Client Stakeholder Management: How to create alignment

Ever had your client’s expectations been different than what they purchased? Ever had unexpected stakeholders show up halfway through implementation? Or have someone new join in during renewal conversations?

If you’ve worked in CS for more than a day, I can guarantee you answered: yes, yes, yes.

Fortunately, with the right strategies and tools, it’s possible to reduce the amount of surprise stakeholders and achieve real stakeholder alignment more often than not. 

In this post, you’ll learn:

• What makes a true stakeholder vs. a customer
• Why stakeholder alignment and management is so critical in customer success
• How to find the right stakeholders
• Strategies for getting (and keeping) alignment across all stakeholders, especially during the vital onboarding and implementation phases

What makes a stakeholder vs. a customer?

A client stakeholder is anyone who has a vested interest in your product, service, or organization. They may hold purchasing power, influence, or a significant interest in your and their company’s success.

A customer is, of course, anyone who purchases and uses your product or service—but not all customers have the same level of power or interest beyond their purchase. 

For example, say you provide HR software. The HR leader who buys and rolls out HR software will have a vested interested in the software’s success (i.e., a stakeholder), whereas an employee end-user of the software won’t care much beyond how the software impacts their day-to-day work (i.e., a customer).

Stakeholders can also include non-customers like investors, employees, or board members who influence or may be impacted by your company’s outcomes. 

The risk of client stakeholder misalignment

Stakeholder management, a concept borrowed from project management, is a key skill for any customer success rep or leader.

When you don’t know who to include in key conversations throughout the customer journey, you’ll never build any meaningful rapport or momentum. 

Misalignment sabotages renewals and upsells all the time. It can even kill the onboarding process. 

Maybe you’ve seen Sales and CS teams that aren’t aligned and don’t receive needed information from each other during the sales-to-success handoff. That means the CS team has a hard time figuring out who the key customer stakeholders are and how to keep them engaged. 

Stakeholder misalignment also influences all the key metrics of customer success teams. 

For example, it may take longer to achieve time to value (TTV) if you’re stuck trying to figure out who the important stakeholders are and what they are looking for. Customer retention rate (CRR) can tank if you haven’t identified the right stakeholders to keep in the loop. 

Proper stakeholder management improves these numbers (and many others) by creating alignment, fostering more buy-in, and encouraging engagement. 

Ackermann & Eden’s Power-Interest Grid

The industry-standard way for Customer Success teams to think about stakeholders was established by Ackermann & Eden in their 1998 book Making Strategy: The Journey of Strategic Management.

In a chapter on Stakeholder Analysis and Management, they introduced the Power-Interest Grid, which focuses on two main concepts: power and interest. 

It asks the following questions:

• Who has the power in this project? (i.e. Who can make decisions or block progress? Who controls the budget?)
• Who is interested in this project? Who cares about the outcome here? Who cares about the details? 
• Where is the overlap in the above questions? Is there anyone who can make or break this project but is also highly interested? 

By answering the above questions — during and after onboarding — your CS team will know where to prioritize their engagement levels among the different stakeholders, what to communicate to each stakeholder, and who to go to for different things (like removing roadblocks).

It’s similar to the sales account mapping process.

Once you’ve grouped your stakeholders based on the Power-Interest grid, managing them becomes a lot easier.  Let’s go over each block one by one.

High Power, High Interest (Manage Closely)

These are the key stakeholders and decision-makers. They are highly influential and invested in the outcome of the work. You need to keep them engaged and satisfied.

Example: C-suite executives or project sponsors are deeply invested in the success of this work.

Actionable tips: Maintain close contact, keep them involved in decision-making, and ensure their needs are heard, acknowledged, and met. 

High Power, Low Interest (Keep Satisfied)

Stakeholders who are not too interested in the day-to-day, but hold immense power over the project. 

Example: board members who can block work but are not particular about the details. 

Actionable tip: Keep them in the loop with progress reports and important details, but do not overwhelm them. 

Low Power, High Interest (Keep Informed)

Stakeholders who are very interested in the outcome but do not have the ability to exercise significant influence over the project. 

Example: Technical admins or team members that may help the work progress but have no meaningful say in the decision-making. 

Actionable tip: Keep these stakeholders informed and listen to their input. They may be enthusiastic and offer great insight but won’t be able to influence decisions. 

Low Power, Low Interest (Monitor)

Stakeholders who have both minimal power and interest. 

Example: External stakeholders who have little stake in the outcomes. 

