Video: You're Not Strategic - And That's Why You're Stuck

Are you tired of being seen as just another task manager instead of a strategic partner? You're not alone—and you're not stuck for good.

I had the pleasure of joining Kristi Faltorusso on this Client Success webinar. In this candid and practical session, I covered the real reasons why many CSMs struggle to gain executive visibility, influence account strategy, and drive meaningful impact.

You’ll learn:

• Why CSMs often get labeled as tactical—and how to change that

• What it actually means to be a strategic CSM

• Practical steps to elevate your customer conversations and career

• Key takeaways from Chad’s new book that you can apply immediately

Why you are not a strategic customer success manager

Full Transcript:

Now, I don’t want to take up any more of your time because you are all here for a very specific reason. You’re here to figure out what’s going on. You’re not strategic and that’s why you’re stuck, not why you suck. Okay? I know that this was a little play on words, and so a lot of people were like, "Wait, I don’t suck." Um, so no, you don’t, but you may be stuck. And so that is why I have asked my dear friend Chad to join us today to not only introduce and cover this topic but to talk a little bit about his upcoming book as well that is going to cover this topic in so much more detail. So Chad, I’m passing this over to you. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks so much Christie. Um, I’ll jump in and just in terms of who I am, I’m the VP of customer success at a company called Sienna AI. So, Sienna is an autonomous AI customer service platform. Um, so essentially what we do is we answer customer tickets via AI and we do it specifically for e-commerce. Um, and I joined that company. It’s a seed-stage company, so It's a small company, but I love early stage startups and saw this as an opportunity to build. It's a small team.

It's about 10 people right now. Um, and as you can see from this picture, um, I'm a big Maple Leaf fan. I like to bike. Um, obviously I use a computer. Mine works. That looks like a fake computer. But, um, a little bit more about me. I've been in customer success for a number of years. I've actually been in SaaS for about 20 years, which is scary, but interesting in the sense that I've seen a lot over the years. And I've also started off as a CS. I was actually a consultant. Um, but what we're going to get into today is talking about how you can elevate yourself and sort of get out of this position that you might be in that you might be stuck. And I had this what I call a turning point, and this was like a number of years ago. And um, these are actually real people, and in fact, that's a picture of me. So this is some of my colleagues.

We were sitting in a basement kind of like where I am now, at our Eloqua office, and we're sitting around a table and I don't know if it was at this point where I got this email, but it was at At some point, I definitely looked like I was very busy. Um, and so I got this email from a client, and the client was basically saying that they were turning, and I was not very happy at that point. Um, many of us have been in this situation. And I’d say why it was a turning point for me is, you know, your natural inclination is like, okay, I wanted to understand why they wanted to turn. Like, what’s the point? You know, why are they getting to that point? And so I happened to have a VP of marketing who knew our decision maker at a client, and we scheduled a call. I had him join the call. Typically, you get on these calls, and you're like, “Okay, great. Another call; this is not going to really lead to much.” So I asked a question. I said, “Hey, can you tell me the reasons why you’re looking to move off our platform?” And the client let us know. They said, “Listen, we like what you’re doing.

We like the platform. Um, it’s a great platform, but we just feel that we’re not getting value out of it, and we’ve made this decision.” At that point, I was very embarrassed to say That I completely froze. I was like, "Oh crap." Like, I don't really know what else to do here. And the VP of marketing on my team jumped in and he's like, "Okay, so what I'm hearing that you're telling me is that you like the platform, but it was just too expensive." And then he kind of went further, and she said, "You know, you're right. Like, you know, it wasn't expensive. You know, it is expensive. And in fact, I have a new CMO that just joined, and I'm a little worried; like, I need to show value, and I just don't see that I can do that with your platform." And he said, "Okay, so you're worried about your

CMO. You know, one of the things around cost is, um, you know what I've heard — and maybe you can just let me know — but it seems that you have an agency that's using our platform to run it. You know, how does that kind of factor into the situation? And she's like, "Yeah, we are using an agency, and they are expensive, and you know, there's costs around that." He says, "Okay, so there's some costs. Um, you know, have you like — how much time has your direct team actually spent using the platform?" She's like, "Well, they haven't really used it all that much because I'm trying to protect them. I want them to do other things. I want the agency to do this, and you know, use your platform. And he's like, "Okay, let me just ask you a question. Let's take a step back here.

You know, what if you had a magic wand and, like, you know, resources weren't an issue? You know, is this something that would be of interest to you? And you know, would you want to use this?" And she's like, "Yeah, of course, I want to generate revenue from our existing customers, and I'm going to need to do that somehow. I need to generate those leads from existing customers." And he's like, "Okay, so what I’ve heard you say, just to kind of sum up here, you know, you really need to use your existing customers to generate leads. It’s costly. You’re worried about your CMO. You haven’t really dedicated as much time for your direct team. Um, you know, what if we, somehow looked at potentially using your direct team and seeing if we could, you know, do something here?" And she's like, "Well, you know, I actually have hired somebody recently, and...

We're trying to determine where is best to put that person right now." And then the VP of marketing on my team responded. He's like, "Well, listen, why don't we do this for 30 days? I'm going to help, you know, Chad and his team are going to come in here. We're going to train your person, get them on board, and we're going to look to get you some results. We're going to determine what those are, and at the end of the 30 days, maybe you can make that decision then, rather than making that decision now." And he's like, "Well, how does that sound?" And she’s like, "You know, I think that sounds like a great plan." And then we kind of went from there. And so, you know, my turning point was like, holy crap. Like, I was just ready to throw in the towel and give up. And really what it came down to was just doing some additional discovery and uncovering what the actual root cause was and then determining how we could turn the situation around and figure out a potential way forward. That is definitely one of the areas in terms of being strategic, and it will help you kind of get to that next level.

