As Customer Success Managers one of our many hats is to ensure our customer champions know how to get the most out of your product. We work closely with our customers to ensure they are well trained on the product. The customers are informed of new features and updates. They get answers to their questions and review their utilization to provide enhancement guidance. We progress a customer through our onboarding programmes, growth playbooks and support him/her as s/he advances to become customer champion.
By becoming a champion of our product within their business it is often assumed that they can articulate the reason their business uses your product. The value the product returns to stakeholders. However, this is often a misconception. Although they can probably do a brilliant job of explaining what the product is, what it does. What is the return on investment?
In case the customer has only one slide and 5 minutes in a budget allocation meeting to explain to key stakeholders why your product is important to the business.
What if they need to explain your very technical product to someone who is very non-technical? Or a CFO who has no idea what the product is except its cost impact on the bottom line?
Provide the tools to your customers to get stakeholder buy-in
Think about one of your customer champions. If they needed to go into a board meeting and explain what your product is, why your product is important to the business and what value it delivers. Do they have access to suitable assets to be able to do this? Could you make it easier for your customer champion while taking more control of how they pitch your product by providing a suite of assets for this very purpose?
Some companies are brilliant at this. Some provide a variety of materials in a variety of formats to help their customer champions. For example- to quickly create a slide, PDF, or image to explain both product and value. From straight-of-the-shelf materials to ones that allow dual branding, and editing to tailor the message to the customer’s business.
At CustomerSuccessBox, we understand there are many stakeholders involved in making the buying decision. Therefore as a process, the sales team sets up a personalized instance having use cases that the champion wants to solve. The alerts, milestones, and playbooks are all set up using the customer data. It becomes easier for the customer to know the exact value that can be derived using the product. The personalized instance is free of charge for 15 days. In between, the sales team gets on a bi-weekly call to understand the progress and also to clear blockers if any.
Apart from this, the sales team also provides a presentation, onboarding deck, and ROI calculation sheet for showcasing the ROI that can be achieved by implementing CustomerSuccessBox.
Atlassian Data Center is another great example. Since there is a number of different stakeholders involved in signing off, they provide templates, checklists, and presentations to enable their customer champions; “Communicate the value of Data Center with an overview of platform benefits and product features.”
The alternative is your customer champion will need to create their own. Or, they may even resort to just verbally explaining the product and perceived value.
Takeaway
We have all seen how unstructured and unprepared presentations can go…
Take control while providing that extra value of support to your customers. Measure the success of these materials and continually evolve them as your product grows and expands.
Thanks for reading..
