The Jasons Take On...

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Episode Description Join us when we speak with Jay Nathan. Jay’s the CCO for Higher Logic and one of the co-founders of Gain Grow Retain.

In this episode, Jay is going to talk to us his recent blog post and newsletter on long term value and growth.

Guest: Jay Nathan Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic

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Transcript Jason Nobel: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble, here in London, and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason. Hello, Jason. Hi. We've not done a podcast for a good couple of, a couple of months now, Jason. I know but we've been hard at work. There's a lot of stuff going on in the background and I have had to cancel a couple that we had in the works. Not cancel, postpone. And one of those that we've had to cancel, sorry, postpone is the one that we've got on today. We've got the one and only Jay Nathan back with us. Massive. Welcome back, Jay. You've been writing some incredible blogs and articles. Newsletters recently. And there was one that really made me think and resonated with some great conversations I was having in London with some peers, some friends about. About the long game with customer success and it really resonated. And I think, I would love, as I said at the time, [00:01:00] love to get you on. It's only taken me six weeks to actually manage to find a slot that works with all. Jay, welcome back sir. How have you been?

jay nathan: I've been great. Thanks Jason. It's been a busy summer and so you know, it, the timing has worked out perfectly as we talked about before the show glad to be back. Thanks for having me. I always enjoy talking to the Jason's.

Jason Nobel: I, so you said both. Super, super excited and this is gonna be a great one for those of you that don't know Jay, and I don't think there are many people out there who listen, I know him. Jay's the chief customer officer at High Logic. He's one of the founders of Gain, grow, retain. A phenomenal community out there around commer commercial customer success, leadership around customer success. And if you're not already part of that community, do join. Jay's worked in leadership roles. I think in all of the post-sales, the traditional post-sales, customer facing part of the business.

A and you have built up a really phenomenal way of, I think thinking is the only way to describe it thinking and [00:02:00] how to do. Business and drive customer outcomes. And you've got some really superb experience. And you did a podcast where us, Matt, it's six months ago. It's ridiculous. The beginning of the year, which seems like yesterday, a again, in response to one of your newsletters, but talking about strategic behavior I don't know how that six months ago, But what have you been up to so far for 2023? Jay? We're we're now in, in H two. What, how's the year been so far for you?

jay nathan: Yeah, it's it really is crazy how quick the year's flown by. I don't know if many people know this about my job, but I'm the chief customer officer at Higher Logic, but I also, I. For one of, we have two business units and for one of those business units I run sales product our entire go-to market around, around that as well, including customer success and the backend of the customer relationship after the sale. And I've been getting a lot of, a lot, just a lot more exposure to what it looks like to run a full business, right? Not just thinking [00:03:00] about the customer experience and the customer success part of it, but also the, how do we go win in the market and how do we compete with those that we're competing with?

How do we make a name for ourselves? And so that's been a big part of my focus this year. I started doing that. Early last year, maybe April, q2, early Q2 of last year, calendar, q2. And it's just been a pleasure. I came from running my own business. I sold the company to Higher Logic, so I like to have, I like to have my hands in a little bit more than just customer success, which I think, A lot of the things that I'm writing about these days are way beyond the scope of customer success. You probably see that it's really more how to think about SaaS, how to think about, the type of businesses that we're running within this bigger world of business. So I'm just having a lot of fun exploring that. But that's been keeping me busy along with family and friends and all that kind of stuff.

Jason Nobel: It's like you, you weren't doing enough previously, so you've now expanded at all.

jay nathan: I always tell people, if you wanna learn about customer success, don't read about customer [00:04:00] success. Go read about everything else. Learn about finance, learn about sales, learn about marketing. Cuz you have to understand. A business to really understand customer success because you don't deliver customer success unless you have a successful business. Anyway, we maybe didn't,

Jason Nobel: I think you, you're so right, and Jason and I with some great guests on our own, we've had conversations around this and we all know there's a, I think it's a period of change for what we've called customer success over the last five, 10, even 15 years. And it is it's that wider commercial revenue responsibility, visibility. What is it really? And we've said, but I think that breadth across all the different roles, how it interacts with them, what it's really about, and what it means to this other functions is so critical. I think. Jay what prompted me back in June to reach out to you was the post that you did written about playing the long game. And how Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, how they invest as part of Bashi Hathaway and they're I think they [00:05:00] called it their sit on your ass investing approach. And it was surreal cuz only the day before I'd been talking to someone about just this need to think longer term about not just about investing, but about customers, about growth. And it's something that I think. In SaaS and particularly in the startup world, we're challenged with, we've got short term, quarter to quarter approaches, much shorter, short term focused on roi and particularly for those early stage businesses it's. You can't just say, Hey, I think about it for 35 years. When Warren Buffet was talking about how long has he had Coca-Cola as a company, an investment, 35 plus years. Yeah. So that there's a disconnect, but I think we've got to introduce that way of thinking and that business philosophy approach that how do we change, how do we think about things differently? And I don't think there's a switch that we can all flip. To make that change. But I'd love to hear your thinking. What made you write the article? What [00:06:00] was drew you into that?

jay nathan: Yeah. Like I said, I, so I just, I'm gonna put in a plug for another podcast that I love. It's called Founders. And this guy, David Sra is his name. He, I don't know him, he doesn't know me, but this guy's amazing. He actually had dinner with Charlie Munger as part of what he's been able to do with his podcast. He's a young guy like us. He's probably younger than us.

Jason Whitehead: I don't think that word means what you think it does.

jay nathan: We'll have to compare notes, but He so his basically what his podcast is all about is he goes and reads, biographies and autobiographies of. Incredible people. Most of them being founders of companies. But also like right now, I was just on my daily walk, I was listening to his podcast, one of his podcasts on Winston Church on Winston Churchill. So he's done Kobe Bryant. He's done Michael Jordan and what you he does a great job of pulling out the real stories behind. These people and their incredible businesses, their incredible accomplishments, and then [00:07:00] correlating their behaviors and their activities and their mindset across one another. He's just very good at it. So if he, if you haven't listened to that podcast yet, I would highly recommend it. It's been an inspiration to me. But let's see. You asked a question, and now i have already gotten lost, but I started listening.

Jason Nobel: What prompted you to write the article? That, that, into it?

jay nathan: I went and re-read it today in the first line. In that article, it says I've gone down a rabbit hole. Cuz I had listened to a couple of podcasts on Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet. I had been reading the book, the Snowball for a long time. I listened to several of his podcasts. I ended up reading another book called the Dow of Charlie Munger, which I also linked to in that article. Would recommend it. Just all these little aphorisms and quotes that Charlie Munger says. Just simply brilliant wisdom is what I would chalk it up to. And I was like, These guys think about the businesses that they invest in a lot differently than most of the companies that I've worked with before. Think about their business and I've worked [00:08:00] mostly in b2b SS my entire career, right? But they think long game, to your point, to sit on your ass investing Charlie and Warren Buffet will tell you. That they feel like they've probably made 10 decisions in their entire careers of their 50, 60, 70 year careers that have made Berkshire Hathaway what it is today, including like investing in Coca-Cola in 1988.

Whereas, we all feel like we have to be constantly moving, changing, doing new things, trying some, you can't. Appear to be sitting on your ass. But what is the strategy where we really take a long approach? And instead of trying to do big things every quarter, it's just no, let's do the little thing today to make us 1% better. And then we'll do the same thing tomorrow. We'll do the same thing the next day. Same thing the next day. And that's called compound compounding, right? We all know that from our. Hopefully our personal investments, compounding interest. Einstein said it was the eighth, Warner of the world. Those that under those that understand it, benefit [00:09:00] from it, those that don't understand it will basically, they'll be paying it. And I think, if we think about our companies in the same way, then we have a real opportunity to build some really amazing companies over time. But we do have a short term focus, and it's largely due to the way that. And this is not a knock, and I'd love to hear y'all's perspective on this, but it's largely due to the way these companies have to be funded because technology companies are expensive to get off the ground.

So the question is how do we get them funded and yet hold onto that long-term. Vision for the market, for our product, the solution that we provide to the market so that we can be not only just a player that we can, turn around and flip this company in two or three years and sell it and make a million dollars, 10 million, a hundred million, whatever it is, but how do we really solve the problem for the long term? Let's make ourselves billionaires, not millionaires, in 30 years. You just have to wait a little longer. Anyway, can we that up for you guys?

Jason Whitehead: Yeah. No I love that perspective too. And I, I think there's probably also a distinction [00:10:00] between the funders and investors like a buffet who this is my, what's my return as an investor compared to a founder or CEO who's trying to build this business and please those people. So what's your thoughts on. Trying to get that longer perspective in, in that your ass approach, how should the executives of a company try to drive that and what are the implications for how they structure and fund and build their CS programs?

jay nathan: Yeah I think the crux of it is really how do you think about making your money on these companies? We'll sit with that for a second. How do the executives and the investors intend to make their money? Is it cashflow? And is it profits or is it enterprise valuation? And I think what in our world, at least in earlier stage companies, it's all about the valuation, right? It's all about, it's like buying a house and flipping it, is the way I think about it, right? You're gonna up, you're gonna, you're gonna, analogy, yeah. Put hardwood floors in and you're gonna sell it to the next buyer. That's like another private [00:11:00] equity firm or another, VC firms usually come in multiple at once, but I think you first have to think about, okay, founders of companies and investors in companies should make money.

They should make a lot of money, right? Because they put a lot of risk on the table when they do it. But the question is, how do you think about how you're gonna make money? Are you gonna actually build a profitable business? Or are you going to build a fast growing business that the enterprise value is growing faster than the cash flows? It's interesting if you go another. Fascinating human being to read about is Jeff Bezos, and from the very early days in the early in the nineties, mid nineties when he started writing his shareholder letters, they, he's, he made a statement that I believe they still hold true to today, which is when they have the option to prioritize future cash flows or present day revenue per the generally accepted accounting principles, they're always gonna choose future cash flows, right?

If you have cash, [00:12:00] You are in charge. So it's also about having control. Having control to drive your vision. In the long run for a company, the more of your company you own, the less of it you give away. The more you can have control over what you do with it and where you take it in the long run. You don't have to take those profits off the table. You don't have to take that debt on to leverage investors. You can actually invest in your market, take those profits and pour them back in. So it's building the snowball. So you asked a very specific question though, Jason. How does that apply to customer success teams? I think, you, we've probably talked about this last time, but. If you think about the long game, then you think about the entire company being in customer success. I was on a pod, another podcast a couple weeks ago, and we talked about SaaS companies are customer success machines. There is no SaaS without customer success. There is no customer success without SaaS. It's part of the operating model, right? The real customer-centric elements of SaaS are the business model. Really in some of the,[00:13:00] the technology that's evolved underneath how we deliver the business model from a product standpoint, those are the real innovations. It's actually not customer success. The real innovation is you can get out of a contract anytime. You don't have to pay me a million dollars upfront for software. You can pay me a hundred thousand dollars this year or Right. Whatever.

Jason Nobel: Do you think? But based on that, what do founders, executives, is there a how do they shift their thinking to think more long term? Is there something they can change or is it just it will naturally evolve. You've got your early stage founder that has to think more about that shorter term, what we're trying to do, those shorter timeframes. And then as you perhaps, Go public, you go, i p o, different investors come in. Does that thinking change or is there a natural evolution or are there some fundamental changes that we need to think about making to generally think more long term and shift our shift what that value timeframe is that we're looking at?

jay nathan: Yeah, I feel like it's [00:14:00] built into the founders, right? The executive team. If you're gonna go choose a company to work for what, what is the psychology of the founders? I think it's hard. People are hard to change. And it doesn't necessarily go from, I gotta think short term now to, I'm probably going be thinking long term.

Like I like to see a company who. Again, Bezos, like in the early days, he was raising a lot of money for Amazon, but he was very clear in his 1997 letter to shareholders. He said Hey look. I'm just going remind you, this is our long term vision. And again, you're not always going see things show up on the short term income statement. You're gonna see it in future cash flows. That's what we're gonna prioritize. If you're not in for that ride, then it's cool, go invest somewhere else. But. But know that's our strategy and that will not change. And it hasn't changed. I'm sure you could argue that it has over time. They've had to become a little bit more short term focused, but not really. They've continued to invest. So the pessimist in me, Jason says, [00:15:00] you either have it or you don't. You don't really change. Because when you go public, things get much more shortterm f short term focused, they get quarterly focused. So

Jason Whitehead: how do you think would look differently if I initial stage investors said, Hey, we're up here for, we don't want an exit for 10 or 15 years. How would that change the way management approaches growing the company?

jay nathan: I think you would probably do more organic selling sales in marketing has gotten super, super expensive. You just look at what's happening with Twitter and Facebook and these, and as these social media, outlets become more mature. They just, their reach gets lower, the cost gets higher. So from a, just from a pure social media perspective, it, and it's a crowded world We live in everywhere else, not just social media, but the airways, the, the streaming services we, we subscribe to but I think you would build, you would do a few more things organically. Say I feel like, when a VC comes in, and this is a gross generalization, so I'll just [00:16:00] preface by saying that, but typically when you get an, a round of investment, okay. That's a serious round of investment. And those VCs expect you to spend money quickly. And they give you a lot, but then they expect you to quickly turn that into future cash flows for them. Or future cash flows for business. And so you hire a lot of salespeople, you hire a lot of BDRs, you hire a lot of marketing folks. Maybe before you even know what works, right? You have a general sense of what's working in your go-to market, but you don't have a real firm grasp on how to scale it yet. Yeah. Throwing money at that problem doesn't necessarily solve the problem. It sometimes just makes it worse. Now you're, if inefficient, I think you're seeing that, right?

You're seeing that and you hear and read on LinkedIn every day and read these articles about, over 60% of the Salesforce is under 50% of their quota for the year. Something like that. There's all kinds of metrics out there. We've invested in sales and marketing to a point that it's not sustainable and scalable yet because [00:17:00] scalable cause we talked about last time isn't about just making it bigger. It's about making each incremental thing we do a little bit more efficient. So you add another customer if she cost you a little bit less to add the next one than it did the than it did the last one. I think

Jason Nobel: I, I was gonna say, Jay you point there about, naturally your founders as an execs have to be, it's a certain type of individual. It really is. Know, and they have, they have, they've got to be more willing to take those risks and quite often be prepared to shift very quickly. And change. So there's a natural short-term thinking. And I love your Jeff Bezos. I think absolutely. Amazon to start with was a bookstore doing this right. And his is what's missing sometimes that very clear, long-term vision, cuz Jeff's vision has been to be the most customer-centric business on the planet and a big, bold statement like that. And I, there are some things that Amazon do. [00:18:00] And they do him so well. And absolutely. You could see where he is going and it actually, not changing the conversation, but you wrote another post about being customer-centric shortly after this long journey one and how a lot of companies think they are, but many, most aren't. How would you define and it's great because I love. This is almost bringing it full circle. The fact that Jeff's vision is around being customer-centric. How would you define what it really means? What does being customer-centric really mean for us today?

jay nathan: Great. That's a great parallel, by the way. Very. I'm sorry to do this. I gotta let my dog in cause he's scratching up

Jason Nobel: some background music while that's happening.

jay nathan: Sorry about that. When everybody else leaves the house, then the dog comes. You're in charge, my friend. Yeah, exactly. So if you think about some of the things that Amazon has built as a customer obsessed company it's not just.[00:19:00] It's not customer service per se. They weren't throwing humans at it to be more empathetic and high touch. They were designing process, customer centric processes from scale and actually even before that, they were building the infrastructure to do what, to provide the lowest cost. Goods to their customers.

So that was part of their strategy, right? It's like Walmart, like Costco, right? Is we're going build this massive infrastructure and buying power to bring the lowest cost to consumers. So right there that's completely different than what we do in the technology world, right? We want to charge as much as possible for our software because we spent a lot of money developing it. But everything over time on Amazon tends to get less expensive except for their prime subscription, of course. But you're you're building customer centricity into. The entire thing is a little bit like Southwest Airlines too, right? They have a strategy of being a low cost carrier. They know who their customer is. [00:20:00] They're not targeting the business traveler. They're targeting the everyday run of the mill traveler, and they're going to give them the lowest cost best experience that they possibly can. Is it going be a white glove experience? No. And they tell you that upfront. So sorry, tangent. But if you think about all the other things that Amazon has done, prime is a great example. They rolled that out their board was like, are you sure you want to do this? Shipping is so expensive, is this going work? But he thinks about it like a flywheel, right? You design these customer centric processes in, it drives more customers to the site, which drives more people to sell in the marketplace because they also. Allow their competitors to sell against them on their platform. Very customer centric. They allow reviews, positive and negative on their products and their competitors' products. Very customer centric. So at every step of the way, Amazon has optimized for customer centricity, not by employing an army of people to talk to customers. It's a B2C of course, but by [00:21:00] engineering it into the way that their platform and their offerings work. So it's just a completely different mindset. So my question is, I, tying it back to customer success, I think of CSMs as a channel. CSMs are a channel through which you can communicate to customers through which you enable customers.

But it's a very expensive channel, right? Whenever you have a human involved doing a high touch thing, it's expensive. I don't care if you sell something for $4,000 a year or $400,000 a year, it's expensive to assign a human. You have to manage that human. You have to coach them, train them, all that kind of stuff, right? And then their performance. You have to monitor it, but. In some places, we need those humans to do those things, especially as you get up toward the 400,000 side of the equation, right on the a r. But how if you were going to build your company from scratch and that customer centricity from scratch, wouldn't you start the way Bezos did and build it into your product first? And a lot of product teams don't think that way, right? They're building a [00:22:00] solution. They're not thinking about how it gets implemented. They're not thinking about Know how the customer has to use it every day or they're not thinking about how to make it less and less effort for the customer to use it every day necessarily. They're just getting more features out. So

Jason Nobel: It's fascinating you've said that , because you, you're right and I think that's what a lot of business businesses are challenged with, but is this massive chasm and there is a gap between leaders, founders, people like Jeff Bezos and all these other great. And. I think a lot of them are B2C companies that, that actually have a better understanding as to what it means. A lot of them, not all of them, but is there always going to be that big gap and can some companies and people just not make that shift in thinking, like you say, we're just going to stick products and features out on it.

How do we stop that? How do you really make everything. Customer centric by design. Customer obsessed by, I don't like the phrase obsessed, applies negativity but centric, customer [00:23:00] focused, building everything from design. How do you get that built in? Because I think that's what a lot of people are missing, and I think you do. You get some amazing product teams out there that build great features, great products, great services, but they're not thinking with the end customer in mind all the time about value.

jay nathan: I think it a couple of things come to mind when you say that. One is you, and you said it earlier, the vision has to be really strong. What do you want to do for your market? How do you want to do it? What do you want to do and how do you want to do it? And then I think, one of the things that also comes out in these stories that I've been studying is that with all of the greats, There's usually not a lot of committee decision making.

Yep. There there's somebody who has that strong vision. It's not a vision that's being created by, putting a bunch of people in a room and saying, Hey, let's brainstorm and figure this out. And that's something that that I've [00:24:00] as I've reflected on the reading that I've been doing, it's like I'm a big believer in teamwork to get things done, and I always have been, but that's execution. When it comes to setting a vision and choosing a direction, I think you have to have somebody. Who is bold enough to pick a direction and get the team rally behind it and say, no, we're going go this way. And then it comes back to the control too. Do you own enough of your business back to the financing piece?

Do you own enough of your business to be able to say, look, this is the way we're going do it, and come hell or high water, we're going burn the bridge behind us and we're going go. And I can say that because I have that much, I think there's a lot of companies that don't have founders. They may have that vision. But they've given away so much of their business in terms of how much money they've had to raise and how much of the equity they've had to share, and how much of the, quote unquote advice they take from people who know how to do it better than they do or have been close to it, maybe never been operators. The investors, and I'm not knocking them, we need them, but it's [00:25:00] hard, right? It, those two things. I think if they're lacking, then you're not going to get this long term purview. Does that make sense? Yeah. It.

Jason Nobel: Thinking that you need because I'm the same. I, it's about teamwork. I talk about we rather than I, but I, you need those two types of people. You've got your visionary and they've gotta be someone that's got an idea, that focus and that, do those great ideas come from committees? Probably not. It probably needs one person wandering, one vision. And I think it is then that it's the coming together of those two groups, and maybe the ones that are very successful are the ones that, it's where those two groups work really well together. You can still work, very founder led under the founder's vision, but you've got that more collaborative group function that can focus on delivering execution.

jay nathan: Those are [00:26:00] companies to work in too, right? When you're, everybody's pursuing something, it's like bigger than themselves, it they're much more fun companies to work in.

Jason Nobel: A absolutely, and it's a great, it's a very it's a very ambitious and powerful place to be where you're all trying to focus on something that's bigger than all of you, what you're doing.

jay nathan: Yeah.

Jason Whitehead (2): I've worked with several organizations where people are very committed to the organization and very kind and want building a, they want a high performing team. They believe in all this stuff, but sometimes they suffer from not giving enough direction or not being quick enough to say no and saying No, we're going this other direction.

Jason Whitehead: So I think it is that tough balance of, it's when to have a committee versus when to be very clear. If you have a vision how to quickly correct people who are straying off of that and bring them back. Jay, when you were talking about giving away too much of your ownership, but I can't remember who said it, but, the golden rule of he who has the gold makes the rules and I think there's, something to that as well too.

jay nathan: Yeah. That might have been a buffet quote actually.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah. So I'm curious though and Jay, from your perspective, you've worked with a lot of companies, especially as it [00:27:00] relates to being customer-centric, that think they're customer-centric, but probably aren't. What are some, can you give a couple of examples of. How that manifests itself in a B2B org and how the people listening to this podcast might be able to say, oh, that's us, or we now recognize that we're not as customer customer centric as we should be, and being able to recognize that and figuring out how to pivot.

jay nathan: Yeah. I think, one of the telltale signs is, again, if you're throwing people at it and you expect, if you think customer centricity is. Having a highly empathetic support interaction or or having a CSM who will, compliment you and, tell you happy birthday when it's your birthday, and so celebrate when your kids graduate from high school. This is all lovely things, right? And I'm not knocking that. Please. I hope nobody takes it that way, but. That is not customer centricity, right? That is just what kind human beings do [00:28:00] when you have a relationship, right? Yeah. My, my buddy Jeff, you guys know Jeff Kme? Have you heard this guy? No. You would love to talk with him sometime. He's got a little podcast of his own and is very, he's very articulate and But he did a post just this week.

He was like, Hey, I've reviewed, I've had a bunch of people come to me for executive CS roles and say, because I, he's a consultant. He talks to a lot of companies and. 50% of the profiles that I look about look at, talk about being empathetic and customer centric. And he's like, why don't you just cut that and go straight toward be a business owner, right? Prove that you're a business owner, you know how to drive revenue, you know how to drive you know how to drive renewals and retention and customer advocacy. Like talk about business outcomes and guess what Sales teams should be empathetic and customer centric too. So you're not differentiating yourself by saying you're empathetic or you're customer centric. I just thought it was an interesting parallel, but yeah, look at where you're throwing people at problems. because if you're throwing too many people at problems, [00:29:00] there's a great chance that as soon as the business starts to falter at all, you're gonna have to get rid of those people. Yeah. You see it happening all over the place right now. And guess what? If that's your method of customer centricity, it's now gone, right? Again, are we taking, are we innovating on behalf of the customer or are we just competing with our competitors? Are we copying what they're doing just to keep up? Or are we doing something new and innovative? That's the product team, right? In the executive team, they have to have that vision. Do you have a vision that extends beyond. The next funding round for the company. Where are we going the long run with this thing? Where does it go? Do you, what else?

Jason Nobel: That, that's where, that longer, so you know you want the response to be, yes, I've got a longer term vision and it's not changed. This is my long term. Moonshot if you're, it's that really big ambitious goal. This is what I'm doing, this is what I'm going to do. Yeah. And that doesn't change. That doesn't change quarter to quarter. [00:30:00] Yes. You've got the shorter term, more tactical, sometimes strategic, but you've still got, this is where we're going. This is the goal that we're trying to get to. And I love, there was a thing you talked about in your post the original one about the long game. And that infamous letter from Jeff Bezos back in 2013 to his shareholders when he says that Amazon focused on their customers, not their competitors.

And that's a such a big difference. It's not, I'm not worried about the competitive market. Of course he is, but I'm still focused on that long-term thing. I'm not going to just add features and functions and benefits to differentiate us. Just cause customers are asking for them. What I'm going to do is do something that's going to create that long-term viral growth loop that just keeps adding more value and delivering more value for them. But I, I think that's, it's a disconnect. I think a lot of us are struggling with that today. I, and particularly in times where there's economic challenges, cashflow becomes so much [00:31:00] more important. You've gotta sometimes focus on the shorter term, but I think you always still need that, right? This is what we're trying to do.

jay nathan: I got a question for you guys. Have you ever seen a customer stay for a long time because you built a feature that they begged for years or for quarters and quarters? Usually you do that kind of stuff and then. Don't have to be pessimistic about it, but some business change happens on their end. The stakeholders leave and you still lose the customer. So you're much better off if you're looking for the next wave of innovation for those customers in applying it there, that's not a customer success function per se, right? CSMs can contribute to that and they can, they have good visibility into it. Sorry, my dog. I'm gonna have to go close the door now. Can you hear it?

Jason Nobel: Just one little bark feed me. Ok.

jay nathan: Good. Doesn't sound like a little one to me. Thank you for zoom. But so yeah, that is [00:32:00] the biggest, that's the biggest telltale sign, right? Is where is your product headed and is it headed in a way, in a direction that. Everybody on the team believes in, or is it, are you just, trying to get any feature you can in there to try to save a customer? That's a telltale sign. Going back to the last question you asked Jason, I.

Jason Whitehead: Great. No, I think that's a great point. Just one, one thing before I move on as well too, cause I see we're getting close to time here, I'd love to talk about being long-term focused and all the things that we've talked about, but Jason brought up quickly in these current times when things are a bit of a downturn, we're seeing some companies, really slowing down and either laying off staff, whether it's CS or otherwise and things like that. What should companies be doing to balance their need to be long term customer centric and CS focused versus. The short term realities of the marketplace and the economy today?

jay nathan: To survive and be viable. And, to make it to the next stage, you gotta free up cash flow. So the first thing, it sounds crazy but to be [00:33:00] customer centric, you actually have to be able to control your own investing again, and to control your own investing, you have to be in control of your p and l and your cash funds. And I think the first thing to do is what you see a lot of people doing, which is you gotta cut the fat and you've got to get really down to basics.

If you're doing eight or 10 things as a business, like strategically, it's too many. You gotta pick one or two and you gotta go all in on those. Whatever you believe is going to be the future of the business. Even Jeff Bezos in all of the, and I've read most of the shareholder letters cause I'm reading Invent and Wonder right now, which is, it's basically all the writings of Bezos. And in every single one he talks about scrutinizing cost, right? And be, if you're going to, if you're going to provide. A a high value, low cost solution to a customer, then you yourself have to watch your cost. And I think it's an area where over the past decade we've, as an industry gotten lax, right?

Is just we spend, right? We talked about sales and marketing earlier, but it's not just that. It's [00:34:00] we've, we spend on perks and all these things that we conflate with culture, right? But it really is about. Making yourself viable so that you can be the last man standing last person standing and serve your customers in the long run. I don't know, that's just one thing that hops to mind, but what do you guys think?

Jason Nobel: I think you, you're so right and this I'm we could talk about this particularly with you, Jay for hours and this, I love the way this conversation's gone over all sorts of different directions. It's a challenge and I think. You've gotta look at businesses now. How do they grow? And as I said, particularly look at where we are. Look at the challenges we've got in the economies locally. We've got environmental challenges. The world shifting and is very challenging right now.

And I think to balance all of those things together is tough. You've gotta invest and attract the right people, the right team to help you deliver and execute, but you can't overdo it. You've also gotta make sure that you're building up [00:35:00] a function that can scale and grow and it becomes very difficult. And I think my, my, my take on it I don't think there is a single answer to any of this, but I think a lot of these founders doing the right thing. I, and I think with any of this, it's the right person coming in that's got the right mindset, that's willing to take risks. And we need those people. And sometimes it's not gonna be right.

Sometimes it will fail. But what those people are able to do is pick it all back up and go and try something again with what they've learned. Yeah, and I think that's, that for me is probably the take from this. I don't think, as much as, I hate to admit, I don't think there is a magic switch that we can flip for any of this. And I think there are some phenomenal examples out there. And going right back to our first thing about that. Think about the longer term, make sure you're all attuned to that vision. Have you found it? Really come back and articulate that vision, and [00:36:00] not just internally, but that's very important.

But articulate it and say it out to the market. Tell people what you're doing. The idea that, Jeff Bezos publishing, there's a book, like you say, of his shareholder, and it's a great read. But who else does that? Not many people. Yeah. And it's a different way of thinking, right? If that makes sense. So I think, yeah. Yeah. I think there's lots of great things for everyone to listen, to hear, to take away, say we do need to make these little incremental changes. And you say It is, it's those 1% changes. It's the idea of. The aggregation of marginal gains by all of these little shifts that you don't notice suddenly massive changes. And I think you've got to think short term to what's that small change I can make today, but what's it gonna do for the long term?

Jason Whitehead: Jay, I think also you hit on something interesting of the, preserve your cash and that there is a lot of fat out there. And in fact, a lot of the CS teams that I'm working with and some of the personalities you described, like very empathetic, but that's not this. I think there is, [00:37:00] Even today, a lot of fat and CS teams, either the wrong people, the wrong role, or what you said about. Software, the price always goes up, it never goes down. You the opposite of Bezos. And what just occurred to me as I was listening to you was how quickly we forgotten some of the lessons of the lockdown where everyone was losing all their customers very quickly doing anything to keep them and.

How do we lower our prices? How do we extend our contracts? How do we do what, whatever it needs to be just to survive? And it seems like right now people have forgotten some of those lessons that, that, we need to survive first and Maslow's hierarchy before we can get long term thriving. So I appreciate you sharing your insight that really triggered things for me as well too. I'm like, oh, I hadn't thought of that in a while. It's

jay nathan: Sitting on the airplane. You gotta put your mask on before you help others.

Jason Nobel: Absolutely. But that's what people forget about. But it is that mentality. Yeah. I, Jay, look this is, I'm going to break from tradition because I think you've already answered what we were going to ask. We're not going to give you our traditional bold challenge question I, I. I love the conversations with you. They are great and we could talk for [00:38:00] hours more, but I and I think there's more of these to come.

If you're going to keep these emails coming and I'm going to read it again and say, Jay, I need to speak again. But this so topical, it's front of mind for everyone. These are challenges that everyone's going through now, so it's just superb. I, let me give you a shameless plug for those few people that don't know who you are. Shameless plug for what you're doing, how people can reach out to you.

jay nathan: Yeah, sure. LinkedIn is the easiest. Just you can find me on LinkedIn by typing in Jay Nathan. Customer success.io is my newsletter that Jason has referred to a few times, and if you haven't joined it yet, please sign up for Gain Grow retain gain grow retain.com, and it's a wonderful. Set of resources and people and networking. It's a community for customer success leaders and the more people that are in it, the more valuable it is. We have over 12,000 members now. Fantastic. We have I'll put a plugin for this. We have an event, a live [00:39:00] event coming up in Denver, Colorado. We'll also be doing one in Salt Lake City area in Austin later this year. Denver is, I want to say August 29th. If you go to ganga retain.com, you can register for a spot in that it's free. Networking, food, fun. It's great. We really love these events but I really appreciate hanging out with you guys because I always think we have this higher level of discourse that you don't get in many places. And so I appreciate you, you always reaching out. No matter how long it takes us to schedule, I'll do it any day with you guys. So

Jason Nobel: just, man, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation with

jay nathan: you guys too.

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Episode Description Many CS organizations need to move from delivering high-touch services to every customer, to a more scalable approach. Developing a high-impact customer education program that enables customers to achieve success on their own is one approach for reducing the need for high-touch CS. In this episode, we sit down with Vanessa Neurohr, Vice President of Customer Success at MuckRack to learn how she has transformed and scaled her CS team by building out their customer education program.

Guest: Vanessa Neurohr Vice President of Customer Success at Muck Rack

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Transcript Jason Whitehead: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone, and welcome from sunny Washington DC to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast. I'm here with my partner in crime, Mr. Noble, over in the uk. Say hello, Jason. Hello,

Jason Noble: Jason. Hello everyone.

Jason Whitehead: There you go. And today we're really excited. We've got Vanessa Nero here and Vanessa is the VP of Customer Success at Muck Rack, which is a great PR related technology space that she'll be telling us about.

And I'm very fortunate I've had the chance to get to know Vanessa over the past year or so, and I've learned a lot about what she's been doing with her CS team at MuckRack. And they've seen some amazing growth as a. But also within the CS team, they've made some great strides in scaling and changing and she is going to tell us about her journey there.

So Vanessa has built a high-impact team and they've really taken some status to transform how they deliver customer success. And one key area has been, Evolving customer education and programs and [00:01:00] reducing the need for one-to-one customer engagements to really help all their customers be successful.

So today, Vanessa, we're looking forward to your experiences, your tips, any advice that you have, and just learning from you. So thank you so much for

joining us.

Vanessa: Thank you for having me. I'm really excited.

Jason Whitehead: Absolutely.

Why don't you just take us all off, just tell us a little bit about your background and your experience at MuckRack and about the company itself and just give us some context.

Vanessa: Yeah, a hundred percent. I joined Muck Rack in December of 2016 when we had about 15 employees at the company total, and at the time I was the second customer success hire at the company. So definitely doing a lot of tasks back then, wearing a lot of hats, everything from support. To onboarding, to helping with renewals and value selling there.

So I got to learn a lot about our product, our customer base, and the other functions within the company at the time too. And as the company's grown, I've been able to take on a growing list of responsibilities as well. And now leading the customer success department, which includes [00:02:00] over 50 employees. So went from essentially a.

Two to now 50 plus and growing. We're actually hiring for five more people this quarter within my department, so I'm really excited to be part of a growing company and a growing team, and I really enjoy the different functions that are now represented in the department. Two, which include customer support.

So we have a dedicated support team. We have a customer onboarding team that's really engaging in the higher touch, one-to-one facilitated trainings. And then we have our C S M team. They do own renewals. I know that's a hot topic too within the customer success world, but our C S M team does own the full cycle post onboarding.

And then last but not least, we have our newest function in the department, which is customer education. So really excited to chat more about that too.

Jason Noble: Vanessa. I've always enjoyed.

I was gonna say the growth in that team is quite incredible. What kind of spearheaded that, as you join as person number two, to see that growth over quite a short timeframe what kind of was the [00:03:00] catalyst to getting the growth and how has the team found it and what have the biggest challenges been to you growing that quickly?

Vanessa: Yeah, that's a great question. I give a lot of credit to the product itself. We have great product market fit, and that's ultimately the catalyst for growing my team. We have so many more customers that we ultimately wanna support, enable, train, and make sure they're getting value out of the product. So that's really been the catalyst for growing my team and specializing the team as well, so that we don't have.

Someone one role if, for example, trying to do everything under the sun, we really wanna specialize so that we're bringing the best of ourselves based on functional areas to our customer base. So our product has expanded definitely since I joined in 2016, but the core of our product has been the same. So we've really been able to maintain a lot of strong customer relationships for at least as long as I've been here.

But I know some of those predate me to joining the company. .

Jason Whitehead: That's great.

When, we've talked a lot before and it sounds like there's some customers that really do need a high touch, one-to-one model, but you've got a lot of smaller customers where either they [00:04:00] don't have the same needs or they're, or it's cost-prohibitive to do that.

Can you tell me a little bit about what your vision is for the customer education program and how you're switching the model in months working?

Vanessa: Yeah, absolutely. We decided to invest in customer education. 21. And I had the idea because we have such a fast growing small business customer base, and when I joined in 2016, it actually was realistic for me to talk to every single customer of ours, one-to-one.

But at the size and scale that we're at today, it's no longer possible. So how do we still bring a premium experience to small business customers knowing that we cannot. Communicate with them one-to-one when they come in the door. So that's where customer education comes into play. And I started out by hiring an instructional designer because that's really the foundation for strong customer education.

You wanna make sure you're bringing in if this is something that you want to invest in, that you're bringing in. Someone who understands all of the ins and outs around instructional design, knows [00:05:00] how to train adult learners, knows how to keep them engaged, knows how to structure curriculum or content in a way.

Keeps people wanting more. So that's where we started. I started by hiring our first ever instructional designer at M Rack. And then since then, that same individual has really expanded the function within my department and is now leading our customer education team as our manager of customer education.

And so now, We have another instructional designer on the team that reports into him. And then we also have an L m S administrator too, who's ensuring that all of our content within Skill Jar, which is the L M S platform that we use, is staying up to date, that our customers can continue to rely on all of our academy materials that our education team has developed.

Jason Noble: How did your customers find the transition? So going from that one-to-one relationship conversations. not doing it. How? How was the transition and kind of over what timeframe did it happen? Yes. Were customers happy [00:06:00] with it? Because I can imagine some quite challenging cus customer conversations cause it's a big shift, big change in your model.

Vanessa: That's an excellent question and it all comes down to internal enablement. If you are fundamentally ch changing the way that you're training or onboarding customers, your sales team needs to know that inside and out. So that's where we started. Our sales team needed to be brought up to speed on. Not just what we were changing, but why we were changing it so that way they could sell it in a way externally that really resonated with our customer base.

And we are still delivering a high touch onboarding experience for our mid-market and enterprise customers. So honestly, the biggest change through all of this is in small business or S M B. So we really spent a lot of time training our SMB reps. On what to say and why we're doing this. Without that internal enablement and messaging, I think you're setting your post-sale team up for failure.

Because what will happen, and what probably does [00:07:00] happen quite frequently is the sales team will say one thing and then once they become a customer, the experience does not align. Yeah. With what they heard during the sales process. So that's why. We did spend a lot of time up front there, and I know our manager of customer education here also has spent a lot of time building strong relationships within our sales team, so that way we can continue to move this forward in a way that doesn't hurt the customer experience, but actually maintains consistency from pre to post sale.

Jason Noble: How did the sales team find that then? Because it must have been a very, was it. What's the opposite of a sales enabler? If previously they were selling the ability to have relationships, and now for these small customers that's gone, did they find the sales more challenging?

And again were customers and prospects really receptive to this kind of more digital level of engagement. .

Vanessa: Yeah, that's a really good question too. And there's always a little bit of hesitation, right? Whenever you feel like you're taking something away. But we framed it, which is true, that this is a way to meet our customers where they [00:08:00] are.

Honestly, our customers within our S M B segment have a lot of jobs, a lot of hats that they wear. So PR tends to be one of many. Things that they own within their organization. So they don't always have time to schedule a one hour meeting with us. And it's actually better if they can learn on their own time how to use the product.

So that's really how we've been positioning it, which is the truth. And it's, that's how we communicated it to our sales team too. So it's not that we're taking something away. We in theory, are taking away the one-to-one training component, but we're bringing back a lot more because now you don't have to reach out to a human at muck rack to get value from it.

You can learn on your own time. You can choose to digest all of the information in one setting, or you can break it up for yourself and maybe do 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. That's the positioning and that's how we've communicated it to our sales team now. We definitely had to balance customers that were already in the onboarding process that weren't sold this [00:09:00] new experience with brand new customers that were coming in the door with this expectation.

So to your question around what was the prospect or customer reaction, we.

Sensitive to the fact that, we had customers to disrupt that just based on a change that we made on our side. So that's something that we had to be a little bit more patient with. And now we're at a stage where our sales team has been fully trained on this new way of training our small business customers to the point where, you know, a new customer that we're welcoming at this point that's what they expect.

They expect to go through our Muck Rack Academy versus having a one-to-one training with someone on our onboarding team.

Jason Noble: I think that

guys, I was just gonna say, Jess, I think the, I we lost you there for a second with the connection, Vanessa, but I think what you're saying, the, that transition is key.

And I think now you're in a position where your sales team understand it, your customers understand it. You've not got any of these kind of ones that are stocked like that. And it's a very clear [00:10:00] sales proposition now. And this is how you sell it and it works. And I think it's a great process to have gone.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah, so I'm curious when you first sat down and said, okay, we're going this direction. We've got the designer, the instructional designer in, but you've got a whole list of content that may need to be developed that doesn't exist right now, or is in the wrong format. Did we focus just on the product?

Do we focus on how to engage with us as a company? Do we focus on how to be better subject matter expertise and be better at PR in general? How did you map out where you wanted to go first and how long did it actually take you to start to have enough critical mass of content that you could make this transition?

Vanessa: Yeah, that's a really good question too. It did take some time. It took months to create the content, and the focus was on the platform specific knowledge that we wanted our customers to know. We have a lot of aspirations too, on industry level content that we wanna eventually train on and certify anyone, even if they're not a muck rack customer in.

But the near term [00:11:00] focus has. Been on product training and making sure that we can scale that because that's what, if people don't know how to use the product, then they won't be engaging with us for long anyway. So that's where we really focused upfront and it did take months and it took a lot of cross-functional partnership.

And that's why when we first brought on that instructional designer, I really encouraged them to. Meet with people internally in product, in sales, in marketing. So that way they're forming these relationships before they ultimately collaborate with them on all the content that was to come as part of our initial fundamentals course for Muck Rack.

Jason Whitehead: .

And have you found. Content format that seems to be more effective and more desired with more videos or more short guys and checklists, or what sort of things do customers actually want?

Vanessa: Yeah, so we actually surveyed our customers on that too, which I think is important because every industry will likely have some sort of different preference on how they want to learn, how they want to [00:12:00] look through content the length of it, things like that.

So we definitely surveyed our customers and then aligned our content offering. Based on their responses, but what we find is that short form videos work very well. People don't wanna sit and watch a 30 minute recorded video, but if you give it to them in smaller doses and two to three minute videos, it's a lot more digestible.

And people retain the knowledge too, through that format.

Jason Noble: What's the what? What's the kind of internal relationship between your customer education team onboarding and your more? Traditional CSMs. How do they interact? What's the kind of collaboration like between them?

Vanessa: There's a lot of collaboration there.

That's a great question too. So our manager of customer education, he, he's done a phenomenal job of really getting to know not just what customer success does, each functional area within the department, but also cross-functionally to be able to [00:13:00] make those pairings happen when they need to. So for example, our C S M team.

There is essentially a committee that gets formed to review different things that our customer education team is pushing out. so they have a chance to weigh in on something before it's been exposed to our customer base. And so it's a way to generate buy-in as well as alignment early on. And we have even A C S M, for example, who will go through and review the course outline for a new course that we're putting into the academy and weighing in on everything from copy edits to structure to content.

So it is highly collaborative, and I think that's important too, because if customer education just operates in a silo, No one will adopt the materials both internally or externally. So you really want those internal stakeholders too, outside of education that will be the biggest supporters of anything that education is pushing out.

Jason Noble: I think that is critical that isn't it, getting that alignment with the other internal stakeholders, [00:14:00] cuz it is, I think. It's great. I love the way you guys have split this out and created this function from nothing into something that's now driving value and getting.

Collaboration, not just with the sales teams, with marketing to, to, how do we pitch this is a big sales pitch, it's a big value add for us, but how do we make sure that the content's going in the direction we're needing it too, and the customers are wanting, and I love what you're saying about the surveys, asking customers what works best for them, cuz that just fits into kind of how they can grow and get more value from what we're.

Jason Whitehead: What did what did you have to do to get executive support for Yeah, for these initiatives? Because I imagine what you're describing is a big shift in, in model and mentality and staffing as well too. Were they open to these ideas? Was it hard to sell it? How did that process go for don?

Vanessa: Yeah, that's a great question too. So I would say it was easiest to sell to our CFO because really the pitch here is, By scaling more for small business, we'll be able to still offer a positive [00:15:00] experience with both the product and the company, but we won't have to dedicate as many one-to-one human resources essentially to that effort.

So that was a pretty easy sell, but I definitely spent time with other. They're members of our leadership team too. And really it was providing the context, showing them the framework where other companies have already done this extremely well and saying this is what it could look like at Muck Rack if we're open to adopting this model.

So I definitely spent a lot of time sharing the context or the why behind why I wanted to invest in this in customer education and how I felt like. We didn't wanna wait too long to invest in it. It's better to invest in it before you desperately need it , than to invest in it when you desperately need it.

Because this comes back to how long it takes to produce all the content. It's not something that, and this is what I would encourage to anyone listening to. It's not something that you can invest in and then immediately expect R ROI on three months out. It's gonna take time. You have to have an L m S in place.

You have to have, of course, [00:16:00] At least your first instructional designer in place who's creating all of this content, and it's going to take months. So I also made sure to mention that upfront too, that, I'm, there's a lot of. Potential here with customer education, but it's also not something that we can expect an immediate return on.

So I set that expectation up front too, and we've been able to continue investing in it. So it is going well for us, and we're going to keep investing in education too. I really think that Morris SAS C companies should be putting education at the center of their customer.

Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. So I'm curious as well, you designed this for the SMB market and it sounds like it's been very impactful there.

Have you also been reusing this with your larger customers how have they embraced or is, or they still prefer the high touch?

Vanessa: Yeah I love that too. We've, Absolutely embraced it with our mid-market and enterprise customers too. And I'll give you an example of an enterprise customer that's been extremely excited about this, that I think has longer [00:17:00] term potential to or impact.

But we work with both brands and agencies at Muck Rack, so an in-house team that has a PR team of five people, let's say, but then also agencies that have their own list of. That they're supporting too, through the use of our product. And so on the agency side, one thing that they wanna be able to say to their clients is that, we're an expert in this, or we're all certified in this.

It really helps them win new business, but also helps them retain. They're existing clients too. So with this academy and the ability to be certified in Muck Rack, we now have larger agencies coming to us saying, how do we get our whole agency certified in Muck Rack? That's a great thing for us to be able to communicate to the market.

So that's just one example of how we can really leverage this further to make a bigger impact for both our customers as well as for them to make a bigger impact for their own business. But, . It's absolutely something that we designed with SMB in mind, but also has a ton of carryover into our mid-market and enterprise segments too, who are [00:18:00] getting that higher touch onboarding experience.

But let's face it, they're still going to have someone who wasn't part of the original s. Sales process, who joins six months in, who needs to learn how to use muck? And so it's things like that where having an academy in place can really help accelerate learning for any customer regardless of which segment they're in.

Jason Noble: . Absolutely. And what are some of your big kind of lessons? Learned being along the journey. When you've grown your team, you've grown this up, you've had the feedback from your customers and what kind of guidance would you give to people that starting on this journey to build out an education program like this?

Vanessa: Yeah,

that, yeah, I love that too. So one big piece of advice I would say is if you're investing in education for the first time, please hire an instructional designer. I think. Education teams al design, or should I invest in a customer trainer? And a customer trainer is great to the extent that they'll go out there and talk to anyone and they're [00:19:00] comfortable speaking externally about the product.

But you really need an instructional designer to scale an education program. So my biggest piece of advice is please hire an instructional designer as your first hire if you are investing in customer education. . And then second to that survey your customers. I would say even before you hire someone, it's great to have at least a preliminary understanding of what you would be bringing to your customers through an education program.

So definitely survey your customers, listen to them, ask them how they want to learn, ask them how they're already learning about your product, even outside of what you offer them, because you might be surprised about how or where they're turning to, to learn about your product. And then the other thing that I would add too is look, Other certifications, look at other courses, other thought leadership content you can offer that aren't specific to your products.

So that's where we're really heading now is how can we upskill the industry, not just people using Muck Rack, but how can we upskill folks across PR in general?

Jason Whitehead: That's great. So [00:20:00] I'm curious as well too, as you as you start to embrace education, how does that throw off or adjust product launch time?

So as you're running out new functionality, I'm assuming that, oh, now we've gotta build this education piece we didn't have to before.

Vanessa: Yeah, that's a great point. So we have at Muck Rack a launch leads committee that spans across multiple functions. So our product operations team is really leading that committee.

Our manager of customer education sits on that committee too, so he's privy to our launch plans well in advance of a new feature actually going live to our customer base. So that's really important too. Our customer education team and really any customer facing team Should not be finding out about a launch at the same time as our customers.

And you need to have enough lead time, as you've hinted at too, to be able to produce the right materials to set customers up for success using that new feature. Now, there will be some smaller features that don't necessarily require a dedicated education output, but I will say help center, that's something that our education team owns as well.[00:21:00]

It is important to update that, of course, as you're launching new features. So regard. Make sure you've aligned internally with your product team specifically on what lead time you need from them to be able to get this customer facing documentation, curriculum, et cetera, available by the launch date. If you aren't having those proactive alignment conversations internally than.

You're not going to have that lead time.

Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much. We always like to ask our guests a bold challenge question so we have one for you. What is the single most important bold action CS leader should take to quickly transform your teams and get out this one-to-one meeting mindset and embrace more of an education, customer education approach?

Vanessa: Yeah, I love that question. I think there's two things there. Number one, Start by investing in instructional design. Even if you know you won't be able to scale your customer education program quickly or reinvest in it quickly, having an instructional [00:22:00] designer on your team will do wonders, not just for your customers but internally as well, making sure that everyone has the same foundation of product knowledge across your customer facing teams to be able to educate.

If it is in a one-to-one fashion or in a scaled fashion. So definitely invest in instructional design. You won't regret it. And then the second thing that I would say too is listen to your customers. Be iterative. Be flexible. You don't have to have a fully built out academy day one. At launch. You can start with a.

Simple course and see what the customer response is to that new way of learning, especially if this is really something you're changing within your organization. There's obviously the internal change management that you have to navigate and the external change management, so you can start small.

You don't have to bite off everything all at once.

Jason Whitehead: Awesome. Great.

Thank you so much for joining us today. And before we go, we always like to invite our guests to do a shameless plug, so please let us know what sort of exciting things are going on with you and how people can get in touch with you or [00:23:00] anything else you'd

like to share.

Vanessa: Yeah, I love connecting with folks on LinkedIn. Please reach out to me if you're navigating through your career journey and customer success. I would love to share notes to help you to be supportive of your journey as. And if there are any PR professionals who happen to be in your network too, you wanna share the good word of muck rack, I am always happy to connect with those types of folks too.

So happy to share more information with anyone if you wanna just DM me on LinkedIn.

Jason Whitehead: Great. Alright,

thank you so much Vanessa. Really appreciate you being here.

Jason Noble: Thanks, Vanessa. Great conversation.

Vanessa: Thank you both.

