Two Stories about CSMs turning the tide when a customer was ready to leave — Part 2
By: Artem Gurnov
Tags: SaaS, Customer Success, Wrike

The ability to manage tough customer cases is an essential skill for a customer success manager. Even though a professional in this role is perceived as a trusted advisor and so the tone of an average conversation with a client will likely be positive, the client will sometimes go into a call disappointed and announce that the team is not planning to renew their subscription.

In order to manage such situations, CSMs need to have both experience and expertise. In the first part of this article, two CSMs from Wrike shared stories on how they were able to handle difficult situations with customers and turn the tide when everything seemed to be going against them. Today, we’re going to present two more stories and we hope that they’re going to help novice CSMs when they encounter similar situations.

VICTORIA EGORENKOVA (CSM in the UK, CIS and Middle East markets)

I once worked with a Japanese company, whose Wrike champion was from Europe. When I sent an email to suggest a call, he replied: “Yes, I’ll attend the call. We’re disappointed in Wrike and I don’t think it suits our needs.” I was like: “Then it is even more important that we meet!”

So, we had a call with this person. From the outset, it was obvious that Wrike’s whole setup had been deployed by another person, and our current champion had just inherited it. It also became clear that the person responsible for that setup didn’t invest much effort into learning Wrike. He just did it in a way that made sense for him.

The champion mentioned from the very start that reporting was crucial for him and that, for some reason, he couldn’t get Wrike to show him what he needed in these reports. We tried building a couple of reports together and it became clear that the main reason for failure was the old setup, which was 0% compatible with what the champion wanted to achieve.

We tried several workarounds, but nothing worked. The way everything was organized was too chaotic and it was literally impossible to source the necessary data and present it in a suitable way. It was clear to me that the whole structure had to be reorganized. I suggested doing that together on the next call. He would provide me with remote control of his account so that I could relocate all the folders he needed to build his report. The champion said: “Ok, why don’t we do that tomorrow? I’m 100% sure that it is impossible in Wrike.” My response was: “Let’s conduct an experiment then. You still have about 3 months before your renewal day, so we have plenty of time.”

The next day we had that call, and the champion was delighted. I demonstrated the best practices in adding and using custom fields, removing the ones he wasn’t planning to use. We then discussed some more features. He was impressed and at one point asked me: “Ok, and how else can you advise me here?” It was clear that he was beginning to trust the product. He was no longer managing someone else’s Wrike — it was he who had built everything and had full control over it. And this is how our ongoing conversation was initiated.

After some time, the champion reached out and asked me a question: “So we have an ERP system that is being used to invoice our customers. Is there any chance we would be able to integrate it with Wrike?” I replied: “Of course! We have API integration. Here’s the documentation. If you’re an engineer or have engineer resources, you can have a look yourself. And if any questions emerge — our folks from support would be able to help.” At that point, it became clear to him that he had the Wrike team at his side to provide all the necessary help and support. Not only did he make the decision to renew, but together with the team, he also reorganized its structure to yield all the necessary reports, and built an integration with an ERP system to ensure that the data would flow back and forth between the systems. Last time I spoke with them, they were considering getting one of the paid addons. Wrike stopped being a useless thing for the team — it started to deliver real value. And sometimes a single call is all it takes to make that change.

CRAIG McCOY (CSM in the UK market)

One of our customers purchased Wrike in 2017. The deployment went well but, almost immediately after, our champion left the company. I still had the names of other sponsors and I started reaching out to find out what happened. They were really difficult to engage — I was only able to get them on one or two calls. They told me that they were hiring someone to manage Wrike, but it took about nine months to find that person.

In 2018, they decided to transfer someone from a different team to manage Wrike. Luckily, she had had some experience with Wrike in the past and was familiar with its core features, but the problem was that she didn’t have any experience rolling out software in the company, and this is exactly what was needed. We got her on a call to see where we are and build a plan together.

What made things even more difficult was that their two-year contract was nearing its end and the renewal date was close. In addition to the fact that the team was actually missing a champion for the majority of the year, we had to deal with the customer’s misguided expectations on pricing. I went onsite to conduct an ABR (Annual Business Review, a meeting in which one of the main goals is to evaluate whether a customer has been able to achieve Wrike-related goals that have been set in the previous year, and come up with an efficient plan for the next year) with the account manager. The problem was that we spent the majority of the meeting discussing pricing. I was expecting to thoroughly go through each goal, but that didn’t happen.

After some tough negotiations, we scheduled another meeting. One of the things we wanted to make clear is that we’re not just a vendor and don’t want to have a vendor-buyer relationship; we want to have a company partner relationship. We went through the original reasons why they purchased Wrike, and we talked about how it wasn’t as successful as they probably wanted it to be. The main reason for this was the fact that the champion had left, which led to a break in its setup.

After a small amount of analysis, we found that the original setup wasn’t appropriate for their current use case. I also said that the product had evolved a lot over the last couple of years and, due to the fact that they weren’t engaging, they had missed out on a lot of stuff. I had to take that into account. Eventually, I was able to win them over. I told them that we could still plan and achieve what they wanted to. I said: “With this new resource functionality, you can do this. There are spaces that we can be using better, and you haven’t even looked at blueprints yet.”

This was the inception of a plan, and they were getting more and more into it, so we eventually won them over there. We built a whole success plan a week after that, and during the month after they renewed.

I often think about why I won them over. One of the key factors was that they wanted to hold us accountable the whole time, and sometimes you need to push back a little bit. One specific example was that they wanted to track time, but they weren’t, and they blamed Wrike. So I asked them how they did it in the past. They explained that they would fill in spreadsheets. My response was that it is possible in Wrike as well and that it is always more convenient to use a single tool instead of several. They agreed but said that no one would do that in Wrike. Then I asked a simple question: “When the time was tracked in spreadsheets, I assume there was a person who was holding everyone responsible for these time entries. Isn’t it better to have your work and time logged in a single system?”

And it was at that point that a switch clicked for them. It was they who said: “Maybe we should be holding our users more accountable!”

One of the key learnings from the time tracking scenario is that our customers often want something but they are unsure of what it is or the impact it might have. We need to dig into these questions and understand why they want to change a process or want a new feature. We can simply say ‘Yes’ and implement a new feature, or say ‘No’ and do nothing, but as CSMs it is our role to be consultative and help them understand what is the root cause of the problem that is leading to these questions. Once we know this, we can better advise and help the customer understand what the root cause is. If we can do this, the CSM will deliver much more value and you will build a stronger relationship moving forward.