Actionable tips: Keep an eye on these stakeholders for any surprises, but they can usually be left alone or provided with occasional updates. 

Common stakeholder roles

The Power-Interest Grid is a great framework for mapping out your client stakeholders. It’s often even more valuable when you apply it to the types of stakeholder roles your team will encounter:

• Sponsor(s): High power, high interest
• Senior leaders & executives: High power, low interest
• Managers: Low power, high interest
• Admins & technical stakeholders: Low power, high interest 
• End users: Low power, high interest.  

Based on the role and where a stakeholder lands on the Power-Interest grid, you’re better able to tailor your approach and drive alignment.

How to identify client stakeholders

In order to identify the right client stakeholders, you need to start early in the buying process.

Identify stakeholders during pre-sales 

Ideally, your Sales team’s discovery process should help identify the key stakeholders long before the deal closes — and then reliably pass that information on to your Customer Success team. 

But these key contacts often get lost in the sales-to-CS handoff. When Sales documents who’s involved further down the line, you’ll open the door to creating a stronger start and decrease the odds of your deal stalling out. 

Using a digital sales room like Dock to do this makes this way easier, because you can build out mutual action plans, capture relevant info (without losing it in long email threads), and seamlessly transition everything into your customer onboarding hub—without the need for messy CRM notes.

And it’s even more effective if the Sales-to-Success handoff is a collaborative process. When she joined us on Grow & Tell, Eloise Salisbury, Chief Customer Officer at AutogenAI, put it this way: 

“Customer success doesn't start, at least in my mind, when somebody signs a contract. I typically go into pre-sales calls and say, ‘You're thinking about investing heavily in our product, but you're also going to be investing heavily in the people that sit behind and support the product.’”

A good Sales team can also help drive early adoption and implementation so that by the time new clients reach the CS team, they are aligned and ready to go. 

Monica Perez, Head of Customer Success at Notion, credits Notion’s sales teams for having 70-90% of their clients already active by the time they reach the CS team. 

Surface new stakeholders during onboarding

Even if your Sales team has proactively identified the key stakeholders before closing, it’s up to the CS team to reaffirm that they do indeed have the right people in the room.

The best way to mutually agree on key stakeholders is to document it in your Dock customer onboarding hub.

A great time to do this is during your onboarding kickoff meetings. As you confirm the right stakeholders, document everything in Dock:

• Who controls the budget
• Who seems like the biggest advocate
• Who the key users will be

You can use Dock’s Contacts module to display key client stakeholders, or use tables to list roles next to key contacts.

Some CS teams worry that asking for this information again during onboarding feels like asking customers to repeat themselves. But client stakeholders can change on a dime, so it’s beneficial for both parties to re-confirm who has a stake in the game.

If you don’t want to ask for stakeholders again during a meeting, you can add a client onboarding questionnaire to your Dock onboarding template to capture info like this. 

Brittany Soinsky, Manager of Onboarding at Loom, believes that being proactive is the key to successful onboarding:

“Our job in customer success is to package everything up really easily to help our admins, champions, and stakeholders to communicate this change effectively.”

For example, Loom provides enterprise customers with a ready-made communication plan.

💡 Pro tip: Dock’s workspace analytics can be used to identify hidden stakeholders who may be engaging with onboarding materials but not showing up to many meetings. It’s a great way to double-check your key stakeholders.

How CS can create stakeholder alignment: a cheat sheet

Let’s say there’s a stakeholder who, according to the Power-Interest matrix, is high interest-low power. They’re very vocal with their thoughts and opinions. 

If you lean in too heavily based on the feedback from this person, you may miss out on the quiet executive in the back. The one who doesn’t say much, but actually holds the most influence on the decision to renew for another year (and may have a vastly different opinion).

To create stakeholder alignment, do the following:

• Identify and correctly categorize the stakeholders using the Power-Interest grid
• Create communication plans for each category of stakeholders, including content and cadence. 
• In Dock, upload relevant content for each category to your client portal.
• Create shared customer success plans with action items and milestones tailored based on each stakeholder’s role. You can bucket this by the related stage of the customer journey, and only show whatever is relevant for the given stage.  
• Link results and metrics from the day-to-day users to the executives and key stakeholders, such as “pyramid KPIs.” 

Eloise from AutogenAI describes pyramid KPIs in the following way: 

“Think about a pyramid. There are three different layers of that pyramid. Your tool's day-to-day users are at the bottom. You need to identify the KPIs they're tracking and that they care about. Then you do the same for that mid-layer of management at the company. At the top of the pyramid are the execs. Then we link how the KPIs from the day-to-day users would roll up to the middle management and up to the execs.” 

