Learn About a Wide Range of Sales Training Topics
Give your entire sales teams access to the industry’s most highly rated training and coaching programs that cover a vast range of sales training topics geared to drive recurring revenue.
Processes for all revenue teams
Achieve sustainable growth, with consistent process design and training applied across the entire Revenue team
Live, interactive training led by experts
Give your reps the fundamental skills needed for their roles – whether AE, SDR, CSM, or Manager
Trusted by 600+ SaaS companies
We help recurring revenue teams achieve sustainable growth. Our scientific models and frameworks are used by high-growth Scale-Ups, startups, and Fortune 500 companies
Our Process
In a modern recurring revenue business, it is impossible to scale without treating growth as a science. We apply proven frameworks and expose the math that underpins each step of the customer journey.
Diagnose
Uncover gaps and opportunities to optimize recurring revenue growth
Design
Apply a universal methodology and process across your entire customer journey
Activate
Activate through defined processes and playbooks, implemented directly into your workflow
Train
Arm your reps with the core skills for success, with a common language to unify as one GTM team
Coach
Provide your team with ongoing development to make change stick, gauge progress, and reach your goals
Client Results
Customer Success Consulting
Winning by Design Founder Jacco van der Kooij is looking forward to a day when the divide between marketing and sales and customer success isn’t so wide. Today, many companies still think of marketing and sales as operating in completely different parts of the traditional sales funnel. And customer success is often left out of the equation altogether. He’s excited about finally tearing down these walls. “What if it’s not just marketing at the top of the funnel and sales at the bottom?” he asked in a wide-ranging interview on the Customer Success Podcast. “And what if customer success is not just something that takes place after sales gets a commitment from the client? What if they’re intertwined?”
Marketing and sales are thought of as profit centers, while customer success is considered a cost of doing business. But van der Kooij is adamant that customer success should be considered another profit center. After all, research reveals that up to 93% of a customer’s lifetime value takes place in the months and years after the initial deal is signed. That means that customer success is crucial for today’s B2B companies. “If you sell your customer something and you’re not able to deliver, there is going to be churn before you even make a profit,” he says. “In other words, the more deals you win, the more money you lose.”
According to van der Kooij, customer success consulting can be a crucial value driver for company growth, particularly for SaaS companies and others taking advantage of recurring revenue models. But what’s the best way to transform your customer success associates into a powerhouse team? The answer for more than 600 companies has been Winning by Design, the leader in accelerating and optimizing recurring revenue for B2B organizations. Even “Training Industry”, the leading research and information resource for corporate learning leaders, gave Winning by Design high marks in its list of the Top 20 Training Companies in 2022.
With its new Customer Success Operating Model, Winning by Design’s Revenue Academy offers interactive training sessions, engaging instructors, best-in-class frameworks, and detailed blueprints designed with your customer success network in mind. In our roster of open courses geared toward all skill levels, we pinpoint why most companies leave this opportunity for exponential revenue growth on the table. We help you understand the types of customer success technology needed in today’s market.
Courses like Customer Success For Impact (teaching the fundamentals of driving more recurring revenue) and Account Management for Growth (teaching how to uncover opportunities, plan strategically, and build and deepen relationships with customers) help your customer success team thrive. On top of that, our private classes have curriculums that can be tailored to your company’s needs, and our coaching sessions reinforce the strategies that your customer service team has learned along the way.
Courtney Rinden, a Customer Success Associate at ID.me, said that Winning by Design helped her have more constructive sales calls. “The content helped me think more critically about the customer conversations I was having now and the ones I wanted to be having in the future,” she said. “I learned strategies to take discussions to the next level and connect more deeply with my clients.”
Customer Success vs. Consulting
Wondering about the difference between a customer success specialist versus a customer success manager? Are they the same thing as a customer solutions manager? And how about customer success versus consulting? The truth is that customer success is still a fairly new addition to the traditional marketing and sales team. Depending on the company, a member of a customer success department might have any of these titles. But they are responsible for establishing and maintaining a long-term relationship with customers. Their job is to make sure that your customers stay your customers for years to come. It’s no surprise that a survey conducted by Hubspot found that high growth companies are 21% more likely to recognize the important of a robust company success team.
