11 Tips to Build Stronger Relationships with Customers. Right Now.

Hey everybody. I wanted to give you 11 simple actionable tips to build stronger relations with your customers. This will drive your NPS up, it'll drive your retention up. It'll drive your NRR up. It'll make everything better. These are 11 things that are somewhat obvious, but my guess is you're not doing most of them. The number one thing, and most of you, don't do this, at least with your bigger accounts. Do a formal review call 30, 60, 90 days in. If and if it's a big one, the CEO should join the customers. Love this. Listen, how are we doing? How's the deployment going? What are the issues? No one does this and this is your chance to spot real issues early, especially with the big customers. Hopefully your customer success team can do this. Frankly, with every account. Every account should have a check in 30, 60, 90, maybe even two or three times in at the beginning of the deployment. But as the founders, the CEO join that call. Not just the pre sales stuff. And magic just happens. 2. We've all learned how to be better being distributed. You have to zoom with six customers a week. I know it sounds like a lot, but six is intentional. It's more than one a day. Customers love, love, love to talk to the CEO. They love to talk to any executive. This goes for a VP of cs, VP of Sales, VP of Product, VP of anything. Maybe all those executives should talk to six customers, not just prospects a week. And they'll love it. They'll love it. We did an event with Stuart Butterfield a few months ago where he talked about how he was talking to so many more customers now that he wasn't going to the office. He had a smaller customer that he talked to and they said, oh no, slack's slack going out of business. He's like, no, no, we're doing a billion in revenue. But they were just so shocked that the CEO had time to talk to them. But you have time. I bet before all this you didn't have time to talk to six customers, but you do. And it's magic. Make this change, especially as a CEO. Three related to this and once we're out of this, and it's going to be sooner than you think, go visit your top customers twice a year or at least zoom with them and it intersects with the prior two points. You as CEO and founder should check in with your top customers twice a year. If you don't know what to say, show them the roadmap. This always works. Come with your roadmap for the next few quarters. The next few years and just present it to them quickly and and ask for their feedback. People love to have input. Even if that feature they've been dying for isn't coming for a few quarters or longer. At least they've been heard. We all want to be heard as customers. And so this is magical. As CEO, go with your VBA product, go with whomever. Just talk about your roadmap with your largest customers one on one, twice a year. 4. Measure it. If you want to have stronger relationships with your customers, you have to know how strong they are. I find that most startup execs think they have better relationships with their customers than they do. You have to measure NPS and maybe NPS and csat. You have to measure them and then no matter what the issues are, or even games that could happen with metrics like NPS and csat, at least if you measure them the same way, you have a baseline. Whether your MPS is 10 or 20 or 40 or whatever it is, or 0 or negative. I hope not. It happens then as long as you measure it the same way, using the same tool in the same systems, you can set KPIs for your whole company to drive it up, drive it up from 20 to 30 to 40 to 50. It's magical. But if you don't measure your relationships with your customers, you'll always think they're better than they are. And you'll never drop. You'll never have as happy customers or improve those relationships the same way you expected. Point 5. It sounds simple and I know we all get there. But we don't always do it in the beginning. Every account, in theory, every account of any size, every account worth even even a couple thousand dollars a year should have a named csa, a named account manager. Now, when your accounts are millions of dollars a year, maybe that account manager only has two or three accounts. It's okay. It's worth it to maintain millions of years, millions of dollars, years in revenue. But ultimately, as you scale, a CSM should be able to handle ultimately 2 million of customers. But maybe in the early days, half a million to a million, it's okay to keep that revenue. And if the accounts are tiny, well then they might handle 100 accounts, 20 accounts, 200 accounts, 300. And the way they work with those customers will be very different based on the number they have. But every customer that is even remotely sizable should know who their account manager is. That Jason or Leslie or Larry or Lana is their rep. Think about that. How many apps that you use? Do you know who your account rep is think about how much more magical your relationships are with any vendor, with a bank, with anything. The handful of folks who you know, who your person is, who your guy or gal is. That is magic for retention and customer happiness. So try to get a name CSS for everybody. And if you think about it, that may mean your CS team's a little bigger than you planned. And it's probably the cheapest investment you can make is to keep the customers you work so bloody hard to get. Okay, number six, and we've talked about this on the last on Saster, but it's magic. Do a weekly webinar every week at the same time, 52 weeks a year. It doesn't always have to be the same