Building on the emotional, social, psychological, and mental strengths previously described, I outline in this section a few specific approaches to interact with both the customer and vendor personnel involved with your projects.

Dealing with Varied Personality Types

A quick search on the Internet will provide a list of each of our personality types. We cross over more than one of these types as individuals. These personality types yearn for something—such as spotlight, friendship, wisdom, experiences, mental stimulation, harmony, expression, leadership opportunities, action, freedom of expression, idealism, certainty, creativity, or old school values.

A good CSM will know how to observe, understand, and cater to these personality types among both the customer and vendor personnel involved with the project. The CSM needs to manage the expectations of these different personality types when talking with them individually and facilitate interactions with varying kinds of personalities when they are working together.

Diplomacy

An excellent diplomatic persona will help you round out the personality required for this job. I suggest the following diplomatic skills:

• Maintain touch with more than one customer resources
• Don’t intimidate anyone with titles, wealth, other college-level or professional achievements
• Be humble and helpful
• Tell the truth and keep your message concise (don’t provide details that are irrelevant now or could be later)
• Offer help to customer resources that are coming up to speed
• Build alliances with other vendors and partners serving the same customer
• Watch for competitors and their alliances that could participate in future RFPs (request for proposals) at the customer
• Don’t take anything personally, and don’t carry any grudges.

Coaching Vendor Resources

Set up your associates for success. Let them take charge of relevant customer conversations. Remember, if you lead all conversations, you will never be able to scale. Let associates appear confident in front of customers.

For more details on this topic, refer to Chapter 13, titled “Supervising and Managing Vendor Resources.” You and your supervisors will need to follow the principles outlined there to grow your organization.

Friendship

Build friendships with natural chemistries and honest intent. Pretense and charades don’t help and are usually a waste of time. Make long term friendships with your points of contact. When they leave their firms and join others, they will likely carry your business with you. Make friends everywhere you go—airports, flights, restaurants, health clubs—whenever possible. Don’t aggressively reach out but stay accessible. Such friendships help when relationships take a turn for the worse in adverse scenarios.

Give the other person the benefit of the doubt. In the CSM role, consider yourself as an investor who will reap the rewards from the customer relationship in the longer run. Short term losses and expenses, such as implementation rework, will be covered by future windfalls such as cross-sell, upsell, renewals, and new license opportunities. Reach out to your supervisor when you encounter such situations and make a business case for continued investment.

If the relationship goes sour or the customer contact has concerns with your style, it is better to hand the account to someone else on your team. There is a fine line between negotiating a bump in the road with a customer (which you can overcome) and admitting there is a problem better solved by someone else. If you have a relational conflict with a customer or someone on your team, however, it might be best to clear the air with your supervisor about the situation.

Lastly, when vendors attempt to experiment with customer messaging related to the product roadmap, estimates, expenses, and expectations from a customer—that may turn out to be unacceptable to customers. There are other cases where CSMs are overloaded with work and are unable to cope up with supervisor demands. Attempts to juggle multiple tasks at once could result in dropped balls, adversely affecting the health of the project. The combination of unacceptable messaging and dropped balls from the CSM, in addition to potential CSM gaps, could affect customer’s relationship with the CSM. In such situations, supervisors need to understand root causes to avoid the same result with the replacement CSM on the customer’s project.