Ideally, sales cycles get shorter and easier over time as the product matures and processes for customer journeys improve. However certain sales cycles can take longer than expected, especially for large enterprise customers and strategic deals. As I analyzed the success of the kickoff and onboarding of long sales cycles, I discovered that more than 60% of these presented problems and dragged longer than expected. I ran retrospectives with CSM teams to uncover the reasons and more than 90% of these had problems with customer expectation misalignment. 

We reviewed sales & tech notes, sales pitch decks, success plans, and tech design documents. It became obvious that most of these became stale and outdated quickly as the sales process dragged on. When it came time to do the project kickoff and run the onboarding plan, the customer's priorities and objectives had evolved. CSM teams were spending additional time realigning with the customer stakeholders while the onboarding process was underway, causing delays.

I wanted to find a way to prevent this by offering customers an opportunity to realign objectives and priorities 

 the project kickoff and after they signed the deal.

I worked with sales leaders to get an idea of customers' expectations around kickoff and onboarding. Surprisingly, I heard that the larger the deal and the size of the customer, they had looser expectations in getting their teams engaged with the service/platform they had just purchased. Large hierarchies and company structures require dedicated teams or individuals to get involved while planning capacity and resources. This usually took one or two weeks which sounded more than ideal for performing internal preparation and planning.

, I designed an optional process that could be executed in the one or two-week window between contract signing and the expected kickoff date. 

The main objective is to realign business objectives and success metrics with customer stakeholders that will own the kickoff, onboarding, and implementation of the product/service they purchased. These are the basic requirements needed from both parties:

Define a kickoff and onboarding captain. A main point of contact that will route questions, tasks, and responsibilities to other customer stakeholders. This captain must be present in the pre-kickoff call and subsequent kickoff and onboarding calls.

(Optional) List any other stakeholders that can support the kickoff and onboarding journey. They can temporarily provide coverage if the captain is unavailable.

Reserve time for a 30-minute live call with the CSM team after the contract signing and at least 3 days before the expected kickoff date.

Secure and confirm the 30-minute time for the call with the customer kickoff captain and any optional stakeholders. If possible, invite the pre-sales team (Sales rep, Solution Architect, and any executive sponsors).

Review any notes, presentations, and docs created during pre-sales. The 

Create a 3 to 5 slide presentation that lists:

The customer's business objectives, success metrics, and value realization objectives.

The customer stakeholders that the CSM team will be working with. List names, titles, and emails.

The expected kickoff date and onboarding journey milestones.

(Optional) The contract terms, with any consumption, license, usage limits, or stipulations.

Validate the contents of each slide with the customer. This will be an opportunity to show the customer "Here's what we heard during pre-sales. Is this still valid? If not, let's refresh it and commonly agree".

You will likely edit the contents of the slides as you review them with the customer. Be ready to do hot edits or take notes. Alternatively, recording the call for later review can help.

Send a copy of the updated slide deck to the customer at least 24 hours before the kickoff date.

As I designed the process and looked for a few customers to try it with before launching it, I asked for feedback. I first asked if they would like to have a pre-kickoff call and if they would find it valuable. The response was divided 50/50. As much as some were open to this new process and found it useful, half of the customers surveyed said they would prefer to address the alignment issues during onboarding; this prompted me to offer the call as optional.

When I enabled this new process internally to CSM teams, I emphasized "selling" the call. Showing templates and examples of what the call looks like and what it aims to do. But most importantly, to show the value and gains of doing so. Still, CSM teams will always mention that it is completely optional. 

After 6 months of running this process, 3/4 of customers opted to have the call. I also ran a simple CSAT survey to measure satisfaction and 87% of customers responded positively. Worth a shot!

Get aligned with a pre-kickoff call

CS leaders are always looking for ways to improve the processes and playbooks in their organizations. One of the most important motions is risk mitigation and churn prevention. This process entails doing deep dives with account teams to understand the reasons that led to churn. Although a lot can be done proactively to mitigate potential churn, when churn does materialize, there are a lot of learning opportunities. The key is to have a program in place to get the most out of these learning opportunities, and it can all start by having the right amount of churn reason analytics in your CRM.

Review your CRM for account data collected

As a first step, CS leaders should review the data collected from the accounts in their CRMs. At a bare minimum, accounts should have:

Account health (green, yellow, red OR score)

Lifecycle stage (onboarding, adopting, nurturing, churned, etc)

More data will be specific to the product/service offering like consumption analytics (usage, adoption), renewal and expansion opportunities, etc.

