Retention, revenue and return: Why it’s important to identify and hire top Customer Success talent

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Over the last ten years or so, cultural trends and customer expectations have combined, resulting in more and more businesses prioritising customer success.

Recent research reports that there has been an increase in the total number of open Customer Success jobs for the first time since February. In June, there were 6,515 available Customer Success jobs posted. This number was nearly 500 more than in May.

Regardless of the organisation’s size, gone are the days of Sales and Marketing departments only delivering the business goals. Today it’s critical to have the customer success department straddling sales and marketing to achieve your deliverables.

Customer Success versus Customer Service

Most customer support roles tend to be reactive as they respond to inbound customer requests, complaints and issues. The opposite tends to be the case when it comes to Customer Success roles.

These roles are focused on working proactively in partnership with customers post-sale to ensure maximisation of the product or service value delivered to the client and head off any issues before they fester. It’s key that Customer Success delivers a positive customer experience and creates a close professional relationship.

If done correctly, Customer Success’s broader and essential role leads to business success. It’s also a vital contributor to customer loyalty. When you help your customers succeed, they become promoters and advocates of your business. Customer Success is connected to your bottom line as it:

  • minimises customer churn rates,
  • improves renewal and satisfaction,
  • and in turn, boosts revenue.

Murphy’s law

 

Edward Murphy Jr. was an American aerospace engineer who worked on safety-critical systems and was born in 1918 in the Panama Canal Zone. He is best known for his namesake Murphy’s law, stating, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.

 

While Customer Success done well offers a significant commercial advantage to a business, if done poorly and with Murphy’s law at times coming in to play significantly affects business factors.  

But what can possibly go wrong with Customer Success?

For starters, to maximise productivity, organisations may allocate too many client accounts to one team or representative to look after. Or weight incentives are heavily towards revenue generation. Or worse still, wrong people are assigned to the role.

Spend any time with a sales organisation, and you are likely to hear a similar story—a story about a consistently top-performing sales rep who failed to make the transition to sales manager.

And the reason? The skills and attributes required as a successful salesperson are vastly different to those needed to be a top manager. The same is true applies to Customer Success Managers.

The abilities and traits required to be a successful Customer Success Manager are many and varied, and selecting the right people for this role certainly presents risk elements.

What makes a great Customer Service Manager (CSM)?

Firstly, there is no one size fits all. Industry type and service or product offering contribute to answering this question. CSM’s usually possess broad business experience. It’s not uncommon for people with backgrounds in sales, support, presales, project management, and even marketing roles to have made successful CSMs.

When we ask managers what makes a great CSM, they usually tell us their best people are proactive and tend to have similar traits such as:

  • Great at managing stress
  • Resilient
  • Empathetic
  • Customer-focused
  • Sincere
  • Keeps promises
  • Positive attitude
  • Calm in a crisis
  • Self-assured
  • Socially relaxed
  • Strong reasoning and analytical ability
  • Great communicators

It’s quite the laundry list. The complex nature of backgrounds combined with the challenge of pinpointing the varied attributes that align with your business and service offering is where many organisations fail.

In fact, studies tell us that failing to get the right person that fits your organisation will result in a decrease in productivity, higher levels of staff turnover and high levels of job-related stress.

Determine the requirements and spot the people

The challenge for organisations today, especially in the current tight market, is identifying the best potential CSM’s. Typically, in our work, we observe many organisations that rely on the job description, resumes and reference checks when making hiring or redeployment decisions. And this then results in a high level of three out of four recruits who just aren’t the right fit.

 

It’s a case of ‘rubbish in = rubbish out”. If we don’t have the right information,

how can we possibly make the right decision?

 

We have worked with many clients using our next-gen tools and helped them profile the critical success attributes that establish fit for a role. Using our 4-step robust process, our clients in the main enjoy a 3-fold increase in pinpointing top people that excel, 47% reduction in team turnover and a significant increase in productivity.

The war for talent is in play right now in Australia. You owe it to you and your business to remove the higher risk of getting it wrong.

