Pointers to Customer Success for CRM, CDP & MarTech Platform & Onboarding Partners

These are personal views of the writer (not organization). The post is meant to educate potential prospects considering CRM, CDP & MarTech Platforms. It is not meant to diss any platform for they provide a yeoman service to a marketer to up their marketing game. Of course, no pain-no gain.

1.      Remove complexity in Plans Selection

      Unless a prospect is steeped in CRM/CDP/MarTech or migrating from one platform to another – the plans and related platform features are a blackhole

2.      Prospects feel ‘manipulated’ as the Best Plan for Use Case and Single or Combination of Offerings are Not Clear for the First-Timer

      Prospects’ Use Case Requirements are spread over platform plans; unless the prospect subscribes to the highest plan and all the Hubs (in case of HubSpot), for 50K Marketing Contacts, the customer will be billed $100,000 per annum with very few takers, as evidenced by HubSpot Annual Report: average HubSpot customer revenue is ~ $10,000 per annum over 135,000 customers; need of the hour - custom plans as per use case with mix and match of features from across Hubs with an average price of $20,000 - $30,000 to grow the market, exponentially

3.      Simplify Decision-Making at Prospect End (read save time)

      Platforms interact at the CIO / CMO level who are personally and professionally time-starved (if they are doing well, more so, if they are not – the motivation to subscribe to a platform); the sales process must minimize prospect time to decision (‘time is money’) by reducing complexity in the decision-making process

4.      Collapse Sales Cycle for Prospect and for Platform / Improve Cash Flow

      Senior managers have to deliver on their goals / KRA within a financial year, so long sales cycle because of decision complexity, is a major no-no for senior management, so the process gets shunted to junior level who do not have the big picture, a decision is taken and signed off, and immediately purchase dissonance sets in because the senior managers are not seeing the data as they had ‘imagined’

5.      Full-Day Prospect Session to Iterate and In-Principle Sign-Off vs Hard Stop 1-Hour Sessions

      For decision-makers and platform users instead of unproductive hard-stop one-hour sessions that concludes, inconclusively, the Agenda should be:

1. Platform Features Explained and Understood
2. Use Case Discovery Done and Accepted
3. Platform Features Reviewed in Context of Use Case Discovery
4. Custom Plan Developed (Suggestive or Final) and in-Principle Buy-in Sealed (plan to be refined and sent as a formal proposal, thereafter for final sign-off)
5. Report Summary / Dashboard Sign-off with Dummy Data Presented as per Use Case
6. Onboarding Custom Plan Discussed (not standard plan thrust on customers) and Costing Range and Milestones to Completion (including Milestone-Based Payment Schedule), Agreed
7. Support Video Case Studies Presented to Set Right Expectations
8. Consensus on Customer Success Description / Statement Frozen to become the North Star for the Assignment
9. At some point Procurement needs to be brought into the Process – not too late or too early – so that the deal is not lost because of price not value perception

6.      (If a) Listed Company with Pressure to Deliver Quarterly Numbers

      However, no excuse to pardon miss-selling as in insurance; renewal is at stake; for that matter, cancellation and suspension of quarterly payments are potential outcomes within the contract period 

Notes:

7.      How platforms make money: Billed on volume of marketing and non-marketing contacts; features suppressed in lower plans to gravitate to higher plans at escalating price points; slew of products that have to be individually subscribed to comprehensively address the use cases; and of course, some platforms are an amalgamation of bought out platforms and thereby multiplies their complications; and the BIG one, acting ‘duh’ about your use case to load on costs when the subscription is done and onboarding starts

8.      Truckload of Competition: Check https://tech.co/crm-software/hubspot-pricing; not sure if it is a plug for HubSpot, but highly informative with comparison with competing platforms https://tech.co/crm-comparison-table though not comprehensive enough; does not include Oracle Eloqua https://www.oracle.com/cx/marketing/automation/ or Adobe Marketo https://business.adobe.com/products/marketo/adobe-marketo.html or SALESManago https://www.salesmanago.com/ ; probably to do with industry definitions of what is CRM, CDP and MarTech; platforms tend to use one or all three for their offerings

9.      Internal Resource Platform Setup Malfunction: Knowing that you don’t know is the secret to a successful subscribing and onboarding plan; internal resources forge ahead with setup due to pressure from Marketing without guidance from Onboarding Partner [13-24-week onboarding timeline is dead on arrival with pressure on marketing to deliver MQLs]

10.   Caveat Emptor: Insist on use case discovery before subscribing and Total Cost of Ownership (TOC) that includes onboarding costs before sign-up; it’s about getting platform and partner to work for their lunch or tragically the customer will be the lunch

11.   The House Always Wins: The odds are ‘stacked’ against the subscriber and novice to the platform due to information asymmetry – ‘they’ know it all and the subscriber chances are knows little including how to explain the use case that makes sense to the platform vendor

12.   Two Most Used Phrases by Platform Vendor and Onboarding Partner: Out-of-the-Box (read: in the box i.e., what you get for the License Fee); Out-of-Scope (read: what you discover after you have paid the License Fee)

13.   Definition of a Masochist: Took on the task of subscribing and onboarding a MarTech Platform; Definition of an Individualist: Ditto (the feeling of loneliness that cannot be expressed except through flaying of hands and head movements)

14.   Hands-off approach of Principal-Agency viz. platform vendor and implementation partner; platform is responsible and yet not responsible; they have influence over partner (grading; starve the business flow) but no control over the partner to enforce adherence to commitments; and the partner gives a damn about the principal because of multiple platform vendor engagements with 100’s of customers to farm out work to their workforce (*hence 6-months onboarding proposal from platform vendors as no onboarding team is working fulltime on customer business)       Hint: Invest in a full-time campaign specialist with CRM/CDP/MarTech Onboarding Chops to              Onboard the Platform with platform 24/7 Support provided FREE with License Fee

15.   It Starts Badly: Payments have to be made upfront for platform and implementation partner, and then it is sink or swim, be ready to treat your investment as ‘sunk cost’ if you have not managed to ‘swim’ out of it to move on to a more palatable, low cost platform (in fact, Platform Starter Pack is a great place to Start), and hopefully learn from the experience, and start afresh scarred, but wiser