Stop calling everyone a champion. It’s causing you churn.
Raise the bar, and get a true picture of churn risk.
Full disclosure: 90% of this post is ripped off from another one I read and saved years ago.
I still use it with CS leaders to this day.
It was penned by Chris Hicken, with contributors Ziv Peled, Kristina Valkanoff, Jeff Breunsbach, Jay Nathan, Emilia D’Anzica, MBA, PMP, Kristi Faltorusso and David Ginsburg.
OK, so champions…
Everyone intuitively knows how important champions are.
You don’t really appreciate it until you see it for yourself.
You find that first customer that goes to bat for you, advocates for you.
Then you realize – ohhhh, I need one of these in every customer.
But true champions are RARE.
Except you’d never know it. If you listen to most sales and CS people, every customer has one.
Trust me, they don’t.
And if you think they do, you’re not being honest about how much your customers really care about you.
And how likely they are to leave.
Here are some great tips to give your champion strategy some teeth.
1️⃣ Define the difference between champions, power users and users.
2️⃣ Use a relationship scorecard to define what a champion is and is not.
3️⃣ Determine how many champions you should have for each customer type.
From here, you can:
4️⃣ Put qualification criteria in your CRM to raise the bar on who is actually a champion.
5️⃣ Develop strategies to build champions and move them along the relationship continuum.
6️⃣ Better assess churn risk based on the quality of your champions.
Champions are critical to any sales and CS strategy.
If you’re expecting them to show up and do your job for you, that’s not how it works.
They need to be identified early and nurtured.
Do this, and you’ll get a whole new view of your customer base.
And you’ll have taken a huge step in reducing the hidden churn risk you’ve been blind to.