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Episode DescriptionJoin us when we speak with Pat Phelan. Pat is the Chief Customer Office for GoCardLess, where he's responsible for building and scaling a best in class customer success organisation with leadership of Customer Onboarding, Support, Experience, CS management and Account Management disciplines globally.In this episode, Pat is going to talk to us about his journey to becoming a Chief Customer Officer.Guest: Pat PhelanPat is a seasoned CCO in the fintech space and has held a multitude of leadership roles in different GTM and commercial functions with some very fast-growing tech companies. Pat was the CCO at Brandwatch before GoCardless where in addition to the usual CS functions he also led a global account management team.Scroll Down for Episode TranscriptSponsorsThe Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional ResourcesHere are some related resources we think you will find helpful:* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter * Read Jason Noble's Blog * Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

SubscribeJoin our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.Don't miss out - subscriber today!TranscriptJason Noble: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's Take Home podcast. With myself, Jason Noble here in a very cold and chilly London minus four degrees in real temperature and my partnering crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason,Jason Noble: We have another super exciting guest to welcome today talking all about the journey to becoming a Chief Customer Officer.I'd like to give a very warm welcome to Pat Felan Pat's the Chief Customer Officer at Go Cardless an organization I know well, I've worked with previously Pat's a, I'd like to say a season Chief Customer Officer in FinTech in a number of other spaces, and has held a multitude of leadership roles across all sorts of d.Go to market functions, commercial functions in some of the, I think, fastest growing tech businesses that there are. And as C O at GoCardless, he's responsible for building and scaling what he says is the best in class customer success organization. And looking after leadership from boarding [00:01:00] support, experience, csm, your traditional customer success management and account management disciplines globally.So all of. Traditional post sales functions, which is really good to see. It was previously that the c o at a brandwatch before go cardless, where we built all of the functions up all of the traditional CS functions. But also I you led a global account management function again. So seeing that come under that commercial element, cut under the remit of customer success is really exciting.And I think if I'm right, you started off way back, it was in marketing and I think that's, A, a really phenomenal way to come into customer success and understanding everything about engagement, advocacy and it's just a route that I've not seen many other people come in. And, I'd love to hear more about that.Pat. Welcome. Yeah. Amazing to have you with us, sir. Thank you.Pat: Yeah, thanks for asking. This'll be an easy one. I won't get anyone's name wrong, , hopefully throughout the process, so I'll just have to. Not at the individual I'm talking to here. But no, I appreciate you coming on.I've I've followed and seen your podcast in the past, so Yeah. [00:02:00] Excited to start.Jason Noble: Love it. Pat, look,I've given a little intro there, but we'd love to hear in your own words about your own journey a and what you're doing now, and your plans for the next year or so. As we've started.Pat: Yeah.Jason Noble: Started thenew year.Pat: I'm not so much sure about the plans for the next year or two , but everything that's gone on in the last two years, it could be ranging anything from another global pandemic to God knows what else climate. But yeah, we're yeah so yeah. Gosh, it's been a, it's been a hell of a journey really.I've often been asked the question and I've often, I've probably, the older I've gotten, the more I've actually reflected on it. Definitely more so than I ever did when. Idiot, if that makes sense. So I, came from Ireland way back. Moved to England. First chance I got, couldn't get out of the country fast enough.Love it. Very proud to be Irish. But the Ireland that I knew is very different to the Ireland that is now in terms of opportunity and. The landscape for employment. So I did a post-grad and, it was never a given that you got an opportunity. It was too small basically.So I went through the marketing route really, because I couldn't really figure out anything else at the time. And I felt like it was something that might work, it might work for me. [00:03:00] And, I never was, I, yeah, it was one of those kind of weird scenarios where having grown up in, in a hospitality environ always knew that, I got my energy from people.And engaging with people and being able to, service people to some degree. I grew up in a hotel and, we had bars and bed and breakfasts and, grocery shop in the building. So we were always around people. We were always trading in some way, shape or form.And we were always obsessed about really the quality of what was delivered and repeatability and people coming back to you. So always knew it was gonna land there but, When I first got into software it was an interesting path. So I started in marketing, moved back to London from Dubai, got into recruitment for a while because it was a wild industry in the sort of early two thousands, late nineties, early two thousands.It was just amazing the energy around recruitment and the buzz around a contract versus permanent and I loved it, absolutely loved it, but I knew it was never gonna be a long term thing, it was very much a here and. And after about two years of that, myself and a very good friend of mine from [00:04:00] home went out on our own.We set up our own company and it was really gonna be focused on initially risk management recruiting, but that morphed very quickly into technology because he was a bit of a tech head. Himself self thought. And we both were interested in that area. So we built up a small business.It wasn't anything spectacular. And, again, it was the days before VCs or before kind of investment capital, and you you were, everything was was what's the phrase they have for it now? Shoestring or, you profitability drove expansion basically.I think there's still a lot of that today though, isn't there? There is. It's more it's more acceptable today, I think, given our profitability at the time. If that was today, we'd be a unicorn. We literally made money every month from the beginning but we started getting into technology and it was really interesting because, th this was a time when, particularly on-prem was still a big thing.Sass was unheard of. We built a. A really fantastic piece of technology focused at the recruitment sector. That was it was effectively sas. It was to live on external servers and, it was gonna solve lots of problems that a lot of our customers had at the time.But it was just phenomenal. Looking back [00:05:00] on it, the. The the lack of willingness to trust data that lived physically lived somewhere else, not take, the architecture was immaterial. Nobody cared. Nobody cared about the security. Nobody cared about the scale. They just felt safer when the box was.In their office. And I remember going to pitch and to demo this platform and literally having to bring, a box with me and a flat screen with me because the majority of customers just wouldn't have even the tick on on, on site. So we went down that path and it was really interesting because we got some traction but overall it just was so mistimed in terms of the willingness for people to adopt this stuff.But I knew at that point tech. Was something that really excited me and when we moved away from that, so we saw the business and we went our separate ways and Mike's since gone on to move across to the US and he was actually co-founder of jet.com. In the us which is a pretty big retail site that Walmart owned now.But I always knew I was gonna move into the tech world. And my first role really was as a community manager. It was called, I remember because nobody really had the [00:06:00] term customer success. Genuinely didn't exist at the assignment. It was community manager. And that was with a company called Verb.So it was a talent tech software and that was the real versioning of the start of my journey because I loved it. I adored the culture and everything around it.Jason Noble: And that's amazing and really as everything now aswell, how big community is particularly thelast couple.Pat: Yeah. Yeah.Jason Noble: Start off with that and yeah, that's incredible.Pat: But it wasn't what it is now, community. When I started was literally the only word people could really think of for what is now customer success management. Yeah. It was more about like, how do we engage our customer base, most of which were mid-market or enterprise. But the term just was so unheard of at the time and eventually it started to move into that, but went from community management to.A customer executive and I think one of the titles was, I can't remember some of the like, relationship manager was another one and . So eventually I moved across to Bazaar Voice and that's where my career took off. Started as a C S M and then moved manager, director, VP and VP in the over the six and a half year period.And that's the big, that's the [00:07:00] company for me that we all have those companies that we look back on and think it was a. A moment in time where, personal values aligned with a company values and it just great things happen. And from that then the move to brand watch, because I really cut my teeth atar at Bizarre Voice.It was a super fast-paced company. Social commerce, was new segment. Businesses were really pumping online. And I loved it. It was great. But at the time then brand watch came up and the social media management space was really fascinating as well.They're there were tangential similar challenges. Hard to renew, first thing that people will look at when budgets get tight. The playbooks were really volatile. You had to, use your intuition quite a bit but I loved it down there too. And when we merged with our main competitor, I took over the chief customer officer role.So I was heading up customer success at Brandwatch and we merged with our number one competitor, so that doubled the size of the company. Doubled the size of the CS org. So I took that on and then go, Carlos came knocking and, I'll be honest, direct debits was not, top of my list of priorities in terms of the segments I wanted to work in at the time.[00:08:00] But I went in and had a great conversation and was just blown away by. The people first and foremost, Hiroki is much as he would absolutely hate me to describe him as an inspirational character. He is. He's one of those people that you just look at and think, yeah, this is a guy.I I wanna be around as much as I can. And and this the market, FinTech, as we all know now, has just gone crazy. Plus for me, it was a very different it was, going from two and a half thousand customers to 75,000 customers. It was moving from fixed annual commitments to consumption based cs which is really interesting and I just wanted to really challenge myself on that.But that was the journey on paper. And obviously in between that journey, lots of screw ups, lots of mistakes, lots of opportunity, lots of luck. But the main reflection for me going. And I talk to a lot of Cs, I speak to a lot of CS leaders just ad hoc who contact and chat and whatnot.And it's really interesting because if I think about what I would advise people now in, when I look at my path through a lens of a sort of a [00:09:00] consultant, like in terms of what the keys were, no, no question. In my mind the first element was the company companies I joined. I was lucky enough to join companies that, that really aligned with me and my expectation of how success should be interpreted.Companies that acknowledged Execut. Acknowledge delivery. Yeah. Didn't really accept politics, didn't accept, proximity bias, all those kind of things. Like they, they knew what was being done and they rewarded accordingly. And then the second element was the people that I had around me.I think I've developed a pretty good mix of, Hiring the right people and developing the right people. So there's a good kind of hybrid and a lot of those people, like I, I often joke like that. My, my challenge now is that my network has just matured too much for them to ever come work for me again because now they're CCOs and they're VPs of cs.Maybe five years ago I might have nobbed one or two, but They're running like big orgs now in terms of, that's great across SaaS, like it really is, and because it's a shared journey that we've all been on [00:10:00] and I think, that they were the and personally just a willingness to embrace change.The biggest opportunity in accelerators I've had in my career have come. In times of absolute chaos and turmoil in an organization like I, there's nothing has ever been linear. They've always been in scenarios where change was like the constant and change was in front of you, and I've never been afraid to.Throw myself into that, but not in, in a selfish way, as in, I will do this if this is the outcome. I've always assumed that if I did the right stuff, good things happen. Then you align that with the right culture, the organization you're in, and usually that kind of plays itself out. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting one to have that kind of career conversation now, because I see a lot of what's the next step?I need a C in front of my title. I need a V in front of my title. I need these kind of things. It's just take a little bit of a step back there. We all know, like that is not necessarily the definition of success in this game. That's for sure.Jason Noble: I love your journey there, pat is amazing and that kind of chaos and that focus and that start, like you say you've had that [00:11:00] service and delivering quality from day one.It's a phenomenal story and to,Pat: yeah.Jason Noble: To see your network go onto these leadership roles themselves, again, is a really it's a wonderful feeling, isn't it, to know that these,Pat: I love it.Jason Noble: People have been successful themselves.Pat: I love nothing more. Like I, honestly I, the, it's the person in the ring.I think, I can't remember the quote of the poem, but the, it's the, you gotta play the game. Like whether you win it or lose it, it doesn't matter. And like we've been through there's people that I've been through, pretty tough times with, and yeah. I owe them a lot personally because they backed me and they bought into me and they trusted me.And like that. As a leader, that weighs very heavily on you. It should, because that's your job, but at the same time it's never given. And we've all been in situations where most of our time's been spent trying to, placate egos or convince people. I've rarely had to convince people to do anything, once the purpose and the mission is clear and despite, how that path works.But yeah, it's an interesting one now, I think more prevalent than ever because, there is a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty.Jason Whitehead: And I think that's also another great example where, so [00:12:00] often we judge the quality of a c o or VP of Cs based on the numbers and the metrics in churn and n r but we don't really look at the impact on their team.And I think the, that so many of your team members have grown on, grown under. Your guidance as well worked for you that they've excelled in their own career. So that's another great measure of the success of a leader, I think. Which, as opposed to yesterday.Pat: Yeah,I think it's the primary one, if I'm honest.I would judge myself. I always think like in 10 years time, if you know these people met in the public what would I want them to say about me? What, what would I want them to say that, we had great net revenue retention or our NPS was, constantly 80 plus or what I want them to say that shit that, That was a really good period in my career that I look back on a as, as a, as an accelerant.That's all I want is people to say about, because things change. You know what you,Jason Noble: I love that people put,I was gonna say that, that pub conversation, oh, do you remember Net revenue attention?Pat: Yeah. We'veall been,Jason Noble: you just, but it's so it. People side of things that honestlycritical.Pat: I [00:13:00] listen to, I think about that.I, every time I'm in it, I'm in those conversations cuz it happens to all of us all the time. Yep. I still reflect on my first manager Darren Robinson. And and I still talk about him and that was 29 years ago. Like he was the first person that really, I felt like, wow, this is what a manager's supposed to be.Exactly. So we do say this stuff. So I do think about that and I think there was a post I think it was Nick Meta posted it a while ago, and then I, it did resonate with me. I think he said something like imagine all of the things that you don't want the person who takes your job now to say when you're gone about you or what you did.And do. And I quite like that it's a similar kind of thread, which is we know someone's going to come, I know someone's gonna take this job at some point and they're probably gonna look at what I've done and go, what the hell was he thinking? Or ? That was like and I I want to minimize that.I just wanna minimize it so at least grudgingly they can say, sure. That was all right. . Yeah.Jason Whitehead: Nope, no one putstheir NPS [00:14:00] score on a, no one puts their NPS score on a gravestoneeither, too. So absolutely. Little fun alongPat: maybe they should. A personal N ps score.Yeah, exactly.Jason Noble: Can you,The roles that you've been in as Chief Customer Officer it's a role that, that hasn't always been at the forefront. I and I, it's amazing that you've been in some organizations that have seen the need a and why it has to be, but two, two questions for you. Why?Yeah. What do you see the role as being, in your own words, what is a chief customer Officer? Yeah. It's a really, so why do you think it's not always been given that same level of recognition that it is?Pat: I thinkthere's still a lot, there's still a way to go, if I'm honest. In terms of the recognition, I think we're far from there.I think when I think about my role, it's probably. It changes, it varies. If I look at it right now it's about really protecting the base and making sure you know that the customers we've got right now stay with us and remain with us and continue to see value and hopefully expand depending on how the environment works out.During the merger of, let's say, brand Watch and Crimson Hexagon, my role was to bring, very disparate groups of customers together and try to [00:15:00] normalize and standardize how we engage with them. But overall, I see myself as, Very much, first and foremost, the voice in the room, right? My job is to be provocative on behalf of a customer.And however that shows up as immaterial to me. It changes every day, every week. But I'm the guy in the room that says Colombo style, like just one more thing. And I've done it a couple of times in that style, which is always quite funny But that's my job, right? And my team's job is to make sure that we have a mechanism whereby I can have those conversations and I can be confident and clear and articulate and credible when we actually have those conversations.So that's my primary role. And I don't get too caught up, honestly, and I see a lot of. Blog posts and comments around like the five steps to, be whatever. It's like that changes it's fluid. But that's my purpose, right? However that shows up, depends.Sometimes it'll be in strategy discussions. Sometimes it'll be in, comp discussions acquisition, whatever but that's my gig. And then the second one I, that I [00:16:00] take, very seriously is I am an acceler. To the organization achieving their goals right now. That to me is very important because I am an, I'm an accelerant to go cardless achieving our goals, whether that be revenue goals, whether that be, long term goals, short term, it doesn't really matter what I am.Is a protector of a part of a business or a protector of a function or a protector of a process, right? So this is where I really am very careful and very specific in my wording because my job is to make sure we sell. My job is to make sure we renew, is to make sure we expand. It's to make sure we retain.It's not any individual component element of that. So me and the c o like that relat. Is absolutely critical to the success of the organization. And that's why, for me, it's really important with my team that I'm always very clear about that [00:17:00] because I have a very low tolerance to the conversations that go some way along the lines of them and us, or that's a bad deal, or we're getting all the crap, or okay, I, I get all of this stuff.My job is to level it up and to raise that up and to actually get outta the weeds on those types of conversations and say, Hey, okay, how can we contribute to that outcome? How can we contribute to that success and vice versa? So I've been very lucky in terms of my kind of engagement with Chief revenue officers, particularly because I think that's the most pivotal relationship in Annie SaaS business, in my opinion, because that's the one that can go pretty badly wrong or very.So in myself and Evan's case, we sat down years ago and mapped out our expectations of each other and committed to that. And I'm under no illusion. That, Evan has a hard job like revenue and bookings and going out and acquiring customers is not easy. Cross selling's, not easy.Upsell's not easy. Be under no [00:18:00] illusion. It may look easy, but we all know it's not easy to do that. And my job is to make sure that I give him the tools and I give him the capabilities, and I give him the resources and the outcomes that he can use and need to leverage either net new acquisition or expansion and up.And the other side to that is I need to be okay with that. Like just because I don't own this or I don't own that, like my value to this business is not born out of the fact that I have proximity to a number. Because if that's my only value to go cardless right now, then I think I have a problem.My value hopefully is multi-threaded and that's just something that is always kind. With me. I've had a lot of conversations with people around that, and there's no right or wrong way to approach it, but that's always the way I've approached it because any other way I found in the past to the wrong kind of discussions and the wrong kind of relationships.I justJason Whitehead: I mean it'sreally, it's hard to have those tight relationships and I find so many of the there's a lot of friction between the c o and c o and finding ways to collaborate [00:19:00] effectively to align your teams. And I really love what you're saying about getting out of the weeds of the minutiae.This is a bad deal, or that is,Pat: yeah.Jason Whitehead: That becomes very toxic very quickly, and it becomes all consuming. And if you're able to nip that in the bud, I think it helps a lot of organizations.Pat: It does. Yeah.Jason Whitehead: Almost outta time here already. This has flown by. So wanted to throw up to you a bold challenge question.What is the number one bold action that aspiring CCOs can take today to make? To make the step up so that how do they go from wherever they are up to the c o piece and you've got twominutes, .Pat: I think the number one thing anybody can do is be utterly connected to the objectives of the organization and make sure that everything that you do and your organization does is in service of that.And that alone, and to have the humility and the CAPA and the flexibility to accept that sometimes that's not going to be aligned with what you think you should own or you should do, but it's not about you and it's not about your function. It's about the ultimate outcome. That's where I would tell people to spend their [00:20:00] time because if you do that, people will notice that's how you're operating and if you're in the right place, good things happen.If you're in the wrong place, go to somewhere that is the right.Jason Noble: I love e everything you've said from your own definition that Colombo style that that's key. Cuz it is. We're there to challenge things.Pat: Yeah.Jason Noble: And it's difficult to do and I've said before, it can be quite lonely.People don't want those questions there.Pat: Absolutely. Absolutely. But making them explicit and making them visible is critical.Jason Noble: Yep. I absolutely, andI love your journey. I. I think it's unique. I think your background's phenomenal. It's put you in a really strong position to to be able to talk to people about this, and it's a really,Pat: yeah.Jason Noble: Phenomenal story. This a big thank you, pat. This has been an amazingPat: Yeah it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. And I will say if anybody I ever listen to this wants to reach out and chat through anything like that I'm more than happy to facilitate that.Jason Whitehead: Great. Thank.Always like to invite our guests, get a shameless plug.Let people know anything that you're working on or how they can reach you and [00:21:00] then we'll,Wrap this up.Pat: Yeah. Yeah. You can reach me on LinkedIn, pat Felan. I've actually got myself off some of the platforms recently from Ons Sanity. But LinkedIn is the safest pair to come at me, and I think the key thing I'm happy to do is yeah, just be a sounding board for people who.Kind of gone through a, either a career path or indeed any kind of scenario that they're in, that I can help because it's a it is lonely, it is tough. As a function, there's a lot of pressure on us now in a world that isn't as structured as perhaps the sales kind of world or the marketing world.So I think being realistic and practical about the support we need as we go through this is really important. So I would love to help. I'm happy. Whenever anyone needs it.Jason Noble: I think you've probably opened yourself up to a lot of , but it's,It's phenomenal that's an amazing offer that you've made to people to come and talk about.And I think it is, it's something that is unique to our industry. It's unique to leaders like yourself. That allow people to do this, and it is it's very different to that structure that we've got in marketing itself. You on the challenges and how do you navigate that.Pat: I love it. Yeah, exactly.Exactly. Huge. [00:22:00] Really enjoy. Pleasure. Thanks again for having me.Jason Whitehead: Thanks.

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Episode DescriptionJoin us when we speak with Jay Nathan. Jay’s the CCO for Higher Logic and one of the co-founders of Gain Grow Retain.

In this episode, Jay is going to talk to us about strategic behaviour and how it relates to customer success.

Guest: Jay Nathan - Chief Customer Officer at Higher LogicJay is a world renowned CS leader and has worked in exec roles across pretty much all the post sales customer facing parts of the business and has built up a methodology and approach for building, leading, and scaling SaaS companies serving a wide range of end-markets and customer sizes. He founded Customer Imperative, a company focused on helping B2B SaaS retain customers, grow revenue and scale customer success which he sold to HigherLogic and then in 2020 co-founded Gain Grow Retain, a community for customer success leaders.

Scroll Down for Episode TranscriptSponsorsThe Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own.

Additional ResourcesHere are some related resources we think you will find helpful:

Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
Read Jason Noble's Blog
Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

SubscribeJoin our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.

We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.

Don't miss out - subscriber today!

TranscriptJason Noble: [00:00:00] Excellent. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble in London, a and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.

Jason Whitehead: Hello Jason.

Jason Noble: This is our third recording of the year. We are super, super excited to have yet another amazing guest with us on today.

I will give a quick introduction, but we're gonna talk. Strategic behavior and how that relates to customer success. And I think it's something that's very topical at the moment. How do you really bring customer success to the table to help be part of those transformational changes we're looking to do?

So a quick intro to our guest. A very warm welcome. He's another, a-list guest that we've got in 2023. It's the one and only Jay Nathan. Jay is the chief customer officer and e v P at Higher. He's of course one of the co-founders of Gain, grow, retain. He's a fellow podcaster with the podcast over at Gain, grow, retain and he's also a several times over CS thought leader executive.

He's worked in multiple [00:01:00] exec roles across I think pretty much all of the post sales, customer facing parts of the business. So he is got that tenure, that experience. He was doing this before it was called customer. He's built up an approach and a methodology for really how you help SaaS companies scale.

Really about, irrespective of what the markets are, what their sizes are. He founded customer imperative before coming into gain, grow, retaining higher logic, and they really were focused on about how you go about retaining SaaS customers and growing revenue, scaling customer success.

Which he ultimately sold to Higher Logic. And then as we know, get, I think this is where most people know from JE founded Gain, grow. Retain, which is a, yeah, nothing short of, I think it's the community for customer success leaders and practitioners. A and the growth you've seen there. It has been amazing over the last few years.

You're also a fellow runner. I'm a runner myself, getting back into it now after hip surgery recently, and a big guitar player. So Jay, a huge welcome to you. We [00:02:00] both are super, super excited to have you here.

Jay: Thank you very much and I got the pleasure to meet Jason. I guess it was. Was it last year or two years ago?

Jason Whitehead: I think it was two Big rig.

Jay: Yeah, at big rig. Yeah. So g got the opportunity to meet Mr. Whitehead in person. But glad to finally get to meet you as well, Jason Noble.

Jason Noble: Actually this is awesome. I love this for us lot the podcasts are, these are the people that you know so well and you feel that you know each other.

But it's great to have you on Jay. Look. Just go ahead and give our listeners a bit of an intro into your own journey and I think it's a phenomenal one and kind. What your own plans are for the year.

Jay: Yeah, sure. A lot of the things you mentioned in the intro I won't repeat a lot of that, but somebody did ask me there's a guy named Mohammed Ock who is, who started customer Success Middle East.

I don't know if you know of him. Another great community.

Jason Noble: I've

had conversations with him recently. Great.

Jay: Good. I actually hope I pronounced his name correctly, but great guy and he's done great stuff and he asked me the same, he asked me this question which is like, what was your path to get into customer success?

And I think the cool thing that you find, [00:03:00] and you all undoubtedly have your own stories as well of how you got into this. Part of the industry is, it's different for everybody, almost for everybody, unless you really started out, fresh outta college, going right into customer success. I was in professional services for a long time.

Actually, I started out as a, so a software engineer. So I got a business degree in college, but I was super hands-on in the technology programming, doing a lot of data work, analytics which all ends up paring pretty well into the things. Have to do Now in my roles as a leader at Higher Logic and other companies I've been in, you gotta know how to work with data.

Also spent, my, my first software company, I was telling you in the pre-show, we moved down to Charleston, South Carolina in 2005 when I worked, went to work for Black bod and that was my first software company being in, I was there for almost nine years. Ran built and ran a large professional services team there, which I think is a good foundation for customer success and we could maybe talk about that.

I spent three years in product management, which is another helpful thing if you're gonna be in customer success. And then went to smaller company after [00:04:00] that. As you mentioned, I started a consulting firm after we sold that last company. Got to learn so much that was really cata. Part of my career is customer Imperative, was a consulting firm, but we just got to speak with hundreds of software companies trying to go through and transform into true subscription SAS businesses, customer oriented businesses.

Got to learn what their pitfalls were, what their problems were. Got to work with a lot of them, not just talk with 'em, but actually help them design their strategies. It was really informative to what we ended up doing over the past few years, which was then Launch Gang. Yes, we sold that to Higher Logic and now it's part how we basically engage and go to market from a Higher Logic, which is a customer community platform company.

It's been a goat path, I guess from a career per perspective. But some really fun stuff in there over the years, and I'm sure you all have similar stories that you would share if we talked about your backgrounds as well.

Jason Noble: I love that. And it is, I love your point there about that. We all come, the journeys are very different unless you just started out in this.

Yeah. So there's this guy that I actually had an [00:05:00] intro to yesterday who's come from the cruise business and you think, okay but there's a lot of similar. And it's quite an amazing transformation to go through that. And I love it. It is, I think that background in other types of organization, other roles really brings something.

And I think that you as a software engineer must, from a product development point of view, must have some great internal conversations. You wrote an article recently about strategic behavior, which really resonated with me, which is where we got chatting. Could you just talk us a bit more about what you mean by strategic behavior, then why do you see it?

Yeah. Why is it so critical for us as customer success practitioners and professionals?

Jay: Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great question. So the, I guess the article I wrote, we, I think it was part of, probably one of my newsletter posts that I sent out, and we can talk about that later as well. But I think one of the things that I'd like to see happen in our industry, in the customer success world in particular is is that the entire industry gets a little bit more business savvy because [00:06:00] customer success.

On its own is, it's an amazing goal, right? We have to make our customers successful. That's almost a foregone conclusion. It's a given. But the other side of the coin is that you actually have to run a business, and the business has to be profitable. The business has to be growing. The business has to be, providing value for shareholders.

If you want the business to. And so I think sometimes we get a little lost in the customer success world about being a customer-centric company and how that should work, but then also being a successful business and having those two things work together. In my consulting firm, we did management consulting style work.

So it's almost impossible to go in front of an executive, A C E O or even a board of directors for a company and say, Hey, we need to invest more in your customer success organization. The first question they're gonna ask is, Okay, that sounds great, but why? And what do I get outta that investment?

You [00:07:00] have to justify your investment in anything you do in the business, whether it's marketing, whether it's sales, whether it's product development, human resources, it doesn't matter if you're gonna spend money, you have to justify those expenditures. And show how they're gonna be accretive to the business in some way.

So we got really good at going in, looking at retention, looking not just at retention overall, but looking at different segments of customers, different parts of the business to say, Hey, if you invest here, we could probably move the needle this much in retention or in expansion. And by doing that, you can pay for the investments that you need to make and it'll pay off further down the road with ag advocacy in terms that customer base.

We, I've just always gotten accustomed, through, through my work in the other software companies that I talked about, or in the consulting work to justifying the investments that I wanted to make. And that's really what it's all about is tying the work that you're gonna do as a customer success leader to the business outcomes that your executive [00:08:00] team and your board are looking.

Jason Noble: Why do you think we don't do that? It, I think it's a skill that is lacking a lot in cs, but what do you think are some of the challenges that are stopping CSMs doing that? Is it that they don't have that kind of consultancy mind frame, that experience? Or is the more to it?

Jay: I think it's a, it's, there's some experience there.

I actually don't think it's a CSMs job to. I think it's the leadership team's job to, to do that type of work, right? And now interestingly, if you look at a lot of tech companies, no knocks here, but if you look at early stage tech companies what often happens is your best C S M becomes the manager of customer success and then they become the director of customer success, and then they become the vp, and then maybe someday they become chief customer officer.

Which is a beautiful career path. Like people make those transitions all the time, it's fantastic. But what you have to do along the way is you make the transition from being an individual contributor or even just a frontline manager. [00:09:00] You have to make the transition from your functional role, which may be customer success or support or professional services or product management, into a business leadership role, which means.

you have a functional responsibility, but you have accountability to the broader business to make sure that the way your team interact. And the value they provide actually is coordinated and interacts well and is accretive to the business across the other functions as well. So I think, customer success is still a relatively young function.

We, I think we always say that, but, we're probably coming up on 15, 20 years worth of solid, customer success, thought and integration into the SaaS ecosystem, the subscription. And so I think the more mature that it gets, you will have leaders that have come from different areas that have learned those lessons that will apply them naturally in the companies that they join.

Jason Whitehead: And

I'm also wondering, even just the businesses that we interact with, they're getting more savvy too, and expecting different things from customer success professionals and They're not always used to dealing with [00:10:00] customer success and what is, or started out, what is this thing called customer success and slowly evolving the point of looking to them to be those more strategic advisors about their own business as well too.

Which ends a bit of a challenge.

Jay: Yeah, that's right. And now, I think what happening in 2023, which not to make the podcast, not live what's the word I'm looking for? Not to put a date on the podcast and screw it up , but the, in 2023. Companies are asking their customer success functions to get really strategic.

Yeah. So let me ask you guys this. Do you think that we've built customer success the right way over the past 15 years? Is it, has it do have we really nailed it yet, or do we have some opportunity to tweak it and get it right? I have some

ideas. Of course.

Jason Noble: If you've thrown us here, Jay, you're asking us questions.

This is . I know this is a great question and I think the answer is no. I don't think we have, I think historically we haven't built them the right way. And I think there's changed you, and I think it is to your point, it is, it has to be a commercial function that's driving [00:11:00] margin for the business profit pro positive margin.

And it's really important. I think we've got to look to where it, where does it actually align to, there's a lot of organizations have it as part of sales, as part of operat. Let's break that and say this is where it should report. Stop the, it could report here or brought here, but give it its own remit.

This is what it should be. And I think we've got to come up and define properly what is meant in the industry and the community by customer success. A and I think you, it's, that's a phenomenal question. Cause I don't think we have, I think historically, It's been built as a reactive function quite often, and we're still seeing a lot of the fallout from that.

There aren't many organizations that are proactively going out and creating it from day one as they would with a sales organization.

Jason Whitehead: I agree with that. And I think when I look back, my career, early career I think was similar to years Jane's Professional Services and spent a lot of time in management consulting and approaching things through that lens.

And I also have a background in user adoption and change management as part of my consulting work. And I [00:12:00] remember when I started to first look at The new CS platforms when they were first coming out, like when I first learned of Gainsight, when I first learned of to Tango back in the days, and so much of their early functionality and seemed so much more oh, this is really influenced by marketing analytics, software marketing, automation software, and now we're just applying it post.

Post sale to our internal customers and they threw in a little bit more around, oh, we can track what our customers are actually using, and they built up around that. But just I think the big drivers and influence in money that influenced the industry came from a different mentality around how do we automate this and platform it and get people to believe, sell the solution, and find a problem for it.

Which I think is very different than folks who come from more of a strategic management viewpoint. But I'd love to hear some of your thoughts, Jay. What do you think is the right way to do

Jay: well? Yeah. I think both of your points are great. And it's funny you mentioned to Tango.

I met Guy near PAs in 2013 at the business of software conferences where we first got to know each other. He's the c e o of that company, but, and they. They were the biggest game in town at the time. Okay. And there were some others as well. [00:13:00] Blue Nose and who was it? Was it Frontleaf? There?

There was a few other early stage one that sold very quickly to other businesses, but the thing that I've been thinking about a lot lately is how does the, especially with 2023 rolling around and the economy being what it is and valuations being what they are for tech companies is. Ha have we built, have we overbuilt customer success as a high touch?

As a high-touch model? And I would say in a lot of companies we have, right? And that when you think about customer success and you listen you watch LinkedIn, people talk about it, and you read the literature and all the articles that are out there. You see a lot of things about how to drive customer relationships.

But it's, a lot of it is high touch. And I think the thing. I'd like us to do as an industry is get more strategic in terms of building out the way we scale, making customers successful first, and then layering in that human touch where it's absolutely necessary. I I had the opportunity to [00:14:00] sit in on a QBR r with one of my team members, which I often do, and I noticed in, so we're guilty of this too.

We, we can do a better job too in my company. But I noticed there were a lot of conversations that were happening during this QBR r which are like, oh, that is a great question. Let's do a follow up call on this, or let's do a follow up call on that. And in my head I was thinking, man, wouldn't it be cool if we.

A standing workshop to for that one need there. Or if we had a, a webinar series that, that customers could go to, to learn about this other thing and just more programs that we could, that our CSMs could plug customers into. So I think it really, Jason Whitehead, it comes back to your education change management enablement background.

Which is like, how are we building that foundation so that the high-touch customer success model doesn't end up being an expensive, overloaded, unreliable element in the customer success strategy overall not the strategy, right? Having a bunch of CSMs running around connecting with customers is not a strategy.

[00:15:00] It's throwing bogies at a problem and it does not scale, right? Scale means me is doing more with.

Jason Whitehead: I so agree with that. And I remember working on a customer project God, probably 10 years ago. It was a CS type project and facilitating 'em through. And the approach we were taking is, let's map out the high-touch customer journey.

Cause that's where most of their customers were and where most of, where, what they were doing, where the struggle is. And then we were going to strip away what are the elements that don't apply for low-touch. And now when we work with customers, we flip that. What are the elements that we can automate for everyone and where do we need to layer in high-touch just for those folks?

And it took a while for me to get there, but also I think for the industry. Me too. Yeah. I'm not sure the industry is there yet either too.

Jason Noble: I love the thinking about, you almost start off as that digital approach, that automation, how do we do this? This should be. Just like another tool or service as part of our standard tech stack.

And I think the other risk, and I've seen this with when the focus shifts to high-touch is a lot of the real meat of what you're doing gets lost in the noise. Your example there, Jay about that. Why don't we do webinar series? All those things cuz other people [00:16:00] ask about 'em.

Absolutely. Cuz otherwise that CSM is gonna be setting. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 other meetings that are just about that customer that are just more high touch and you lose what you're trying to do. You lose the goals and objectives and how do we drive value here? Yeah. I, I, oh, go ahead Jay.

Jay: Oh just one point.

You also lose quality because if you have, let's say you have 30 CSMs on your team, each trying to run around and do the same thing five times a week. Somebody's gotta monitor quality on that and enable that team to do that. What if you had one person or two people who are responsible for running that program over and over and tuning it and tweaking it?

Everybody could see it. Yes. I just to further on to your point, Jason Noble.

Jason Noble: It's almost, it's great cause I've seen another challenge with customer success go back a few years where, You start off with lots of CSMs, all doing their own thing. And I've seen this quite a few Cs organizations starting like cuz they don't know what to do.

So it's not high touch, but you've got that inconsistency built from day one and you can't scale with that. [00:17:00] So the other benefit that this brings is, like you say, having one c s m working on one thing, you and fine tuning it, you're building on what you've got, it's the same thing you're delivering and that, that consistency is a big part of what quality.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah. I think another issue related to all this too is organizations that are buying software for many years and even universities when they're teaching information systems and all that good stuff, they focus more on. Getting systems live and managing it as opposed to how do we ensure that we move beyond what the technology needs to do, to what can we, as an organization do with the technology and how do we make that happen?

I studied information systems and I remember, years ago now, was very young and figuring it out. All of the classes were focused on managing technology and development life cycles and testing and getting it. And all that stuff. And maybe a little bit of change management in the sense of, let's train some folks on it and tell people what's in it for them and all that other Tom foolery.

And that's where it stopped. And a lot of times when I'm working with customers, we're like, all right, what is success three to five years after the system goes live? Let's get rid of the [00:18:00] noise and the focus on time and on budget and switch that conversation, not a. Concept to do. But I think most organizations don't even think about that of, Hey, why are we doing this and how are we gonna ensure that we have our own success with whatever software we build?

And I think if more buyers of organizations understood those challenges, it would really change the dynamic with the customer success team and where A C S T needs to focus their efforts.

Jay: Absolutely. I have an information that's, that was my actual degree, was an information systems degree. And so I had some of the technical, had a lot of the project lifecycle stuff, but didn't have a lot of like value in R ROI or change management.

I had organizational behavior but not change management. So I think you're spot on. I think you're spot on there and change. Such a fundamental part of customer success in my mind.

Jason Whitehead: That's funny. My first masters was in information systems and I was working at a company where my boss said, it's great.

We've got the system up and running, but if we can't get people to use it and the execs don't see value, we don't need it. Or you, and that's when I'm back to school and got another degree in organization development to learn the [00:19:00] skills around change and adoption that I didn't have before. But it was just by dumb luck that I fell into that piece of it.

Jay: That's awesome.

Jason Noble: If we go back to the strategic stuff, how do you as a, as an individual in cs, as a CS leader, how do you get the balance right between focus on what needs to be strategic and then quite often that roll your sleeves up, get your hands dirty, that more tactical operational work, how do you get the balance right between them?

Jay: Great question. And I don't know if I have the right, the best answer. I think, To me. Everybody when they're earlier in their career says, oh, I want to get in a more strategic role, or I wanna do more strategy. But to me, part of strategy is execution, right? It's actually trying things and figuring out what's working and what's up, but doing it in a controlled and in a smart way, so you're not betting the farm on something that you don't yet understand.

If it's gonna be a. Effective. Yeah. So let's say, you think you, you could do a better job for your customers if you went from this high-touch model to more of a pulled or a scaled customer success approach, right? The wrong, [00:20:00] that's a good strategic thought to have. We could assume maybe we save some money, we do things more efficiently.

But the question is how do you go from that big thought to practice? And that's where you would say, okay, why don't we, instead of just making that declaration, taking all the CSMs away from the customers that we've assigned them to and doing something different. Why don't we test something first?

Why don't we go create a, we have a hypothesis that we believe that customers will get more benefit. It'll be of higher quality, more co. If we create a workshop style new user onboarding webinar, for example, versus doing it five times a week per c s m, and then you go test that out and you say, okay, what worked, what didn't?

Where do we go with it next? What else could we do? It worked fantastic. What's the next. Most painful item that we're gonna pick off. I think, part of it's one of the things that, that I spend a lot of time doing in, in, even in my role, is gathering data and analyzing it in Excel. Yeah.

And thinking about, and this is where my data. [00:21:00] Warehousing to date myself. Background comes in handy because, you can think about the way the data needs to be structured in an Excel file to get the right view of it. So across our customer segments what are the different breakdowns?

How do we need to bucket? Data. If you try to look at everything and you don't try to summarize it up to make some sense out of it and try to glean some insights into what's actually happening in your business, then it's hard to decide what the right actions are to take. And so if you're not starting with data, you cannot be strategic.

But I think. To me, strategy is about deciding how you're gonna win, right? It's Patrick Lynch. It's, classic, basic stuff. It strategy gets confused because people think it's like this pie in the sky thinking, but it's not. It's just answering a very simple question. I wanna achieve X.

How am I gonna go achieve X? Whatever my goal is, how am I gonna get there? I want to go grow my business by 20% a year. Does that mean I go sell into enterprise? Does that mean I focus all my energy on smb? What is it? How do I do that? And then how [00:22:00] do I go execute on that plan, right? . So I, I think sometimes we make strategy more complex than it needs to be.

If I'm a CS leader, I have a goal. I need to drive additional retention in a certain. How do I go do it? What is, what are the tactics I'm gonna employ? That is still strategy. Even though it's there, there's a tactical element to it. Absolutely. I'm no scholar but , so it prob it probably doesn't come outta my mouth.

But that's at least the way I think about it.

Jason Noble: I think it, no, it makes a lot of sense and I think it is hearing. . It's that practical, real world. This is what it really means. That's the key thing. It's all right. You could write, and there are scholars around strategy.

You can do degrees in it. , but it's hearing the. What does it really mean when you are on the ground doing the job at an exec level, at a CS level or whatever the level is? What does it really mean? What does strategy really mean? to us as a business, why are we doing this? What, and I think you're so right.

A lot of people get confused by what it is and have that kind of separation in the mind that strategies, this thing [00:23:00] that's way off here and they're stuck doing this thing.

Jay: That's right. Strategy should be informed by, if you're a C S M and you're listening to this, guess what, you have a really valuable role to play in this because everything you hear from your customers on the front lines every day could be summarized and fed to people who are trying to make decisions about where to take the business, how to grow it.

That's really valuable insight that you're gathering. If you're listening for those cues, you're connecting the dots across your customers. To understand what's really happening in the market. Do you hear, you, let's say you have five customer conversations in a week. Are they all referencing some integration that they have to do with their CRM system?

Maybe that's, Something that you should be paying attention to. And that's where I think I, if you are gonna have a high touch customer success motion, they're talking to customers directly on the phone, via email, then it's so important for customer success, people on the front lines to be asking questions that aren't just about the product.

Help me [00:24:00] underst. As a leader, I want to hear from my CSMs, help me understand the context around the product. What other solutions are in the mix? What what organizational dynamics are at play that prevent people from adopting? Because a lot of times the software all of our software's pretty good these days, right?

I'm sure there're, there's plenty of crappy software too, but for the most part, software has become pretty reliable. It's building it as a known thing. , right? It's not rocket. The thing that prevents adoption and our barriers to companies achieving outcomes with your products is usually the things that sit around the software that you have no visibility Yep.

Into, but you may have some influence over if you know enough about them.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned that half of our business is working with buyers of software to drive adoption success internally in their organizations. And recently I was helping one of our customers doing a vendor evaluation and improving some of their adoption of other systems.

And just the conversations that a software vendor and a C S M ask are so different than what they're asking [00:25:00] internally in their organization. And being able to see both sides, like they're still talking past each other a bit. and I think it's an opportunity for CSMs to learn how to have a different conversation that would be more impactful that I think as an industry, we haven't quite

gotten there yet.

Jay: Oh, absolutely. I think a lot of what we're doing in customer success land is by rote if and it's I have to have calls, I have to ask questions, I have to make sure the product is being utilized. But to be honest with you, you're gonna get so much. Again, if we are in this high-touch mode, which a lot of companies are, you're gonna get so much more love from the customer by just asking questions about their business that aren't about your product, that help you connect dots and then just sit back and listen to the answer and absorb, let them talk.

That's a skill in itself, which we, you

knows difficult,

Jason Noble: I think. I think a lot of people can't do it or they don't think they should be doing it, and they don't like to take that back step or back seat and say actually, what about the bigger things? What about.

Jay: What you really, that's a great way, that's a great way to be, quote unquote, strategic, [00:26:00] right?

Ask fricking strategic questions, , don't ask tactical questions of your customers, right? Hey what is your, what's your plan for the year? What worries you about your budget for the year?

Can you that and at the beginning of 2023, what a perfect time for people to start doing that.

Abs.

Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. Exactly. And I think to that point too, when everyone wants to be a trusted advisor, if you start asking more of those bigger questions, but not just ask the question to get the answer, but ask the question that will then provoke them to take a different action that gets better results or provide a solution they haven't thought of at that level.

That's the stuff that really drives it forward. But it does have to start with asking those questions and positioning yourself in that strategic advisor role as well too. think many CSMs that I deal with, especially the ones new to their. They're either not comfortable with that role or they don't know that's their role, or they're not sure what questions to ask.

So I think there's a certain amount of mentorship and professional development that needs to happen from your more seat and your folks to, to get them there.

Jay: But yeah you're absolutely right. And I, to me, there, there's still. I post about this a lot on LinkedIn and pe. I know people are [00:27:00] tired of hearing about it.

I know Dave Jackson always gives me hell about when I post about the difference between support and customer success, but I do think that a lot of times our customer success teams end up looking like very much white glove support. High-touch, expensive support teams. Yep. And I think be, because we do focus they have to be focused on the product.

They have to know the product, they have to handle escalations, all manner of issues. And that's, even if the organization is designed in a way that we would deem quote unquote correct. I do think it's a wholesale mindset shift, like c customer success to me is much more like the consulting that you talked about, Jason than it is, than it should be product support.

Otherwise, why isn't it just product support? That's cool too. Like we need that. So cool.

Jason Whitehead: And I think you can, one could argue the case as well too, that should be more like a post-sale professional services that's not about implementation, but the ongoing value creation for customers. And I think right now, yeah.

So many CSMs. They have a portfolio of customers. They don't have time to keep in touch with 'em all, let alone to do any real value added services [00:28:00] to them. It's a bit of a question. Even five years from now or 10 years from now, will there be both CSMs that are meant to be that business relationship and monitor the outcomes versus the wholesale professional services that will have an impact on changing adoption behavior and value.

I think it is.

Jason Noble: If you look very well said, the thinking about is it is a consultative function. What are we trying to do with our customers? Generate more value, generate value for them quicker. It is consulting what we're doing and I think people that have got that background just have it's a skillset and a way of thinking that I think really is what we need now and need more of in the industry.

Jay: Yeah. And that's, if you're gonna, if you're gonna do the high-touch model, then that's what it should really be. Otherwise, it's hard to, it's hard to differentiate it from other things that you should have anyway. Support, training, and enablement. Absolutely. Yeah. So on and so forth. But you can even do that kind of stuff at scale too.

Like one of the things that, that. We're looking at doing, I'll open up the kimono a little bit, is success plans, right? We all know that could go through this [00:29:00] consultative kind of conversation on a one by one basis with a customer, but what if we had a workshop style? Program where we can invite all of our mid-market and SMB customers to, to walk them through the process of how to think through this for themselves, and coach them and let them ask questions live of how to create a suc success plan. Because really the success plan is for them to justify internally their own success in our product success internally. So that does not necessarily need to be something that can only happen on a one-on-one basis.

Right? Absolutely. We're just trying to enable them at scale to do it.

Jason Whitehead: We actually did that with a internal client. They were planning a big CRM rollout and they have, enterprise across all 50 states, each state had their own organization. So it was 50 different implementations you were managing at once.

All this great stuff. And we brought them in to do that and facilitate them through success planning. And what does it look like in, in your state's organization? . It was both impactful, but it was also surprising how difficult it was for folks who had never in their own organization thought about things like that before.

[00:30:00] And it took much longer than we expected. We got results from it. But for those of us who had done it fairly easy, this is, or often this isn't that difficult. And then for folks who have never had that mentality, especially if you're working like in a nonprofit or a government world it really would blow their mind.

So I think. A great way to scale and it's powerful, but it's, it will be more challenging than some folks anticipate just because the people on the other end of it could prove a challenge.

Jay: Did, I would love to dig into that more. Yeah. If we have. But did the people who weren't necessarily used to thinking that way, were they appreciative of learning something new in this?

Jason Whitehead: Appreciative new yes is the short answer. But also in their organization, it was interesting. They were senior leaders and have been there for quite a while. But not a lot of business acumen and business terminology and the organizations, none of them were big on putting in repeatable, scalable processes.

They were not very good at implementing technology about anything in their organizations. So it was one of these where they recognized they had a problem they had to improve. They had tried over the years, different attempts to do this. But they'd never really gotten technology, [00:31:00] so they weren't quite sure what to do.

And frankly, they also just didn't devote the time and resources, and they didn't make it a priority the way they should have. They learned something new. It took a lot more reinforcement and handholding than we thought. And probably looking back, we probably should have done some other prep for them in advance of the, these meetings as well that we didn't do.

Lessons learned. But it was just .

Jason Noble: Yeah. Jay this has been. Such an awesome conversation. A big thank you. This has been really insightful for us. I think there's a lot of stuff we could go on and on. There's a lot more conversations we could have. What we do to do is give you a, what we call a bold challenge question.

And the one for you is, what is the, what would you say is the number one bold action that CS leaders should take today to ensure that the CS activities in their business get the right level of strategic visibil? They need to.

Jay: This is a great question. I would say if you have not gone to sit down with your VP of finance or your C F O or even maybe a board member and ask them what is your perspective of the money that we're spending on customer [00:32:00] success, how do you think about that?

Do you feel like we're getting the value for it? That's a great place to. to connect the dots directly. So it, it's a very tactical and tangible thing that I think a lot of CS leaders could do and benefit from is just get closer to the people who think about the dollars and cents in your company so that you can map your activities, your initiatives, and your strategy to.

The broader company strategy cuz everybody is in a slightly different place. And you got it's unique to every business, so you gotta understand

Jason Noble: it. I think being, where we are now with the economic situation and everything that, that awareness of wanting to understand the financial impact, what you do well.

Brilliant thing. Really good. And I think. Not a difficult thing to do, to have that conversation with your cfo, F o, with your finance team and understand better about it. Awesome stuff, Jay. Thank you. Jay. What? Thank you. What we wanna give you the opportunity to do, please. We haven't talked much about gain, grow, retain but we want to give you the opportunity to shameless plug yourself, gain, grow, retain at the community, anything.[00:33:00]

Jay: Sure. I work for a company called Higher Logic. We're trying to help our customers scale customer success, utilizing community as a tool to do that. So if you don't have a customer community or you're, you have an old one, you should come talk to us and give us a chance to walk you through what the modern version of that can look like and how you can scale.

So that's exciting. Gang grow. Retain is our customer success leadership community, as you've mentioned. Thank you. It's just been the most fun thing to be involved with in my entire career. So it's just been a lot of fun lots of knowledge sharing that's all about giving value to the community.

That's what we're all about there. We just, we give it out freely and we try to, Find people like yourselves who are amazing thinkers and doers in the space and elevate their stories there. So that's number two. And then I have a weekly newsletter as you pointed out, and you can find that@customersuccess.io and you can sign up there.

And I actually pulled 500 of my LinkedIn posts from the past couple of years and I've put 'em up there and organized 'em on that site too. Yeah, may maybe that stuff is [00:34:00] interesting or useful to somebody, but but yeah check that out as well. But thank you all very much

for having me.

Jason Noble: Thank you, sir. This has been really cool. We're looking forward to the next one with you. Awesome.

Jason Whitehead: Great.

Thank you.

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Episode DescriptionJoin us when we speak with Maranda Dziekonski. Maranda is the SVP of Customer Success at HourWork. She is seasoned customer success executive and leader and with extensive experience building and scaling teams in early and mid-stage startups and has been part of 3 companies who have all seen successful exits.

In this episode, Maranda is going to talk to us about the future of the customer success manager role.

Guest: Maranda Dziekonski - Chief Customer Officer at SwiftlyMaranda Dziekonski was until very recently the Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly. For those that don’t know Swiftly is helping us make our cities more efficient, and helping to improve service reliability, passenger information, and operational efficiency. But she joined the team at HourWork as their new SVP of Customer Success.

Maranda is a vey well respected and well known leader in the customer success space and has extensive experience building and scaling teams in early and mid-stage startups and has been part of 3 companies who have all seen successful exits.

Scroll Down for Episode TranscriptSponsorsThe Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own.

Additional ResourcesHere are some related resources we think you will find helpful:

Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
Read Jason Noble's Blog
Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

SubscribeJoin our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.

We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.

Don't miss out - subscriber today!

TranscriptJason Noble: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's take on podcast series with myself, Jason Noble, here in a very dark and wet London, and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.

Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason.

Jason Noble: We are really thrilled today that we've got our, it's our second podcast of the year and our second guest podcast, and today we have a, another amazing guest with us and a great conversation we're gonna talk about, all about the.

The csm, what does the future of the customer success manager look like? And I think it's a really topical topic. There's lots of challenges between, in the industry, lots of changes, and I'm sure it's one that a lot of our listeners are really gonna be keen on this conversation. And I'd like to give a very big welcome to Miranda Dsky.

Miranda, welcome. Miranda until very recently, I think until yesterday was the Chief Customer Officer at swiftly. This has taken us about 10 different chances to get this reorganized. [00:01:00] Predominantly down to me, my fault of other things coming up, but I'm thrilled to bits that we've got Miranda here. Miranda spent a lot of time at swiftly as their C O.

Helping build their processes up swiftly if you don't know, help us make cities more efficient. So it's a pretty big task that they're undertaking, but she's done some amazing work there, building out their customer success function, their customer success team there. And if you're not connected with her already, and I'll let her talk more about this, but she's departed and she's gonna be joining the team at our work in the US as the s VP of customer Success.

I think beginning of next month. So really excited about this. And Miranda, she's very well respected in the customer success community, a very well-known leader, extensive experience building teams, scaling teams in early startups, early to mid-stage startups. She's also been part of a number of companies that have seen a number of successful exits, so she's.

A lot to bring to the table. She's also a repeat rep recipient of the much acclaimed top 25 and top [00:02:00] 50 customer success influencer awards. Huge achievements. Miranda, welcome. I'm so excited to have you here and to be actually doing this conversation at last.

Maranda: I know finally I'm on the Adjacents. I can't believe it.

I've made it. I'm talking to the Jasons on the Jasons podcast

Jason Noble: all that day.

You can sit back and relax a bit and enjoy the conversation, but

Maranda: yeah, you know me, I love to chit chat, so this is gonna be great.

Jason Noble: Absolutely.

Could you just start us off, I've given a little intro there, but in your own words, give us a quick intro to who you are, who Miranda is, and really your own journeys to where's got you to, where you've got to and your upcoming role with our.

Maranda: Yeah. I think you did a fantastic job introducing me. I don't know if I have a ton to add. But I did start out in customer success, some 20 odds something years ago, working at a very large organization that had, 30,000 plus employees globally. We were. 50 billion a year in revenue. I spent nine years there learning how to do [00:03:00] customer success.

I managed some very large strategic portfolios and that was in Michigan and then made the journey to Silicon Valley and now have been part of seven startups. Some have had. Successful exits. Some have exited in a different manner. . Yeah, they've all exited one way or another. . I've been really fortunate though.

I've landed at, lending Club, which had a unicorn, I p o Hello Sign, which had an, a successful acquisition by Dropbox. I had, Castlight Health. I was there short. before their I P O and then of course recently swiftly, which had an acquisition by J M I equity. So that's for equity events, I guess is what I could call it.

Jason Noble: In my four F seven. That's a good hit, right?

Maranda: Not bad. Yeah. Now I'm starting my eighth which I'm really excited about and I shared a lot about, why I chose this location and I did talk to a total of 39. When I was going through this journey and I ta I spoke more seriously [00:04:00] with 14.

But I was very fortunate to be in a ton of conversations, to have an idea of what's out there, figure out what type of leader I wanna work with, what kind of team, the mission. And definitely I, I po I, I chose, Our work because the mission just really spoke to me as somebody who grew up with a blue collar family and poverty and, understanding needing to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck.

