Sales and Customer Success Hinge On WOW

I’ve been reading a lot about customer success and onboarding recently. It’s top of mind for me these days as we continue to onboard more and more customers at SalesWise. Two articles that have stood out: 

The Slack article was more about go-to-market strategy. In it were important tenets that were also echoed by WP Curve. This includes the importance of getting to the “wow” factor.

I wrote a post before titled “U in UX Stands for You: The Evolution of Consumer Engagement”. I highlighted the importance of early user experience like Spotify which enables users to get up and running quickly. Then, I highlighted the importance of empty-state design in “Starting With Nothing: Solving Early Churn With Empty State Design”.

After reading the WP Curve and Slack articles about the “wow” factor, it’s important today more than ever to present value immediately. For Slack, the “wow” moment was user engagement. For Spotify, it was signing up and browsing channels before listening. For a marketing automation platform, it’s seeing an automated campaign in action.

At SalesWise, many customers share their “wow” moment — getting real-time visibility into insightful data they hadn’t seen before. We do this with simple, secure Oauth for services like Gmail and Salesforce. In 10 minutes, an entire company can be up and running. The algorithms and heuristics work in the background to organize it all. That’s how we get to “wow” fast.

One President of a customer company said it simply: “You deliver on the SaaS promise”. That is, our platform just worked. Some customers share how other SaaS platforms they started trials with took too much effort to set up. Even in today’s world of SaaS and APIs, set-up friction is high.

Body Boss, back in the day, required too much effort to get to the “wow”. We required too much setup of strength coaches. Thus, we had many coaches bail after the first and second visits.

It’s critical for companies to recognize “wow” moments, and how to deliver that as soon as a user signs up. The SalesWise “wow” factor is seeing real-time sales activities automatically organized. We’re developing some new features that will highlight even more “wow”. We’ll be able to help our customers instantly identify sales opportunities that may fall through the cracks. This will drive immediate value by spurring a sales rep to take action. This, in itself, will be massive in value to our customers.

Find your “wow” factor, and deliver it as soon as possible. Find ways to present value and insights without having to do much set up. Show enough to get the user to get value. You can always get more data and do more set up once the user sees immediate value.