To get there, there are typically four roles that we play that really prevent us. And I'm sure many of you can say, "Yes, I definitely do this every day." So, there's the firefighter role where we kind of strap on our hat and we jump in and put out fires. Uh, whether it's a support fire, whatever it is, it's very tactical. Then, there’s what I call the entertainer. So, the entertainer is not telling jokes, but more of the focus is on keeping customers happy. And the fact that my customer is happy. They like to jump on a call and we have this back and forth. We talk about each other's dogs, and everything's great; but, guess what? That's not going to necessarily lead you to that customer renewing. Then, there's the waiter role. And the waiter role, um, whether that's like a bell there or a pot that you lift up, the idea is that you're just taking orders from your customer. They're just saying, "Hey, I really like this feature. I need it tomorrow." And it’s like, "Okay, how would you like that feature?" What else can I do? What can I give you on the side? Can I give you fries with that? And so that's the waiter type role. Um, and you know, that's definitely not going to put you, I'd say, in the best light, and it's definitely not going to get you where you need to go. Um, you're basically just, you know, doing what the customer wants.

Um, and then the last one, which is an interesting one, is the fixer. So a lot of times we feel that our role is to just solve problems, right? Um, a customer brings us a problem and like we solve it. We're the fixer. But the challenge typically is that, and I'm sure many of you can relate to this. You'll get on a call with a customer and you'll be like, "All right, what do you want to discuss today?" And they're like, "Oh, we've got this problem over here." And the customer's kind of blabbing on and you're like, "Listen, can you just be quiet because I know what you need to do? Like, I know how to fix this for you. Let me, you know, do this for you and then we can all kind of get on our way and keep going." And that's, you know, you're going to be helpful to the client because you might solve their immediate You need, but you may not be understanding the full context of what they're trying to tell you. By solving that problem and doing it for them, they will keep coming back to you and see you as the fixer, not necessarily as the person who's going to help their business or help them achieve the value they’re looking for from your platform. However, they'll definitely see you as that fixer and be very helpful. These four areas are important, but if you’re stuck in these particular roles, it will definitely make you stuck overall.

Now that we've defined these types of four roles, let's talk about what "strategic" actually means. To do that, we can leverage one of the people I’d say is probably an authoritative person on this. His name is Richard Ruml, and he wrote the book, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy." He defines strategy as a set of actions that is credible, coherent, and focused on overcoming the biggest hurdles in Achieving particular objectives, and so if we think about that and we think of it particularly as a Customer Success Manager trying to solve problems for their customers, we can kind of break it down into three areas. So the first one is identifying the biggest hurdles.

So if we go back to that scenario I just described, where you know the customer was telling you something and you’re already in solution mode, you’re really ready to help them and fix their problem, you actually may not be fixing the core or root problem. So if you think about a tree and you know you have your leaves and your branches and you see above the ground, and you’re like, “Oh, like you know these branches are dying, and I’m going to spray the tree.” But the problem actually might be at the root level, right? Because at the roots is where the water is coming in and nutrients and things like that, and you really have to dig deeper and you have to understand the biggest hurdle that particular client has. The second thing talks about focusing on achieving a particular objective that is your customer’s business outcome, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that.

In a bit, but it's really focused on the business value. Right? It's not focused on um, you know, I’m logged into your platform and I click on this and it doesn't work. No, that's like, you know, a bug; that's not a business outcome. Um, or if you look at metrics and you say, "Well, it's like your email open rate has increased by 40%." That's nice, and that’s important, but I would say that that's more of a vanity metric, right? That's just metrics that you can see. It's not necessarily the metrics in terms of why they bought you and what is going to ensure that they keep you or potentially grow with you.

And then the last one is around creating concrete action plans. So, you know, you've uncovered their issues. You've determined what their business outcomes are, which is great. And you have this great conversation. And I’m sure many of you have this. You have this great conversation with your client. "Oh, I just had the best business review. It was amazing. Client was engaged. It's great. And then, uh, two weeks later, nothing happens. Um, and so you can't have a really good strategy if you don't have execution along with that. And so, That's where you have to create concrete action plans, and there are actually associated actions with that.

Um, so that kind of gives you the overview of what being strategic means from a client's perspective, but I would say that, um, it's a little bit more than that. And so again, like you know, if this person is, you know, with Mr. Bean here and he's waiting for the customer to reach out, um, you know, never send an email or a message to your customer saying, um, you know, "Do you need any help? Is there anything I can help you with?" Um, because again that kind of puts you into the server-type mentality.

Um, and so that change from a typical CSM to a strategic CSM has kind of three main areas. And there are obviously more than this, but the three main areas I would say are that a typical CSM is let's say an expert in their product. They know their product back and forth. And the change that you need to make is that you need to be an expert on your customer's business. You need to understand their business. And listen, if you're a scaled CSM and you're working across multiple customers, it's It is obviously harder. But if you understand that segment of the business, maybe it's a particular industry or maybe it's a type of persona, a user persona, really

knowing that customer is really important. The second thing is, again, we focus on adoption. We focus on, you know, is our customer leveraging it? Are we maximizing licenses, consumption? Are they, you know, clicking on this new feature that we launched? Which is good and that's important, but you have to understand the why. The why is that eventually you have to achieve a particular outcome with the client needs to actually achieve something that's going to that's going to determine value and it's going to be a reason why they stay with you.

