CSMs and customers often use syncs as a tool for discussing how to reach desired outcomes with our software.
CSMs can envision what these discussions will be like to best help our customer with the goal for the call.
We can have a game plan in place with the strategy for our meeting.
What can we think about to develop our call strategy? Let’s review.
- What roadblocks will I face? Our customer may be struggling with an aspect of our software, in need of suggestions for a workaround or evaluating us against a competitor’s features. Planning for the challenges we may face can help us address risk.
- Where should I focus my preparation? Typically, we will have a main topic for our discussion. We can review the points we will cover and decide where we need extra preparation. We may want to study certain features of our software, refresh ourselves on technical documentation or review customer-provided materials related to the call.
- What are my customer’s preferences? Our customers have unique ways they like to conduct business. We can tailor our meeting format to our customer’s style and preferences. For example, will our call be free flowing or a structured agenda? Will we chat loosely at the start of the call or quickly get to business? Is our customer product-driven around our software or do they want to spend more time talking about business strategy?
- What recommendations can I suggest? CSMs can help our customers get more value from our meeting when we bring ideas and solutions to the discussion. We can look at our available content resources, success stories and product use cases and have ideas ready to share with our customer. We can give extra value to exceed expectations for the meeting.
- What questions can I ask? We can have questions prepared to move our discussion ahead. Questions can help our customer challenge their current situation, provoke new thoughts and discover information to create new ideas. Planing the questions we want to ask in the meeting can help create a rewarding discussion.
Finally, we can think about how we will conclude our meeting. The book Crucial Conversations describes this as “decide how to decide.” We want think about what the next step will be, who will be responsible and how we will follow-up for accountability.
CSMs can envision the situations they may face in a customer discussion and prepare ahead of time. We can have a plan in to place for what we should know, what we should do and how we will act to help have a valuable discussion with our customers.