person. That'll be nice. And the beauty of this webinar is if you do it every week and it's talking about your product, yes, sales can use it. Sales can drive folks in their funnel to this webinar where you talk about the company, its product. But what will happen is your customers will also send other folks with their org to it. If you use the webinar to explain how it works, they'll want to socialize how your app works to their colleagues, to folks in other departments, to folks that work for them. And so if you have a weekly webinar about your product and about the industry, and it's done 52 weeks a year at the same time, you will find over time, half of the folks that come to that weekly webinar are not just prospects, are not just folks that the marketing team is getting there, the sales team getting there. But it's existing customers inviting other people to that webinar. So that's magic. It's a little bit of work. But once you get in the habit of it and get a good template and some good slides, and I get a simple demo going each week, it becomes pretty easy. And even if you get 5, 10, 15, even 3/4, highly qualified folks to it, it's worth it. Okay, next point. Have honest pricing. Okay, it is now 20, 21. Now, there are times certainly when contact me or call me makes sense on the pricing page, if your product is complicated or if you have no interest in small businesses or smaller accounts. But however you do it, whether pricing is transparent, semi transparent, or contact me, that's a different point. The point I'm making is this exercise. And it will transform how your sales team works, which is that assume every customer knows what every customer pays. Sales hates to hear this. They hate it. They want to be able to cut a crazy discount every once in a while. That isn't fair to your other customers. Or cut a crazy deal. Don't allow it, folks. Don't allow it. How would someone in your company feel, a director, if they found that another director made twice as much money as them? They'd feel terrible. How would a customer that invested in you, that spent years of their lifetimes your champion, deploying you across hundreds or thousands of employees, worked so hard for you, did a webinar for you, did case studies for you, then they found out a company disliked them, paid half. It destroys your relationship with your customer. So discount how you want. Be transparent if you can. But whatever you do, pretend act as if every customer knows what each other customer pays. And remember, once you start having customer conferences and things like that, they'll talk. They'll talk in the hallway, they'll talk on Zoom, they'll talk. So just like employees, you'll be 10 times, you'll have 10 times less stress and happier customers if you just assume everyone knows what everyone else is paying. Okay, next point. And again, this has been controversial until recently, but a lot of developer centric products has helped us see that slack was, was at the bleeding edge here. But let customers downgrade easily if they want. Look for folks that allow a lot of downgrades and a lot of folks that sell the SMBs do. There's nothing sort of, it's sort of soul crushing when you get a weekly update and you see new customers, upgrades, churn that stuff. And then you see downgrades, downgrades, and sometimes they can be a lot. With certain products, small businesses in particular can grow and shrink in size. They may need 20 agents in 2020, but maybe they only need 10 agents in 2020, 21. Yes, there are games you can play so that you can get a little bit more on that monthly or annual subscription for a little longer. But it's not worth it. You're going long. It actually doesn't matter what your revenue is this year. What, what matters is the revenue base you're building this year and where it will lead you. For example, we were just doing a deep dive on Qualtrics. Qualtrics eight years ago is at 35 million in revenue. Today it's at 800 million in revenue. Okay, think about that growth in eight years. What you want is that initial 35 to be super happy to keep growing and adding new accounts, but you don't want to rip them off. You don't want to make it hard for them to leave if you make it easy for folks to downgrade, they'll stick with you. If you make it in fact even easy to leave. If they have to leave, it increases the odds they'll come back later. You don't know why customers leave, even if they lead to a competitor. If they leave happy, you've got a shot at getting them if the competitor screws something up or the champion changes. So even though finance folks and others will tell you differently, burn down the gates to leaving. Let your customers go. If they want to downgrade or they want to cancel, thank them. Thank them for betting on you. Thank them for at least remaining a customer. Make it easy. Don't make them embarrassed. Don't hide the button. And that will ultimately get you the higher customer lifetime value. Okay, three more points and then we'll break do customer marketing okay, we've talked a little bit about Saster. Go read it on saster.com, but none of us do enough of this. What is customer marketing? It's obvious, but the problem is most of us don't have a VP or head of customer marketing or director or something. Customer marketing is all the marketing you should do after you close the deal. Eventually we all kind of figure out how important demand gen is, how important building the funnel and doing communications and drip marketing and webinars and all these things we talked about and white papers and co marketing so that sales can be