And again, like this is not an area that is easy. It's not something that's you know all that straightforward and we'll talk about it more specifically because if you look on any LinkedIn post, all you see is business outcomes, and nobody tells you actually how to do that. So we'll get into that.

And the last one, which is maybe somewhat controversial, but is very important. I don't think there's anyone In customer success, who isn't customer-centric? If you are, you should leave. You should not be in customer success. You shouldn't be in a profession, um, where it says customer in the name and you're not customer-centric. But one of the areas—and this took me a little while to learn—is that it's not just about being customer-centric, but it's also about being company-centric. And what I mean by that is, um, if you go around bashing your sales team and bashing your product team all day, it's not going to get you very far, especially when it comes to promotions.

And so we'll talk a little bit more about that. Listen, it's fun. We like to do it, right? There are funny memes on the internet, but it's only going to get you so far. So, we're going to talk about a few, like three different areas. Um, we can't get into everything, but we'll get into some core things that you can take away and use right away. So the three areas that we'll talk about are the three C's, uh, the OARS framework, and then we'll talk about some cross functional alignment. All right. So the three C's— and so what does this mean? If you're getting on a call with a Customer, there’s a lot of things going through your head. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what the customer is going to do or say. Um, I’m not prepared for the call.” Um, listen, you’re most likely never prepared for a call that you’re going to get on with the customer. And that’s okay. Um, the biggest thing that you could probably take away is that you know more than you know, and you’ll be fine. Um, I’ll give you some guidelines and just in terms of questions and things that you can do, but one of the key things that I like to do getting on a call, especially in my role, is the three C’s. And so the three C’s are very simple. I want to understand what the company—let’s put our product aside. What does the company do? What products do they produce? Um, you know, where are they headquartered? I mean, but really just the basics, like what do they do? What are the products that they sell? How much do they sell them for? Those basic things are just really important. Just knowing those core things will put you more in the mindset of the person and company that you’re going to meet with.

The second thing is knowing the end customer. Who do they sell to? Who are those typical people that buy? Are they consumers? Are they real estate agents? Um, moving companies, or whatever they are. I've worked with many different end customers. They’re all different, but just knowing who those people are is important. The other thing that’s important is that you know your customers will tend to use certain terminology, and that will depend on who their customers are.

So as an example, I had a customer, and they called their customer "she." She does this; she does that. And it’s important to embody the terminology that your customers use. They could call their customers patients. Use their terminology that builds trust with your customers, and that helps you in terms of building up the strategic mindset that your customers have of you. So that’s just another important thing to consider. The last thing is around challenges, and again, I’m not talking about the challenges with your product. It’s the challenges that maybe that company is going through. Maybe they just launched a new product.

They’re trying to raise more funding. Knowing those things, and it’s so much easier today. You could literally go under Perplexity and just type in, "I’m meeting with this company and so and so at this company. Can you just give me some background on who these people are and what’s going on in the company? And I like Perplexity for this because it looks at LinkedIn, looks at some, I’d say, kind of more modern news type of, um, you know, AI like LLMs. Um, but you can obviously use anything for this. It takes 3 seconds. Having that 3C knowledge will make you better, and I’d say more informed and put you on a bit of a higher level than typical CSMs going into a meeting.

Um, the next thing I want to talk about is this concept called OARS. Um, this is an acronym, and yes, it’s a framework, but it’s not my framework, and it’s not something I just kind of came up with out of thin air. It’s actually a psychotherapy framework that’s used by psychologists and counselors. And the reason why it’s used is that, you know, previously when they were trying to get people to do certain things—and let’s say someone had an addiction, um, you You know, they wanted that person to stop drinking alcohol. They'd basically say to them, "You suck; you need to stop drinking alcohol like this; you're going to kill yourself." And you know, obviously, did that really work very well? Probably not. I think all of us can recall maybe some stories with our parents where they did that and it would have the opposite effect. So the idea of motivational interviewing and this concept of OARS is really trying to understand more about what the customer, and in our case the customer, but it could be their patient, why they are holding some of these things dear and why they are not able to change.

There are four aspects of it, and these are things that you might be doing today, but you may not fully realize it, and they're definitely things that are really important. So number one: open questions. We're all very familiar with open questions. You know, these are how or what questions. You know, "How did you make that decision?" Um, you know, "What was the reason why you bought our product?" Uh, and I'd say that we can go much further into this area. Um, if you recall the story at the beginning that I That I was talking about, um, with the customer that churned, um, there was one what I'd call a disruptive question that was used. And that question was, you know, if you had a magic wand, how would you go about, you know, doing things differently? And that's, I would say, kind of a disruptive question, a very different type of question. And, you know, honing those open questions is really important. And one of the things that you can do now is a bit of a cheat code; when you go into a meeting, think about what's the outcome you want to achieve. And then what you can do is to create these open questions. You can actually use AI and say, "Listen, this is the outcome I want to achieve. What are some open questions that I could ask my client to help achieve that?" Um, and so those are ways that you can help prepare yourself for those particular meetings and maybe not necessarily have the same anxiety that you might have. Um, and it can also uplevel you because the better questions you have, the better practitioner you're going to be going into those meetings.

