Some customer accounts are zombies. They’ve been around forever. They never add any new features or show any excitement about your product. They just suck your energy and maybe your brains.
I had a customer like that. They represented a significant chunk of the ARR I managed and they were a complete dud. Early on in my relationship with the account they outsourced the team that managed my product internally to the organization and switched to a managed service provider (MSP). Now, not only were they a dud, we were working through a company we had no direct relationship with to get to our actual customer.
Making matters worse, my sales team was fed up with this customer. They never responded to any kind of upsell opportunity. They had a bunch of legacy technical debt which really made it impossible for them to even take advantage of our more advanced feature set.
We finally got them on board to take on a project to bring them into a more modern era. Then halfway through the project they canceled our professional services contract and decided to push it all to their MSP. This really put the project in jeopardy.
On top of this, the sales team were angry about losing the professional services income and stonewalled the customer about some required database services we had been providing for free. The database team was getting frustrated about running one-off scripts for the customer. Sales saw it as an opportunity to upsell for the database services and hit them with a half million dollar proposal to continue the database services. The customer balked and decided to torpedo the project entirely. And frankly that was the beginning of the end of the relationship.
Bottom line, we played hardball because we allowed the customer’s perceived poor treatment of us to get us riled up. And as a result we lost a $4.5M annual renewal and a long time customer.
In our case, we forgot the actual value of the customer because they weren’t interested in up-sales or new features. My lesson learned is that when a zombie customer shows some life, you jump on it and bend over backward to get them what they need, even if they treat your poorly on the surface. You can’t expect your customer to meet you halfway to repair the relationship. They’ll just find your competitor instead.