armed. Sales can be fueled with leads and that is critical. We cannot grow without new leads. But ultimately, as you look at all bigger SaaS companies, it is their existing base that fuels them. So many of the IPOs we've seen in the last couple years, most of their growth has come from their base, from their base, from their existing customers. We've seen this at pagerduty, we've seen this at Survey Mikey, we've seen this at so many other leaders. We've seen it with Fastly and others, we've even seen it with Slack where despite their growth in customers, which is outstanding, the customer base, the existing customers have grown just as fast, so you have to take care of them. So you should be putting at least 10 or 20% of your marketing budget, really more if you think about it, but at least 10 or 20% discreetly as a line item into existing customers. And it deserves its own VP or its own director and owned hire. And think about that for a moment and ask yourself, are you spending enough of your marketing budget, growing accounts, making them happy, driving NRR up as you are acquiring new customers we almost all get this ratio horrifically wrong. Penultimate point with your customers. Do QBRs Quarterly Business Reviews QBRs are one of those things that a While ago in SaaS and Cloud like MPS, seems something dated, seems something that old school companies did, the saps and the Oracles and that was true. But a lot of these metrics and processes have been reinvented for today's SaaS and Cloud. And QBRs are amazing. You can't necessarily do it with every single customer. What's a QBR? You create a report card. There's different types of QBRs. Google it, look at different products and different examples. But a QBR is frankly a report card. How did we do to bigger customers this quarter? What are the metrics? What are the analytics? You can see the product. Where was utilization and where do we come short and what do we have to work on together? Customers will respond to the qbr. They will love to get it. It will remind them of the ROI and the value of the product. They will come to a call, a zoom or whatever it is or a call to review it. And you will get wonderful structured feedback in a way you can't even get from an NPS survey or an email. Customers respond to a QBR process. They'll read the memo and they will show up and tell you their concerns. And sometimes they're rough, sometimes they're gripe sessions. The nature of a QBR means you don't get a lot of kudos or thank yous, but you get structured gripes. Your customers will think about it and they'll they' they'll force rank them in my mind. Here are my top three concerns about your product. If you do that with all your top customers, magic comes out of it. And again, they've been heard. Okay, the last point. Do events now. During global pandemics, it's a little bit harder to get together and in person. Events are magical. I know they're expensive, I know they're a headache. I know they cost a lot of money and they're stressful. But when you get people in customers in a room, they talk. And when you get customers and prospects together, magic happens because your existing customers convince your prospects to buy. That's been the magic of Dreamforce in the beginning. But it's okay. First of all, when we can do physical events, do small ones, do steak dinners, do meetups, do a half day. It doesn't have to be crazy expensive, it doesn't matter. Just get 100 of your customers together and do it digitally today. Look Digital events and we've done plenty at Saster. We've had almost 100,000 people and 5,000 viewers of our digital events since COVID hit. And they have their place. They have a lot of engagement. The tools aren't the same. I don't care what tools you buy. And the tools are getting better. But watching some chat stream is not the same as spending an entire day with another customer or another prospect or whatnot. But it ain't bad. It's a lot better than nothing. It creates some engagement. And the great thing about digital events is you can have a lot of customer stories. Customers love to hear stories about other customers. It's a great learning how they deployed your app, why it was great, and what the challenges were. And you can load up your digital events with dozens of customers stories and then you can also record them, put them on your YouTube, put them on your website and you have wonderful video testimonials and video stories without having to go out and do any extra work. So do IRL events in real life events when we can again, but do more digital events. Try to do something, do a big one each year and find at least a secondary one and do smaller ones maybe even once a month if you can. They're magic when you bring people together. So these are my top ideas to drive up customer happiness, to do more for your customers, and mostly to better bond more with them, spend more time with them in a structured fashion. NPS goes up and I wrote this iconic post on Sasser and It's still true 15 years later. I never lost a customer I visited in person. Now we can't all visit customers in person today, but the point stands that the closer that relationship you build with the customer, no matter what the bumps are, no matter what the feature gaps are, no matter what the competition does, they don't want to leave you customers. If they trust a vendor, if they love a vendor, yes, it's stressful and yes, they'll eventually kick the tires for other vendors. But no one wants to go to the trouble to rip out an app they love. And that works well. So be that. All right, Good luck to everybody.