A lot of times when accounts churn, nothing is tracked about the reasons that led to churn. Most companies will just flag the account as churned in fields like the "lifecycle stage", put the ARR value to $0, and unassign the account team attached to the account. By adding churn reason fields to your CRM, you'll have the ability to do periodic churn reviews that can uncover trends and patterns that can help you avoid future churn.

Add fields to collect "reasons for churn"

Expand your CRM to allow account teams to give details about the reason for churn. Depending on your CRM setup, you could do this at the account level or opportunity level; the advantage of doing it at the opportunity level is that you can expand your analysis to failed expansion motions. These are some fields you can offer:

Churn reason - a multi-select dropdown with a few common options like:

Churn reason details - text box to capture further details, especially for reasons like "went with a competitor", "product deficiencies", and "external factors". You can also have a pre-populated list for these to normalize data collection.

(Optional) Churn mitigation attempt - text box to list any churn mitigation attempts. This can help improve the playbooks in place by measuring efficacy. 

Gather your CS and GTM leaders to discuss the findings from the data. I suggest you run quarterly reports based on the churn reason fields to uncover findings and trends. Present them to other cross-functional partners like Engineering, Product & Design (EPD) so they have more data about product fit and deficiencies. I led this motion and I focused on:

The span of control - What are the reasons that are under our control, either directly in our CS team or company partners, or purely external? It helps prioritize efforts that are easier to influence.

Correlation to ARR and account tenure - What accounts churn faster and how much was the spend? Place special emphasis on long-tenured accounts with big ARR.

Use AI to categorize churn reasons details - For the free-form text box fields, use AI to bucket them into common categories. This exercise is super interesting when you analyze the progress over time (for example, quarter over quarter).

Review current churn mitigation processes - This allows you to retire ineffective programs and try new ones as the product and the market evolve.

Take a step further and make sure that CS teams and other cross-functional partners follow up on the proposed changes. As teams refine the product and iterate over processes, it's very important to be able to show how these are improving the churn analytics, reducing churn, and improving Net Dollar Retention (NDR). This will keep them motivated and will ensure significant changes to your bottom line. 

Taking advatage of churn reason analytics

, I decided to start a new blog that I could deploy on a Vercel hobby account to practice some of the skills I learned while working there as a Manager of one of the CSM teams. I wanted to get started quickly, so I searched the available 

 to see my options. After considering a few blog templates with CMS integrations like WordPress and Prismic, I went with the 

 powered blog with native content editing and instant previews. 

A few thoughts about my experience with setting it up from scratch:

I had no previous experience with Sanity but I didn't need much to get going. Creating a free Sanity account first makes the project creation flow in Vercel much easier

The process of creating a new Vercel project (like starting your personal blog) by using a template is wonderful and easy for all levels of coders. The process boils down to:

Add the Vercel Sanity integration and create a new Sanity project

Let Vercel do the initial deployment and enjoy the 

 to set up your project locally and deploy it to production

Open your deployed URL to see your brand new blog and follow the "Next steps" suggested to access your 

 (the content creation backend) by adding a CORS origin URL from Vercel that can connect to the Sanity API

Create some content in your Sanity Studio

The Sanity integration for Vercel comes with a basic Sanity schema that allows me to set up the basic information for the blog like title, description, OG image, add myself as an Author and create posts 

The post schema is enough to get started, offering a title, post slug, content (that uses 

Publishing new content and content updates requires no new Vercel builds as long as you set up ISR but once you do, the content flows seamlessly in seconds

So this is it. I have a new blog up and running with Next.js + Vercel + Sanity.io and all in all, the process took me about 1 hour. There are a couple of improvements that I have in mind to make it feel more my own like:

Improve the post content presentation to my liking and support more content styles and decorators

Play with the Sanity schemas to add post categories or tags

I highly encourage anyone to go through this journey if you're interested in learning how to build a website with Next.js + Vercel. I could've well gone with an out-of-the-box solution like Medium, Substack, Tumblr, or even the good old WordPress but that would be no fun, right?

David Medina

Starting a new blog with Next.js + Vercel + Sanity.io

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Get aligned with a pre-kickoff call

Taking advatage of churn reason analytics