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Master the strategy of multithreading in customer success: Q&A with Emilia D’Anzica
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Last week, Emilia D’Anzica from Growth Molecules™ delved into the art of multithreading in her ChurnZero webinar, which you can now watch in full here. Below, you’ll find Emilia’s answers to questions asked in the post-webinar Q&A session.
Mastering multithreading in customer success: Q&A with Emilia D’Anzica
Our webinar’s Q&A session covered topics including who should own multithreading responsibilities, the value of multithreading within your own team, and how to navigate gatekeeping behavior when you encounter it.
Q: Our CSMs each have 100+ clients of varying sizes. How should we approach multithreading at this level in a scalable way?
A: Start with your highest-revenue clients who have the highest engagement. If you have a customer success platform (CSP), you can be able to segment them quickly so your CSMs aren’t overwhelmed, and set up a weekly cadence.
If CSM has a hundred clients, look at who has the highest engagement and revenue and is up for renewal this quarter. You might identify ten, so start making sure you have multiple contacts in those organizations, again starting with the highest engagement and revenue.
You may have to pull people in, including yourself. As a leader, you should make yourself available, but with some guidelines. You need to know what the risk is, why you’re being called in, how you’re expected to help, and who else will be on the call. That way, as a manager, you’ll be prepared for the call rather than scrambling and side-Slacking, which the client can see you doing.
Q: What’s an effective strategy for when a customer gatekeeps you from engaging with others in their organization?
A: It’s a common scenario. If there was someone else involved in selling—your sales counterpart, an account manager—you can partner with them and ask them to reach out to that customer contact. You can also ask your manager to reach out to the manager at the customer organization.
This is where being a team player and working as a team becomes incredibly important. When I was leading a CS Ops organization, I tested a new onboarding strategy. During final calls of the sales process, our head of sales and I would invite the person signing the contract on the other end to join a mini-kickoff, which would include the director on our team.
That call created multithreading immediately. Now, we knew who the champion was, and the director on our side was able to say: John, should any escalations or concerns arise, you have my direct email address.
All of this should be recorded, and in your CSP or your CRM as a result. Now, even if your own CSM leaves, you can go back to that decision-maker and say: I’m new. Here’s when I’m going to be reaching out to you. You don’t step over the gatekeeper; you include them, and let them know that there are multiple tiers of people here to support them.
Q: How can you track and report how multithreaded a CSM is with their accounts?
A: The CSM should be putting that information in your CSP, and it should be a requirement of the customer’s onboarding with your organization.
In other words, you don’t mark a customer as onboarded if you don’t have a minimum number of contacts, their titles, their LinkedIn profiles, added to your CSP. Unless you’re in product-led, where there’s only one contact, it’s incredibly important to make these things a requirement of your team’s onboarding tasks.
Q: If your primary point of contact is laid off, can you recommend a tactful way to gain an introduction to the new primary point of contact?
A: Earlier this week, I asked a CEO what his biggest challenges are right now. “In our space,” he said, “we’re seeing entire departments obliterated: everyone is let go, and suddenly we don’t have any contacts.”
Well—even as a CEO, you can set up a message in a CSP that goes out to your customer’s founder, or the champion who signed the contract, of their CFO, or COO, or so on, introducing yourself to their organization, and making yourself available to answer their questions. If this point of contact is gone too, and you don’t have the next person’s email address, contact them through LinkedIn.
There’s nothing wrong with doing this if you do your research, show empathy, and explain that this isn’t a sales call but a message from a partner who’s providing a service. Make it a human-to-human conversation, instead of “hey, you’re an account, and I’m responsible for renewing you,” and the relationship changes.
Q: Who is primarily responsible for getting new contacts added to accounts?
A: During the sales process, it needs to be the salesperson. During the handoff, especially in enterprise, the CSM needs to confirm the contacts.
IF you have a CRM that tracks your emails, it should add them at the account level. Then, during the handoff, you can confirm that you have the right people, titles, and roles. For example, if your product is complex, you need an IT contact at some part of the onboarding journey. That ten-minute conversation with sales, to confirm all that information, is an important responsibility for your CSM as they take on the new customer.
If your product goes to account management for renewal, whoever takes it over should take on that responsibility too. After all, they also want the right contacts to have the right conversations at the right level to ensure continuous impact, renewals, and expansion.
Q: Is there value to multithreading within your company too—in other words, introducing a customer to multiple people on your internal team?
A: There can be, especially during risks. I’ve seen examples where teams have assigned their head of product to a group of customers alongside each customer’s CSM, or where the CEO has taken on 10 customers to get more involved and understand client pain points. These can be incredibly valuable.
However, you always want to have a main point of contact in your organization—the CSM—taking part in those conversations as a constant, so that your product leader or CEO doesn’t suddenly become a second CSM for those customers as well.
Thank you, Emilia D’Anzica, and everyone who joined this webinar! For more customer success webinars and resources, click here.