Reality is, you’re never done managing stakeholders (sorry to be the bearer of bad news).

But each stage of the customer journey looks different — it may bring different stakeholders into the picture, require different strategies, or involve different measures of success. 

So let’s look at some tactics and tips on how to identify and engage stakeholders well, from before the contract is signed until the day your client relationship ends.

(Many moons from now, of course.)

1. Optimize for time-to-value during onboarding

If it takes six months for your clients to see the results they were expecting to see in three, that’s a massive issue. 

They want to see value, and they want to see it quickly — and that’s why most CS onboarding teams measure time-to-value (TTV).

One of the most effective ways to increase TTV is to offer value directly during onboarding. 

Gillian Heltai, former CCO of Lattice, explained the need to offer value quickly during onboarding on our show, Grow & Tell:

“If you don’t deliver a great onboarding, it’s like a trough of disillusionment. You need to do a great job with getting time to value and keeping the onboarding experience the same as they experienced in the sales process…If you don't deliver a great onboarding, it's a trough of disillusionment where it's like, ‘Oh, I thought it was going to be this. And now this is so sad.’" 

For example, if your product has a trial period and customers can see how things work and produce results before they even pay, that’s a big win.

You don’t want sad and disillusioned customers. 

To make a quick TTV a reality, you need clarity on the client’s goals and alignment from the get-go. You can’t get that if your Presales- or Sales-to-CS transition is rocky and spans dozens of email threads or disparate systems.  

For complex use cases, like when you have several critical stakeholders, your CS team will need a place to centralize information, keep stakeholders informed, and create clear, value-packed steps for clients to complete and successfully onboard. 

That’s one reason why Rachel Jennings-Keane, Global Head of Customer Success at Assignar, loves using Dock for onboarding:

“What I like about Dock is that it's basically their own little website guide to how to get the most out of your tool. It’s reaffirming our value and it's easy for them to find it and get that.”

2. Create client buy-in during onboarding

A key aspect of onboarding and change management is gaining buy-in from different stakeholders. 

“We want to make it really easy for our admins and champions to tell our story,” says Brittany from Loom. “It's much more effective coming from them than it is from us. So, during onboarding, we're very focused on enabling them to enable their own teams.” 

Your onboarding program will be far more successful if you remember these additional points for effective SaaS change management:

Create a step-by-step success plan tailored to each customer’s use case. This helps ensure nothing is overlooked, while also highlighting progress achieved and next steps at every stage. With Dock’s customer onboarding templates, this becomes really streamlined and easy. 

Incorporate quick wins into the onboarding process. Change is hard. You can make that pill easier to swallow by helping your new customers achieve quick wins early on. A short TTV and quick success boosts confidence and helps others get aligned and on board. 

Tailor your resources for different stakeholder profiles. When you’re uploading resources to your Dock workspace — from training sessions to implementation guides to case studies — consider what would be the most compelling for each kind of stakeholder. Don’t assume they’ll find content or assets on your website. Put them front and center in your client's workspace.

Offer a clear escalation path for technical or adoption challenges. If a product champion gets frustrated during onboarding, you don’t want them complaining to the executive sponsor. Use Dock’s contact cards to dynamically auto-populate the contact info for the best points of contact for your customers, so they always know exactly who to reach out to for help. 

3. Maintain alignment with multithreading

Multithreading means creating and building relationships with multiple stakeholders—not just one key contact. 

Just like a sewing job that uses multiple threads, the more stakeholders you have a healthy relationship with, the stronger the bond will be.

That means less chance of misalignment or losing a hold on the relationship. And fewer surprise cancellations.

The opposite is also true: if you only have one key point of contact, your relationship is fragile (and churn risk is probably high).

No two stakeholders are the same. Everyone has different personalities, priorities, and perspectives, which means they won’t all respond the same way to the same approach. 

Plus, even if you have external alignment between you and your client stakeholders, they may not have internal alignment. The only way to ensure they’re aligned with each other is to multithread your relationships and get a pulse check from everyone involved.

For multithreading to work, you need to cater your approach and communication to different stakeholders based on their power-interest levels and their personas. The stronger your network within the company, the greater chance there is of success.

It can be a team effort. Madison, our Customer Success Lead here at Dock, prioritizes her stakeholder relationships and pulls in other team members to help: 

“My order of importance here is champion, then department manager/execs, then power users. See if any of your execs have connections to their execs and ask them to reach out to engage. If the top-down approach doesn't work, go bottom-up and find those individual contributors.”