Um, the next one's affirmations. I'd say that these are probably the easiest.

This is probably the easiest one. An affirmation is just giving someone really a pat on the back. And although I don't belittle it, but I don't spend a lot of time on it. It's really important and something that we tend to forget about. So a good example of this is your customer is going through their onboarding and let's say they've hit a certain milestone. They've turned something on for the first time.

Uh, they're starting to see metrics in their dashboard. You just reach out to them and say, "Listen, like I just saw you did this. This is amazing. Like you probably have gotten here faster than any other customer." Um, which okay, don't be disingenuous to your customer. So don't maybe go too far. So that's maybe the caveat with affirmations, but give them the pat on the back. Make sure that you're doing that consistently. And you can even go a step further and you can say, maybe to the decision maker that you’re working with, you know, your primary contact, your champion. Um, and you can say to the person's boss like so and so has just done such an amazing job.

They're doing that. Um, don't forgo doing that. Affirmations are really important, and even on a call, like, you know, customers will have a great insight, and you're like, you know, that's a really great way of thinking about that. Um, you know, can you tell me more? Those are affirmations to kind of keep the conversation going, especially if you wanted to go in a certain path. Um, but I'd say that out of all of these options, the most important one here is the R. It's the reflections. Uh, and so this is all about active listening. Um, and if we think about being strategic, um, we've talked about business outcomes, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Um, and that's all about understanding what value means to them and delivering it. But the key to this is building trust with your customers. Um, you have to marry trust and value, and that's something that I talk about in the book and it's very foundational to customer success. It doesn't matter what will happen. Those two things are really, really important. And so to build trust, active listening is a key part of that. So if You ask a question, and let's say I know the question at the beginning of the book. Um, so you know, I'm aware that agencies are really important. You know, they're being used for their products. You know, how does that factor into the cost that you mentioned? And the customer will mention, "Well, you know, it's a big part of our cost. Like, we pay this outside agency, and you know that that covers a lot of expenses with your product. And so here's where a lot of CSMs make a mistake, and they're like, "Yeah, that sucks. Yeah, really." And then they go on, they ask their next question. So, this is a key moment, and here is where you want to use a reflection. A reflection is very simply saying, and you heard maybe some examples at the beginning where I said things like, "So, it sounds like you're using these agencies and that they're really expensive, and that's maybe contributing to, you know, maybe some of the negative outlook that you're having on our product." Now, I changed this reflection a little bit from the story at the beginning, but what's interesting and important here is that You’re interpreting what the customer said. And so, there are two things that are happening. One is you’re showing the customer that you’re listening to them and that you’re repeating back what they said. And so, it puts them at ease a little bit because they’re like, "Okay, this person has a sense of what I’m saying." Now, you may have actually repeated it incorrectly. Um, and that’s okay as well. So you don’t have to worry about a wrong reflection because your customer will correct you. It’s just kind of a natural thing that they do. It’s like, actually, no, you didn’t get that right, Chad. Like, it’s actually no, your product is more of a problem than my agency, but thank you.

Um, now you can also, as you get more, um, I’d say you develop more of a mastery at this, you can intentionally have an incorrect reflection where you might say something, well, like what I’m hearing is that you know you just didn’t spend any time on our product and that’s probably the reason why you’re turning and you know there’s a line there, right? You don’t want to cross too far, but you can use reflections as a way of kind of directing your client and influencing.

Them in a certain way, but I’d say at the outset. You don’t want to use a reflection for every answer the question has, or the customer gives you, because sometimes you want to go deeper into what they said. A great way to show a customer that you’re listening and repeat back what they’re saying and potentially kind of move the direction in a certain way is to use a reflection. It usually results in a very positive, you know, outcome from the client.

And here’s another tip. If you don’t know what to say or you weren’t listening to the customer completely, repeat back what they said. It’s just a way of, you know, buying yourself a little bit of time. So, the last one is a summary. The summary is almost like you’re, a lawyer doing your summation at the end. You kind of piece together, a bunch of reflections and you hopefully will get to more of a conclusion. You typically do this at the end of the meeting. It’s like you say something like, “Okay, so here’s what I’ve heard.” You know, you were not the happiest in In terms of using our product, or you were concerned about using our product because of the costs. You've got your CMO, and you know, you've got this agency, but you also mentioned you have this new person on staff. What we're going to do is train them up.

We're going to define your particular metrics. We could have a meeting that we want to set up, and we're going to get you moving in the right direction. How does that sound?

So what you're looking for from the customer is like an emphatic yes, like that sounds great. Let's do that. This is a great framework that you can use to improve your conversation. There's more that is obviously involved here, but you know, for the purpose of this conversation today, this is a great framework that you should be thinking about and leveraging in your customer conversations.

The second to last thing I want to talk about is business outcomes. So again, going back to something I mentioned earlier is that if you go into LinkedIn, and you kind of do a quick scan, all you'll hear about is business outcomes.

Business outcomes, you need to uncover business outcomes. And it's like, okay, great. Thank you so much. Um, why don't you join my customer calls and then you're going to see our customers complaining and having all these problems? And why don't you get the business outcomes? Okay, I would really appreciate that. And I would say the bigger issue is that we haven't necessarily defined what those are and how to achieve them. So let's break down what business outcomes are. And there are usually three parts to it.

