The first thing I’d discuss is why the product manager is running a customer account review. Most modern B2B tech companies have a separate Customer Success team whose job is to ensure that existing customers are happy, are trained, are using the product successfully, etc. And also making sure that those customers are buying more of the product, are upgrading their usage, and/or recommending it to others.

While a good Product Manager can also pinch-hit for the Customer Success function, PMs tend to be both more expensive and less effective than experienced Customer Success Managers. A good CSM will usually be significantly cash-flow-accretive within a few months— both directly (customers upgrade faster and churn less) and indirectly (happy customers tell other potential customers to buy your product).

If you’re unfamiliar with the Customer Success Manager job role, it’s worth some Googling and/or Quora-search time to learn. It will make your company more profitable and make your job as a PM more fun and more productive.

That said, if for some reason your company has decided that PMs should act like CSMs, then an account review should ideally be a straightforward, cut-and-dried affair:

• Ahead of time, define which accounts to cover. If your product has more than 10 customers, you probably don’t want to spend time on every one individually. Typically the criteria include:
• Top N largest customers (where if N is any larger than 10 you should reconsider — consider showing summary results by segment for the smaller and/or less strategic customers)
• Customers who are churn risks (or have churned since the last review)
• New customers whom the executives may not be familiar with yet
• Start the meeting by listing action items from the last review (you did record action items and owners last time, right?) and hassle people who haven’t done theirs. Make sure you’ve done yours! For better results, hassle the owners *before* the meeting so they’ll have a better chance of getting them done.
• Next, for each account you want to discuss individually, define which metrics you want to cover. Typically these include:
• Revenue / Growth - how much are they spending with you? Both current spend (e.g. last month) and rate of change over an agreed-upon length of time (e.g. compared to last quarter or last year for slower-growing products) ?
• Adoption - where is the customer in the adoption pipeline? Have they been trained on the product? (if you do training) What features are they using.. and not using yet? How many users are using the product? How does their adoption pattern compare to a typical customer? Slow adoption of features and/or slow user growth relative to other customers may indicate a churn risk or at least can indicate the need to figure out why they’re adopting slowly and how you can help.
• Feedback - any notable feedback you’ve received from this customer recently? Can be top feature requests, complaints, problems, etc. Don’t let your execs be surprised when your top customer calls them to escalate a problem— you should have already told them! If you have NPS or other quantitative satisfaction data on a per-customer basis, this is where you show it.
• Help Needed - what help do you need from other functions to make this customer happier and/or more profitable.
• Post-Mortem - if something really bad or really good happened recently with this customer, discuss what you (and others) learned from that experience. If this was a big customer that churned, definitely be prepared to spend time discussing this.
• For the rest of accounts that you’re not discussing individually, show summary metrics, e.g. revenue and revenue change, satisfaction metrics, feature usage, etc. Bonus points for doing this by segment— e.g. small customers, mid-size, etc.
• Finally, discuss general topics that affect multiple customers. These can include:
• a new competitor you’re seeing in several accounts
• themes that unify feature requests across multiple accounts, e.g. integrations with accounting systems or the need for improved ad-hoc reporting. This will help prepare your executive teams for your asks for more resources to solve them!
• requests for help, e.g. additional training for top customers, or to spin up an “insiders group” for your top customers to meet once per year
• Remind the executives that they really need a Customer Success Manager— who will have time to call customers every day to see how they’re doing, to help train laggards and prevent churn. A CSM will pay for herself quickly… and will let you get back to the core of PM work which is understanding what to build next and partnering with engineers to get it built.
• Remember to capture action items and who’s responsible for each one!