Eloise (from Autogen AI) tailors cadences for ongoing engagement based on each stakeholder’s role — weekly or biweekly calls with end-users, then monthly and QBR calls with executive sponsors while also trying to maintain a flow of communication between each level of stakeholder. 

When Wynne Brown led Sales & CS at GitHub, she told us she replaced customer “check-ins” with more content-driven engagement. They ran quarterly education sessions for every customer to keep them engaged at a deeper level.

💡 Pro Tip: To get greater visibility into client alignment, create open communication channels like shared Slack channels or Dock workspaces where your client stakeholders can collaborate openly with your team and each other. The fewer conversations that happen behind closed doors, the better.

4. Keep alignment with business reviews

As time goes on, your CS team needs to continue engaging and communicating with the different stakeholders as needed, especially leading up to and during renewals. 

Renewal decisions come from the stakeholders who have high power and high interest, so they’re the ones you want to keep happy and engaged with working towards desired outcomes. 

A simple yet effective way to keep your clients engaged is with quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and/or executive business reviews (EBRs). 

QBRs sometimes get a bad rap, because a common mistake customer success managers make is to use QBRs to showcase metrics that matter to the CS team, such as customer health score. 

But your customers don’t care about their health scores. They care about the value you and your services/products bring to them. 

Why did they sign up with you in the first place? What problem are you solving for them? 

Articulate the answers to these questions in your QBRs, and you’ll have much more satisfied and loyal customers. Focus on the client's needs and the deliverables that matter to them. 

Eloise from AutogenAI asks an important question that every CS team should ask: 

“At the end of the day, you should be asking yourself, ‘What does a customer of ours need to be doing to ensure that they are sticking to the product, that they see value in the service that we provide, and that coming out of the implementation, there is a likelihood for them to renew?’” 

Keep stakeholders aligned with Dock

Stakeholder management isn’t sexy, but it’s one of the key elements to effective customer success. 

Identifying who your stakeholders are, the power and interest levels they hold, and their ideal outcomes puts you miles ahead of other customer success teams. 

And while it’s never truly easy dealing with a diverse group of stakeholders, using Dock makes it a heck of a lot easier — from pre-sales, to onboarding, to renewals and beyond. 

Sign up with Dock today for free and you’ll be well on your way to creating a more aligned stakeholder experience. 

Client Stakeholder Management FAQs

What are client/customer stakeholders? 

A client/customer stakeholder may or may not be the end-user, but they can still play a crucial role in decision-making and implementation (and budget). 

Think of the executive team (CEO, COO, or CFO), directors or VPs, or even board members as stakeholders, while the customers who use your product/service on a day-to-day basis are also stakeholders. And you may have partnerships where there are more and even unexpected stakeholders. 

This can include outside investors, regulators, or maybe even community leaders who have a vested interest in the product and work you and the client are doing. 

An example in the B2B world could be that your end-users are the ones that will need to know how to use the product and may love how easy it is to use your product, but if they aren’t using it in such a way that generates revenue for their company, then the other stakeholders (i.e., CFO or board members - who don’t use it every day), may not see the value in renewing the account when the time comes. 

What is stakeholder management in customer success? 

Stakeholder management in customer success is a blend of long-term relationships, data alignment, and expectation setting. By identifying the proper stakeholders, including those who hold power and/or interest, and clearly communicating with them throughout the customer experience, you stand a much greater chance at being successful in customer success. 

What is the difference between internal and external stakeholders?

Internal stakeholders are people within your organization, like Customer Success team members or project managers, who contribute directly to the success of the project. 

External stakeholders, on the other hand, are those outside the organization, such as investors, clients, or partners, who have a vested interest in the project. Understanding the balance between these groups is key to stakeholder analysis and maintaining alignment throughout the project lifecycle.

Client stakeholders are therefore known as external stakeholders.

How do you keep stakeholders aligned in customer success? 

Create relationships that are built on trust and transparency with your clients. Create shared success plans and consistent communication schedules for different stakeholders and implement QBRs that demonstrate the value and problems you are solving for your clients. 

You can even onboard seamlessly and keep your data organized in Dock. You can use this to create shared success plans with your clients so everyone knows what’s going on at any given time. 

Create an account map to keep organized on who is who in each org. This will help you:

• Understand your clients
• Communicate effectively
• Build trust & strong relationships 
• Manage and exceed expectations
• Make it easy 
• Make it repeatable