If you break it down, it becomes much easier and has something you can actually work with and deal with. At the highest level, a business outcome is something that the decision maker, they are probably the reason why they bought your product. It's either to save money, to make money, um, it could be to generate more leads. It could be to have higher employee retention. There are typically certain things that your products do that if you ask your sales people, they will tell you these particular reasons.

Business outcomes. There typically aren't all that many, right? It's typically like, you know, three, you know, three to five things. I mean, obviously it depends on how many products that you have and kind of what your company does, but you can usually narrow those down. So the first thing that you should do is actually narrow down what those high-level business outcomes are. Now this is usually the area where the train goes off the tracks, and this is around defining the success criteria to achieve those business outcomes. So a success criteria could be, okay, let's say your business outcome is generating revenue.

We want to make sure that you increase revenue by 30% in the next quarter. Um, or let's say you want to, you know, save costs. So we want to make sure that you can reduce the costs, and in my case, like of our CX team by 20% by the end of Q2. Um, and so what's really important there is you define what the metric is, what the change in that metric is, and a particular time frame. And so that's not easy. And the reason why it's not easy is usually you don't control the outcome of that metric. It's usually something that your client is measuring. Um, it's Usually not in your particular application. But listen, that's okay.

This is kind of what you need to work with the client on. Um, and then the third part of this is how the heck are you going to actually achieve it? And this is where you focus on goals. And you hear about smart goals. So, for example, a smart goal could be very simply, we need to onboard you on our product in the next two months. Um, and it's like a binary, like yes or no.

Another particular goal would be, um, we need to send out 30 campaigns, um, in the next 30 days. So, you know, that's a particular goal. Um, a business outcome is not a project plan. It is simply defining what the high-level business outcomes you're trying to achieve. What's the success criteria? What are the goals to achieve that particular business outcome? And you may have, let's say, two or three success criteria, and you may have like three or four goals, um, up to five, I would say, to achieve that particular business outcome. And then what you do is you put everything into a success plan. Um, and that way, um, you can track how you're progressing against that.

There are lots of different ways of doing it. A success plan is not just bullets on a PowerPoint slide. You can do that and listen, that's a good first step, but how many PowerPoint slides are just stuck in PowerPoint? It's fine that you kind of refer back to that PowerPoint slide, and that's great, but really there should be particular statuses that you're tracking against those particular goals that will tell you if you’re actually completing the goals, achieving the success criteria, and then ultimately did you get to where you need to go for your business outcome. Again, this isn’t easy, but this is the way to achieve business outcomes: track them, report them up to decision makers, and essentially become more strategic.

Customer success isn't easy. If it were easy, we wouldn't be here. But it’s definitely not easy. All right, the last thing, and again, probably the most contentious, is aligning cross functionally. I used to not align cross-functionally. I used to think that everybody else was the problem and you know if only they would listen to us I know customers would renew. Um, I remember a particular example many years ago where there was a failed implementation, and I was very angry with our services team. Yes, I probably threw our services team under the bus. I did something I can't remember, but our head of services was in town, and he met up with me and he sat me down.

He's like, "Hey, how did this go?" And I was like, "Well, it didn't go very well." Um, and he was like, "Yes, listen, our team screwed up. I get it. It happens." Um, but how you react to it is the most important. And I think that you really need to change the way that you react, and you could have improved it. And he was totally right. Um, and then he gave me some really good advice that I take with me. He's like, "Listen, what you should do — and this is something that's really worked for me — is that you should be going to different teams and asking how you can help them. I was like, "Whoa, so you want me to go to other teams who have been causing my life to be horrible, to ask them how I can help them?" I was like, "Really?" Um, but I would say that it was Extremely good advice. So, at the next sales CS kickoff that we had, I did that. I went around to some of our sales reps and I just asked them, "Hey, what can I do to help?" And they were completely flabbergasted. They're like, "What are you saying? What do you mean help?" I was like, "Listen, how can I help you? I know a lot. I know customers pretty well."

Um and so then it turned into a really good discussion. And again, the reason why this is so important is that you cannot win this battle in customer success by yourself. Even though you might think you can, you can't. You need product to develop the features that you need. You need engineering to fix the bugs you have. You need sales to make sure that they're selling to the right customers. And you will need them at times to jump back in and help you with customers. They have a lot of expertise that you can leverage. You need marketing. Marketing is going to give you the right communications to customers, the right messaging. And while it's really easy to blame everybody else, it's only Going to get you so far. And I can guarantee you that if you're someone who does that, you will be stuck where you are. You're not necessarily going to get promoted because if you think that promotions are just aligned around your manager, they're typically not. They typically need to get buy-in from other cross-functional leaders.

Obviously, it depends on your organization, but there are only so many people who can get promoted. I mean, I was at Meta. Um, so I think I know about large organizations, and there are only so many promotions that can actually happen, and it will come down to various managers determining who is going to get promoted. Um, and so it's really important to be known as someone who is helping the rest of the organization.

That is being strategic. Um, if there's a problem, don't just solve the problem or complain about the problem. Even worse, look for ways that you can get others involved to fix the underlying problem and not just the thing that's affecting you right then and there. Um, and so these are just some of the things that you can do. And So just to wrap up here, one is you want to focus on your customer over your product. You obviously have to be a product expert. I'm not saying not to be a product expert, but if you really want to get to another level with your customer, think of the three C's: the company, the customer, and their challenge.

