How Marketers Can Persuade Customer Support to Sell More

Sunir Shah, CMO at Olark states that Customer Support teams can be a great asset to sales efforts, but it’s not their job to hit a sales quota. Through strategic plan and gentle persuasion, marketers will find their customer satisfaction and bottom line numbers improve

A few years ago, Comcast thought it would be a great idea to have their Customer Support team sell more. That experiment ended very badly one day in a recorded interaction with the former head of Engadget, Ryan Block.

Customers reach out to you because they have questions they want answered or needs they want fulfilled. They're expecting your Support team to help. If your Support team is instead trying hard to upsell them, it will result in failed expectations and customer churn, and churn is bad.

For example, I decided to try an experiment: I put an automated "salesy" chat opener on our pricing page that says, “Hey, I’m here to help explain what Olark is. What business goal are you looking for Olark to solve?” Any responses to this question were immediately answered by our Support team. It doubled the number of conversations on that page, which lifted our sales between 5 and 7 percent.

If you go the automated route, try to be as human or as unexpected as possible. Things like lowercase subject lines, or emails containing a food reference (especially pizza or tacos) have a more authentic feel. If you're automating conversations over live chat, Johnathan Dane, founder of KlientBoost, found that using 'unexpected', automated greetings on his client's websites increased overall conversion rates within their AdWords account by 37%. (Source)

Yes, this is partially us being tricky marketers in the 21st century, but it also enables the Customer Support team to sell.

Conclusion

Your Customer Support team can be a great asset to your sales efforts. Just don't expect them to meet a 'sales quota' - that's not how they operate. Put them in a position to be friendly, helpful and responsive, and watch your customer satisfaction and your bottom line improve.

Hopefully this gave you some ideas to try with your own team, but I offer six more ways to be tricky marketers in my book, Persuading Customer Support to Sell.