Daphne Costa Lopes

CSMs, your customer is ignoring your emails for these 5 brutal reasons:

1️⃣ They Don't See Your Value
- Your check-ins feel like interruptions
- Your QBRs look like vendor reports
- Your “touching base“ emails add to their workload

Fix: Stop reporting. Start solving. “I noticed your team's login dropped 40%. Here's a 3-minute fix.“

2️⃣ Wrong Audience, Wrong Altitude
- You're talking features to a CEO
- You're talking strategy to an end-user
- You're sending technical updates to business leads

Fix: Match message to role. CEOs get ROI. Users get quick wins. Managers get team impact.

3️⃣ Their North Star Shifted
- The champion who bought your solution left
- Their Q4 priorities just changed
- Their budget is under scrutiny

Fix: Realign or die. “Let's review your new objectives and rebuild our success plan.“

4️⃣ They're Drowning, Not Swimming
- 121 unread emails
- 47 Slack notifications
- 9 “urgent“ projects

And you want a “quick sync“?

Fix: Make every interaction count. Send: “I found $50K in savings for you“ Not: “Hope you're doing well!“

5️⃣ You're Not Speaking Business
- You track activity metrics, they track revenue impact
- You celebrate feature adoption, they care about business outcomes

Fix: Translate everything to dollars. “Your team saved 82 hours this month using our automation = $12,300 in recovered costs“

The harsh reality?

Your customers don't owe you their attention.
You have to earn it.

Every. Single. Time.

Your Next Move: Look at your last customer email. Does it solve a problem or create one? Does it save time or waste it? Does it show value or ask for attention?

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Nobody wants to admit it, but most customers don’t want a strategic relationship with their CSM 🙊

And that’s ok!

Because the reality is that execution eats strategy for breakfast 🥞

And where most customers fail to get to their goals isn’t due to a lack of strategy.

It’s due to poor execution.

A CSM can add a ton of value to their customers, without ever touching the strategy, when they:

- help get the system set up right
- track progress towards key goals
- integrate to the rest of the stack so information can flow freely
- overcome challenges with usage
- educate users
- implement new use cases
- help remove technical blockers
- continuously improve the existing set-up
- share how others do this thing better
- advocate for solutions to help improve specific use cases
- connect customers to the right resources to drive better results

This doesn’t mean CSMs don’t have conversations about the customer’s strategy.

In fact the strategy informs the tactics.

You’d have a very different conversation if someone is hoping to grow their business through international expansion vs. launching a new product.

It also doesn’t mean the CSM isn’t being strategic about how they spend their time, how they communicate, how they prioritise etc.

What it means is that going through slide decks and QBRs with a CSM, is not a proxy for the strength of the relationship.

The outcomes they get is.

And sometimes being tactically excellent can be the best strategy to success.


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