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CHAPTER 40Objections from Customer Success

“Every day we deal with struggling customers. We are literally on the front lines. Yet the product teams seem not to care about what we think we need.”

First and foremost, if a product team truly doesn't care about your needs, then that is a serious problem, and you should immediately bring this up with product leadership.

That said, realize that product teams usually are getting pressured from every side to improve a product—directly from customers, from sales, from marketing, from operations, and from senior leadership, to name a few. So, it is very possible that the product team does care, but it can be difficult for them to hear the signal through all the noise.

One technique that we encourage in this situation is for the customer success team to keep a single, live top-10 list of the ten most serious issues that are causing pain for your customers.

For many organizations, this list can be derived from the tools used to track issues, but it is fine if this is a subjective list based on your judgment.

This top-10 list does a great service to the product teams because they know that if an item is on this list, it is a serious issue, and they don't have to bother weighing it against everything else.

It's important to realize that there will always be a top-10 list, but product teams should always be working to remove those items.

It's also important to realize that sometimes product teams will address the problem with a solution ...