Re-Engaging the Buyer

By Kristen Hayer

Many CS professionals lose the relationship with the buyer somewhere along the customer journey. Maybe that relationship never existed in the first place. The salesperson allowed the buyer relationship to fall away after handing off the admin relationship to customer success. Perhaps it disappeared during onboarding. The tactical details of the onboarding process took priority over maintaining and growing the relationship with the buyer. Maybe it disappeared over years of managing the account. Or, possibly, when the original buyer left and someone new took their place. 

Unfortunately for these CS professionals, they have lost a critical piece of the overall customer relationship. While the buyer relationship certainly isn’t the only relationship that matters, it is a crucial one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a CS team member “blindsided” by unexpected churn, and when we dug into the issue, it turns out they had no relationship with the buyer and no visibility into how that person was measuring their success. Having a happy day-to-day contact is great, but that doesn’t mean that the buyer is seeing value. Ultimately, business value is what drives renewal and expansion.

So, how do you go about building a relationship with a buyer who is no longer engaged? It’s tough (hey, nobody said being a CS professional would be easy!) However, it isn’t impossible. Here’s an approach I’ve had good luck with that helps you re-establish your value as a trusted advisor and gets your buyer relationship back on track.

PROVE YOUR VALUE

If you’re struggling to connect with a buyer, you may need to prove your personal value to them first. One of the best ways to do this is to proactively become their one-stop-shop for all resources related to your industry and even business in general. Executives all want and need to be up to date on industry news and best practices. However, a day in the life of a typical executive doesn’t leave much room for reading, and certainly doesn’t allow time for cruising around on social media looking for interesting articles. By curating and sharing great content about your field, you can start to build your reputation with the buyer as someone who knows what’s going on. That will make them much more likely to accept your invitation to the next business review or strategy session.

This approach takes time. It also takes a dedication to doing research on your field and business. You might be thinking, “I’m a busy CS professional, and I don’t have time for this.” Two counterpoints. First, if you want to move your career forward in your company, you should be doing this kind of research and reading anyway. You need to know what is going on in your field in order to move into management or a more strategic role. Second, you can use the information you collect across your entire customer portfolio, so it isn’t like you’re doing this work customer by customer. In fact, one of the best ways for teams to adopt this approach is to divide and conquer. Each person on the team takes one resource that they are willing to commit to reviewing monthly, and everyone shares the resources they like best in a central library.

So, what kind of information is interesting to buyers? It needs to be strategic, of high quality, and specific to issues you know they might be running into. Some suggestions to get you started include:

Trade Publications – almost every industry has a trade association, and they typically publish major articles and research monthly or quarterly. They also often have newsletters with blog posts and information about upcoming events.

Social Media – most fields have influencers who produce great content and share it via social media. You’ll often find that cutting edge ideas surface first on social media before they are turned into books or magazine articles.

Harvard Business Review – in addition to industry-focused material, you should also keep an eye on general business research and trends. One of the best places to find interesting articles is HRB.org, and it’s worth the cost of a subscription.

A monthly cadence of sending something strategic and relevant to the buyer is a great start. It should be accompanied by an email that is short and personal. Here’s an example:

Hi Buyer,

I recently ran across this article on remote work. I’ve been working with Bob Smith, and he mentioned that your company is considering going fully remote. I thought might find this interesting. Please reach out if I can be of help.

Best,

CSM

Over time, this approach helps to position you in the buyer’s mind as a strategic and trusted advisor for their business, not just someone who is tactical and product-focused. This positioning is critical to opening up a relationship at the buyer level. Also, be sure to give this approach the time it takes to be successful. Don’t give up after a couple of articles. I have had people reach out to me after years of sending things to them with no response. Go into this project with the mindset that you’re playing the long game.

Good luck, and I’d love to hear about other strategic resources you find helpful as you’re building buyer relationships!

The Success League is a boutique customer success consulting firm that offers accredited certification training for customer success professionals. Visit TheSuccessLeague.io to see our full training and consulting offerings.

Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with scaling tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of 3 podcasts about the field. Kristen has served as a judge for the Customer Success Excellence awards, and is on the board of several early-stage tech companies. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.