm dialing as the Sandler folks refer to it, maybe the hardest business profession ever. I have tried it, hated it, and it’s one of my many failures and lessons learned.
Leaders at all levels of the organization need to take the handoff from the sales team, realize that getting that deal took 1000s of calls potentially, respect that, and then intentionally help the new client actually use the service or product they bought.
Fancy people call this ‘Product Adoption’.
Simple people say ‘You don’t use it, you lose it…’
Here are some quick tips to bake this into your Sales, Ops, Account Management, or Delivery teams.
- After the sale is complete, use an onboarding checklist and touch on the top 3-5 features they should know how to use
- At the first Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly account management meetings, ask how they are doing with those features
- Each meeting you have with them bring usage stats and call out how the product is helping them, but then touch on a feature they could be using moving forward
- Be a cheerleader for others in the organization to engage with current and new users by asking how they like specific features, or anything they would like changed
Just like when I wrote about my sore 40-year-old muscles… If a new close /won client is onboarded and forgotten, they will forget you and then leave you wondering why your product or service lacked… when it could be that they just needed someone to help them actually use what your sales team closed and celebrated over coffee…
Want to talk about some ways your leaders could enable ‘Product Adoption’ (people using the stuff your sales team sold) email me: jasbelt@gmail.com
Jason A. Belt 