I've been there, so this is the community I'm gonna serve at our work and I'm really excited.

Jason Noble: I think that mission behind a, an organization it's not a vision. It's a mission. And they're very different, aren't they? And I think that's something where you can see the fundamental difference it can make in, not just in, in the city you live in the country, but in society.

It's a huge thing. I think in the, it's a great intro that, and I think you've, You know that, that experience from large organizations to seven startups, eight, now, y you've seen it all. You really have you've seen the good, the bad, the ugly. How, in [00:05:00] your timing, customer success, how have you seen it change and grow?

What are some, particularly when we look at the roles in it and we'll get onto the role of the csm, but how have you seen the industry and the roles changing it?

Maranda: Now I think investors. Finally, I think in the last five years or so, I've started noticing that investors really get what, customer success is and the value that it can bring to an organization That has not always been the case, which means that the leader of the customer success organization had to fight to sit, to have that seat at the table.

That's no longer the case. I believe in, at least in most organizations that I've spoken with the investors seem to understand that whether it's a PE firm or a vc, they understand the power. Of having a very strong customer success motion. On the other end of the spectrum I think we have done a pretty damn good job of moving customer success managers from that reactive support like function.

and the management of the portfolio being the afterthought to, having a [00:06:00] strong motion of them managing the portfolio proactively, doing the account planning, thinking about what needs to be true in order for a renewal to happen, what needs to be true for them to expand with us. And this is, I'm of course talking about the heavy B2B enterprise motion, but I think we really got that down.

We have those playbooks. I will, That the new emerging thing that I don't think we quite have down is this tech touch, digital touch, one to many touch, whatever the hell you wanna call it. Touch. Yep. I don't think we have that down yet. I think

Jason Noble: I like your last definition of that. The, what the hell,

Maranda: Yeah. I think that's the next thing that we've got to figure out is a leadership teams. Yeah. Or as a community because there's a lot of power. Whether you are in B2B enterprise or you're in B2C or whatever you're in, you have got to figure out how do you communicate to the masses?

How do you leverage technology to make you more efficient, especially, given the economic downturn. [00:07:00] Yeah. We cannot continue to throw bodies at problems, so we're gonna have to really figure out how to be more efficient. I think. Layer that one to many or whatever the hell we call it, , is, we've gotta get that figured out quick.

Absolutely. Because money's not going to be flowing freely like it used to.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Money and headcount are not, I like what you say about we've progressed in the five years and all that. I'm curious too, are there any areas where you think we've actually taken a few steps backwards, so it's the tech touch we haven't figured out yet, we've progressed in some other areas, but are there some things you say, wow, that was probably a mistake and we should have or this could be a mistake right now as an industry?

Maranda: Yeah, I think one of the things that I'm raising my eyebrow, like my right eyebrow at very frequently now is I'm seeing. Because of the state of the economy. , I think leadership is panicking. Whether it's your board, it's your c e o, whoever who, whomever it is. And I'm starting to see companies push, have like a power play and push [00:08:00] some of that power back over into the sales realm.

Because for one reason or another, maybe the CS leaders. Comfortable with sales or they haven't been given that opportunity or that training, or they don't have those chops, and I think that makes me a little nervous. It makes me a little nervous. I'm seeing it a lot. Not just, in isolation, but the minute there's a panic, it's oh let's get this into the revenue owning hands, right?

Jason Noble: ,

I think that is, that's a common theme and thread that we see as well globally. It's the know different organizations panicking about economic situations, what they need to do. Do you, in the organizations you've worked in, when you've seen the different CSMs there and you've built these functions, I love the way you've said, You've seen that kind of growth from reactive to proactive driving renewals and cross sell.

You, you do get a lot of c s m still wearing multiple hats, doing too much being still very reactive and I think a lot of it can depend on a, their level of experience, but also the company they're with. And a lot of companies have very different views as to what they [00:09:00] should be doing.

And often even the customers, there's a different expectation for you. If we look at the ideal customer success matter in one of your organizations? What are the core elements that they're doing as part of their role?

Maranda: Yeah, that's a really good question and call, and it depends on the stage of the company.

So I'll use swiftly as an example. When I started at swiftly there was a couple of handful of CSMs there, and they did everything from onboarding to support. To the relationship management and renewals and all of that stuff. It was all owned by just a handful of people. Problem with that was, is, first of all, the company was small.

I joined when we were just under 30 people and just not a ton of customers. So at that time, it made sense to have all of that owned. By just a small group of individuals because it just, business sense and also customer sense. The problem with that was, is it didn't scale and it couldn't scale because you have to eventually start peeling [00:10:00] back those layers of the onion and specializing in order to scale.

So see this happen again and again at these organizations. They need to really figure out, when do I specialize? Because if you do it too early, then you have a bunch of folks who. A ton of bandwidth on their hands, and they're not busy. But if you do it too late, you sacrifice employee morale team morale, the customer experience, and ultimately the business outcomes.

So I think that the c s m that joins, that wants to do everything is sometimes different than the C S M that evolves with you while you special. So I don't know if that

answers your question.

Jason Noble: I think does and I think that getting that balance right is so difficult, isn't it, in trying to time it so that it's right because you can't let you say you've got, what you don't wanna do is having a team that are not doing anything, they're twiddling their thumbs.

Cuz that impacts morale as well, as much as having too much to do. And it is, and I think you've gotta be very careful. You've gotta look at the stage, the [00:11:00] business. What your priorities are, what your level of funding is, what your customers are. So there's all these other things. I think to your point earlier, when you look at the market as well, that brings in another dimension to it, the external economic situations.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think too you were saying you need to specialize to scale, need to automate to scale, and now everyone's, all that requires investment and people are getting very scared about making investment, whether it's in tools or people or process or whatever it is. It's gonna be a challenging few months I think for quite a few folks.

One of the things I wanted to ask you is, since you've seen this evolution of CS over the years, I've maintained a theory that over time CS will become more of a competitive differentiator to help companies win new sales. When you can point to look at our track record of making our customers successful compared to our competitors.

But I personally don't think we're quite there yet. But for that to actually be impactful, I think customers need to be more sophisticated in what they're buying, what they're looking for, and what they realize it takes. What sort of evolutions are you seeing in terms of the sophistication of customers when it comes to what they're expecting for out of [00:12:00] a customer success team?

What they're demanding, and what they might see with their other vendors up there. Say, Hey, we need, you should be doing this for us.

Maranda: That's a really good question. And I just wrapped up my tenure with a company that served public transit. And. I don't know. I wouldn't call them, unsophisticated buyers.

They know the problems that they're solving and they know what they need. However, it's also a government entity and it moves a little bit slower. Yes. So in order to answer your question, I think it depends on your customer base. And how, what problems they're solving with your services or your product, and how in tune they are with how those problems can be solved.

I think. I think where customer success can come in the sales cycle or, as a differentiator. Is when we start looping in things like maturity matrix, where we show the customer this is a, a customer similar to you. This is how they've used our [00:13:00] product to solve these particular product or problem statements.

Are these problem statements that you, encount. Yes, great. These are the things that you could do with our products and services to get you from A, B, and C and those that are the most mature in using, the majority of the features are solving these types of problems, like really wrapping it into problem statements and showing how the customer success manager will partner with you to drive those outcomes.

That's what we've done at swiftly and that has, that is what has netted us are very strong outcomes for the customer and also for the company.

Jason Whitehead: That's great. No I like that approach. I haven't heard people do it in quite such a consistent fashion, especially early in the sales process.

Maranda: Yeah. I wouldn't say it's super early when you have a long sales cycle, you're not gonna bring that right in at the beginning and be like, look no.

It's more when you know that it could definitely be a differentiator that you could leverage in the sales cycle. Always customer success was listed as a differentiator. You will get this team is going to help [00:14:00] you, with your outcomes. They're gonna do regular business reviews with you, make sure you're collecting the goals of what you want to achieve, partnering with you to achieve those goals.

And then once you achieve those, we collect new goals and we do it again.

Jason Noble: Did you find it hard to get buy-in from the sales team to do that and be part of their process?

Maranda: No, not at all. It's beneficial to them. Yep. If a, if. You can speak to the salesperson through their wallet,

You show them how this is beneficial for, expansion, upsell opportunities, cross-sell opportunities, renewals if they own renewals then it's just like a no-brainer.

Jason Noble: It isn't. Even if you bring it in at the right point, it is. You're part of closing that initial deal as well. I think the way, I love the way you've phrased it there.

For me it is it's you bring the csm, the CS team into the sales process to really bring case studies to life. You really exactly showcase what customers are really doing and it does, it makes such a difference when it [00:15:00] works.

Maranda: Case studies, references, yeah. All of those types of things.

Gener are generally generated in customer success. So if we're doing our jobs correctly, we should have customers out there that are willing to advocate for us and our products.

Jason Noble: What do you see today as some of the biggest challenges for CSMs as the roles coming into it? How do we go about addressing those issues

Maranda: not being the dumping ground in the organization?

I've seen this time and time. Where, I, I don't know if it's causation or correlation, but everybody says let's just, push this over to customer success, or put this on customer success. And next thing you have a C S M team that's doing 50 things and then they can't do the things that they need to do, right?

, because you can't have that much on your plate. And be able to really manage your portfolio. So if I was to say anything, I urge leaders out there to be guardians of your CSMs time. Understand [00:16:00] where they're spending their time. Don't, of course, come across as somebody who doesn't wanna partner with others in the organization, but understand if something's being punted over to your organization, why?

What is the problem it's going to solve? Does it really belong there? or does it belong within another function, maybe within the customer success organization and not with a C S M. Just really drill in on the why's before you're just like, yes, we'll take that. We'll take this. It's sometimes viewed as like a power play the more you own.

Yep. I will urge folks to think about it in the opposite way. If you're not doing the core of what you need to do owning more means nothing.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah I think that's a tough balance to figure out, like what should we own and what should we meet? And so many organizations I meet with, they really struggle to get that internal politics and balance and roles and responsibilities and, if you're able to get that to work, I think that you're really ahead of the game.

Absolutely. I'm wondering, in your perspective, what is the future of A C S M look like and how it will be different today? Where do you sees need to pivot more going forward and what's [00:17:00] your timeline for this? Five or 10 years down the road? Or is it like in the next two or ye one or two years down the road?

Maranda: Oh, Jason, I work in early startups. I can't even think a year or two out five years. What does that look like? I do think what I said earlier about the economic state customer success managers, if they are not comfortable with owning renewals or expansions, upsells, things like that, they need to get comfortable with the commercials or else or else you know, that function will go to sales.

I'm really concerned that we're just gonna start seeing. , all of the commercials just completely put in this bucket with sales. And I think that CS just needs to get comfortable with this.

Jason Noble: I love that. And it is you've gotta, cuz it's. It's a commercial function, we should be a revenue generating function.

A profit center part of the business. Exactly. Enterprise, a mind shift, and it's part of that shifting from doing everything from doing support and things to how do we generate revenue for the [00:18:00] business and how do we ultimately generate enterprise value for ourselves.

Maranda: Exactly. A hundred percent.

Jason Noble: Do you go, Jason, were you gonna say something? No, go ahead. I was just gonna say, Amanda, this is a really phenomenal conversation and. Appreciate you taking your time out. timing, of all the rearrangements, weran here on the day that you leave. I so apologies for the timing, but it's been a great conversation.

I think there's so much that you bring to our listeners your experiences. I think it's unique. It's what makes you who you are but there's so much to add. What we always like to do is give our. Guess a bold challenge question and the one for you is, what would you say is the number one thing as a C S M that I should be doing if I'm a C S M?

What sort of number one thing I should be working on today to ensure that I'm ready for the future?

Maranda: Okay, so I, it's a big question. It is a really big question. I have noticed that a lot of customer success managers don't understand the business that they work in, [00:19:00] so really understand what is net retention?

What does that mean? What is your levers to drive net retention? What is gross renewal? What is gross dollar renewal? What is gross dollar returned ? Really know all of these things and understand how you impact that and how those you partner with impact that. Get a big picture of how these businesses work, not just your day-to-day.

Look outside of the mechanics of I do A, B, C, to, how you impact everything, the full ecosystem.

Jason Whitehead: That's awesome. Love that. Thank you again for being here. Before we go, we always like to invite a guest to do a shameless plug, so please let us know what's top of mind for you or how people can get in touch or whatever.

You'd like to plug.

Maranda: I don't have a lot to plug these days. I sunsetted my podcast. But I do talk a lot about customer success, leadership, hiring, cause I was also a human resource professional. I was a chief people officer at swiftly for three years. So feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. Very easy to find.

Jason Whitehead: That's great. [00:20:00] Awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate Miranda.

Jason Noble: Thanks Miranda. This has been great, and I know you've got I'm looking forward to more of these conversations. There's some great content that you do push out for people to listen to. So do, like Miranda said, if you're not following her, make sure you do.

She's a person to watch and listen to superb conversation. Thank you so much and best of luck in your new role next month.

Maranda: Thank you. Thank you. Happy New Year. Happy

Jason Noble: New year.

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Episode DescriptionJoin us when we speak with Ryan Johansen. Ryan is customer success leader based in Boston who has been an IC, Manager and Director of CS.

In this episode, Ryan is going to talk to us about mental health as it relates to CSM's and their workloads.

Guest: Ryan Johansen - Senior Customer Success ManagerAs a first time manager at a startup, Ryan ended up in a hospital because of a mental breakdown caused by workplace stress. After going to a dark place with mental health, he discovered putting your mental health first can actually have major career benefits.

Driven by a desire to help people avoid what happened to him, he started doing presentations on managing stress as a csm. This quickly took off and he has helped thousands of individuals at dozens of companies. He provides live training programs on how to manage stress, improve productivity, and change work for the better.

Scroll Down for Episode TranscriptSponsorsThe Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own.

Additional ResourcesHere are some related resources we think you will find helpful:

Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn
Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter
Read Jason Noble's Blog
Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

SubscribeJoin our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.

We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.

Don't miss out - subscriber today!

TranscriptJason Noble: Welcome everyone, a very warm welcome to our first podcast episode of 2023 and our first guest Ryan Hansen.

Ryan is a customer success leader based in Boston, who's, He's gone through the full customer success journey. So Ryan started off as an individual contributor. As a C S M. He's moved up to a manager, to a director and then some more leadership roles. And as a first time manager at a startup in customer success, Ryan actually ended up in hospital because of a mental breakdown caused by workplace stress.

And after this, what he did was he put a renewed focus on mental health and really found that by putting your mental health. Can actually have some fundamental career benefits for you. So we're really excited to have Ryan here today to talk about this and the impact of mental wellbeing, a burnout of workload stress here, and Ryan's [00:01:00] what he is done.

Since then, he is been driven by the desire to help people avoid this situation, and he started doing some presentations around how he stress as a csm, but found that this took off really quickly and he's gone on to. I think you said Ryan, it's thousands of customer, people, of individuals literally dozens, yeah, if not hundreds of organizations.

And you now help provide training programs on how to manage stress, improve productivity, and really change work in the workplace for the better. So a big, a huge undertaking. And today, Ryan's gonna share some of his story with us today that I think starting 2023, we know there are some challenge.

There's a lot of organizations going through huge layoffs. Now we know there are economic challenges still, so I think it's gonna be a really cool conversation. Welcome, Ryan. We're really excited to have you with us.

Ryan: Yeah, thanks for having me. I love talking about this topic and I'm super excited to dive in today.

Jason Noble: Ryan look I've given a brief intro there, but I'm sure you can do a better job there, so please go ahead. Tell us a bit about your own journeys that brought you into customer. Then what got you down [00:02:00] the road you're in now and what you're doing now and what your plans off 2023?

Ryan: Yeah, definitely I got started out in my career in sales in the pharmaceutical industry interestingly enough, and ended up moving into tech about 11 years ago. And from there, like mostly was a sales guy and ended up getting in a customer success. I was working at a company called RapidMiner, where a data science machine learning platform, and got really interested in some of the use cases we were solving.

It was, the forefront of AI a couple years ago. and I loved talking with our customers and figuring out like how they were using it, how they were changing their business. I've always been a really curious guy. So I ended up making the switch over to CS and haven't looked back. It's worked out very well for me.

I always did fairly well at sales, but I feel like I felt my calling and always someone that. Really wanted to, grow and work hard. And that's something that I definitely grew up with. And from there, I worked really hard to get a management job at that company and, did whatever it takes, worked the long hours, [00:03:00] as we all know.

And from there, got that management position. My, my CEO came up to me and I think it was February, 2018, he said, Hey you're doing a great job. We want you to lead the team and I feel like I had made it. It was a great experience for myself. And the thing no one tells you when you become a manager is that everyone else's problems are now your problems.

And it was just this sudden heap of responsibility. It's a small company. I tend to take, I, at that time, tended to take things very personally, have a lot of passion, but definitely brought a lot of that home with me. And about six to eight months in, started to really struggle with things like, things don't always go your way in management or in general in life.

And from there I started working even longer hours that we had some really high goals to the point where, I'm starting to get really negative about things. I am having trouble sleeping and really all of these typical signs that you should probably take the foot off the gas and set back a little bit just made me kept pushing harder and harder.

Because I thought that, hey, [00:04:00] maybe I'll come out of this and I'm sure we can all deal with it. And as you. Feel that pressure. You want to keep pushing yourself, and that's something that I really identified. Because it's it was really your fight or flight, which is really the whole key of stress.

So I, I kept pushing myself and the last thing I wanted to tell is how I was doing to anyone especially my leaders, because they had taken a chance on me. I wanted to make them look good. I wanted to make myself look good, but then it started to affect my health. I started having panic attacks all the time.

I'm having trouble sleeping. I'm really irritable. I withdraw from a lot of my, social activities, things that I actually like doing because I was so afraid of failing. So I keep pushing myself. , and then it hits about the 11 month mark and it's our q4. We have some, a couple big renewals coming in really close to the target.

And then I walked in and it was like almost an out-of-body experience. I walk into the office and I feel my whole body start to almost break down. I'm having a massive panic attack as soon as [00:05:00] I walked into the threshold. So I just grabbed my boss. I told him what was going on. And what he, something amazing happened, he said he's listen, take as much time as you need.

There's nothing more important than you feeling better cuz you're very important to this company. So that gave me a little permission. And from there I had no idea what to do. There's not a standard playbook for this. When you're struggling with mental health things, You tend to feel all alone and that you're the only one dealing with it, but and you don't know how to deal with it you're probably your least resourceful when you're going through something like this.

So what I ended up doing was called my therapist that I wasn't seeing anymore because I was so busy with work. And he said, why don't you potentially check yourself into a hospital that could be a good option for you. At least it's somewhere safe. I thought it was a little bit much, but I didn't know what else to do, so I decided to go that route.

Which when I get there that, that felt like a complete low point. I thought that my life was over and, there's obviously a lot of shame that comes with something like that and there's some stigmas and, it definitely felt like a low point, but it ended up being something that was very helpful.

and at least, if anything, it gave me a breakaway from life [00:06:00] for just a few days. But before that, I was actually looking at like meditation retreats. But I figured I'd go at the end of the year, but that didn't work out. But after that, I end up, taking care of myself and, I have this realization in there and there's a guy following me around who was another patient, and he thought I was in the cia.

A, he thought I was a. And that was something that I, clearly isn't true. And then it just made me click in my head that, okay if his brain's telling him this, maybe some of the stuff my brain's been telling me isn't completely accurate either. So that opened the door for me to start looking at some of the thought patterns that I had going on and starting to do a lot of work.

So even in the hospital, I started just cracking whatever books they had so I could learn. What was going on being, that's, I think that's why I've done so good in CS is very naturally curious. I wanna learn. And from there I also saw a poster of people like Abraham Lincoln and JK Rowling and people that have overcome mental health challenges.

And it made me think, okay. If they can do it, why can't I, that competitive spirit kind of kicks in under me. [00:07:00] And from there, I just spent really all of my waking hours I had to go back to work. I'm not independently wealthy, so I, within a week I'm back at work. I have to take the foot off the gas, but like my main focus was just feeling better and getting through the day.

And that was a rough road. It wasn't like I got outta the hospital and everything was perfect. But I started working on what are some tangible coping skills that I can use? How can I think of a better way to work more efficiently by, learning things like if I take more time off or actually rest, then I'll be more effective at work.

So made all these big changes. . A lot of them were uncomfortable at first, and they're all different. But it, I came to the point where everything I was wor doing wasn't really working that well. So I end up, things are going fairly well and at one point my career started to really take off after that.

because I was putting my mental health first. I could show up to more difficult situations. I could have more challenging conversations just by putting my mental health first. And I have this realization that, hey, I wish [00:08:00] someone had told me some of these things and I, I probably could have avoided what happened to me.

So I have this wild idea to throw a webinar together to see if anyone else cares about this topic. And I pitched you to turn zero who we were. We were working with, and it was their number two webinar of the year. So like more it was beyond my wildest expectations. And from there, like this thing took off fairly organically where a lot of people reached out to me.

After that. I've had a lot of different conversations. I've made, pretty close relationships with people who were going through the same things. What I'm trying to do here is make this conversation happen. I think it's something that like we all acknowledge that, you should take care of your mental health, but just a little bit more than paying it lip service.

I think it's, what I've identified is. , it can be very helpful even if you don't have any, diagnosable mental health condition to learn some of the skills to, to deal with life and how things go wrong. Especially right now in the economy where, things are really taking a nose dive and there's a lot of challenging situations.

We're having a lot of negative thoughts, things like that can really help people [00:09:00] get through tough times. So that's a super long-winded answer, but that's my story

Jason Noble: Ryan? That is, I think that the look on both of our faces I and the silence here, that's a very personal story.

Ryan: Yeah.

Jason Noble: Thank you for sharing that. It's difficult to do things like that, but an incredible one to see the ultimate transformation and journey you've gone on and what, it's something I think in Cs we. Are a big part of is the community and giving back. I and I don't think there's a better example of giving back than what you've just talked through now.

Doing and how you're doing it. It's I'm, it's an incredible story, Ryan. It really is. Thank you. That really is a very personal story as well,

Jason Whitehead: and I think a lot of people have some sort of way they can relate to that in their own work lives, whether they're in CS or other things too, of the stress.

Having the skills to handle those and cope with those and I think people get where they need to go different ways. But I'd love to hear more about how you're helping people now with the work that you've been doing. Cuz it sounds like you've had quite an impact [00:10:00] on also taking it, on, being willing to share such personal stories.

So what else are you doing now?

Ryan: Yeah, so that's a great question. And it was I don't wanna sugarcoat it. It wa it was very difficult to be open about something like this. . But the reason that I decided to do this and get into this is one thing that really helped me out when I was feeling it my lowest was other regular people who shared their story.

Some, there were some celebrities there that I would read, but like hearing other people who have dealt with the same thing and gotten through it. I had a couple friends that I knew who had some challenges that I've talked. I think that's something that, that was very important to me. So like I, I felt like I was at a point where my mental health is, fairly well right now.

I'm, feeling much more confident about myself and all that other good stuff. And, it, the amazing thing is I was afraid of what people might say or anything like that, but the outpouring of support has been really wild. And what's been interesting is that, I've learned that one in four.

Deal with something like this. So like the odds are if you're not affected by it [00:11:00] yourself, you probably know someone in your life that is that was one thing that like, I felt super alone, but the specific ways that I'm helping people with it is, what I really got started off with is that building out webinars for people, so what I'm doing right now is it's mainly training programs where like I'll sit down with a company and I start out with a stress test to identify which I've built out to identify like what are the biggest challenges that people are facing. Stress can go in a million different ways.

We are all experiencing different things. Some things might bother one person more than another, but like really trying to find what are the skills that this team needs to build in order to work at an optimal level. So things you might find are like, especially in cs, like they're handling a lot of conflict and the people aren't really ready for that or having difficult conversations.

That's another thing that like you have to get comfortable with is cs. So that's been a very popular thing that I'll do a lot of lessons. And then also I do a fair amount of coaching, and that's something where like I'll, obviously hop on a call with someone and identify what are some of the challenges that they're [00:12:00] having, talking through some things like that.

Then I also, I think one of my favorite things to do is I run a newsletter every week that's obviously free to sign up for that. And just sharing in what's been really helpful is I write it to myself a few years. And it, what, it's obviously helpful for a lot of people that I've heard.

But it, it keeps me in check too of, I, I wanna stay on this path. And, that's another thing that I've heard is if you want to take care of your own mental health it's very important to like, help other people. Cuz that takes the focus away from your own challenges. So that's been important for me.

Jason Whitehead: Oh, I like that.

Jason Noble: Yeah. I love what you said, Ryan, about the, when you were in hospital and that the other patient that was there. Thinking you were from the cia, I mean that how that then became a kind of a turning trigger point for you. Yeah. How did you go about then, once you, that moment had happened, what did you actually do?

What are some of the steps you took to say, actually that's made me rethink and I need to now question the way I am thinking? What's the process there?

Ryan: Yeah, that's a great point too. I think what really got me going there is obviously that was. [00:13:00] A more extreme example of thinking that someone's in the cia which I guess you never know.

But I can confirm I'm not in the CIA . But so he says yes, exactly. Yeah. I don't have that much room on my plate. I got enough going on. But with, with something like that it made me think that like maybe my thought patterns aren't right, and I looked. A book on cognitive behavioral therapy.

And that's something where you're typically talking through or thinking through how your thoughts get distorted and how to think of it in a more helpful way. Because, the interesting thing that I found out is that, your thoughts aren't necessarily true or false.

It's more helpful to think of your thoughts as helpful or hurtful. So it's one of those things where like you can just get a better understanding of them by asking a few different questions which can be very helpful. Trying to bring objectivity to it is something that's very helpful.

My, my standard answer for a lot of stuff is like just reading multiple different sources on it and learning as much as I can. And then you. You tend to get conflicting reports, so you have to figure it out for yourself too.

Jason Noble: I think it [00:14:00] is it's that wide experience and knowledge you're taking in. I think, like you say, one, one of the skills that I think we're very privileged to have in customer success, and I think more so than other fields, is that curiosity. . And we want to know about people, we wanna know about situations. And it does I'm a big avid reader. It is, there's so much more you can learn again, phenomenal story there.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah. I'm curious as well too having the experience that you did and also working in cs, where do you think CS leaders could be more attentive to their team or help with their own development? Because, I remember when I was a first time manager and trying to figure it out, like there's a lot on your plate of, okay, I, I need to be an expert in my subject matter, but now I've got this team that I'm responsible for and I've never done this before.

So I think a lot of first time managers struggle with the role. Getting their sea legs under them kind of thing. But I'm curious though, for cs, since it is a stressful job in dealing with stress dot clients as well too where do you think more leaders should be and how should they help their teams?

Ryan: Yeah that's a great question. And I think I mightily struggled as a first time manager and that, that was probably half of the equation that ended up [00:15:00] creating that story that I told you. And I think that's one thing that, Companies, don't probably provide enough training for people to get up and running.

A lot of it you're gonna learn, but it's not just the nuts and bolts of managing a team. It's you're going from, if you're an individual contributor and you get promoted, you tend to be very good at your job, and then you change into a brand new position that you're doing for the first time. So that mental adjustment can be very challenging for a lot of people.

So that's one thing that like, I think. I've done a, I actually teach a first time manager training course through with a company called Electives, and that's been pretty helpful too. and what I did for that is the same thing. Like what's everything I wish I learned a few years ago , and think thinking of things like that.

And I think one of the most helpful things that will be really useful for people is changing a lot of the belief patterns of you need to be more comfortable with failure. And that's something that like as I got closer to our CEO and other leaders at the. They shared a lot of experiences [00:16:00] where they've made mistakes, but they've learned from it.

So I think just relationship with failure as a leader is something that like, you really want to unpack and understand that we all know the story of Michael Jordan didn't make his high school basketball team and Colonel Sanders try to sell his recipe like 8,000 times, but when it's yourself, it feels a lot more uncomfortable.

So really working on that belief and making sure that's something that you can get a little bit more comfortable with and trying new. And I think with, first time managers, it's a big change. But if you're trying to lead a team, I think one thing that really helped me is, it starts at home.

If you are a really stressed out and angry parent, it, sometimes that will rub off on your children. And I think it's the same thing with management. If you are not taking care, if you're, running around. Stressed out, miserable. That's gonna rub off on your team. So I think you set the tone as a leader.

I had to do ton of work on myself, but it was really great the. First person I ever managed. We, could butt heads occasionally as we were first we were both she was new in the position. I was new to a leadership role, but like after about a year after I'd gone through the transition for a few [00:17:00] months of, really taking care of myself.

She was like you've done such an amazing job and you've gotten a lot better. So that was like one of the more rewarding parts of my career. So I'd say like a, work on yourself. I think that's probably the most important part. But b like just, give your team that space and identify how your team ticks.

I think like understanding like different personality types is another thing that I'll make a plug for as.

Jason Noble: Absolutely that thing about stress outside of work as well. We are, many of us are parents, I've got two teenagers. You've got to try and balance it all as well. We're much more than just our jobs and our position and work, but everything impacts each other and it's really important.

And I think there's a really, having seen my two children as well, you can see how I think the pressures today are bigger on them than they were on. Things like social media devices. It's just the being as public as they are, and I think it, it's really important that we, a lot of the lessons that you're sharing here, I think apply [00:18:00] well outside the workplace and just to, to people growing up and I'm encouraged that you see lots of kind of schools and education systems.

Teaching kids about this, and like you say, failure's, good failure's, okay? , Talking you through the lessons there and everything, and it's really encouraging to see them coming through and learning that.

Jason Whitehead: Yeah. And I I love what you're saying about taking care of yourself first.

I think as like the airplane, you gotta put the mac, the air mask before you put on great example. If you don't have the any juice in the tank here, you know you're not gonna be any good to anyone. I found. In my journey. A while ago, I started to prioritize as well, putting aside time every day that I can go for a swim or I can go and read a book or do whatever I wanna do.

And at first I felt very guilty oh, I should be, this is not productive time. I should be working. And I've come to realize that on the days when I do take care of myself first, whether that's exercise or something else I'm more relaxed and I have better ideas and I'm more effective going through.

So I actually now prioritize the time and I have a blocked out on my calendar every day for an hour and a half. This is my time. What practical tips do you have for [00:19:00] CSMs either frontline folks or leaders of how they can be more attentive to their mental health on a daily basis? What are some little things that, that they could do that would make a big difference?

Ryan: Yeah I'm big on blocking off time for yourself. That's a very important thing if you think. Think of your brain like a muscle. If you're constantly, if it's constantly in use, it gets fatigued, and then that's why at the end of the day, after you've been on your tent zoom call of the day and you're nonstop, that you just, your brain feels like mashed potatoes.

But as far as more practical things that you can do, my biggest one that I recommend to anyone is to not start the day on email. That's something that I tried as an experiment that I still go with. And I think it's, there's a couple reasons why. And when you check your email first thing in the morning it sets you up for a distraction right away.

It also can make can immediately be miserable cuz you can get bad news as soon as the day starts and like before you're out of bed you can be in a bad news and like that. I was just, I was constantly holding onto my phone all the time and just checking it and usually. The reason we go to email is we're [00:20:00] looking for a dopamine release.

So we're hoping for good news. , and you throw up that phone and then if it's bad news, then it's even more disappointing because you were hoping for a certain expectation and that can make you check your phone even more. So what I advise people to do is at the end my, I have this shutdown routine.

I write out the top three things that I wanna accomplish in the morning. Could just be one, but just, a, what are a couple actionable things that even if the rest of the day blow up, I would still feel like I've accomplished something or moved something important to me forward, especially in cs, you have to work with so many other customers and counterparts within the org, but write out those three things and then I start my day on those three things instead.

So I don't check my email for the first hour of the day. I tend to start a little bit earlier. I'll get a workout in and. I'll do those three things, and then immediately, instead of just feeling like I am behind the eight ball as soon as I wake up, which news slash you're never gonna be on top of your email.

That email's always gonna come . So that's one thing that you're chasing the dragon that you're never gonna get. But as soon as you get [00:21:00] that email as soon as you get those things taken care of, you're in a more positive mood. You feel more accomplished, and you've actually gotten some work done.

And from there, like I told, and people are very hesitant to try that out, but I read a book called Deep Work and they had talked about something similar about that, and that's one that I highly recommend. But I told my boss and I wa wanted to do an experiment and I was like, Hey, and the way I framed it, I'm not gonna be available for the first hour.

Everyone that needs me has my phone number. They can call me, but I want to try this out to see if I can be more productive. So any probably rational human is gonna say, okay, go for it. And, the rest is sort of history. Wow.

Jason Noble: E email. Absolutely. But over the last couple of years particularly, we've seen things like Slack teams.

Ryan: Oof. Yeah.

Jason Noble: How do you apply the same methodology to that?

Ryan: Yes. ? Yep. I don't, Alerts on anything whether it be Slack teams, email, text I it's almost a. It's a situation where I'd rather be in control of my day. Because I think obviously you want to be responsive and [00:22:00] I still check things even probably more than I should, but I know that some people might recommend checking it twice in the day.

I don't think that's the most realistic thing. I'd love to get to a position in life where I could actually do that. I think my productivity would skyrocket. But one of the other things that, like I, I talk a lot. In some of the courses that I teach is about multitasking. That's something where, that's one of the biggest culprits that's making us miserable as a working society because you have all of those device you're having to manage multiple different.

Avenues like that and your brain's being compartmentalized. Whereas if you just focus on one thing at a time, you're gonna be a lot happier. You can be in more of a flow state and you get more accomplished. But I think with multitasking the numbers are that like, it can take you, if you're doing like three things at a time, it can take you you get about 20% of the amount of the work done.

So like it reduces your productivity by 80%. It increases your stress levels by 40%. So it's one of those things where if you can avoid it as much [00:23:00] as possible instead trying to do like that more focused work while you. That's going to, that helped me get a lot more done and less time. And that's one of the other things that I tried to solve for getting outta the hospital is like a, how can I feel better and get through the day and deal with some of those challenging thoughts, but b it was like the way I'm working is totally wrong.

So like, how can I make that more effective? So that's one of the main things I solve for is like, how can I still be a top performer but work way less hours than still have. I

Jason Noble: think you've probably answered this question I'm gonna ask you now. With that comment there, but in the, when you've started doing this coaching, this teaching you're doing more, you've still got your day job. Yeah. So I was gonna say how do you do it without it becoming too much workload again? But I think from what you've said there, you've learned to be more effective with each of those so you can pack more.

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. And I'm definitely a good case study of my own I hate to eat my own dog food, stuff like that.

But It might seem a little bit more rigorous to, there's very simple things that I follow. I schedule out my day as much as I can. And I know that like some things are [00:24:00] gonna blow up, but I have the appreciation that like, if I can get 60% of what I was hoping to do, done, instead of just walking through chaos all of my life it's gonna make a big difference.

Focusing on what's important, having some type of a schedule and I've, I. I feel like I'm never done with this too. I love learning about either how to be more productive or, more mentally sound. And I keep, this is something where I'm constantly figuring out new things.

So it's creating content or lessons or anything like that is so easy because I'm constantly learning myself. That's great. Yeah.

Jason Whitehead: Let me ask you for leaders of cst , what are some of the signs they should look for? That people on their teams are struggling in maybe Yeah.

Burnout or maybe need some help or need some other sort of interventions, but what people are you paying attention to?

Ryan: Yeah, it's a great question that I, it, that always comes up and I think one of the things is any deviation from normal behav. And because all of us handle things differently.

If you have someone that's fairly talkative and positive and all of a sudden they're withdrawn and quiet or if you have someone that's more reserved, that's [00:25:00] suddenly, Really talkative and almost like nervous or something like that might be something you wanna look out for.

But the important thing is that like you can't force it out of someone. So I think as a leader, I obviously have a, a much different experience where I've always tried to lead with my own vulnerability of Hey I've gone through it before. And that, that's certainly been a good asset for.

To have people open up. But like you, you can't expect people to always to, but like I think leading with your own vulnerabilities is very important, but if someone does open up to you, like really respecting that. And I think the other part too is if someone ever does open up to you you have to keep that between you and the other person too, because I think that's one of the biggest concerns that anyone has is if I say something, Everyone else is gonna find out about it.

Everyone else might think of me in a different light. So if anyone ever does confide in you it's so important to hold that confidentiality between you. And I'd say another thing that's very important is really having an understanding for how's your own stress level and looking at if I'm.

Really in a tough spot, and I know that my team's been working really hard, doing something proactive can be very [00:26:00] helpful instead of waiting for it to get really bad or noticing that people are having challenges. So like addressing the elephant in the room and yeah. Doing things like that can be helpful.

Jason Noble: How do you make sure that, a lot of these kind of tips, the coping skills of grit, but how do you make them become habit so it's not. Someone might have a, an event today, tomorrow that makes 'em stressed out. They can't cope. And then they go through what are your programs?

And they, and it's all okay, but then how do you make it so if there's the same situation in the future that they can learn from that and they can keep, so it becomes a skill. How do you make it so that it's an unconscious skill that they've got that they just do and they need to do it?

Ryan: Yeah, definitely. And I think it, a lot of these things come down to practice because, Some of them are uncomfortable or different, or some of 'em so seem so simple that they won't work. Or it's like one of the things that I, Try and do that I think I do a fairly well job of is like doing after learnings with any sessions that I do.

So like just sending helpful tips to make people, keep following up and trying some of the things that we've talked about. But one helpful exercise that I [00:27:00] always. Try and get across that, that can be very helpful is at the end of the day, you need to participate in your own rescue mission.

So it comes down to some of your own practices and what you're working on. But is a gratitude exercise where like that this is recommended by like the Mayo Clinic, which is one of, a lot of different actual hospital systems recommend this, but. A gratitude practice is something where like you just write down three things every day that you're helpful for, which just sounds like the stupidest thing that's just so simple that's never gonna work.

Like the studies on that are actually phenomenal. And that's something where I had to do that too, even though, I felt at the bottom of the barrel, like a real low point that I would try and I would start writing those things out. And it actually did make a difference. I think the other challenging thing is with a lot of these, We're in a society where we expect, you put a LinkedIn statement out and you get the likes and you, it's that immediate feedback loop where a lot of these things, it takes some time for things to work.

So I think my hand was forced because the alternative the alternative reality was so miserable that it made me try that out. But I think What [00:28:00] can be really helpful is like just sticking with something and giving it time until you see the benefits. Like things like meditation too. They do take time to work, but it can be a huge difference.

Jason Noble: I think that, like you say, when you had that episode at your organization and spoke to your, you manager himself, having that support at the organization. It is critical, and this is why this is such an important topic for every company, every individual to really, yeah, look at and consider.

Make sure that your friends, your colleagues, they're okay. I, cause I think hate to think the situation, but if you don't have that support at work, this could be a very different conversation if you hadn't had that. And it is, I think we've gotta be thankful that a lot of organizations are, and individuals really are already thinking about.

Ryan: Yeah there's companies doing a phenomenal job at this. I think it, it's an area where this happened to me back in 2019 and it wasn't really talked about as much there, there was some rumblings of it, but I think covid the, one of the helpful things is like that, that started this conversation and made it a lot more open for people.

Yep. But I think, with businesses like [00:29:00] it's. It's a big hairy elephant. It's a tough thing to we don't know where to start with how to help people or how to do things like that. And it's, you're not sure where, individual responsibility and company responsibility fall in.

But I would advise any company is, don't be afraid to take a small step. Because you're not gonna come out with this like world class mental health program. Tomorrow. Every, everyone's figuring it out. But you can't do nothing anymore. That's because even though the economy's getting a little bit tighter as people have options, especially people like high level talent will, can and will go other places, and I think your top performers are also very susceptible to burnout as well.

So that's one thing. I've made decisions very much on any opportunity looking at us like, is this place somewhere that's gonna I don't want to be. And I think another thing that companies might, think of differently or people in a leadership position is The mental health thing isn't about coddling.

It's about making sure that like you can, understand people and let them be themselves, but to also help them build skills to handle difficult times. As opposed to just because one of the more popular ones that people [00:30:00] do is they'll give people a couple days off a year or something like that to recuperate, and that's one of these like things that is helpful.

But if you have to go back to the same. That is causing all the stress to begin with, then that's not really gonna be the most impactful thing. So that's why. I think what I'm doing is really gonna start growing even more because having people, you're, instead of trimming the weeds, you're actually pulling them out and helping people like really get to the core of the issue and get ahead of things.

Jason Noble: And almost that, that, that analogy there is brilliant. You almost wanna stop the weeds growing in the first place, don't you? Yeah. Because it is, yes, I have two days out, but you go straight back. You've not learned anything. I, Ryan this has been a phenomenal conversation. What we always like to do is give our guests a bold challenge Question.

We, we had one in mind. And I'm still gonna ask the same one cause I think it's still relevant. But what do you see as the kind of, what's the number one thing or a bold action as we call them, that a practitioner in customer success can take either as an individual contributor or as a. To, to help them manage [00:31:00] stress, avoid burnout, and to manage situations like this.

So if you narrow it down to, it's a big ask, what's the number one thing that they can do?

Ryan: I usually go with what I talked about with email. I think that's one thing that would be very helpful. But another one might be,

Learn more about yourself. So I think with that, everyone's affected by stress differently. We all have different things that get us bothered. Different negative belief thoughts. So I would say pick up any book. I'm happy to recommend things, but Try and improve your emotional intelligence.

I think that's one thing that like, that can have very large cascading effects, whether you're a leader running a huge team or whether you are just an individual contributor. Because that can have positive effects if you can learn to [00:32:00] handle more challenging situations or build resilience or whatever you wanna work on.

And that's like the one thing that I'm trying to get across to people is you have the. To build your own skills so you can look at any weaknesses there. There's YouTube there's there's books. There's really like limit. We live in an age of limitless information that's freely available.

So work on one thing that you're challenged with and that can have, like if you get angry really easily not only will working on that help out your career or handling more difficult situations, it's gonna make your home life a lot. and that's gonna make the life of the other people in your home better and the people that they interfere with and they interact with.

So just I'd say that the thing is like figuring out, a weakness or something that you'd wanna work on and dedicate 10 minutes of day to it. That you don't have to do something this major overhaul or like a cleanse or a, a 10 month meditation trip or anything like that.

Just take a simple step and work on something.

Jason Noble: That awesome. 10 minutes a day. Brilliant. It is. Cause people, I think, see a lot of these things, there's, I can't do it. It requires me to do it, change it five, 10 minutes a day. Easy. We've all got that. . Brian, please, can you, could you give a [00:33:00] shameless plug for yourself what you're doing, how people could reach you if they wanted help from you?

Just give a, an insight more into kind of the training and things that you do.

Ryan: Yeah for sure. So my, my website is ryan johansen.me. Hopefully you can link it in the episode, but, I would recommend if you're, like I talked about taking that first step I is very important and just what I do is primarily like work with companies and put on trainings, either like a one-off program.

What the more, the most popular one I have is. Feel better, work better, perform better. So it's a three-step training program where the first thing we talk about is how to manage stress. The second part is how to work in a more structured way that's gonna actually make you a better performer but reduce some of your stress.

And then the third is perform better. So like things like building mental resilience, setting goals. It's a really a step-by-step process to go from really overwhelmed and struggling to performing at a very high level. So if your. If you like the, I think the opportunity with a lot of companies right now is like, This is a, not only is like taking care of your team's [00:34:00] mental health and teaching them things like this obviously a nice thing to do in a very, rewarding thing to do.

But it's it also makes business sense. If you have people who are showing up in a good mind state every single day you're gonna have a better performance at work. Have no doubt about that. So definitely reach out to me through that website and you schedule a call. I'm happy to talk through everyth.

Jason Noble: I've signed up for you newsletter this morning. Yeah. Thank you. I'm, I, this has been a thrill, really. I, a super just listening the conversation. I think it's for me, this has been one of the best ones we've done. I'm really excited to what people are gonna say, and I'd really I'd love to have you back later on in the year to come back and talk more about how this has gone and what changes you've seen in things.

Ryan: Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on and always good back, good to give back and talk to people about this. I'll I'll yell on the soapbox is for anyone who will have me. So thank you so much, .

Jason Whitehead: Thank you. Appreciate it.

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Episode DescriptionJoin us when we speak with Jamie Bertasi. Jamie is the President and COO of Totango. Previously she was also the company's Chief Customer Officer.In this episode, Jamie is going to share her predictions for Customer Success in 2023!Guest: Jamie Bertasi - President and COO of TotangoShe is responsible for the go-to-market, onboarding and customer success teams at Totango. A proven and trusted leader, Jamie has a demonstrated track record for building high-value experiences for customers and partners, delivering strong business results and building teams with a positive culture.Jamie is a recognized expert in go-to-market and customer success strategies. Before joining Totango, Jamie was the COO of HomeSuite and previously led TellMe to a successful acquisition by Microsoft."Scroll Down for Episode TranscriptSponsorsThe Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional ResourcesHere are some related resources we think you will find helpful:* Follow Jamie Bertasi on LinkedIn * Visit Totango's official website * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter * Read Jason Noble's Blog * Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

