You are meeting with the customer, having great conversations, and then, all of a sudden, the customer stops responding to you! They have gone dark, become non-responsive, or gone radio-silent. This happens to every CSM at some point in their career, and it can be hard to handle. In this article, I provide a clear methodology to successfully re-engage non-responsive customers.
Why?
The first question to ask yourself is why? Obviously, you won’t know for certain, but you probably have a pretty good guess. Typically, this will fall into one of four categories:
- The customer has decided to not renew.
- The customer is in the process of deciding whether to renew.
- The customer doesn’t value the meetings/conversations, so is now ignoring you.
- Something happened to your customer: extended PTO, they were terminated, they quit, etc. Emails get forwarded to managers when someone leaves, so you won’t get a bounced email response.
Understanding the why will help you create proper content when following the escalation steps outlined in the next section.
What to Do?
Now that you you have a hypothesis as to why the customer is non-responsive, I recommend following these steps to re-engage with the customer:
- Try to confirm your hypothesis as to why they are non-responsive through analysis:
- Is the contact still there, or have they moved on? Look them up on LinkedIn.
- How is usage? Who has logged in last, who has submitted support tickets last, what does product activity look like?
- Are they moving to something else? An example of checking would be if your software is integrated into the website, you could look at source code on their website to see if your competitors information is used.
- Ask for help from fellow employees who may know your contact/customer.
- Are there individuals on your Services team who may have a relationship?
- Have they worked with a Partner, and if so, can the partner help you?
- Can the sales rep who closed the deal be off assistance?
- Did they have a different CSM who could send an email?
- Does anyone on your support team have a relationship with someone at the company?
- Start contacting individual contributors within the company who could help.
- Reach out to Power Users you may know of. They are typically helpful, and will help you understand politics that may be happening.
- Contact anyone who has logged in recently.
- Contact anyone who has submitted a support ticket recently.
- Go through your CRM and contact anyone who looks like a legitimate contact and user of the product with a title of manager level and below.
- Start escalating upwards within the customer’s company.
- Contact them to get information on status.
- Look at LinkedIn for Directors with the appropriate title for your space and contact them.
- Final step is to go directly to the executive level. Look for VP, SVP, or C-Suite and email them directly.
- Leverage your internal Executive contact. Escalate to your Manager for help. Outline the steps you’ve taken before asking for executive help. From here, work with your manager to have an executive at your company contact the points of contact directly. Include pre-written emails when asking the executive for help. Start with your original point of contact and then move up the org chart to their executive.
Contact Follow-up Cadence:
Contacting a person to restore a relationship is rarely a one-time activity. I recommend these follow-up steps for each person you try to contact:
- Send email #1. Wait 3 business days.
- Call person, wait 4 hours.
- Send email #2, saying “Following up on email and phone call.”
- Send a LinkedIn message alongside email #2.
- Call person again (at different time of day AM vs. PM)
- Send final email #3.
- If deal is six figures, consider on-site.
Message Content/Tone
In your messages, you should focus on addressing the reason you believe they are not responding. Make sure it’s obvious what’s in it for them! If you haven’t provided value, acknowledge it and recommend actions that will help them out. If it’s the renewal, offer a concession (PS strategy, discount, etc.) to proactively re-engage them. If you are at the end of your message cadence, your tone can become more direct (carrot vs. stick). As an example, “If I don’t hear back by September 15th, you will have officially not renewed. We will be shutting down your instance, at which point you will not be able to retrieve your data.”
Final Thoughts
From my experience, I’ve learned the following lessons:
- CSMs frequently rely on just 1-2 emails. Use the phone. Use LinkedIn. If appropriate, go to their office!
- CSMs frequently don’t look internally for other relationships and are intimidated to blindly go up the org chart. This does work! Frequently, the original contact reaches out to you as a result.
- The executive contact point works! Either they will respond to the executive directly, or the contact will respond to your prior email within 24 hours!
