Hey team - I have a question for y'all about how you've seen B2B Sales and CSM teams incentivized to support customer marketing 🧵
I'm currently in a position where I find that the B2B Sales and CSMs are not incentivized in any meaningful way to either:
Get co-marketing terms preserved in contracts/MSAs
Help support my team's ability to make case studies, capture testimonials, etc.
Sales is also not doing much to incentivize the customers, either. The paradox I'm trying to navigate right now is the "discounts impact my quota and commission so I'm not really incentivized to broker deals in exchange for comarketing" conundrum. I need to change something, but before I spend any more time trying to make a case, I am wondering what you all are doing and seeing, how you've approached this before, what you think a best practice could look like. This isn't a scenario I've had to contend with before and I want to make sure I do my due diligence before I make a recommendation. Any and all thoughts/help/ideas/experiences would be great to hear!
Kevin Lau Do you have any wisdom around this? ☝️
If I understand correctly is the main problem to get more nominations and "pipeline" from your sellers and CSMs?
This is a really good question. Laurie Timms any thoughts?
Nominations, intros – the whole nine
If you are getting pushback from reps...I recommend having this conversation with sr. leadership on what the shared outcome and goal leads to for all these teams - stronger account stickiness, relationship building, NDR, etc.
yeah, I've done that a few times.
The main problem here is that I don't have any real tools for incentivizing customers right now, either, typically discount structures have worked, but our sales team is disincentivized to do that
(in addition to the disengagement)
Without knowing the details, I would just say it doesn't need to always be monetary to incentivize the customer - sure a discount helps but it can come across as a transactional tit for tat relationship
thats definitely true. Are there any creative incentives youve seen, outside of things like speaking engagements, conference participation, etc?
I usually bucket WIIFM (what's in it for me) under 3 main areas - with that said ask your customers on what they want:
Peer to peer networking (think exclusive, curated groups, etc.)
Titles / recognition (think thought leadership, speaking ,etc.
Rewards (Ranging from swag to experiences to access to your internal teams)
Can I ask, where are you looking for these customers? Can you reach out to them personally? Are you in an industry where it's harder to get customers to share success?
We're looking both at internal user data and SFDC – the thing that's tricky is that we're a SaaS co where we're just not a critical part of the tech stack, we usually end up in enterprises via IT consolidation
so the relationships don't exist
