The foremost and the primary goal of a Customer Success Managers is to develop a positive, trusting relationship with the client. There are many reasons to reach out to a customer. However, not all reasons provide value (and some make customers less likely to value discussions with you in the future). Using the information that you already have about their organization, their goals, and what they’re doing today, you can call (with a few more minutes of prep work) and quickly add value while minimizing the impact on everyone’s time.
Check out: Difficult customer conversations and the best way to handle them!
Let me tell you a case, so on one fine day, Martha who is the CSM of a Marketing Automation company decides to make a check-up call with one of her clients whom she assessed to have an upsell opportunity, and interestingly she never made an engagement with the client in the past few months.
As soon as Martha’s client picked up her call, she went ahead with saying
“Hey, I’m calling because I just want to check in and see how things are going.”
The client made a cold reply mentioning that things were going well and that was it. After that Martha did not bother to take up the conversation ahead. Where she could have shared information in terms of a value proposition or tips to make the client’s life easier or probably an inlet of any issues with the client’s account.
After a bit of an awkward goodbye, they both parted ways and went about their days. What a waste of time.
What do you expect out of this call? Do you think this could anyway help her get an upsell from that client account?
The answer is probably a Churned account.
This blog is specifically catered to help you avoid such awkward situations that could lead to miscommunication and provide you with a few reasons to legitimately call your clients and bring value.
1. When your customer is using a new feature of your product/solution for the first time
Let’s say you’re going through your client’s account health using your Customer Success Software and you just came to know that your client was using a new feature for the first time. That’s a perfect opportunity to reach out and ask to lend a helping hand. According to a lot of experienced Customer success managers, it does a fantastic job of showing the feature’s value in the initial calls. But if they go to use it and find it to be too time-consuming, then they’re much less likely to try to use that feature ever again. You as a CSM have to make sure they get early value out of a feature as soon as they start using that new feature.
Suggested Read: Best practices for configuring a customer health score (and why single health score fails)
2. When your customers haven’t achieved the desired outcome out of your product
Your customer onboarded with specific goals in mind, and somewhere along the way, they stopped pursuing those goals. If they haven’t reached their desired outcome, then brainstorm a few ideas to help them achieve their goals with their existing investment. This particular idea makes so much more sense because it invokes trust and lets them know you care enough to not let their investment go to waste.
3. When it’s time to introduce a complementary feature
Let’s say, your customer purchased your product to achieve a particular goal “A” do but they’re currently only using 2 out of 10 of the main features needed to achieve the goal “A“. Use your Customer Success software or usage data from another source to compare actions between your customer and users with similar attributes. You’re already using features #1 and #2. When customers within your same vertical also use feature #3, they’re able to achieve “A” just by expanding their understanding of how to use our product.” As customer success managers, show them a quick win and they’ll be more likely to pick that phone up next time you give them a call.
4. You are in the middle of renewal or another conversation where a features-focused upsell would fall into motion organically
In most situations, it’s difficult (and unwise) to spring an upsell conversation on a customer out of the blue. It can be awkward and lead to distrust on the customer side. Instead, including upsell discussions in an ongoing commercial conversation, such as a renewal or expansion project, is the perfect time to bring up big-picture solutions.
Suggested Read- How to build an upsell strategy for your b2b SaaS product.
Take Away
Communication plays a stellar role in this part of keeping up with your customer’s value because the results of your efforts to create value are measured in the customers’ perception of that value. Therefore, value is created through the improvement of processes, much like other things in your business. It is connected to your company’s culture and vision. That’s why almost, if not all companies, always include their “customers” at the very heart of their core values.
P.S. – The main image has been taken from pexels.com