Contact Great People Inside if we can help recruit your next CSM or top performers for other important roles to benefit your organisation.

A Coaching Culture – how does this Protect Productivity and Profit?

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You need to attract and retain the best talent for your organisation and adopt a coaching culture to ensure you win. 

However, as the vaccine rollout in Australia gains momentum and the economy continues to rebound, research tells us the labour market will get tighter. For this reason, this situation will result in the war for talent becoming more likely to happen.

Hybrid work arrangements and work from anywhere policies are now the norm in most organisations. Then, to win this talent war, it’s now mission-critical:

  • to have your dispersed team highly engaged 
  • led by outstanding remote managers 
  • supported by a strong organisational culture. 
Productivity

Markedly, more than 70% of employees state they are more productive working from home, and businesses report 47% productivity increases during COVID. 

Most business leaders agree that increasing employee engagement increases productivity significantly and improves bottom-line profit. 

The fact is, it’s never been more important to focus on the productivity of your remote teams for the long term. And equally, ensure your managers feel equipped with the skills and tools they need to meet and exceed company goals.

Managers hold the key

If you have been fortunate to work for a great manager, I’d like to invite you to reflect for a moment. What was great about them? How do you remember them? Certainly, the fact is that managers can make or break a team. 

  

The Oxford English dictionary defines a manager as “a person responsible for controlling or administering an organisation or group of staff”. 

 

This is one definition; rather, my personal definition of a manager in 2021 and beyond is a “person that leads, supports, and develops a team of people to deliver the organisational goals.”  

 

By and large, the way we work has shifted forever. Being a manager has always been a tough gig, but in the hybrid environment, it sucks!

So how can you ensure your managers are ready for the hybrid normal?

Future-ready culture with a coaching culture

A culture of coaching is an approach in which leaders, managers and staff members work together to increase individual, team and company organisational performance.

The future hybrid workplace with a strong culture will be one where workers feel empowered to work towards their own goals independently. Managers who foster this type of working environment will positively impact employee engagement and organisational productivity. 

Gallup research has shown that managers are a massive influence on engagement rates. It was found managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. And with high engagement rates comes better company results.

So how can you transform your managers into coaches to create a culture of coaching in your workplace?

Teach coaching skills

The first steps are knowing:

  • who you are as a leader, and 
  • whom you have on your team. 

Its commonly accepted that not everyone has the required traits to work remotely long term. And business WHS responsibility for their employees does not change just because they are not working at the office. The solution we recommend is using established science to predict how your managers and team members will perform in a long term remote/hybrid environment.

I’ve used many people assessment tools over my 20+ years as a coach and a people leader. With this in mind, I find the bespoke next-gen people assessment tools from Great People Inside are easy to use. And, their predictive capability and insights are second to none for this exercise. They are outstanding, too, when you’re hiring a new remote employee. They truly de-risk the recruitment process and increase your success rate by 300%!

Not all managers have a coaching mindset, but all great managers do. Certainly prioritising coaching in your workplace training is the best way to create a coaching culture. This type of training is essential for employees transitioning into leadership roles or those coming to grips with managing people remotely.

Rank employee engagement as a top priority

Tying together talent and employee engagement to achieve important business objectives is what coaching is all about. 

To nurture employees’ professional development to keep them engaged, a good step is discussing with each employee their professional goals from their point of view. Then communicating clearly and precisely how the organisation can support them to achieve their goals.

In this way, the employee owns their own development and their careers. 

A coaching culture fosters an environment of trust.

Trust influences everything. A work environment in which managers coach and trust their employees and employees trust their managers is one where productivity can thrive. Creating trust is challenging. Again this is where a coaching mindset can play a huge role.

 

Professor Ralph Stacey, a renowned organisational theorist and Professor of Management at University of Hertfordshire, in the UK., says it best – “the quality of the system is determined by the quality of the relationships which is determined by the quality of the conversation.” 

 

When individuals have accountability over their work, they are more likely to achieve important business outcomes independently. Autonomous workers also understand how their everyday work contributes to the overall success of the company. Having this connection to the purpose helps to empower individuals to reach their highest potential.

