Starting in 2022, Matik has been hosting dinners with customer success executives to foster collaboration and conversation on topics within the CS field, including challenges, successes, predictions, and more. Read on for an overview of the key takeaways from the most recent executive dinner in March 2024.

In-person meetings

In-person meetings are coming back! Leaders are pushing teams to meet customers in-person (not for all accounts but bigger ones). One way of doing this in a remote world is by figuring out when the customer is scheduling their leadership offsite (ie when everyone will be in one spot) and asking for 30 minutes of their time.

EBRs

Consensus was that they needed to be done, but the way they currently were being conducted wasn’t working. People honed in on how critical the quality of the narrative was to the EBR’s success, and that you have to continuously be building a story with executives that was tied to outcomes & value. One idea that popped up was sending a one-pager before the EBR that would make executives want to come to the meeting, and ask if there was anything specific they wanted to get from the EBR outside of the agenda.

Enablement

Enablement is critical to EBRs. Creating effective content for an EBR is one thing, making sure team members are able to confidently communicate/interact is another. There’s the EQ stuff, like being able to read the room and know how to adapt accordingly. Then there’s the IQ stuff, like asking the right questions and being able to speak to the data. AI could help solve for this (ex. Matik uses AI to write customer-ready takeaways for charts & tables right into presentations and emails).

Owning renewal

A perennial debate is whether or not CS should own the renewal. Recent conversations have leaned towards CS should not own renewal and rather should be focused on building trust. Now that doesn’t mean they can’t keep an eye out for potential upsell opportunities and hand over to a relationship/renewal manager to close. And they should be rewarded for doing so ($$ wise). Doing a quota off of NRR/GRR (80/20 or 90/10) could be a great way to incentivize this.

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