How Do I Deal With Challenging Customers as a CSM?

How can customer success managers enhance customer retention? In this enlightening episode, Alon Ahronberg, AVP of Customer Success at Cheq, shares invaluable insights on navigating common yet challenging customer scenarios!

HIGHLIGHTS

- Strategies for scaling CS teams from 5 to 30 members.
- Tech stack recommendations for managing long-tail segments.
- Creative solutions for common customer challenges.
- The power of peer influence in customer webinars for boosting product adoption.

Whether you're an aspiring customer success manager or looking to refine your customer retention strategies, this episode is packed with actionable insights and success stories from the front lines of CS.

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Alon, a seasoned Customer Success Leader with over 15 years of experience, excels in building and scaling CS teams at B2B SaaS companies. Currently, he leads the Customer Success Mentorship program at SixFigures and is the Senior Customer Director at CHEQ, managing international teams and CS Ops. His dedication to delivering customer value shines through as he expertly navigates complex scenarios.

🔗 You may connect with Alon via LinkedIn

Watch the interview here.

#CustomerSuccessManager #ProductAdoption #CustomerRetention #SaaSInnovation
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Additional Resources:

📑 Read: CSM Proactivity Assessment


🎥 Watch: What CSMs Should Know About Their Customers

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Transcript

00:00 Thank you for joining me for another episode of our distinguished podcast, everything that has to do with customer success methodologies and setting up a customer success practice for your organization so that you can increase land and expand, retention, advocacy, you name it is just awesome for business
00:21 growth. And today I have Alon Alonberg, who's actually from Israel. I met him at the customer conference in 2020, 23.
00:31 And he actually does two remarkable things. First of all, he's a senior director of customer success and a company called Chek, which he'll tell you a little bit about in a second here.
00:42 But most importantly, at his spare time, he's actually dedicating his time to help those that want to join the customer success movement and to become better CSMs and he does that through a company called Six Figures, they have the school of the high tech customer success.
01:01 You can learn more about that class. I have no stick in this game. I'm just sharing it because obviously it's a very practical class with some theories and how to promote yourself and how to get connections so you could land your next job.
01:15 So many people are now out of the job or looking to get into customer success. I think that's a great resource.
01:23 You can see here the stats and with that alone. Thank you so much for joining me on this podcast. What can you share about this class and why should people from outside of Israel probably look into it?
01:36 Hi, Rachel. First of all, thanks for having me regarding the class. We try to do something different from other places.
01:43 What's unique at six figures is that besides the great material, it's no lectures here. We have mentors. If you look at our website, each course is being taught by thought leaders, senior VPs, CCOs, customer success directors, you learn from the experts, which is so important these days.
02:05 It's not just theory. You hear different opinions. You hear things that happen in reality, that gives you the base to understand customer success.
02:14 Or even the important. We help our students to create a network. It's hard to land your first job. It's probably the hardest thing.
02:23 If you graduate the best university, having this network of senior people in the industry helps you out. And if you're shining the course, if you participate, that's what helps our student most.
02:36 And we have some amazing success stories of our students. Just looking at the list of the folks that are instructors in this class.
02:44 And I assume that This is online in the days generation. Like I can definitely recognize some big names in the Israeli community that are leading the chart in customer success, like Adia Loneen, who's actually living here in Palo Alto.
03:00 But also like Shon Pee and Oguz and Sivan Mo and so I had that Slechameen, there's been also on my channel, Shia Uibla, there's a lot of very famous people from the Israeli customer success community that I know and appreciate a lot so thank you for sharing that.
03:19 What kind of customer success team do you have? How many clients are they dealing with each CSM like what is the CSM ratio?
03:25 Our CSO organization is a bit complex because we have several products and that's what makes it interesting. First we have our scale product so over then we have tens of thousands of customers it's a pool model so CSM they're managing basically all of the customers then we have our enterprise organization
03:44 with hundreds of customers as well. Depends on the tier, obviously, in over the years, it's tens of customers as you go up the tiers, it would be less.
03:54 We kind of still stick to the golden number of $1.5 million in there or per CSM, but give or take, obviously.