Contact us today to find out more about incorporating a coaching mindset for your leaders and our Great People Inside assessment tools.

How do people management skills improve your business success?

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People management skills are one of the essential soft leadership skills a leader should possess.

While working from home in some form is accepted will remain after COVID, managing teams remotely has, for the contemporary leader, added the need to develop new skills.

Now may be an opportunity for your business to increase focus on this area with employees recognising the value of these skills.

These skills help overcome challenges in the workplace and build your team and business for several reasons:

  • handling interpersonal conflicts
  • leading employee training
  • managing deadlines
  • communicating and distributing information between employees working remotely and onsite
  • building a solid company culture, and
  • developing your employees’ maximum capability.

Leaders who adopt people management skills provide constructive feedback and mentor employees to grow and succeed in their positions. Goals will also be able to be established and achieved.  And overall, this results in a positive influence on the work environment.

A leader who has an in-depth understanding of their employees can evaluate:

  • the strength and weaknesses of their team
  • the resources required, and
  • set realistic deadlines.

This approach encourages the employees to strive for success and not set them up for failure.

In addition, leaders are able to build rapport, ask the team for constructive feedback, and take actionable steps to make positive changes in the work culture. As a result, this benefits everyone.

Below are four critical people management areas to help you understand your team and individuals at all levels. From onboarding, developing new skills, preparing them for other roles, to working on specialised projects.

  1. Understand Human Behaviour And Acknowledging Diversity

It is crucial to understand one simple concept – we are all different. Each individual will react and behave differently in any given situation.

A leader needs to realise that family, environmental and cultural influences have shaped some beliefs and behaviours. Understanding and learning some behavioural types and conditioning will allow leaders and managers to treat their employees with respect. In return, the business will be rewarded with best work practices, a motivated team, and valued ideas and opinions.

  1. The Individual’s Purpose

It is also imperative to understand how the individual team member sees their own purpose in their role and how they can contribute to the business. This can lead to improvements at both the individual employee and business levels.

A continued effort in understanding their sense of purpose, whether they are in the office or working from home, ensures the individual and business goals stay aligned.

  1. Transparent Communication

When there is open and transparent communication, it creates an atmosphere of trust. In effect, by employing people management skills, this communication works both ways, i.e., you tell, and they listen, and you have to do the same – listen to your employees.

This area is more critical than ever for businesses undergoing managing teams remotely. Video-based onboarding and mentoring and a remote communication strategy are essential for employee skill development and project delivery.

  1. We Own This Together

While leading with example is great, it also benefits when you entrust team members with specific tasks which best fit their skill sets. It shows that you are acknowledging their skillset and allowing them to demonstrate their capabilities. As a result, the team is closer and creates an environment of ownership and positive experiences.

In a remote setting, delegate tasks through shared online platforms that allow for the employee’s autonomy while still maintaining a sense of community in the workplace.

Responsibility and accountability on both ends improve overall morale and reduces people management skills coming across as complicated, unnecessary at times, and time-consuming.

Ongoing people management for development and retention

Just because you have hired a superstar does not mean you don’t have to continue managing and developing them to maximise their potential and business outcomes.

Development should start from day one of an employee’s journey with their new company. The rapport the new employee develops with the company can have long-lasting effects on the business, including the employee retention rate.

Trends have seen employees become more focused on developing their individual skills. Placing importance on their progress can help connect their goals to the more significant objectives of the business. Supporting these goals can be achieved remotely from the onboarding stage and continue through employment by hosting video workshops and online training seminars.

Many reasons cause an employee to leave an organisation, such as:

  • a lack of training
  • development
  • engagement
  • progression opportunities.

Quantify top performance 

Many assessments compare candidate results against generic benchmarks or no benchmark at all. In other words, this leaves the user with either no reference point or, at best, a near enough is good enough benchmark.