SubscribeJoin our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.Don't miss out - subscriber today!TranscriptJason Whitehead: [00:00:00] All right. Hello and thank you everyone for joining us for another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast. My name is Jason Whitehead, coming to you from sunny Washington, DC area. I'm here with my partner in crime, Mr. Noble, say hello, Jason.Jason Noble: Hello, Jason. Hello everybody. Good evening. Good morning, good afternoon from a very dark and cold London.Jason Whitehead: Yep. And today we're excited to extend a very warm welcome to Jamie Bertasi. Did I pronounce that anywhere close to correct? I'm sorry.Jamie Bertasi: Close enough. No problem. Jason.Jason Whitehead: Jamie is the president and COO of Totango, and previously she was also the Chief Customer Officer at Totango. And Jamie's going to share her predictions for customer success in 2023. So we're excited to hear about this. Just a little background on Jamie. She is responsible for the go to market onboarding and customer success teams over at to Tango, and she's a proven, a trusted leader. Jamie has a demonstrated track record for building high value experiences for customers and partner.We're delivering strong business [00:01:00] results and building teams with a positive culture. And many of you will recognize that Jamie is an expert in Go to market customer success strategies. And before joining to Tango, she was at Home Suite and previously tell me to a successful acquisition by Microsoft. So Jamie, thank you so much for being here. We're excited to have you.Jamie Bertasi: Thank you guys both for having me. The Jason.Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. We love it. Before we jump into your thoughts on 2023, why don't you just tell us a little bit more about your background and your experience in customer success and how you came to be where you are.Jamie Bertasi: Sure. In terms of my background, I've been in high tech my whole career. Started grew up on the East coast. Went to Tufts University, graduated, went right into a software company and have been pretty entrepreneurial. I've had the opportunity to build three companies from the ground up and have very successful.About five years or so ago now, I was introduced to Guy Niaz, the CEO and founder of To Tango through a board. Guy had built this amazing product and company, but he really needed his go-to-market partner. [00:02:00] And I spent about four months getting to know guy, making sure it was gonna be a great fit, and and then joined to Tango and it's just been, up until the right since.Super fun. Have really sold all the customers that we have and implemented all the customers that we have and just built everything from the ground up with Guy. It's been just a great ride and super fun to work in customer success.Jason Whitehead: Wow, that's exciting. And I'm sure over that time you've seen a lot of changes in the the industry and in the space. Before we jump into predictions for 2023, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what have you seen as the biggest changes in CS over the last five or 10 years as of as a launching ground for where we're going next?Jamie Bertasi: I think it's become very mainstream. Early on, I used to spend a lot of time meeting with senior executives at, corporations explaining to them what customer success was. What is this thing? A lot of people would really, I would say, confuse it with customer support. Many, support organizations rebranded themselves as customer success. Like doing nobody any favors with that one . And yeah. [00:03:00] And I think early on it just a little to tango history, which I think also I.Guy started the company in Tel Aviv where our engineering and RT still is, and but what he quickly realized was that all the companies that were buying customer success technology right outta the gate were these small SAS software companies. Because of course they realized that they couldn't hire people.They really couldn't afford to hire people and throw it at this customer success thing, or basically their post-sale functions, right? They had to use technology to scale that maybe one person in some technology as opposed to say five people. So really I think CS got started in that space.But what we've seen happen really since then is it's become much more mainstream, is people really understand the value of really focusing on delivering those customer outcomes in that post sales world in terms of holding onto your arr. And now customer success has really become also something that applies to all recurring revenue businesses. No longer is it just SAS software companies?Jason Noble: do you see kinda things as they stand now, we've. It's very [00:04:00] challenging year. This year. We've had economic situations, there's geopolitical situations, there's all kind of tech layoffs and things. Yeah, I think we're, we've seen, our organizations seem to be still wanting to make investment in customers and customer success, but really interesting how have you seen the last 12 months and how do you think that's positioning us up for changing and progressing into 2020?Jamie Bertasi: Yeah, so I think as we started into 20 22, 1 of the things that I saw as a trend was, really the, what I would call the pace setter customer success leaders, those who are the real visionaries moving the industry forward, really leaning into digital customer success, across all their segments, not just, the tech touch segment, but really using digital as what's called the baseline, and then layering some human in, human touch in for the higher. Higher ARR areas or segments. So I think what happened, as, folks got more and more comfortable with that type of an approach. And as the economy worsened, as they realized that, frankly they could use the [00:05:00] technology, lean on the technology more and more, and humans less and less.So what I've seen is that a lot of times now people are basically saying, first of all, If I could even get the head count to add the CSMs, I would, but I'm not getting it. So I have no choice but to lean on the technology for automation and so forth. Or if I, even if I had the head count, I can't hire them because there's so many open heads for CSMs, right? As we all know on LinkedIn and so forth. So I have no choice but to lean into the technology to do a lot of the stuff for me, and really provide those, deliver those outcomes for the.Jason Noble: Do you see that continuing next year then? Do you think digital customer success is really the big trend that we're gonna see?Jamie Bertasi: I think so. Digital CS and then automation, and I think it's really about also rethinking the entire post sales journey. So the folks are really trying to bring together all of the functions to deliver seamlessly for the customer. To give you maybe a little bit more detail on what I mean by that, I think that as customer success initially got started, people [00:06:00] would say the Cs.The CSM team was customer success, but I think what you realize over time, if you have a very successful business, is that customer success is what we call an operating model, which means that it's really all of the areas in the post-sales world working together. So that might be the onboarding team, your customer success engineering team, your support team, your csm. All those teams coming together to deliver seamlessly, which is challenging, let me tell you, because it's very easy to have silos and scenes, where the customer just falls between.Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. I've said for years I thought the CCO title should also be Chief Collaboration Officer, cuz it really. That saddle busting, you've had a lot of experience with that as well.Jamie Bertasi: Yes. It's something I'm working on just right now. So give you a flavor for it. So my job is, head of go to market here and head of the really everything delivering for customers. And one of the things that we've done, and actually one of our customers also has done this exact same thing, is we hunt two VPs.So we have a VP of what we call customer [00:07:00] operations, and then we have a VP of CSMs. So the VP of CSMs is really working on kind of the human aspect of the entire thing and the customer operations VP is working on more of the automation, right? And really working through like that seamless handoff between say, support and the CSM team as an example.Jason Whitehead: I like what you're saying as well about more reliance on digital. Some of the software vendors I've been speaking to, they've been concerned about over digitizing things that customers would miss, the high touch piece. But when they've gotten in there and actually started to make some changes, they said, no, actually our customers really prefer to be able to self-service for a lot of things, get the answers faster 24 7.They don't wanna have to deal with us. All that time. They've had a lot of demands on their time, and I think it's probably gonna be one of those trends that you see to going forward is that more folks realize that customers don't always wanna be. Handheld one on one for things.Jamie Bertasi: Absolutely. So I would say two points on this. I'll tell you a funny story. I always tell people here to tango place so sick of this, but I'll just tell you guys anyway. So at one point in my career I worked when I worked at Tellme, I worked, I had a lot of [00:08:00] airline customers and at that time to date myself, it was. Pre the automated, ticketing check-in machine, right?And one of my airline customers was trialing that in the airport. And they were, telling me about, I was the, their vendors, they were telling me about the project and they were basically saying, yeah we're trialing this machine. We're gonna stick it out in the middle of the of the, entryway at the airport.Nobody's gonna use it. Everyone wants to start, talk to a human and get in that line. And of course, as we all know, they were blown away because as soon as they put this machine out there so you could just check yourself in and be on your way in 30 seconds as opposed to waiting in line, everyone lined up for the machine.For, ATMs and everything else. And of course it's trans, really transformed the world and I think that's how humans are. We would rather use a self-service technology that was like very, if it has to work well of course, like I. What'd you guys do for dinner last night?Did you order online? Or when was the last time you actually called a taxi company versus, Uber or Lyft or whatever. So I think as human beings, we'd rather have those experiences that we understand. [00:09:00] They're simple and easy for us. We know we don't have to deal with any drama and we can get it done in that like 30, 45 seconds that we've got for this particular thing before we move on.Jason Noble: I, I think that's a key thing and I think that story, there's great, cuz there, as much as you might want to go and talk to a human and check in, you don't because there's a massive cue. So the process that. They've tried to make the process simpler, but they've done away with the problem.You don't wanna queue up for three hours. My time's precious but there's only, you've always gotta bear in mind as well that there's only so much that the technology can do. You, we've always said before that you, you still need to bring the human in at the right place. And I know a lot of the airports in the uk, there are lots of around the checking kio.There are airline staff wondering about to answer questions and you still need that. So it's making sure the technology works. That process is simple, that experience is seamless, but if there's a problem you can deal with it straight away. Cause otherwise you just go back to your default and you will get fed up.You're going that long queue or take you three hours, not a [00:10:00] great start to your holiday. And it's similar in technology. It's not a great start to that initial. Process and engagement with the customers.Jamie Bertasi: That's right. And I think that, I think it's important is also to constantly be learning. So as an example, I'll just give you another real life example. So let's say that you have a question about any particular technology that is asked twice. To two, twice a day to two CSMs. You do that for a week and you can see maybe there's 40 times that particular question's been asked.But if it's going to individual human beings who are not reporting that in, in any way, it's, there's no learning in the system, no self baked learning. Whereas if you have that, coming through a technology in a way that it's being fed back. You can actually improve, you can change your processes, you can change your ui, you can change the, whatever the underlying issue is that's causing that question. Because you're learning. So the self-learning also has to really be baked in.Jason Noble: Absolutely. Do you, in addition the digital side of it, where do you see the big other priorities next year and where are organizations gonna be investing and focusing their budgets and efforts on customer success?Jamie Bertasi: Yeah. I think[00:11:00] I think it's really all about growing the customer base, retaining and growing the customer base, right? C is a good example of this too, where of course we all know, so let's just say March 15th of the covid year, everything just stopped, right? No one knew what was going to happen and really all new logo.Pretty much stopped that moment. But then ultimately what you had to sell was your existing customers because you already had a relationship with them. You could already service them more, you could offer them more, you could, just do that much more for them. And I think that's what's going on right now too.A lot of folks are taking a second or third look on external purchases, and so therefore new local sales, but you've got the opportunity to really continue to invest in your customers at this time. So I think the whole kind of customer. Concept company's understanding that they can grow through the customer base, delivering great ne net revenue retention.We see, we would call again, like the pace setters and customer success delivering, the neighborhood of 125 percent and more in nr, which is a super impressive number. [00:12:00]Jason Whitehead: So I like what you were saying about some of the changes that are coming on, and I think it is different than Covid with, everyone all the same time is coming to a screeching halt, but there has been so much talk of a recession coming next year.Jamie Bertasi: Yeah.Jason Whitehead: With your crystal ball, do you think one's coming and how long will it last? And if so, how is this gonna impact CS teams?Jamie Bertasi: I. A recession coming or not. I am not the person to say this. All I could say is what the rest of you guys are saying, which is okay preparing for everything because we just don't really know. And of course we wanna prepare for the worst to make sure that we're in good shape. So I think you just, in these down times, you've gotta do more with less, right? You have to make sure that you're increasing, okay. So I might not be able to fill that head. When people leave, you really might not get folks back.So how are you making sure that you're gonna be able to deliver for your customers? Still giving them an incredible experience and making sure that they're very successful in what they're trying to do. Even though you might have to do that with less, right? With [00:13:00] less human beings. So what is that going to mean?How are you gonna deliver those programs and continually iterate? And I think the iteration is a super important. Component as well, because you can't just put something out there these days and send and forget. To the point we talked about the learning component Sure. But also the ongoing iteration.Okay, so what are you gonna do to continually improve your onboarding programs, for example? Or, what are you gonna do to continually really digest what's coming in from nps and feeding that back into your system so you know, so that you're improving the product, for example. Or let's say there's a particular issue with, some component of your experience.Jason Whitehead: Do you do you see any of your customers doing anything creative or unique to really prepare for a potential downfall? A down downturn?Jamie Bertasi: I, what I see all my customers doing, especially, the really forward thinking ones they're just really leaning into automation. They're really trying to figure out, okay, how much of this can I do in a way that delights my customer?Not like crappy automation, like good, right? So delights my customers . But at the [00:14:00] same time, know, we achieve my business goals in as efficient way as possible. And we've had a lot of success with that, with our customer base and with to Tango itself. So we believe that for sure can be done.We started out trying to figure out how to automate a lot of our onboarding, right? And how to give people a better experience there. We tend to see that with the customer base. I would just say that most people actually do start with onboarding. It's interesting cause we wonder why do people always start with onboarding, but I think it's just human nature, right? We go kind from left to yeah.Jason Whitehead: Yep. Absolutely.Jason Noble: Can you see in how do organizations CSM CS leaders, what can they do to help convince the boards their CEOs that they need to continue the level of investment they do to make sure they're driving growth for customers, retaining customers and also if they're looking at starting up new digital customer success functions, how do they go about getting that buy-in, that executive level buy in to do that and knowing it's the right thing, they're gonna see the return.Jamie Bertasi: That's right. I think that you have to first of all, you have to really [00:15:00] understand and be able to demonstrate the outcomes. So first, before the, let's say the new investment, let's just say folks are already doing it already. What are the business results you're delivering? And are those improving?What's the trajectory? Are you going up by a percentage, every quarter? Are you going down by a percentage? Every quarter. And I think that really understanding the customer journey and then the results you're driving, that's critical because you have to be able to really demonstrate that to leadership.And what I find with a lot of the larger companies is who are, let's say, moving into customer success now. So they're not let's call it digital native. Those folks who were going through transformations, even wrapping their brain around what is their journey and how do they think about the journey post-sales journey, let's say in a a cross bu cross brand way is very challenging because they tend to be super siloed, right?So each bu each brand is thinking about the journey from their point of view, but their customers are experiencing many of their brands. And so how do they think? The journey from the overall corporation point of view, which is of course, what the board and what the [00:16:00] CEO and folks like that really care about.So I think that it's, if you wanna go get more mon, more money, more funding, what you've gotta be able to do is show those results. I was just talking to a CCO last Monday. And I won't say who it was cuz he doesn't he didn't tell me it would be okay to talk about these results externally, but I'll just say a major corporation, very large successful software company with NR of 115%.This is incredible for this company, which is, pretty old stayed company, right? This is not like a digital native. And he is his budget and customer success is not being cut, whereas the sales and marketing budgets are because he's got those results to really point to and show, and he can, he understands them and he can speak to them very clearly. So I think that it's, that's what you have to do. You have to be able to really put your finger on the results that you're delivering and showing the positive outcomes for customers.Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm wondering as we talk about this and, I think there is a hunker down mentality for the short term and, pivot towards [00:17:00] digital for now, while we're trying to get that done.But at some point, some of the things will get back to normal and headcount will start to get improved again at some point. If you put on your magic, look in your magic ball again, what do you see the biggest challenges they're gonna face in those areas afterwards? Come when we come back to more normal cycles and investment in CS being a little freed up again. So the industry moves forward.Jamie Bertasi: Yeah. I think the first thing is that customer success professionals are still gonna be really in demand. Yeah. So it's tough these days to hire and then when you do, even when you do hire CS means so many things to so many different people that you then have to actually train them.Because it's not it's not like sales, okay? If you hire a salesperson, they come with a track record of sales. You understand that they know how to actually sell the selling techniques and so forth. You might have to tell 'em to train them your product. But in Cs, because C, as a company, a, company B, company C, can be so different.Their expectations of what the job is can be very different, and you still have a lot of training to do. So I think for sure, once everybody starts hiring, The demand is gonna be there. [00:18:00] And I think from the layoffs, what we may see is that a lot more folks are transitioning into cs, right? From other arenas. And maybe from marketing jobs or from sales jobs. The areas that are really I think folks are cutting back on right now.Jason Noble: Jamie when you said that about CS being different in every org, do you see that as a challenge? Because it's something that, there's been a lot of kind of conversations on LinkedIn recently around this and it is. It. It can sometimes present a challenge for cos not knowing what it is or having a different interpretation of it. Do you see that changing? Do you see that being a coming together in an agreement on what it really is? An organization's agreeing on the standard definition for it.Jamie Bertasi: I think, so I guess lemme question a couple ways. First, in terms of CEOs, I spend a lot of my time talking to CCOs and CEOs and executive team members explaining what customer success is and how they should think about customer success for their organization. And what I see with a lot of those folks is they understand it like at a conceptual level, I see this is the function that exists [00:19:00] after I sign the contract that's gonna actually deliver.The ARR retain this customer and grow this customer. Perfect. Got it. But then when he goes a little deeper, then they start to adoption. What does that mean? These kind of funky new terms, let's say for some of the folks who are obviously very smart people, very good at what they do, but this is just the newer concept for them.So I spend a lot of time understanding explaining that to people, talking to 'em about it. And I think there's a we are over the. Where you don't meet, I don't meet with leaders of major corporations who are anti customer success or who are, thinking this is not really a real thing.I think people totally get it, and now they're just trying to either do their 1 0 2 oh or three oh version of this thing, depending on where they've come from and so forth. So I think there's that side. In terms of, what is customer success and coming back, Jason, to your question on is there a shared definition?I think what people, I think universally define customer success as the function of the company that actually, [00:20:00] implements the customer, delivers the arr from that, from the customer, make sure the customer's using the product renews and buys. They all say it, maybe using different terms and so forth, but I think people agree that's the thing.But what I see as like slightly different from our point of view, and I'm seeing this again from some of the from the other customers as well, is the concept of saying, let's say in the post sales world for a second, just put the customer success thing to the side. Let's say in post sales you've.So your salespeople sends, closes the deal, hands it off, right? They hand it off to the onboarding team. You've got your onboarding team, got customer support team, you've got your customer success engineering team, like technical issues that might come up, whatever. You might have a, you might have a a consulting organization or kind a services organization, right?You have a training team, you have your CSMs themselves, right? You have all of these functions. So if you say customer success is just the Cs. [00:21:00] Then you are basically not really understanding what has to happen from all these other people who actually have to work together with the CSMs.So we think of, that's why we call the customer success operating model, and maybe they'll be a longer term, a better way. It seems cluey to say it that way, but this whole arena we see as customer success as opposed to the CSMs, the.Jason Noble: I think that's the key thing, isn't it? It's much bigger than that.Jamie Bertasi: It is. And if you just put it on the CSMs, it's, it just doesn't work. It's not possible.Jason Noble: It's, and it's too much responsibility on individuals as well. It's a much bigger remit.Jamie Bertasi: Yes, exactly.Jason Noble: We look the next five, 10 years, so we've got digital customer success that's very mature now. What challenges do you see in the industry and how do you see CS leaders? Changing and what do they need to do to make sure that we're delivering it in the longer term here for what customer success is.Jamie Bertasi: I think that the first thing that's really hard for people, even still depending on the complexity of the business, but really a big successful business, let's say, like [00:22:00] Microsoft, where I came from, it's it's really understanding the journey because.It's very difficult to think that through across all of your various brands, right? These huge corporations have all of these brands and they wanna have some continuity and some similarity of customer experience across all these brands. But at the same time, especially even if they're buying, companies, if they're an acquisitive company, they're growing through acquisition and so forth, it's challenging pull it all together in one unified experience, right?There are companies that do it very well. And Microsoft I think would be an example of one that I think does do it very well, but there are, But it's quite challenging, to think through it. And so I think that's where people's brain hurts. And I think on the tango side of the house this is an area that we work on as well, because trying to even track that and write it down on paper and so everyone can wrap their brain around what's actually happening is very challenging.Jason Noble: Absolutely.Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. Excuse me, Jamie, this has been wonderful. I really [00:23:00] appreciate your thoughts. Before we go there, we always like to ask a bold challenge question, and for you, what's the number one bold action that you'd like to see CS leaders take today to really set their team and their companies up for success in 2023?Jamie Bertasi: I'd like them to really dive in and understand their journey and take it to the next level through iteration. Don't just don't. Sit there. Don't just accept it as it is. Think about how can it be better? Let's move forward. Let's move forward. Let's change, let's iterate. Let's try some new things and see where we can take this.Jason Whitehead: Awesome. I love that very much that, that's great stuff. Thank you again for being here. Before we go, we will always like to invite our guests to do a shameless plug for anything special on top of mind to them. So please let us know what's exciting and of interest to you and how people can get in touch with you. And we can include links in the show notes below for anything as want to.Jamie Bertasi: All right, Jason, thank you so much. So I guess I would just have a shameless plug for two things. The first is for To Tango itself. So Tango is one of the leaders in customer success technology and customer success platforms.And we, of course, help our customers do all the things [00:24:00] I've been talking about here. So you can check to Tango out for free. You can just start using the product. And if you like it, you can buy@totango.com. tango.totango.com. And it's our community edition. That's the first thing. Then my second shameless plug, of course, is for my own CS podcast called CS No BS.So I hope you guys will all listen to that. It's a lot of fun. I typically, my guess, will typically be customer success leaders and they'll be talking about what they're doing, which I find. Folks really enjoy that cuz they wanna see, okay, what am I missing? What are people doing that I'm not doing? Or what have they tried that's failed?That kind of thing. And in terms of getting a hold of me, would love to talk to anybody. You can of course reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm Jamie Bertasi, or you can email me at to tango, jamie to tango.com and I guess you guys are gonna put all the contact info in soJason Noble: a huge thank you. It's been such a cool conversation having someone of Your background, your experience doing [00:25:00] your other podcast, but coming from one of the industry leaders as well, I think gives a really unique insight. So a huge thank you. Such a great conversation.Jamie Bertasi: Thank you.

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Episode DescriptionJoin us when we speak with Deborah Andrews. Deborah (aka "Debs") currently works across all post-sales functions at Unit4, alongside leading the Customer Success Operations and Digital teams.In this episode, Debs is going to talk about the world of customer success operations and why it's critical to businesses today.Guest: Deborah Andrews - Director of Customer Office Operations, Unit 4Having a varied background in IT, Support, Operations and Customer Success Management for companies such as Sage, Gainsight and Salesforce, Debs actively collaborates to drive the awareness and implementation of customer centric initiatives that are intentionally designed to drive a seamless, leading-edge and sustainable customer experience. Success for All is her favorite mantra.Scroll Down for Episode TranscriptSponsorsThe Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional ResourcesHere are some related resources we think you will find helpful:* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter * Read Jason Noble's Blog * Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

SubscribeJoin our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.Don't miss out - subscriber today!Transcript[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, all in the wrong order. Welcome everyone to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble here in London the 1st of December, and my partner in crime, Mr. Whitehead, over in the us Say hello, Jason.[00:00:14] Jason Noble: We are today talking about the world of customer success operations or customer operations and why it’s critical to businesses and why we've seen I think in the, for the right reason, the right shift and priority given to it. And we're really lucky. We've got another guest with us today.[00:00:30] Jason Noble: We've got Deborah or Debs Andrews. Deb's is the director of the customer office operations over at Unit four, where she works across all the post-sales functions alongside leading customer success operations and the digital team. She's a customer success leader that I'm sure lots of our listeners will.[00:00:47] Jason Noble: She's been got around 15 years or so, experience building out customer centric corporations, management, innovation and customer success, performance management. She's also worked with some really big names in the world of customer success, the [00:01:00] likes of gain sites, which we all know. And Salesforce, her mantra and I love this cuz this really aligns with my way of thinking is success for all.[00:01:09] Jason Noble: And her approach is really focused about enabling others to be successful and. That just aligns with my way of thinking about us being responsible for someone else's success as CS leaders. So Deb's a big welcome fan to see you again. It was great to catch up a few weeks back. How are you doing?[00:01:26] Deborah Andrews: I'm very good. Thank you. Really excited to be talking to you today.[00:01:30] Jason Noble: Excellent. Well, could you just tell our listeners a little bit about your own journey in CS operations, why you've made that move and the different areas that you are focusing on today?[00:01:38] Deborah Andrews: Yeah, no, definitely. I'll give you a little bit of background into how I've evolved along my career, because as we know, CSMs and now CS Ops, you can come from a varied background and that, that explains how I've gotten to where I am today. I think, my career history to date, I started my career in sales management, moved on to support management, then operations [00:02:00] management. So it was already, all encompassing. It was around about 2007.[00:02:04] Deborah Andrews: I actually stumbled across this seemingly unknown company. I dunno if salesforce, right? So they were a bit smaller back in 2007 than they are today. But I say that was pretty much when everything changed for me. So I went from being very function specific to becoming a hands on techie, analyst, administrator, project manager, literally everything.[00:02:25] Deborah Andrews: Self. Yeah. Self developed every skill that I could under the sun to be able to implement a CRM system across an organization single handed. It was quite a small organization, but such a varied, expansive role that actually, I think that experience spoiled me in a little way. I basically find it now quite challenging to operate just within a specific function.[00:02:48] Deborah Andrews: So this whole philosophy surrounding, customer success management not just being a function actually resonates really strongly with me. And it's an opportunity for me to go, yes, I wanna have all of my fingers in all of [00:03:00] the pies and help consolidate and transform organizations. Yeah. So I think that was the changing point for me.[00:03:06] Deborah Andrews: But I transitioned from working in that capacity in end users to the ISV space, as you mentioned working with gain site, Salesforce and SAGE within customer success management. So progression into CS Ops just felt it was perfectly natural to me to go back to my operational roots and combine that with, experience on the ground of being a CSM.[00:03:27] Deborah Andrews: It just added value behind being able to focus on operations and digitization, but with a degree of empathy, having engaged from an end user, from a vendor perspective, and a broad spectrum of function.[00:03:41] Jason Noble: I love that story and that natural evolution into role. I think a lot of us that have got a bit of experience here, that's how we've come into it.[00:03:47] Jason Noble: But it, you get that particularly with organizations like Salesforce and joining there. Wow, you must have seen some growth to where they are now. The same with Gainsight, but that broader experience and like you say with your sales hat on as [00:04:00] well, seeing everything and then seeing the value that, that the world of customer success can bring to a business.[00:04:06] Jason Noble: But also this newer area around customer success ops. Absolutely phenomenal. If we take a step back and going back to basics what do you define customer success ops as and how do you see us having come about over recent years and how do you think it fits the wider revenue ops and commercial[00:04:23] Deborah Andrews: ops?[00:04:24] Deborah Andrews: Yeah, I think, CS ops really for me answers the question that most businesses raised when customer success management functions were formed, CSMs were performing one to one activities and driving value for each customer on a case by case basis. And I think businesses generally asked at that point as it was gaining traction, how on earth can we scale?[00:04:45] Deborah Andrews: And how can I measure, how do I know if it's actually working? It seems to be doing a good job. But, I think most companies at that point actually decided rightly or wrongly, that investing into a CS tool was the solution to all of their problems, right? They needed to [00:05:00] scale things so the technology will do it.[00:05:01] Deborah Andrews: And I had again, like the privilege of partnering with some customers as a cs. On that basis back in 2018 I remember thinking back then that most of the customers that I was engaging with would actually benefit from having someone in place, helping them make the changes needed to be able to take full advantage of the tools.[00:05:21] Deborah Andrews: Turns out I wasn't the only one thinking that at that point. But yeah, and I think it's widely accepted now by businesses. It's most certainly a combination of tools, people and processes that have to be in place and working in harmony across an organization to be able to realize those value points, both from a human and digital perspective.[00:05:40] Deborah Andrews: And I think that's ultimately what CSOPs works to achieve, right? They are the interface between customer success function and the end customer. And the business operations.[00:05:51] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, absolutely. think it's interesting, like even back five years ago, very few people were even talking about CSOPs as a separate discipline.[00:05:59] Jason Whitehead: It was like, oh, we need to get [00:06:00] some processes, or let's get some playbooks done. But they weren't really thinking about it in the same way that they are now. And it seems like now there's been a big shift where there's a lot of acceleration. For CS Ops. What's your take on what's driving that, that change in that pivot?[00:06:12] Deborah Andrews: I think. Yeah. For me, CS Ops is transformational. It's not just about, change management, et cetera. It's really, aligned with the philosophy behind customer success be putting the customer at the forefront of the business. And I think Jason, back to your point on, what's the difference between CS ops and revenue operations, difference it has as compared to a standard operations role. And why it can transform organizations is because it actually services the customer's needs over and above the business needs. Which I actually think is a bit of an oxymoron really, because we're talking about the same thing. The customer's needs are actually the same as the business needs.[00:06:51] Deborah Andrews: Both want to work in partnership. Both want return on investment, both want to be successful with the product and use it in anger. Both want to [00:07:00] grow, both want to innovate, right? And I think businesses are now questioning why we weren't actually doing that before, because it makes complete sense. It, and I think, this is where CS ops leans into revenue ops.[00:07:11] Deborah Andrews: It helps. It helps bring that customer centricity to the organization and tie it to the overarching business outcomes like net revenue retention. In my case at the moment CSOPs tracks the retention and expansion motion KPIs, but they are linked to churn rates and net revenue retention that revenue ops reports and analyzes.[00:07:31] Deborah Andrews: So we complement each other. We meet in. Middle, and if changes and enhancements are needed, then we collaborate on those initiatives together. So it really is actually making the business stronger and connecting all of the dots internally, which is in itself transformational.[00:07:46] Jason Noble: I think that's the key thing.[00:07:48] Jason Noble: It really is. Like I say, this isn't, it's not a standalone service. It's a key part of a broader function and is, I've seen businesses where it. Part of a wider operations team, like you say, with [00:08:00] revenue ops, with commercial ops, and even marketing or sales ops or whatever we call them. What do you think, I I've also seen businesses where CS ops maybe starts as, oh, we just need to put a person here to just install the customer success management platform or something.[00:08:14] Jason Noble: But how do you, for you, what do we need to to do customer success ops? What, what makes a customer success ops team and function really[00:08:21] Deborah Andrews: stand? Yeah. Yeah. I think to me, in my experience and my background, I've been there. Got the t-shirt and put all of those different hats on.[00:08:30] Deborah Andrews: So for me it feels like common sense now. But I get a general sense from what I've seen and heard. CS ops roles can be anything in between a broad and narrow in scope. Some are more data admin focused, some are more technical solution focused. Purely management focused.[00:08:45] Deborah Andrews: And it really does depend on the business needs and existing resources that are in place. But for me there's three sort of key learnings I'd say in my experience. And the first one would be awareness and alignment. And one thing I've learned particularly over the [00:09:00] past few years you can achieve great things in CSOPs when you have access to the right resources, right?[00:09:05] Deborah Andrews: But if it's not visible and accepted across every facet of the organization, it immediately becomes siloed. There's limited capacity to scale, and it's often unsustainable. Someone changes something, some. Didn't realize you were doing something with the tool, the infrastructure changes and you're on a break fix basis, and it's just a vicious cycle.[00:09:24] Deborah Andrews: So I'd say make sure that you share the love across your organization. Identify stakeholders and take them on the journey with you. Focus on this upfront and then it will, your life will just become so much easier down the line as you look to mature and drive. Further transformations and innovation.[00:09:41] Deborah Andrews: Have[00:09:41] Jason Noble: you gone through a similar journey there at unit four? Did you come in, it was unknown and you've helped build it up?[00:09:47] Deborah Andrews: Yeah, I think I've worked in varied types of organizations, so not industry specific. I've worked in very small companies where. You literally, Bob next to you is doing PS and you know exactly what each other are doing.[00:09:59] Deborah Andrews: You've got [00:10:00] sales just over the way and your got support just around the corner. So in that environment, it's just everything is just seamless by nature. But I've also currently the, in the role that I'm in today, it's a very complex matrix organization. So we have, global functions of, you around about 2,500 people.[00:10:20] Deborah Andrews: Regional presidents as well that have their own level of operations work across verticals, et cetera. So to actually align and engage and keep everyone up to date with what's happening can be a real challenge.[00:10:34] Jason Noble: Yeah, absolutely.[00:10:34] Jason Whitehead: How big do you think an organization needs to be before they have to, before they can justify having a dedicated CS Ops role or.[00:10:40] Deborah Andrews: I think it depends on how customer centric they are. And I do feel like some, I've seen some revenue operations roles or sales operations role. When you look at the descriptions they really are talking customer success thoughts, right? Because it all depends on the kind of organizational structure really that ties.[00:10:58] Deborah Andrews: But yeah it's [00:11:00] very vast, very varied. I think I wouldn't say there's any particular recommendation. know from a an administrative perspective, they say, oh, for 80 users that you have in a tool that you should have one administrator. But that's pure administration, right? So I, I think, The velocity and the degree of change needed within your organization, irrespective of the size of your organization, should indicate whether or not you need or what level of investment and support you need from a CSOPs capacity.[00:11:31] Jason Noble: When companies are starting to think then about it, so say, you're starting to see the metrics come in, the data come in, that suggest you need it. How? , how do you go about taking that first step and building a team and actually getting the right people? Cause it requires a certain type of individual.[00:11:46] Deborah Andrews: Doesn't. Yeah, it requires a superhero, especially for your first Ops hired. And I think, this is where CSMs were back 10 years ago. It's prove the value. Prove the value and you are constantly trying to make good, get the references from [00:12:00] the customer. If they buy more, then you are hugely successful and rewarded for that.[00:12:04] Deborah Andrews: Same goes really for operations. If there was gonna be one superhero ops person that. In your company, they'd need to be one of five parts. A fifth leader leading the vision across the company, a fifth manager managing the execution of that vision and journey, a fifth techie to actually build the solution and configure the tools or the resources that you have.[00:12:28] Deborah Andrews: A fifth analyst evaluating the results, making sure. That you've defined what success looks like and that it's measurable and then a fifth administrator to really ensure that it carries integrity and consistency through governance and controls. Easy to find then Oh yeah. Like a unicorn and csm.[00:12:46] Deborah Andrews: But it is,[00:12:47] Jason Noble: I love the way you, it is, it's like what CSMs, that department of everything. Yeah. What we shouldn't be, but what we've started off some years back as, and I can imagine as well that's. Say it's five ways must vary and change over [00:13:00] time. It fluctuates depending on what the need[00:13:01] Deborah Andrews: is.[00:13:02] Deborah Andrews: Yeah, definitely. And also depends on the resources around you. So as I said, you've gotta be resourceful, right? If you haven't got the answers or the skills you need to find answers and skills because it's just as we're in scale mode, we are proving the value of it. There are moments where, I'm.[00:13:16] Deborah Andrews: An amazing data analyst. And quite frankly, I haven't got much time to be doing that. So wherever I can if I need some detailed analysis done, I will call in favors, I will ask people and tap into the resources that we've got around us to help support those aims.[00:13:33] Jason Whitehead: Wow, that's great stuff. With all the focus on that and bring up data as well too, what role does data fit with CS ops and how do you think about it relative to the other platforms and tools and what does an organization need to do to make sure they're successful with their data and getting the information they need?[00:13:48] Deborah Andrews: Yeah. Data. We all love it, right? Love it and hate it. It's like Marmite . It's gonna make or break us. I put you on that . I love Marmite, so I'll go with the love side. I'm[00:13:59] Jason Noble: another [00:14:00] one. I'm a big friend of Marmite.[00:14:00] Deborah Andrews: I think, data underpins all digital transformation and that's where companies are headed right now.[00:14:06] Deborah Andrews: Without definition, without governance, without measurement, without course correction, what would your level of confidence be in your customer? 360 view? Would you be confident in automating an unsolicited journey or an interaction that helps not hinders the customer experience?[00:14:21] Deborah Andrews: I think this. All part of the digital hesitation. And again, where CS ops can come in and really add value. I think CS ops needs to drive scale efficiency insight, and it just can't be achieved with poor, incorrect, or missing data. think this was the biggest turnoff actually for most companies straight out of the implementation of a CS tool, right?[00:14:40] Deborah Andrews: So their expectations of their own data was really high. And they'd been sold the dream. It can do this, these amazing things if only you have the right data, and I think the reality actually sounded a bit like yeah, our customer 360 s pretty rubbish. I can't trust any information in it, or our health [00:15:00] measures only tell us part of the story or the information.[00:15:03] Deborah Andrews: Looks good, but it doesn't match up to our finance system or our CRM system. So I think, or it could actually be that the data was so great and insightful but it was actually just confined to the CSM function. Yeah. And the CSM function weren't sharing it across the organization. So that's another perspective on it.[00:15:22] Deborah Andrews: Or maybe lots of insights were produced and shared, but the culture is so what, or I don't know what I'm looking at to be able to leverage it. And so I'm just gonna go back to what I'm, the way I've always done it before. CS Ops, it starts and ends with data, quite frankly. We need to be governing our customer information, making sure that it's accurate and relevant at all.[00:15:42] Deborah Andrews: For all business stakeholders who were expecting to rely on it our robots and our humans will be taking action on it, and our customer experience will most certainly be impacted by it. So yeah, I think We need some integrity to start off with. But again, the next layer as we unpeel the onion [00:16:00] and look at more root causes behind the insights that we're generating I'm certainly investing more of my time at the moment into performing root cause analysis from our customer listening posts and actually having that.[00:16:11] Deborah Andrews: Root cause analysis played back to key stakeholders across the business as part of the voice of the customer council. And we tie that back to the financial impact of this feedback, and it really resonates across the organization and helps to drive accountability for the action that people need to take.[00:16:28] Deborah Andrews: So I think you. CS ops can govern those processes. Really drive the insight production, yes, the technicals behind it, but it really does need strength behind driving it across the organization.[00:16:43] Jason Noble: I think the insight that you've got there, working from organizations like Gainsight in, in the customer success kind of role and implementing these tools is actually quite phenomenal.[00:16:53] Jason Noble: And I've. At the, you've got something that's quite unique. Having seen these challenges that customer face [00:17:00] customers are facing and I think gives you a really powerful perspective on the value of this role and function. Deb's this has been a superb conversation really insightful.[00:17:09] Jason Noble: We always like to give our lit, our guests a bold challenge question and the one for you is, as CS leaders, what's the one thing that we should be. To focus really on CS ops as we go into 2023.[00:17:22] Deborah Andrews: Oh. Can I think[00:17:23] Jason Noble: about that? Yeah, you can think about now we'll narrow it down to one we like. We like one.[00:17:28] Deborah Andrews: Okay. What I think today might change tomorrow, but you never know. I was, you do that. I would. Sponsorship. One thing that I've really actually been challenged by is the sphere of influence. And I've worked really hard to build up a profile and persona surrounding what, what CS ops is and.[00:17:47] Deborah Andrews: How it should be elevated in the organization. So when we try to drive accountability it can often be a challenge because we can get pushback to say, you are just ops, right? So why should I listen to [00:18:00] you kind of thing. So I think sponsorship. CS leaders should absolutely sponsor, get behind CS Ops and really help, fight the cause and challenge the organization to do better in, in the face of the customer's needs and expectations.[00:18:15] Jason Noble: Fascinating. Absolutely brilliant. Deb's a huge, thank you. This has been such a, for me listening to, just hearing you. There's so much passion about it as well. So big thank you. Thank[00:18:25] Deborah Andrews: you so much.[00:18:26] Jason Whitehead: Before we go, we always like to invite our guests to do a shameless plug and Jason always forgets, so I'll throw it out there.[00:18:32] Jason Noble: I'll wait for you to prompt me. Jason, always wait for you to.[00:18:36] Jason Whitehead: So sometimes though, please go ahead and plug anything of a passion or excitement to you and let people know that they can get in touch with you[00:18:42] Jason Noble: if they have[00:18:42] Deborah Andrews: questions. Yeah, no. Feel free to get in touch with me on LinkedIn. You can just search for me.[00:18:48] Deborah Andrews: I'm more than happy to mentor people. I realize I've got vast and buried background and some experience that I hope I can share the love with some other people. So feel free to get in touch with any questions. [00:19:00] Also, if you enjoy yoga and you're around the Redding UK area, I'm more than happy to spend a bit of time meditating.[00:19:07] Deborah Andrews: Always my best idea, come out when that happens. Yeah. ,[00:19:09] Jason Noble: do you combine the two Cs ops and[00:19:11] Deborah Andrews: meditation? Yeah. Oh, it's essential. Sorry, I couldn't put that in my Toppi .[00:19:19] Jason Noble: Super Debs, thank you again, a really great conversation with you. Thank you.

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Episode DescriptionJoin us when we speak with Alan Fecamp. Alan is a Director in Zeren’s Commercial team and has 20+ years of experience in senior level recruitment and Executive Search, and has worked extensively across the UK, EMEA, and US.In this episode, Alan is going to share his journey as the head of Customer Success at Zeren, an executive recruitment and head-hunting firm that works with innovative businesses to really help accelerate their growth.Guest: Alan Fecamp - Director of CS, ZerenIn more recent years, Alan has operated extensively in the post-sale arena, and has developed deep levels of expertise and networks within Customer Success.Prior to joining Zeren, Alan founded Just Digital in 2009 who built an exceptional reputation for helping Seed through Series C B2B SaaS companies hire for specialist commercial roles. This success led to Just Digital being Acquired by PIE Recruitment in 2019. His core strengths are working with investor backed high growth tech businesses who are looking to build exceptional go-to-market teams across the globe, with a particular focus on Sales, Customer Success, and Operations.Scroll Down for Episode TranscriptSponsorsThe Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional ResourcesHere are some related resources we think you will find helpful:* Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter * Read Jason Noble's Blog * Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

SubscribeJoin our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.Don't miss out - subscriber today!Transcript[00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, everybody. Welcome to the latest episodes of the Jason's Take on podcast with myself, Jason Noble here in a very cold and dark London in the UK and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason. Hello, Jason. Today we have another very special guest with us today, a very warm welcome to the head of Customer Success and the commercial practice at Zeren executive recruitment and head-hunting firm that work with innovative businesses to really help accelerate their growth.[00:00:32] Jason Noble: And Alan, I think we, I've known you for a couple years now. You are, I think, one of the few recruiters out there, the exec recruiters with a real focus on customer success and commercial growth. And I know you've been driving this focus and change for a number of years, so really excited to have you.[00:00:46] Jason Noble: I think when we were first, first met, you were back at PI recruitment, which I believe you'd come from your own business, just digital and just acquired that. So, a great journey you've been through. Yeah. I think your expertise is all around as scale up [00:01:00] startups and that really accelerated growth journey, and I think what a journey it's been over the last couple years, particularly coming into where we are now at the end of 2022.[00:01:10] Jason Noble: The emphasis has always been on the post-sale side of it, and I think you've worked. If I'm correct, some like 150 companies now helping them[00:01:17] Alan Fecamp: build teams. So probably got up now. Jason. Thanks for having me. But I think it's[00:01:22] Jason Noble: awesome. I think you've, you're also massively involved in CS community and we just missed catching up a pulse, so really warm welcome[00:01:29] Jason Noble: Super excited to have you here. Please, in your own words, could you just tell our listeners a bit about your own journey, ton to Pie and then your own business and what's been your motivation[00:01:39] Alan Fecamp: in customer success? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Thanks for having me on both of you. Much appreciate it. So yeah, I suppose that the voice will stop to is Career recruiter 23 years?[00:01:51] Alan Fecamp: I think it is. All in commercial recruitment. Going through scale up journeys with those particular companies ventured into the SaaS world. Back in 2009 when I formed just [00:02:00] digital by accident and truth. So just digital was set up to be a digital marketing and e-commerce recruitment company.[00:02:06] Alan Fecamp: And by a I suppose by associations being in a digital world, we attracted lots of MarTech businesses to us who didn't have a home to go to from a recruitment perspective. So that digital marketing, e-commerce recruitment company very quickly pivoted to coin a startup. Expression to becoming a B2B SaaS specialist within a few months.[00:02:26] Alan Fecamp: And we never look back. We, it was only a boutiquey small specialist agency, never more than 10 heads but really carved out on each working with C through series B, high growth businesses that had some investor capital put in. Whether they be US founded, UK founded really wanted to go on that scaling journey and.[00:02:44] Alan Fecamp: Our role within that was helping them build out the gtm the pathway into CS came about halfway through that time, and that was really when customer success was taking off. And, I can remember now the conversations being, we need, is it an account management role? Those account management roles suddenly became customer success roles [00:03:00] and alongside the business growth journey I spent most of my personal time as a recruiter.[00:03:05] Alan Fecamp: Figuring out what this CS thing was and it just took off and started to build year on year. Going back about three and a half years now, I exited that business to Pie. And that was born out of wanting to go on a scaling journey moving away from what was a lifestyle business. So we, we did a jv and that went very well for a few years.[00:03:23] Alan Fecamp: And then fast forward to where I am now I'm in Zeren doing more of the same, but on bigger scale. Yeah, that's the whistle stop tour. So really like the, I suppose the takeaways, the last seven. Plus, years has all been in customer success for me. Certainly, majority of my personal building time has been helping scale CS teams.[00:03:39] Jason Noble: I think you seeing someone like yourself that's got that industry experience and you've seen cs. Come into its own being and then move to that focus is, it's quite unique. There are lots of organizations around recruitment that say they're doing it, but a lot of struggling with it. And I know in the couple of years that I've known you, we've seen some big changes in the industry, marketplace and the economy, as we said. [00:04:00][00:04:00] Jason Noble: How do you see the world of recruitment today and customer success? I see.[00:04:04] Alan Fecamp: What are founders, CEOs and investors looking for[00:04:07] Jason Noble: in leaders, and the highest that you're.[00:04:09] Alan Fecamp: So the recruitment world is interesting. So I suppose from a me and competition standpoint, I think, what you'll find as a candidate is lots of sales recruitment companies trying to hire for CSMs, assuming it's an extension of sales.[00:04:21] Alan Fecamp: So I think that's the, that's the difficult challenge to navigate as a candidate. I think what we tend to walk into is, an educational play. We're often dealing with a founder or perhaps a CRO that has come up through the sales route and is probably less well versed in customer success.[00:04:39] Alan Fecamp: And quite often when we're going in to talk about, the brief and what they want to do, what they're understanding is if CS is quite apparent quite quickly that there's, know, there's a lot of education required from us around. What type of CS leader they need. So we would dig into things like the, their revenue model, their customer journey, what kind of CS motion they're looking to build.[00:04:59] Alan Fecamp: And quite often you're [00:05:00] asking these questions and there isn't a clear answer coming back. So you're having to take them on a bit of an educational tour to actually get to the point where know, you're telling them really what type of profile that they should be hiring in today.[00:05:10] Jason Noble: Look, how does that change the relationship[00:05:12] Alan Fecamp: you've got?[00:05:12] Jason Noble: Cause where they're, Are they looking for the right people? Are they just thinking they need cs?[00:05:18] Alan Fecamp: No, I think what happens is it is tied to stage of growth and funding round. Generally, post series A retention really comes into the spotlight. I That's that shift into. NR right now for obvious reasons.[00:05:30] Alan Fecamp: But I think, for as long as I can remember, that retention number was key in how an investor would look at your series B round or how they would value your business. So I think I, I don't think it's, I suppose for a time it was a, You were, it was a nice to have.[00:05:44] Alan Fecamp: Everyone else is doing it. I should probably do it. But then I think it got serious four, five years ago, and I think it was a real commercial awareness around just how much revenue was attributable post sale. And that's when it, and that's when it started to grow up. And there was a lot more [00:06:00] value placed on it.[00:06:00] Alan Fecamp: But even now as we're seeing in the current market, there's a lot of people being laid off and so forth. It's got a seat at the table, but whether it's the same seat that sales has debatable yeah. So I think, but I think, no, I think it's got serious. I think founders leadership teams do value CS an awful lot more.[00:06:19] Alan Fecamp: Not all of them understand, what, in what inputs they need to put in place in their CS functions to deliver the right outputs. And I think it is that educational piece in there and just trying to drive that value from a leadership perspective. And you guys will know this, trying to drive it back up the, back up the chain to actually articulate what value CS brings to the business isn't always that straightforward.[00:06:39] Alan Fecamp: It's that[00:06:39] Jason Noble: commercial value. What commercial value does it have and how, I think there's. There's an impatience sometimes, you wanna see a return on that investment quite quickly. Yeah. And it's understanding what that return will be and actually what timeframes you should look at.[00:06:52] Alan Fecamp: Yeah, I think so.[00:06:53] Alan Fecamp: Quite often the brief that we get, there are, there might be a CS team in place, but they, they haven't hired a head of [00:07:00] director of VP leader before and it's coming and, there isn't necessarily always a problem to fix, like a churn issue. It's coming and overlay a framework over something that is there, but we don't know why.[00:07:11] Alan Fecamp: It's good. Yeah, they're not, if it's onboarding, they're not measuring time to value, time to live. They're not doing any of the, the basic framework stuff that enables them to. Effectively to the board or actually to work effectively with their customers. So quite often that's the scenario in these series A businesses, it's right.[00:07:29] Alan Fecamp: We need somebody to come in and actually, show us what great looks like, design the playbook and execute it for us. And you are telling the leadership team what needs to be done. That's quite a common brief that we'll get.[00:07:41] Jason Whitehead: Wow that's fascinating to see how it's going there.[00:07:43] Jason Whitehead: As I think about where we are, some interesting economic times, and in some pivot points where you still see a lot of CS jobs being advertised and people struggle to find qualified candidates not candidates, qualified ones, and then in the next breath we hear a lot more people are, putting the breaks on hiring and things are slowing down and people have recessionary [00:08:00] fears.[00:08:00] Jason Whitehead: How are you seeing things evolve today and what do you see is the biggest challenges and. Where are we and where do you think it's gonna bein[00:08:06] Alan Fecamp: the next few months? That's really good question. I've tested a theory here. So during Nick Me's opening, Speech pulse. He quoted a stat from Bain where I think they'd surveyed a thousand companies and 90% were even intending on preserving their CS function or expanding it in 2023.[00:08:30] Alan Fecamp: So I put a poll out on LinkedIn last week just to test that theory. And actually it's bang on. So I've had I've had over 200 votes on it so far, all from CS people in CS hiring positions. And 48% are intending on expanding. It's only 8% are intending on reducing head count in CS next year.[00:08:50] Alan Fecamp: So I'm taking, I'll take that. I'm taking a lot of confidence from that. That said, my inbox from a. Individual contributor perspective in [00:09:00] CS has got busier. So I think there is some movement in the market at an IC level. I spoke to one CS leader today who's, he's down, he's lost three people out of a team of 20.[00:09:10] Alan Fecamp: So I think what you're gonna see is probably more, probably a higher number of accounts per CSM. It's quite likely, see if you're losing some heads, obviously expecting to do more with less I'm pretty confident we're not gonna see real big numbers flood into the market. We did see that during Covid, and I think people then struggled to hire quickly enough on the other side of it and got burnt.[00:09:32] Alan Fecamp: So I'm hopeful that the CS space will hold up pretty well during 2023. It's really busy from a leadership perspective. There's lots of roll around. If you look around on LinkedIn, I'm seeing new stuff every day still. Lots of people pop up in my feed having landed new roles.[00:09:45] Alan Fecamp: So it still feels busy out there. We've had lots of pitches, lots of inbound. It still feels pretty busy. We don't have a crystal ball. But right now it feels like it's in a reasonable place.[00:09:56] Jason Whitehead: That's good to hear. Any predictions on if there is a slowdown?[00:09:58] Jason Whitehead: How long you think it would [00:10:00] last for the CS[00:10:00] Jason Noble: recruitment?[00:10:02] Alan Fecamp: Oh not an economist, but I, I think, yeah the general rule is like the cuts all seem to be like 25% of headcount. Yeah, I think it, it will go, it'll go with a recession, whatever recession we end up in, which I'm, everyone's assuming we will. I think it will follow that pattern, but actually I'm pretty hopeful.[00:10:18] Alan Fecamp: Once you find a bottom in any market, that's when he starts to start to build back out of it. So I think if we get a, if we get a tough spot, it's probably gonna be in the first couple of quarters of next year.[00:10:26] Jason Noble: How are you seeing that, the quality of kind of candidates in the marketplace?[00:10:30] Jason Noble: Cause there's a, there's lots of new people coming in. Again, a past event, it was really interesting to see the number of people that hadn't been Yeah.[00:10:39] Alan Fecamp: Post event before. And that,[00:10:40] Jason Noble: that I think's indicative of the number of new people coming. But what do you feel like in terms of the quality and level of experience to people Yeah.[00:10:48] Jason Noble: Versus the roles that you've got[00:10:49] Alan Fecamp: to match them up with? Yeah. I think so my, my focus being primarily leadership if I look at the UK, it's a tiny pool of. VPs of cs [00:11:00] 374 to be precise. It's not, that's not a big number when you overlay that with the thousands and thousands of B2B SaaS companies out there.[00:11:06] Alan Fecamp: But in theory, we'll need a CS leader at some stage. There'll be more. Once you tear that down to director and head of, then there's, it's a a big number. I. There's lots of people going in at mid-market and I think that's where the term will likely happen if there is some fallout. There's kind of high velocity, probably 18 months to three years of experience.[00:11:30] Alan Fecamp: Lower touch type plays that can be automated. Where some of the scale methodology kicks in, that can probably be soaked up into some of those higher velocity type CS motions. If I think there's gonna be some fallout it will likely be there. There's lots of new people into the market cuz it's such a big growth area.[00:11:48] Alan Fecamp: The growth in CS leadership, you, on your VP level has been 66% increasing people on LinkedIn carrying that VP title. It's still growing. There aren't enough people. So you think that supply [00:12:00] demand thing is playing Absolutely. At the moment. So[00:12:03] Jason Whitehead: When you think of So many new people coming into and coming into their first VP role that may have never had 'em before.[00:12:08] Jason Whitehead: What advice do you give to candidates? Say, this is how you can really distinguish yourself, and here's where you need to prove that you can deliver excellence to a potential.[00:12:16] Alan Fecamp: Employer. Yeah. I thought, and this isn't CS specific. I think it's about the growth mindset stuff. And actually, and CS we're blessed with so many communities and people wanting to help.[00:12:26] Alan Fecamp: There's, and actually the challenge is finding your way to the right material. Cause it's, there's so much content out there. I would say, from. From a CS perspective or from anybody's perspective, use the resources available to you in the market. You've got some great communities out there, like gain, grow, retain, and amazing.[00:12:41] Alan Fecamp: A list of amazing podcasts like this one. Absorb it. Learn, learn from the people that have been doing it for a long time and invest that time to, to try and, try and better yourself. Learn new methodologies. There's been some great articles posted recently about, know, where CS is heading in 2023 and what impact that's gonna mean from a revenue perspective.[00:13:00][00:13:00] Alan Fecamp: You really just need to digest as much of that content as possible and, formulate your own opinion and perspective on what's gonna happen. I think the people that interview you well turn up with an opinion. It's quite a common question for an interview to ask you what does CS mean to you?[00:13:14] Alan Fecamp: And it's quite an ambiguous one, and if you're fairly junior and yeah, you've just landed in cs, it's probably quite a hard one to answer. So I think, just forming a really educated opinion and using the content out there will make a massive difference to you to upskill yourself.[00:13:29] Alan Fecamp: I like that[00:13:30] Jason Noble: thinking cuz it is, it's something that still, I think it's one of the challenges we've got is that the definition is very different for different organizations and individuals, but I think what it shows is, that thinking, you want someone to understand that it's a commercial mindset, that it's a go mind function and that can come out in that question.[00:13:48] Alan Fecamp: Yeah, it can come out in that question and just have a holistic view of, the different, I suppose the different. CS models out there, some being more commercial than others. If you've got, if you've got that knowledge, you also, it means you're probably gonna apply to the [00:14:00] right types of companies for you and find the right home for you based upon what you feel comfortable doing as a CSM.[00:14:06] Alan Fecamp: So I think just learn. Learn as much as you can. And Cs, you're blessed with having more means to do that, that most other functions.[00:14:13] Jason Noble: What are your thoughts as we go into next year? I What are. What are you expecting to happen in the industry? What are your thoughts about what needs to change?[00:14:21] Jason Noble: What would you like to see change? Yeah, I,[00:14:24] Alan Fecamp: thoughts on trends, scale, digital CS and scale is coming up daily, but the moment the need to do more with less is driving that. Obviously from a cost perspective I think that is gonna be really tough for companies to hire.[00:14:39] Alan Fecamp: There are so few scale people. Out there that have done it and are seasoned in it. I've run multiple searches for scale CSMs and scale leaders. It's a tiny amount of people that actually have true expertise in that. Often they're coming out of the product led growth companies cuz they're great at it.[00:14:56] Alan Fecamp: So I think that's the change that we'll see next year as a real uptick in [00:15:00] demand for digital CSMs and scale CSMs. I love that area. I find it fascinating. It was pretty apparent that Pulse, there was a big theme around that, for obvious reasons. Obviously trying to drive, community and so on.[00:15:11] Alan Fecamp: Those are the really interesting tracks I was, I geeked into. So interesting to see how that plays out next year and how companies plug that skillset.[00:15:22] Jason Whitehead: Sure. I think that's always gonna be a challenge when there is such demand and not enough qualified people in there. What what advice do you give to hiring managers around that?[00:15:31] Jason Whitehead: Where say, Hey, this may not be the perfect fit or the perfect yeah. You're looking for, but either given your budget or expertise, how do you guide them to come up with the next best candidate to Yeah.[00:15:42] Alan Fecamp: I think account velocity. Yeah. As long as there've been some level of automation. And some level of, whether, one, one to many activities.[00:15:51] Alan Fecamp: You, if you are, if you've got a CS leader who's managing multiple segments and they've got. A higher number of low value customers at the bottom end of their funnel. [00:16:00] In theory, they should be applying some type of digital CS motion in there. You can look to do that.[00:16:07] Alan Fecamp: They won't be a pure place digital CS expert, but they should have exposure to it. And I'd apply that on a CSM level as well. People that are managing high volumes of customers should, in theory, have some level. Digital CS expertise. Generally when you're hiring for those digital CSMs, they're not coming from pure play CS backgrounds.[00:16:27] Alan Fecamp: They're coming from CS ops, possibly marketing quite often. They're coming from a real broad range of backgrounds. Cause if you look at the skill set that's required around kind of content creation, Running webinars, marketing, building out communities. It's a quite a heavy marketing skill set in there.[00:16:44] Alan Fecamp: So if you've got somebody that's got some customer facing experience, plus some marketing, maybe some CS ops, blending those skill sets together on a csm, individual contributor level, that tends to work quite well as well.[00:16:56] Jason Noble: In the conversations you have with kind of the CEOs [00:17:00] and founders, what are their biggest gaps that they're coming to you with, How are they seeing things when they're looking to you to help them build out their commercial teams, their GTM strategies?[00:17:08] Jason Noble: What are the biggest issues for.[00:17:09] Alan Fecamp: On a CS level? Sorry. Or just on a general? Just[00:17:11] Jason Noble: generally. Just generally, what are the biggest challenges they're seeing and what are they coming to you guys for? Why are these people[00:17:17] Alan Fecamp: we need help? Yeah. I It's all leadership.[00:17:19] Alan Fecamp: It's leadership challenges, whether it be a cro, vp, sales vp, cs, I think Fi, finding the right leader that wraps around. Their sales motion or their CS motion, that's where they struggle. If you've got, we've done an assignment recently for a VP of CS for a an e-commerce tech business.[00:17:37] Alan Fecamp: 12,000 customers, 2000 paying customers. How do we drive operational change into this business? And actually, we're now doing a VP of sales. We've done a VP of product and the remit across all of them was fairly similar. It's all about. Aligning to the, the type of customer, lower acv, that's where the challenge is from these founders.[00:17:57] Alan Fecamp: They're looking for us to help them solve, it's not just right, we need, [00:18:00] someone that's built out a great CS team. It gets really granular into, know, the type of customer. The ACV sales velocity. And that's where you have to get really deep into the market to, to find the right profiles.[00:18:12] Alan Fecamp: So that's where we're helping them is, going out, doing these big research pieces of market mapping and figuring out there are only 10 people in the world that exist that do what you're looking for, and breaking the bad news to them that they might have to change their minds or concede on certain[00:18:26] Jason Noble: areas.[00:18:26] Jason Noble: Do you find many organizations that, that, that must be on the most interesting parts of the[00:18:30] Alan Fecamp: job as well, is that[00:18:31] Jason Noble: market research and actually realizing there is a small number of people that fit everything you ask for? Yeah. Do you find your, these organizations, are they looking for industry vertical experience?[00:18:42] Jason Noble: So you mentioned about the e-commerce role. Do they. That as being critical versus someone being a commercial customer success leader? What are you seeing the trend there?[00:18:51] Alan Fecamp: Yeah. It depends on the stage of growth. So sub 10 million, I think the main expertise sorry, sub 10 million are the main expertise tends to be.[00:19:00][00:19:01] Alan Fecamp: The forefront of people's minds is really early stage. You're gonna have that dynamic with the CS leader working closely with the product team cause they're probably still scrapping around trying to get product market fit and you need that relationship to work. One, one scale kicks in and the product market fit is there.[00:19:18] Alan Fecamp: Really see a brief that requires the main expertise. Okay. It's much more around how you work operationally. Yeah. Team size, customer numbers, tooling. Growth journey and acv, those are the things that you really align to. We kind of work in that framework. You're pretty close to finding the right match.[00:19:37] Jason Noble: This is, I Jason, you and I have had, there's another podcast that we've got about exactly this. Yeah. Is it industry ex or domain experience versus that leadership thing? I think this is the conclusion that we came to as well, that there's a. As organizations grow and scale that the focus is on, I need someone that understands how this leadership piece works.[00:19:54] Jason Noble: Yeah, absolutely.[00:19:55] Alan Fecamp: Yeah. And it's hard to actually pin a number on it, but I think the general market perception is [00:20:00] in or around that 10 million r mark. My view is it's as you partly linked to funding round as well. Yeah,[00:20:06] Jason Noble: I think the latter.[00:20:06] Alan Fecamp: Definitely. Yeah. The vc, the VCs, PE companies will drive the thinking on that for sure.[00:20:12] Jason Whitehead: Wow. Alan, thank you so much for being with us. We've loved your insights here. Before we go, we always like to ask everyone a bold challenge question, looking into your crystal ball. How do you Yes. And commercial recruitment evolving in the next three to five years?[00:20:25] Alan Fecamp: That's a question, isn't it?[00:20:26] Alan Fecamp: Everyone else goes out business and it's just left with there. That's what what's gonna happen. I. What am I seeing right now? Yeah. I think need to have deep, functional expertise is gonna become more and more, and this is through the lens of, technology focused recruitment companies, that deep level of expertise, functional alignment, is gonna really become beneficial.[00:20:49] Alan Fecamp: I think. We touched on at the start of the call. I think, me sitting with a founder, business leader and talking CS shop for two hours, I think that's what people are [00:21:00] buying into rather than the traditional, we're working with five agencies and we want those of cvs through the door quickly.[00:21:05] Alan Fecamp: I think that's fine at an individual contributor level to a point, but I think it can get more granular and sophisticated. You're gonna get better. Outcomes from your hiring and better performing people into your business. And I think that's where it'll go. I think we've seen more retained agencies crop up over the last two years.[00:21:22] Alan Fecamp: More people pushing for retained work cause it's harder to fill jobs and they wanna protect themselves. And I think that drives a higher level of expectation from the customer as well if recruitment's got a bad rep out there. I think lots of people in my profession don't lend themselves any favor.[00:21:36] Alan Fecamp: And I think, I think what you're gonna see over the next year in particular is the standards being driven up. Cause people are gonna be really fighting hard for business. And I think that's a good thing.[00:21:46] Jason Noble: Alan, massive thank you, as Jason said. Really interesting.[00:21:49] Alan Fecamp: I love[00:21:49] Jason Noble: your, as I said, I've known you for a few years.[00:21:51] Jason Noble: The domain expertise really shines through and I think it's just so nice and refreshing just to hear really how it is because it. [00:22:00] It's a massively changing, fast changing market as well as something that's evolved massively. So to get your insight is really[00:22:06] Alan Fecamp: great. Big thing. No, enjoyed it. No, enjoyed it.[00:22:08] Alan Fecamp: Thank you for having me. Of[00:22:09] Jason Whitehead: course. And before you go, we always like to invite you to do a shameless plug. So if you wanna plug your company yourself, whatever, it's that people know. Yeah.[00:22:16] Alan Fecamp: Love to. So I'll tell you about, I'll tell you about zn. Sozan are Owned by an executive search business called Reva, who are a 20 plus year C-suite operator who also have their own private equity fund as well called El Capital.[00:22:30] Alan Fecamp: They're heavily involved in the investor world. Born there and about five years ago, really to go on a longer journey with the technology companies that we, we recruit for. So what was tending to happen is they'd place a CEO. A question will come in, can you help us find a Chief Revenue Officer or a VP sales or a VPCs?[00:22:47] Alan Fecamp: Invariably the answer would be no, because they were so heavily tied to that C level and that's why Zern was formed. So Zero now operates across. It really reflects our customers. So we have the commercial team, which is where I see, which is [00:23:00] everything gtm. We have the technology team, which is engineering product.[00:23:06] Alan Fecamp: And beta. And then we have the operations team, which is finance people and strategies. So we really align ourselves to the kind of core areas of the clients that we recruit for. Our world is really partnering with the VCs and private equity companies across their port coast. So we'll go in and build out the leadership teams and then actually do big team build projects beneath that.[00:23:26] Alan Fecamp: Once we've executed at a senior level. So yeah, and we work with some amazing customers and lots of them. So yeah, that's the zero plug. And I'm here to do the CS piece is the final part. .[00:23:37] Jason Whitehead: Excellent. So we appreciate that so much. Check out zn if you're in the market for recruitment and we'll catch you again soon on the JS take on.[00:23:44] Jason Whitehead: Thank you so much. Thanks guys.[00:23:46] Alan Fecamp: Thanks a thank you.

