Implementing a structured coaching Program
Rachel McCourty, Chief Customer Officer at e4enable
There are many exciting things about joining a business in its early growth phase - the freedom to create, the need to be involved in all aspects of the business, the close relationship with customers. It’s an exciting time for me to become Chief Customer Officer here at e4enable.
My mission and my passion is to create a scalable delivery model, while ensuring that the ethos of customer success is baked into all aspects of e4enable right from the start.
If you break it down, the CCO role has four main areas of responsibility:
Onboarding new customers and helping them deploy it so that it quickly meets their key objectives
Inspiring, coaching and training them as it transitions into “business as usual”
Ensuring the support we offer - both technical and advisory - is fast, reliable and a pleasure rather than a pain to use
And - because we are a business - ensuring they renew their contract with us!
In addition, as the voice of the customer inside our organisation, I help the product team ensure the roadmap for development is in line with customer needs.
So, that’s me and my role covered - but in this blog I also wanted to discuss two main observations from my first few months here. One is about something that’s quite new to me, which is working directly with sales teams. But first, I wanted to discuss how I help pace deployments… using the famous myth of Daedalus and Icarus.
Most people know this Greek legend, but as a refresher: Daedalus was a great inventor and created wings that allowed him and his son Icarus to fly. Sadly, despite Daedalus’ warnings, Icarus flew too close to the sun (which I guess was much closer back then!?) and his wings melted.
In my experience, delivery teams at SaaS technology vendors can feel like Daedalus - trying to persuade their beloved customers not to fly too far, too soon.
We have found that we can give the platform to a customer and by the end of the first day or two, they have set up their competencies, organised a string of one-to-ones and scheduled a whole programme of team reviews. They are flying! The platform is so easy to set up, customers want to use every feature immediately.
But that can be a mistake.
Everything seems great for a while, but changing from an ad-hoc coaching model to a very organised one can be a big change. If, one day, a busy Sales Manager logs into the platform to find that all their staff reviews are due, everyone needs their competencies rated and every team member must have their objectives reviewed - they can feel overwhelmed, and things might start to slip.
So, part of my role is to ensure our deployment model helps them meet key objectives quickly to demonstrate value, but pace the rollout of their exciting new sales coaching and development program so that it’s built to last.
The other quick observation that became clear to me very quickly is that salespeople as customers are different. I’ve been surprised and delighted by my interactions with the SDRs who will be using the software - none of them have joined the strategy or training sessions with a negative mindset. None of them have joined the calls and immediately gone on mute, contributing nothing unless their manager yells at them!
On the contrary, many of them have come with their own ideas for self development, their own personal goals that they want to achieve, or their own sales targets - above and beyond those set by their company.
Whenever I see this kind of attitude, I know they are set for success.
It’s been a great start here and I am already pleased with the progress we have made. I look forward to sharing some more insights and discoveries soon.