Restoring Faith

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

I share strategies and guides for CSMs and CS leaders to improve their performance and get the recognition and compensation they deserve every week.

Want to excel in CSM? Check out these resources 👇️ 

• The Customer Retention Blueprint *NEW*

• Raising the Bar - Enterprise CSM Guide *NEW*

• Plugging the Hole - Churn Guide *RENEWED*

• Peeling the Onion - Customer Problem Discovery Guide *RENEWED*

• The CSM Operating System for Customer-Value Led Growth

The silence is deafening. You’ve yet to send another email to your customer. Packed with a ton of supposedly valuable content. But there’s no response. Worse, your Email analytics tool says they have not even opened it.

The same thing happened last week when you invited the customer to your webinar. And the week before, when you shared a case study. And the week before, when you asked to meet for a QBR.

When customers become disengaged and non-responsive, it can be soul-crushing. Doesn’t matter whether you are a beginner or senior CSM with 20 years of experience. You’ve poured your heart and your soul into this relationship.

In your head, you run a dozen scenarios on why this is happening. It’s depriving you of sleep because you can’t make any sense of it. And there’s no closure as long as they are not talking to you.

In today’s episode, I’ll show you how you can re-engage customers who have vanished into the void and rebuild your relationships.

1. The 3 Types of Non-Responsive Customers

Let’s start by taking a step back and distinguishing between different types of non-responsive customers. This is important because it determines the measures to be taken (if there are any at all).

Feel free to use your terms and categorizations. Here are the 3 I came up with so far:

• The Early Dropouts - Customers who purchased the product and afterwards realized it was not the right choice. They don’t interact with you because in their mind, they are already gone. They are only waiting for the next opportunity to cancel.

• The Non-Interacters - It’s wrong to assume that every customer wants to have exchanges and relationships with their CSM. Some people simply want to be left alone. The only things that visibly separate them from the Early Dropouts are their continuous renewals.

• The Retreaters - This is the group this post is dedicated to. Customers who were initially enthusiastic and highly engaged. They were happy to interact with you at every opportunity. But at some point, the interactions became lower and lower until they stopped entirely.

  Why are customers vanishing, how can you get them back, and how can you prevent it from happening in the future?

2. Root Cause Analysis

This is a tough pill to swallow for every CSM. The reason why your customers become non-responsive is that your interactions are either irrelevant or non-valuable. It’s important to make this distinction because they require different measures.

Whether you are relevant refers to what you are doing, while the question of value is all about how you are doing it. A QBR can be highly relevant, especially for a new customer.

But if you are bombarding them with 50 slides showing usage statistics, there’s a 99.99% probability that your customers don’t see it as having any value for them.

Missing your mark once or twice is not the issue. Yes, you are supposed to deliver value with every interaction, but nobody is perfect.

The problem is that continuously wasting your customers’ time adds up until you have crossed the turning point. From there, customers assume that all interactions with you are no longer worth their time.

3. The Solution

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