Customer Success & Failures
10 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingSharing tips, experiences and insights that I've learned in 15+ years in customer success from large and small organizations. There is no BS. You can leverage what you learn from these podcasts right away.
chadhorenfeldt.substack.com
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Episodes
Layoffs in customer success happen to all of us - myself included.
November 13, 2022 18:26 - 9 minutes - 13 MBThis has been a difficult week. I had to say goodbye to many amazing colleagues as part of a Meta layoff that impacted about 11,000 people. I’m thankful that I’m still employed but sad and concerned for those that have been let go. I’ve been trying to help those affected as best as I can. Beyond trying to directly help those impacted, I thought it might be helpful to share more about my journey and provide some advice. Unfortunately, the tech sector and especially startups can take the bru...
Don't settle, you are worth it
September 19, 2022 13:05 - 3 minutes - 4.93 MBA father was on his deathbed but before he died, he took his daughter aside and said: "I'm giving you this watch that was your grandfather's. It's almost 200 years old. Go to the local jewelry shop and ask them how much they would pay you for it.” The dutiful daughter did as her father asked and went to a local jewelry shop. She returned to her father and said: "They will take $100 for the watch because of how old it is." The father then said: "Now take it to the local pawn shop and see how...
Customer success pros often forget to take this critical element into account
September 12, 2022 13:29 - 5 minutes - 8.06 MB“I’m not busy at all” said no customer success professional ever. Listen, I know you are super busy but what about your customers? They are extremely busy too and we sometimes fail to take this into account - all to our detriment. I know it’s frustrating when you see your customers floundering and you want to help them. The problem is that it doesn’t mean your customer has the mindset or capacity to act at this moment. Keep in mind that they work with multiple products and already have a ful...
Two questions every customer success professional needs to ask
September 01, 2022 12:09 - 3 minutes - 4.75 MBYou are sitting there and scratching your head. You just got an email from your client that they will be churning. How could this be? You spoke to them last week and have had regular meetings and they never mentioned the possibility of leaving. Unfortunately, if you are in customer success, this can happen from time to time. The relationships that you think you have with your clients aren’t as strong as you think they are. Sorry to burst that bubble. Here are two questions that I’ve borro...
You May be Losing Customers Because You Are Failing in The Moment of Truth
May 13, 2022 14:47We’re moving so fast - light speed at times. In customer success we have to make so many micro-decisions that at times we can operate on autopilot. Think about a recent customer interaction you had. How did you respond to it? You probably relied on instinct based on your previous knowledge or processes and policies that your company has in place. You may not remember half of what you said. In most situations, that’s fine. But this of course doesn’t always work - especially where customers ...
Stop blaming the sales team
March 21, 2022 19:11 - 6 minutes“Did you see that crazy deal that just came in? I can’t believe that we sold to them!” “The salesperson reached out to my client and didn’t tell me. Now I have to clean up this mess that they created.” “Why did sales push through that upsell? They clearly weren’t ready to make that purchase!” Do any of these sound familiar? While these examples are fictitious, they are commonly said by customer success teams in regards to their sales colleagues. I’m sure I’ve said something similar over t...
How to get customers to do something when they don't want to
January 26, 2022 14:32 - 4 minutesA number of years ago I was working with one of my clients who was a very talented marketing operations manager when I was a customer success manager at Eloqua (a marketing automation platform). Their goal was to deliver more targeted content to their prospects but the data that they stored in Eloqua was all over the place as data tends to be. They had collected contact information in a very unwieldy manner over the years. As an example, for the country field, United States was spelled in 20...
Your customers are probably measuring their success the wrong way
January 05, 2022 14:38Do any of these statements sound familiar to you? “We expected your product to be able to do that with the click of a button. If you don’t have this feature we may need to look for another solution.” “Your competitor is able to display our data as line charts and bar charts. Why can’t you do that too?” These of course are fictitious examples but the pain that you may be experiencing may be similar. Your customers may have expectations that your solution is supposed to have certain featur...
Why you need to poke the bear
November 04, 2021 13:16 - 5 minutes“Is there anything else we should discuss?” You’re just wrapping up what you think is a successful customer meeting. However, you have this bad feeling in your gut that is telling you that something isn’t right and you know it isn’t from your lunch. You start to recall other signs that may affirm this belief. You remember seeing a sarcastic remark from the customer in one of their recent support interactions and you know that their business may not be doing as well right now. Instead of inq...
The mistake that most customer success pros make
October 27, 2021 01:15 - 4 minutesPicture this situation: Your meeting with a customer who you’ve known for a while. You get along with them fairly well but they can be challenging at times. You spend the first minute of the meeting catching up and of course talking about the weather. Finally, everyone on the Zoom arrives, people have figured out they need to go off mute and the meeting begins. Before you have a chance to go through the agenda your client asks for the floor. They spend the next few minutes ripping into you o...