What are some common challenges you've encountered in managing customer relationships?

There a few "plays" you should always be ready to run when you think about customer relationships:

1) Change in champion: folks switch jobs. The loss of your champion can be engagement-killing if you haven't multithreaded. For every strategic account, you should have multiple contacts. For every large account, you should have more than one contact. Only for your VSB or SMB segments that should be running on a fly wheel anyway is it reasonable to think you would only have one contact.

2) The customer doesn't think they've received value. This is almost always due NOT to the lack of value but due to the lack of a shared and agreed-upon way to measure value. If your product is simple, it is likely that measurement is standard across the board. If your product is complex like a platform that has myriad use cases, your CSMs should capture the two or three goals the Customer has during implementation and onboarding and agree to how outcomes should be measured. Then you must provide a steady cadence of measuring those results!

3) Ghosting. You just can't get in touch with your customer. Usually this is unrecoverable and you should work on this problem for your current and future customers, not the one ghosting you. The solution here is to look back at the ghost and figure out where the break with you happened. That is the moment in the customer journey that needs to be fixed.