At GPI, we believe assessing an individual’s job performance as accurately as possible requires benchmarks built specifically for each role. Assessments can apply to both positions operating onsite or remotely. By identifying the success DNA of your top performers, you can create job benchmarks based on what success looks like in your business. Further development of your existing team members can be implemented where appropriate, including a coaching option.

As the employer, benchmarking flows through promoting and succession planning of your people to measure candidate profiles against the relevant top-performing role profile in your organisation.

Given these points, assessments that treat people as multi-faceted complex individuals we are, open a world of possibilities with both your new and existing people. You will find yourself in the stronger position of identifying your people’s true potential and providing opportunities for laser-focused development.

If you’d like to trial our assessments for consideration as part of your organisation’s people management strategy – contact us.

How people capability in organisations is impacted by assessment types

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Taking a punt on a one size fits all approach to recruitment

Most managers and leaders know hiring a new employee for best people capability is an expensive exercise.

I’ve never actually met anyone who set out to hire a less than ideal employee on purpose. However, it always bothers me that statistics tell us we hire the right person only less than 25% of the time.

Think about that for a moment. Imagine you have a process in your business that only delivers the right outcome with such a low level of consistency. What would you do?

I’m thinking you’d change the process and look for new ways to deliver better outcomes. Good. Then read on.

Roll the dice and take your chances

The goal of recruitment is to hire a new employee that will add value, contribute to the business, and enjoy their work. All this leads to high people capability and engagement.

But it’s not that easy. You gamble $30,000 EVERY time you start the hiring process because humans are complex beings.

For starters, there is the deep-seated unconscious bias that comes with being human. To add to our responsibility, some candidates:

  • lie on their resume,
  • fudge their referees, and
  • turn out to be more of a lone wolf than a team player.

The potential pitfalls are endless! As my mother used to say, “you’d need eyes in the back of your head”!

Typical behavioural assessments for people capability

Many businesses use psychometric assessments to help in predicting the behaviours and ability of candidates.

Assessments are not new. Most have been around since the last century.

However, the issue is that most psychometric assessments are ‘off the shelf’ packages of measures selected by the test provider, not the buyer.  This leaves buyers with no opportunity to vary them in any way.

Consequently, this approach means that buyers measure things they do not need to and fail to measure elements that are critical to their business’s success.

This traditional ‘one size fits all’ solution used across the employee life cycle does not meet the needs of modern organisations. As a result, the ability to attract, assess, select, develop and retain the right people is negatively impacted.

Stack the odds in your favour for your organisation’s people capability

Great People Inside (GPI) appreciates that every organisation both large and small is unique. Organisations spend millions on defining, developing, and implementing for the commercial advantage of their successful business. Some aspects include:

  • those specific leadership competencies,
  • that unique culture,
  • that state-of-the-art customer service,
  • those well-known values and dynamics.

We understand that the uniqueness and greatness of your organisation cannot – and should not – rely on a ‘one size fits all’ approach.

That is the reason GPI invested hundreds of years of collective, international know-how to create technology empowering you to embrace the complete life cycle of employees and executives. From talent acquisition and onboarding, talent growth and development to employee assessment and performance management.

Guided by our easy-to-use platform, the buyer can select from a menu of more than 60 validated and reliable psychometric dimensions.

This same flexibility applies to our 360° surveys, where you can choose from more than 50 managerial skills and competencies. In addition, suggestions for future improvement and development are available.

In effect with GPI, you can easily create totally customised assessments and surveys specific to your needs. From the competencies, values or objectives of any role, department, or organisation – anywhere in the world.

To learn more about the dimensions available suited to modern organisations, or if you’d like to trial our assessments – contact us.

VUCA Leadership today: how to identify great VUCA Leaders

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VUCA leadership is paramount, with the world facing an uncertain future today.

The VUCA acronym (Volatile, Uncertain Complex, Ambiguous) has been around since 1987. It was the US Army War College’s response to the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s.

No one was forecasting Covid-19, even in January 2020.

Without a doubt, it has been the most disruptive event in our lifetimes. It has devastated:

  • countries,
  • economies,
  • businesses,
  • individuals,
  • families, and
  • communities.

