What Should Your CSMs Do? + Weekend Reads

When SaaS budgets come under pressure, what do you cut first? Most CFOs will look at any cost that does not (a) make money (b) save money, or (c) build the product.

Sales is usually safe, as long as you are near your quota. Marketing is looked at far more closely, especially the ROI expectation for each activity. Travel gets cut. The PR agency gets cut. Employee benefits start to be cut. The annual offsite now becomes an onsite :-)

The team that always faces pressure is the CSM team. Because.... what do CSMs do anyway? They are responsible for growth, but so are the account managers, so let the AM deal with it. CSMs are responsible for stopping churn, but some customers still churn.

Often the data that CSMs report on has lots of overlap with sales, support, etc Whenever a leadership team sees overlap, they see wastage.

What should CSMs do?

There are 3 areas where CSMs can add unique value.

1. Product Adoption and Value

Product Adoption - A well-designed product delivers more value with more adoption, and it becomes harder to replace.

Think of an AI chatbot. If I only ask questions sometimes and use it to clean up my writing, the value is ok, but I can switch to any other tool. What if I also use voice chat, image generation, and code creation, and I have set up multiple chats for each task? More value and more difficult for me to change tools. Now, what if I custom-train it on my own documents so it can write in my own style? Much more effort more me to change tools.

Your product has specific types of adoption that deliver more value and make vendor changes less likely. It could be more users, more usage, more types of usage, more custom integrations.

The CSM team should work with customers on these specific types of product adoption, and shouldreport on the progress.

Value - there is a saying that you can't expand a customer until you have delivered the value that was originally sold. Was it ROI? Cost saving? Efficiency? Speed? Whatever it was, the CSMs should be clear on this value, and should track it and report it, and ensure that the customer knows that it has been delivered as promised.

2. Relationships

This is often fuzzy, but it doesn't need to be. Make a checklist of specific activities that should result in a stronger relationship between the two companies (or indicate a strong relationship).

Here are a few examples:

A QBR that was attended by the decision-maker

A CXO-level meeting each year with your founder to talk about the road map

Case study, testimonial, G2 review

The customer speaks at one of your events

The decision-maker attends a customer dinner

Create your own list. The CSMs should be reporting this for every significant customer. A customer who suddenly stops wanting to meet, or have QBRs is a red flag for churn.

3. Risk Ranking Customers

Churn should never be a surprise.

The CSM team should maintain some form of report that captures the level of churn risk for each customer. You can use a score, or red/yellow/green, or a hospital analogy. Whatever you like.

This should capture issues like product problems, downtime, number and severity of support tickets, budget pressures, team changes, engagement level, the customer's financial health, changes in product adoption or usage, and the entrance of competition into the customer's tech stack.

The leadership team can review this ranking and plan specific actions to reduce the risk levels. This also creates clarity around preventable vs non-preventable churn, and gives some more cash flow visibility to the finance team.

How do you assess the impact of CSMs:

Product adoption - how effectively are they at driving the right type of product adoption in customer accounts?

Value - how effective are they at tracking and reporting on value delivery?

Relationship Growth - are they ensuring that the steps on the checklist are completed?

Risk Ranking - is the ranking comprehensive and accurate to ensure the risks are clearly visible?

Some other reads for your weekend (or week... whenever you read this)

Not for everyone, but this is a Hackernews AMA with an immigration lawyer who works with Y Combinator and startups - might have some helpful tips if you looking at the US market.

This is Hockeystack's data report on the number and types of touchpoints in the B2B buyer's journey. It created a bit of buzz about the methodology and how the data was presented. It is important to understand that these were the observed touchpoints rather than the required touchpoints for a deal. Great read.

A collection of amazing advice on launching a newsletter . I should spend more time on this myself :-) Since most newsletters end up abandoned, more help is always helpful.

Enjoy, and catch you next time.

Chris Higgins

www.gtmvelocity.com