04:04 For your lower segment, what is your tech stack and do you recommend it? We're basically transitioning into vitally. We're going to use vitally for both teams, enterprise and scale.
04:15 And we're transitioning from two platforms that we have. The previous platforms didn't allow us to do what we wanted. And he invited me first.
04:23 It supports the scale model with very robust playbooks and data integration, the enterprise motion. It was brought from me also to have features for the CSMs, features they would love to use in the day-to-day, like summarizing calls, taking notes, not just features that are important for the management
04:42 perspective, so we kind of get everything in one place, and obviously behind that we have the entire data pipeline to inject what we need into the platform.
04:52 So we use segment, we take some from cells for senders, snowflake. The satellite has a built-in functionality to handle a pulled model.
05:00 And that's, yeah, you can do a run robin for CSLs. For the pulled model, is there anything else that you're doing besides the round robin?
05:08 And I think you mentioned email campaigns. Is there anything else that you do leveraging technology, whether it's vitally or something else that you found to be quite effective with a longer tail segment?
05:21 The first answer comes from a head is data. You can't move without data. So data is the main pillar for identifying opportunities, risks with those accounts.
05:31 There's no way we can do it manually. So data basically triggers personal interactions if needed or specific emails with value proposition for example for identity and so on.
05:43 Also identifying risks if needed. Like how do you eventually identify potential not just features but which accounts might be able to grow which accounts So very small, and it's eventually a waste of time also to interact with.
05:56 So data, it's the first thing that we work on. And then there's layers of email. There's emails that are coming from the CSM and there's a layer of marketing emails that we do to educate our customers how to activate the platform, tips, and tricks.
06:11 You also do it according to their journey. So it's not that I had a hard company that goes through all of the customers.
06:16 It's depending on where they had in their journey what they used in the product and we try to tailor it as much as possible for their needs.
06:26 Hmm, have you tried anything else besides email campaigns such as customer webinars, in-app messages? Yeah, we have both actually, yeah.
06:36 Let's talk a little bit about the high touch during your presentation that the customer conference in 2023, you were doing a service to the audience and you brought about three challenging scenarios that are fairly common with customers.
06:53 What was the challenge? How did you combat those? Lessons learned? I think it would be great for anybody that's watching and is constantly dealing with customers to kind of go through these scenarios to see what we can learn from those together.
07:07 So, in general, what we're going to do next is how the SM should basically navigate common, yet challenging scenarios with customers as a CSM.
07:20 Yes? Tell me about this like what is an untrained CSM or a new CSM or a CSM without frameworks experiences their role.
07:31 We always say we shouldn't be firefighters and we should be strategic but I always feel it's very, very high level.
07:40 At the end of the, I think if you'll do a survey to CSMs, most of them would feel like they're putting out fires.
07:46 And a lot of it is not because of them. It's because of many other reasons, it's products, it's crisis, there issues, there's bugs.
07:53 But yes, there's a lot of things that we can do better. And of course, we need this methodology and frameworks and know how to work.
08:02 But we have to develop the muscle also of thinking outside the box. I don't think it's always the same playbooks that you can use.
08:12 Something happened, let's do ABC. I think a good CSM brings two important elements. He has to bring much more, but first, he has to bring some value to the tables.
08:24 He has to understand what the product is doing. How can he tie that to the business needs of the customer?
08:30 And the second element also is understanding situation, how you navigate those situation, each situation could be very similar, because you had so many customers before, but at the same time could be different completely.
08:50 The customer's different, there's other agendas, there's other elements that you're not aware of. And if you could master that and understand situation, be creative, that's how you eventually deal and succeed.
09:02 Yes, there's so many other elements that are not only affected by you, but to be the best, you have to be able to navigate.
09:11 When I was asked to prepare something for the conference, I was just thinking, what can I do with that? Could you give real-life examples and not just theoretical materials?
09:20 So I tried to do it through a few stories. I had a pleasure to work in my past or my team had a chance to work with some of our customers and through that touch, if you methods that could help dealing with those scenarios.
09:35 Love that. So first of all, what shows up for me is, as executives, we often create a playbook. And I think that for CSMs that are sort of new, they mistakenly think that the playbook is a by step instruction.
