When sales teams shrink, there’s one casualty that often gets overlooked: the customer experience. As sellers, managers, and the revenue operations team experience heavier workloads, follow-ups can fall through the cracks. Handoffs fumble and fail due to lack of continuity. More time is spent managing tasks and sitting in catch-up meetings than customer interactions.
The result? Customers are left feeling forgotten, frustrated, and confused. And when the customer is unhappy, the whole company pays the price through longer deal cycles, lost opportunities, smaller deals, and increased churn.
What if it doesn’t have to be that way? What if even the leanest revenue team could provide a smooth and superior customer experience? With the right tools and processes, even small teams with big workloads can become a conversion and retention machine.
This becomes possible when you ensure your entire revenue team — post-sales as well as your sellers — is working from a single platform. That one move can eliminate the challenges that create inefficiencies and poor experiences in the first place, like siloed information and fractured lines of communication.
We recently examined the basics of why it’s so important to put your entire revenue team on the same workflow software. Now, we’re taking you one step further to demonstrate how to turn that unified view into a material advantage for you and your customers. In this piece, we will lay out a proven plan for combating churn and improving retention, one happy customer at a time.
Retention reality: Smoother handoffs deliver better customer experiences
From the customer’s perspective, your company has dozens of faces. Prior to closing the deal, they’ve already seen the SDR who made the first connection, the BDR who led the qualification call, the solutions engineer who answered their technical questions, and the AE who closed the deal.
Maybe your senior leadership even connected with their executive team a few times during the sales process. Then, once they’ve signed a contract, there could be any number of CSMs and other post-sales team members who handle their day-to-day needs.
Even if there is one person assigned to manage their account from end to end, there are always transitions over the years as your team members get assigned to new territories or promoted into new roles. And where does that leave the customer? Explaining their business all over again (sigh) to yet another new face.
The last thing a customer wants to do is repeat the same story five times to five different people — let alone keep doing it once they’ve become a “valued customer.” Not only is it annoying (in fact, it borders on insulting in the era of increased personalization), it’s a waste of their valuable time — and yours.
By implementing a revenue orchestration platform across the organization, you can change that story and put your customer first every time. A shared platform tracks every email, every call, and every interaction with an account, starting at Day 1. This gives your team an easily accessible record of what the customer expects, what issues are top-of-mind for them, and what they’ve already been told.
Instead of taking up time from colleagues in download or catch-up meetings, team members can directly read and refer to past email communications and listen to previous calls (or just review the AI-generated summary and notes).
As a result, every member of your team can be confident that they understand what the customer needs and have more personalized experiences that cover new ground instead of rehashing past exchanges. And when the customer gets a much smoother and satisfying experience, you improve their trust in the value of your business and strengthen your relationship.
A customer’s company or needs may also evolve — yet another case for operating on a shared platform. You can easily keep new stakeholders in the loop, catching them up on conversations you’ve had with their colleagues and predecessors and helping them understand why certain decisions were made. When your contact has tricky questions, you can go back to the platform to share past call recordings or recaps that they can then share and socialize internally, making them look like a hero to their team.
Being able to provide this kind of history and context makes your revenue team an invaluable resource for your clients — and that’s exactly the kind of value that helps pave the way for retention and renewals. The bottom line? A shared revenue orchestration software gives every one of your customer-facing roles the ability to do their part in ensuring conversions, combating churn, and promoting retention.
Top churn burner: Never let customer relationships fall through the cracks
Everyone in customer-facing roles has a lot to juggle, even more so when your team is lean. Your post-sales team is often carrying a portfolio of dozens or even hundreds of accounts — all with different needs and in different stages. But every customer still needs to feel the love even after you’ve closed the deal. Nothing says “I’m not that into you anymore” like failing to deliver something you’ve promised.
Here’s the hard truth about a competitive, commoditized business climate. It may not seem like the end of the world if it takes a few extra days to follow up on a call or if an email gets sent without an attachment — but those tiny details add up in your customer’s mind, especially after all the attention you showered on them initially to land their deal. And if a customer feels disappointed by or ignored in the small things, how can they fully trust you with their business?
To be fair, there are tons of one-off tools that can be helpful in avoiding ball drops. Client comms tools let you compose reusable threads of emails and phone scripts. Multiple services offer call recording software, many of which also have an artificial intelligence component that provides you with a post-call transcript and summary. Tracking and sales forecasting tools help you monitor deal health and predict when deals are likely to close.
Individually, however, these tools leave potential gaps where the customer can fall through. Katie Krippner, Global VP of Client Sales at Salesloft, knows the dangers that come with a point solution approach. “If things are all in a silo (individual tools versus a full, shared platform) and you can’t see how they impact each other or events aren’t connected, then you can have an amazing call with the customer — and then never call them back.”
That thud you’re hearing in your head as you read her words is the sound of a valuable ball dropping, hard. It’s also the sound of disappointment when customer expectations are not met. Ouch.
A full workflow platform bridges those gaps and seals those cracks. Not only does it connect meetings and emails into a single, continuous flow, it connects the dots between different stakeholders on both the buyer and the seller side so that no one is ever left out.
But it doesn’t stop there. A good revenue orchestration software will also use AI to automate steps and reminders. For example, instead of just recording a call, the platform will suggest next steps — then remind the seller to actually execute the recommended or agreed-upon follow-up. These automations help scale engagement and ensure a consistently great customer experience no matter how big of a portfolio load your team is carrying.
Saving face: Claw back valuable customer engagement time by reducing admin tasks
Like all good storytellers, we’ve saved the best for last. For many revenue organizations, the most valuable benefit of having everything and everyone in the unified workflow platform is also the simplest — your team members get to spend more one-on-one customer interactions.
There are only so many selling hours in the year. It’s all too easy to spend more time than you can afford getting up to speed, arranging calls with team members, hunting for account information, digging for Zoom recordings (and tracking down who has the darn password), email records, Slack conversations, and on and on and on.
When you’re going down that many rabbit holes on a daily basis, there simply isn’t enough time left for the kind of meaningful interactions that cultivate stronger customer relationships with every client in your book. That’s a shame — and also a perfect recipe for lost deals, missed expansion opportunities, increased downgrades, or more churn.
As before, point solutions can help save time here and there. But where you can really increase your efficiency in a seamless, supportable way is by having everything on one platform. Without the unified platform, even when (or, more often, if) you can find the information you need after rifling through folders in multiple locations and swivel-chairing between different tools, you still have to piece it together before the next customer interaction.
With everything in one place, though, you take all the guesswork out. Not only do you have the information you need, you understand where it came from and how it fits into the larger picture. You don’t have to hunt, you don’t have to make connections, and instead you can focus on your time with the customer — which is the real goal of any customer-facing role.
Salesloft’s own revenue team uses the platform for all customer-facing roles, and Krippner previously worked in sales at other organizations using siloed tools and point solutions. Working at Salesloft while using Salesloft in her role has made her a believer in the value of a shared platform across revenue roles.
“I think you get nominal to positive efficiency gains with having an email marketing platform, or a customer intelligence platform, or a forecasting and deals or sales management-type of platform,” she explains. “But where you really increase your efficiency in a substantial and sustainable way is having it all in one platform.”
So don’t waste another minute worrying about conversions or retention! Reach out today to see Salesloft’s comprehensive platform in action. Then bring your entire revenue team on board together — because conversion, retention, and churn prevention are hard enough already.
Salesloft can improve your team’s efficiency, your customers’ experiences, and your business’s bottom line. Now that’s something worth sharing.
Have Salesloft already but not using all your seats? Allocate any unassigned licenses to your post-sales team to start realizing all the advantages we’ve just discussed.