How to stay top of mind with your customers and get that second meeting
Provide insights, not features. Provide value, not useless information
“Don’t tell your customers something they don’t know about you. Tell them something they don’t know about them.” This is a quote from sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer.
If you’ve ever reached out to a client to book a meeting and flaunted your new features as a reason to meet, you’re doing it wrong. Reviewing your cool new features can be helpful, but that is your value-add. It may get you the meeting, but it most likely won’t get you the next one. You need to teach your customers something about themselves to deepen your relationship.
There’s a tech vendor I’ve used (I won’t name names), and the meeting with the CSM will go something like this. We would both jump on the meeting and after some nice pleasantries, the CSM would ask me, “So, what do you want to cover?”. It wasn’t long until I started canceling the meeting. It was rare that the CSM had shown up to talk about my needs and that was only if I had emailed them a topic ahead of time. These meetings provided no value and it wasn’t long before I started taking calls from competitors that could provide me insights I wasn’t aware of.
“Tell them something they don’t know about them”
With the advent of AI, meeting preparation has become much easier. Today, I fire up Update.ai and grab a quick AI-generated synopsis that summarizes where we left off with the client from a previous meeting. With that context in hand, I can quickly scan the client’s metrics, compare them against their stated outcomes, and start making recommendations.
If I don’t know their business outcomes, I can compare their key metrics against the benchmark metrics we gathered. Then, I’ll pull out a playbook that provides suggestions on some strategies they can use based on how they compare to the benchmarks. I’ll use AI to create a three-sentence hook that I can use for my client outreach. This should take less than five minutes.
To go a step further, dive deeper into how your client has set up your application. Look for a few ways they can optimize their use of your products that you’re fairly sure they weren’t aware of. Include just one of those in your client outreach and let them know that there’s more of that you want to share when you meet. This is the kind of value that they are looking for from their CSM. It’s what will differentiate you from 90% of your CS peers.
Teach your clients something they didn’t know themselves. Spend those extra few minutes building that value. That will get you noticed. You can then leverage that opportunity to learn more about your client’s business and really transform yourself into more of a strategic customer success manager.
Yes, this takes some extra prep time, but trust me, it will be worth it.
What are ways that you provide your clients with insights?