Over the last 20 years, software-as-a-service has all but eliminated companies buying software outright. No more slimy salesperson duping businesses into an expensive (and sticky!) installation, only to disappear when the check clears. These days, products have to complete a repeat sale cycle every time the customer is sent a bill for their subscription.
For a customer success manager at a SAAS company, relationships are currency. If a client is unhappy with the product, you want them to come to you early so you can fix it. The last thing you want is to hop on a regular business review with your boss and hear that the client is calling it quits. The more you get to know the stakeholders, and the deeper your relationship with them, the more likely they are to come to you with grievances in advance.
Before the pandemic, a customer success manager could ‘wine and dine’ clients to help build that bond. Now you have to build that relationship screen-to-screen instead of face-to-face. “Connecting to a Zoom call has never been easier, but connecting to a person has never been harder,” says Chief Customer Officer for AppsFlyer, Ziv Peled.
Some of the world’s best customer success managers have told us they’ve been using our Warmly Zoom app to turbocharge their meetings.
“Warmly is a superpower for CSMs on Zoom because it allows them to build deeper relationships,” says Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta. “Every customer success manager here uses it because we know it works.” Gainsight has currently partnered with Warmly to give all their subscribers free access to our enterprise software.
Here are a few ways top CSMs have told us how they use Warmly to build better relationships over Zoom.
Look omniscient.
Say you’re in a Quarterly Business Review on Zoom and the director ropes in a VP that you’ve never met before. All of a sudden, you’re dealing with a different stakeholder who may not share the same values, objectives, or even veto power as the person you originally planned to meet. Warmly can make a Customer Success Manager seem all-knowing by pulling up information on everybody in the meeting without even leaving Zoom. You’ll never scramble to secretly Google someone while talking to them—and risk looking distracted or disengaged.
Take note.
When you’re in back-to-back meetings handling dozens of clients, it can be hard to keep track of what you know about every single person. Customer success managers love that Warmly lets you take notes on your contacts and pops that information back up every time you meet with that person. You can use it for account-based notes, like feature requests, or to help you remember details specific to the stakeholder—think beloved pets or a touchpoint you share.
Show you’re on their team.
In a survey of 1,000 business professionals in April 2021, 73% said they are more likely to skip a second meeting with someone who wasn’t prepared for the first one. Among C-suite executives, it was 90%. You want to make sure clients know you’ve done your homework. As a CSM, you can look extra professional by having the customer’s logo over your shoulder in every meeting. For extra credit, use their company’s headquarters as your virtual background. Your job as a Customer Success Manager is aligning the client’s outcomes with your company’s. What better way to show them that their success is your success than by visually repping their team?
Save time on introductions.
The customer has an issue, and you smartly rope in the Solutions Engineer to solve it for them. Next thing you know, there’s five people on the sales side, and another five on the customer side. Introducing ten people in a meeting easily eats up time you could instead spend fixing the customer’s problem. Our CSM users have told us that using a Warmly Nametag helped them eliminate formal introductions because everyone’s names, roles, experience, and even pronouns are right there in the Zoom window as they’re talking.
Write a biography.
CSMs that use Warmly to share personal information often tell us that it makes conversations go more fluidly.
“It ends the awkward beginning of every call,” one customer success manager told us. Warmly’s “Bio” section lets you add a few lines under your name.
You could list your hobbies (“Amateur surfer” or “Chipotle enthusiast”), professional credentials (“CCSM-certified”), or by sharing a fun fact about yourself.
Keep Things Fresh
Meetings can get stale when you’re seeing the same people, in the same office, on the same screen over and over. Many customer success managers have told us they use Warmly’s “Conversation Starters” to help keep things fresh. It’s extra important when it’s been a long day and they don’t have the energy to come up with that conversation spark themselves. A pre-written question to break the ice helps everyone get to know each other better, so you can focus on building a durable and more successful relationship.
Read our case study with Gainsights here.