By Chad Horenfeldt
In times of cutbacks and reductions, Customer Success leaders need to innovate and experiment with different initiatives. While your budget and resources may have been reduced, you still need to nail your core retention and growth goals. One approach you can consider is broadening the traditional executive sponsor program to include additional leaders from organizations a step below your exec team. These supplementary participants can sustain and even increase customer engagement and deepen customer relationships in challenging times. I’ve given this initiative a simple name: “the leadership sponsor program”. I’ll outline what it entails and how you can set it up yourself. I’ll first define what an executive sponsor program is for those less familiar with them.
What is an Executive Sponsor Program?
A traditional executive sponsor program matches your company executives with key customer executives at your largest and most strategic customers. Executive pairings are typically based on previously established relationships, the area of specialty the client requires (for example: client has a number of feature requests and are paired with a Product executive), similar role matching (pairing a marketing exec with another marketing exec), or geographic location.
The way these programs operate can differ across organizations, but the main goal should be to have your assigned company executive meet with the corresponding customer executive at least quarterly. These meetings should be informal with the focus of keeping both parties informed of key developments in each other’s businesses, uncovering potential challenges, and deepening personal relationships between your companies. Beyond the quarterly meetings, your executive sponsor may also participate in strategic meetings such as customer onsites or executive business reviews.
While the CSM doesn’t actively participate in these meetings, they act as the facilitator to do the introductions between the executives, remind their executive sponsors to schedule meetings with their counterparts, and capture any notes when the meetings take place. These meetings should be tracked in your CRM so you can measure the impact of executive engagement on customer retention and growth.
These programs add some additional burden to CSMs and may not seem like they are worth the effort. You may be saying, “I have a great relationship with my client - why do I need to get someone else involved?”. The challenge is a CSM’s focus is more aligned with the day-to-day contact and not with the key customer stakeholder that will decide if they renew with you or go elsewhere. An executive sponsor program can deepen and broaden the relationships you have with customers and provide you with additional insights that a CSM may not have been able to attain.
Even if a CSM has an excellent relationship with the customer decision makers, there are some subjects the customer may not be comfortable discussing with their CSM. They could include sensitive matters around their company’s performance or even some constructive feedback they have on their CSM and their overall customer experience. For your largest and most strategic customers you need to have additional outlets for customers to share their concerns and vent their frustrations.
But when you need to stretch your resources and protect revenue more than ever, how can you make better use of leaders from across your company? Enter the Leadership Sponsor Program.
What is a Leadership Sponsor Program and How do you set it up?
A leadership sponsor program is similar to an executive sponsor program, but it taps into the senior leaders across your organization who are 1-2 levels down from your executives. These could be senior leaders on your Product team, Engineering directors, regional Sales leaders, Marketing directors, or leaders from Finance, People, or Operations. It also should include senior leaders from your customer facing teams such as your head of Support or your head of Onboarding or Professional Services. I recommend starting with the functions in your organization that your customers want more access to, such as Product and Engineering. Next, consider the caliber of the leader and what value they could bring to the customer.
Once you have a short list of potential candidates, you need to get buy-in from your executive team. Craft out a proposal that outlines your program, including the criteria that determine which customers are selected, what is expected of each leadership participant, and what the projected impact of the program will be on your core metrics such as retention and growth. You should include other benefits of the program, for example, how exposing more leaders to your customers will bring them closer to what is most important for the sustainability of your company. It can also be perceived as a way of rewarding your high performing leaders and a badge of honor. Get the proper approvals from your executives and also ask them to review and provide feedback on the leaders you recommended for the program.
Once you receive buy-in from the executive team, start to craft out the details of your initiative. This should include how your leaders will be introduced to customers, the text of the emails they should send to their customer leadership counterparts, the proposed agendas of their meetings and even the questions they should ask. Your CSMs should have explicit instructions on how they will prepare your leaders for these meetings and how they will track when these meetings take place.
Next, start to pair up the selected leaders with your customer executives. I recommend asking your CSMs for input as they may have insights on which leaders would make the best leadership sponsors for specific clients. You may be concerned that you’re no longer able to match titles such as matching a VP from your organization with a VP on the customer side. My view is you don’t need to be perfect here. As an example, I’m very confident a VP-level customer executive will be okay with meeting with a Director of Product as they are more interested in keeping tabs on how your product is evolving than worrying about speaking to another VP. I would limit the number of customers assigned to each leader to three maximum. You don’t want to overburden people or make them resent being part of this program.
Once you’ve drafted your proposed pairings, go back to the leaders in your organization who have been selected for this program and provide a summary of the customers they have been matched with and the reasons behind it. For example, you may have matched your Finance leader with customers in the banking industry. Providing this context will also give these leaders confidence they have something to contribute to this endeavor. I also recommend providing an opportunity at this point for leaders to trade customers with each other based on their personal preference. Giving people some say in the matter increases how bought in they are. At this stage you should also provide these leadership sponsors with the appropriate process documentation and even offer to run a Q-and-A session to ensure they are comfortable in their new roles.
Once this has been settled, you can relay to the CSMs which of your company leaders are matched up with their clients. CSMs can now start the intro process and you are off to the races! Be sure to track which of your leadership sponsors have connected with their associated customer stakeholder and the date of their last meeting. When you are a few months into the program seek out feedback from all parties - including customers - and refine your program as needed.
Building Empathy and Creating a Customer Centric Company
Besides improving your customer engagement, I’ve found that these types of expanded leadership sponsor programs can improve customer empathy throughout your organization. Moreover, they can enhance the status of your Customer Success teams as more people across your various company departments will hear about CS accomplishments from customers directly.
We often talk about Customer Success being more than just a department, but how do you put that into practice? By expanding your executive sponsor program down a level or two from the top, you give your customers greater access to your company; you stretch your resources in tough times, and you create a more customer-centric company that is aligned around the ultimate success of its customers. During challenging times, the highest performing teams adapt to the environment they’re in and make do with what they have. How are you innovating to meet the needs of your business? How could more of your company leaders support you and your efforts to retain and grow your customers?
The Success League is a customer success consulting firm that offers coaching, and a CS Leadership Certification training program. Please visit our website at TheSuccessLeague.io for our complete offerings.
Chad Horenfeldt - had 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.