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Episode Description Join us when we speak with Rupesh Rao. Rupesh is the CEO and founder of CogniSaaS. CogniSaaS helps enterprise SaaS companies deliver customer-centric onboarding and implementation at scale.

In this episode, Rupesh is going to share his experiences and insights in how to best help companies manage complexity during the onboarding and implementation process. Guest: Rupesh Rao - CEO and Founder of CogniSaaS Rupesh has over 20 year’s experience globally (including US, EMEA and APAC) in leading multi-national companies as well as fast growing SaaS companies in multiple industry verticals. These roles include software engineer, account manager, Chief Customer Officer, and now CEO of CogniSaaS. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript Sponsors The Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!

Success Chain provides the tools, services, and support you need to build your change management, user adoption, and customer success capacity. You achieve greater results faster, more effectively, and cheaper than you can working on your own. Additional Resources Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful: * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter * Read Jason Noble's Blog * Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Whitehead: Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us for another episode of the Jason's take on podcast. I am Jason Whitehead, based in Washington, DC here with my partner in crime. Mr. Noble, say hello, Jason.

[00:00:09] Jason Noble: Hello, Jason. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody.

[00:00:14] Jason Whitehead: Well done. And we're excited today to have a very special guest for us. Rupesh Rao who is the CEO and founder of CogniSaaS. CogniSaaS helps enterprise SaaS companies deliver customer centric onboarding and implementation and. And Rupesh has over 20 years’ experience in a wide range of roles, including software engineer, account manager, a couple roles as chief customer officer, and now as CEO.

[00:00:40] Jason Whitehead: So today Rupesh is going to share his experience and insights on how to best help companies manage complexity during the onboarding implementation process. And Rupesh, thank you so much for joining us today. If you could, just to get us started, please go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to be an expert on complexity and onboarding.

[00:00:59] Rupesh Rao: Great. First of all, thank you Jason and Jason for having me here. Very honored to be here and yeah, very excited. We've been talking for a while, so it's great to finally be having a conversion with you both, so thank you for the opportunity. Absolutely. So yeah, so quickly about me. Obviously started cogs as three years back, early 2020 and before that, spent about two decades in the industry in various roles.

[00:01:19] Rupesh Rao: Had a chance to see the full customer journey, life cycle, so to speak, from all the way to acquiring the customer, delivering value and account management, customer success, and so forth. And yeah, so it's been a great journey for me so far. All in all. And yeah, that's good about myself.

[00:01:36] Jason Whitehead: Great. Thank you so much. And it was such a pleasure. We got to meet in person the other day when we were, all the three of us were at the conference and it was nice to, after all these years, put a face to a name and really just connect. It was great to see. So, let's jump in. There, there are a wide range of application types out there and obviously a lot of us are very familiar where you can sign up on the fly and the freemium models and jump in and just get started instantly.

[00:01:58] Jason Whitehead: But that's not really what you do and where you focus. You're more the other extreme, if I understand correctly, where it's a complex, either complex product or complex organization, may take weeks or months to actually. Get folks up and running and implement it. Yeah. What do you see as the biggest challenges when you do have a complex implementation that need to be managed and how is it different than more of the sign up and go?

[00:02:19] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, weird question. Great question Jason. And this is a challenge I think we are seeing a lot of companies face this is a challenge. I face myself before I started Cognos, and that was actually the motivation why Cognos came into being, right? So, the fundamental challenge, Jason, this whole notion of customers buys from you to achieve certain outcomes customer business outcomes, and then how does that translate to your product and your implementation process, onboarding and the way you get them live.

[00:02:47] Rupesh Rao: And we all have been there seeing that, hey, the moment you go live the next day, you have a bunch of escalations and tickets and expectation mismatch and all that reactive firefighting starts. I think that's fundamentally a problem that we are seeing. And fundamentally the problem we are trying to solve for our customers is that how do you go back to the basics of truly customer success by tracking the customer outcomes, right from the sales and pre-sales side, all the way implementation and then, Go beyond go live as well, right?

[00:03:14] Rupesh Rao: So that's the fundamental I would say the complexity and the challenge. It sounds very simple, but it's really still a lot of companies are struggling with because, this is a phase where a lot of teams are involved, number one, right? So, you got the sales team closing the deal and handing it over to the implementation team, and you have the product team involved.

[00:03:32] Rupesh Rao: You have the solution team, you have engineering team, QA team, and so on, right? So, a lot of players, and then you also have the. We're trying to collaborate with them as well. So, a lot of moving parts, a lot of themes and a lot of silos, right? You have the CRM system where the sales opportunity was tracked, and you have the implementation side.

[00:03:50] Rupesh Rao: You people are tracking it in JIRAs of the world, or Microsoft Project, or Asana or Excel trackers. Then you have the picketing system. Then you have the product roadmap tools. So many silos and it's getting worse with the whole more SaaS tools coming into picture. I think that's the fundamental complexity we are seeing across a lot of our customers and the industry that how do we alignment, right?

[00:04:11] Rupesh Rao: Internal alignment between different cross-functional teams that hey, this is what not metric, and then how do we drive that alignment using technology because our technology sometimes is, becomes a roadblock. We have so many silos of tools, so that's in the complexity we are seeing in the.

[00:04:27] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:04:28] Jason Whitehead: It's out there. I spent many years of my career doing CRM, enterprise-wide CRM implementations, and, most of them were multi-year efforts. And remember one client, I was there for a few years. And they were doing a 10-year program. That was everything from redefining all their stuff, moving their systems in, consolidating 72 call centers in the amount of effort it took to just manage that internal complexity and to get all the different teams that were, hundreds of people over, a 10-year period.

[00:04:56] Jason Whitehead: It, the struggle was real. It's, it can be real in there. And I think most folks who have never experienced something like that really can't even fathom just how many moving parts there are. And the stress. You need to keep it all together.

[00:05:08] Jason Noble: Absolutely. It's an area that I don't think people are investing the right amounts in.

[00:05:12] Jason Noble: This is why you guys are doing what you're doing there, Rupesh. But it is something that organizations struggle with. They don't understand what investment they need to make in this and how they do this. One, one way that we always like to work and Jason and I have spoken about this, is you take a.

[00:05:26] Jason Noble: Step into your customer's shoes and then work backwards to, to your own shoes there. But what are some of the things that you are seeing most customers doing that, that go wrong? That mean that they need help? When they're managing these complex implementations, onboarding these complex change programs, transformation programs internally what are the common things that you're seeing them, them doing wrong and what makes them reach out for external?

[00:05:51] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, so fundamentally the problem statement is still the same using that we had 20 years back, that companies struggle to take their customers to value, time to value successfully. At scale, right? So that's the fundamental challenge. And there's a lot of things going underneath the surface that how do you track what was promised in the sales cycle, what outcomes and then how do you translate that to your internal different cross-functional teams right from your SOW document to a bunch of tickets in Jira that your product team needs to close.

[00:06:24] Rupesh Rao: How do you keep the connection between all these. Your kickoff meeting, your implementation process, your Jira tickets, your document. And these are all things disconnected in a lot of companies, right? And that is where a lot of companies and our customers struggle, where essentially things fall through the cracks, so to speak, right?

[00:06:44] Rupesh Rao: Either fraud team missed the context of the customer requirement or an outcome, and they build the feature. They go live with the feature and straight away there is a meat defects or expectation mismatch. Prioritization is a big problem. We are saying where a lot of companies are not getting the prioritization right, because you may have 20 customers who are asking for certain things from your product, and obviously every customer has got their own timeline when they want to go live.

[00:07:09] Rupesh Rao: Yeah. How do you keep track of all these timelines at scale in a meaningful manner? So, your product team might decide to release a feature next month, but that might be good news for some customers. It might be bad news for some other customers who wanted this earlier. So how do you keep this, what we call this whole customer centric prioritization is a very common and legacy problem companies are struggling with.

[00:07:31] Rupesh Rao: So those are the few examples I would say we see very often.

[00:07:34] Jason Noble: you see, are you seeing organizations change? Are they getting better at this or is it a problem that's growing and getting worse with the level of complexity, the number of implementations? Is this a problem that you see growing and growing?

[00:07:48] Rupesh Rao: So interestingly, I think people have now started to realize that there is, this is an important problem because if you look at customer success as a sort of board level metrics, everybody now clearly knows [00:08:00] what they need to track. So, they know clearly that they need to track three things. Primary in customer success.

[00:08:04] Rupesh Rao: First is your NPS, right? And second is your attention. And third might be your upsell cross sell expansion. Now that's very clear to a lot of companies, and they are now put the tools and process in place for these three metrics. Now, the challenges, these three metrics are actually lagging indicators of customer success.

[00:08:24] Rupesh Rao: The customer has, let's say, gone live. And for whatever reason, the adoption is not happening, which happens to all of us, right? Adoption is a big challenge now is if you are a CSM, the next question you will ask is that, Hey, why is the adoption not happening? And that is a point where the post smart kind of thing opens up, and then you start to go figure out, okay, what did we do wrong?

[00:08:42] Rupesh Rao: Is it on the customer side? Is it on our side? Did we miss any ball or did we drop any outcome they wanted? What went wrong? Then you have to travel backwards into the customer journey all the way to the sales and presales stage. Okay, what was it that we jointly agreed on the success plan or the outcomes, and then did we deliver all those [00:09:00] outcomes or not?

[00:09:00] Rupesh Rao: So that tracking becomes very critical. So, this is a realization we are seeing now. A lot of companies are going through and it's a kind of early stages were. They recognize that unless they nail the leading indicators, these lagging indicators will be always out of their control.

[00:09:17] Rupesh Rao: So now companies are putting, starting to put investments and, metrics and process and everything around it to make sure right on the sales and pre-sales, the handover and the implementation is taken care in a structured way so that when you have gone live, then NPS adoption and retention, these are all taken care, you have set the state success.

[00:09:37] Rupesh Rao: For these three metrics to happen. Yes. So that's the change we are starting between the industry. We're

[00:09:40] Jason Whitehead: seeing a lot of that as well too, cause you know, my business partner, Sue ABT Moore she developed what we call AM and PM metrics and the AM or the activity metrics or adoption metrics pm those performance metrics, the logging indicators.

[00:09:52] Jason Whitehead: And we're doing a lot more with customers up front saying, we know there's a period between now and go live in between go live. And when you see those outcomes, [00:10:00] here's how we track the activity and know we're on the right path and the right trajectory to. And here's what that should look like along the way.

[00:10:06] Jason Whitehead: And that's been very powerful for a lot of folks. Keep the faith while until you get see those lagging indicators that you want, that we're doing the right things and moving forward. Absolutely. One of, one of the things I'm curious about making the distinction between onboarding and implementation when you have these long-term, multi-year projects, how did, how do you see most clients deciding that onboarding is over even before the implementation is live or, guess I'm wondering, with that complexity, what constitutes the end of onboarding when there's still, a lot of things going on to, to get system?

[00:10:33] Rupesh Rao: The way we look at this one, Jason, is implementation is really a subset of onboarding.

[00:10:38] Rupesh Rao: It's part of your broader onboarding, right? You're trying to onboard the customer and all their users onto your platform. And implementation is. Step in that journey, right? So, you close the deal with the customer, you go through the implementation, then you have the go live, then you onboard the users, you train them and then you make sure they realize the value.

[00:10:57] Rupesh Rao: So there are three parts of the value proposition, so to [00:11:00] speak. So in the sales cycle, you are promising the value. In the liberation cycle, you are delivering the value. And then post go live, you have the value realization. So the value promise, the value delivery, and the value realization post go live is, that's what essentially becomes your onboarding, so to speak, the full circle of onboarding.

[00:11:19] Rupesh Rao: Okay, great.

[00:11:20] Jason Whitehead: We've talked about a lot of things here with complexity in different areas. What is it that you think vendors need to start doing differently to help their customers? Where do you think vendors are still getting it?

[00:11:31] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, so I think what I mentioned earlier, the fundamentally it's the.

[00:11:34] Rupesh Rao: The internal alignment we see is the biggest problem. , the alignment or the disconnect between the classic disconnect between what we call sales, customer success and product. Yeah. They typically have different priorities. Sales has got their own priority. Customer success has got their own priority, and product has got their own priority with their own roadmap and stuff.

[00:11:51] Rupesh Rao: I think this alignment and bringing all these teams together on what really is the key metric we are trying to achieve for the customer is still a challenge. I [00:12:00] think a lot of companies go wrong. Simple things like, for example, retention right now. Retention in many companies is a metric or KPI for customer success teams.

[00:12:10] Rupesh Rao: Right now, I'm gonna make a segment here, which might be very this thing. Product teams also should be, measured on retention because to large extent we all know that uhlin or churn can happen because the customer did not get value from the product. And so today a lot of companies obviously are not organized like that.

[00:12:25] Rupesh Rao: They're not incentivizing those teams like that, right? So that creates a disconnect between your objectives and your in. So unless you incentivize different teams in a harmonic way, your objectives will be always a challenge. So I think that's the fundamental way. I think companies are still figuring it out.

[00:12:43] Rupesh Rao: What's the best way

[00:12:44] Jason Noble: where do you see vendors struggling most with building out their own processes around onboarding, implementation? And then secondly, what, why do you think it is so difficult for these organizations.

[00:12:56] Rupesh Rao: So, the reason why it is so difficult [00:13:00] is if you really think about the simplistic three things that people, companies want to track and doing, onboarding, implementation is, Who is the customer?

[00:13:08] Rupesh Rao: What have we promised to them? What are the outcomes we want to achieve with them? And then how are we gonna deliver those outcomes? So this who, what, and how is what they're trying to figure it out right now, if you see the way they operate today is who is the customer? Is all tracked in your CRM system, opportunity, customer context, and all of that.

[00:13:28] Rupesh Rao: Then what are the business outcomes we are trying to deliver for this customer is again, track in. Various tools. Some companies track it in CRM, some companies track it on a piece of paper SOW document or a BRD document, which is an unstructured piece of data, right? Anything in pt PS unstructured data.

[00:13:46] Rupesh Rao: Now, the how it, the how I gonna deliver these outcomes is again, tracked in different set of tools, right? So the how will typically have two tracks to. One is your product track. You have dependencies on the [00:14:00] product. The customer might have asked you for a new feature request or announcement or an integration or a configuration, all those tech stuff.

[00:14:07] Rupesh Rao: So, for that, typically companies will go create a bunch of Jira tickets, right? So typically, they a document will get hashed out into a sort of a document where they do their solutioning of for each outcome, what product outcomes or product dependencies we need from our product team, which will go into a bunch of.

[00:14:25] Rupesh Rao: And then there is a implementation task that the implementation team needs to do, right from the handover to kickoff meeting, then B Rd, then, and then all those steps. Now, all these tools, as we all know, don't talk to each other very well. Your project management tool, which tracks your implementation task, is not very well much aware of what's going on in the genetic tickets.

[00:14:47] Rupesh Rao: Yeah. If your product team has released or not released, a feature is unknown to your project management. The IT has to travel back via human loop. That product team will say, Hey, we have done this, or We have not [00:15:00] done this. It'll come to the CSM, our implementation team, then needs to figure it out.

[00:15:04] Rupesh Rao: Okay, so what does it mean for my, that customer who asked for that feature? So they have to connect all these dots manually. Juggling around these different tools, right? Yeah. So it's a combination of silos, of tools to answer your question, Jason, and the mix of unstructured data and structured data. So you have some document information in some documents and Jira tickets, and then tasks in the project management tools.

[00:15:28] Rupesh Rao: So that is what makes it very complex.

[00:15:30] Jason Whitehead: I'm working with a client now and has the exact situation that you've just described where multiple teams, different incentives, multiple tools, things not coming back and forth, and it's a huge challenge for them. And I think you're right that you know the tools.

[00:15:43] Jason Whitehead: They may not talk to each other as well as they do, but the amount of time it takes to organize your internal organization as a vendor to get everything humming nicely and get the handovers done and the process and the incentives, I think it's massive and many organizations I think, still struggle with that quite a bit.

[00:15:56] Jason Whitehead: It's really interesting.

[00:15:57] Rupesh Rao: Very true. Yeah.

[00:15:58] Jason Noble: I think if you are a customer as well, I mean [00:16:00] you're potentially going through more than one of these at the same time. Yes. Or going through implementation. And maybe you've just gone live with another one. You said there's lots going on at the same time.

[00:16:09] Jason Noble: And that kind of perspective, how do they all work together? What's the integration like? But then how do they all compare to each other? Is implementation onboarding, working for one? Is it not working? It puts you as a customer in a very difficult position. You've go through all this big change and all of these different systems at different stages and different levels of maturity,

[00:16:29] Rupesh Rao: I think.

[00:16:30] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, Absolut.

[00:16:31] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. So rap, one of the things I'm wondering, cause you work with a lot of teams SAS teams and CSMs and all those things, how do you actually see your customers, like the SAS vendors organizing their internal teams to help manage this complexity? So for example, do you see, or do you recommend that they have dedicated onboarding teams or do you typically see be more like, CSM generals that do the full life cycle of a customer.

[00:16:52] Jason Whitehead: And do you have a, any recommendations on how to make those decisions of how to organize? Yeah,

[00:16:58] Rupesh Rao: absolutely. So we have seen the full spectrum. Typically it's in the early stages. The CS team does everything. They will be involved right from the pre-sale stage in the, scoping discussions.

[00:17:08] Rupesh Rao: In the solutioning discussion. They will do the implementation, they will do the post life support, and so they will do the full life cycle, right? But as the company scale to more number of customers, they raise an external funding, they ABC and so on. So, they start to segregate different teams.

[00:17:24] Rupesh Rao: And that is really the best practice I've seen where you'll have a dedicated onboarding. And then you'll have a customer success team, which typically will come into the picture after the customer has gone live. And then you might also have an, what they call account management team whose job is really to work closely with the customer success team to drive the upsell cross sell.

[00:17:44] Rupesh Rao: So a lot of companies don't want to see US teams to be sales targets incentivized team. They want them to really focus on the value for customers. They separate out the account management team from the customer success team. So then you on the other team, you then have these [00:18:00] three teams, the onboarding team, customer success team, and an account management team will take care of different KPIs.

[00:18:05] Rupesh Rao: So account management team will take care of your upsell cross sell customer success team will take care of your adoption and NPS metrics and onboarding team will take care of your time to value, right? Kpi. So that's how the KPIs get manage.

[00:18:20] Jason Noble: Refresh. What are the typical kind of organizations that are looking for help with this?

[00:18:24] Jason Noble: Are they across all industries, all levels of maturity, or are you guys seeing a pattern in terms of the types of organization that say we are looking for help in managing our onboarding processes? Yeah, I think

[00:18:37] Rupesh Rao: so far obviously we are focusing, talking to a lot of companies in b2b software world.

[00:18:41] Rupesh Rao: So they are definitely any company who. Targeting mid-market to enterprise customers, it is not a plug and play solution. Requires a lot of handhold of the customers. Specific requirements that require a lot of API integration work or configuration, or they may [00:19:00] ask for module specific work or roadmap items to be prioritized as a new feature.

[00:19:04] Rupesh Rao: So those are the kind of, companies who are scaling very rapidly. They might have already had 50 plus enterprise customers. They might have raised their cities a round and cities B round and they're looking to, double, triple their customer base in the next six to nine months. And that is where they feel this pain quite badly.

[00:19:21] Rupesh Rao: And that's where they realize they need help. Yeah, because Excel sheets. Start to fall apart at some stage and anywhere you have any human intervention leads to think falling through the cracks. And in a lot of cases we see customers having customer churn and I'm, I've seen this myself in my experiences where customer has churned right during onboarding itself, even before because it took too long.

[00:19:43] Rupesh Rao: They did not get the value during onboarding and all that. So super critical for a lot of companies and that's where they are starting to put their.

[00:19:49] Jason Whitehead: One of the things you said earlier that really made me think as well too is making the distinction between onboarding the new customer, the new organization versus onboarding the end users.

[00:19:56] Jason Whitehead: And I think there's a lot of that, that where I've seen a lot of [00:20:00] organizations get into trouble is they really view the initial, go live as the focus of end all and be all, but then they don't really think through how they're gonna onboard new employees that may come in six months or a year or two years down the road, or they don't really think through how are we going to onboard existing customers to.

[00:20:15] Jason Whitehead: Modules or new key functionality that's just been developed or released and those sort of things. What have, what are your experiences or recommendations around that ongoing onboarding, whether it's new employees or new modules that are coming out to existing users, and how can things be improved there or are there any unique challenges around that as opposed to the initial implementation?

[00:20:34] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, very interesting question. That's actually a very different kind of challenge we see a lot of companies struggle with where this information of. Your case studies, right? We, you might have a hundred customers who you have implemented in the last five years. At different points of time and those details of what modules, what use cases, what outcomes we have implemented for which customer.

[00:20:57] Rupesh Rao: This data you can imagine is [00:21:00] all over the place. It's in some bits and bobs in CRM or Jira or some documents and PDF documents and all over the place. So there is no one single intelligent repository which can tell the. That, Hey, this customer we have done these three things in the last three years, and these seven things are our logical upsell cross, opportunities from a product or a module or more outcomes that we can see other customers have already taken right from the same industry.

[00:21:29] Rupesh Rao: And customers love to know, what are you doing with my peers, right? Am I missing out on something? So those kind of information exchange becomes extremely challenging, which I tried again in my earlier career manually, and it doesn't work, right? So one of the use cases we help with other customers is having that single sort of, digitized repository of all the implementations.

[00:21:47] Rupesh Rao: And then how can you, Cross the dots and make sense of all this data to deliver more value for your customers. And then, expand as part of that as well.

[00:21:56] Jason Noble: I love that idea cuz it gives you that consistency as well. How do you do good and [00:22:00] repeat what good looks like.

[00:22:02] Rupesh Rao: True.

[00:22:02] Rupesh Rao: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:22:04] Jason Whitehead: Great. Rap, thank you so much. And before we go, we always like to throw out a bold challenge question to all of our guests. So your question. What is the single most impactful action a SaaS vendor can take to ensure fast effective onboarding and implementation of a complex product?

[00:22:19] Jason Whitehead: So if there's one thing that they could really do, what's the most impactful thing you'd like to see SaaS vendors doing

[00:22:25] Rupesh Rao: consistently? So I think the one most important thing is, as I mentioned earlier, touch up earlier, is this whole internal cross-functional alignment aligning different teams, your sales, customer success, onboarding, product engineering.

[00:22:40] Rupesh Rao: Because a lot of times these teams, especially the product tech teams, don't really have the context of why, right? Why are we building this feature? What outcome is it going to deliver for our customers? What is the revenue impact for us? Why should we prioritize it? All these data is just in flowing in emails and excels and different silos of tools.

[00:22:58] Rupesh Rao: So I think if that's one [00:23:00] thing they can sort out the internal cross-functional alignment I think that will take care of a lot of problems. Not

[00:23:06] Jason Noble: a not, not a small task there, not a small

[00:23:08] Rupesh Rao: office . It's extremely challenging and

[00:23:11] Jason Whitehead: yeah, absolutely, it is indeed. Again, before we go thank you so much.

[00:23:15] Jason Whitehead: We've loved having you share your insights. We wanna invite you to do a shameless plug for anything CogniSaaS how can people find you and anything else you'd like to add?

[00:23:23] Rupesh Rao: Thank you Jason again for the opportunity. So yeah Cognis is a customer onboarding tool for enterprise mid-market SaaS focused companies.

[00:23:30] Rupesh Rao: You can reach out to us. Our website is cogs.com. I leave my LinkedIn profile link in the notes here. So yeah. Happy to chat. The companies who are looking at customer onboarding is a strategic objective and priority and looking to streamline and faster time to value. So happy to have a chat and see if we can add value.

[00:23:47] Rupesh Rao: Great.

[00:23:48] Jason Noble: Awesome. Super conversation. I think this is not, every organization is looking for this, so this is just huge. This is really good. And as you said at the beginning, so good to actually meet in person before we did the [00:24:00] recording. It's really good to see you last week. A huge thank you from.

[00:24:03] Rupesh Rao: Great. Likewise super honored to be here, Jason. And Jason and thanks for having me. And yeah look forward to future releases and look forward to speaking soon again. Fantastic. Thanks .

[00:24:12] Jason Noble: Thank you.

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Episode Description Join us when we speak with Nick Mehta. Nick is the CEO of Gainsight, the platform that helps companies of all sizes and industries drive durable growth through customer-led and product-led strategies.

In this episode, Nick shares his view of the growing importance of Customer Success in the next 5 years. Guest: Nick Mehta - CEO of Gainsight Nick Mehta is a SaaS veteran. He works with a team of over 1400 human beings who together have helped create the Customer Success category that's currently taking over the SaaS business model worldwide. Gainsight is a five-time Forbes Cloud 100 recipient and Nick has been named the #2 CEO by the Software Report, has a 99% approval rating on Glassdoor, and was named Entrepreneur Of The Year for Northern California Award. On top of all that, he was recently rated as the #1 CEO in the world (the award committee was just his mom, but the details are irrelevant). He is a member of the Board of Directors at F5 (NASDAQ:FFIV) and has co-authored two books on Customer Success, Customer Success and The Customer Success Economy. He is passionate about family, football, philosophy, physics, fashion, parody music videos, and SaaS Customer Success. People told him it’s impossible to combine all of those interests, but Nick has made it his life’s mission to try. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript Sponsors The Jasons Take On... is Sponsored by Success Chain!

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning, Good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's Take on podcast series. It's myself, Jason Noble, here in a gloomy looking London. I'm almost time for the weekend and my partner in crime, Mr. Whitehead in the us.

[00:00:13] Jason Noble: Say hello, Jason. We are super excited today. We have a very special guest. We're talking about the next five. In customer success, so really looking longer term. A very warm and big welcome to Nick Mehta, the CEO of Gainsight, and I'm sure a guest that doesn't need much of an introduction.

[00:00:33] Jason Noble: Nick, you're the CEO of Gainsight. You're an advisor on the board of directors of many tech companies. You are one of the godfathers of customer success. You've written the book for customer success. You've written the Customer Success Economy book that, that I think talks through some of these really monumental shifts that we need to make today.

[00:00:52] Jason Noble: You're an award-winning author. You've been with Gainsight, I think for 14, 15 years now,

[00:00:57] Nick Mehta: and you've seen it's about 10 years.

[00:00:59] Jason Noble: [00:01:00] 10 years. But you've seen the company Yep. Flourish and grow from what it was in the beginning to. Huge organization today that's leading the way in customer success.

[00:01:09] Jason Noble: But you've also been there to seen the industry grow from where it was to where it is today and how it's continuing to grow. But you've also been pivotal in building, leading, defining the industry that we all know as customer success. You're a big steel as fan. I know you're super passionate about physics as well, and I love that.

[00:01:27] Jason Noble: I'm a fellow physicist. Love it. I love the playback to physics. Everything is about physics and. And of course, you're a big fan and we are of your music parody vis videos. Thank you, Nick. Welcome. We are super thrilled to have you here with us. We've had, we'll just set this, the record straight.

[00:01:44] Jason Noble: We've had some other big hitters from Game Site. We've had Dan before you and Adam but we had to invite you on so welcome Nick.

[00:01:52] Nick Mehta: So great to meet your guys' company and I really appreciate it. Love what you're doing for the community and obviously very honored to be on anything that Dan and Adam were on.

[00:01:59] Nick Mehta: So thank you.

[00:02:01] Jason Noble: Nick, I said already I can't believe anyone in customer success doesn't know who you are. I, and we are super thrilled to have you on here, but I'd love you. A quick intro from you, but then also what as customer successes in, in, in your own words, and why does this number one driver for growth in teams today?

[00:02:18] Nick Mehta: Yeah, totally. I used, you did it so well, Jason and I won't elaborate. Ceo, you of Gainsight been doing this a long time, very passionate about. Customer success in three levels. Really there's the level of it as a business strategy. There's the level of it as a profession, which you know that those are two different levels.

[00:02:36] Nick Mehta: And then obviously we make money by making technology for customer success. And so, I think there's three different levels that I end up spending time at. And to answer your question, I think what's really an incredible is over the last 10 years as more and more companies have moved to these recurring revenue business models like SaaS and cloud, they always go through the exact same kind of like inevitable process where they come in taking [00:03:00] all the ideas they had from the old world of transactional selling where, you sell to a customer and then after the sale what you do is you support them.

[00:03:07] Nick Mehta: You wait for them to call you. And what you realize is any recurring revenue business, at the end of the day, if you're not. Getting that customer to value and adoption. They're not going to stay with you. They're not gonna grow. And if they don't stay with you and grow, you're never going to make any money. All of the economics in recurring revenue business comes from your existing customers from the lifetime value them.

[00:03:26] Nick Mehta: And today, companies think about this in the metric, net revenue retention, we'll talk more about it, but that metric has become a real north star metric for most subscription businesses and a real way to drive value. So, what's happened? Companies have figured out customer success is indeed a function, but it's much more than that.

[00:03:42] Nick Mehta: It's really the way to drive value in a recurring revenue business. I love that.

[00:03:47] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And Nick, as we've said, you've been with this from the very beginning and you've seen such progress over the years. Do you think customer success is really where it needs to be yet in terms of wider recognition and the level of [00:04:00] investment that needs it?

[00:04:01] Jason Whitehead: Do most companies get it now, or is there still a lot of people out there? Haven't heard of it or don't fully buy into the promise of customer

[00:04:07] Nick Mehta: success. Yeah, I think that the, so if you look inside technology businesses, I think the why and the what are pretty well defined in most companies, and honestly, if you're a tech company, you don't know what customer success is.

[00:04:22] Nick Mehta: You're just literally, living in a cave and you're not paying attention at all. And so the why and the what you know why being, okay, you've got a recurring revenue business. The, it's all about lifetime value, net revenue retention. I think everyone gets that, right? It's so important. And then the what of what is customer success at 30,000 feet, I think is pretty well defined, but I think where the how is where it really comes rubber beats the road, right?

[00:04:42] Nick Mehta: 10,000 companies practicing customer success, there's probably 20,000 definitions of how to do it right? Like literally, there's all these different approaches. Very, And it's not it, by the way, I've thought about this a lot. I don't think it's wrong that there's different approaches because customer success is so fundamental to a business that because businesses are [00:05:00] different, customer success is also going to be a little different, just the same.

[00:05:03] Nick Mehta: Company A, B, and C's products are different, which makes sense cause they're different companies the same way. Customer success is a little different in each company, right? If you have a consumption-based pricing model or subscription, if you sell to big customers or small customers, if your client's very technical or if they're more business oriented.

[00:05:18] Nick Mehta: If you're an early-stage company, you're more mature. You have one product; you have multiple products. There's a lot of flavors of customer success. And so that's why I say customer success today is much more in the how phase of how do I do? For my business and my maturity, and also one of the things we all make mistakes on is try and apply, a, the model from a company.

[00:05:38] Nick Mehta: That's totally different to my model. Maybe I'm a small startup selling a security product and I'm trying to apply Salesforce's customer success model to my company. It doesn't apply at all, right? And so that how of, how do I find what works for me? That's where the energy is.

[00:05:54] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. It's nice to hear you say that too.

[00:05:55] Jason Whitehead: Cause whenever I start with a new client, as part of our customer success consulting, one of the [00:06:00] first things we ask 'em is, what do you actually do for customer success? Yeah. It's all over the map, And I've yet to get the same answer twice. It's good

[00:06:06] Nick Mehta: to hear you. Totally. And I think that a lot of it is also, over time you're trying to learn and improve, just like with your product.

[00:06:13] Nick Mehta: I think product's a really good analogy, right? Product isn't static. Nobody's Hey, we're done with the product. We don't have to do any more product work. That doesn't ever happen. Customer success is never gonna be done. You know what I mean? People are like, Oh, when am I gonna be done?

[00:06:25] Nick Mehta: No, you're never gonna be done. It's like your product. You're always getting better, you're always changing. Your market's changing. Competition's changing your underlying software is evolving. There's new features. Over time the new features are less mature, but your old features are more mature.

[00:06:38] Nick Mehta: Your new customers are less mature. So it's a constant iteration. And if you're in this field, the only way you'll survive is if you love that. If you love the iteration, if you're looking to be done and Oh, I figured it all out, you should get a different job.

[00:06:54] Jason Noble: I think we, we've been saying this for a while.

[00:06:55] Jason Noble: It is, it's constant change and we're seeing this rate of change [00:07:00] now in technology. It's just

[00:07:01] Nick Mehta: growing. Totally.

[00:07:03] Jason Noble: You look at our kids and just the pace of technology change for them, they're Exactly. We're getting more used to it than we are, but we are that transition. Things weren't changing and now they're changing this fast.

[00:07:12] Jason Noble: I love the way you talk about different flavors of custom success. Yep. That's one of the best ways to describe it. Cause a lot of the answers are, we always say it depends. Yeah, it does. It depends on so many factors and I think that, That understanding that's okay. And you've got to find and model.

[00:07:27] Jason Noble: It's the principles that are the same. This is what we're trying to do. Totally. What do you see, given that, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges today For the industry itself and then for customer success professionals and leaders?

[00:07:39] Nick Mehta: Yeah, so the we actually did this presentation at our Pulse conference about six weeks ago.

[00:07:44] Nick Mehta: And basically we talked about this idea that the future of subscription businesses is this idea of having a more durable approach to growth, right? In the last 10 years with all this crazy, all the money that was out there, the funding, it was growth at all costs. And companies spent a [00:08:00] lot of money on new sales and marketing and burned a lot of money and the economics didn't matter and some.

[00:08:05] Nick Mehta: Concepts now, like profit and EBITDA are coming back into fashion, right? And so the question is how do you grow in a more durable and efficient way, and what are the challenges to that? So starting not at customer success, but let's start with a bigger problem. And so if you looked at that kind of challenge of durable growth and you said, What are the things that people are struggling with right now?

[00:08:23] Nick Mehta: One thing people struggle with still to this day. Is the idea that they, unless you really have built your foundation of customer success, you're still surprised too often. That's one of the core emotions in customer success. You guys have probably both been there too, which is a customer reaches out to you and says, Oh, we're thinking about churn.

[00:08:38] Nick Mehta: And you're like, What? And that surprise really shouldn't be allowed now, right? Like we have all this data, we've got processes, we've got systems. So the first thing that people wrestle with a little bit is the surprises. Now that's, I think, going down over. But that's something that I think you'll, if you have that, you've gotta fix it.

[00:08:54] Nick Mehta: Number two, which is, I think extremely timely is scaling without hiring people.[00:09:00] And so this is the thing that everyone, I think every company realized the value of customer success, but they're also trying to get more profitable or, burn less money. And so therefore, most companies have really slowed down hiring.

[00:09:11] Nick Mehta: But they're bringing on new customers. And so therefore, this idea of digital ed customer success, doing things like in-app communications using community digital journeys, pooled customer success, self-service, that second area of how do we scale customer success without hiring more people. That's the second thing that people rest with a lot.

[00:09:29] Nick Mehta: Third is, people wrestle with this idea. Why? Why is customer success so internally oriented? We talk about gross revenue retention and churn and upsell, net promoter score. Those things don't, Customers don't really care about those at all. And so how do we have more of an outside in approach to customer success?

[00:09:48] Nick Mehta: How do we bring the customer more into this versus making it just about us? So that's the third. That's things like creating a joint success plan with the customer side by side based on their goals. Creating a [00:10:00] community where customers are learning from each other. So that kinda involving the customer, that's a third big thing that people are wrestling with.

[00:10:05] Nick Mehta: Fourth is this idea that up till now, I think a lot of companies would say, customer success, your job is to prevent churn, right? Stop, turn, fix the leaky bucket. But the truth is that At some point, it's not just about reducing churn. Maybe you've taken your retention rate from 80% to 90%. Now the question is, how are you actually helping customers to expand?

[00:10:24] Nick Mehta: And the truth is, it's not just it's not as simple as do you do focus on churn or expansion? Expansion often will reduce churn because if customers are doing more with you, they're gonna be more sticky. And so this idea of, we call it going on offense, how do you move from defense to. In customer success, that's a fourth challenge.

[00:10:42] Nick Mehta: Fifth is this idea of how do we do more through the product, right? At the end of the day, customer success is fundamentally about closing that gap between what the product does and what the customer's desired outcomes are. Actually, Allison Pickens, who is our original coo, came up with that idea of closing the gap, and so that [00:11:00] concept is so important, but you don't always wanna be closing the gap.

[00:11:03] Nick Mehta: You wanna be extending the product. Getting feedback to the product team making the product in the app, better at driving it, onboarding and adoption, et cetera. And then finally what we talk about at Gainsight is the fact that especially right now, clients are more stressed than ever given everything going on in the world, our teams are dealing with a lot.

[00:11:20] Nick Mehta: And so having more of a human first approach to how we think about our teams and our customers, never forgetting that. Like it's not just. Client or an account, but it's actually a bunch of human beings. Each of them have their own goals. They've got career goals, right? Tracking your, those people and your stakeholders.

[00:11:37] Nick Mehta: Doing a little bit more of that account management, relationship management. Sometimes you can forget about that when you've got all this great data. So those six challenges, we think are the biggest impediments to durable growth right now. Wow, tho those

[00:11:50] Jason Whitehead: are great. I really love what you said there too and so many different elements.

[00:11:54] Jason Whitehead: I love the how. Scale your impact without scaling your team, and really helping customers take [00:12:00] more of that, teach Amanda to fish approach where it's let me build your capacity so you're not as reliant on us as we go forward. And I think there's still a lot of room there to happen around that.

[00:12:07] Jason Whitehead: I'm also, I'm wondering as we look at this and. Do you think that CS professionals are really doing enough to beat the drum for what's neat and what's not? And if not, what else should CS professionals be doing with their customers or internally with the rest of their team members to really get everyone else on board?

[00:12:22] Jason Whitehead: Cuz I think there's still wide gaps of customer expectations, but also even across, sales and marketing, what they expect versus what customer

[00:12:29] Nick Mehta: success expects. Totally. Yeah. So I think there's probably three, if I'll give one piece a tip for each of the three audiences I think that are really important.

[00:12:36] Nick Mehta: So one audience. Your product team, We talked about that. I'll give a little advice there. Yep. One audience is your sales team and one audience is your customers. So let's talk about each of those three. So on the product team side, I think every CSM in the world has a list of things that they wish the product would do differently.

[00:12:51] Nick Mehta: Every single at a hundred percent of them, I guarantee if you're listing, you have that list in your head. Now the challenge is that. If every CSM just emails the product people [00:13:00] inde independently with Okay, here's my list and here's my list and the product. People just get a list of a thousand different things, then it's really hard for them to figure out what really matters.

[00:13:07] Nick Mehta: And so what I would take a couple piece of advice from a product perspective, number one, is before you go to them, Asking for something, try to go to them to help. It's basic human relationship. 1 0 1. . So maybe they need help finding beta customers for a new feature. Maybe they need help getting feedback on a new mockup or design.

[00:13:26] Nick Mehta: Maybe they need help understanding who the best customers to talk to, to get research interviews, be that CSM that's helping the product team, calling them out on Slack about how great the new feature is, or our customer loves it. Do some stuff to build some relationship capital with the product team before you ask for stuff.

[00:13:42] Nick Mehta: And then when you're asking, this is where the leader really comes in, build a process where you're consolidating those requests, you're ranking them, you're providing examples with data and we actually added a feature of gain site that basically does this now, where we're like, okay. We actually integrate with product management tools and we're like letting the CSM flag [00:14:00] features, but then letting the PM see, okay, what customers are affected, how much AR is affected?

[00:14:04] Nick Mehta: So giving like more context and prioritization, and then being willing to roll your sleeves up to help we had a customer event this week and one of the CCO said, Hey, If you're a CSM and you're complaining about the product, then you don't get to complain. If you're not gonna go, then join the session to give them the feedback and actually talk to talk about it.

[00:14:23] Nick Mehta: If you're just emailing into the void, then we're not gonna listen to your input, right? And so that's in the product side. On the sales side, I think one of the biggest things people are doing is building more of an integrated methodology for defining the client's desired outcomes in the sales process.

[00:14:38] Nick Mehta: What are those goals? What, et cetera? With a bit of a framework, not just like open-ended, but here's maybe a checklist of goals and then having that automatically feed to the CSM team. So for example, a lot of our clients and we do this too in the sales, in the crm like Salesforce, they'll have like, when you're closing an opportunity, what are the clients desired outcomes, What are their KPIs?

[00:14:56] Nick Mehta: Make it pretty structured. And then automatically have [00:15:00] that create a success plan, for example, in Gainsight, if you're using that. So it automatically creates a success plan for the CSM with, Okay, here's the goals and here's the plan to go achieve them. And so that kind of put pre to post sales hand off, no brainer.

[00:15:12] Nick Mehta: And then finally, from a customer perspective, I think one of the biggest things that CSMs need to do is be pres. While being consultative. And it's a real hard balance, right? Yeah. So on one extreme is consultative. I'll do whatever you want. Whatever you want the product to do, we're gonna do. But the problem is the customer ends up using the product in bad ways, or doesn't get value, and then they blame the vendor no matter what.

[00:15:34] Nick Mehta: Why did you let me do that? And then on the other hand, is the CSMs this is the way you do things. The customer's our business doesn't work that way. And it's Nope, this is the way you have to do it. And that doesn't work either. And so you have to find this balance of being prescriptive, for example, Our best clients do these three things with the product.

[00:15:51] Nick Mehta: Which of these are relevant to you? Maybe not all three are. And then actually like hearing them, having it be a dialogue, but being willing to say things like, Our best clients do [00:16:00] X or our best practices, y and having some confidence around that. So those are three, three sets of tips for the three

[00:16:06] Jason Noble: audiences.

[00:16:07] Jason Noble: I, I that they're so varied as well there, Nick, and. The first two kind of products and sales. It's really building on that kind of growing collaboration that we need. Exactly. Yeah. Customer success is across the business. It's not one team. This is us all working together and I think there's so much that we can do to help break down these silos that we still see.

[00:16:27] Jason Noble: And I love that getting the CSMs involved in product roll your sleeves up, do help them identify those customers. And I, it's great cuz I I'm not seeing enough of that yet in many organizations and it's a trend I'd love to see grow more and. Love it. Are you Nick? We're beginning to see customer success appearing outside of the world of SA and Tech.

[00:16:47] Jason Noble: Yes. And it's really exciting to see more organizations and even a lot now in Europe investing in your CCO roles and C level that have the customer focused. Where do you see the next big [00:17:00] growth areas, in terms of new industries for customer?

[00:17:03] Nick Mehta: Yeah, it's interesting, we've been following this for a long time, obviously out of great interest cuz it six plans are addressable market, right?

[00:17:09] Nick Mehta: And I think what's happened is you think about all the other industries in the world and actually let's start with the fact that what is a tech company, right? It's a little bit hard to define out cuz it tech is everything to, to some extent, right? But what's happening.

[00:17:22] Nick Mehta: You have all these kind of vertical industries where you have the incumbents and then you have often technology based disruptors, right? So let's take financial service as an example. So you know, you've got all the credit card companies and then the banks that accept credit cards. And then you've got online payments companies like PayPal, right?

[00:17:42] Nick Mehta: Or Stripe or anyone else. And so what we find is you'll have in each industry, The disruptors and the disrupted embracing customer success. Usually the disruptors first. So for example, PayPal has created a big customer success team to manage all the merchants, meaning the people that [00:18:00] accept PayPal credit cards, they use Gainsight, and we work with them.

[00:18:02] Nick Mehta: And so we've seen that. Another example that's in the disruptor category is in the all. Healthcare, IT technology companies that are using technology to really change the way healthcare works. And many of them now have customer success. Lot them use Gainsight. And so we see that a lot. But then you see traditional companies that are trying to not be disrupted or disrupting themselves.

[00:18:22] Nick Mehta: So I'll give you a couple examples there. There's a big telecommunications company in the US called Lumen. It used to be called CenturyLink. And they're they basically provide. Broadband and other connectivity. And they used to have more of a traditional sales and service approach, and they basically worked with McKinsey Consulting and created this customer success team.

[00:18:41] Nick Mehta: And it's big, huge team, and they basically are trying to have a more digital first experience. Another example is a company called Rockwell Automation, which is out of Wisconsin. They make equipment in factory floors. Now with that equipment, They often now sell software that helps you manage and monitor the equipment.

[00:18:58] Nick Mehta: And since that software is [00:19:00] now a subscription, they started saying, Hey, we need to do customer success. And more and more of the revenues coming from recurring revenue. And so those are examples where you have big incumbents, these are both huge companies adopting it, and then you've got the startups and the disruptors adopting it.

[00:19:13] Nick Mehta: So I think if you summarized it, you're probably gonna see a little. in financial services and FinTech. Kinda like the PayPal example cuz that's naturally recurring revenue. You're seeing it in healthcare for sure. That's definitely a big area. You're seeing it industrials, the Rockwell example, telecommunications.

[00:19:29] Nick Mehta: Now the thing that these things have in common is they all have some nature of a recurring revenue model, right? So think of financial services. You use your PayPal and on a regular basis there's a recurring transaction, right? You think of healthcare, there's a recurring patient coming in, right?

[00:19:42] Nick Mehta: You think of telco, there's a recurring billing relationship. And so each of these examples, even the manufacturing, you have a recurring software relationship. And so I think over time, How many companies, 10 years from now won't have software as part of their business? Zero. Every single company will have it.

[00:19:58] Nick Mehta: And every one of them will go through this curve of [00:20:00] Oh wow, we saw selling this software, but people aren't really using it. What do we do? And then they're gonna go Google, what do we do? And they're gonna find customer success. They're gonna find your podcast, they're gonna read our book.

[00:20:08] Nick Mehta: And that's how companies get into this area. I think

[00:20:12] Jason Noble: you, that example there of the telcos is great cuz it is, We're the same in Europe. In the uk we've got lots of big telcos that have these totally four play models that they've, it's been a subscription service forever. They might have a retention department, but they're not thinking about growth, what they can do. How do they That's

[00:20:28] Nick Mehta: right. And. And even the retention department historically in telcos is your classic reactive retention, in other words. Absolutely. I'm trying to cancel my subscription and they're like, Oh, we'd love to give you six months for free.

[00:20:40] Nick Mehta: But obviously that's. That's not customer success. So get ahead of the game.

[00:20:44] Jason Noble: If you could gimme this price now, why didn't you gimme the price before? Exactly. The other industry, I think, I think there's a big play in other financial companies like

[00:20:53] Nick Mehta: insurance. Insurance. It would be huge opportunity over time for sure.

[00:20:57] Nick Mehta: Yeah.

[00:20:58] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, absolutely. So Nick, [00:21:00] then I'd love what you've said so far, gonna ask you to put on your crystal ball for a minute, huh. And within looking in the customer success space, you've been here for so long and seen so many changes over the past nine, 10 years, where do you see the changes or the biggest changes in the next two to three years, but then even looking longer term, five to 10 out, if you were gonna go to Nore Adamas here and write down, here's my predictions, what would they

[00:21:19] Nick Mehta: be?

[00:21:20] Nick Mehta: Yeah, so I'll give you three categories. So number one is that the. The way we do customer success is gonna become mu much more multichannel tied into this digital concept, right? So today, we think of it as, okay, it's a largely a human activity. Hire CSMs, you have 'em, reach out to customers, right?

