Practice radical customer candor
Win customer loyalty by speaking hard truths and guiding real change
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, The Strategic Customer Success Manager: A Blueprint for Elevating Your Impact and Advancing Your Career:
Recognizing your customers and investing time to guide them shows you care—but earning their loyalty sometimes takes the courage to deliver tough love. This involves being frank with them and questioning their actions. As a CSM, you need to practice what author Kim Scott calls radical candor in her book of the same name.
Scott describes radical candor as “caring personally while challenging directly.”1 Being an effective CSM requires you to boldly help clients examine their conventional wisdom and standard practices. You can’t be a doormat who lets customers step all over you and and gives in to every demand. As I said earlier, you’re not a waiter who simply takes orders and your goal isn’t to make customers happy. You need to have your own opinion on what is best for your customers. You also can’t be complacent and accept it at face value when your client says that “everything is going OK.” Trust me—it usually isn’t.
Your clients may be trapped in their own bubbles, completely isolated from what is happening around them. You have the power to give them the gift of perspective and help them see their situations from a different angle. This is what I call radical customer candor, and it is a central part of being an SCSM.
For instance, I’ve seen numerous examples of clients demanding that CSMs recreate outdated and inefficient processes during onboarding. When faced with such clients, I stood my ground as best I could instead of acquiescing to their requests. I pointed out how other similar clients had made measurable advancements in their business by implementing our software, following our recommended approach, and moving away from legacy processes. I also reassured them that we would be there with them every step of the way so we could help them through this transformation.
I stood up to them, but I did so in a respectful way that took into account the vast amount of experience my client had in this space and their reluctance to change. I also had this conversation after I had already established a trusted relationship that embodied many of the recommendations covered in this book. The client knew I cared about them and their interests, and I had earned the right to challenge them. This is what radical customer candor is all about.
At times, you will need to take control of the situation. The good news is that most of your customers will welcome this with open arms. Authors Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, in their book The Challenger Sale, present their research concluding that buyers want sales reps to help them avoid landmines and to provide a unique viewpoint. This is no different in the world of customer success.
Dixon and Adamson claim that your customers are secretly saying, “Challenge me. Teach me something new.”2 They don’t want to be pampered—they want you to be real with them. They need and want to be challenged. As previously noted, an effective means of engaging your customers involves educating rather than lecturing. People yearn to learn, so don’t worry about standing up to your customers or disagreeing with their views.
Being a challenger is a central component of radical customer candor. It may mean asking your customers tough questions, questioning their motivation to act, or confronting them with a completely different approach. If this approach feels daunting, take heart—the upcoming chapters will provide frameworks to help you master this vital competency.
Join my book launch team! If you liked this excerpt and want to learn more, join my launch team, visit my launch site. You’ll get the intro, first chapter, and bonus chapter immediately. You’ll then get access to the book prior to its official release (slated for late June).
Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean (Macmillan, 2017), 82.
Dixon and Adamson, The Challenger Sale, 53.