How To Introduce Coordinate to your Customers

Our customers often come to us with questions about their CS processes and how they can maximize their value from Coordinate with their customers. Some of these are the obvious questions like how to best drive stakeholder engagement, how to maintain alignment over the course of a relationship, or how to use Coordinate to demonstrate ROI to the customer. However, using Coordinate effectively starts before any of that. An important factor is knowing how and when to introduce Coordinate to your customers.

In this article we talk about some of the best practices around introducing Coordinate to your customers.

When to introduce Coordinate

This is a common question from our customers and one that has quite a bit of nuance. It may sound like a good idea to get all of your customers using Coordinate right away, but depending on your relationship with each customer it might make more sense to wait for a more opportune time to introduce a new methodology. Some examples of good time to introduce Coordinate are:

For new customers, right away! Onboarding new customers is the perfect time to set expectations and introduce Coordinate. In this case it’s easy to convey that Coordinate is the way you manage all of your customer relationships and why that’s a good thing for them!

For existing customers, there are a few good opportunities to introduce meaningful changes in how you’ll interact:

• Strategic events such as QBRs, renewal discussions, or general alignment meetings. Typically these discussions involve a good deal of preparation to recap previous successes, outline a plan for the coming quarter/year, and align on goals. You can capture all of that in Coordinate and introduce it either at the start of the meeting to drive the recap and alignment or at the end of the meeting as the place where you will capture the results of the discussion and track progress.
• Relationship resets. A relationship reset is what happens any time you have to re-align with the customer either because things have gone sideways or because a key champion has left and you need to re-establish a relationship with the customer. These are a great time to introduce Coordinate as a way you will focus on the customer and their goals and provide visibility to encourage a good relationship.
• Expansions and new projects. If a customer is onboarding with a new product, expanding to new teams, or working with your services team on a new project, you can introduce Coordinate to kick off that work with all stakeholders involved. This is a great way to put the new work in context of the overall relationship and strategy with the customer while also clearly defining timelines, requirements, and personnel for the upcoming work. 

Highlighting the value

The value to Coordinate for you and your business is clear: increased customer engagement, better customer accountability, consistent value delivery, and identifying expansions just to name a few. However, when introducing Coordinate to your customers, you need to outline the value for them. A few key examples are:

• A focus on their goals and a commitment to achieve them
• Organized communication so nothing gets lost or repeated
• Visibility so all stakeholders can stay informed of where they are, what has happened, and what happens next
  

With Coordinate these value-adds to your relationship with the customer are provided on an ongoing basis and that’s a huge benefit that they don’t get with their other vendors (unless they also use Coordinate!). 

From the customer’s perspective, Coordinate should be seen as a tool you utilize to ensure your customers realize value from your products. You can frame this for your customers by saying things like “This portal is part of our commitment to ensuring you get as much value as possible from our products and services” or “This helps us stay strategically aligned and focused on your goals and success criteria so we don’t miss the mark and don’t waste anyone’s time.” 

Setting expectations

We talk about expectation setting in more detail here, but it’s worth emphasizing here as well. When you share Coordinate with your customer stakeholders it’s critical that you clearly communicate its role in your relationship and your expectations of them. If you want your customers to be communicating on the plan and updating progress on Tasks and Goals, you need to outline that up front and reinforce those expectations on an ongoing basis!

Introducing Coordinate to customers isn’t difficult, but it will go more smoothly if you wait for a logical time to make changes, highlight the value to the customer, and set expectations around the use of the tool.