[00:21:36] Nick Mehta: Do meetings, zoom meetings, video meetings, et cetera. That, that, it's great. It doesn't scale to all your customers. Also, lots of customers don't wanna engage that way. Maybe. Maybe they just don't, They don't wanna do a call or a QBR or whatever. And so what you're gonna see is absolutely. Organizations driving this end to end journey where they're looking at the email communications, the in app, the community, the self-service.

[00:21:58] Nick Mehta: And right now [00:22:00] that stuff is pretty fragmented in companies. Some companies don't do all that, but the ones that do the product team's looking at in app and the marketing team's sending some emails and support, the communis more of a like support deflection. And so looking at more of an end to end multichannel journey for customer success versus the default as a human.

[00:22:17] Nick Mehta: Digital first is some way people talk about that. So that's one, one prediction. Second one is I think that product teams will now proactively want to get input from customer success and solicit feedback, and we're seeing that it's definitely the minority, a majority. I think companies are still trying to figure out that relationship, but in the future, product teams are gonna realize CSMs are like their best friends because they really understand.

[00:22:40] Nick Mehta: The context of why customers are asking for something and what the value proposition is and all that. So you're gonna see a much stronger relationship. And third is you're definitely gonna see CS teams owning more revenue. That doesn't mean the CSM is on a quota. Some people conflate those two. It could be that the chief customer officer has a CSM team and an account [00:23:00] management team underneath them.

[00:23:01] Nick Mehta: It could be the CSM owns the renewal. Could be they get credit for leads for expansion, but definitely much more of a tie into revenue. Those three things will I'm a hundred percent confident it'll happen.

[00:23:12] Jason Noble: I think it's, you just look at how the industry's changing and that's that maturing.

[00:23:17] Jason Noble: All of those things are signs of maturity and there, there's a long way to go for it. And I, you know what you said about some companies still don't do it, but we're got, we've got such a diversity where people are, but such a growth. Nick this has been really insightful. A big thank you once again.

[00:23:31] Jason Noble: What? What we do like to do is give you one, what we call a bold challenge Question. Yes. The one for you. It's not that much of a curve ball, I promise. I hope it's not. I love curve ball. What is the number one thing that a CS professional leader should be doing today in their organizations to really continue the growth of what customer success really is and for their own customer success.

[00:23:52] Jason Noble: So

[00:23:53] Nick Mehta: yeah, I think. I think the number one thing is probably if you're a leader, is spending more time [00:24:00] cross-functionally. So I think it's natural. You're a leader, you got your team, you got your customers and escalations and all those types of things. That kind of pulls you in. But what are you doing to relationship build with head of sales, the head of product, the head of marketing, et cetera, and what are you doing to build those bonds?

[00:24:15] Nick Mehta: Not just tactically Oh, we've got a customer situation. Can you help that? That happens naturally, but more strategically. How much time are you spending? Just, let's spend a half a day together. My, with my head of sales and plan out the future of the customer journey. Let's spend a half a day together with my head of product and talk about better ways that our teams can work together.

[00:24:33] Nick Mehta: And so are you taking a step back, spending more of that unstructured time to build those cross-functional relationships? That, that,

[00:24:40] Jason Noble: I think is brilliantly summed up. And it is, it's that collaboration. How do we work better as a team? Nick, Love it. This has been such a great podcast.

[00:24:49] Jason Noble: I, I think all of the real examples you've seen about things that you guys are doing. What in the industry is really gonna resonate with all of our listeners. So a huge thank you again.

[00:24:58] Nick Mehta: Thank you so much Jasons, [00:25:00] I appreciate it really. It's been great. Thank you.

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Episode Description Join us when we speak with Manuel Harnisch. Manuel is VP a seasoned VP of Customer Success with extensive experience building and leading CS teams with very technical products and technical teams.

Many SaaS companies have technical staff in their product team, but, especially in the B2B space, they are focused on providing functionality that is used by non-technical users, such as front-office staff. We don’t often talk about what it takes to make customers of very technical products, with very technical staff, successful. Today we are going to change that. Guest: Manuel Harnisch - VP of Customer Success Manuel is a serial startup executive who most enjoys helping young companies and founders to develop and grow their Customer Success motions, particularly those who solve complex technical challenges for their customers. He has grown and led multiple customer success teams. On a personal note, he's been making the most of the COVID years by shedding 100lbs and spending more time with those who matter most in his life. Going forward, he's again looking to help early-stage XaaS companies in their Customer Operations and Success journey. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript Sponsors The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Whitehead: Hi everyone, and thanks for joining us for another episodes of the Jason's Take. We're here talking about bold customer success and have a lot of great conversations around that. I am joined today by my co-host, Jason Noble, based over in London.

Say hello, Jason.

[00:00:13] Jason Noble: Hello, Jason. Hi there. Everyone. Really excited to be here for another episode and another great.

[00:00:19] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. And today we're very excited to have Manuel Harness here joining us today. So welcome Manuel. Little bit of background. Manuel has grown and led several CS teams frequently at companies that have very technical products built for technical users.

And he's really had an expense extensive experience in this area and we're excited to have him here because, Many SaaS companies that we talk with, their technical staffs are in their product team and, building for the B2B space, they're often building functionality that's intended for non-technical users, such as front office staff and sales folks and all that great stuff.

But we don't often talk about what it takes to make customers with very technical products successful and what that means for customer success phones. So we're gonna change that today by looking at how to do customer success when you have a very technical product with a very technical. Manuel, thanks for being here today and say hello, and please just give everyone a quick overview of your professional background, your career, and any experience you've had, building and leading cs.

[00:01:16] Manuel Harnisch: Yeah. Great. Thank you. And hello, Jason and Jason. I call this the Jason Square podcast. So this is very exciting. Very happy to be here. And yeah, so my background is I've been in the in the tech space for the better part of 20 years now. Most recently built and led a CS function at a company called People Data Labs.

Prior to that built one and LED one at Kenk and spent about nine years at seven one. And this is the old cell days when you still had on-prem appliances and you would ship know, put software on and ship that out and then get installed And, Back then we called what we do now post sales and support, right?

These days it's all about success because it's all about recurring revenue. Yeah, that's a little bit about my career and what I've been doing, and so far so good. I'm still enjoying it and hoping to do it a couple more decades here. But but yeah. Fantastic.

[00:02:01] Jason Whitehead: Thank you for joining us.

So let's just jump right in. Since so many of the products that you've worked with and teams you've built, it really has been extremely technical products with technical experts as your users. How would you compare that to building CS for more of a front office type product or more business type users that have less technical expertise?

How do you approach it differently and what are some of the big

challenge?

[00:02:21] Manuel Harnisch: Yeah, so I, I think the interesting thing and really the differentiator is you have a lot more skeptics when it comes to technical products that you have to overcome. Every company I've been a part of over the last decade or so, has always sold to engineers, whether they were network engineers or they were developers like would doing now at f.

And, having those types of personalities means that you have to overcome a much larger barrier with regards to technical expertise, technical trust, and really getting those folks on board. A lot of times the buyers are not really the people that will end up using or implementing either, right?

So that, that's another sort of dichotomy and really it starts with, having people on your team as the vendor that can speak at the customers level at the engineers level, and they can build that report. Rather than just just being, say a customer success manager that sort of models through, runs the meetings but doesn't really get deep.

And so it's all about building that that, that trust, that relationship, and then being able to deliver value in a continuous basis. A lot of times CS teams nowadays they focus on the QPRs, they focus on the presentations, and I think those are still valuable and those can still be important.

But if you have a very technical product, you gotta make sure that you can. Delivered a technical value first and foremost before you go to the, to qbr.

[00:03:34] Jason Noble: With, and you've got technical teams. How do you get that customer success mentality and way of thinking on them? Cause quite often it's not something that's very natural to a developer.

It's not the background they've got, when they're an engineer, it's a very different mindset. How do you go about educating and training them and helping them get aligned with what customer success really is and what we need to be.

[00:03:55] Manuel Harnisch: Yeah, that's a great question and I think the, as with anything in life, the answer is it depends on the situation, but you end up having to be less direct in some ways with folks like that because we come in and say Hey, you have to do it this way and that's because we say it's going to be that way.

You're probably going to run into a brick wall relatively quickly. Engineers don't like to be told what to do from the get go. They, you have to earn their trust and you have to earn that relationship. And so one of the things we were really successful at doing this at Ken Tech, Was to bring in folks that had done the job of the customer in the past, right?

Like they were peer coordinators. They ran large scale networks and so forth. And so they could immediately, get get a base level of trust established because they spoke the same language, right? Like they, they understood the acronyms the short text and so forth. And they, they could get that established like right away.

And then from there, it was just a matter of Hey, I actually know what your job looks like. I've done your job. Let me show you some of the things that have worked for me in the past. And also let me help avoid some of the mistakes that I made. Because that's one of the things engineers don't like to necessarily.

Learn all the lessons the hard way. Some of 'em do, but for the most part, they're open to, if somebody comes in with a base level of understanding and they've done the job before they're willing to listen a lot more closely in, in that scenario. So those are some tactics and some strategies that I think are working really well.

[00:05:15] Jason Noble: Have you found it? Is it, does it take time? Have you found it quite quick to do that? Or is it something that, that takes a long time to do and it's very degrees of success?

[00:05:23] Manuel Harnisch: I think it depends on, again, it depends on the personalities that are gonna be involved early on. I actually think that a lot of times you can set yourself up for success in that regards early on by involving the people that will ultimately work with you post-sales in the final closing stages.

And that's something that we'll be doing a lot more here at fasa as I get up to speed and build up the team in a function. For fasa, the buyers are usually the legal departments and like the procurement procurement is always involved, but legal tends to be the buyer, the economic buyer.

But engineering tends to be the ones that ultimately have to implement it, right? Like software engineers have to deploy the product and get value from it. Legal buyers it for compliance reasons and do a cya, right? And so involving those engineers in the final closing stages, It's a lot more, it will have a lot better outcomes down the line because that way they won't feel like this is something that's being crammed down their throats.

They're not seeing it after the fact. They're involved in the final decision making process. That is that is definitely a better approach than just surprising people.

[00:06:22] Jason Whitehead: I'm curious, since you, you've brought that up, having so many non-technical buyers involved and who make that buying in renewal decision in there, how do you approach things differently when, or do you, when you have a very technical product, so you've gotta be able to create technical value, but prove business value and have those mixed discussions.

What's, what have been some of the challenges around that? What are some things you find that work really.

[00:06:42] Manuel Harnisch: The reality is I'm just getting started here at Foster, so I don't actually know exactly what that will look like just yet, but I have some hunches, right? Because looking back at PDL and also at kenk a lot of times the economic justification did have to happen more so with the finance departments, right?

It wasn't so much legal there but they had to show proofs. Now the The space was a little different because at Ken Tech, at least, we could always say if you don't monitor your environment, you don't know what's going on, you might be missing a lot of things that you know are either bad or that could be improved, or, Hey, we're really doing well over here, and us being able to show value that way.

So the ROI was always like, Hey, this is a, this is like a CYA to some extent, but also here's a way to identify future opportunities and maybe some cost cutting measures or expansion into new markets. What I think is gonna be really interesting here at fasa we, we have obviously compliance piece.

So what we do is you install this into U C I C D and your development pipeline, we will then scan your code base and make sure that, you're complying from a license perspective against all open source licenses that you might use. And every software companies, there's whether they know it or not, is using some sort of open source, right?

So that's the first part. But then the second part and this is becoming more and more prevalent, is around security, right? A lot of these open source projects have zero, 80 vulnerabilities all the time. Unless you subscribe to every single one of 'em on, on GitHub or respective websites, you're not gonna know about that.

And so the value there is that proactive notification to both the engineers, right? So they can actually take mitigating steps. Earlier on, but also to legal and compliance so they know what might be coming down the line, right? Hey, is this possibly a giant leak potential for us? And so do we need to start, PR early?

Do we need to have communications out? Because a lot of this is now also a matter of just government reporting, right? More and more if is happening in that space. It is going to be an interesting challenge, right? But I think this product at least speaks to both the engineers because it makes their job easier and it gives them peace of mind, but also to legal and compliance, who is ultimately the economic buyer.

From a, from an insurance perspective when

[00:08:41] Jason Noble: you're building up a, an organization in CS than in, in a more technical organization, how do you, what kind of people do you look for? Are they very experienced? Are they earlier in their career? And then how do. And this is always a challenge, but how do you find the right mix of technical business and customer focused skills?

Cause that, you said earlier in the intro, there's ways of doing it, but it's challenging to do to get that right balance. And when you've got someone who's naturally more technical, it makes it more challenging. But really interested in kind of a couple questions there for you.

[00:09:13] Manuel Harnisch: Yeah. And my thinking on this has evolved over the last five to 10 years.

I, it used to be much more common to try and find sort of one person that could do all of these things and then just scale that one person to a sizeable team. We did this a little bit of can and also people data labs in the past and you end up with sort of CSMs that are also more technical to some extent.

But then you also still had to have. Yeah, what we would call customer success engineers that were like purely technical, but could also talk to customers to some extent. And they would work in tandem. So as CSM and the CSE would work with their given account base and ensure that they're delivering value there.

I think. It's become increasingly more difficult to try and find customer success engineers that are also really polished and able to talk to customers. And they're also becoming a lot more expensive, which I think, it's just the way that the market's going. And then on the CSM side, know, finding folks that are both like able to map the account, have those relationships and so forth, but, and also be able to sell to some extent and negoti.

Negotiate renewals and find upsell opportunities and actually be able to run a call and hold their own in certain minimally technical situations is tough. And so I what I'm thinking. Might be the future here is to specialize more early on. A lot of companies do this at scale they'll have like CSMs that are purely non-technical and they are the account manager.

And then they'll have, implementation engineers and they only work on the implementation side. And they may have a project manager that maybe working only during certain parts of the customer life cycle. And then of course they'll have a renewal specialist or an upsell cross-sale specialist that comes in when those situations open up.

And so that's usually something you can do at scale. But I'm thinking about of doing this earlier on, especially in this kind of company where, the engineers tend to be developers. Like they've written code. They live in GitHub. They understand. You may only need one or two of those, right?

For a given startup to cover your entire customer base until you have several hundred customers. And then have one or two really strong CSMs to be the account managers and maybe one renewal specialist upsell specialist. That kind of helps out. That's the thinking I have. As, as you think about all of that though, in a earlier stage startup, it's hard to hire people that have no experience.

Especially on the engineering side. You have to have a base level understanding of what's going on. And you can start making some bets and Bringing on some more junior folks as you have established a team. But making making a complete blind bed early on and just hoping might set you back too far.

So for now we'll focus on people that have done this before and then have, couple years experience. But as we get bigger, they'll be promotion paths and, even bringing in folks that have customer success. I

[00:11:54] Jason Noble: like that, and I think that really makes logical sense. As you start, you've gotta get those right people in.

If you, how do you go about if you can't find the right skills in the team and experiences that you want, particularly when you're early stage startup, how do you go about building those skills and developing those skills and which, who do you see as the most important first

[00:12:13] Manuel Harnisch: hires?

Yeah. So I think what's good about customer success is there is a fairly established community at this point, especially on the CSM side, right? Anybody that's more on the account management side of things. There's resources out there. There's Success Hacker, there's, the various CS platforms that gain, that has a really good program.

Catalyst has a customer success coaching program. And so forth where you can both do some recruiting right? For folks that are early in their career, but also help existing folks that you may have on the team that, may have inherited did to get some coaching and some additional resources.

From the outside on the engineering side I think. This might be controversial, but I am, I'm a big believer in, in, in hiring some folks from your customers, right? If you find a superfan or two, like that's on the engineering side in some of your customers, and it's not going to be a detriment to that customer's business, try to recruit them over because they already love your product, most likely, otherwise, they probably wouldn't be talking to you about that. And they might be willing to take that risk to come to a smaller startup and really accelerate things. We were very successful. At doing that at Ken Take two, folks actually came over from existing customers and they're still there.

They're still some of the best engineers that are that I ever hired over there. Shouted to Dan Kelly and Dustin Bayer who are the ones that did that? And so that's another that's another avenue of approach that you can take. Cool.

[00:13:36] Jason Whitehead: I'm curious talking to you as well too, so if you've had very technical customers with engineering backgrounds and skills and all of that knowledge What is it that they actually want from a CS team?

Where does it, they need help and that they can't do for themselves. And other than technical support, what is it, Are they looking for subject matter expertise in the field? Are they looking for additional technical expertise in customer success? Are they looking just air cover with their internal business users?

What sort of,

[00:13:58] Manuel Harnisch: what's the goal? Yeah. So again, I think it depends on the product. What I do know at fasa a lot of our time will be spent early on in the implementation onboarding cycle. Because unless you implement and are in the C I C D in the development pipeline there's no way for the product to work, right?

And there's a number of things that just have to happen and have to be configured that have to be set up and that, have to happen both on our end, on a, and on the customers and in order for that to to be true. And a lot of that happens early on, but then, Later on it's about just making sure those things continue to work over time at at Chemex, similarly we had that as well where, that product, you would send data from your devices and then it would do a bunch of analysis and and you would be able to use it in EY and APIs and so forth.

But in order to get that set up, you had to configure, protocols on your routers and switches. In order to export that data. Some customers knew exactly what to do. And those were the easy ones, but the vast majority of them required some sort of handholding, right? Every router and switch has a slightly different self version to commands might be slightly different.

Having the expertise to know that difference and being able to help customers along that. And then also, and this is, it sounds silly, but a lot of times you have to overcome some compliance concerns on the customer. What do you mean? You're gonna send metadata about all of our network traffic out to some cloud provider, right?

Is that safe? Can you help me understand that? And that's actually a challenge. We'll be seen here at Fossa more and more so as well, because now everybody uses GitHub and GID lab in the cloud to do the development. Some people have that on-prem, right? So there's a unique set of challenges to come with that.

Once you've passed the onboarding piece though, it's all about showing customers, Hey, this is the business value that we actually found. Like you have so many vulnerabilities that we've identified. You are out of compliance for, these software licenses. Here is our recommendation as a vendor who's done this, hundreds of times with other customers on how to remediate them.

And so that's truly where, the power of customer success will come. And that's more down the line because you've gotta get through the onboarding piece. But that's when you become truly an consultant and an advisor to your customers. Very

[00:16:07] Jason Whitehead: cool. Very cool. So I'm also wondering then in such a technical environment, you mentioned sometimes they're doing implementation work, sometimes they're, IT changes after the implementation's live.

How do you draw a distinction between customer success and customer service and support type piece and where do you draw those lines? And even just internally how do you need to manage your teams and workload

[00:16:24] Manuel Harnisch: differe? Yeah so interestingly again, it depends, right? At Kenk it was when I was still there, it was all under my umbrella.

We had support, we had one person that ran a reactive break, fix inbound ticket queue, and then everybody else was more proactive. Similarly at People Data labs we shared the support queue. Between myself and my technical services manager, and there wasn't a lot of support cases that came in and everything else was more on the proactive side.

Here at fasa, we have a separate support team right now that actually reports in under the product leadership. That may be the way that we keep that down the line. It may eventually move under me. I don't know what that will look like yet. But ultimately, It is distinctive workflows, but it tends to be the same value space, right?

And me as a customer, like I have an issue right now I want to have that resolved. What's the most natural thing to do is I'm gonna reach out to my customer success manager. You as a company may not want that. They may want them to. Goes through a certain process, but ultimately you're trying to make that as easy as possible for your customer.

I think the differentiator though is is it proactive? Are we helping a customer achieve a certain outcome? Then it's customer success. Is it reactive as in Hey, I found this issue. I'm gonna tell you about that, and I expect a resolution that's more service or support. But at the end of the day, you really are there to help the customer resolve their concerns and to get value from what you're providing.

[00:17:46] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. Absolutely. Also as I'm listening to, I'm wondering, in the more technical companies where everyone has to have some technical chops behind them there as well too, how do you work with your internal leadership and executives to communicate the value of CS internally?

Do they instinctively get it? Or do they, is this a big sell for them? Cause I know like in a lot of, front office facing applications, there's obvious. A lot of folks who don't have the technical skills and interest, but have a lot of business acumen, and sometimes in more technical companies you get some of the leadership who are very tech forward.

[00:18:18] Manuel Harnisch: Yeah. Yeah, so that's an interesting one I always look at when I evaluate companies like, what did, like how did the CEO or like one of the co-founders of grow up in terms of like their career journey. We were super fortunate at Ken Tech with a Friedman who had been the CT of Akamai for, the better part of a decade.

Had run, other internet service providers and built the first ISP in Philadelphia. He's a nerds nerd, as we used to say. And so like he got it. And he was a big proponent of making sure that, customers get technical value and. It was never really a question.

PDL is, was a little bit different. The the idea that was like, Hey, we don't actually know what will work yet. We'll just build a bunch of products and see which ones work for our customers. And guess what? This data product ended up being the one that took off. And both of the both of the co-founders, they were more the tech, sorry, wanted a business side of things.

And it, it became a little bit more of a challenge, but we were able to, bring in a lot of other. That were early on in the company to be champions of of the technical side of things. our ceo, and it's actually a solo founder company, which is unusual, but also a nice challenge to see is more on a technical side.

So he understands like he understands the problem space of open source. The compliance and security aspects from a technical side. So I think we'll have a lot less concerns around the technical value there. I think where challenge will lie is the the account management aspect of that and really making sure that we're not just focusing on the technical things because I think we're doing that reasonably well.

But also making sure that we don't lose champions. We understand that the customer's business the macroeconomic impact of what might be happening, the overall shift in, say the economy, for instance, every company these days is the tech company to some extent, right?

If you're a car manufacturer, like it may not be your parent, but guess what more and more car software also relies on open stores, right? And having that where all that understanding I think is critical when it comes to taking care of a customer as a whole, where it just, the technical pieces.

[00:20:12] Jason Whitehead: Cool.

[00:20:13] Jason Noble: Great. Thank you. Do you find what's the responses of your customers and the feedback from your customers are is it working? Is the model working when you're speaking, having these technical conversations? Does the model of customer success in a technical organization work?

[00:20:26] Manuel Harnisch: So in, in perfect fairness, I am literally just starting here at fsa, so I don't have the answers to that yet. I think, going back to both people, data labs and Kenk, I would say a lot of times the yes it does work because. Yeah we would make sure that the technical value as well as the business value that somebody had signed up for was being delivered.

I might now be missing part of the question, so I'm lost my own thoughts here, but does that answer it? It

[00:20:55] Jason Noble: does, yeah. I'm just curious cuz. The majority of customer success is probably on, on the more non-technical side, and I think it's quite easy to equate success for customers there but the outcomes and value that we're doing from a technical point of view can be very different.

I'm just curious into how you've seen the success of customer success in more technical organizations.

[00:21:16] Manuel Harnisch: Got it. I think it all so there's always a business outcome that somebody wants when they buy your software. Or they buy your product. And a lot of times yes, it can be just like a front end thing and that's fine.

And it's, it can be relatively easy to explain that. And in those cases, like you can just get away with just having a CSM run the whole thing. Where it's different is if what you're providing, like in order to get the business value from it, you have to have a certain level of technical implementation happen or it may even be very complex, right?

Like going back to the people data labs for a second there was like, there wasn't a ui, like the UI was very limited. It just told you how many API policy made and what your API keys were and maybe some other stats, right? Everything else that we did was in the data, right? So you would either do API calls, which would give you the value, and you had to implement them into your product in order to.

Look up people or extract other information, or we would deliver it as a giant flat file into some cloud storage. And then you as a customer would have to download that into your data pipeline and and implement it, right? And so that itself is a very technical task, right?

Because you have to make sure that you're paring in a certain way, like you're cleaning the data a certain way, you're storing it a certain way and so forth. And In order to ultimately get to the business outcome, which may be like, Hey, I want to build this app and I want the to do these things and I need this data for that, you had to do all the technical steps.

And so in, in cases like that of course you have to make sure that it works. Technology wise, it's interesting. The customers that would fail at at that company were the ones that were trying to outsource all the technical development, right? They're like, Hey we're buying this. We understand it's a technical product, but we're gonna outsource all of the technical work to some third party developer.

And nine chances outta 10 is, that wouldn't work because those people were not bought in into the mission of that customer the same way as, say, founders who are. And so I think that's like the proof that, you have to overcome those technical implementation challenges.

[00:23:11] Jason Whitehead: Wow. That's interesting stuff. No. Thank you so much for being with us. We're just about out of time here. I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and insights. Before we go, we always like to ask a bold challenge question, and this one for you is, what's the single most important action that a leader of a technical CS team should take to ensure that their team is delivering a high impact CS service?

So if you're leading a technical team as the leader, what's the most important thing for you?

[00:23:37] Manuel Harnisch: I think you need to be, you don't need to be the smartest person in the room, but you need to be able to understand what your technical folks are talking about and you need to be able to challenge them on some of their assumptions and thinking.

So I like to think of it this way. Just know enough to be dangerous, but don't be the smartest guy in the room. .

[00:23:55] Jason Whitehead: I like it. That's great. Great advice. Before, before we go, we wanna invite you as all of our guests, if you would like to share a shameless plug for your projects yourself, your background, anything of interest, any outside activities that you're really interested in.

Please just go ahead and tell our audience what's of interest to you and how they can get in touch with you if they have questions.

[00:24:13] Manuel Harnisch: Yeah, Sounds good. The get in touch part is easy. I'm on LinkedIn, so you can just hook me up the manual harnish and send me a message there, or M Harnish at top.

Surf that info. That's another quick way to get ahold of me. In terms of shameless blog, I am super excited to be starting here at fasa. And so like this is gonna be all about fa. If you use any sort of open source software in your development pipeline if you are, building big projects if you're going through digital transformation, you should seriously take a look at what we can provide not only from a security perspective, but also from a compliance perspective.

Relatively easy to get started, get implemented, and then, to the right value from. From the products that down the line, it, the way I try to explain this to people that aren't in the industry is like, it's like buying insurance, right? Like you, you buy life insurance with the hopes that you'll never need it.

But guess what? If you do need it it's there. So think of it from that point of view. And that's just for the compliance piece. The security piece is obviously a lot more day to day. So yeah, that's the shameless plug. Fantastic.

[00:25:11] Jason Noble: Such the, that, the background there, talking through kind of the technical side of it matter is just great cuz.

I, I think platforms and products are getting more technical, particularly when you look at big enterprise solutions, big organizations and you need to understand how we get that break and what's the right thing to do. And those examples you've talked through I think are really useful and quite different from a lot of how a lot of us deal with customer success.

So really insightful conversation.

[00:25:37] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate

[00:25:39] Manuel Harnisch: it.

View Details

Episode Description Join us when we speak Lynn Hunsaker. Lynn Hunsaker is Chief Customer Officer of ClearAction Continuum. Lynn is joining us today to talk about CS leaders as the stewards of customer value.

Lynn recently wrote an important article for My Customer talking about shrinkflation and skimpflation, and how during times of economic downturns many companies make the mistake of reducing the scope, content, and value of their products and services. Lynn shares insights about how this can harm your company, brand and customers. She also shares ideas about what you can do instead.

Guest: Lynn Hunsaker - Chief Customer Office, ClearAction Continuum Lynn Hunsaker is Chief Customer Officer of ClearAction Continuum. She led company-wide customer experience transformation for many years at B2B Fortune 250 firms Applied Materials and Sonoco Products. Starting out in the Strategic Planning department, her roles included VoC Manager, Customer Satisfaction Improvement Manager, Marketing Director, and Head of Corporate Quality.

Lynn is a past CXPA Board member and she is a CXPA Recognized Training Provider, Certified Customer Experience Professional, Professional Certified Marketer, Certified Quality Manager, and Certified MBTI Practitioner. She is past president of Silicon Valley American Marketing Association and Bay Area Association for Psychological Type, and past co-chair of several CXPA committees. She was the first in the world to benchmark marketing operations practices, and she also designed the first ever global study of B2B customer experience practices, which she conducted for 5 years.

Lynn is author of 3 Kindle handbooks, including Innovating Superior Customer Experience and Metrics You Can Manage for Success. She is one of five recipients of CustomerThink's Hall of Fame Award. Lynn’s current passion, and life work repository, is the Experience Value Exchange subscription community, which she cofounded to help your extended CX team make CX a team sport across your company's non-customer-facing groups, for a 1-to-1 ratio between your brand promise and customers’ realities.

CONTACT LYNN HUNSAKER

CX Team Sport Awards: ClearAction.com/cx-team-sport-awards

Experience Value Exchange: ClearAction.com/team-sport

Experts’ CX+EX+PX MasterClass: ClearAction.com/leader

CX Playbook: ClearAction.com/customer-experience-faq

LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/lynnhunsaker

Twitter: @clearaction

Facebook: Facebook.com/customerexperienceoptimization

CustomerThink: CustomerThink.com/author/clearaction

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good evening. Good afternoon. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode in the Jason's take on podcast series with myself, Jason Noble here in London and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason. Hello, Jason. Thanks for joining us, everyone.

[00:00:13] Jason Noble: We, we are super excited to be back. I think we've had a break over the summer. Hope everyone had a good summer holiday but we are really excited today to have with. Lynn Hunsaker, who's gonna talk to us about customer success leaders as the stewards of customer value. An article that she published recently that really resonated with myself and Jason, a lot of good stuff in there.

[00:00:35] Jason Noble: Welcome Lynn. I hope I've pronounced your surname. Your last name correctly. Yes.

[00:00:39] Lynn Hunsaker: Lynn Hunsaker. Glad to be here. Perfect.

[00:00:41] Jason Noble: Welcome. Really excited Lynn a quick introduction. I'll give you on. Lynn is the Chief Customer Officer of Clear Action Continuum she's also the co-founder of the experience value exchange subscription community.

[00:00:54] Jason Noble: Lynn spent, you've spent a number of years now leading customer experience, customer success, [00:01:00] transformation across some great companies. And you've also worked across a number of other key roles. I see you've been a marketing director, voice of the customer lead. So you've got a really extensive and I think really focused experience as well on what it means for costume.

[00:01:14] Jason Noble: In addition to all of this you're a writer, you're an author, you're a publisher. You've got a number of books now that our listeners can find on Amazon that cover amazing topics like innovating customer success, customer experience. You've also run a number of trading courses on journey mapping, facilitation and one that I really like is customer centricity skills for founders and execs, which is.

[00:01:37] Jason Noble: Incredible. And I think a lot of these courses and books are being translated into other languages. So it's really widespread this. So, it's an absolute pleasure to have you with us for our listeners, even that don't know you. I wonder if you could give us a, just give us in your own words, a brief introduction to your own work that you're doing at clear action and your own journey really into the role of chief customer [00:02:00] officer there.

[00:02:01] Lynn Hunsaker: Sure. It's all about closing the gap between what's promised and what's expected. What would people get? Marketing will put out a value proposition. The brand stands for something. People have an expectation based on what sales told them. And then, they get what they get and they use what they get and if they need to get help, then that's usually a red flag that there's a gap.

[00:02:30] Lynn Hunsaker: It wasn't exactly what was promised. So this happens to all of us. I'm experiencing it in my own small company where people need help or something didn't pan out. Nobody's perfect, but we need to be striving toward closing that gap. And when we close the gap, we have a good experience. And I think we need to revisit that as marketers, customer experience people, customer success, service, and just executives of any.

[00:02:59] Lynn Hunsaker: It's all about [00:03:00] closing that gap. And when we do that, we're creating more trust. So how we got into this field was through strategic planning, a role in fortune two 50 company initially, where I was asked to go visit CU customers across north America and talk to their purchasing managers, general managers, about their perceptions of where we stood compared to, Value.

[00:03:24] Lynn Hunsaker: So what were they were getting for the price paid and our competitors. And then that turned into a voice of the customer role reporting into strategic planning, where we were using the VOC, both for our strategic planning formula and for total quality management and ISA 9,000. So I went from that packaging company in South Carolina to.

[00:03:48] Lynn Hunsaker: Voice of the customer role in California in the Silicon valley reporting into the corporate quality. And after about three or four years, I became head of corporate quality myself. [00:04:00] And in, so doing, I was responsible for making major change happen across more than 50 P and LS worldwide, but I had no direct authority over them.

[00:04:11] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. And so I learned a lot about organizational change and things like this, and that really flavored what I've brought to clear action continuum. First of all, seeing really clearly a strategic viewpoint, how it connects to business and investors, second taking action and being accountable. And then thirdly, continuing the momentum.

[00:04:36] Lynn Hunsaker: So being in Silicon Valley for Almost three decades. I I wrote innovating superior customer experience as a way to have a connection between, hey, I'm about keeping customers, but most of the people there about acquiring customers with the latest mouse trap. So that's an eclectic mix that was generated over time.

[00:04:57] Lynn Hunsaker: I, I

[00:04:58] Jason Noble: love that journey and that [00:05:00] I think that kind of focus, as you said about keeping customers is this transition that we're seeing. And I love the way you've come into this and all these different focus roles and this idea of kind of change. There is a lot of organizations that struggle with change and kind of, we've talked about it before and how I think even as custom success professionals and leaders, we're offering change agents.

[00:05:23] Jason Noble: I think there's a really good overlook there. You wrote an article recently, and this is how we came connected on the customer think site about how chief customer officers can stop. And I'll say these correctly, shrink inflation and ski inflation. What I really liked about the article was how you described as customer success leaders with the stewards of customer value.

[00:05:43] Jason Noble: And this really, as we said, at the beginning, this resonates with both me and Jason, tell us a bit more about the article, what prompted you to write it and you’re thinking behind it?

[00:05:52] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. Going back to that first definition, if you think about customer experience, a good customer experience is nothing.[00:06:00]

[00:06:00] Lynn Hunsaker: Fancy then your ex, the realities meeting the expectations. Then when realities don't meet expectations because we're cutting corners, we're, whether it be making the product smaller that's shrink inflation, or making the product with lower quality that's skim inflation, or even a service with lower quality and even inflation, just having to pay more for what you.

[00:06:30] Lynn Hunsaker: Last month or last year, it's costing more. Now that's wrong because it's we're supposed to be generating value, growing value for our investors, for our employees, our partners, and our customers who else in the company should be the. The key Stuckey for growing value, besides the customer experience leader, and then, affiliated with that marketing and employee [00:07:00] experience.

[00:07:00] Lynn Hunsaker: And strategic planning, it all, it actually starts to mushroom out to everyone really should be caring about creating. Additional value. And that's why I say that customer experience is a team sport. And that's how you really get to preventing ski inflation and shrink inflation. You need to be thinking about customer experience as a team sport, meaning that there is no extraneous player.

[00:07:26] Lynn Hunsaker: Every player on the field is necessary. Any player on the field that drops the ball, takes shortcuts. Didn't get enough sleep the night before wasn't paying attention. Can mess up the game. And that's what happens here. You've got a promise to customers that you're gonna deliver X, Y, Z, and then you don't.

[00:07:48] Lynn Hunsaker: And so, then you have all this customer remedy need, right? That's massive waste in. If we could stop the customer remedy need, [00:08:00] then you could re-channel that money into. Hey, we don't have to shrink our product or skimp our service. So, I call this CX annuities. The whole concept of CU is customer experience annuities, where you're getting to the root of those issues, where you're creating waste and requiring remedies to prevent churn.

[00:08:25] Lynn Hunsaker: And get out of that rat race. Stop the insanity, get to the root of it. And then re-channel that. Investment that would've had to take, go on forever and ever into perpetuity, right? Is the more, you're a adding customers. The more you have to actually add your remedy staffing and technology and remedies themselves, it's crazy.

[00:08:49] Lynn Hunsaker: It's an expensive way to run your business.

[00:08:52] Jason Whitehead: I love the concepts of shrink IFL and skin inflation particularly as it pertains to service, when you're in the grocery store and you see the boxes and the [00:09:00] products and doing that, it's pretty easy to re. I think it's probably not as always fast to recognize when service that you're receiving.

[00:09:07] Jason Whitehead: Can you give a couple of examples of that you've seen of people shrinking their CS or CX services so that our listeners might be able to recognize, oh, we're doing this, or we're thinking about doing this and here's why it's a bad idea. And here's something we should do instead.

[00:09:22] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. I've heard about it quite a lot that because of the talent shortage, you know, Partly and because of all the remote Ole that companies had to go through over these past few years in the pandemic we had to ask customers for more patients.

[00:09:44] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah, we had to ask customers to plea B, please bear with us. Please listen carefully. These things have changed and this and that. Okay, let's get over it. Let's get back to normal or let's get to, a new level of efficiency. [00:10:00] Surely, there's been a logic, a lot of things, digitalized, there's been a lot of streamlining and reengineering of processes and policies.

[00:10:10] Lynn Hunsaker: Why in the. Are things worse, not better haven't we been through enough, but there are a lot of companies and managers who are just caving in to the idea that hope interest rates are rising and gas at petrol. Oil prices are higher and blah, blah, blah, be clever, be creative in my own company.

[00:10:36] Lynn Hunsaker: During the pandemic, I figured out how to shrink our costs. And expand our value greatly. The cost went down by about half the value went up two to three times as much of what we're, what people get when they buy our things. Shouldn't this be the way of the future that we're always. Overcoming the odds to increase our [00:11:00] value to people.

[00:11:01] Lynn Hunsaker: We need it,

[00:11:02] Jason Noble: I think completely. And I love that cuz it shouldn't just be happening now in a pandemic and particularly even now we're still at the end of the pandemic we hope or coming towards the end, but we've got lots of new economic pressures. As you said, growing inflation, supply chain challenges, and these are global.

[00:11:20] Jason Noble: So, you shouldn't just be focusing on these situations, but how do we do this ongoing I love what you were saying about how do you make CX kind of a companywide way of thinking. I and I'd love to get your thoughts on how do you do that? How do you go about ensuring that what we're delivering to our customers as value is a companywide thing.

[00:11:41] Jason Noble: It's not just a team. It's not just a department. It's not just one leader. How do you, what are some of the things that you've seen that can really help people. That organizational wide buy in and way of delivering. Cause it is, it's a business wide way of working. It

isn't

[00:11:56] Lynn Hunsaker: a team that's right.

[00:11:58] Lynn Hunsaker: If you doubled or tripled [00:12:00] your customer service, customer success, customer experience, user experience, staff, whatever, digital CRM, if you double little tripled, the number of people you could hire into that and the company would say, yeah, ride on, we can afford it. Blah, blah. Would you be able to guarantee excellent customer experience?

[00:12:19] Lynn Hunsaker: No, absolutely not because the definition of a good experience is a one-to-one ratio. So that means that anybody in your company's ecosystem, including your Alliance partners, your channel partners your suppliers, your legal team, your facilities managers, everybody really. Reliant the customer relies on them to not mess up the customer experience.

[00:12:53] Lynn Hunsaker: and, frankly, people don't wake up in the morning thinking, oh, where can I cut some corners? Where can I create a [00:13:00] bad experience? Everyone's trying their best. They just don't know any better. So the onus is on the customer experience leaders to take all this precious insight that we're collecting marketing, customer service, customer success, customer experience, digital management partner experience, employee experience are all collectors of great insights and we're not using them like even a 10th of what the value could.

[00:13:30] Lynn Hunsaker: Companies could get 90% more value out of their

[00:13:33] Lynn Hunsaker: VOC, VOE, VO X, by making sure that they're sharing it on a regular basis with all of the other groups, not just on some, precanned dashboard. That's not good enough. You need to be translating these insights into the lingo and the cadences of these different groups.

[00:13:56] Lynn Hunsaker: So that's what I did when I came into the [00:14:00] Silicon Valley company leading customer experience company wide. I was the voice of the customer manager and I created more than 50 reports. Back when we had Lotus 1, 2, 3 for heaven, six

[00:14:12] Jason Noble: I remember those days, that was a scary piece of enterprise software

[00:14:16] Lynn Hunsaker: that okay.

[00:14:18] Lynn Hunsaker: So, we were using like Excel spreadsheets, but we were creating more than 50 reports for, so that each group would have their own cut of the CX data. And then I got on a plane and I went around. Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, all through Europe, north America. Yeah. Every place that we have business.

[00:14:40] Lynn Hunsaker: And I did a readout so that they would understand here's our corporate situation. And then here's your cut, here's what you own. And then the same day, we had a cross organizational workshop [00:15:00] where. All of the people that associated with that cut of the data. We had representatives from sales, finance, HR, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, supplier management, the whole nine yards.

[00:15:15] Lynn Hunsaker: So we would break into two groups and address two of the key drivers that group had toward loyalty. And so every group had two action plans going on now once a quarter. My team would collect their single page strategies for these two action plans. And we published these single page strategies in what we call the green book.

[00:15:40] Lynn Hunsaker: And we shared the green book with the senior leadership team every quarter, as they were preparing for the stock market analyst calls. So they had a blue book of operational data. They had a black book of financial data and a green book of customer experience, progress data. So we [00:16:00] were focusing people on the root causes that we did in the workshop was we figured out what was the root cause of the key drivers.

[00:16:09] Lynn Hunsaker: And we were rewarding people for their progress in working on the root cause. That's how you create customer experience annuities. That's how you create millions of hours of save time for customers, millions of dollars or euros of, or pounds of save money for customers. And on down the line, what precipitated this, how we got onto this trajectory was our largest customer was quite upset with.

[00:16:39] Lynn Hunsaker: And it was the largest customer in our industry, quite a bit larger than us and very influential. And the CEO of that company stood up in one of those appreciation dinners and said, we buy so much from you just because you're always first to market with the latest technology, but I have to be very.

[00:16:59] Lynn Hunsaker: [00:17:00] Transparent with you. We're looking forward to your competitors being first to market, because you're really hard to do business with. You're really arrogant. Wow. And so that was the Genesis of my role where I was brought in a few, some months later to take on the VOC role. And I was chartered to turn that around.

[00:17:20] Lynn Hunsaker: I love way

[00:17:21] Jason Noble: you talked about the kind of different books, you've got your financial book, your operational book, having. Having people think about we need something it's as important as the business finances. Yeah. It's the customer data. I and I don't think enough organizations are doing it yet.

[00:17:37] Jason Noble: I love, initiatives, like what you've done, what you're doing, but I just love more organizations to be starting to make that investment and realize they need to do it. But it is such a great concept. It is as important as your company financial.

[00:17:54] Lynn Hunsaker: Where do the finances come from?

[00:17:56] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah, absolutely. I just don't understand this whole thing. I've [00:18:00] taught business. I have an MBA, and I just don't understand why the wall street journal and the London time, whatever they do not put customers on the front-page stories. Even when you go to the money section, when they talk about customer whatnot.

[00:18:17] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. It's never really about customer experience. Any story they have is about customer service few and far between never really linking that. The, where the heck you get your money is from a customer's.

[00:18:31] Jason Noble: Why do you think that is then? What do you think's missing? Why ?

[00:18:37] Lynn Hunsaker: First of all, it used to be so clear before we had the industrial revolution.

[00:18:41] Lynn Hunsaker: And then of course, people specialized in all their functional. Functional expertise. Yeah. And people have come to take for granted that, these functions exist just because every company has to have them. And we've gotten removed from the customer and viewing them as some [00:19:00] kind of voluminous.

[00:19:01] Lynn Hunsaker: Pain in the bum a thorn in your side, if we just didn't have those customers, then everything would be nicer in our business.

[00:19:13] Lynn Hunsaker: those best people. Luckily, I I had so I think that, just finishing that thought is back in the seventies and eighties, there was quite a lot of Really interesting modeling done about inve investor value, right? Shareholder value. And so somehow in the seventies, eighties, it seems that the definition of business success became creating value for shareholders in 2019, I think it was 20.

[00:19:51] Lynn Hunsaker: 2018 or 2019. There was a, an organization called the business round table, which consists of [00:20:00] hundreds of leading CEOs. And they decided to issue a proclamation about the purpose of business and I can't be more thrilled. Have you seen.

[00:20:14] Jason Noble: Not seeing it. No, I'm intrigued now. Absolutely intrigued.

[00:20:19] Jason Noble: What is the purpose of business according to the article?

[00:20:22] Lynn Hunsaker: The purpose of business is to create value for customers, employees communities, suppliers, and investors in that order.

[00:20:36] Jason Noble: It is it's phenomenal that the word value is in there. And I we've said before, I think that the thing.

[00:20:43] Jason Noble: I feel privileged sometimes in the field that we're in is that we're, we are responsible for other people's success and driving value from, and that's not just our customers. It's our team members, it's external stakeholders. So that definition really rings true there. I love that. [00:21:00]

[00:21:00] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. When I teach a college class, I always move that chapter in the textbook from 13 or 18 or whatever about customer segmentation.

[00:21:09] Lynn Hunsaker: That's what we talk about the first two weeks. We talk about customers as the source of salaries. Yep. Budgets and dividends or returns to your investors. Yeah.

[00:21:24] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. That only makes sense. Start there and follow the money. I love the story you were sharing about the customer saying, I've gotta be honest with you and if I'm a CEO receiving that com that direct feedback from a customer, I'm probably a bit worried about a lot of things at that point very quickly.

[00:21:44] Jason Whitehead: I'm curious. What advice would you give to our listeners who may find themselves as a head of CS or chief customer? Where they recognize and agree with a lot of things that you're saying, but they're struggling internally their own organization to create those Hals with CEOs, with the other leadership team or even the [00:22:00] border investors.

[00:22:01] Jason Whitehead: And what should they be doing, or could they be doing to try and trigger some of that awareness for folks so that their CEO doesn't have to be on the receiving end of that conversation from a key.

[00:22:11] Lynn Hunsaker: We have a lot of reengineering still going on because of supply chain, talent remote or hybrid situations.

[00:22:21] Lynn Hunsaker: And this is a wonderful opportunity to step forward and say, Hey manager X you're reworking something. Did you know that our customers and employees have made comments about things related to this? And it could be quite insightful as a guide. To minimize the waste to keep this organization lean and to generate higher value in the course of it, I saw that as a huge opportunity at the very beginning of the pandemic.

[00:22:54] Lynn Hunsaker: I was so pleased that to hear that people were saying, what's going on with our customers in any functional [00:23:00] area, you know what's happening? What could, what do we need to adjust to be to, to to, for the new things happening with our customers. You heard about that a lot in April and early may of 2020 huge opportunity, huge window there.

[00:23:17] Lynn Hunsaker: But very few customer experienced people. I've never heard of any customer experienced people who really, you know seized the day for that. And it's a travesty, but it's because we're too. We've been drinking the lemonade or the Kool-Aid for too long and thinking about, oh, we just have to ask people if they would recommend us and we have to go and fix things that went wrong and we have to digitalize everything to be and make things, a profit center.

[00:23:46] Lynn Hunsaker: And it's all a bunch of BS. Really. That's not what it's about. It's about closing the ratio one to one ratio. Absolutely.

[00:23:57] Jason Noble: How do you see so that the role of [00:24:00] chief customer officer it's, we're beginning to see more and more organizations investing in that it doesn't have to be that name necessary, but that C level exec role focused on the customer.

[00:24:12] Jason Noble: And it's, even in Europe now we're seeing a lot of organizations and even non-tech bonds, you're seeing your. Foods food organizations, pharmaceuticals, airlines, even investing in these roles. How do you see that role evolving and what does the ideal team structure look like for a chief customer officer?

[00:24:31] Lynn Hunsaker: Yeah. So you should be aiming for almost automatic customer experience excellence, meaning that every group needs to understand their performance standards in a customer experience context. So what are, let's just give the example of two banks here in America that have recently been called on the carpet.

[00:24:57] Lynn Hunsaker: One is recently as this year for the [00:25:00] business development group, creating phony accounts for their customers because their bonus goal over the year was to have higher number of accounts per customer on average, compared to the industry norm. The business development group, who would think that you need to include the business development group in customer centered thinking or customer experience not creating problems so that you should care about that because what happened in each of those case studies is that.

[00:25:36] Lynn Hunsaker: The stock price plummeted after people were outraged, the government got heavy handed and find them really heavy fines and other stipulations, a lot of paperwork and pain in the bum. This is this is damaging. The brand customer experience is really about. [00:26:00] Enhancing the brand.

[00:26:02] Lynn Hunsaker: So the main idea for a chief customer officer is to drive almost automatic CX excellence by helping the whole company become more customer centric. It doesn't mean being a doormat. It means understanding your role in terms of the one-to-one ratio and generating more value. How do you do that?

[00:26:27] Lynn Hunsaker: You need to listen to what your customers are saying. Take a lot of you have a ton, a huge treasure trove of comments on hand that you could just be using text mining, voice mining, video mining. What have you. We have that technology now and distill all of that into a couple of camps of expectation sets.

[00:26:52] Lynn Hunsaker: Okay, so you, most brands will have two or three overall expectation sets. For example, in one company [00:27:00] that I worked with, they had a simplicity expectation set, and then there was another group of customers that was very keen about timeliness. Meaning like a two hour window or just, be exact with what you promise make it happen at that time.

[00:27:16] Lynn Hunsaker: Okay. And both of those camps of customers had quite huge consequences when things weren't simple. Like even just introducing a new order entry system was like a huge headache for them because they were juggling so much the timeliness ones, if something was a little early or so, a little late, it was just astounding what the snowball effect was on their costs and their reputation and their productivity and they're buying right.

[00:27:47] Lynn Hunsaker: They would buy a lot more from this brand if the timeliness or if the simplicity thing were kept within a certain. Range. So by just distilling it to two simple things [00:28:00] like that allows every group business development group, the legal group, the supplier management group, the engineering operations on down the line is this thing that we're thinking about doing contributing to or detracting from simplicity and timeliness or whatever the theme is for your company.

[00:28:21] Lynn Hunsaker: Yep.

[00:28:22] Jason Whitehead: I like that. And I love the distilling it down to two things that, we often talk about our to-do list and how long it is. And I think people should just respe that the T O list and just, these are the two things we're going to do. And just ,

[00:28:36] Jason Noble: I couldn't agree more, Jason. I think that, that simplification there, as you've said in, is so critical and too many organizations are over complicating.

[00:28:46] Jason Noble: Really what it is, that, that simplification, I think makes it so clear. For everyone in your team, your whole business to understand what we're about, what we're trying to do.

[00:28:56] Lynn Hunsaker: That's right. So I've also suggested in some of [00:29:00] my articles about a value quotient. Metric. Okay. So instead of, patting ourselves on the back where people might recommend us, but they might recommend five other brands at the same time, or they might not, , I just think, that's just way over done.

[00:29:19] Lynn Hunsaker: Let's shift our thinking to a value quotient, which means every time that we are contributing toward the timeliness and simplicity thing, or, whatever it is for your company, then you get a point in the numerator. Every time that you're missing the mark in the simplicity or timelines goal, then you're getting a Demer in the enumerator the denominator So it's a very simple way to just keep a tally of, okay. Your handoffs. And you can do this as an internal customer satisfaction, internal customer experience thing, as well as external . So everybody can be [00:30:00] more consistent. And more aware of the instances where they're creating grief internally and externally it by having a one-to-one ratio.

[00:30:16] Lynn Hunsaker: oh, you don't wanna really have a one-to-one ratio on that. You wanna, but you wanna have like maximum numerator and yeah. Hardly any denominator on that. It grows trust. And trust is what people are really clamoring for. They're just thirsting for it. In employee experience, partner, experience, and customer experience.

[00:30:37] Lynn Hunsaker: We've become so mercenary. And so superficial really in experience, we need to get back to what is it that people are trying to get done? How are we contributing to that or detracting from it? How do we stay true? How do we, how do. Demonstrate consistency and [00:31:00] growing people toward what they're trying to get done in their life.

[00:31:07] Lynn Hunsaker: Wow.

[00:31:08] Jason Whitehead: That's really great stuff. I'd love those ideas. And thank you so much for sharing all those with us. As we wind down here, we always like to throw out a bold challenge question and really this. And to be for our listeners, what sort of bold actions would you like them to take to have a dramatic impact very quickly?

[00:31:26] Jason Whitehead: So our question for you is what is the number one thing that CS leaders should be doing today to ensure that they're delivering value to their customers when the external market challenges and pressures like we have today. And it sounds like you've already seen some bold action. You've seen some bold mistakes as well, too.

[00:31:42] Jason Whitehead: What is the thing you'd like to really challenge people to do, to have a tremendous positive impact in the organization and for their

[00:31:47] Lynn Hunsaker: customer? Yeah, I think that if you can cut corners and some of the administrative things that you're doing that, or even operational things that you're doing, that our [00:32:00] customers don't want.

[00:32:01] Lynn Hunsaker: , that would be the place to cut corners, not in the product or the service. Not in, laying off your people. But be more aware of where you have you're creating waste. What are the prevalent issues? I just published another article on customer. Think this week called six customer experience, spirit animals for the today's imperative of trust And I would. I would hope that people will go to those spirit animals. And there's several suggestions for the new way of customer experience leadership that I've been describing under each of the six animals. That would be my challenge. Excellent.

