Marketing is about emotions.
Sales is about emotions.
Repeat after me: Customer Success is… really?
Marketing cannot be trusted. Sales cannot be trusted. All they do is lure people in, and sell them something they don’t need.
We tell us this story as a mechanism of defense, because we have seen it far too often. Our commercial colleagues paint the sky blue when it’s grey. Why can’t they just be honest?
I am of course exaggerating. But with most Customer Success teams I talk to, I sense a distrust towards the other teams.
But we can actually learn from Marketing and Sales to improve our onboarding.
Here’s how.
Marketing and Sales have long understood that emotions guide buying decisions. That’s obvious in B2C, but it’s not different in B2B. Emotions play a far more important role than we might think. It’s not all about fact sheets and specifications. Every buying decision in B2B is intensely emotional “under the hood”.
But our onboarding is not emotional enough
Lincoln Murphy describes this as the emotional disconnect during onboarding. Sales and Marketing have built up this big emotional pain point, and it resolves in our solution.
And then our Customer Success team comes to the rescue. And we are the factual partner. We set up milestones. We define KPIs. We are everything but emotional. We have won a battle but lost the war.
Because what we fail to see is that our customers are on an emotional yabba-dabba-doo high, and we smack them in the face with reality.
So take a closer look at your onboarding playbook. You take care of the factual, data-driven onboarding part? Great.
But how can you connect that data to emotions? How can connect a certain milestone to a feeling? How can you make them feel like they are on the way to achieve a higher goal – one that goes beyond “An ROI of 20%”?
Lincoln says it like this:
“If you simply take over from the salesperson and jump right in to dry, unemotional functional or technical onboarding, you get customers ghosting you, losing interest, making excuses.”
Lincoln Murphy
My homework for you today: Next to your onboarding playbook, write down how every part of that onboarding will result in an emotional resolve that connects to the desired outcome and the ideal world that Marketing and Sales have promised. Yin and Yang. Facts and emotions. You need both to win.
Have a great week and stay safe