09:49 This is exactly what I need to do. And then it's a dangerous slippery slope if they're actually thinking that they need to follow exactly that playbook.
10:00 Instead it's a guideline. It's taken the tribal knowledge of everyone else on the team that dealt with similar situations in the past.
10:11 And this is a recommendation of how to deal with it. And the reason it there and I want to emphasize it for anybody that's watching or listening to this podcast is so that you don't need to reinvent the wheel.
10:24 Like if this is the first time you deal with it, here's how others have dealt with and so it should be a source of inspiration, if you will, but then you have to take the situation, you have to take the recommendation, you come home Yeah.
10:41 And so with that, I wanted to kind of dive into the first scenario that's probably scenario we all face as CSMs and managers working with our CSMs.
10:52 It's about customer that doesn't have enough priority. We all know this situation that we're trying to push more. Let's create more use cases.
11:00 Let's bring more users who work in our platform. Let's bring more departments. And on the other side there's nothing we don't have time.
11:08 We need to do a projects, I don't have R&D, and we don't understand why it doesn't make sense to us.
11:14 This specific story is a great one. It was back at the day I was working at Cicense, we were a BI company similar to Tablo or click.
11:23 This specific was actually one of my team members that was working on this account, and it was a huge account, a huge brand in the UK, globally spread, 18,000 employees, it's real enterprise.
11:35 We were sure there's huge potential. Although it was a T1 account 100k ARR, we were sure this one is going to be huge.
11:44 But we only were able to implement a basic use cases that went live partially. And we were kind of stuck.
11:53 We couldn't progress basically with this account. We couldn't convince them to implement more. Our technical lead or champion was avoiding us.
12:02 He didn't had time to work on our product. He had other priorities. He was dissatisfied, it wasn't what he liked and it was hard.
12:12 And we had two executives that were sponsoring this project. We had a CFO and we had the head of operation that was also very hard to get to them.
12:23 Each one of them was also pulling into a different direction, couldn't move anywhere. And obviously renewals starting to come up and we'll worry.
12:34 Why would they pay 100k for a simple use case? But also we have to exploit the potential of this account.
12:41 And we try numerous meetings and talks. Nothing work. We couldn't move for this account. At one point I said, we have to do something different.
12:50 Let's go there. I said in that man email, Hey guys, I'm going to be in London. Let's try to meet.
12:56 They said yes. Let's meet up. And we sat the meeting, we prepared me and my team member, prepared a whole presentation about the use case that value what we think we can do with a full proposition of our plans for this company.
13:11 When I came to the offices, it was actually funny story. They forgot to book a meeting room. So we actually sat down in the dining area.
13:19 There wasn't even somewhere I could plug my computers or my battery was out. But that's probably the best thing happened.
13:25 Because I didn't stick to the slide and to the narrative that we created, we end up having a very, very open conversation about their business.
13:37 We talked about what their needs are. We didn't understand how organizations so big doesn't have KPIs, doesn't have analytics inside.
13:47 And we understood why, and actually our two executives, the goal was to push that in the company, and starting to introduce KPIs, which nobody in the organization wanted.
14:02 And we ended up with changing the plan, thinking about what we can do. We actually created and defined a new use case that would help the management first to see a data.
14:15 And hopefully that would trickle down to the teams and different regions to understand what are they measured by and we also understood that the technical lead didn't like us because so many things he wanted.
14:28 So I offered them professional services. We will be able to help them when something that to kick things started and that really resonated with what they wanted.
14:37 We set it off. We renewed the account and we set up a new road. That in building changed everything. Some of the lesson learns that we can take from this scenario.
14:49 There's actually a few lessons to learn here. And I see that many times, by the way, not just in this scenario.
14:56 But CSMs have a tendency to take assumptions. I see that a lot of times. You dealt with this scenario before.
15:04 It's the same industry, maybe the same role of your customers that you work with. And you think you already know what the solution.
15:13 What is the cause for the miscommunication or lack of satisfaction when you can be careful with that? We always have to think about every scenario and try to be created and understand what's different here.
15:28 It's not the same things. So that's one. The second thing here and I think we all know that and we can't do that every time.
15:35 But face to face, it's a complete game changer. If you meet someone face to face, the things that you can get in the face to face meaning it's not the same thing as having a Zoom call.
