What's your best account recovery story?

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Mine was an inherited account from another CSM. Supposedly green when I got it. I introduced myself as their new CSM and they unloaded a laundry list of issues. They also recently attended a tech conference and were actively shopping us against the competition. We lost our champion and she was replaced with a consultant firm that hated our software. I was competing with my competitors and my users.

We called an all hands meeting between the customer, consulting firm, and us. We showed areas that they are not using that has shown revenue growth for other customers in their market. The customer was convinced and the consulting firm pushed back. We offered an in-depth training and consult to go over how they currently do things and our solution to see if we would recommend they use their solutions. We found some ways that both systems had some weaknesses that help each other.

We retained the customer, renewed the customer, and created a partnership with the consulting firm where they now exclusively use our software with their clients.

 

What's your best account recovery story?

Melissa Logothetis

I had a situation once with a large financial customer. It was their first renewal and the price was significantly higher than what they were expecting. They threatened to leave for being misled. I found out that the sales rep made promises that they didn't intend on delivering since they were planning on leaving. He just wanted the deal to get the commission before leaving. I had to work with multiple levels of senior management on my side and the customer side. We were able to get to a satisfactory solution for both sides but it was tricky.

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Navigating leadership and multiple departments is the trickiest part of the job. Even harder than managing the customer. I intend to make things easier for my CSMs to get approvals for simple things the day I enter into leadership. Especially if leadership usually has a framework in place for approvals, it is much easier to automate that instead of for a rubber stamp that has competing attentions.

Melissa Logothetis

Definitely.  It was hard as I had to find a compromise that everyone was happy with. The discounts were WAY outside the prescribed bounds even for our exception process. I had to get them to see the bigger value in the customer not just the immediate renewal.

Lauren Mecca

Important Q for anybody interviewing I always ask candidates to describe a turnaround they've accomplished. 

Mine is an enterprise customer whose health was also supposedly "Green". In my first conversation with the COO I learned that we were actually on the chopping block due to an effort to centralize vendors. So I asked a lot of questions to uncover key decisionmakers and their criteria. Other stakeholders were unresponsive at first, and if I left it there, we would have been dropped. So I set up reminders for our team to reach out to various contacts there once/week, and after several weeks we did start to engage with someone who became our advocate. Then I brought our Head of Product in and we identified some quick wins that proved our commitment and helped us stand out from other vendors. They renewed, we identified an upsell opportunity, and they continue to participate as advisors and beta testers for our product team. 

 

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

great use of resources. That is huge to use product to execute some quick wins.