The second thing is having more strategic conversations. So, think of using a framework like the OARS framework. There’s obviously more involved there. Think about asking better questions, and then you can lead to better outcomes in your conversations. And then uncovering business outcomes. So don't just focus on vanity metrics. Focus on what will actually deliver value to the customer that will guarantee that they're going to renew with you. So those are things that you want to uncover.

We talked about the three different parts of that. Creating a success plan. And the last one is driving cross-functional alignment and cross-functional relationships. You know, customer success. We talk about it.

We're like, "Oh, it’s not a department. It’s a whole The thing about the organization," and then we don't necessarily act on that. Um, but we're all stewards in our organization. I think everyone that's worked with me has always kind of had this approach where we want we in customer success want to be the model function in our organization.

We want to set the standard, and I think it's really, really important to do that. It'll help you, it'll help your company, obviously, and it'll help your customers. Um, and so that's it. I wanted to wrap up. And you know, in terms of what I'm focused on, um, you know, I've been in the final stages. I'm waiting for my book to be proofread. By the time you might see this on video, um, it will probably be out. Um, but if you'd like to join my launch team, you can go to strategiccusuccess.com, or you can scan this barcode or QR code, and you can join. I'll give you a few free things,

and when the book comes out in its final version, I'll give that out as well. Um, and really what I'm trying to do is just take some of this knowledge that I've learned, both some of the successes But mostly failures, and share that with other people so we can all learn together. Um, so yeah, that's it. But thank you, Christie, and thanks to everyone. I saw a lot of familiar faces on the chat. Um, just a lot of really good discussions I'm seeing in the Q&A, and yeah, we can get to some of those questions.

Excellent, Chad. Well, I think everyone's got lots of great questions. Um, the first one being, is this also going to be an audio book? Yes. Um, I will look to make it an audio book. I've had a few requests, but I will definitely look to do that. That'll be fun. So, the first one is from Karen. Um, what are the best ways to get up to speed on a customer's business if we are a one-to-many CSM and most of our customers are not public?

Yeah, it's a good question. So, I mean, obviously it depends on, you know, um, how you're conversing with that particular client, but let's say it's like a pooled model and you need to jump on a call with a particular customer. Um, in the past, I would say use Google News. Today, I would say use Perplexity, just because it's Pulling from the latest like LLMs.

But you could use ChatGPT or code. They’re going to give you some good information. I would go to there first. I’m assuming what you mean, Karan, here is that you’re jumping on a call with them. But that’s something I would do. And in the future, I mean, we’re going to see, and I’m sure BDRs are doing this already, where they’re pumping in particular details about the company into their communications when they reach out. That’s probably where digital customer success will get to. It’ll be much more personal in the communications that it sends out. But for those who are in digital customer success, you should be thinking about that. How can you leverage AI to make your communications more personalized? All right, very good. Next question here is Monica. And hopefully, Karen, we answered your question thoroughly. Feel free, if there’s any follow-ups, to go drop those in. Next question up.

I personally struggle with shifting the mindset with legacy customers who have been with us for 10 or more years and have a certain idea of what CSMs do or are. Any recommendations on how to shift the Partnership? Our calls always get derailed by some part of the four traps you mentioned earlier.

Yeah, I think it's a good one, and we can all get into these. There are a few ways that you can approach this. One is that you can kind of have some sort of disruption in the meeting. A disruption could be your manager, and you just kind of bring them into the meeting; they can help maybe reset expectations. A lot of it comes down to setting the agenda and saying, "Okay, listen. I know we've talked about this in the past. Here is something I want to talk about." Usually, it's a step back question where I'm borrowing this from Bob London, where you're going to say, "Listen, I want to take a step back question. I'm going to ask you. It's a little bit out there, but it's an open-ended question, and I want to start there." And so, you can do the disruptive, like bringing your manager in and say, "Okay, listen. We're just going to reset expectations. Or you can just do it. It's like the Kaizen approach, like the small Improvements where you just say, "We're just going to ask one question." And the one question, the question I love to

ask is, you know, if you think about what you're going to get done in the next 60 days, or sorry, um, you know, if you look at your whiteboard that's behind you, what's the one thing that you need to get off that whiteboard the next 60 days? And so, it's a really good question because you can just picture a whiteboard behind you if one doesn't exist. Um, and it's one thing and everyone has one thing that's probably the top of mind. And so just start with like one type of, you know, disruptive question that will change the mindset and not necessarily focus directly on your product. And you can add something to that too. You can say like another question would be, um, you know, what's one thing you want to get better at that relates to your role, not necessarily to our particular product. So that way you're focusing less on your product and you're focusing on them and kind of what they need to get done. Um, and so that's what I would recommend. Um, it's not easy.

The other thing is that you might want To assess where you're spending your time, you can do your own little assessment. I forget; it's like the time management box, like the Eisenhower box, where it's like the important things versus urgent versus non-important. And then just assess kind of where you're spending your time and then have a chat with your manager. You can say, "Listen, here's kind of where I'm spending my time. It's not the most effective.

This particular legacy client, I think we should do something here; maybe they could buy services or maybe they could buy premier support. Um, or you know, the other thing is that sometimes you can tell your manager, "I think it's time to switch off this particular account; we want to reset the relationship, and I can't do that." So, just some techniques and tactics that you could potentially use. It's a good question.

