How stakeholder mapping prevents churn and protects renewals
Sales knows how to map stakeholders. They identify the champion, technical evaluator, business evaluator, economic buyer, executive sponsor, final decision maker and other roles they need to successfully close the deal. Then the contract is signed, and customer success inherits… a single point of contact.
This is how churn begins.
In B2B, knowledge about a client isn’t held by one person. Multiple people use, benefit from, or decide whether your product or service stays. These stakeholders remain just as important after the sale as they were before it, because they decide whether you’re kept. They actively drive loyalty or cause churn – and ultimately decide whether your get the renewal.
Yet customer success teams are often far too narrow in their day-to-day contacts. Accounts stay single-threaded.
The CFO will decide on your fate, not just in FinTechs
Finance leaders look at cost efficiency and value generated. If they don’t know what you provide and what monetary benefit comes from your product, they will question it. That questioning is the first step towards churn.
The COO will want to standardize tools and systems
With the proliferation of different tools available today, the COO and CISO will look at consolidating and reducing. If you’re just another vendor to them, one of dozens they’ve never engaged with directly, you’re already on your way out.
Multiple teams using your product or benefitting from it?
If you’re an anonymous tool to them, they may not be aware of what you actually do, what value you provide, or how important you are to their work. They will not be your allies when it comes to defending the tech stack.
In one customer organisation I worked with, we discovered that 40% of at-risk accounts had zero executive contact in the previous twelve months, executive sponsors were not aligned. The correlation was not a coincidence.
The solution: build and maintain your Key Stakeholder Map
- Create a first version during onboarding. This forces the conversation early and signals to your client that you take the relationship seriously beyond the day-to-day user.
- Update it continuously throughout the relationship. People change roles, leave, join. Your map is only as good as its last revision.
- Align key client contacts against matching contacts in your company. Their CEO is matched to your CEO, their CFO to yours, their Legal to your Legal.
- Let functional peers speak to each other. Your CFO speaks a different language than your CSM, and they will be valued differently. Your CSM can still facilitate, but shouldn’t be the only voice.
- Ensure regular check-ins with executive contacts that have meaning and provide value. A quarterly call where you simply present usage stats is not enough. Bring insights, benchmarks, or strategic observations.
- Brief your executives before they meet their counterparts, and ensure follow-ups happen. An unprepared exec meeting does more harm than no meeting at all.
- Adjust this for “commercial” clients or “SMB” but keep the logic. You might have fewer contacts, a lower cadence, more done through digital touch.
This practice is sometimes called multi-threading in customer success.
If you do not stay in touch, they will forget you
Consider the number of tools and systems companies use today and how they are tempted daily by the new kids on the block: supposedly smarter, more integrated, fully AI-driven, quick-to-implement. If you don’t stay close to your clients, at CSM level but also throughout their organisation, you will soon be out.
The right cadence depends on your segment, deal size, and CS capacity. If you’d like to work through what fits your organisation, get in touch.
