The part most people skip: stakeholder management in customer success
I still remember the afternoon this started.
My client SPOC called me. Not a formal escalation through the system, not a meeting invite with a loaded agenda. Just a call. And somewhere in the middle of it, almost as a side note, he mentioned that the leadership team had started looking at other platforms.
That is actually the harder version to receive. An angry email, you can prepare for. A calm, almost reluctant disclosure from someone who has been your internal champion, that one lands differently. It told me the situation had been building for a while, and he was telling me because he still thought it was worth telling me.
I held onto that.
What I did not do
I did not call a review meeting and walk them through a slide deck of everything we had delivered. I did not send a long email explaining context. I did not loop in four people from my side to signal seriousness.
All of those are instincts I have seen play out badly. They signal that you are managing optics, not the relationship.
What I asked for instead was a working session. No agenda, no deck. Just a conversation with the CHRO and two of her team leads. One question on the table: “What does success look like for your HR function in the next eighteen months, and where are we genuinely falling short?”
She did not talk about the platform. Not at first.
She talked about her team feeling like they were running a system instead of driving something, about going into leadership meetings and not having the data to back up what she already knew intuitively. About a sense that the implementation had gone live, and then the energy had left the room.
That was the real problem. The competitor conversation was a symptom.
The part most people skip
After that session, I spent nearly three weeks doing something that does not show up neatly in a CRM: just talking to people.
My SPOC was wonderful to work with. But he did not control the renewal narrative internally. The CHRO did. The CFO’s office had opinions. There was an IT leader who had concerns about integrations that had never been surfaced to us in any formal meeting.
I mapped all of it. Separate conversations, no agenda other than listening. What does each person care about? Where do their priorities overlap, and where do they quietly pull in different directions?
By the time I came back with a revised success plan, the document was not a proposal. It was a reflection of what I had already heard from each of them. Walking them through it felt less like a pitch and more like a shared recall.
That is a very different room to be in.
The ninety days that changed the account
Commercially, the pressure was to close the renewal and move on. I made the case internally for a different approach: a ninety-day reset before any expansion conversation.
Three things anchored it. A platform adoption diagnostic to understand where the gaps actually were, not where we assumed they were. A proper QBR rhythm with the CHRO, so she had a regular forum where the data told the story. And a focused sprint on two features the HR team had asked for during implementation that had somehow never been fully configured.
That sprint matters more than it sounds. When the HR team could point to something that worked, and worked because they had pushed for it, their relationship with the platform changed. They stopped being users. They started being invested.
The first expansion conversation did not come from me. It came from them.
How the account grew
Over the next three years, the contract moved from USD 15,000 to USD 45,000. Not in one jump. In layers. New modules as confidence grew. Geographic expansion into North America and Europe as the company went through acquisitions. And when those acquired entities came in running a rival HRMS, the client decided to migrate them onto this platform.
We did not push for that. They chose it. That sequence, client-led expansion rather than vendor-pushed upsell, is what a recovered relationship actually looks like.
The thing about escalations
A client who tells you they are looking elsewhere is still talking to you. They have not gone quiet. They have not let things drift until it is too late. There is still a thread connecting you, and they are choosing to hold it.
The accounts that go silent are the ones you should worry about.
When someone picks up the phone and tells you something uncomfortable, they are handing you a door. What you do in the next few weeks determines whether you walk through it or spend your energy standing outside it, deflecting.
This one, I walked through. Three years later, the CHRO was a reference. The account had tripled. And that uncomfortable afternoon call became the story I return to most often when I think about what this work is actually about.
If you are working through a difficult client situation or thinking about stakeholder strategy in your own organisation, I am happy to exchange notes. Find me on LinkedIn or reach out through the contact page.
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