Sabina M. Pons is the Managing Director of Growth Molecules™ and a member of Vitally’s Success Network.

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An executive sponsor program is the assignment of stakeholders in your organization, typically at the executive level, to strengthen customer relationships, promote growth within selected accounts, and boost customer retention.

Although these relationships have a range of benefits (which we’ll get into below), they are ideal for proactive peer-to-peer relationship nurturing.

For instance, a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) may want to talk to another CCO. Naturally, there will be organic bonds built and rapport established enabling them to celebrate when things are going well and work collaboratively to address hiccups necessitating improvements.

Read on to learn more about how to build a successful executive sponsorship program and how to leverage it to boost customer retention.

Benefits of Executive Sponsorship

The key internal benefit of establishing an executive sponsor program is multi-threading, or having multiple touch points across the customers’ ecosystem. This helps preserve the relationship if a key contact leaves the client organization. You still have others who are familiar with the value your organization, product, or service offers, increasing the odds of retaining the client.

An executive sponsor provides your organization with another vantage point internally, creating visibility and a potential runway for expansion. It offers insight into what the climate is in terms of product roadmap, helping discern what’s needed in the industry using your product or service.

This program acts as an important mechanism to prevent churn and improve revenue retention.

Selecting Accounts for Your Sponsorship Program

An executive sponsor isn’t something you offer to all customers, or just to larger or strategic accounts. When you think about dividing your current customer landscape and anticipating your go-to-market and new customer acquisition strategies, consider how they all align.

Typically, customer segmentation is based on revenue, geography, vertical, product usage, or license types purchased. However, it’s essential to always be looking at commercial white space and product white space.

Commercial white space is about whether there’s an opportunity to grow and expand an account or if they have already bought all your products or services and are saturated.

Although there isn’t any recurring revenue opportunity remaining within such an account, pairing them with an executive sponsor can increase loyalty and advocacy.

By contrast, there are customers where you’ve only scratched the surface and there’s a lot of commercial white space or opportunities to expand sales into other departments or divisions of the account.

You also need to look at product or service white space. Consider how the customer is leveraging your offering in comparison to their peers’ utilization. Expanding how many of your product or service categories an account leverages creates a stickier customer who’s less likely to churn.

Those are some of the factors to consider when deciding to assign an executive sponsor. It’s not a black-and-white decision. Customers will have different needs and companies should be selective about how they assign these roles.

A Cross-Functional Approach to Executive Sponsor Assignments

Achieving success with your sponsorship program means allocating time and prioritizing it. Executive sponsorship can feel like one more initiative to manage when company executives are already inundated and they’re feeling pressure from the board, their peers, their teams, and market conditions.

To relieve the pressure on execs like CCOs and CSOs, take a cross-functional “rotation” approach to the executive sponsor program, to ensure it’s not a big burden on any one person

It’s a great experience for other executives to get out in the field and engage with customers. Plus, it’s a great reminder of why we do what we do and how critical it is to have a well-oiled machine.

Leveraging a cross-functional approach makes the sponsorship program part of the cultural norm within the organization. It also allows space and time to do it effectively, so it ultimately has a material impact on recurring revenue.

A framework for peer matching for a cross-functional approach could be industry domain expertise matching. For instance, let’s say your CFO previously worked at a CRM company. If your client is a CRM software provider, then you may peer-match the CFO to that account.

Even though they may not know the intimate logistics of the service offering or the license types the customer purchased at the granular user level, they may have enough rapport at the executive level to talk industry shop. And doing so builds bonds.

When you use the rotational approach with leaders across the business, and they have an opportunity to step in, they’re going to see the pain that their customers are facing at the different persona levels. They will understand the victories and what helps the customer feel like a hero internally.

They’ll also likely have a better appreciation for their own internal teams. This provides opportunities to stop, start, and keep doing something in the quest of customer-centricity and ultimately recurring revenue to give them a better vantage point.

Operationalizing Executive Sponsor Programs

There are various ways to put an executive sponsor program into practice without a lot of additional effort. Here are some of the activities I’ve found to be effective.

Attending Business Reviews

One easy way to implement a sponsorship program is with ride-alongs for executive or quarterly business reviews (EBRs or QBRs). Jump on top of the motion that’s already in place. There’s no need to create something new, especially if the sponsorship program is a new initiative your company is looking to launch. This means the assigned sponsor is joining four calls a year and can make themselves available for ad hoc needs.

Meet for Coffee

Your executive sponsor can also call the customer whenever they’re in town and invite them to grab some coffee. Keeping a quick list of key stakeholders and where they’re based makes this easy to accomplish.

For instance, I’ve done it where I’ve set up shop at a coffee shop and literally had different customers meeting with me every half hour on the hour for two hours. It works well and builds rapport. Plus, customers have the opportunity to meet each other during the transition moment, which they might also benefit from.

Internal Voice of Customer

Other tactics that work to help bring an executive sponsor program to life are also internally spotlighting stories and soundbites from customer executives during your town hall meetings.

For instance, “As a chief product officer, I met with three of our customers in New York last week. It was eye-opening. Here are the things that align with our current product roadmap. And boy, I have some things to think about based on the narrative that I heard. My team and I are going to regroup internally and come up with a plan to address these things next month.”

Documentation

It’s also essential to make sure that the executive sponsor is making an informed communication touch point with the customer. This means accessing your Customer Success Platform (CSP) and the account’s Customer Success Manager (CSM) to first ascertain what is going on with the customer before engaging with them. You don’t want them to walk into a landmine. It’s best to prepare with the right armor and potential resolution to address any issues.

Review and Adjust

An additional practice for continuous program improvement is quarterly executive assignments and touchpoint information reviews. The best way to do this is with record-keeping and internal communication through a CSP like Vitally to assess the assignments’ effectiveness and adjust as needed.

Final Thoughts on Executive Sponsor Program Success

To boost the success of your sponsorship program, include an element that addresses the “what’s in it for me?” aspect of the executive mindset. For example, tying some portion of their compensation or bonusing to a successful program like this might be advantageous, depending on the culture, individual, or CSM.

However, if you’re a startup and are just scratching the surface of this type of program, you can create that focus by incentivizing the behaviors or organization key results you wish to drive.