In a world defined by digital transformation and distributed work, it’s only natural that SaaS sales enablement should evolve in step with these trends.
Yet many businesses do not appear to realize precisely how much things have changed. In the past, the SaaS sales model was primarily focused on conversion. When SaaS was still relatively new and there existed a dearth of vendors, this worked for the most part.
Today, however, customers are swimming in options. If a vendor to which they’ve subscribed doesn’t effectively meet their needs, they can simply swap to one that does. In such a market, how many customers your business converts is irrelevant if you cannot retain them.
Customer training is foundational to retention. Equipping your engineers, marketing team, salespeople, and customer support agents with the right training tools is a good first step where retention is concerned. With that said, it’s also essential that you lay the groundwork to ensure a consistent customer experience throughout the pipeline.
That begins with integration. Ensuring the data and insights generated by your customer training is available in your CRM software. Here’s why, when it comes to sales enablement, salesforce integration — or more accurately, integration between your customer training and CRM tools — is crucial.
Gain a Holistic View into Customer Progress
Modern B2B customers demand personalization. They don’t want to waste time with a brand that doesn’t seem to understand them. Case in point. consider the following:
- 65% of B2B buyers will stop working with a brand that doesn’t make an effort to personalize its communications.
- 84% of B2B buyers are likelier to purchase from a sales rep that understands their goals.
- 75% of B2B buyers expect companies to make relevant suggestions based on their needs.
Siloed data is bad for personalization. You need to enable a holistic view of the entire customer journey, from beginning to end. By consolidating training, proof of concept, and customer data into a single source of truth, you’ll be able to identify the precise moments at which you should engage with each customer to keep the process moving.
Deep Insights for AE’s and CS Managers
Synchronizing the different technology stacks involved in customer outreach and management doesn’t just provide value to your sales team. It also arms your account executives and customer success managers with actionable insights into each customer. Through analysis of your customer training data, your business can:
- Proactively reach out to dissatisfied customers
- Predict and potentially mitigate churn
- More effectively help customers integrate your software
- Identify bottlenecks or pain points in your software
- Identify upsell opportunities
- Determine the best way to secure a renewal with a customer
- Identify and eliminate issues in the sales process
- Identify customers that may need additional training or guidance
Adding POC integration can further deepen the insights above, allowing you to more accurately discern what works and what doesn’t where demos are concerned. By tracking the results of your classes and POC demos, you can fine-tune them, while also engaging with customers who appear to be struggling.
Determine the Return on Your Customer Training Investments
In spite of the clear value and importance of customer training, quantifying its ROI isn’t always so clear cut. You can certainly examine factors such as overall revenue, upsells, feature adoption, or renewals. However, measured in a vacuum, these metrics alone are not necessarily indicative of success.
In order to know for certain whether or not your customer training has had an impact on your business’s bottom line, you need to drill down into data points such as engagement, satisfaction, and audience profiles. Integration with your CRM solution provides you with the necessary information where the latter is concerned, allowing you to determine which customers are renewing, and why.
Position Yourself for Revenue Retention and Expansion
We’ve already touched on the fact that onboarding is crucial to customer retention, particularly as it relates to the customer’s overall experience with your software.
But onboarding aside, customer training has another purpose — it can also be leveraged as a sales tool. By tracking training metrics alongside other data in your CRM solution, your business can compare and quantify the precise impact that training has on each customer. That data can then be used as a value driver, demonstrating the power of your software when it is used optimally while also encouraging enrollment in your training programs.
Data Hygiene and Workflow Efficiency
Traditionally, generating cross-platform reports and moving training data between your CRM and training software requires a great deal of manual work. This not only contributes to the formation of data silos, but often means that non-technical users may not be able to leverage training data to its fullest extent. Integration eliminates this issue, killing data silos whilst allowing for better analysis, personalization, and decision-making across sales and support.
More importantly, by automating the flow of data, you free your teams from unnecessary busywork, giving them the time to focus on what actually matters — the customer.
Introducing the CloudShare Integration Hub
We recognize the importance of integration between customer training tools and solutions such as Salesforce. That’s why we’ve created the integration hub. This solution will allow our customers to connect their CloudShare accounts directly to either Salesforce or Google Sheets, choosing which fields to populate and how often to sync the data.
By creating a seamless flow of data between CloudShare and your preferred system, you can:
- Provide non-technical users with access to CloudShare data.
- Allow non-CloudShare users to track the results of training programs.
- Ensure better business decision-making across your organization.
- Improve the value of your analytics.
Learn more about the integration hub
