Effective Post-Sales to Customer Success Handoff Checklist

What Is a Post-Sales Process?

A post-sales process is a series of tasks that you perform after your customer buys a product or service from you. You’ve gone through all kinds of hoops to make someone buy your product. Now that the deal has been closed, does it mean that it’s over? The answer is no. There are several different steps you need to follow to provide a great experience and to make sure you keep your new client happy with the service. 

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These collections of processes may include sales, marketing, and customer service tasks, and they deliver the obligation your service or product has to the customer. These actions also help to improve and build upon the customer relationship.

Different departments need to follow-up on the post-sales process as they provide a series of benefits and uses to each of them. Marketing teams use post-sales services to reduce customer dissatisfaction if. They also keep an eye on any complaints to assess their performance as well as to show customer commitment, which can later help to build up a company’s positive brand reputation. 

Product teams will benefit from the post-sales process by learning from consumer data after product evaluation. As it may happen, perceived performance can differ from actual performance, and this can lead to non-satisfaction from customers. By learning from this, it can lead to making necessary changes to the product at the right time, which can prevent consumers from returning the product, switching to the competition, or to complain about the brand or service. 

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Why Create a Post-Sales Process?

Companies use post-sales support as a business strategy as it typically leads to higher customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, word-of-mouth-marketing, and even repeat-sales. However, the post-sales process usually entails a variety of different actions that will need to be performed by different people, the most common transition being a handoff from sales teams to customer success or customer service teams. 

To make this handoff as seamless as possible, and to make sure your clients are getting an excellent customer service experience, you need to carefully plan and execute a post-sales process. Here are some of the most relevant benefits of working with a post-sales predefined process:

• You can see the status of all your customers and deals at a glance.
• Information becomes centralized in a single document or a single platform.
• Teams can easily keep track of their deals as well as the steps in which they are.
• Follow-up on progress and check on the status of each client.
• Ownership becomes visual to everyone involved.

Benefits of a Post-Sales Strategy

1. It strengthens your relationship with your customers. The goal of every company out there should be that their customers are satisfied with the service they’ve purchased. An effective post-sales process will ensure that your clients are satisfied with your product and their overall experience. What’s more, by providing outstanding customer service, you’ll be guaranteeing that your customers are making the most out of their purchase.

2. It builds your reputation. When you meet your client’s expectations and needs, you will also be making sure they feel good about their decision of buying your product. By solving their pain points efficiently, you’ll be enhancing their opinion of you. This can lead to recommendations from existing customers which can sometimes even be more influential than other types of promotion, such as direct advertising.

3. It improves your product. By receiving feedback you can understand what needs to change and what needs to improve with your product. 

4. It benefits your entire sales process. How? Because it keeps you centered. An effective post-sales process will allow you to understand where your process is thriving and where it needs improvement. 

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Streamline Your Post-Sales Process with Instagantt

The goal of a post-sales process is to prevent you from missing any steps and to make sure your handoff from the sales department to the customer service department is as seamless as possible. By implementing a carefully designed process, your customers will be receiving the attention and the service they need without doubling your efforts.

An effective post-sales process enables you to support your customers to get the most out of your product, to improve your overall customer loyalty, and to gather relevant feedback that will help you improve your business and your service. After all, it’s harder and costlier to acquire new customers than to keep your existing ones happy, and you can achieve this by following through on product support, customer service, customer feedback, and constant evaluation.

We know, there are many different steps that come into place. But this is where project management software such as Instagantt can help. Because a post-sales process involves multiple steps and teams, it can be difficult to rely on a simple checklist to make sure each step is completed at due time. After all, overlooking a single step could potentially translate to unhappy customers. Luckily, when it comes to staying on track of chronological and time-sensitive tasks, Instagantt is the go-to solution.

Instagantt is a Gantt chart software that can help you create efficient workflows for your post-sales process. You can create multiple processes for multiple clients, in a way that it perfectly fits your company’s need. But the most important thing is that you won’t ever miss a step because this tool was made for managing projects and schedules, and you can easily keep track and update your different tasks with just a few clicks. Additionally, you will be able to share your progress with key team members, managers, and stakeholders alike, helping you make sure everyone stays in the loop.

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Step-by-Step Post-Sales Checklist Example

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