Okay, very good. The next one up is from anonymous. What advice do you have for getting out of the cycle of reactivity while still getting everything done? Yeah, this is a hard one. Like I I would say, like, you know, going back to that advice I just shared around, first of all, assessing where you're spending your time. So, one of the first things you can do is, if you're recording your communications, you can actually look to see which customers you're sending the most communications to. And then try and determine why; like, where are you spending your time? Um, and the other thing that you can do is look at your calendar and review all the meetings you have with your particular clients, and actually write this out, put it in a spreadsheet or however you want to do it. What's the meeting cadence with these particular clients? And that can give you indications that, okay, I'm meeting with this client bi-weekly, this client monthly, and this client weekly.

Like, should I still be meeting with them at that cadence? So, what you want to look to do is, how can you actually free up your time? Um, and then going back to what I mentioned about looking at, you know, your correspondence and the clients you're working with and say, okay, you know, Should I be spending this much time?

Like, should someone else be doing this? Like, should I be directing them to support? Like, what's the problem here? You know, why am I so reactive? And I think one of the things that I think you should do as well is don't just have all the stuff on your shoulders. Talk to your manager, talk to other people. There's a huge CS community as well. And you know, maybe ask them for advice. But your manager might be someone who says, "Listen, I really need help. Like I'm spending way too much time with this particular client or these particular clients." Um, the problem might not be you. The problem might be your product.

You might be filling a gap that you shouldn't be filling. And never assume that your company knows what that gap is because most likely, "Oh, that's fine; customer success has it," and meanwhile you're killing yourself week after week, manually pulling data, when if you brought that forward, most likely your colleague has the same problem, and then you can make a case to the company saying, "Listen, if we spent three hours, we could build Out this thing and we wouldn't have to pull all this data, and we can actually do more strategic work.

Very good. Well, hopefully that answered that question. We've got another one up.

So, another anonymous. Oftentimes, from my five and a half years of experience as a CSM, I see that a lot of companies don't understand their own business outcomes. And if they do, how do we find — how do we find we are reaching their business outcomes if the ROI doesn't equal a clear dollar value?

So, how do we connect the use case success better to the business outcomes? Yeah, listen, this is hard, right? Like we have a lot of people, um, that we're working with, that their main focus is finishing their day and like seeing their friends and family. They're not necessarily thinking of it from a business outcome because they're not necessarily strategic in their role. So there's a couple of things, like one is you may not be — think you may not be talking to the right person. So you might need to uplevel the conversation um, you know, to their boss. But I'd say the better approach is I like to use something called social proof. So Something like Robert Cialdini in his

book on psychology, and what you can do is say, "Listen, I hear what you’re saying. You don't know what outcomes you’re trying to achieve. I have this other client over here, very similar to you. Here’s what we did with them: Here’s what they defined, and here’s how they tracked that. How does that sound to you? They were very successful. Here’s where they got to. And so you know, there’s a book called "The Jolt Effect," which I highly recommend. It’s where sometimes that force approach— they're asking open questions and doing reflections. That’s good to some extent, but other times you need to come in and actually shake the tree a little bit, and you need to give them some prescriptive advice.

That way, they don’t come away saying, "Okay, we didn’t really accomplish much here." So, you have to determine when to do that and when not to do that, but that’s a good approach to customers in that situation. There are other techniques I talk about in the book, like asking certain types of questions. But it’s important to understand; this is not an easy solution.

All potentially have this particular problem. Okay, very good. Next question up from anonymous. What is the recommended frequency for formal value discussions with your customer and should we be conducting these beyond a midyear touch point? Yeah, I mean this is probably Christie's, like it all depends — like putting that on the t-shirt. Um, it depends on the size of the client, depends on the segment, like how important they are to your company, like how strategic they are to your company. Um, but I would say like if you're going to go about this, it doesn't matter if it's

scaled or, you know, high touch. First of all, you should have a definition coming out of the purchase. Um, what is it they're trying to achieve? You know, if it's high touch, you can obviously ask them, ask sales, look at the recorded calls. You can use now AI to pull that data out of the recorded calls, which is really awesome. Um, there are solutions that are asking clients those questions. You may even have that in your product. Um, so that's the first touch point is understanding that and then ideally what you could do.

If you understand it off the top, you could potentially do it in a more digital way. It's like, okay, this is what you told us; here's what you've achieved. Um, and I'd say like even at the minuscule level, here's something that we're doing. We're taking our data, pulling it out. We're putting it into an email, and we're showing their data, how it trends, how it compares to benchmarks. Um, and again, that's vanity metrics. That's not great. And obviously with our higher touch clients, we're having a discussion around that. Um, but I'd say that, like, you know, you want to have that at certain key areas. You don't want to do that a week before the renewal date.

So let's put it this way: another thing is that you are going into your renewal, and something I talk about in the book is that you want to make sure that you've had that value discussion going into the particular renewal so that you show them, "Here's what you said you wanted to achieve; here's what you've achieved." Um, so yeah, there, it's not a one-and-done answer for that particular one. Okay, we've got seven minutes, guys, so Please feel free to continue to either upvote or drop more questions in the Q&A. We're going to continue to get through as many as possible. All right, next one up, Chad. As you mentioned, when the success criteria is something that your company doesn't directly control or measure, but the client hasn't or isn't willing to give us the data to measure it, how do you suggest breaking through to them? Yeah. Again, like this is a really tough one, right?

