Q: What can a member of the retention department of a company do that a regular sales associate can not?
Go deeper.
What a customer success professional or retention specialist can do is go deeper.
- Sales professionals can do a little customer support, it’s part of the job. But they have to manage the trade-off of time vs. return.
- Sales will answer a lot of questions during discovery. But only until it is too much vs. the deal size. At some point, it’s too many questions and too much time vs. potential commission check.
- Sales will answer basic support questions when customers check-in. But after 2 interactions, they tend to fade away. Once the answers take a lot of work, it’s usually “I’ll log a trouble ticket for you.”
- Support, customer success & retention have more time. They can go deeper on customer needs and requests.
Sales can help pitch in. But they can’t dedicate enough time on existing customers to solve many more complex issues.
