What do you do when a customer's executive sponsor won't engage with your CSM?
Without fail, there will be customers where executives are hesitant to engage.
There are a myriad of reasons for them to not engage that do not reflect on your team's executive presence. They could be looking for their direct report to manage the partnership, or they may not fully understand the type of value that you can create for them.
This is when outreach from you, as a senior leader, is needed to drive home the importance of their involvement and input on your partnership. Aligning with executives on partnership goals and overall expectations is the surest way to create a clear path to success for both your CSMs and their respective teams.
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- Engage an executive at your company to connect. You may or may not already have a relationship at that level.
- Create a 1-pager that summarizes your progress to date, value delivered and any roadblocks.
- Deliver the 1-pager in a creative way - via FedEx, Courier, Singing Telegram (kidding, but maybe not). This may not work in current times but when offices are back in business, it will.
- Record a video summarizing the 1-pager - keep it short and to the point.
- Send schwag or coffee or donuts - something to get their attention with a nice note.
- Send a hand-written letter. Nobody gets many of these anymore.
- Challenge your team to each come up with 5 ideas - no matter how off the wall they are.
I think you have to get creative, here are some ideas...
Two things. Ask the AE or my main stakeholder about their decision making process to understand just how much the executive sponsor is involved. Sometimes the main stakeholder holds the keys and the executive sponsor is just a rubber stamp.
Second, I engage my own executive leadership. A director writing a director or a VP writing to a VP has more leverage and value and often opens up the dialogue. Then, any communication to their executive sponsor will have my leadership CC'd. Both executives gain a golf buddy, I gain a channel to the executive.
A key is having a defined Playbook for lack of Executive engagement. This playbook should contain the path to engage from the CSM level, and a path for internal escalation.
Within the path for escalation, I like to have my CSMs ghost write an email for the executive to use when engaging with the Customer's Leadership, and 1 pager that the CSM needs to fill out to provide our executive with Customer Health, Communication Cadence, Customer Profile and Usage Trends.
I have the same playbook!
You can't ask a customer executive to invest time if they don't have a counterpart at your company who does the same. And the way to pique their interest is only on ROI.