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The customer success outreach technique for hitting all of your accounts with value, regularly
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“You need to be proactive, not reactive.” “Our team needs to do more with less.” “We need to make things more scalable.”
As a CSM, you hear these truths all the time, says customer success coach Ryan Johansen—and they never get easier to hear. After all, it’s not like you don’t want to talk to your customers more often. What’s hurting your customer success outreach is that you manage a lot of customers, some are noisier than others, and you have limited time.
The bottom line, though, is that failing to talk to customers regularly creates an uphill battle. Time flies, accounts fall through the cracks, renewals get harder, and you miss upsell opportunities. So what can you do to fix it?
In just 15 minutes of his CSM Appreciation Week tune-up mini webinar, Ryan showed us a three-step customer success outreach technique that’ll get you closer to hitting your accounts more regularly. You’ll find the steps below the webinar video, as well as Ryan’s answers to our audience questions.
Step 1: Create an Account Outreach Matrix
Ryan’s Account Outreach Matrix is a tool he designed to help CSMs manage an overwhelming book of business. It’s simple: determine how often you’d like to contact each account, add up the total, then spread it evenly across your working days.
For example, if you’ve got 40 accounts and you want to touch base monthly, you’re looking at two accounts per day if you work 20 days a month. This simple system ensures that no one gets left behind, while keeping your outreach efforts more organized and manageable.
Step 2: Schedule your daily check-ins
Set yourself recurring, daily calendar reminders for the outreach you’ve mapped on your matrix. In each invite, include the account name, contact info, and other relevant information so that you don’t have to hop from system to system. Schedule them for roughly the same time every day to build a habit of consistency.
There’s one more thing you’ll want to include in your calendar invites: a link to…
Step 3: Your Value Menu
How do companies like McDonalds and Wendy’s achieve such massive scale? It’s through repeatability, predictability, and standardization. This is what building your own Value Menu will help you achieve as a CSM.
To set it up, simply compile your most useful content and plays in a single place like a Google Doc, from where you can pull and use them repeatedly. As your Value Menu grows, tag its items by customer persona, with a note on the benefit of each piece.
Now, get your team involved by giving them access and encouraging them to add their own favorite content and plays for customer outreach. Before you know it, you’ll have an accessible repository of content that can make every customer interaction more meaningful and helpful. Just be sure to keep it organized.
Webinar Q&A: How to hit all your accounts with value, regularly.
Get Ryan’s answers to our audience questions on his customer success outreach techniques and more.
Q: How can I balance customer success outreach with the risk of overwhelming my customers, given that our marketing department is already sending newsletters?
RJ: Make sure you’re on the same emails that your customers get by subscribing to them. Depending on the size of your company, it’s also worth getting to know your marketing team so you can understand their content calendar.
But, equally importantly, you don’t just have to send out your company’s content. Sharing some industry-leading research from Gartner, McKinsey, or Forbes, on a topic that your customer cares about, can be very impactful. It also reduces the likelihood of duplicating your marketing team’s messages.
Q: Should I send the calendar invites on the Account Outreach Matrix to my customers?
RJ: No—those invites are just for you, as a good way to keep yourself organized.
Q: Even when I prioritize and plan out my day, I don’t get all my daily tasks done—and I really think it’s more of a workload issue than a “me” issue. What should I do?
RJ: This resonates, and it’s one of my specialties. Start by getting to know the 80/20 rule, which means that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. It’s not always that number, but you’ll always find that some things you do are valuable and meaningful, while others are a waste of time.
From there, you should have some conversations with your boss, while also ways to automate the less impactful things. I would suggest, in the next few days, going through your tasks to see what you could automate and take off your plate.
Q: How should I calculate my number of contacts per day for my Account Outreach Matrix?
RJ: Divide the total number of accounts by the number of days you plan to reach out. To give an enterprise example, if you manage 10 accounts and there are five business days in a week, you should contact two accounts per day.
Q: Do have any customer success outreach best practices for clients at risk of churning?
RJ: Really, as soon as the deal is signed, every customer’s natural motion is towards churn (and onboarding is where you lose more customers than anywhere else). So, as soon as bring a customer on, it’s super important to reach out and understand why they bought, and what they want.
There are two levels of answers you’re going to get, depending on where your customer contact sits related to what sales teams call the power line, which divides VPs and above from the people using your product. You need to understand both types of answers and how to talk about each. Execs, for example, are concerned about the business priorities, so talk in terms of trends and growth numbers.
Q: How can I handle outreach when a champion leaves the company?
RJ: Obviously, it’s easier to do this ahead of time, so maintain relationships at multiple levels within the customer’s organization, with at least one relationship each side of the power line. If a key contact leaves, the person on the other side of the power line can brief you on what’s going on, and you don’t have to start over from scratch.
Q: I get a lot of work delegated to me. How can I communicate my capacity to team members without sounding like I’m complaining?
RJ: Have an open, respectful conversation with your manager first. Go over what’s on your plate and what is the top priority. Bring the top priorities as you understand them, and explain how the other tasks are taking away from them. Sometimes it helps to envision yourself as an engineer who can only build so many products at any one time; if you’re trying to build 20 at once, it’s not going to go well.
Also, check out the “Mastering Tough Talks” webinar I did with ChurnZero, which covers how to push back on some of these requests.
Q: Any tips for setting boundaries with clients to avoid feeling overwhelmed all the time?
RJ: Explain why you need to set boundaries, and communicate your point of view empathetically but firmly. If, for example, a customer thinks its important for you to fix support issues for them explain that: yes, you can, but that it’ll prevent you doing more valuable things for them.
Q: How should I change my communications as a customer’s renewal date gets closer?
RJ: Get better at knowing your customers’ goals, their measurements, and their use case for spending money with you. Then, you can start by asking how you’re doing against those goals. A lot of people get really uncomfortable about “sales” questions, but the more you practice, the easier and more natural it becomes.
Q: How do I tread the line between proactive outreach and outreach overkill?
RJ: I love this question. I’m a “less is more” person who prefers to have a good reason to reach out to someone. Outreach overkill happens when things aren’t relevant. Frequency is a factor too, but the number-one cause is sending outreach that’s neither relevant or personalized, which makes it feel transactional. I would rather send out one good email a month than 20 cadences.