If all this sounds a lot like the responsibilities of an account manager, it’s because the two jobs work together in tandem. B2B companies who are achieving sustainable growth don’t think about customer success versus account management. They approach them as equal partners in the revenue team. As far as sales goes, their part of the process mostly ends when a customer signs on the dotted line. That’s where the customer success team takes over. For customer success, churn is the focus. Understanding what a customer needs from your company, and making sure that they get it, is how they prevent churn.
This partnership between sales and customer success is only possible if all your go-to-market teams are on the same page. If they are using different sales methodologies, or measuring their output with different metrics, chances are that they will remain siloed. Winning by Design unifies the sales process through the SPICED methodology, which it created to provide a common language across revenue teams. SPICED is being adopted by more and more SaaS-based companies because it can be applied at every step of the sales process. This means that marketing, sales, and customer success are part of the same team.
Adam Young, Senior Team Lead for Client Success at MindBridge, said that Winning by Design has helped his team perfect the sales to customer success handoff. “Winning by Design’s training helps make our kickoffs more professional, which leads to a smoother and more impactful onboarding process with measurable objectives,” he said. “It is also helping us build our internal playbook and library of resources. This will make our employee onboarding a better experience as well.”
Success Consultants
Putting together a customer success team from scratch isn’t an easy process. First, you have to define what it is you’d like to achieve. What CSM performance metrics are you going to track? You need to understand the differences between customer success versus implementation. When we talk about implementation, we mean figuring out the best way to onboard a new customer so that they don’t encounter any roadblocks along the way. It involves thoroughly understanding your customer’s process and workflows.
You also have to have a firm grasp of what we mean by customer success versus professional services. It’s similar to implementation because it’s also about making sure your product is successfully onboarded. But professional services is all about integrating your product with the software a customer already uses. All this is more important than you might think: According to recent research, 52% of customers who bail in the first 90 days do so because of poor onboarding. That’s more than twice the amount who leave because of your product.
Many companies, especially those still in the early stages, opt for hiring a client success consultant. A CSM practice can help startups launch their customer success program while giving them the time they need to focus on scalable growth. But customer success consultants are also invaluable for more established companies who have a wide range of customers who need different services. Customer success consultants can help them understand how their customers use their products and how they can improve implementation and professional services. They assist in formulating an organization-level approach to customer success.
At Winning by Design, we uncover gaps and opportunities to help you optimize your revenue growth. We review your processes against industry best practices and peer companies and recommend improvements. We also offer playbooks that can help you up your customer success team’s game.
Best Customer Success Organizations
What do all the best customer success organizations have in common? Of course, it includes having an in-depth knowledge of their company’s product, an understanding of a customer’s needs, and the experience to be able to provide a customer with the impact that they need. On top of that, it requires having a repeatable process so they can give each customer the same level of service. It’s having the playbooks that can guide you through the process. That’s what Winning by Design gives to clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
What is a customer success consultant able to do for your company? According to Andrew Levy, Co-Founder and CEO of Aircover, one of the big wins for his coaching platform for sales reps and customer service managers has been working side-by-side with an expert like Winning by Design. “Aircover has virtualized Winning by Design’s leading scientific approach to recurring revenue into a real-time, in-meeting playbook. We’re thrilled to surface this unified SPICED methodology across sales and customer success directly via our in-meeting coaching software.”
When Winning by Design talks about the future of customer success, we don’t just focus on the latest technology. We don’t point you toward the customer success articles in business publications or recommend that you study the customer success trends of 2022. That’s because the advice we offer our clients is pretty straightforward: provide the service that your customers deserve. When your company can provide your customers with the recurring impact they are looking for, that’s when you can achieve the recurring revenue you need to succeed.
Related Articles
Get in touch
Contact us to see how we can help your team transform.