Leadership time with Customers

Rachel Provan

If you are a VP/Director, how much do you engage directly with customers?

When do you think it's a value add for the customer vs bothering them or encroaching on your CSM's credibility?

I'm sure I could engage directly with customers more, but I want to make sure it's for their benefit, not just to get product feedback on my own terms.

What's working for you?

Jeff Breunsbach

@Jay Nathan, @Kristi Faltorusso , @Ziv Peled - any examples here?

Here are a few that I've seen @Rachel Provan...

• Create a "target list" for the year - this can be high paying accounts, strategic accounts, "loud" accounts and see how you can align it to key executives.
• Make sure to introduce the executive on our side to a key executive on their side. This isn't about just repeating what our CSM is telling our day-to-day contact... this is about the executives bonding over key items. SO let them expand beyond our solution and get into other business challenges.
• We try to encourage our executives to make networking introductions - found this very successful in solidifying relationships. Give them connections in their industry, etc.
• We might pull in the executive to a key meeting but often times don't want to just do that blindly... it has to make sense.
• We invite the customer executives to join thought leadership communities and office hours calls - again, another way to get them value without us always having to provide it.

Just a couple examples.

Jay Nathan

I like everything Jeff said here. To me, 1:1 networking is a powerful reason for a leader to engage. I find that the biggest risk of leadership getting on the phone with a customer is the product feedback. The CSM is aware of all the issues, challenges, and opportunities with the product. And when the leader gets on a call and the customer lays all of those out, then the leader is obligated to respond.

In fact, not only are they obligated, but if they don’t close the loop on the feedback, more damage than good could be done to the relationship.

This is where we have to have strong talk-tracks around our product development process and roadmaps, and the leader must be cognizant of the explicit or implied commitments they make on these calls.

This goes hand in hand for me with the EBR, the role leaders play I’m them, and how they network and interface with customers on a more intimate basis.

We have an executive sponsor program where connect our leaders with customer leadership for networking. This, for our business, seems to be a better approach to leader-customer engagement than an EBR. We are still learning and optimizing.

As for CSM credibility, having leaders target folks outside the day to day contacts is a good way to avoid “stepping on toes” and getting higher and wider relationships with a customer.

Rachel Provan

Amazing insights from both of you - thank you!

I think an Executive sponsorship program is more of what I'm looking to do. I'll Google around to find out best practices, but do you have any "I wish I'd known THIS when I started this program"?

Thank you so much!

Rachel

Rachel Provan

@Jeff Breunsbach I definitely have practices in place around community events and industry-specific thought leadership. It's more the 1-1 I'm curious about. I hear that as a VP of CS you should be engaging with customers at least a couple of times a week, so I want to know what that looks like elsewhere because in my experience it was more in group settings.