Does this sound like your situation?
A sales person (we'll call her April) works tirelessly to demo your software, follow-up with customers, negotiate terms, send over proposals, and then makes that glorious change to your CRM to "closed-won.'
To then celebrate her hard work, she sounds the gong—often times only digitally via Slack—and receives dozens of "LFG's" and 🔥 🙌🏻 💸 emojis.
Then what? Usually this triggers a motion for the Customer Success team to assign a CSM to this specific account and start the "Handoff" process (AKA, hand-me-down, toss-over-the-fence, etc).
The Hand-Me-Down Dilemma
What's wrong with this approach?
The stereotypical handoff process often usually lacks accountability, it isn't results-focused, and has way too many potential cracks to fall through. These often feel like a relay-race without a finish line, and here's why:
Accountability:
Are we over-promising and then under-delivering?
Is the kickoff call getting scheduled?
How is the reporting and visibility? Silo'd for pre- and post-sale?
Outcomes-focused:
Are we aligned between our revenue teams on the outcomes we ACTUALLY drive?
More importantly, are we aligned with the customer on the outcomes that matter most to them?
What are we actually selling to the customer, and what are we helping them achieve?
Wasted Time:
How much back-and-forth is required before a CSM is actually assigned?
How many messages are exchanged to get the CSM up-to-speed on the account?
How much time passes between the "closed-won" event and the CSM's kickoff email (or often scarier, how much time has elapsed before the kickoff-call happens?)
Even if you have great processes, detailed documentation, and a clean CRM, when we have complete silos between our Sales and CS teams, we're playing a game of hot-potato between the two departments, and eventually the potato is going to get dropped.
Removing Customer Handoffs
How do you build a more fool-proof process to fix your Sales-to-CS handoff process? You need to remove the handoff entirely. And in my experience, one of the best ways to do that is by creating "Revenue Pods".
Here's a really basic example:
A simple revenue pod would consist of a Sales Person (April) paired up with a Customer Success Manager (Andy). This is a pod built in both your CRM and as a sub-team within the org-structure, and when done correctly drives immense accountability, aligns teams to customer outcomes, and saves SO much time.
Process:
Since these pod assignments are built within your CRM, when April is in the final stages of closing a deal, she can educate the customer on who their CSM owner will be sell the expertise of that person.
On the closing call (or email), April can show how aligned they are by scheduling the kickoff-call on Andy's calendar (or using a calendar link specifically made for this type of event).
Another option (that I personally love) where possible, Andy helps April in the sales process by attending the solution/closing call to walk the customer through the specialized onboarding process that he has in place. He can then schedule the kickoff call before the deal is even closed.
Overlap & Accountability
Once the deal is closed, the kickoff call is already schedule, and the customer see's how mature your team's operations are, April helps Andy by attending the kick-off call (usually just the first 5 minutes) to drive customer continuity and ensure continued strategy alignment.
To help drive accountability and visibility, April and Andy have a weekly "revenue pod" meeting where they go through upcoming pipeline, customer outcomes, alignment strategies, and onboarding process/results.
These meetings take 30 minutes but allow for feedback to happen and course-correct very quickly when needed.
Revenue Pods at Scale
Now, this is obviously a very basic example meant for early stage tech-startups. But I've seen this exact revenue pod structure scale through $100M tech companies. As you grow, you begin segmenting and adding people to each pod—creating pods with SDR/BDR functions, product support and CX, Implementation, onboarding, solutions architects, etc.
As the company grows, the pods can grow. When you reach a point where you need to break pods apart, you begin creating more specialized, segmented pods (ie, ARR segments, regions, use-cases, etc).
Aligning On Outcomes Is Key
This is a really basic example, but the whole idea with revenue pods is to align on customer outcomes. These are the measurable results that matter most to your customers, and equally as important, the results that your product produces.
We have to align our teams around the finite outcomes (usually a very short list) that we help our customers achieve; however, you first need to know EXACTLY what outcomes you produce. Think, how did our product save time, increase money, decrease spend, improve growth, etc. these are the outcomes that matter to our customers.
If you need help identifying your outcomes, interviewing your most successful customers is the best way to go.
Once you understand the outcomes you help your customers achieve, you can then align your teams:
Marketing --> Message the right outcomes
Sales --> Sell to those outcomes
Onboarding --> Prescribe change to achieve those outcomes
Customer Success --> Align and measure outcome achievements
etc.
When your internal teams align on the outcomes that you impact (and ONLY those outcomes) your alignment with the customer becomes streamlined through selling, managing, and onboarding that customer to those outcomes.
In Summary:
Revenue pods create alignment around customer outcomes, drive accountability for all teams, and improves sales and onboarding momentum.
Starting with Revenue pods early in a startup will force you to manage your team and customer operations in a much cleaner way as you scale. As you grow your teams, revenue pods can/will grow too - adding SDR/BDRs, Sales Engineer, Implementation, Support, etc. to the pod.
Remove the handoff, improve accountability, and align on your customer's outcomes by creating revenue pods.
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