But it is likely there may be other disruptions waiting in the wings that, as yet, we know nothing about.

What does VUCA leadership and uncertainty mean for organisations?

The BIG questions for organisations are:

  • which elements will affect you,
  • to what degree, and
  • how will a combination of consecutive catastrophic disruptions alter the change.

Despite the deliberations of many so-called thought leaders and experts, the truthful answer is no one actually knows what’s going to happen in the future!

What you can rely on, though, is that there will be significant change. VUCA leaders in your organisation means the capability of anticipating, responding and reacting to change when it happens in turn, reacting again and again when it changes again (and again).

 

“THE ONLY CONSTANT IN LIFE IS CHANGE.”  – HERACLITUS (C535BC – C475BC)

 

What makes an effective VUCA leader?

Effective VUCA leadership is demonstrated by those who can give their company more than an abundance of skills and experience. Traits of VUCA leaders are that they can:

  • develop and communicate a clear and motivating vision, based on an understanding of the constantly changing economic environment, and
  • apply it through quick decisions, well-adapted to ever-changing conditions.

In addition to skills learned for a role, experience, and qualifications gained, there is no substitute for the enthusiasm, motivation and vision these great leaders possess. VUCA leaders can mean the difference between an average team and a high performing team in an organisation. They are the leaders every company wants to keep, nurture and develop to their full potential.

VUCA leaders are acutely aware of the strategic goals they are striving for, and what they need to do to get there. They share:

  • company values,
  • strive to be the best at what they do,
  • identify areas for improvement, and
  • actively engage with their own leaders to perfect their craft and leadership method.

Leadership style isn’t a perfect science – but what all great leaders have in common is their ability to be authentic.

Future proof your business through VUCA leadership

Thinking back to the beginning of the Covid crisis, who among your managers disappointed you with their response? Who impressed you? Were any of these a surprise to you (either positive or negative)? Those who responded well are, potentially, your VUCA Leaders. If you manage to retain them they are the people who will guide you through future change events.

Using the Great People Inside customised VUCA leadership assessment, you can identify and quantify which team members and potential candidates possess the required attributes. Gaps that may be obstacles to your organisation’s success can also be uncovered.

Click here for a free trial.

What attributes do top salespeople have in common?

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Better sales staff equals more sales. It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Increasing the productivity of your salespeople, however, is a complex task fraught with misunderstanding.

Finding high performing staff involves a specific hiring approach which targets those with precisely the right attributes for the job in hand.

Once you have the right players, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a question of matching them to the right sales roles, managing them and developing the sales team in an ongoing way to ensure maximum efficiency and results.

Remember the old maxim ‘If you can sell, you can sell anything’?

Well, times have changed. Not all sales positions – or reps – are created equal.

According to studies analysed by Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney in their book How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer, around 50% of those working in sales lack the fundamental traits necessary in effective salespeople. A further 25% are selling the wrong thing, for the wrong managers, in the wrong place.

That leaves just 25% of salespeople operating to full capacity and producing great results.

So one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to finding the right salesperson to sell your product or services.

Financial benefits of hiring the best salespeople

Having a sales team composed of star performers can make a significant difference to your bottom line.

In a study of 100 businesses, Sales Force of Top Producers – A Manager’s (and Owner’s) Dream, reported in Employer’s Advantage, the company’s top performer outsold the bottom performer by a whopping average of 5.7 to 1 – with a range of 3:1 to 9:1.

Just imagine what kind of results you’d get if your entire team worked at the lower margin of 3:1, not to mention 5:1 or higher.

Salesforce Work.com and the TAS Group drew some more shocking statistics from their research. These include:

  • Two-thirds of salespeople miss their quota.
  • More than half of all salespeople close less than 40% of potential deals.
  • Top-performing sales reps are 250% better at qualifying leads.
  • High performers are 2.5 times more likely to be effective qualifiers than the general population.
  • Around 40% of salespeople don’t understand their customer’s ‘pain’, addressing problems they don’t even have.
  • Revenue can be up to 25% greater at companies where sales and marketing are well integrated.
  • High performers are 57% more likely to come from companies where sales and marketing work in harmony.

