Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM, deliver more value for your customers, and turn it into revenue for your company every week.

Need additional help? Check out these resources 👇️ 

• Training Platform

• Coaching Services

• Guides 

• CSM Operating System 

• Free Templates 

Your leadership does not believe in CSM and keeps the budget tight. Your product has major flaws that keep causing trouble. Sales continue to bring in bad-fit customers. Foreign tasks keep flowing in.

It’s easy to blame all your struggles on someone else. But are you actually doing everything right? Are you even doing the right things?

Before you look elsewhere, you need to ensure your performance is top-notch.

In today’s post, I want to talk about 5 crippling mistakes I see CSMs doing over and over delivering serious blows to their performance.

1. Don’t rely on guessing and assuming

While I don’t intend to make a ranking for these mistakes, this is the clear number one. So many CSMs know very little about their customers besides the standard data they are measuring.

Low product usage does not necessarily mean a customer is at risk. It depends on their use case. High product usage does not necessarily mean customers are doing great. Maybe they have not figured things out and put in way too much effort (and might give up soon).

You need to talk to their customers to understand their goals, problems, and resulting needs for education, training, and advising. You need to know where they are in the journey.

You need to know how they are supposed to use your product. In CSM, context, not content, is king. Knowing the “what” without the “why” is useless and makes you vulnerable to unpleasant surprises.

2. Don’t waste your customers’ time

Are you still doing the “good old” check-ins with your customers? Asking how they are doing? Telling them to reach out if they need something? How does that work? Do silent customers suddenly change their tune? Most likely not.

A lot of CSMs I meet keep wondering about why their customers are non-responsive. There may be customers who were forced into your product by their leadership and don’t care. There may be customers who simply have no interest in building bonds.

But there are also customers who became non-responsive only after being bombarded with irrelevant outreach. Outreach that isn’t considered helpful and valuable but spam. So over the weeks and months, they became deaf.

Do yourself a favor: Before sending more content, meeting invitations, etc., evaluate whether you have anything interesting to offer for this particular customer. Don’t reach out for the sake of it. Don’t reach out because it’s on the agenda (rethink your agenda).

3. Don’t wait for customers to reach out 

That does not mean you should be afraid of reaching out to customers. Do your homework and give them something they want to read and respond to or a reason to meet with you.

Never wait for your customers to reach out. It’s an open secret that telling customers to reach out if they need anything does not work in most cases. Last time I read about it, 86% of them never do.

Radio silence is a much stronger churn risk indicator than almost any of your fancy customer satisfaction/happiness metrics. And if customers reach out, it might instantly put you in firefighting mode.

Because they only do so after things have seriously gone south. They are highly frustrated and expect you to fix their issues by yesterday. Or worse, they only reach out to tell you they are not going to renew.

At a point in time where you don’t have enough time to turn the tide or their decision to leave has already been final.

4. Don’t talk about features and functions

Your customers don’t see your product like you do. They don’t care about its features and functions. For them, it’s merely a vehicle to help them get the outcomes they care about. The (expected) outcomes that made them purchase your product in the first place.

That’s why I believe the term “product adoption” is harmful. When you talk to your customers about features and functions, it’s easy to lose them. Especially when you go too far and too deep early.

There’s only so much your customers can process at once, and they don’t need to know all 47 customization options of features X and Y 2 days after signing up. Stop thinking and talking about your product.

Start thinking and talking about

• tasks to complete

• problems to solve

• solutions

Your customers’ success is not an event. It’s the culmination of a process. They are achieving their goals after eliminating a series of (bigger and smaller) problems standing in their way.

Example: Don’t create 60-minute tutorials exhausting a specific product feature. Create 3- 5 minute ones teaching your customers how to use it to solve a common problem.

5. Don’t waste time and energy on (bad)-fit customers

Who ends up in CSM? People who are naturally wired to help people. Certainly, there are worse character traits you could have. But it comes with a catch, where you might end up losing yourself.

Not all of your customers are meant to become successful. Spending your time with the right customers is a critical part of success. Chasing after customers who have 10 higher priorities than your product is a waste of time.

They should never have purchased your product in the first place. They are not a good (enough) fit. There are bad-fit customers, and then there are customers who are just bad. Technically, from the outside, they look like they are a poserchild of a customer.

Your product is the ideal solution for them. They have enough resources to properly run it. They have the required skills and knowledge to get a ton of value out of it. But they don’t.

Because they don’t have the mindset and attitude for it. They are not willing to put in the effort. They keep ignoring your advice. They don’t show up for scheduled meetings without a word, repeatedly. They don’t execute with discipline.

If you keep trying to fix them, you’ll only burn out in the process. Without success, as they will leave sooner or later. While you are not able to unlock your best customers’ growth potential, as you don’t have enough time for them.

Walk away from bad and bad-fit customers. Put them on minimum support until the inevitable happens (or you take the initiative and politely show them the door).