[00:32:44] Jason Noble: Excellent. Thank you so much. That's where I'm gonna go after this call in.

[00:32:47] Jason Noble: I, I wanna see this article. I love the idea of that. in this conversation has been phenomenal. Really insightful. I've learned a lot. I think there's a lot of great takeaways for our listeners [00:33:00] your style, your experience, I think lends so much to what, we're all trying to. In the field of customer experience and customer success.

[00:33:08] Jason Noble: So again, a huge, thank you for joining us today. What we'd like to let you do before we go shameless. You're gonna tell Jess, I didn't forget this time. Shameless plug, please. For what you guys are doing for your organization.

[00:33:24] Lynn Hunsaker: We're running right now, a customer experience team sport award.

[00:33:29] Lynn Hunsaker: Contest and it's pretty simple. You just go to player action.com/cx hyphen team, hyphen sport, hyphen awards, CX team sport awards, and enter it's really around those six spirit animals that I just mentioned. We have what's called the experience value exchange, which is an online community that you can.

[00:33:55] Lynn Hunsaker: Subscribe to for your whole marketing department, your whole customer experience, customer success. What [00:34:00] have you, and what that does is it builds the competencies in these six areas of lifetime value mindset driving Root cause improvement based on customer experience insights, increasing value in your growth plans, through customer experience, insights and so forth.

[00:34:23] Lynn Hunsaker: So I hope welcome you to join the value exchange. Fantastic.

[00:34:27] Jason Whitehead: Fantastic. Thank you so much. And we'll obviously include links to that and yeah. So, Lynn, thank you so much, really enjoyed it and look forward to keeping in touch.

[00:34:36] Lynn Hunsaker: It's been a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks Lynn. Take care. Take care.

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Episode Description Join us when we speak with Dana Alvarenga, VP of Customer Experience at Slap Five. Dana Alvarenga is a very well know and leader in customer experience and customer success, with a big focus on voice of the customer programs, advocacy and customer marketing.

In this episode, Dana shares her insights into growing and expanding your Voice of the Customer Program. Guest: Dana Alvarenga - VP of Customer Experience (Slap Five) Dana has over 15 years experience in the technology industry within sales, sales training, management, customer education and success. At SlapFive she is the VP of Customer Experience and leads the Customer Success function, along with Education, VOC, and Advocacy. In her role she is always striving to deliver an amazing customer experience by constantly improving, educating, and building customer focused programs and processes. Dana is customer obsessed, lover of travel, food, her family and a reality TV junkie!

Contact Dana Alvarenga

Slap Five: https://www.slapfive.com/

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danaalvarenga Scroll Down for Episode Transcript Sponsors The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!

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We share a variety of articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's take on podcast with myself. Jason Noble here in London and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.

[00:00:12] Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason. Thank you everyone for joining us today.

[00:00:14] Jason Noble: We are super excited today.

We have a, another really amazing guest on a well known CS leader. Customer experience community. We've got Dana. Alga apologies. Dana, if I've got you, soname there wrong. I did ask in the beginning, but I just wanna make sure I've got it right. But Dana's joining us today. Dana is a very well known leader in customer experience in customer success.

She has a massive focus in what she's doing on voice of the customer programs, customer marketing advocacy. She's also the co-host of the customer X therapy podcast with Kaylie basket and she's the VP of customer experience at slap five. And a rockstar voice, customer, voice coach, and customer marketer therapist.

I love that. Welcome Dana.

[00:00:59] Dana Alvargena: Thank you. Thank you. That was a mouthful, but I am all of the above.

[00:01:03] Jason Noble: And you do so much, and this is what I think we, we are thrilled to have you with us big fan of what you've been doing. And I think we, we see a lot of people in customer successes.

They do a lot more than just their day. And I think willing willingly as well, people want to give back to the community. And it's so exciting to see this. Could you go ahead and give an intro to yourself? I've said a little bit, but list, some listeners might know you not know you as well as I do, but we'd love to know a bit more about, about your own journey.

What's brought you to where you are today.

[00:01:31] Dana Alvargena: Yeah, exactly. And thanks for having me. As Jason mentioned, I'm the current vice president of customer experience at slap five. But my background really came from, I started way, way back in my career of at enterprise rent car. So I've done management training program, renting cars, cleaning cars, but also running a business and moved into kind of more of.

An inside sales role, and this is pre customer success days. I was doing a lot of the pre-work and figuring out what customers wanted to do and building out really their customer journey and then threw it over the fence to account managers. And I hated that. I was like, no, I wanna see. What they do, what happens?

So I ended up finding a full sales cycle role, cuz this still was pre customer success days again. And then fell into customer education and customer success. And that grew into an advocacy role. And then I landed where I am at today. I was actually a prospect of slap five at my last role. Was thinking of bringing slap five on and ended up going to work for them.

[00:02:36] Jason Noble: I lo I love that journey and I know quite a few people that have come through a similar journey where they've been a prospect or a customer of an organization, seen a lot of good with there's a lot of lines the way they're thinking. I love your kind of description as well about the rock store, rockstar, customer, voice coach, and the customer marketing therapist thinking, can you tell us a bit more about what those are and the kind of the work you've done for.

Yeah,

[00:02:57] Dana Alvargena: sure. So the rockstar is actually tied to my customer program that I run with my customers, it's called the slap five rock stars. So I'm looking to make my customers rock stars, get them on stage speaking engagements, talking on webinars, like really rock stars, like having them be that spotlight talking about themselves and what they're doing, not talking about slot five.

I want them to talk about how they are awesome at their job. Obviously slot five is helping them do it. So it helps. And then the therapist aspect is my customers are a lot of one person teams. So I after a lot of weekly, check-ins like probably my first year into my role. I got off and called my CEO.

And I was like, I just really. Honestly just had a therapy session with that customer. We did not talk once about strategy once about the product. It was what she was dealing with. There was new management, she couldn't get this approved and it just became a thing and we spun up a webinar series and it's still living today.

And it's part of our conference that we're doing in September two. We do group therapy, breakouts and just go along with a therapy. That is just

[00:04:04] Jason Whitehead: fantastic. I love that. We we do a lot of coaching for customer success leaders and a lot of that is the therapy is clearly a big part of it.

And people need help. People need to have someone they can talk to and they can trust. So I think that's fantastic. Yes. I'm curious though, since we're on this topic too, why is customer marketing so important today? And what are some of the key areas that our listeners should focus on when they build their programs?

What is it that you go over with your customers and what that people need to

[00:04:28] Dana Alvargena: know? Yeah, so customer marketing and I look at customer marketing more as a facet of customer experience, you have customer experience under that is the customer success, the customer marketing, the customer advocacy, and having a program that encompasses all of that builds.

Builds advocates. That's huge. In this day and age, and it's been huge the last couple of years with what's been going on in the world of people wanting to. Your current customers. So how do you do that? You make them advocates, you bring them to the forefront. You make them, like I mentioned, the rock stars and you have them talk about what they're doing, how they're saving time how their life is easier now.

And they're talking about their role and it's elevating their own brand and it's helping their career path. So it's really nurturing that relationship piece and Then if those customers leave, they go somewhere else. They bring you on at the new company. It's a full circle. So customer marketing, I think is huge because it, it helps drive renewals.

Renewals are pretty weak if you don't have a strong customer marketing or customer advocacy, because you don't have those advocates . Yeah,

[00:05:37] Jason Whitehead: exactly. So if someone's looking to start their customer marketing program today that doesn't have one, or they're new to this, where do they start? What are some things that they should really focus on when they're thinking about this?

[00:05:48] Dana Alvargena: It's definitely doing your homework internally, doing internal roadshow. Talk to other departments. There may be another department. Is talking to customers, they're gathering customer voice and surveys, or they're doing interviews or they're getting email feedback. So do that internal homework to see what you have do that inventory of what internally other customer other departments are doing, but then go back and see what customers have done things for you in the past.

Who spoke at an all hands meeting. Who's been on a webinar and go back and talk to them and see, did you like that experience? Is it something you'd wanna do more of what other type of activities or acts of advocacy I call them? Would you like to participate in? So that's the kind of two main areas.

Do your internal work with your internal teams and then also. Talk to your customers. It seems like a no brainer, but it doesn't always happen.

[00:06:39] Jason Noble: We, we I realize in the introduction I was so excited about talking to you that I missed off what we're gonna talk about. And it is it's how you, it went with the flow.

It absolutely. I think it, it came across. So actually, but it's the first Ja. We the focus and why we've got you here is to talk about evolving voice of the customer programs. A and it really fits in really nicely with custom marketing. It's a critical part of that, but how do you go about defining what a voice of the customer program actually is?

We, we talk about them a lot. I do. It's absolutely fundamental for what we're doing, but how do you understand really what it means? How do we represent it back to our leadership teams and our teams, but what it's all about and why we're doing it?

[00:07:16] Dana Alvargena: Yes. Yes. So the way I define a voice, a customer program or customer voice program is more on it being a two way exchange of value.

So it's a defined program where not only you as the company, you're getting something out of it by capturing true, authentic voice. And when I say voice I'm meaning like the authentic voice, the video or audio, not necessarily an NPS result. Yes, you get that number. That's a great stat, but you're not getting that true, authentic voice of why they're happy or why they are doing what they're doing.

So I look at it one as an authentic voice and then two making it that two-way exchange of value where your customers are they're selecting their electing to be a part of the program. And they're raising their hand too. Yes. I would like to be served up an opportu. To cohost a webinar. I would love to be a guest on a podcast.

I would love to be a peer to peer reference call. So then when the time comes, you're not scouring your email database talking to different team members and putting out fires to find a person that you need. You go right to your pool of customers that already raise their hand, that wanna do it, and you provide them that opportunity.

And it becomes that two way exchange of value for them giving them the opportunity to share their voice and. Getting that authentic voice.

[00:08:38] Jason Noble: Have you ever come across any challenges when you've implemented them, that people not understanding why you're doing it either, either internally or your customers and if you have, however, have you worked through those or do you find most people say, absolutely get this.

We, we need to do this.

[00:08:52] Dana Alvargena: Usually it's the latter. I personally work with a lot of customers that have been doing it either. Piecemeal siloed. So it's making it a program. Maybe product marketing sting, one part customer. Marketing's doing one part customer success is doing another.

So it's bringing it into one, one program where there's there's insight into who's doing what so customers aren't being over asked or overused. So that's the main part of it is making it a program to know what your customers want. To participate in, but then also being able to track who's done. What, and when, so you don't get that burnout and always have that same customer on your website or that same customer on every webinar, you wanna be able to share, spread the wealth.

[00:09:33] Jason Whitehead: And what are some of the biggest challenges you've found? Is it that people internally don't quite. Knowing what to do once they have the information or, oh, we're asking questions and we're not liking what the answers are. So we really don't know what to do with it now. Or is there something else entirely that, that usually gets in

[00:09:46] Dana Alvargena: the way from folks?

That's a great question. I would definitely say challenges is our yeah. Not putting. The customer voice to use and not putting it to use directly tied to an initiative or a specific campaign. And just capturing it just to say, oh, I got customer voice. Yeah. So having it tied to a go to market initiative and that, that plays internally is a challenge that it could fall flat.

And then externally the customers, if they don't see how it's being put to use, why am I gonna share again? You already asked me this last quarter, right? So it's that closing the loop aspect of it. That is a challenge that does get, does come up. And in the side companies, I think too, what we talked about before of getting started, if you're looking within a company and you're building out a new customer voice program If you don't do the internal homework, there might be other people doing something.

If you're working in a siloed company or it's not a top down priority, so it's not getting the support that you need. So that's a challenge I've faced in the past too.

[00:10:45] Jason Whitehead: I I worked with one client very briefly and it was interesting. They had a very technical product and when they were gathering.

Their KPIs and the metrics. And then they tried to convey it into a sales message, future customers, everything they were talking about oh, X number of bites were saving you or data flow and things like that. It really fell on deaf ears, but it was interesting cause they had also gone through and recorded a lot of YouTube testimonial videos from very satisfied customers and in their own voice, which I love that you said actually capturing their voice, literally.

They were saying how great it was, but they were talking about in terms of things. How much time it had saved them or that they doubled their throughput of work without having to have a single staff member or all these other equivalent metrics that were actually important to them. And it just struck me that they had the customer's voice, but they weren't really listening.

They didn't know how to translate in that and something meaningful for the future. And I'm curious if you've seen similar things or what are some of the creative uses or ahas people have had through a good effective customer voice program.

[00:11:41] Dana Alvargena: Yes. And that's so a lot of that I would say and I've seen that in the past and still see it of you get this great.

Interview this great feedback from the customers. And then it gets put into marketing speak, not the customer's voice. So then it's like the drone video, the super sophisticated two minute video that's coming in and showing the office building and words flashing on the screen and yeah it, it gets lost.

So it's more of, yes, those can have their place and their value. Those two minute produced videos somewhere on your website. When it comes to new prospects and sales partnering with customers, or they wanna maybe they can't line up a live reference call. They're able to provide them what hits the cutting room floor.

Those other Tibit that were in that recording. Take those out, have one to two minute short snippets that are then given to a prospect. Or we create at slot five, we create storyboards. So it's like a landing page that they can serve up. But you could do this. Just editing out one long zoom call and cutting out two, three minute slips that mentioned, like you mentioned the time to value and didn't have to hire a new person.

So it's taking one recording, one customer voice, ask. And reusing it multiple ways and fuse it everywhere. So yes, if the end goal is that produced video. Great. But take all of the other stuff that they recorded and use it and put it to you. So even if it doesn't go on your website, you still could use it internally or to those prospects.

[00:13:12] Jason Noble: I, I think that's one of the key things is you, because you there's so many things that you could use it for and do with it, that it I love the way that you've thought about this has to be something that's not siloed internally. You need to have joined up thinking much like a lot of what we do in customer success.

I, and it's how do you get those? Any silos broken down and work collaboratively internally, but to then come up with all of these different ideas once, once you've got your program defined and your vision for what you're trying to do, what are the first steps that you go through to get it set up and working and get it actually up and running.

[00:13:45] Dana Alvargena: So that's, it's, that's, that comes back to again, having it be a formalized program. And it's partnering with, depending upon where the voice of customer and the customer voice program lives, if it's living in customer success, great use the customer success managers as the ones that are figuring out who should be nominated to join this program, to raise their hand of what acts of advocacy they'd like to do.

Make it part of onboarding with new clients, new customers here, we have this program, voice of customer program. And let them pick from the menu. It could be a Google form. It could be any type of signup sheet where they're able to fill in their information. Yes. I'd love to be presented with an opportunity to be on a webinar.

I'd love to be on stage and speak at one of your industry conferences, whatever it may be. Give them the choice to elect what they want and start to gather that details. But also. With that, make sure you have a content calendar of opportunities to serve up to the customers ready once you've launched it.

So you have to do both at the same time, ha have some opportunities to capture customer voice and customers participate. But then get the customers into the pipeline that will raise their hand to be a part of the program

[00:14:57] Jason Whitehead: now for something like that, to be effective, how. How big should a company be to start really engaging things like that, or when's the right time in a company's IUR like you mentioned, you worked a lot of solopreneurs and things of that nature.

If you're just one person, should you be doing that already? Should you wait until you have, 10 or 15 clients when's the right time to really put together a more structured program?

[00:15:17] Dana Alvargena: So this is this is probably a debate out in the world of customer advocacy, customer voice. I, my opinion is it should be for every customer.

They don't need to hit a certain stage. They don't need to be enterprise level all size companies. You could have five customers. You could have 5,000. I mean it's and I think it should be. Part of when are they the happiest right after they've signed on, not even after onboarding's completed capture it, then either capture some customer voice then, but also make it part of the selling process.

We have this customer voice program that you could be a part of it's branded. You can share your voice network, it's it involves peer to peer networking. Cuz you could have some. Webinars where you're on with your peers speaking or whatever that may be. So I say, do it up front. I know that out, out in the industry there are folks that do wait until onboarding is completed, or they wait until customers have hit a certain usage stage dependent upon the industry.

But it's not anymore after the first year of renewal, this is the first six months. You wanna get them invited and engaged in.

[00:16:19] Jason Noble: Once you've got your program up and running and you're seeing results from it. So say you've done kind of first year great effect. You've got the rest of the team on board.

How do you look to evolve it further? What's next? And what is really the future of this? What do you see as the next major revolutions for us when it comes to advocacy, custom marketing and customer voice program. .

[00:16:40] Dana Alvargena: Yeah. So the future, once you've had a program up and running, you wanna not just annually, probably quarterly evaluate it.

What activity engagements of these customer voice program. Opportunities. What are you serving up to them? What are you lacking? What are they liking? Talk to your customers? What are they enjoying about it? Pivot, change, change the program if you need to. And I think the future for sure is going to be tying.

What's done with customers in regards to customer marketing, customer advocacy, acts of advocacy, whatever you wanna call it. Tying it back to revenue. So customers that are engaged, they're speaking on webinars, customers that are doing case studies, did that help support an upsell? Did that help with a new business?

Did they renew the people that are engaged in this program? So that's the next wave of tying it all back to revenue.

[00:17:34] Jason Whitehead: To that in tune. What do you see as the most effective ways for folks to track those customer participation in a voice program? Is that just activities in a CRM system? Are there other ways that you prefer to do.

[00:17:44] Dana Alvargena: Yeah. It's yeah, it's gonna be activities. Yeah. And a CRM or a customer success tool. Really anywhere where you're tracking customer activities and reporting on it. I started years ago on just reporting on customers, completing. Their education through our learning management system and another company that I was at.

And I tracked that to see, did it tie to renewals or expansion because they were going through the self-paced learning in the LMS. So a similar role like that, creating a field check, check the box there a customer voice program member would be the best way.

[00:18:15] Jason Noble: I think there are I love ideas like that, cuz they're so easy to implement aren't they really are.

And it, and what it does, I think it makes it. The forefront of what your team are doing. They think about it. I, there was an organization I worked at some years back and we had a marketing team that was focused purely on new BIS. And we had nobody even just talking about opportunities and videos.

We started doing video programs, interviews with customers, and we just weren't thinking about it. But we very similar to that. We built it in to part of our conversations with customers, part of the playbook that you've. Voice of the customer program, then you've got what are they doing? Would they be an advocate for us?

Would there be a reference you've got all of these things there and, yep. I don't think it was the right thing at the time, but we actually targeted the team on some of these metrics. It worked well for what we were doing there because we needed to get some of these marketing pieces of work in, but I, don't not convince that's one of the right things to do longer term, but it worked really well then, but.

That really helped change the way that the team thought about it and actually got a really quick and positive and very encouraging engagement with customers.

[00:19:17] Dana Alvargena: Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Dan,

[00:19:19] Jason Whitehead: I'm wondering as well. What is it that you recommend people do in their organization to really drive support for customer voice program?

Are you, have you seen people do things like, oh, it's part of a compensation or a bonus criteria that they must get a certain rating from customer voice or other things like that, or. Are there other activities that say this is what's really gonna make a programming sell in your organization and have the impact you want by online.

[00:19:42] Dana Alvargena: Yeah, so I think that's varied because there's more and more customer marketing roles. Today than there were a year ago, three years ago. So it they're building out that actual function of a customer marketing manager. That's responsible for a customer program. Tails customer voice. If that isn't the case.

Then I do see, and I completely lost track of what you were asking me now.

[00:20:14] Jason Whitehead: I lose track all the time. No. What are the things that organizations should be doing to get

[00:20:18] Dana Alvargena: widespread internal support? Oh yeah. Buy-in buy-in support. Yeah. So I was saying if it's not a team, the buy-in, so the buy-in would be one going to the customers of that, that the customers want to be a part of a customer program and getting, and gathering that feedback.

Obviously going out and doing some competitive analysis against what your direct competitors are they offering a customer program is that differentiator has helped in the past. I've done that. So those would be the aspects and then really just putting together what that process would be.

What are these opportunities and what objections will it help knock down? One of my customers, she just put a together a great slide of this is what we were doing before. And now with the customer program, this is what. Knocked out these objections and these hassles internally in regards to like burnout asking multiple customers the same, having those fires to always look for someone to speak for something that they have that pool of customers already, that they know.

So bringing the negative to light of what the program could help cross off would help too.

[00:21:24] Jason Noble: I love that way of thinking. I think this. Like I say, voice of the customer is something that we've talked about a lot, but I think you've really brought to life that kind of focus on it and the need for this Dana look, this has been a great conversation.

One, one thing we always like to ask our guests is what we call a bold challenge. Question, nothing to be worried about. But for you what would you say? The number one thing is that business leaders can do today to help set up a real voice of the customer program? What's the number one thing that we can.

[00:21:55] Dana Alvargena: I would say the number one thing that you could do is, make it a part of your go to market initiative that having customers involved in a program is one of the goals and having your campaigns aligned to needing customer voice, to be supported of these and included everywhere. If there's a piece of content that goes out, wear.

Where's that snippet of that customer, giving that quote in audio on there, support a blog post with it. If there's LinkedIn post going out, where's the video or the audio of the customer reinforcing what that use case is that we're talking about. So it's less marketing talk and have your customers be the forefront of your business.

[00:22:36] Jason Noble: Fantastic. Dana, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. Absolutely thrilled that you've joined us really excited about this and looking forward to hearing more about your conference later in the. And

[00:22:47] Jason Whitehead: Dana, thank you. We also wanna invite you to give a shameless quote for your endeavors, your organization, whatever is inspiring you to greatness.

So what would you like to share with folks and how can they get in touch with

[00:22:57] Dana Alvargena: awesome. Thank you. Yes. So yes, I alluded a little bit before I, I work at. At slap five or our customer marketing tool. So I partner work with customer marketers, customer reference managers, and we help build and capture customer en engagement tracking of your customers, what they're doing.

They can actually capture their customer voice right within the tool on audio or video on their phone or their desktop. It also helps manage with reference management as well. So it's an all in one tool. For customer marketers, and we're bringing all the leaders of customer, the customer X world.

So X factor of customer experience, customer marketing, customer reference management to customer Excon in September for our third annual customer X conference in Boston. So looking forward to seeing what's gonna be happening there and all of the insights from the practitioners that have built the agenda and built the conference.

So it's gonna be pretty.

[00:23:51] Jason Noble: Sounds that sound sounds an amazing conference. That awesome.

[00:23:55] Jason Whitehead: Thank you so much and we really appreciate it and have a great day. Thank you so much, Dana. Thank you.

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Ideal Customer Behavior In this episode, we discuss the concept of "Ideal Customer Behavior" (ICB) and how you can use it to drive desired customer actions and success.

Far too often, we narrowly focus on things like the customer profile and journey map without identifying and influencing the specific actions – the behaviors – our customers need to take to ensure success. By taking a behavior-based approach, you can improve the way you engage with customers to ensure they, and you, achieve greater levels of success.

Check out this episode to learn how focusing on Ideal Customer Behavior can help you drive success! Scroll Down for Episode Transcript Sponsors The Jasons Take On is Sponsored by Success Chain!

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the latest episode of the Jason's take on podcasts where it's got myself, Jason Noble here in a, not too sunny London. After the lovely four day bank holiday weekend, celebrating the Queens. Do you believe that we've just had here and my partner in crime, Mr.

Whitehead, say hello, Jason.

[00:00:24] Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason. And thank you everyone for joining us from

[00:00:27] Jason Noble: Washington. Absolutely. We are both really excited to be here for change. We don't have a guest. This is the first time that we've done one of our own, just us talking to two Jasons. I, and we've had some really great guests over recent months.

We're really extra. I've got some more coming up, so please do stay tuned. But today we're going to talk about ideal customer behavior, which is a really, I think, interesting topic, something that we don't spend a lot of time thinking about. We talk about ideal customer profile, which customers. Yeah.

But all we think he about what behavior we want for our customers. So Jason, I had a chat. We thought this would make a really interesting episode. We're really excited by the number of people that are listening to the podcast as well. It's great to see the number of downloads growing. If you do like this episode, please feel free to subscribe and listen to previous episodes.

There's also, as I said, other ones covering some amazing guests coming up and some great ones over the last couple of months with guests. And don't forget to hit the like button. If you like this. Jason, I will throw the very first question over to you, sir, as we'll normally do as well. Sorry.

Before we start with questions, as we normally do, we'll end with a well-armed with a bowl challenge question, which you always like doing just to put something out there, but let us give a very brief intro. If you don't know us, Jason Noble I'm based in London, in the UK, currently the global VP of customer success for organization called.

Finley is a mobility company in the automotive space providing data solutions and technology around insights and opportunities for customers in the mobility space. So I look after our European business unit, but then also our global customer success business being there three and a half years really enjoying it.

Jason, quick and Tribune. Great. Thanks

[00:02:08] Jason Whitehead: everyone for joining us. My name is Jason Whitehead. I am the co-founder of success chain along with my wonderful business partners to NAB it more who most of you would probably come across at some point. She is a legend in the customer success community, and we do a lot of work to help customer success teams drive their skills and capabilities and increase user adoption.

Our big focus. Also helping to drive change and adoption of technology in your customer's organization. So check status, sustain.net. And before we jump into the first question, my partner here skipped over our bold question. So as we always like to start out with a big challenge to get people, take bold action.

As you listen to this episode, and we'll remind you that the young ones. What bold actions can you take throughout the entire customer journey, including the sales process that they've been drive your ideal customer behavior. So give it a thing, give it a good read. If you have ideas, we'd love to hear your thoughts because this is a

[00:03:00] Jason Noble: fun, fun concept.

Thank you for the reminder. I'd forgot that we talked about that at the beginning, as well as at the end, I loved your intro. That's what you guys are doing at success. Jane, I think is really key because. You help organizations with this? Aren't what is customer behavior? What do we want our customers to do?

And quite often you need that direction coaching from experts. But let me ask the first question to you, Jason what do we mean by ideal customer behavior? As I said in the intro, we talk about customer journey. Customer profiles but customer behavior. And why are we talking about it? What's the context about this?

[00:03:34] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, no, this is a fun topic for me. And I've been really excited about it. We've have great conversations with you and Sue and others. I think. When talking about our customers, we often talk about what is it that they're doing our meetings or what is, they're not even showing up to meetings or what are their end-users doing.

And people have, they're so close, but they really aren't being explicitly. What are the behaviors and actions we need clients to take that are going to drive their success? And our let's be honest. It is about mutual success here. And, when you get thinking about it from even a business model term, back before this is the push-in model, pre Salesforce day, the customer owned all of user adoption and a Fitbit breast, and it was up to them to get their user, their people, to use systems and to create value with it.

And then when SAS came on, They really transferred a lot of that user adoption risk from the customer to the vendor. And the question becomes then if the customer doesn't take the actions required to get value, then you know, the vendors struggles, and this is really the heart of customer success.

And yet we still find that most organizations that are buying you, you don't know what actions they need to take internally to get value from technology. And they don't know what to do or they won't do it. When I get thinking about ideal customer behavior is really there. How do we map out your war customers for taking the desired actions that lower our risk is a vendor and there's as a customer and increase the likelihood of success.

And in turn, this increases the likelihood of longterm renewals and expansions. But I think the distinction here is really by dressing desired behaviors. You lower the risk for both parties and you increase the likelihood of longterm successful parties. And instead of focusing just on. Playbooks or milestones or things like this, but what are the actions people do that?

Try success and stop in. If they're taking the wrong risks, how you can trust those behaviors and really get the correct actions. And that's really the heart of what it is as we go through there. One of the things that I often talk about when working with customers, and this is the constant, how do you change someone?

Else's. And I throw that question out there and I just let it sit in a room and people think about it and they, him and they haul. And then they'll talk about a little things here and there. But the short answer is that you don't, you change your own behavior or you change the environment in which the behavior of others.

And I think there's a lot of examples we could come up with around us, but ultimately what we're talking about here in ideal customer behaviors, what are the things that we can control as a vendor that will help influence someone else's behavior? What are those environmental factors and what are the specific actions that I, as a vendor, as a customer success professional can take that will get them there.

And how do we map that out in a well thought out and effective approach? So that's my contextual take on what are your thoughts? And when you think of ideal customer behavior, what does it mean?

[00:06:14] Jason Noble: I like that, the kind of idea of the mapping at the end. I think this is something that we don't think, we don't think about what we mean by behavior.

What are we trying to get our customers to do quite often you're focused on that end goal, the outcome, but how do we get an X part of those steps to get there as well as a tactical plan, there are behavioral steps and exactly what you say, getting we've talked before about change management.

This is part of that. If we're asking our customers to change behind. That's something that's more deeply ingrained on them and I think even harder to do, but I think we've got to look at what we mean by behavior. And I think a great way of defining is it's the actions that our customers or even prospects are taking or not taking.

And what we're talking about here is the specific actions of individuals. If you look in the dictionary, it's very interesting. This, the behavior, what it means is the way in which one conducts or acts towards. So we're talking about how our customers act towards us potentially and towards other people and what do they do towards us.

And I think that's really important to know that there's something behind what this means. And I think when you look at this from a psychological perspective, you always get the behavior that you're rewarding. Like you said, in your intro that Jace or rewarding or even reinforcing. And if you don't get the desired response, From a customer or any individuals, you need to look at what you're doing and how you're doing it.

Don't keep repeating what you're doing. If it's not getting the right behavior. I think it's too easy to fall into that step where we've got a playbook. This is how it works, but you've got to continually change that. But you've also got to look at who is the. Th that is rewarding. The behavior. Is it the company?

Is it the individual? W well, let's have a conversation while the points we'll talk about in a bit, but about incentives and rewards. And I think it's really important to do that because you do, when you go in, when you have a company that gets you to go into training, I know you guys do this a lot at success chain.

They discuss problems that they're having like costumes, not attending meetings, not following up on agreed actions. And all of these are specific behaviors. That need to be addressed changed, and this is what constitutes ideal customer behavior. And I just think it's a, is when I don't think we'd really thought about it in this holistic approach until we talked right the other day.

And it's a very interesting thing. And it does, if you're trying to change it and influence how people are using doing things, it's a very difficult thing to do.

[00:08:49] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. I think about it too, in the sense of as a parent, you've got your children and when they start to behave one way.

You're like I can't control your behavior. I've got to figure out other ways to get you there. And usually it's, we talk very explicitly in terms of behavior, oh, be on your best behavior. Oh, you were acting out or this or that. Let's talk about how you're going to behave when it gets to this event, whatever.

And we don't do that in the professional context as much. And I like what you were saying about the examples of, oh, do they take my call? Do they show up to the QBR? I can't figure out how many times I've had clients come up and call us and say, I just can't get these people to even take a call or they'll feel for one meeting, but they won't show up again.

Oh, they're getting rewarded for that behavior. Either. The reward is they feel they've saved time because they don't value their time. Or no one's giving them no, one's giving them a punishment for not doing that for not honoring their commitments. So I think it opens up a lot of ideas. When you look at

[00:09:43] Jason Noble: it does nothing.

There is, remember the episode we did on the psycho psychology of customers. There's a lot as part of this as well, which absolutely. I love that one. I do. If you've not listened to it, haven't listened to that one. I think it's one of our most listened to ones, but what what are some examples of behavior that.

Our customers to take that we can influence and change. What are your thoughts on that, Jason?

[00:10:04] Jason Whitehead: I think there's a lot of them at different levels of the organization. You really need to think through that. I like to start at the leadership level to say, what are the actions we need to customer executives or leaders to take to really set their organization up for success and hear that internally they're doing the right things to drive adoption and change success.

For example, pumping heads, fuel rewards. If you might even offer them, you prefer pricing, video, things like that. Sign a senior person in the organization to have ownership for adoption, not forgetting the system lock. Everyone can get a system live. That's no big deal, but getting the system to be a top 10 and used in a way that creates value and that you can measure that, the simple act of assigning an owner, there has a huge impact. And there's a lot of. Follow on Domino's from that. I think, the other thing is providing the resource and a plan for change and adoption for this effort who the project team complete, at least 85% of the actions within to due dates, you can get very specific around what you're going to.

Get the executive pretend at least two TBRS and be an escalation point for issues. There's a lot of things like that, that you could do that. Oh, if you would take these steps in so many times, because half of my business is also working with buyers of software to help them drive adoption internally that's such a great piece, but one of the things that always comes over as the executive site I'll do whatever it takes to be successful.

No one's ever told me what that is. And don't ask me to, do you know what. But I think it was also then having them set adoption goals within the organization as well, too. So incurring the all data's loaded within a required timeframe. I have several customer success teams come and they say, we get the system live or we get the system largely integrated, but then we have to wait weeks or months even to get the data from the customer for them to start using.

You're saying it's been six months and they're not going to renew. They haven't gone live by what they, so putting some things around those and know, then there's also looking at things like, do we have the right number of logins and transactions in the system by a certain due date? Are we using the right modules that are going to create value or we have the right people using it.

But I think there's a lot of tool specific things that you can come up with as well too. But one of the

[00:12:09] Jason Noble: things come to mind. I liked the idea of, and these are all it's trying to define those triggers to that action. So it's this kind of call to action. And I really like this cause it, this is when we're looking at what we want our customers to do to hit their success goals, how they can do it.

And even if we look at tools that we use, but having those triggers that then say this is what you should do. And we can apply that to this as well. And I think it's so applicable to this. I was going to say, I think this is the key with this as well. Is this around behavior? What were we talked about?

Ideal customer profile on a previous episode as well. And I think that the big difference here is your ideal customer profile talks about who is a description of what they are today. This is who your organizations are, who your customers are. What we're doing here is talking about how they need to act to achieve success.

And this could be individually. This could be groups of people. This could be companies. So this talks about what they need to do and how they're actually going to need to do it. And I think that's the key differentiator here,

[00:13:13] Jason Whitehead: I think you're absolutely right. And it's also different ideal customer profile that's a marketing and a sales focus issue like, oh, target these people.

This is what they might look like. But then even you might have five companies that, that fit your ideal customer profile in terms of size industry. But then when you start to engage with them and the first thing, oh who's going up for meeting. Who's getting these deadlines who are doing those things.

You might have huge differences and the likelihood of any, one of those being successful will change in the cost of service, going to be very different. So I think part of this is even mapping. This is what we said earlier during the sales and marketing process. So how can you identify and try to influence.

Pre-sales behaviors, for pre-purchase behaviors to really assess and analyze is this person, or is this company going to take the actions required to be successful for them and for us, and you can structure these engagements, pre sales and. We'll give you some pretty good indicators that you can influence the actions they want, but this is a very different way of

[00:14:11] Jason Noble: thinking.

Yeah, I think that's the big thing here is this is a different way of thinking and it is, you've got to acknowledge this, make a note of it, identify on the map, what do we want these people to do and how do we, our customers and how do we help them on that journey? And what do we do when there are issues and gaps and we have to correct it.

I think that's important to do that. And this is why. I think calling out the distinction between this as a behavior, what they need to do to achieve success is so different to what this ideal customer profile that we talk about normally.

[00:14:43] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. And it's a big, I think, if you not a lot of sales folks, I imagine right now we're talking about what are the actions that my customers need to demonstrate today to, to show that they will be successful tomorrow.

And how does. Request those analyze if they're doing them or not. And I think if you can get there, but it will be a bit of a heavy lift for them. I think one of the things that would be interesting there, who is during the sales process, having the salespeople, I should discuss with the customer here are the actions that you're going to need to take to be successful.

Moving forward in a very behavior-based approach and having a sort of mapped out, this is what successful behaviors look like. This is what's this festival look like for. And be able to effectively evaluate their ability and motivation to do that. And will they do that? And how, what are some of the proof points we can have with that?

And then really identify who's going to be able to get there and who won't. And it's a different way of thinking. I think it's cool. Let's shifting gears a little bit. Jason, tell me, how do you think we could incorporate this idea of ideal customer behavior into customer personas?

What does that look like?

[00:15:45] Jason Noble: I think that's a really interesting question that I think many personas today that we look at are focused on buying behavior with our customers and they don't take into account what the customer will do after the purchase is complete. So it's about. And if we do, we look up and our cost recently on this, but you look at customer personas from a buying point of view, how do we start that engagement with them, but not what they do after this issue, where the behavior comes in.

And I think you really need to incorporate it to incorporate into your personas, the experience the individual has in leading change, adoption success with technology. How do they do. Have they had great success elsewhere before getting technology and services implemented and have they used it to create value?

Have they never done anything like this? Are they responsive and open to taking actions internally to drive adoption success? Do they think it will just happen? And a lot of this does go to change management. You've got to walk them through this path as to how they do it. And I think it's really important to include.

The actual personas behavior, Allah, and the anticipated behavior into your personas and look at how it can shift your engagement with your customers throughout the life cycle. So how do you need to change how you are engaging with new customers throughout that life cycle? And again, that's something that I don't think we think about.

You know how you're engaging with them at the outset when you've got the initial launch, even on the sales process versus how you engage with them on a renew or when there's a, an issue with support. When there's escalation, that's got to be very different. I think that's really important to remember that.

I think, some good examples here. If you look at, you can have conversations with customers that difficult conversations. Really struggle to lead technology adoption in their organization. If they can't do it. And you can have really challenging conversations as to what, why they're doing it. But what you need to do is really help them understand what happened.

When their organization can do this, what are the steps to take to help them achieve success? That, that I think is a really key thing is to walk them through that process. Or even if you've got a customer that takes a perspective, like people just have no choice when it comes to using it. But that again, the worst case there is it piss people off.

The don't want to do it. They want to be, why am I doing this? Why do I need to make this change? Why should I change? Why should I change my behavior? I think by incorporating these behavioral aspects into the personas you're looking at and expanding that persona from just being about buyers, you can drive a rule a lot more from this and really engaged with your customers better.

And I think you could also start looking. Being able to forecast the likelihood of them being able to achieve value quickly, so that time to value. But then also how likely are they to renew? How likely are they to grow and expand? And I think you need to adjust your behavior and efforts accordingly when you're having these conversations.

And I think this difference of how you engage with your customers and how their behavior looks is a really critical thing. But let me ask a question to you then, Jason. In practical terms. What does this really mean? How do we do this? What do we need to do? Definitely you've given some great insights and ideas, but on a real practical level, how would we implement looking at ideal customer

[00:19:16] Jason Whitehead: behavior?

Yeah. Cause it always comes down to that too. And before I jumped into the answer for that, one of the things has always used to come up with the user adoption clients that I've had is I would ask them the question. If you had to put in place a user adoption project plan from the point of go live out for five years into the future, could you do.

That specific actions that you should be putting in there and the resources that you're going to be to how to say this is what it's going to take to, to drive and sustain effective adoption over the longterm. And the answer is most people don't. And I think very similar to this concept of ideal customer behavior might be doing things really.

Some people could probably do it a little bit more, and then a lot of people will need help going through this process. But I think that the five step process, I think the first one. It's to really identify what are the desired behaviors that your customers need to take in their organization? Not in the organization.

We drive success on there because, ultimately it's the customer's not successful. We're not successful as a vendor. So this can look at things like what are the actions the customers need to take, but engaging in your organization, like returning calls, attending to BRS, completing action items on time, providing the data, all of those things that we talked about already at an organizational level, So that's what they need to do when interacting with your organization as the vendor, but then also what are the actions they need to take us by their own organization to chiefs.

And this is things like providing the required resources, driving change in adoption, ensuring systems are used on a daily basis. We actually had one client that part of what we had to do with them is get them to agree, to put other projects on hold, to take work off of people's plates. So they had the capacity to do what they needed.

And that was a required action. They had to take in their organization to really drive for success. I think, as part of this process to identify the team, to have expertise in adoption programs. So you'd have ideas around what are the specific actions that, that can most customers take to be successful.

And what are the commonalities then that you can ask for all the way through? So that's really step one is, what are the actions in the perfect world a customer would think in their organization and with us that the trucks. Oh, you have other stuff thrown out before I go

[00:21:17] Jason Noble: on. Hi. Yeah, I think I, not on that, but another thing I'd look at is, another key step what's the next one on, I think is how do you map out, look at how you map out how you're going to incentivize these behaviors?

I think that's really key. You talked about it earlier on. But what are we trying to reward? How do we want to incentivize the right behaviors? And you can look at financial awards and non-financial awards. You can look at company awards for customers. You can look at individual rewards as well.

And I think what you should try and do though, is combined into buckets, get to combine these rewards into buckets that really show, or even the kind of actions into buckets that show all the required actions to achieve. Given a certain reward package. And I think that's really key. So it's like a tiered approach to it.

I think the key thing with all of this though, is any incentivization you do is keep it simple, start small, test something, iterate, be agile around it and make sure that it's achievable. And I think we've got to look at not overwhelming our customers, not upsetting them, not taking too much of their time, but making this to be.

A natural piece of how they work and how they flow together. And that for me is the biggest challenge. You changing behavior is difficult. I, and if you can do it in small steps, easy steps, it becomes. More natural transition. So it becomes a natural habit for our customers. So the more complex you make it, and the bigger overload it becomes is really difficult.

And I think that can really throw things off. The other thing I'd look at as well as how do you determine how to track your customer actions and which ones. You should reward it, incentivize, how do you find the right words to do that? I think there are plenty of ways of doing this.

We've done previously using a standard CRM tool. You could look at customer success platforms, customer success management platforms. There are other ways of doing this behavior as part of the journeys and the steps there. And I think that's really key. I think the other key thing I'd say is you need to make sure that you want to map.

[00:23:17] Jason Whitehead: Before you go on the I think one of the things too, that you said that made me think was the incentivize and rewards and behaviors piece, an example of that came to mind and I talked with a former client about this was how would you do things such as in order to qualify for this discount, either out of renewal or for your second progress payment or something?

That you've completed these critical tasks in the first 90 days. And then you may have these infections objectives within 90 days. And she was saying, oh, I was thinking the other way of, you have a free resource, a CS resource for 90 days, and then we would start to have to charge you for that resource, as opposed to you get the resource.

But we're going to discount you if you achieve these goals within that timeframe. So I think there's a lot of opportunities there.

[00:24:01] Jason Noble: I think there is you're right. It's looking at it, as you said, package it up, build these buckets as to how you do it. And I think that's the key thing. And there are lots of ways of doing this and, you ultimately want your customers to see the end game.

Where is it we're trying to get to and what. What's in it for them, why should they change their behavior? And that's the really key thing. This has to be beneficial for them as well. And I think that's the important thing to highlight and

[00:24:25] Jason Whitehead: relate that to was the idea of, having some incentives and rewards for the company, like the discount on our licenses.

If we do X, Y, and Z, by this timeframe, we're going to prioritize and make sure our teams do that. But also for the individual. So I know of another organization they were sharing. If certain, if a T users or administrators just on tasks by a certain date, they would give them pre access to a certification course or a training course that would help them in their individual careers.

Or there might be a here's you get an invite to our conference or a discount on the conference or something like that. So I think for a lot of organizations, you can get very creative with what are the behaviors that you want to incentivize to reward, but you have to think differently about it and really understand the audience.

Not just what's important from what's in it, for me, it was important to me, w what's going to motivate me what are rewards that are going to stick. So that was just, something came out. And then you covered step three, which was the determine how to track customer

[00:25:19] Jason Noble: actions from that.

I think the, the other kind of steps falling on for this. You just go through these quickly, I think step four, mapping to the customer journey, we've talked about your ideal customer profile customer journey, map that behavior to. What do you want customers to do during the sales phase, during onboarding and after make sure your playbooks are adjusted your messages, really, to help customers do this and build these behaviors and rewards into your success plans.

You said that earlier, how do you change it so that they renew within 90 days? Build that into your playbook, build that into your success plans. And I think that's really what you can do. It's the first time you're doing this, run a test, pick some select customers, run a pilot, see how it works.

I think the other kind of step five is really about how you manage internal change in your, as the vendor, the partner, your organization, to ensure that all of your teams, customer success, onboarding sales, everybody's aligned around how we manage our customers, how we help our customers. And you may need to change some of our incentive plans into.

We may need to train people, train our teams and having the right discussions to explain why these are being changed. But it's important to look that, we're looking at our customer's changing behavior. There are changes that we need to do.

[00:26:36] Jason Whitehead: You I'd like that too. Cause when I talk with sales folks all the time salespeople work there they're complex and they worked there in some structure and you want to change where they spend their time and effort.

That's how you do it. And I think there's a lot to be said for that. And imagine what a different process it would look like. Pre-sales if your field folks were saying to your prospects, here's the price for what this is, but if you can do these three steps, completed, within the first 90 days, We will not to give you a refund, give you a discount on your second payment, equal to X.

So you've got to get the stuff done them first 90 days, if you'll even 91 days over, you don't qualify for that incentive rebate. But then that's one conversation they should be having upfront that, oh, here's how I can make this, T risk is for us and for our customer and lower the price for them.

But then I think the blended piece that you touched on. Now adjust the sales person's compensation, where they're part of their commission is their customers achieving this 90 day mark or whatever day it needs to be. So if the sales folks haven't set the right expectations with the customer about the value of getting something done in this timeframe or the sales folks haven't reinforced with their customer, these are the behaviors that make them successful or make the customers.

The salesperson should be considered as a couple in their jobs. So just there their

[00:27:48] Jason Noble: stuff before I think it is you just got to get it all right. I think that mapping this out is the right way to do this. Cause it can be very complex, and you've got to start small. Test to right.

Try that again, pick some customers, but let me ask you a question about GGS. If there's a gap between ideal customer behavior and actual customer behavior, what do we do? How do we.

[00:28:14] Jason Whitehead: That's always the same one. Again, coming back to, with our kids about what you would want it to happen in a certain situation, then something completely different happens.

I think part of this though, is that you need to really establish those relationships with your customers. From the very beginning that you can talk about behaviors, you can talk about actual results in the behaviors you've observed and having those conversations. I think for a lot of CS folks that they get very uncomfortable.

Conversation. If the customer hasn't been doing what they agreed or they perceive it to be uncomfortable. Immuno my response usually is there are no uncomfortable conversations. Once you become comfortable having a direct conversation, we're all adults here. Let's just talk

[00:28:52] Jason Noble: about it.

Absolutely.

[00:28:54] Jason Whitehead: Here's what it's going to take to get to. Be successful. Here are the, here's how we provided align boards and pillar my during the initial meetings. And if we missed these, here's what you can expect from me. Here's my behavior is going to be, I'm going to be very direct with you that you did that.

The Mark's going to ask you what happened in your organization that prevented you from doing so I'm going to ask you what you need from us to get back on. And then I'm going to ask you for that behavior. And I'll just highlight for you the rewards that you're eligible for going forward. If you do X, Y, and Z.

And also that you're not like, Hey, in some cases here's where I'm required to escalate this issue up in your organization as part of our agreement with your leadership in your organization. So here's what it needs to look like. But I think there's also. Ask them for the behavior that you want, because you want to strain psychology in school.

That was also just a key piece. This is a behavior I'd like you to do to commit to this by this date, deliver. Here's what it looks like. That smart whole piece, I think you need to be prepared and by telling the customer before the behaviors occur, what they can expect to happen when it does occur, you make it easier for them.

They're not as defensive about the situation and it makes it easier for you to say, Hey, remember when I. What we're here now. Here's what it looks like, but let's fix this problem together. Okay. But let me throw over to you then. So with all of this in mind what does all this mean for a CST and what do they do with all that we

[00:30:12] Jason Noble: talked about?

I think that's such a great question. Isn't it? Cause you've, is this something we haven't thought about? Are we doing something wrong? Does this, over-complicate what we're doing? And for me this doesn't just apply to a CS team. It applies much wider, but I think. Th the key message to this is we've got to be conscious of this.

Be conscious of customer behavior and what we want our customers to do, how they can do it, how we can help influence them. I, and it's really being aware of ideal customer behavior throughout the journey throughout the life cycle, all the way from sales and prospecting through to renewal. It's have your team be conscious of this.

And it's another thing that we've got as part of our tool set that we can help our customers. Yeah, I think you need to focus on the behavior to try and take a step back from it, understand what the behaviors and how it differs from the ideal customer behavior you're looking for, and then identify those actions that we can take to influence it.

And I think this is really key that ability to step back and be aware of this is very important. And quite often you can get caught up in the emotion in the moment rather, and get distracted from this. And I think if we're aware of. What the ideal behavior is from our customers. And we understand that we've got it written down and then we can see and document what their actual behaviors look.

We can start to understand why there's a gap, why this is happening. And then through some of those methods we talked about earlier on, we can help influencing the situation, change that behavior. And that's the key thing. So I think a lot of this is about that understanding and acceptance that this is something that we need to be conscious.

Understanding that we can influence behavior here, that we can get our customers to move to this ideal customer behavior and why they should move to it. I, and then understanding what we need to do that. I think for me, those are the really key things, but like I said, This really doesn't apply just to your CS team.

It applies to all of your business. Imagine a support team. You imagine a customer is phoning up. They're going to be angry, upset. Something's not working. Understand that behavior, preempt that behavior and start getting them to where do I want them to go to what might expect them to behave and how can I change that behavior?

Those for me are really the key thing.

[00:32:30] Jason Whitehead: I like those a lot. And I agree wholeheartedly. I used to disagree in organization development and a lot of that was rotation of patients pills. And the big thing always there was this quote, use yourself as a facilitator. And how do you come in and be a change agent?

I think part of that was recognizing the actions and behaviors and dynamics of the group and the individuals that you're working with. But then also being able to just take a step back and be aware of your own behavior and how you're showing up in influence. And when I think about customer success teams, I think this is a really big lift for some folks and especially folks who are more in the I don't know, more of the transactional elements of customer success, as opposed to the I'm a behavior driver.

I'm a facilitator, I'm a leader of change for my clients. It's a different piece I think. And it's going to help a lot of folks be more effective to take that step back. I think also related to that is. And as a consultant, I see this all the time. There are some clients or some individuals where I'm not the right person for whatever reason, it's the personality clash, or we just have different orientations with.

It can recognize pretty quickly. I'm not going to be the one who's going to be able to influence this person. So either I need to find someone else who can do it in my organization or my client's organization, or I just need to take a step back. How can I think as a customer success professional, once you've built your skills, where you can influence behavior of most of your customers, then making sure that you have the room and the grace to step back and say, I'm the wrong person in this situation.

You need to get your phone. Who's going to get the right person. Anyway, those are there a lot of the things that come to my mind, I think this has been a really great conversation. We've talked about a lot of stuff here from a process for doing this and why you need to talk to them about incentive and rewards, any last thoughts about ideal customer behavior and how you'd like to see it moving forward in this together.

[00:34:15] Jason Noble: I, yeah, I think for me, one of the key things is I think, first of all, that, that acceptance and understanding that we've got to start looking at this, particularly as customers' organizations are dealing with more services, more products, we've got, we've just come out of the pandemic, that's going to affect behavior.

People are very, more wary about things like this. We've got other external events. There's the whole economic situation that we're seeing right now. And that understanding that how other things can impact behavior. Understanding what they're doing is really key. And I think this conversation just gives people another tool set as to how to handle this and just be conscious about that.

And it is, every human being that you do with that behavior is coming from somewhere. Either they're trying to get somewhere, they're trying to avoid. I, and it's trying to understand that and what we can do to navigate that. And I think it's a fascinating subject. I really do.

I think we would probably need a qualified psychologist next time to talk to us, but I think it really is. It really is a great conversation. I, and there's so much from it and I, as we saw with the psychology of customers, I reckon we could easily do another one on the next step from the.

Let me ask the bowl question and JC you skipped it. I skipped at the beginning. You reminded me. Thank you for that. Just a reminder for our listeners. What we always like to do is do a bowl question just to have you think about what bold actions you could take to really help this.

So the one for today is one of the bold actions that you could take throughout the entire customer journey. So not just any CS part, but the OCS team part that the whole customer journey, including sales. That helps shape and drive ideal customer behavior. So have a think about that. We'd love comments.

Feel free to comment on the podcast. Feel free to send us a message, but let us know again what are the steps and actions that you can take to help shape and drive our teal customer behavior throughout the ideal, the entire customer journey. We'd love your thoughts on that guys. A big, thank you, Jason Noble here in London.

Thank you very much. Really enjoy the conference.

[00:36:18] Jason Whitehead: Don't chase somebody down here in DC. Thank you so much. We really appreciate you listening and hope. They'll turn them against you. Thank you so much. Bye

bye.

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Episode Description Join us with guest Ben Winn, brand and community manager at Catalyst Software and one of the leading customer success community and thought leaders.

Catalyst is the world's most intuitive Customer Success Platform (CSP), built by an experienced group of industry leaders and integrates with multiple enterprise platforms to provide one centralized view of customer data. Ben specializes in branding, community-led growth, and creative strategy.