Measuring an individual salesperson’s productivity

All this begs the question, just how productive is your own sales team? Can you measure individual productivity? And once you’ve measured it, how do you replace or improve poor and fair performers?

The answer is using the advanced science from the next generation of smart assessment tools. Our award-winning Great People Inside assessments will help you identify those essential success attributes for each sales role, enabling you to match it with the right employee.

Great People Inside’s dimensions assessment will tell you:

  • what makes your top performers so great
  • why your average performers are less effective
  • how to improve your least successful performers

How to hire the best people

 

The right assessment tools can help you find the right people for your sales roles.

Applied correctly, Great People Inside tools can  make your recruitment of future high performers up to three times more successful and also significantly reduce sales department turnover by more than 27%.

These results should be music to any employer’s ear when considering the statistics.

Figures reported in Employer’s Advantage, show that three out of four new sales employees don’t last the distance. They have, in fact, only a 25% chance of staying with the company for a full year.

Of those that do stick, only one in 10 go on to become a genuine top performer within three years.

So what is the essential DNA of these star performers? Many have fundamental traits and attributes in common, which help drive their peak performance for the longer term.

Using our validated and reliable customised sales assessments, we work with you and scientifically evaluate your current top-performing salespeople.

These measures enable us to create a customised job profile benchmark specific to your company based on your company’s top performers, not a random benchmark based on a collection of external organisations. A company customised standard means you can clearly see what sets your top performers apart from the rest.

This benchmark can also be used to significant effect when recruiting new sales staff, ensuring that candidates fit these rigorous criteria and carry the ‘work genes’ critical to success in their roles.

What to look for in sales job candidates today

There are plenty of things to consider when hiring, but it’s vital that new employees are a good fit with company culture and embrace their new work environment.

They must be able to cope with challenges, build strong relationships with work colleagues – especially in the marketing department – and understand the needs of your customers.

As if hiring salespeople wasn’t challenging enough already, in this new world we live in, where face to face selling may not always be the accepted way, how do you know if the candidates have what it takes to sell remotely. Interestingly, psychologists tell us the many attributes for in-person sales success don’t work effectively when remote selling!

So what attributes do star sales performers typically have? Behavioural science tells us that they commonly possess the following traits:

  • Agreeableness: Tendency to be friendly, approachable, and easy to get along with.
  • Conscientiousness: Tendency to strive for perfection, sometimes at all costs.
  • Stability: Degree to which one reacts positively to negative or stressful situations.
  • Openness: Willingness to try new ways of doing things.
  • Tenacity: Tendency to be determined and persevere.
  • Control: Tendency to take charge of people and situations. Leads more than follows.
  • Entrepreneurial Approach: The tendency to quickly seize and tenaciously pursue new opportunities for the organisation, taking calculated risks at a high level of autonomy. The right recruitment tools help you weed out unsuitable candidates and identify the cream of the crop.

Other benefits of hiring star sales performers

Revenue benefits are not the only advantages of building a high performing sales team.

By adopting a more scientific approach to recruitment, you remove much of your operational downside costs; costs that don’t always show up on your P&L:

  • Frequent employee turnover – even from good people
  • Time spent recruiting and training of replacements
  • Lost sales through an empty seat during recruitment and induction training
  • Wasted investment in salary and training for someone that doesn’t make it.
  • Inability to close deals when not face to face.

Try us for FREE

You probably wouldn’t make a significant purchase without doing your research and acquiring objective data about your future potential investment. Then why would you hire a new salesperson costing more than $100K per annum using nothing more than your “gut feel” and highly subjective references?

At the end of the day if you’re happy with your current sales team’s success rate don’t change anything.

However, if you want to significantly increase your business performance talk to Great People Inside about our sales assessments – we’ll even let you try us risk-free and fee-free. Just click HERE, and we will be in touch.