Strategy vs. Tactics: How to Build Customer Loyalty
We’ve all been hearing a lot about “strategic conversations” lately. It’s a nice sounding buzz phrase, but what does it actually mean when it comes to customer success?
Strategy vs. Tactics
A strategic conversation is about why, rather than the how of tactical conversations. Tactical conversations are about product or service features; strategic conversations are about how your product or service will impact your customer’s business in the medium and long term.
Executed correctly, strategic conversations are outstanding opportunities to gain customers’ trust. Talking about what’s going to happen down the road (and leveraging examples from your own experience) demonstrates to customers that you’re in it for the long haul and not just looking to fix today’s problem and move on.
What does a strategic conversation look like?
It’s essential for CSMs and their managers to be on the same page when it comes to understanding the nature of strategic conversations. If you’re not sure what the term means to your manager, I recommend discussing it thoroughly.
A good place to start is taking the time to define the characteristics of a strategic conversation. Typically, strategic conversations are all about the customer. They move toward the customer’s goals and incorporate the ways your company’s products and services can help achieve those goals. They build trust with customers by demonstrating your commitment to their long-term success.
At first, moving toward strategic conversations will feel different from the tactical conversations you’re probably used to. Tactical conversations focus on today’s problems and immediate needs rather than longer-term opportunities and goals.
The goal is to move beyond responding reactively to the customer’s immediate needs to help them plan proactively how they can achieve their intermediate and long-term goals more effectively. This can sometimes be a challenge if the immediate needs are urgent, or involve meeting the basic requirements of the relationship. A splendid mentor of mine, Kelly Grey @ Bazaarvoice, recommends having two parallel paths – time for tactical conversations, and time dedicated to strategy. That means an agenda that both addresses any short-term “fire-drills” and then clearly allows for exploring the customer’s longer-term needs to figure out how your product or service can add value.
In a nutshell, think about where the customer wants to go rather than how they plan to get there. It’s essential to understand the former if you want to be an essential part of the latter in the long term. Executed correctly, showing this level of interest in the customer’s business can generate significant rewards, creating loyalty and advocacy for years to come instead of just scoring this quarter’s big win.
data infrastructure/pipelines
4yThanks for the valuable insight, Durand Vadnais. Even though this is 2yrs old, still very relevant! Great reminder for CS teams. Do you think 24/7 customer support teams are required for SAAS orgs in order to empower CSMs to stick with strategy, not reactive support?
Keys to sustained high-profit revenue growth: "walking the talk" companywide influenced by Marketing, CX, CS, partner experience, and employee experience teams.
5yRight, Durand, we all need to make time and take time to pursue strategic conversations on a regular basis, not only with our customers, but also with our other stakeholders: wherever we have inter-dependencies. I'm pleased to see the concept of "outcomes-based selling" becoming popular these past few years, because it's helping us remember that unless the customers' business goals are being well-supported by our solutions, there will surely be weaknesses in our relationship with them. I was influenced significantly by two books: Blue Ocean Strategy and What Customers Want (Ulwick). They opened my eyes to new ways of looking at a business, from customers' perspective. We had all our VPs conduct quarterly "executive listening sessions" with a peer at a customer company when I was at Applied Materials. It's tricky to learn how to listen and resist the temptation to tell, fix, etc. Two books that really helped with that are "Telling Ain't Training" (ASTD) and "The 7 Powers of Questions" (Leeds). We have a lot of short-bite resources toward all these skills in ClearAction Value Exchange, customized for customer success and other customer-mgt roles.
Customer Success | Digital Marketing | Growth
5yThank you David Sakamoto! Appreciate your perspective for sure. I hear you are on the speaking roster for #CS100Summit next week, bummed I won't be there to see it + the powerhouse #customersuccess crew w/ Nicolle Paradise, Andrew Marks, Dave Blake in such an awesome venue. Hope all goes swimmingly!
Customer Success Executive | Chief Customer Officer | Driving Customer Outcomes
5yThink strategy is centered on making a material impact to the business, meaning it solves a core business problem in terms of breadth, value and scope of impact. As you noted, the tactics are the paths, activities and even small projects to get there. Thanks for sharing Durand!