By Chad Horenfeldt
Several years ago when I was still a green customer success manager (CSM) I made a rookie mistake. I was working with a marketing manager at a Texas insurance firm who was petrified of technology. She was tasked with drumming up new business for her company. However, she had no idea how to use our product to achieve that goal. As her CSM, I was ready to dig in and make her successful - or so I thought I was.
I immediately jumped into problem-solving mode. The first campaign she wanted to launch was sending an email to her prospects. I tried to get her to watch our training videos so that she could send this email on her own. A week went by and I followed up with her: “How did you find that training?” I asked. She replied, “Um, yeah, that’s just not for me. What can you do to help?”.
Undaunted by the slight setback, I switched to plan B, which was “Do whatever you can to make the client successful”. I was resolved to do everything in my power to get those emails out. I built an email template for her, customized the template with her marketing copy, uploaded the email list she provided, and even hit “send” on the email campaign. “I did it!” I said to myself. “I’m helping my client achieve value”. Fast forward three months and the client let us know they were not renewing. Wait, what? Didn’t I provide value for the client?
Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account that my client was completely overwhelmed by our product and didn’t want to be in her role. By executing the email campaign for her I reinforced that our product was too complex and that it wasn’t for her. I unknowingly dug myself into a deeper hole.
I should have taken a moment to determine how motivated she was. I assumed she wanted to use our product but just needed more help. If I knew how she felt, I could have explored her concerns more thoroughly to tried to address them.
Conducting a Strategic Conversation
In my previous post, How to Have Strategic Customer Conversations: Part I, I covered my definition of a strategic conversation and started to define the different components of a strategic conversation as well as the importance of the concept of motivational interviewing as part of the customer success toolkit. As a quick recap, the objective of a strategic conversation is to understand your client at a deeper level. You want to get a better sense of what will move the needle for them or what their root issues are. You need to be wary of providing advice without having established trust if you want to have productive conversations.
A strategic conversation should consist of three parts:
Building rapport, establishing trust and uncovering issues and objectives
Assessing motivation
Getting commitment and constructing a go-forward plan
The previous post focused on the first component, and this one will expand on uncovering client issues, then cover assessing motivation and getting commitment.
Assessing Motivation Using Scaling Questions
If I had a time machine I would have approached the situation with the client I mentioned earlier differently. I would have engaged my client in a strategic conversation by using open-ended questions and reflections as part of the OARS framework (outlined in the first post) to understand their challenges better. Even if I’d been able to uncover their issues, I still would have had to determine if she was willing to take the necessary action to effectively use our product. To best assess this, I’d have needed to assess her motivation.
To evaluate your client’s motivation to change or take action, ask them the following scaling questions:
On a scale of 0 to 10, where “0” is not important at all and “10” is crucially important, how important is it for you to take action?
On a scale of 0 to 10, where “0” is no confidence at all and “10” is completely confident, how confident are you that you can take action?
Ideally, your client has both high motivation and high confidence to take action (per the motivation matrix below) but that rarely happens. You’ll find some people that are highly motivated to take the right actions but have low confidence they can perform what is required. This may be due to a lack of skills, self-confidence, resources, budget, or faith in your product.
You may have clients that are low on motivation but high on confidence. It could be that they have other priorities, so your product or project is taking a backseat. They may also be egotistical and overconfident in their abilities, so they don’t believe their action is required or your solution is worth the investment.
Once you ask the first set of questions, follow up with these two powerful questions:
“Why did you pick X and not a lower number?”
“What would it take to move it to a higher number?”
Your goal here is to listen for “change talk”, which is your client telling you that they want to make things better. For example, if your client says: “I chose ‘8’ for motivation as it’s important to me to make these improvements”, you know you are on the right track. If they provided a 3 out of 10 for confidence, you want to hear something such as “I really want to use your new feature but it’s just too expensive”. That gives you the necessary information to help your client such as providing a discount or some other incentive to move things forward.
These questions can also unearth deep-rooted frustrations. In the story shared earlier, my client didn’t have the motivation nor the confidence to take action. If I would have assessed her motivation and then followed up with a “what would it take to move it to a higher number?” I could have uncovered my client’s trepidation toward our product earlier. We then could have pivoted to creating an action plan to address the issue and get commitment on next steps.
Summarize And Ask a Trigger Question
Once you have assessed your client’s motivation, you want to summarize what has been discussed so far and then ask a question that will trigger an action. The summary is a good opportunity to weave together a narrative that nudges your client towards a possible solution, but without telling the client exactly what to do.
If I had a “do-over” with my Texas client, I would have provided the following summary: “From our discussion you mentioned that you aren’t all that inclined to use our marketing tools and you find them very overwhelming. This isn’t something that you want to focus your time on but you know that these campaigns need to be executed”. The goal here is to have the client agree with your assessment. You should hear something such as “That’s right” or see a simple head nod if you’re on video or in person.
After you complete the summary, ask a question that triggers an action. Here are some sample questions:
What are the next steps?
What do you feel you should do about X?
What are some possible options?
It seems that x, y, and z are possible options. Where do you think we should go from here?
The objective of this one, powerful question is to put the onus on the client to determine what to do next. You should avoid providing advice as much as you can to avoid taking the power away from your client and causing them to shut down. If they aren’t sure how to answer your question and you have to make a recommendation, you can say: “Based on what other clients have done, I recommend X” and then ask a question “What do you think?” By providing another customer example you are using social proof so your recommendation isn’t a directive from you, but rather a justification based on what their peers are doing. This should make your recommendation more palatable for your clients to latch onto.
Referring back to our story, the client should have realized they weren’t the right person to use our tool and hopefully they could have recommended someone else on their team to take these tasks on, or partnered with a third party. In this type of interaction, you are acting as a mirror to reflect the situation back on the client so they can make clearer decisions that are mutually beneficial.
Map Out a Plan and Get Commitment
Once there is agreement on a possible plan forward, it’s time to solidify the next steps and get your client’s commitment to act. To accomplish this, I use the GAS framework:
Goals. Create SMART goals. These are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and have a specific timeframe.
Actions. Craft out the specific actions to support the goals
Next Steps. Define the immediate next steps. This could be setting up a project plan and scheduling the next meetings.
Once you finish this process and have “poured on the GAS”, you should have a very clear path forward so all parties understand what they need to do next. Lastly, ask for commitment. You can say: “Does this sound good to you?”. If you get an enthusiastic “Yes!” then you know you have made progress and have started on a new journey to correcting or improving the current situation. Be sure to end the meeting by expressing your appreciation and to follow up on any immediate actions including a meeting summary in a timely manner.
I hope that you find these methods helpful and I encourage you to test them out. They will seem foreign at first and will require you to practice them so you are more comfortable. Don’t make the same mistake I made and jump straight into problem-solving mode. Take a step back and have a strategic conversation in which you establish rapport with your clients, assess their motivation, and ultimately solve their problems so you can truly make them successful. Don’t let another client slip away!
The Success League is a customer success consulting and training firm that offers CS Leadership and CSM Certification programs. For information on these and our other offerings, please visit our website at TheSuccessLeague.io
Chad Horenfeldt - Chad is a customer success executive with 15+ years of experience building and developing high performing teams. Currently, he is the Head of Customer Success at Kustomer. Prior to Kustomer, Chad held CS leadership positions at Updater, Bluecore, Influitive, and Oracle (Eloqua). In addition to writing for The Success League, he also writes regularly on the topic of customer success on his blog The Enlightened Customer.