By Shelly Shearlds
In Customer Success, becoming a trusted advisor is the ultimate goal. It transcends the role of merely assisting customers in using a product or service. A trusted advisor builds relationships grounded in trust, expertise, and a shared commitment to achieving customer goals. Sometimes, achieving those goals means challenging customers constructively and having the courage to say "no" when necessary. In this article, we'll explore the art of saying "no" strategically and how it can lead to better outcomes for you and your customers.
Understanding the Trusted Advisor Role
Before delving into the "how," it's crucial to understand what it means to be a trusted advisor. According to "The Trusted Advisor," a book by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford, a trusted advisor has extensive knowledge and experience and provides advice and guidance tailored to a firm's needs and objectives. Trusted advisors are more than just problem solvers or technical experts. They build strong, long-term customer relationships based on trust, mutual respect, and a shared commitment to success. Trusted advisors deeply understand their customers' businesses and can provide insights, recommendations, and guidance that go beyond the scope of their product or service.
The Benefits of Challenging Your Customers
If you manage your accounts with a mindset that the customer is always right, you are doing yourself, your organization, and your customer a disservice. Challenging your customers might sound counterintuitive when you want to maintain positive relationships. However, it can be a powerful tool for achieving success throughout the customer journey. Here are some benefits:
Driving Growth: Challenging your customers can help them identify growth opportunities they might have missed.
Building Trust: When done correctly, challenging your customers demonstrates your commitment to their success, building trust.
Strengthening the Relationship: Healthy challenges can lead to deeper, more meaningful interactions, enhancing the bond between you and your customers.
Challenging Your Customers in a Healthy Way
Here are some strategies:
Start with Empathy: Understand your customer's perspective and challenges. Approach the conversation with empathy and a genuine desire to help.
Ask Thoughtful Questions: Use open-ended questions to uncover their goals, pain points, and aspirations. For example,
"What key objectives do you hope to achieve next quarter?"
“What does a successful year for your team look like?”
“What are the most time-consuming processes your team owns today?”
“What is the biggest complaint you hear from your customers?”
“How do you help your customers achieve success?”
Share Insights and Best Practices: Offer insights, share best practices, and provide relevant data or success stories to support your recommendations—partner with cross-functional teams like Product Marketing to help you with this.
Frame Challenges Positively: Instead of saying, "You're doing this wrong," try framing it as "Here's an opportunity to improve." or “We recently worked with another customer on a similar challenge, and we achieved (insert outcome). Would you like to hear more about how we solved that using a different approach?”
Collaborate: Involve your customers in the solution. Encourage them to share their ideas and insights, making it collaborative.
Set Clear Objectives: Establish specific, measurable objectives for the challenge. Define what success looks like and the steps needed to get there.
Provide Resources: Offer resources, training, or support to help them address the challenge effectively.
Monitor Progress: Continuously track progress and provide feedback. Celebrate milestones and achievements together.
IRL
While it may be easy to understand the importance of being a trusted advisor, let's bring this concept to life through a practical example.
I lead an Account Management team at Medrio, an eClinical technology provider. Medrio’s vision is to improve 100 million lives by enabling secure, reliable, and efficient clinical trials. My team’s key focus is retention and helping our customers grow through our products and services. We achieve this by ensuring customers are getting a return on their investment in our technologies and helping them achieve their objectives effectively.
We often engage with leaders responsible for data management outcomes in clinical trial systems. These leaders may initially have a particular trial design in mind, which only sometimes prioritizes the patient experience. While the ultimate goal of any clinical trial is FDA approval, it's essential to ensure that patients remain in the trial, that clinical sites don't get frustrated with the technology, and that critical data points are captured efficiently.
As trusted advisors, we may need to challenge our customers by gently informing them that their desired design may not serve the best interests of the site, patients, or workflow. These conversations can be challenging, as our customers are also experienced professionals with their own design perspectives. However, they come to appreciate our viewpoint and our team's industry expertise, which is crucial to their success. In a remarkable instance, we helped one of our customers achieve a 93% patient compliance rate and ultimately secure FDA approval by prioritizing efficiency, data quality, and overall patient experience.
While you might not be in the life sciences industry, the principles remain the same. The success and ROI a customer achieves with your company depend on your ability to be an expert in your field, understand their goals intimately, and not shy away from challenging their decisions when necessary. After all, you partner with hundreds of customers striving to achieve similar goals, holding a larger span of expertise.
Conclusion
Becoming a trusted advisor as a Customer Success Manager involves more than just ensuring your customers use your product effectively. It means challenging them in a way that encourages growth, drives success, and strengthens the relationship. By approaching challenges with empathy, insights, collaboration, and a commitment to mutual success, you can become the trusted advisor your customers rely on for guidance and support. Remember, it's not about pushing them out of their comfort zone but helping them reach new heights.
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers consulting engagements, as well as coaching and certification training programs for both CSMs and CS Leaders. Please visit www.thesuccessleague.io for more.
Shelly Shearlds - With more than 20 years of experience in post-sales success, Shelly is passionate about optimizing the customer lifecycle to drive revenue growth. She is currently the Senior Director of Account Management and Customer Enablement at Medrio, a Clinical software company supporting the Pharmaceutical, Biotech, and Clinical Research sectors. Never one to shy away from a challenge, she recently joined the founding team at Success in Black, an organization committed to fostering more diverse, inclusive, and equitable growth within the Saas community.