How to demonstrate Value to your Leadership

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 delivering more value for your customers and revenue for your company every week.

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A lot of CSM teams are still struggling to get leadership buy-in and it has never been more important. The number of CS professionals with green banners in my network on LinkedIn is growing daily.

2 weeks ago I read another post about an entire CSM team being disbanded. It proves that there’s still a lot of effort required to give a satisfying answer to the question “What’s the ROI of CSM"?”.

Putting an end to all the negative labels and associations CSM got in the past like

• glorified support

• a cost center

• the miscellaneous team

In today’s episode, I want to show you 9 ways how you can demonstrate the value you bring to the company in the language your C-suite understands - “revenue-ish”.

Important note: This is not about claiming that all the revenue is solely the result of your efforts. It’s about highlighting your contributions.

1. Churn saved and recovered

There’s still the misbelief among the C-suite that CSMs are responsible for all churn. That they somehow have magic abilities to fix any issue. If customers still churn it’s because they have messed up.

CSMs need to analyze churn to identify the root causes and share their results with their leadership and other teams to raise awareness. And of course, they need to fix the chunk of churn they are actually responsible for. The churn happens due to insufficient education, training, and guidance.

The ultimate solution to churn is not to prevent customers from leaving with every trick in the book and at all costs. It’s to prevent it from happening for the same reasons over and over. However, that does not mean you call it a day and let them leave without a fight. Unless these are bad-fit customers you need to get rid of them anyway.

An excellent opportunity to display your prowess lies in saving customers who decided to leave and those who have already left. For reasons that are not your responsibility like misguided customer expectations.

If you can only save 10% of the cancellations/lost revenue you already have some great stories to tell. Get the numbers (at stake/lost revenue vs saved/recovered) and share some stories about how you made the turnaround. Prove that it would not have happened without your intervention.

2. Expansions, Up- and Cross-sells

There appears to be a misbelief among the C-suite that expansions, up- and cross-sells are a matter of how AEs spend their time. That if they focus on existing instead of new customers accounts are growing by default.

In reality, CSMs have completed 98 of the 100 steps that led to additional customer demand. With AEs jumping in for the last 2 and getting most if not all of the commissions. If you are not in charge of closing expansions, and up-and-cross-sells you still need to include them in the report.

Outline your Net Revenue Retention and share a few stories of how you helped customers meet and exceed their goals. Creating demand for additional resources, features, or products in the first place.

They hit even harder when customers proactively asked what they should buy next. You can score additional points by measuring conversion rates and CAC payback of selling to existing customers to compare it with the metrics for new customer acquisition.

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