Customer Response - "What do I get with your engagement?"

Amy Yap

Hello everyone, 

Excited to join this community! Hoping to learn more from everyone so I could grow and improve myself better as a CSM.

Thought I could get some advise or to hear any experiences from CS community if anyone of you faced similar situations and how do you approach them?

Doug Havlik

Amyy,

You may have gotten a unfriendly customer, and it may have nothing to do with you. Having said that, there is an element of always needing to earn the right for future meetings. Think about coming to every call with a nugget of information of value. I suspect you were already doing that to one extent or another, so it comes down to continuing in that mind set of value creation and value sharing, observing what works well and then doing more of that. 

That can include sharing with your new customer tips from working with other customers similar to them that enabled others to achieve the types of outcomes they are seeking.

Siranouche de Jong

Hey Amy, 

Do not take it personally, they may just be under a lot of scrutiny as is, and perhaps the timing of your meeting just wasn't ideal that day. Who knows, they may have been feeling overwhelmed and being asked a lot of questions, resulted in an irritated response.

Having said that, I think as CSMs there is always something to learn about handling these situations. I usually try to de-escalate and manage the conversation back to just a conversation between 2 counterparts, level with them on a human-level. - I don't know what the culture is like where you are located,  but I would suggest asking them if they can agree to a follow up meeting with an agenda you can both agree on right this minute - maybe keep it small and stick to "simple topics", so they don't feel like they're facing an inquisition next time they talk to you. Check-in with them in a few weeks, asking how they are doing, has the situation improved, how are they coping, basically: work on gaining their trust, do not talk about your product, there's always a next meeting to go into the nitty-gritty CSM stuff.
Usually de-escalating helps, and sometimes it's as simple as: do I really need to push my agenda (topics of conversation) today, or can it wait until a next meeting, when my client is in a better headspace (hopefully)?

- May I ask how you handled the questions they fired back at you and if you've planned (or done) any follow up to this previous meeting? Did you manage to agree on a cadence and the value of your subsequent interactions with this specific customer?