Engaging Customers at Renewal: Practical Strategies and Tactics
Mar 21, 2024
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Explore the challenges of engaging major clients who avoid renewal talks. Delve into the importance of customer health scores and tailoring communication strategies that prioritize client needs. Discover effective proactive communication tactics and the value of aligning your success efforts with customer goals. The discussion highlights how understanding customer dynamics can lead to meaningful conversations and increase renewal success. Ultimately, it’s about making customers genuinely successful, which naturally leads to their renewal.
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Quick takeaways
Understanding customer health and progress is essential for determining engagement strategies during renewal discussions with major clients.
Communicating the value of meetings and shifting focus from renewals to future goals promotes more meaningful interactions and enhances customer relationships.
Deep dives
Understanding Customer Context
To effectively engage with a major client dodging meeting requests, it's essential to assess their context thoroughly. This includes examining their health score, usage metrics, and financial standing. If the customer appears to be healthy and making meaningful progress towards their goals, a more relaxed approach can be taken, such as sending a simple notification about the upcoming renewal. Conversely, if the customer is not doing well, this signals a need for immediate intervention and proactive communication to understand and alleviate any issues.
Perceived Value of Meetings
Customers often avoid meetings when they do not perceive any value in them, viewing them as a waste of time. Customer success professionals should focus on clearly communicating the benefits of these meetings, ensuring clients understand what they will gain. This entails exploring the content and purpose of the meeting to make it relevant and beneficial for the customer. By shifting the focus from the renewal to conversations about goals and future opportunities, customer success managers can create more engaging and meaningful interactions.
Strategic Engagement Timing
It's crucial to avoid scheduling meetings based solely on renewal dates, as this approach can create unnecessary pressure and lead to client disengagement. Instead, customer success managers should prioritize discussions centered on progress and future business objectives. Understanding the customer's busy periods, such as fiscal year-end dates or seasonal peaks, can help in timing engagement efforts for maximum effectiveness. By positioning meetings to discuss what lies ahead rather than just renewal details, customer success teams can foster more productive relationships.
Messaging and Delivery Strategies
When clients are not responding to outreach, it's vital to analyze the effectiveness of both the message and its delivery method. Revisiting the content of the messages to ensure they communicate clear benefits can drastically improve engagement rates. Additionally, leveraging multiple channels, such as phone calls or LinkedIn messages, may help in reaching the client if email alone fails. Ultimately, developing an insightful and customer-centric approach to communication will prevent clients from feeling overwhelmed and increase the likelihood of successful engagements.
ON TODAY'S EPISODE: In this episode, Johan and Lincoln tackle a pressing challenge faced by many in Customer Success Management: managing major clients who are avoiding renewal discussions. They provide a deep dive into understanding the context of such situations, exploring customer health scores, meaningful usage, and the progress towards goals. The conversation illuminates strategies for engaging clients effectively, emphasizing the importance of providing value and aligning with customer goals beyond the renewal date.
THIS WEEK'S QUESTION: "My major client, significant in terms of annual revenue, is avoiding every meeting I try to schedule for renewal. What should I do?"
TOPICS BEING ADDRESSED:
Understanding the context and health of customer relationships.
Strategies for engaging and communicating value to clients.
The importance of aligning customer success efforts with client goals and outcomes.
QUOTES: Lincoln Murphy (06:57): "We're not just trying to renew customers; we're trying to make them successful. The side effect of a successful customer is that they're going to renew."
Johan Nilsson (14:02): "It's not about sitting in a box. A world-class Customer Success Manager knows it's about meaningful meetings and setting the right priorities."
Lincoln Murphy (22:15): "If all you do is take your terrible message and send it across different channels, now you're just annoying them at scale."
Johan Nilsson (29:50): "Renewal shouldn't dictate our overall engagement. We're focused on their next quarter, their next goal, moving them further towards achievement."
Lincoln Murphy (33:08): "Time flies. We're six months into the year already. Your contract is going to renew in six months. Let me know if there's going to be any issues."
Do you want more of this? Check out Impact Academy for interactive Customer Success training programs. https://www.impactdemy.com/
Do you have a question you want us to answer? Submit it here.
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