We all need to send a little love to ourselves sometimes. How do you celebrate the wins and how do y

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

Would love to hear from the community. Here's a story:

Today, I had a customer who experienced these challenges:

• original CSM was unengaging and unresponsive so they requested a CSM change. They got me.
• Things improved and they were comfortable doing a one year extension to see how things continue to progress.
• Major outage changed their tune
• They wanted to go month to month (so at least we are keeping them and I have an opportunity to repair value)
• We told them they can't because one of their products is outsourced and doesn't allow month to month so they were looking to extend long enough to replace us
• They decided they only wanted to talk to me and not the renewals department. They pressed on me to cut a deal for them.
• I managed to set expectations and tell them about the benefits of them coming to the table
• They agreed to come to the table and provided legal and executive sponsor to the meeting scheduled tomorrow.

Rollercoaster. My leaders are impressed with how I got them to commit to the call.

I was well within reason to write this churn off as not my fault and would have been able to mourn without feeling responsible. Solid customer to work with so I would have mourned losing them, but instead I gave our company a chance to win them back.

 

Alex Tran

@Kevin Mitchell Leonor Tactically speaking, I "celebrate" my placing any good messages I've received via screenshot in a kudos folder for myself! Also, I bubble stuff like this up with my manager and she can choose whether to share publicly with the company.

 

Also, you can share this win on a Slack channel if you have that as well!

Betty Ernst

Our product is a tool to celebrate wins, so we usually default to that. But I second Alex on bubbling things up with your manager. They may not have seen or understood how much work went into something, and as a manager, I appreciate when people share the accomplishments they're most proud of so that I can highlight them in our weekly Slack departmental updates, monthly all-hands, and on our recognition tool. I also run a weekly Slack survey to capture highlights from the week and one of the questions is "What are you most proud of accomplishing this week?"

As for mourning losses, I find the most helpful thing for me is taking action to prevent a repeat. Running a retro with involved parties, drafting up suggestions for policy changes, etc. is really satisfying when you can walk away with actionable steps. Mistakes and missteps happen, but as long as you can learn from them, that's the important thing. 

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

ooooh the satisfaction of making preventative policies. That is something that excites me as well.

Scott Hopper

@Kevin Mitchell Leonor I think that shows that executing on the basics helps when the customer has risk factors.  Had you not been engaged, you wouldn't have had the opportunity to have them want to put trust in you.   The outage became an excuse to lighten their commitment.  They wanted to take an easy way out, but you helped reign them in. Awesome.