Um, you know, it's not easy. Um, you mentioned, like one of the things you can use is social proof and say, "Here's what this customer did. Here's how they proved it." Um, proved value. Um, again, you might not be talking to the right person. Um, or you can just say, "Listen, why don't you do the calculations on your end?" Um, you know, one of the things that we did, um, at a previous company is we just made it easier for them to do their own calculations. Like, we gave them a template to use. Uh, it could be a spreadsheet. Just plug your numbers in.

I don't care exactly what those Help you do that. Um, so try and be creative and find ways around that. Um, because, you know, one of the things, um there's, um, it's not the challenger sale; it's the, um, oh, I forget what it is. Um, but there's a recent book that is talking about, um, it's like the growth. Um, in any case, the expansion sale. I think that's what it is. Um, and it talks about just showing the customer, like, here's what you said you're going to do, and here's what you've done. Just showing results — any results will guarantee, um, a higher chance of renewal. And so just helping them get to that point where they can potentially do it themselves.

Um, that can help you, but it's a really tough one, right? Like, if that's your customer, um, you know, you might question how engaged they are and how willing they are going to be successful if they don't necessarily want to prove out their results. But you really just need to do the best that you can.

Very good. Kristi, you have better advice there. That's a tough one. This is your show. I'm hosting it. So I'm going to let your responses Stick afterwards. Chad, I would have said this, this, and this. Like I can't believe you didn't say that. Like, what the hell? You talk about that at a happy hour. Okay. Um, anyway, Jonathan's question is next. How have you handled alignments when the leaders above director plus are not aligned and only seem focused on protecting their own interests?

Okay. Well, the thing not to do that I've done many times is go over their heads and tell them that they suck. Um, I can tell you that that's going to, um, really get you in a job promotion purgatory. So what you can do is always start with data. Always start with facts. And so collect that information and bring it forward. Start with your manager. That's kind of the first place to start with and say, "Listen, here's the information that I have gathered. Here's the problem. Here's what the effect of that is." The other thing you can do is take that same data and you can book time with that director, depending on your organization, and just do the same thing but come from it from a place of here's what I'm seeing.

Here's the results; what are your Thoughts, um, and really try and do it from a way of like, let's try and you know, fix this together. The other thing that I look to do is see ways that will help them. So I'm bringing this data: here's the problem. Here's how it's going to help you. Um, and try and build those allies. But I think this gets into a battle that I think your manager really needs to take on. Um, and so, you know, there are only so many things you can do, but you can help by bringing forward the data and the problem. Very good.

Next question up from Joanna: Do you recommend quarterly strategic business reviews? If not, how often? I I don't, I don't, um, I don't actually recommend quarterly strategic business reviews. Um, I actually don't even want to call them business reviews anymore. So, I talk about that in the book. But it, it again, going back to that question, like it, it will depend when you have them. The case is just you need to get away from this idea of a quarterly. It really should be, um, depending on the customer journey, depending on what the customer needs. Um, and then there are different ways of actually communicating that value.

Okay, Monica, you got a question here. So, would you say customer business outcomes should align with our internal value drivers? Um, it's a good question. Um, yes. Like your business, your product should support the business outcomes. If they don't, you're going to have a lot of churn. So, I would say yes.

All right. Very good. Next question. I'm just chipping away at these because we're going to get to as many as we can before time's up. So, speed round, Chad. All right. Helen asked, "Can you speak to how to get to the right people in the room or how to get the right people in the room?" Sorry. We often inherit a project lead from the onboarding process but need to pivot to speak to different strategic leads. What are key techniques to do this? Yeah. So, a couple of ideas like one is like leveraging whoever has connections with them to help you soft introduce them to you. So, that's one thing. Two is like just providing value in every communication. So just say, "Here's why it's important to you, here's why you should join." Um, and just having even your customer contact introduce you And invite them and explain why they should be there. In the book, I talk about redoing meetings and making them more interesting — more like a board meeting, like a discussion. If you have a bunch of slides and you go through them, you're going to bore the client to tears. So there are just different techniques that you can use. Very good.

Well, listen. While there are still a ton of questions in the Q&A, there are about 13 remaining. We answered 11, which is a lot. I'm going to ask that you guys, if you want them answered, why don't you direct them to Chad following today's webinar, and I'm sure he'll be more than happy to answer, giving his point of view on certain things. I apologize if we weren't able to get to your question. These are all really fantastic. Follow up with Chad directly, and I'm sure he'll be happy to answer those for you.

I want to just end by thanking Chad so much for graciously joining us today and sharing all of his wisdom and giving us a little sneak peek into what we can expect for this upcoming book. Hopefully, you're all as excited as I am to dig in.

I've already got it in the sneak peek, so I can tell you guys it's delicious. You're going to want to eat it. Well, Christy did the foreword, so yeah, she has seen it. Yes, I did. I'm still so honored. But it's going to be fantastic, guys. And so as soon as it is released, please get your hands on it. Make sure you tell your friends and your teams because everyone needs to be reading this. Um, it's going to be a great guide for us all as we continue to advance in this practice.

But thank you again all so much for joining us here with the client success webinar series. We will be back. You're going to see an email from us. Two weeks ago, in our last webinar, we had Rob Zambido on and we got so much fantastic feedback from his session. He's actually coming back to do a two-part miniseries breaking that down. So, it's all about being commercially minded and how we navigate that internally as customer success practitioners. So, you will see that in your inboxes. Please join us for that follow-up conversation. Chad, again, thank you so much. We look forward to reading your book. All right. Thanks everyone. Appreciate it.