15:49 For big accounts, it's easier to get the budget. For smaller accounts, it's harder and obviously we can't visit all of our accounts.
15:58 What we try to do sometimes, by the way, it's like tour. You go for a few days and you try to meet as many customers as possible.
16:05 But that's important. The third thing that I would recommend understanding is what other projects are currently happening that are executives or your champions are dealing with.
16:20 It's not always about us. We have a tendency to think that our product is the most important thing that occupies our customers and it's definitely not that they have thousands of other things.
16:33 It's our responsibility to understand what are they doing and how we can help fit our product to understand the timelines or how we can help or maybe even shift a priority to help them to achieve success without product.
16:50 But we need to understand that as well, not just pushing our product, so that would help as well. You said earlier that customer success managers are a gaps stopper, like gaps stopper for unoptimized products.
17:04 But then in number two, you say, hey, face to face is so key. Understand what's going on and build those relationships.
17:12 How do you reconcile between these two statements? There's a direct relationship with sometimes closing the gap, but number two is where we want to be.
17:20 That's where I want CSMs to be having those face to face meeting. Understanding the business, communicating with executives, understanding priorities, that's what we need to do.
17:32 They need to understand the product in order to recommend what our customers should do, what would fit their needs. In a lot of cases, we're dealing with gaps and bugs and issues and trying to tell why this is not working, but that's wasting our time.
17:51 This is where we do want to be. Do more scenarios? What is the second scenario that you wanted to share with us that happened to you?
17:59 The second scenarios is I call it the misaligned expectations. That's misaligned expectation obviously between us and the customer. In this particular example one of my team members was managing another big account.
18:14 Here it was actually something that was a little bit unique. This customer was sold in an edge case. If you remember, Czech is protecting marketing span and we're protecting the website.
18:27 Here, we are trying to do something a little bit different and do something which is a little bit more like marketing optimization.
18:34 Not a conference, and we're fine with that, but here the challenge was a little bit bigger because it was an edge case, and this customer was very, very demanding.
18:45 They wanted to see ROI very quickly. They wanted to see the data on every step that we made. And this is fine.
18:52 One of our favorite things is an exit point. I know all CSMs like exit point also added to the pressure in this case.
19:00 Sadly enough, those low-paced customers suddenly they don't have priority and they needed to get R&D resources. And we discovered some technical gap on the website that was sending us lacking information that impacted some of their analysis.
19:17 And of course, the champions switched in the middle. So nothing was moving in the pace that we wanted and this pressure of exit point was always there.
19:27 And we agreed to push the exit point with the customer. We told them we're gonna push that a little bit so you can take a decision a little bit later until we are able to go live through value.
19:37 And one thing that we did is also pushing the EBR, the executive business review because we wanted to come to this EBR with success.
19:48 We wanted to come with value so we can prove the case decided we move forward and then continue obviously working on our relationship.
19:57 What happened actually is eventually we did the EBR two months before we knew this is how much we eventually dragged this project.
20:06 But we did found value, which was amazing. We even proved the case. We didn't some testing on a side case.
20:12 We saw value. We came to the meaning excited. But then the executive also asks us to do a lot of security tests.
20:20 Compliance that often prove how we do detection. So many other stuff that we didn't anticipate it, which is not related to the success that we found.
20:31 And sadly, not because of us it took a lot of time. We needed their security team to work in order to past those tests.
20:39 And we missed the deadline of renewal. Wow. What did you do? How did you handle that? We worked so hard to get it through.
20:46 We weren't able. It's all the success story, sadly. It's a sad story, a tragic one. So much time. So much pressure.
20:54 Probably a little bit of a team burnout internally and maybe even on their end. If you could do this again, do you haven't like any lesson learn from this experience?
21:03 Definitely, so the first thing that have to always include executives. We say that all the time is not a slogan.
21:12 Honestly, it doesn't matter if they're in the kickoff, or if they didn't join, create this relationship somehow, use your executive to reach out later, include them in EBR.
21:23 It doesn't have to be even a full-blown meeting, make some connection, make sure that we're on track. You think that if you had the answer to connect with the executive earlier on, you would have known that they were so passionate about you doing those tests and potentially you could have done those 
