How to identify your Customer Champions

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.

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Customer Success Management is a team sport. You can’t win all by yourself. Working together is not restricted to your own team members. Life as a CSM becomes much easier if you have strong partners in crime at your customers’.

Too many CSMs treat customer champions as a nice-to-have. They are not proactively looking for them. Then they were surprised when customers churned because none could see the ROI of their product.

Or when the only person who cares leaves and everything they’ve built crumbles like a house of cards. A risk that’s as unnecessary as a refrigerator in the Arctic regions.

In today’s episode, I’ll share 6 key attributes to watch out for when searching for champion contenders.

I’ve read it many times over the past 12 or so months. People claim that customer champions are not found; they are built. Maybe I failed to grasp the true meaning, but this is wrong.

You can, and you must enable and empower your champions. But you can’t build them up from scratch. They need to possess the right attributes already.

For instance, you can help them further grow their influence. But you can’t turn someone who is essentially invisible into an authority where everybody is paying attention.

Influence is something that comes naturally with a management role. But that does not mean every Director, VP, or even C-suite member is suitable. They do not necessarily care about your product and the success of the collaboration.

At the same time, influence is not restricted to the executive roles. It can also be built from expertise and personality (charisma). Giving you a higher number of candidates.