TLC - As a CSM, what value does your unique knowledge bring in the eyes of your customers?

Ed Powers · 2024-03-11T14:17:49+00:00

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Implementing, learning, and obtaining value from your solution is a novel experience, meaning customers face a lot of uncertainty along the way. You, however, have the experience deploying your solution many times with many different customers.

As a result, you know what works and what doesn’t, and you can reduce their uncertainty. If you had to put a dollar value on that knowledge, how much do you think customers would be willing to pay? How many would buy?

Is this a potential source of revenue? What could you do to find out for certain?

Share your thoughts below.”

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Comments

Guy Galon

CSM's unique knowledge differentiates between adopting a product/ solution and customers achieving specific results. I believe customers expect CSMs to have the knowledge and experience to drive them towards achieving business objectives. These objectives can include increasing revenue, reducing cost, improving time to market, generating more marketing/sales leads, reducing risks, and many more.

himanshu

In my recent experience, we are investigating new product ideas in our business, and when we fly to an event in Amsterdam for iGaming, we gain clarity on what we are doing next, we sit with experts to understand what we are looking for, and we build the product. Many customers have a notion but lack appropriate information about what this sector is about. So we see this as a chance to increase revenue for the company. We created an end-to-end training programme for the industry, as well as some connections from the events where customers may get started and explore.

And I've observed that customers are eager to pay when they can see a ROI, and we make certain that customers receive value and business from our suggested strategy.

So, yes, I can say that if something adds value and more $$ to a customer's business, and you can show that value, customers are prepared to pay and create new revenue streams for the company.

As per stats 6 out 10 customers paid for the program.

Carmit Proper

Based on my personal experience, I believe that having a holistic view of the industry and product is crucial. For instance, if a product offers solutions for the financial sector, collaborating with top organizations in the market and staying updated with industry trends can help me provide customers with insights on what others are doing, where the market is heading, and what they might be missing out on. It's important to keep in mind the "FOMO" factor without disclosing any sensitive information- only trends and directions across the sector. The other aspect is how to utilize the product effectively to accelerate adoption, get the full value quickly after the investment has been made, and communicate this value to their leadership team in a way that showcases their success in a positive light.

Meg Valentine

Very interesting questions. Since I have worked mostly with Large Enterprise, it's hard to imagine customers who are already spending in excess of $2M annually on the software turning around and being willing to pay for reducing uncertainty. At one past company, the marketing department would always communicate to potential customers and new customers that deployment and integration were incredibly simple, especially with their oldest Enterprise solution. Yet in reality that was not the case at all. Personally, it would have saved the account teams and the company a lot of grief if the messaging around the complexities that were usually found with integrating this solution were just tackled head on - perhaps with a consultant to guide the customer along and trouble shoot any issues that they were having. Instead support cases would be opened and support engineers, many of whom had also been told that the kinds of issues they were encountering were not seen often, would keep these tickets open for weeks, if not months, while value of the product was not realized in any timely manner. If I wanted to try to see if customers would pay for this 'hands on assistance' with a trained and experienced Consultant to drive the integration process with each customer, I'd ask the Consultant to give me the top 10 integration challenges that they were seeing customers experience, and then quantify the # of hours it took to alleviate these issues, and who was involved when those integration challenges were met with solutions. Then create a small panel of customers to try to determine the need or desire for this kind of help. And then offer to a few key customers for free, gather feedback as to the value that it created. And try to get them to create value stories that could be then positioned to multiple customers for a short term Consulting engagement.

The only additional challenge I see with that is the problems were often related to how the customer had set up their digital environments, and it was mostly a trial and error process to 'fix' the issues. The cases were quite unique to each customer. But this might just be a poor example.