21:42 earlier before the EDR and present that if you knew what cared about Completely we could do that in parallel. We can mitigate that but we left with no time in this specific scenario the other lesson is Don't push the EBR like you don't have to wait with an EBR or a QBR until there's a clear value and
22:03 success. EBR is not just about demonstrating our success. It's a discussion, it's steering the project, discussing all the risks that we have.
22:13 It's even telling the customer, we need these resources. We can't progress. We have a problem with A, B, C. Don't wait.
22:21 It has to be done as soon as possible. Again, it always depends on the customer size and the frequency. But it's not something we should push to the end.
22:31 All right, the third tail in the saga. It's probably, I think, the most common when customers, they say they don't see value in our product.
22:43 And I think there's very, so many rare products that you can actually measure the real value or ROI. If value is so many things, it's usage.
22:54 It's features that bring efficiency to the company, but it's not necessarily something you can quantify. There's so many other factors.
23:03 Also, that's our happening and could cause improvement in ROI and revenue and so on, but you do have to prove it.
23:11 In this specific account, it was also an account, this part of my work check. This is a smaller account and it was a little different also.
23:20 What we do at check, we offer protection on websites. So our customers, they can lock invalid traffic on the website.
23:29 A lot of customers, they don't want this unnecessary traffic, they don't want information to be stolen, they don't want overload on the website and they don't want to have those bots clicking on their pay ads.
23:42 This one in specific was in a different industry. It's an aggregator. Those customers usually pass traffic through their websites into other websites.
23:52 They started off with us just by purchasing the data and analytics without real activating any protection. And again, a very long process of implementations, how to connect, how to bring the data into their pipeline.
24:05 And we could never convince them to move into protection mode. They only doing analytics, but they weren't willing to move forward with protection.
24:20 And the main reason was because of their business. They're not just having invalid entities inside. They're passing it along into other vendors.
24:30 And that's something that was different here. It was a challenge and of course renewal is coming up around the corner as always and we knew this industry and we tried to convince them that this is a common thing in the industry and you don't want to pass in fact traffic forward because that could also
24:50 impact your business. But we couldn't convince them what can we do here that would be more creative. We actually had our own company kick-off, and in this kick-off, one of the customers that came from Europe to talk about his success with us was a one of our biggest clients.
25:09 He was in the same industry as this customer. We said, why not meet them? Let's have those two meet and talk.
25:18 After our customer had the presentation, we sat down. I was present as well with both of them. And he just told them what he's doing with us, what his perspective of things and how he uses us.
25:32 Although those were similar things to what we said, hearing that from a peer and the company that he knows their brand resonated with him and changed his thought.
25:43 It was actually open up to try new things and we continued to work together and implementing additional features and enabling blocking and so on.
25:52 I want to remind those that are listening that you actually mentioned earlier in this conversation that customer webinars are very powerful for the long tail.
26:04 This is essentially scalable option for two face-to-face meeting. So with a very large companies, you can have two executives sit down that are in similar industries to tell each other best practices.
26:17 And when you have thousands of customers, you bring one of them And they tell it to a bunch of other customers and a customer webinar.
26:25 That's why it's so powerful. It absolutely has the same effect only to much more scalable approach. When I purchase software, the first thing I do, I talk to my peers.
26:37 I want to hear what my peers are doing or their satisfied, which use cases are using. I do that before I talk to the vendor even.
26:45 So, hearing it from a vendor is different than hearing it from peers that were successful in implementing and solving pains that they have.
26:56 I agree with you. That's a very powerful way to do that. Along, thank you so much for sharing around your world, what you do, how you do it.
27:03 I think anybody that listened to this podcast has learned a lot and I appreciate your time today. It's a great honor to be here.
27:11 Thanks for your time. Thank you so much for watching and listening to our podcast today. Give it a like if you learned something new, subscribe and turn that notification bell on so you don't miss out on any new conversations that I have with customer success executives and without big love for me and
27:29 I'll see you at the next video.