Guest: Ben Winn Ben Winn leads community and brand marketing at Catalyst Software, where he oversees content, events, partnerships, and more. Before founding CS in Focus, Ben previously built out the customer success function at SeamlessMD, Canada's largest customer success community with over 2000 members.

In 2021 he was ranked as one of the Top 25 Customer Success Strategists globally, and in 2018, he won the Customer Success Innovator of the Year award for creating the account behavior formula.

CONTACT BEN WINN

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benwinn/
Catalyst: https://catalyst.io/

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's take on podcast with myself. Jason Noble here in London in the week running up to Easter. I cannot believe it's Easter already. My partner in crime, Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.

[00:00:14] Jason Whitehead: Hello everyone.

[00:00:15] Jason Noble: Thanks for joining us today.

We are super excited today for a another guest podcast today, a very different topic, something that is big in the world of customer success. I don't think we've even broached the subject in previous conversations, Jason, with guests or with ourselves something that we've not even covered. We're going to talk about the importance of on the rise of communities in customer success.

And we have the one and only Ben wind joining us from Catholic software. So Ben I'm sure most of you know him from the customer success committee. He's brand the community channel manager, a catalyst software is a data-driven marketing strategists with a background in customer success. And community-building with specialists specialties around community led growth strategy around creativity, marketing led creative.

He's the manager of events and community catalysts. He also hosts the humans of SAS podcast. So he's a pro when it comes to podcasts, we were talking about his setup for podcasts versus our own. And we were feeling a little bit embarrassed not embarrassed, but I think he, Ben seen better ways of doing this.

So there's lots of areas of improvement for us.

[00:01:22] Ben Winn: He's also the goal coming on today was to show you up some, and

[00:01:27] Jason Noble: you've done that. So you've done that, but he's also founded previously customer success in focus, which is an international community. And he really is a fellow customer success thought leader and QC leader.

And he's also the head of production for Anthony Brocco. I understand. So Ben, please go ahead and introduce yourself a big, welcome. We're super excited to have you on with us. Most of our listeners will know new, but for those that don't just give a bit of insight into kind of your own background and your journey into communities and customers.

[00:01:58] Ben Winn: Yeah, thanks. First and foremost for having me on I've loved your show for a while. You guys are fantastic. Covered a lot of amazing CS content. So I enjoy pointing people your way when they're looking for great CS podcasts, but yeah, I think you summed up a lot of my background while there I came from a customer success background.

I was the first CSM. And CS leader at a health tech company called seamless MD for quite a few years before founding CS and focus, which is now 2000 people Canada's largest customer success community. And then when I started expanding it into the states, that's where I met catalyst founders.

And they were like, Hey, instead of, doing this as, Your evenings and weekends job for no money. Why don't you make this your full-time job? And, we'll give you a team and, just build a CS community for us. And jumped at the opportunity to move to New York and build community for the customer success community full time.

And then

[00:02:47] Jason Noble: difficult to say yes to that was an absolutely jumped. The.

[00:02:51] Ben Winn: Yeah, Kevin to our CIO is very convincing. He's a very good salesperson and they've made good on it. Like I've been very lucky at catalyst that it wasn't just lip service because we were moving countries. So I was banking on them actually being honest and through COVID and through all these challenges.

Cause I was hired two months before the pandemic. They've stayed really true to being community centric, community focused, investing in community believing in community life growth. So it's been an awesome journey. I

[00:03:19] Jason Noble: actually remember, I think I've listened. I have listened to one of the podcasts you did with Kevin on talking about your journey.

And I remember it was the beginning of COVID. I can pitch myself now. I was walking home from a session at a physiotherapist coming back and I was listening to it. It's phenomenal. Really good. I think Ben you're one of the leading thinkers and advocates for communities and there's some great work that you've done at capitalist and elsewhere.

Why a community is so important now and why.

[00:03:47] Ben Winn: Community is just customer success at scale. When you think about it like in customer success, your whole job is to, you've got your customer, you identify their desired outcomes, then you build everything around, helping them to achieve their desired outcomes.

Like it's a very simple definition, but at the end of the day, that's what good. Community is just that at scale you identify who is in your communities and CSM doesn't see us leaders is that everybody is it. CS leaders in FinTech is that you can get as broad or as niche as you want. But at the end of the day to build a successful community, you need to understand who.

Target community members are what they're looking to accomplish. And then it's your job as the community builder to then give them what they need to succeed, which can be a variety of things, but that's why it can be used for customer success so well, because it allows you to scale and do you know, tech touch programs that allows you to give customers a place where they can help each other, where they can meet each other, sell from each other, buy from each other.

Learn how learn, how they're leveraging your product. There's a lot of use cases in community for customer success, as well as community for marketing, which is a whole other side of the equation.

[00:04:53] Jason Noble: I think one of the key things they do, they bring kind of advocacy to life. Don't, they it's really those engaging with customers.

And in your experience, when you start a community from a blank sheet of paper, whether there is no existing community, how do you go about setting one up and what are some of the key lessons that you've learned along the way?

[00:05:12] Ben Winn: Similar to think of it as launching a product discovery is probably the most critical thing that you can do.

So start off by talking to think of the hypothesizing about your ICP and then interviewing a crap load of people that fit that profile. Figure out what is keeping them up. What they're working on, solving how they're trying to solve it, where else they're going now, what other communities they might be in?

When I joined catalyst, the, I already knew there were like eight other communities for CS leaders out there. So why would I be like, okay, I'm going to start a night slack team. No, it doesn't make any sense. So instead after all my interviews, we ended up launching the co the coaching corner, which is a free mentorship program for customer success professionals, because that was a gap in the market.

That solved problems that people in our ICP we're actively. Thinking about. And so that's the, I think first and foremost, the most important thing to do when you're thinking about launching a community from scratch, it needs to fill a gap. It needs to solve problems for people in your ICP. And then, Val, as you go from there and make sure you're validating with an early group of advocates and users to be your founding community team.

[00:06:17] Jason Whitehead: You know that it's great to hear that too. And you've described it to a crap ton of work to go on and do all that. Realistically, if a SAS vendor out there wants to create a community assumingly around their product or for some their, for their user base or user population, there may be some other industry ones that are maybe very specific to them.

What level of effort will realistically. Create something that be useful and meaningful to their customers as well as helped create the relationship and engagement that they're looking for.

[00:06:47] Ben Winn: There, there are definitely variations here, but I'd say a standard, a general rule of thumb is one person's full time.

I think like a lot of companies, I think I'm a big mistake. A lot of companies make is they make it a third of one person's job and great. You're going to have one third of, a community and it's going to exist, but it doesn't scale that way where, okay, we'll get one third of the results and if it's good, then we'll invest more and we're going to have what half the result like with community it's either you do it right.

Or you don't do it at all. At least it's the best practice. Because when you launch a commuter. You're running a lot of risks. Some of the biggest worries that SAS vendors have is that other customers are going to just start shitting on the product and start saying, build this feature or why isn't this way, or this is broken and they'll all just pile on line.

Or that it'll just be a barren wasteland, right? You've spent $30,000 on a community platform, built it out, customized it hooked up SSL. And you have one person posting in there every month and that's it. So again, there, there needs to be someone who is owning it end to end. In terms of the inception creation project, managing the design who's fostering activity who is making sure continuously that it drives value.

And it's not hard to prove out the ROI. Even if you look at simple things like ticket deflection customer advocacy, like you going to touch some numbers pretty quickly to that, but it's definitely a mistake to have launching a community B a third of one person's job.

[00:08:15] Jason Noble: I think it's very similar to a lot of key functions in it.

A lot of people going into customer success, operations. You just do that. It's that focus. I think that focus sends a very different message to customers, to people in the community. Actually, this we are doing. This is something very serious about how do you go about selling it then when you've built the community, how do you sell it to your customers?

And do you ever run into challenges where they see themselves competing with other customers, they may be up against their own competition. How do you get them? Both contributing actively?

[00:08:46] Ben Winn: And, we're lucky to be in an industry and a profession within that industry.

I should say where people are generally. Really good people like it. It's weird in customer success. Like people are just great. And it's funny because we've run. We ran a virtual summit last January and half the panels. I think it was something like half the panels had competitors on them. And we've done lots of round tables.

We've done. Our customer advisory board has direct competitors on it and we have everyone sign NDAs and they're sharing insights by. At the end of the day. And maybe we've just been lucky, but people just really like to help each other. And they're careful not to disclose anything that's like super confidential that would directly impact, but.

We've never had any issues with people being like, oh, I don't want to share something smart that our team is doing, because I know that this competitor also uses your product and I'm scared. They're going to see it. That's treating it like a zero sum game where everyone just loses and it really doesn't work out.

So fortunately, at least with customer success leaders, we've never had an issue where people were acting.

[00:09:53] Jason Noble: I think you've one of the key things is I think it is just the type of people, customer success, people are, it really is. And I think there's something very special, with our, about OSS, about someone else's success.

And I don't think you see communities, people sharing and wanting to share and take part in things as much as you're doing customer success.

[00:10:12] Ben Winn: Yeah. You guys are dedicating and have dedicated tons of time to just helping give people free advice and helping people level up in their careers. And that's something that is a trend across our industry, which is amazing, which is why CS communities in particular are so special.

Why UCS is such a special industry and why need to keep investing in.

[00:10:32] Jason Whitehead: So I'm curious as well, too, when you're launching a community entity one of the things that you found most effective for getting people to really want to participate and engage and keep coming back in that, and it relates to that as well as what sort of topics or content seem to be the most valuable to people.

Is it solving a technical issue? Is it something more strategic level or career related or something else? What about to be the best thing?

[00:10:56] Ben Winn: Yeah. A couple of questions in there. So I might divide it up into two because the first one around engagement is always tricky. I always say like engagement for the sake of engagement is not, and it's never good.

I would rather see my community be dad, or, how one person posting a week then having 10 gratuitous posts that mean nothing and provide no value. Which again, translates a lot from customer success. Thinking about approach.

It depends. As long as people are getting value engagement matters in, in that you want to drive up the amount of value, but there's a lot of metrics or benchmarks where people might say this is healthy or that's healthy, but it's really, those are really just vanity metrics are more maybe leading indicators in a best case scenario, right?

Like for example, we know as CS people, that product usage is super important, but. Depending on the person and the company, healthy product usage might look a little bit different depending on where you are. So it's the same thing with communities again, relating it back to, to to a product itself in terms of what people find most valuable.

That's really again, subjective depends on the company and the. With catalysts, a lot of the questions we get are, people want to customer because catalyst is so customizable in terms of the way you can build layouts and dashboards and configure playbooks and automations. People just want to learn from each other instead of reinventing the wheel.

They want to say, Hey, you've had all these great. Oh, braise and attentive and stack overflow and all these awesome people that are using your platform. Can we just do whatever they're doing instead of building stuff from scratch at ours. And obviously we can't just take their instance and give it, duplicate it for them, but we can definitely match them up so that they can learn and give them some resources on how they might think about it provided those companies are willing to share, but that's just one example.

There's communities I'm in that are mostly about. Technology or there's one a minute about like marketing operations, where it's people that are. Experimenting and trying new things and sharing insights, but a lot of it's at the end of the day, it comes back down to not recreate reinventing the wheel.

And then networking like customer success. Leadership network is like one of the great ones. Gaming will retain another fantastic one. And it's these places where you can come and network and you can put a problem out there. You can be like, Hey, VP of CS at this company, this is our problem. How have you solved it?

And generally you'll get a lot of great responses that are super helpful.

[00:13:15] Jason Noble: Did you ever think? I was just thinking, there are so many, there are already so many great customer success communities out there. Do you ever think we'll hit community fatigue? Are there other, too many? And how do you be actively?

Active in a good way in so many, is it difficult to do because I'm just thinking that there's lots that I've signed up for, but there's probably only a small number that I really actively contribute to have you thoughts around that, how you can help manage that. And,

[00:13:43] Ben Winn: yeah and it's something I've talked about with actually the leaders of a lot of UCS communities.

And I know they've talked with each other about, is everyone recognizes that a lot of this started when. Customer success was newer, right? So it was the fact that it was the customer success community was enough to be like, oh my God, so excited. I'm going to go join the talk about things.

Now we need a specialize because ultimately what will keep your community growing over time is your niche. So for example now I'm no longer running CS and focus, but it has a Nisha. Like the only, and the largest one in Canada. So if you're in the Canadian customer success space, like that is the best community for you to be in.

If you're looking to like network and meet other people like Canadian tech companies. With modern CS pros, for example, fantastic one. You have to be a CS leader to be in there and they generally hold very true to that. And so when you send a message in there, it's going to CS leaders and there's is a Google group.

So it's a little bit different. Some of the others, again, the differentiation is breakout CS run by Leah Cheney is a great one. And that's like focused on being very small and niche. Like she keeps it very limited and has a different approach to building it. So at the end of the day, To prevent community fatigue.

What we need are more niches for those to be very clearly established so that we can engage and know exactly where like for example, I'm in, I think three different community builder slacks. I know one I'll go to, if it's Canadian community builders one is Networking and I get matched with people sort of one-on-one if I want to build my network that way and one is great for like just massive library of resources that I can find anything and everything about community.

So again, it's just carving out those niches and then marketing your community in that way.

[00:15:29] Jason Noble: I love that. I think that is something that is so key and you're so right. That to start with, it was everything. Was everything. Whereas now there are the specialisms are all these, this needs look at different areas of focus like that is what will keep people interested and that, that has to evolve and change over time as well.

[00:15:46] Ben Winn: But it's different with a user group, right? Cause in that case, what they have an example, sorry, what they have in common is your product. So it's still good to think about niches, right? So everyone using slack, whatever could be in a community to talk about the best ways to do SOC, but then within that community, you'll still want to think.

How to carve out niches and how to separate people into geographies, industries maturity, a company size goals, right? There's all those ways you can stratify your community. So w

[00:16:16] Jason Whitehead: when you're launching community in if you're a tech vendor as well, what sort of things would you need to do to drive internal alignment to make sure, okay.

There's something the community for the support group for marketing, for customer success, and to make sure people are effectively. Directing customers to the community the right time versus this is something we should handle internally. How did, how do you make it all? How do you make it all

[00:16:35] Ben Winn: gel together?

It's a good question. Launching a community is definitely a cross-functional endeavor. You need to align on at least for V1, what your core metrics that you're hoping to move are. For example, ticket deflection is a very common one. So we'll keep with that for the time being, cause it's a very simple example to, to prove out.

So for that general, what I would say best practice is you have single sign on with your community, for your. Or through your platform or whatever, what have you, people can access it and then very quickly search the way they would Zendesk or hopefully your community integrates would send us for help scout or whatever your ticketing tool is.

For example, our community that we launched w scraped anything existing in the community, as well as the help desk. So you very quickly see if anyone had asked a similar question or talked about a similar topic, if not then it would prompt you to create your own posts. In which case you could do that.

And then the way we hooked it up was that when someone created a post like that, it would go to a slack channel that had multiple members. From our team. So at CSN, it had marketing in it. And that way we could quickly collaborate and see, okay, is this something where we should escalate it to Zendesk?

In which case we had looked like a one-click integration to turn it into a support ticket or do we let it rest? And what we would do as our policy was let it rest for 48 hours. And if it didn't get any. Or it didn't get answered in the best way. Then we would have someone from our team chime in and the community or we escalated designed us, but we always wanted to make sure that we were giving other customers the chance to ought to answer each other first.

And we would also do things like, Hey, we know this person from this company solved this. So we would send them the link to the community and to the post of the community and say, Hey, this person has this question. We know you did this before really well. Do you mind chiming in on what you found most useful or how you did that?

Oh,

[00:18:24] Jason Whitehead: wow. I'd like to being that librarian and coordinator of people

[00:18:28] Ben Winn: inviting them in. Yeah. Yeah. You always want to stimulate engagement as much as possible. There's also a way I can't remember which community it was, but it was a good trip. I think it was Jeff from Gainesville retainer told me another strategy is to when you want to post in the community.

A lot of times, what you'll see is like the same people posting all the time. So a strategy for that is to email people and ask them, what is your or email small group of people and ask them what they're trying to solve right now, or what challenges they're trying to overcome. And then when they email you back, you said, can I post this as you in our community?

I'm just going to copy this text and put it in, and then you can spoof them and post as them with. It was honest. I think it's like gray area, but I think it works because now someone else is posting. They're getting a benefit because they didn't have to do the work to log into the community and write up a post and share it.

You're doing that for them, but then they're going to get some helpful responses now. And you benefit as the community owner because you have diverse now people you've like you've widened the people that are engaging in your. I love that

[00:19:32] Jason Noble: I've actually seen me gain grow, retain that they do that. I'm going out an email the other day from Jeff.

Exactly like that. And you think, oh, and it does, it makes you want to respond, but it's very clever. I think it really is very

[00:19:41] Ben Winn: clever. I still, everything clever half of it comes from,

[00:19:48] Jason Whitehead: obviously this would apply to your communities. Cause it sounds like you've done a hell of a job. Moving them along and growing and being thoughtful about that. But from other communities you've seen or participated in, or who've spoken to folks, is there a time when it's time to shut this community down because it's hurting our brand, it's disappointing our customers.

It's not delivering on the vision. And how would you recognize that? Or advise them on, stick a stick with support, stick

[00:20:12] Ben Winn: with something else for now. Yeah. Community is it's. The comparison that comes to mind is four-day workweek. Once you've let that genie out of the bottle, it's very hard to put it back in.

People are not going to be like, okay, four day, didn't go so well. So we're all going to go back to five days. Sorry. So community is a very similar, the same way. Like you can not. If you're a, if it's a customer community. So I think, the out there public ones that you created a passion project.

I think those, you can wind down if you're not getting the value and it's just taking up too much time and money to run. I think you can just send an email to that effect and people will be very understanding. If it's a, if it's a customer one and it's, because it's hurting your brand or something like that's a problem.

In that case, it's time to do a relaunch. But again, that goes why that goes back to why it's important to have one person where this is their job is to own the success of the community and achieve these established outcomes. And if they're not achieving them, why are they not achieving them?

What is needed? Figure out how we can intervene, recognize leading indicators of why it might be going this way. Do you need more moderation? If everyone's just coming in with feature requests and complaints about the product, maybe you need more moderation. Maybe you need to redesign the community so that they have a specific outlet where those go.

Maybe you need to change the format where maybe they're not putting in. Feature, suggestions or feature requests, but you're promoting in your product roadmap for, 20, 23. And they're just prioritizing and doing that as a group without votes and downloads. Like you can get creative, but it's about figuring out each problem as it comes along.

And at the end of the day is it accomplishing what you intended to? I think it's pretty extreme to shut it down altogether. Cause that just sends a horrible message. That's like people saying. Nope, no political talk at work, right? Okay, sounds good. It doesn't work like you can't people are people they're going to talk about things.

If you just shut down or even a D ongoing debates about Twitter and Elon Musk and all of the free speech on Twitter, right? If you're shut down, if people are commenting and your community, all these horrible things about your product. If you close that down, they're just going to go to somewhere else and you better run as they're going to go to G2, or they're going to go to glass door, they're going to go to wherever you don't want them to go.

So better it happened in your space and that you moderate it. Then when it happened in the wild without. But

[00:22:24] Jason Noble: it's also, that, it's the voice of the customer. You've got the opportunity to really listen to what the real voice of the customer is saying and do something with it.

And I think a lot of people quite often are scared of that. What are they really going to say and how to ensure away from it? Do you ever run into challenges where you start building communities and then you get pushback from the stakeholders or the companies that said they want us to do it where they're saying we're on, actually, this doesn't make sense.

And they shy away

[00:22:48] Ben Winn: from it.

I definitely get some of the fear around is it going to be well moderated? Are people going to comment negative things? What if someone posts a question and we don't take action on it, what's our liability. In terms of SLS and support time and all that kind of stuff, those things come up, those are all valid.

And they need to be have, thought out responses, but It's nothing that should deter launching a community at all. Generally the biggest deterrent is just when I really hammer home, the resources required to launch and run a successful community. They're just like we either don't have budget to dedicate one person, hire one person specifically to build and run all this, done a budget for a community platform.

So we're going to hold off until we can do that. Okay. So actually along those.

[00:23:34] Jason Whitehead: When is the right time for a SAS vendor to launch a community of some nature. And how should they prioritize that versus things such as investing support or CS ops or CSMs, what do you think of the trigger points there?

[00:23:47] Ben Winn: You can start a community before your product is even alive. I think it just depends on what your outcomes are going for. You can also start a community late. Like I, I will give an example of each Josh Schachter, who is the founder of update AI, which is based out of New York. Like a pill he'll cringe at me for saying this, but simplified terms, gong for customer success.

So check out update AI, but he has been doing in-person meetups. The last few months he invites people and always says some special guests great food drinks. And just those, I think, to start building out that community of people that are advisors that are going to be future customers that are just customer success leaders in New York.

Great Mike in his community will evolve and change over time as his products rose. And, but he just came to market. He's very early on, but he launched this extremely early this community in New York on the other end he is a customer great customer catalyst. They just launched their customer community a couple of weeks ago.

It's beautiful. If you're in product or in data, definitely check out the heat community. Most of it I think is open to the public and there, A massive, I think series C company hugely successful and they could have launched community earlier. Sure. But they now is the right time with their resources and they've done a great job of it and they're already getting some great early results, some interesting early data.

I always say the earlier the better, but I know that's a cop-out cause we always say the same thing about customer success. Like when should you hire. So be your first hire. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. But I would say the earlier the better, but you could really do it at any stage, so it's, as soon as you can spare the resources, I would say it'll do nothing except accelerate either your pipeline.

If you're looking to leverage community for marketing purposes or your customer success outcomes. If you're looking for community for customer advocacy, customer advisory, board, user groups retention, ticket, affection.

[00:25:35] Jason Noble: W what do you see the future of community? So if we look five years out what does it look like?

Do you see this, something being even bigger than it is today? Every SAS organization, every product has it built in? What are your thoughts around this?

[00:25:49] Ben Winn: Yeah. I definitely think that. It all depends because community is really broad, but I think when we're speaking about customer communities yeah, I think every organization every, forward-looking, cause even now it's only a small portion that do.

But I do think in five years it will be very much the norm that. SaaS organization we'll have a customer community. We'll have a dedicated customer, community manager if not multiple. And that will sit within customer advocacy customer experience, and it will be the same group that's responsible for managing customer community.

That's also doing customer advisory boards. That's also doing user groups, Tulsa doing research that's basically managing. Yeah the community side of your customers. And ultimately we didn't talk about it, but that's one of the biggest impacts of stickiness, right? Is building a community like you can't replicate that in other places.

So if you can build something that people really enjoy engaging with and get a lot of value out of it, they'll have, that'll make it even more difficult for them to turn and go to another customer because that means losing access to your community. Over the next few years. And there's also a lot of tech advancements being made companies like comScore are doing an amazing job of bringing all these community technologies together.

So yeah, I think in the five years, community tech stack will be much more robust. There'll be community teams at every SAS company for both marketing and customers customers.

[00:27:09] Jason Noble: And this has been such a cool conversation. What we always like to do at the end is give our guests what we call a bowl challenge question.

And the one for you is what do you see as the number one action that companies can take today and their customer success teams to really embrace custom communities.

[00:27:31] Ben Winn: I'd say the number one thing you could do is if it's something that you're open-minded to. Have a, if you have, it depends on your size, but have someone from your CS team, just do some initial discovery around your, go to your top 10 customers. And your VPs of see whoever you sell to, I should say and do some discovery on what's keeping them up at night.

What are the biggest pain points? How are they working on solving them? And then see if there's a common threat, because if you're a top 10 customers, if leaders from your top 10 customers are all having similar problems you can help solve them. One-on-one or you have a clear use case there for saying, Hey, we can bring these 10 people together and they can help each other.

And we can bring in more people. And if they are having this experience, then more people were not in RCP, definitely are also on the same one. And then you can start justifying the investment. But I would say first, like valid. The concept. So is there a want for it? Is there a need for it? Is there, are there common challenges between our users that could be solved with this?

Are a lot of our 80% of our customers having the same issue. And then when you start seeing those broad trends, it's pretty easy to validate another easy step is just to even SIM even simpler. Look at your, do some analysis in your health, in your So ticketing system, like what per se, it's probably 80% of the tickets are like the same three things.

So those are things that you could easily have in a community forum where you don't need the same someone using canned responses, answering them every time you can have them live in there. And you can actually go in deeper on to these questions. So even just doing a quick analysis of that, looking at support times, looking at common trends should be easy to spin up some numbers around ROI and see if it's worth going to.

[00:29:08] Jason Noble: love that. I think that is such it's, that's an actual thing. It's so easy. Anybody can really, you can go in and do that and really pull out, what are those key things and those that engage with your customers that encourages you go there, make sure you're talking to your customers.

There will be some commonality. Let's bring them together. And this has been absolutely amazing. Like I said, at the beginning, this is something that we've not spoken about before. I think it's something that we will definitely keep talking about. I'd love to get you back on with us in the future, as this grows and evolves, and we see more customers embracing this, but a massive, thank you, sir.

[00:29:40] Ben Winn: Okay. Awesome. Thank you doing that. Before we

[00:29:42] Jason Whitehead: go, we always like to do a shameless plug, so please let us know what's important or exciting to you to catalyst. What have you, and if there's ways people can get in touch with you, what's the best way to

[00:29:53] Ben Winn: reach them. Yeah. So definitely check out@catalysts.io, if you are a CS leader and you're not using catalysts currently we're getting a lot of people switching from, I'm not going to say name to start from legacy platforms to us for very key reasons.

So I would love to share more about that with you. But so check out catalyst.io and then yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn. It's just B E N w I N would also recommend for anyone in CS out there and check out CS means.io. That's our meme library. So if you're just looking for a laugh and want to take a little break yeah.

CS mediums.io.

[00:30:29] Jason Whitehead: Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us today, Ben really appreciate it. That's

[00:30:32] Ben Winn: it. Thank you, man. Thank you so much for having me. Hopefully talk to you soon. Take care.

View Details

Episode Description Join us with guest Harini Gokul, customer success leader at AWS (Amazon Web Services), where she’s building and leading customer success for our Amazon’s next generation customers.

These include ISV (Independent Software Vendors), hyper-scale Digital Native Businesses (DNB), Private Equity, Games, and Small and Medium Business customers, helping them accelerate, develop, and scale customer success.

Guest: Harini Gokul Harini is a technology executive, investor, and a civic leader, She’s a recognized thought leader in leveraging cloud solutions to accelerate customer transformation and has worked building growing and scaling cloud businesses. She is a strategic leader with extensive global experience and loves the challenge of building from scratch and navigating complexity.

Harini has spent time in leadership positions with Microsoft, Amazon and IBM and has worked with many global customers, ranging from Fortune 500 enterprises to startups.

In addition to her primary focus on customer success and go-to-market strategy, Harini has led numerous policies, programs, and outreach efforts aimed at building trust in the cloud and addressing data privacy, ethics, and security challenges associated with these emerging technologies.

Harini is also extensively involved in community leadership and the field of social impact.

CONTACT HARINI GOKUL

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harini-gokul/

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's take on podcast series with myself. Jason Noble here in London and my partner in crime. Again, Mr. Whitehead, over in the states say hello, Jason.

[00:00:13] Jason Whitehead: Hello, Jason. And welcome back everyone. Thanks for joining us today.

[00:00:16] Jason Noble: We are all really lucky today.

We have another very excited a guest. Who's very exciting. I'm sure she's excited as well. But we've got a Renie GOCO. Who's the head of customer success at AWS. Joining us today. We're really excited about this. We're going to have a conversation around why customer success is a team sport and how it needs to be a team sport and work across multiple organizations, multiple groups in a business.

For those that don't know the, for those of you that don't know Ronnie, she's a technology. Exactly. And investor and a civic leader. She's a recognized thought leader in leveraging cloud solutions to accelerate customer and digital transformation. And she's worked with some amazing organizations in leadership positions at Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM worked with many global customers ranging from fortune 500 companies to more niche startups, helping them all on their customer success journeys.

She's also a strategic leader with a lot of global experience. And really loves the challenge of building things from scratch and going through kind of complex organizational design things, which I think is really great because that is a similar thread that we've had with some other guests recently.

She's also a really heavily involved in community leadership in the field of social impact. Her primary focus is on customer success and go to market strategy, but she's done a lot of work around policies, programs, outreach. Efforts really about building trust in cloud services, data, privacy, and ethics.

So a lot of amazing stuff with some incredible companies. Welcome Houdini. We're really excited to have.

[00:01:46] Harini Gokul: Thank you for that very kind and generous introduction. Jason and Jason. It's a great start to a Monday morning to ha to be on this podcast. I know I've been listening to some of the great stories and learnings coming out of here and so excited to be here.

Excellent,

[00:02:01] Jason Noble: welcome. Could you just for the people that don't know, you just introduce yourself as you would do it and give us a list as of a bit of a background to your own journey that's brought you to where you are now. Cause I know you've got. You were saying earlier, you've worked in Amsterdam.

You spent a lot of time in the UK, so you've got a really solid global experience. So we'd love to hear more about your journey.

[00:02:19] Harini Gokul: Sure. And you set the context so beautifully, right? I feel fortunate to have grown up around the cloud the past 20 years and fortunate enough to have some great adventures, I've I'm a recovering engineer.

I've been treated during school. Figured out that what floated my boat was to translate technology to human impact. And that's been my first principles that's kept me going all my life. Started work at standard, chartered a bank in Asia, and a lot of emerging markets that many of our listeners are familiar with, especially out in Europe and Asia.

And started working customer support when it was still the sort of reactive behind the desk, people yelling at you thing function. And so that was baptism by fire, but that got me interested in thinking about, what does customer satisfaction mean? What does delight.

What does lifetime value mean? So those were some questions I started asking 20 years ago and it caught the attention of this professor at Vanderbilt who was writing a book. And that was my ticket out of an arranged marriage and into a business school, I took, it, came to the U S never looked back and had the pleasure of that.

Studying in the U S and it opened the eyes to the opportunity that lay ahead and what we could do in terms of delivering a great customer experience. I like asking questions. I like talking to people as you can see. And I like problem solving and that naturally got me into consulting as a next step.

So I had a great time traveling up and down the Eastern seaboard and globally helping companies think about their transformation. And that segwayed into a kid here at Microsoft. Again, It's fantastic working for trillion dollar companies because you get to build billion dollar startups. And I've had the opportunity to do that, grow up around the cloud.

And think about what cloud adoption and what value realization meant for our customers across the globe. Global carrier or all my life with a deep stint invest in Europe. So based soft spot for for Europe. And I get to do the same as Amazon. Now, those are customer success for our next generation of customers.

Thinking about what does good look like when you are a hyperscale hyper innovative, born in the cloud unicorn style? How do you sustain? How do you grow? And and what are the different flavors of customer success? So all of that like I said, it's been a tremendous carrier and I'm excited for what comes next.

[00:04:28] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. That's so exciting too, because having been in the customer success space for years and you didn't grow up from the, what is this term customer success to, everyone's doing the basic stuff and now we're really maturing. You're really on the cutting edge yet. It's great to see that, I'm curious when we set the topics and I was talking around customer success is a team sport.

When you hear that or think of that, what does that mean to you? And what have you seen at the different organizations where you've worked or even in the customers that you serve that are working in the SAS space that also have their own customer success.

[00:04:56] Harini Gokul: Yeah. And it's a question I get asked a lot and I love that as I've been learning, having worked in customer success and customer experience now is that our patterns that are common regardless of where our customers on their journey.

So you have more mature companies that are perhaps are tiding debt and not yet SAS, but on that journey, then on the other end of the sliding scale, you have these born in the cloud unicorns. We talked about. Then they care about success that are some patterns that are common to them.

One of them is customer success is beyond the charter and remit of your customer success team. The company that. That are sustainable in their success. Maintain success sustainably are the ones that elevate this discussion at a leadership level. They bake it. They bake customer experience into the DNA of how they run grow and scale their business.

And I'll tell you what that looks like from bare ice, right? It looks like having board level conversations on customer success. It looks like C level discussions where the CCO or the voice of the customers presented you start the discussion, but metrics that are customer focused. And then translate into internal.

It translates into more than posters on the wall. It translates into the voice of the customer being an active participant in all of your discussions and asking the question what's the, so what for the customer, and finally translates into walking the talk, right? I often say talk is cheap. Walk is hard, should talk the talk of the C level, but then how do you translate it?

How do you translate this customer obsession and the intent. Frameworks mechanisms and metrics that everyone can execute to without confusion at scale consistently across the globe. I know. And what a piece throw in one piece, right? Seriously. I see. I think that is where we need to get to, I call it a team sport because it is a team sport. It is a leadership imperative. It's should be baked in the DNA of how you go to market or how you think about product and really successful companies that Excel at customer experience. And there are too many Ducote do that. And they do that consistent.

[00:07:13] Jason Noble: How do you go about instilling that wider than just one team approach? Because it's not easy to do. And when you're seeing more and more organizations investing in customer success, typically someone might hear about it yet. We'll get a customer success manager and think they fixed the problem.

Maybe they're focusing on churn to style it, but what are some of the key steps that you can do as well to help think beyond just that team? How do we make this a company-wide way of doing things?

[00:07:39] Harini Gokul: Great question. Thank you. I think there are at least three sort of layers to this conversation, right?

First is understanding the voice of customer at every level, but starting from. Making sure the leadership is thinking about it. And one real way to do that is, is the customer advisory board. I'm a big advocate for having customer advisory boards at multiple different levels. One at a leadership level, one at the execution levels of having your director of operations, speak to your, director of infrastructure, that sort of thing at all levels, but having a way to systematically and programmatically get that voice of customer.

That's one thing. The second question is once you get the input, so what are you doing with it? Having mechanisms and frameworks that take. Anecdotal feedback or your customer's data points and translating that into real action. And I'll give an example. A lot of my customers where we have significant product adoption, let's say they're adopting a service for the first time, or they're building a new product for the first time.

We will have product leaders take on sponsorship of the COVID. That means that you're making a real connection between the service that a product has created team has created and the customer that's consuming and adopting the service and they get a ringside view of what the customer journey looks like.

What worked well more importantly, what could be better. And we have a process that takes the. Pieces that didn't work well or the key features and requirements prioritizes and translates it back. So this is a real way, Jason, that you can take voice of the customer and translate it into an actionable process of framework that every product team can do, regardless of where they sit in the.

I'll pause. That's all I can go on and on, but I'll pause it. Yeah no,

[00:09:31] Jason Whitehead: that is great. And I love how you bring this to let's make it actionable and cause otherwise, if you don't do the action, the, so what to your point really doesn't fall through.

[00:09:40] Harini Gokul: And it's actually worse because you're setting expectations with the customer that you cannot deliver.

So if you cannot walk your talk, don't bother with the top.

[00:09:48] Jason Noble: Absolutely.

[00:09:49] Jason Whitehead: Oh, I like that. That's a really good way to put it. I'm curious, like when we talk with different teams and going through there we find that a lot of organizations, some teams just don't get it, especially if you haven't had that conversation before level or some, get it, but pay it lip service where people just have a really different vision about what it means to be customer centric than to help the customer achieve outcomes at different areas.

What have you found most useful or most effective for getting people to realize. In agreement of what good looks like and how to service the customer the right way. So that you do have that sort of team approach to it.

[00:10:21] Harini Gokul: I think internally what, we are we execute to our goals. Human beings are very driven individuals, right?

We see a north star. Once you establish that north star, we're all running towards it. So establishing what that north star is, drives the behaviors you want. So I'm a big believer that, you showcase the behavior. You want to see you can name and shame, but it's better to reward the behavior you want to see.

And for me, and I'll give you an example. It's the, I talk about us being best friends with our product and our sales. Us as in customer success, we talked about the product example. Let's talk about the sales one, right? Because this is an example of how you can orient people towards an and drive behaviors that accrued towards customer value, realization, planning, account planning, right?

Think of life as a pre-op life, as a triad between amongst. Your sales account leader. Who's the CEO of your account, your customer success person, who is your seat or CCO of the count. And then you have you have a technical expert a CTO account, which is a solution architect type role, but we that's called, a couple other things, but it generally means somebody with a deep technical expertise.

My my favorite way to run a con planning for this triad is to start with what your customers want to achieve, pick your customer or your portfolio, depending on what your span is. And then say, what are the outcomes that the customer will think is success at the end of the. And most discussion span multi years, but for the sake of this discussion, let's take a year and say, let's say they want to expand.

They want to expand to the UK. We'll, let's pick a UK example. They want to expand to the UK. They want to meet Compliance, FedRAMP, other things, privacy and security is a big, hot topic for us. Let's take that third. They want to retire technical debt. So you start with the customer's goals in mind and then work backwards to say, and you create what we call a value map and say, what are the things we will do to help move the needle on these three goals?

The goals are not. And then translate those into work products and KPIs and OKR is that'll make sure you're marching down the right path. But the key here, Jason is you're starting with your customer's goals in mind and that unifies all of them. You don't start by saying, this is the number I make you start by saying, my customer needs to launch successfully in the UK.

What do I need to do that? And then customer success in addition, SES, who do I need to bring in? Because we are connective tissue, right? Our job is to deliver expertise and then bring in the right experts to say, who can I bring in? Who can help really give a point of view about launching in the UK?

[00:12:55] Jason Noble: I love that. And it is. It is, it's taking that step back and getting everyone to think about what is it the customer is looking for, not just with our product, but like you say, they're looking to launch a new business unit in a different country. These are the big things, and it's trying to make sure that's articulated and understood by all of our teams, customer success, our product team, our sales team.

How do you the organizations you've worked in, how have you led some of these changes, as a CS leader, How do you go about influencing the level of organizational change that's needed really to get businesses to focus on customer led growth.

[00:13:29] Harini Gokul: Yes. I've enjoyed my journeys and they have span everything from more traditional more mature organizations that have live in lived in licensed driven.

World's moving to subscription to world worlds, to, like I said, born in the cloud SAS companies and for all of them, it's about getting oriented on the culture. Culture speaks. What was that about? Culture reading strategy? Wasn't that a famous coat. I love that coat because I believe it starts with the culture you establish, right?

It starts with making sure if voice of the customer is important, every all hands you do, you are bringing in a customer. And I started that level. I start by saying, what's the culture. We want to make sure customers and customer obsession and customer experience is top of mind. Then let's think about the tactics.

We need to make that real for us. And we've talked about multiple examples, but I'm often in places where, you will have, C-levels go. Of course we want that. We absolutely want the voice of the customer in, but let's do a next QBR and talk all about our internal metrics. And then you have to be the one willing to put up your, put up your hand and say, let's call it BSU.

Yeah, make sure we are working towards, what you say, your intended goal, your stated goal is. So a lot of it is getting that top down, buy in top down culture, baked in, and then setting that process and framework in place. So you are able to deliver to those goals. And that's harder.

Hard, and that is harder to do, but that's also a longer journey. So I'll end with this, which is, these are marathons, not sprints. I've had, you, you need to think through what good looks like at the end of 12, 18, 24 months and work towards that. And you can absolutely see what you, the changes you want to see every quarter or so, but be aware that a mindset change is a marathon.

It's not a sprint.

[00:15:22] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. And I'm curious, when you talk about mindset change, who are the people that it's hardest to change their minds? And what advice would you give to someone if they were a new CS leader in an organization facing, Mindshift rigidity,

[00:15:33] Jason Noble: rephrase Jay's great phrase, my shift rigidity.

[00:15:40] Harini Gokul: I would celebrate. You can work through objection handling and you can work through change in multiple different ways that I'm lots of good ways to do it. The way I prefer to do it is by celebrating what works well. So I generally try to, I always, my, my modus operandi, my M O is picking a doable project initiative program customer.

Something that I can influence and showcasing that when you invest this time, Invest these resources in your customer. This is the change you can bring about once you start seeing the change and you start showcasing that story, people want to be part of it. It's just so it's harnessing natural behavior.

Everybody wants to be part of. Team. And so I, I stark, but small changes that sort of build up into larger systemic changes. Sometimes you need that sort of big hand from above, but I think for change to be sustainable for everybody to believe into it, they must see what good looks like when you do it.

So that could include celebrating great customer. Or losses, and that's a more controversial topic as part of big all hands and organizational discussions, right? Rewarding individuals who've gone over and beyond, and then shown how they've taken their hero effort and translated into scale, which is the other thing heroes are.

But heroes are not sufficient. So every time you see a hero, you have to say, how did that hero take it? So you can replicate it to multiple heroes across the world. But that is how I bring about change. I pick one effort that I can invest in and showcase what good looks like. Maybe that customer becomes a reference.

Great stories from the adoption and then use that to create. That's

[00:17:25] Jason Whitehead: possible. Jason, I often talk about the rule of threes, know, spend 30, 30, your focus on building up your own program. Third of it, building out your own team. And third of it with the customer or internal alignment and what you're talking about.

There's lot of times. Bringing hearts and minds together in any interim action. Where do you think you need to spend most of your time, if you really want to influence the organization as a hands-on with the customer, or is it more the internal alignment or more growing and developing the CS team program and mentality?

[00:17:53] Harini Gokul: That's that's a trick question. The I'm as end, right? All of the above, then you start. Because you cannot function. It's three pieces of a puzzle. You need all of it to come together. You need that customer advocacy, that data points to actually be credible internally.

You're never, I am not going to be credible if I do. If I'm not having regular conversations with customers, sponsoring efforts and being out there speaking with folks and by customers, stakeholders as well, right? Like we have private equity firms that are major stakeholders in our customers.

So I consider it my business to have as wide an aperture as possible. But then how do I bring it in? I bring it in and I say, how do I translate this into programs or investments? We need to make that my CSMs can deliver with their coalition of the willing. All the stakeholders and the team sport we talked about and you have to do it all the time.

I don't think you can miss the beat of that dance. And you have to, and it be probably not as elegant when you start, but that's the hope is you get to a place where you've been, you're not in the room. The same discussions are happening. My real job is to get rid of my job, right?

When you do it, right? Because you want, NBC this, our sales teams, our biggest are saying, what's the value of the is going to get, how do we accelerate time to value? Those are the discussions you want to have. And then of course, You will end up talking about what services they adopted, how do you mature their journey and all of that.

But to me, the litmus test is when your stakeholders starts speaking in customer obsessed language, they start talking about value. They talk about accelerating value. What did we help them deliver to their customers? Because if I do my job and take care of my customers, they are able to do a better job for their customers.

[00:19:41] Jason Noble: I love that. And I think the idea of getting other people to use these terms, it is, you're seeing now the use of kind of values and outcomes is fairly widespread in businesses. I think there is a really good understanding of what we're doing. Look, Harani, this has been such a great conversation.

What we always like to do with our guests is give them one, what we call a bowl challenge question, and the one for you. So this is the big one. Yes, Liz, what is the number one change that companies need to make today to ensure that customer success is done the right way. And so that it is a team sport.

What's the number one change they can make,

[00:20:19] Harini Gokul: align your metrics and your conversations with your customer outcome. And I have a second one. So you, did you say,

I would say my fun challenge would be for every CEO to walk in the shoes of their CCO and for every CCO to walk in the shoes of their CEO

[00:20:42] Jason Noble: a different spin on that one is every CEO should walk in the shoes of. I like that. And imagine you're accustomed come into the business and see what happens, see where they experienced it.

I love them absolutely brilliant insights there. And I think there's some really, this is one of the hardest things to do in customer success. Although I think towards practitioners working in India, It seems an obvious step, but it's a very difficult thing to do and to do. So I think you've given some really incredible insights.

There's a massive, thank you again. This has been a fantastic conversation.

[00:21:11] Jason Whitehead: Yep. And before we go, we also like to invite you to do a shameless plug. So any initiatives or efforts or anything that you'd like to share or ways that people get in touch with you, whatever you care to share, please go ahead and take the floor.

[00:21:24] Harini Gokul: We are hiring.

Tell talent is everywhere. And now thanks to remote the acceleration of remote work opportunities everywhere. So we are hiring and if you are great customer success, talent, and you want to practice a pate in taking customer success and elevating it to the next level. Drop me a note on LinkedIn.

[00:21:44] Jason Noble: I love it. What a great plug. Absolutely. Brilliant. Thank you so much. Again, this has been a fantastic conversation. Really enjoyed this. Thank you very much.

[00:21:53] Harini Gokul: Thank you, Jason and Jason, this is a pleasure.

View Details

Episode Description Join us with guest Markus Rentsch, CEO of Remark-able. A high-profile customer success thought leader, coach, and consultant.

Markus has created the Customer-Value-Led-Growth business model for SaaS companies. Through his work at Remark-able, Markus provides a unique approach that aligns companies on continuously growing and monetizing customer value.

Guest: Markus Rentsch Markus is a customer success consultant and keynote speaker and well-known community influencer in the world of customer success. Markus works as a business consultant helping to change the way SaaS companies grow and to help them put the customer first.

Markus is also the founder of the recently published newsletter “Masters of Net Revenue Retention”. Prior to starting his own business, Markus worked in various roles in corporate development.

CONTACT MARKUS RENTSCH

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markus-rentsch-customer-value-led-growth-for-saas/
Remark-able: https://remark-able.at
Masters of Net Revenue Retention: https://markusrentsch.substack.com

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's take on podcast with myself.

Jason Noble here in London, where it's just above zero is and my partner in crime. Mr. Whitehead, say hello, Jason.

[00:00:12] Jason Whitehead: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today.

[00:00:14] Jason Noble: We are super excited today with another guest joining us today to talk about all things related to customer growth, customer value and net revenue retention.

We have the one and only Marcus ranch joining us from a very sunny Vienna over in Austria. Marcus, welcome to the podcast. We're really excited to have you here you are. I think everybody knows who you are. You're a well known thought leader. Coach customer success consultant. You contribute a lot to the communities on LinkedIn.

You're posting some incredible articles where you're getting a lot of traction. You are the CEO and founder at remarkable where you're helping change the way SaaS companies grow. And as part of your work there, you've created a customer value led growth model business model for SaaS companies, which is say.

A really unique approach that aligns the whole company around continuously growing and monetizing customer value, which is really exciting. And you've previously been CEO and founder of accelerate that focused around creating zero waste growth approaches for companies. As I said, you're an incredible thought leader around customer success.

You've also recently launched a newsletter, the masters of rev, net revenue retention, which I am happy to say I'm a subscriber of and read it evidently every single day it comes out. Welcome Marcus. We're excited to have you here. Thanks

[00:01:28] Markus Rentsch: for invitation. I'm

[00:01:30] Jason Noble: glad to be here. And today we're gonna talk with Marcus about customer value, led growth and at revenue retention, both topics of great interest to us all in the world of customer success.

And particularly with net revenue retention, we're seeing this as being the key differentiating KPI that investors are looking for shareholders and it becomes so critical for us now. Marcus let's go ahead and please give our listeners an introduction to yourself. Particularly for our listeners that don't know more about you give us a bit more about your background and your due only to where you've got to today.

Yeah.

[00:02:01] Markus Rentsch: Hello. My name is Marcus. I'm the founder of the company called remarkable. It's a consulting firm that's dedicated to help SA companies improve their customer success organization and strategies. And I've spent like last two years creating and refining very own approach to customer success, which I call customer while you let growth.

[00:02:23] Jason Noble: do you if we start with a really big question what do you mean exactly by customer value led growth and why now? Why is it so critical for companies today?

[00:02:32] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, the thing I'm seeing in SA companies over and over is that I get the impression they focus on growth for the sake of it.

, but what they should do instead is to focus on growth as the consequence on delivering customer landing. Did you in the business model, what a subscription business model itself, it's literally built on customer success. And most people, they don't see it because the thing is you rely on so on renewals, it's the most important thing if customers don't stick with you for years.

You won't make any profits. And the only reason why customers would continuously pay you is when you make them successful. It's that easy. So if you're selling like cars or something, you might sell a car once every 10 years. So if the same buyer does not return 10 years later, Most companies would say, so what we're talking about one month later.

So if the customer doesn't pay again one month, one month later, you really have a problem. I think when you be as simple

[00:03:37] Jason Noble: as that when you give these examples that bring it down into everyday space, that everyone understands, talking about kind of cars it makes it so relevant to everybody to understand the criticality of this.

[00:03:48] Markus Rentsch: Yeah. Another thing I see in customer success is. There's only many companies see only as the responsibility of a single team. Yep. But customer success in B2B is the reason why a company exists. Why else would you even build the company? And that the logical conclusion is that everybody who works for the company works in customer success.

Everybody contributes to it. It doesn't matter if you are product development, marketing sales, or in the designated customer success team, you need to contribute to

[00:04:19] Jason Noble: it. It big mind shift change. Isn't it. It's changing the way that businesses think. Sorry, Jason.

[00:04:28] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, I was gonna ask, cuz I think for those of us who've been in customer success for a while. It seems pretty intuitive, but I'm still amazed when I go out and talk with leaders of organizations not selling on a subscription that they still are shocked by this concept. Oh wait, no, we sell functions.

We sell this. What have been some of the biggest surprises you've encountered when you're dealing with leaders of SaaS C is around this concept, do they get it? Do they struggle with it?

[00:04:50] Markus Rentsch: It's different from company to company. So in some companies really that the CEO himself or herself is already perfectly aware what matters and really leads the customer success.

Focus in other companies, you have CEOs who don't care, right? They don't see customer success as yes. That the basic goal of the very existence. So really customer success, a single team with very limited resources. They see there's a necessary email. So we all know about these companies and the first thing they do when it comes to cutting the budgets, it's customer success or customer support, which is insane.

[00:05:34] Jason Noble: Do you see it changing in conversations you're having with organizations? Do you see them coming around to the, to this new way of thinking?

[00:05:41] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, slowly but steady, you could say. Okay. But I'm really it's always the same. Yes. So there are only a few companies that will stand out from the rest so that others will always will do what's mainstream.

Yeah. It has mainstream for so long to create the million of leads and hire things. People, et cetera, et cetera, even when the economics are offer. So they are really stuck. With their approach on growth. So it's really hard and difficult to, to change these things. And it, yeah, it moves pretty slowly, but I'm positive that I will be able to make an impact on let's say even if it's only 5% of CEOs and founders, it would already be great.

Yeah.

[00:06:25] Jason Noble: We talk as a bit through the framework that you've created and kinda how you're using that with your customers. Cause I think that's something that's really powerful when you've got a framework. You've seen it work, but just tell us a bit more about the background behind it and how you're using it.

[00:06:38] Markus Rentsch: Yes. So that the traditional approach on a growth and says is like we create a funnel, we pour in a million lead and see what's coming out at the end. So all the money or the funding state, the company gets is to really fuel the funnel. It's really a weak approach because new customer acquisition and all research confirms it is the weakest level of growth because you have so low conversation rates and high customer acquisition costs.

It's literally, yeah, you can't rely on it forever. So my approach. It goes a different drone. So instead of maximizing the number of customers, my approach is focused on maximizing the value per customer for the customer. So that that you really create. There's a quite famous already that grow, Felix.

So where you it's basically, you could say the land and expand fear but yeah, even improved because to me, when you have a successful customer, it will create its own business that the company will literally grow its own. Why? Because a successful customer, we continuously war because they will frequently hit the ceiling.

They need more resources. They want to apply more features. And of course, That's also what drives new acquisitions with much, much better economics because when new customers are driven from referrals, they come much higher conversion rates. Yep.

[00:08:08] Jason Whitehead: And lower cost. So with your framework and when you're working with your customers I like the sound of that.

Get them focused on maximizing the value per customer, which I think people talk about that they don't really focus on quite a bit. What does that mean? That a CEO should do differently in, in their organization to actually operationalize that? What does that look like? Where do they divest the resources?

Where do they focus their effort, as opposed to the traditional approach of putting more leads at the top of the funnel?

[00:08:34] Markus Rentsch: So that the first and most important part of the CEO is to create alignment across the whole company. , that's most important. So what we are now seeing is that all the different teams, they pull in different directions because they have different goals.

So marketing teams, their goals, and the incentive they get are based on the number of leads. It says you have the same with a quota. And then you have customer success, which is usually evaluated by the retention rate they've got. Yeah. But the problem is with all these different goals, you even contradict the next team's goal.

Yeah. So you when you have the sales team and they only a quota to achieve. they will do everything they need to do to achieve the quota, even what it means to acquire bad fit customers. Yep, absolutely. And then you have the CS team and they get the customers and their goal is a retention rate.

Let's say 95% retention rate , but how on earth are they going to succeed? If they get these bad fit customers?

[00:09:37] Jason Whitehead: Exactly.

[00:09:38] Markus Rentsch: That's really the most stupid thing. So a question that occurred in the past I've been asked several times is what are the best metrics to evaluate the customer success team performance?

My answer is basically doesn't matter because the problem is everything will be tainted. If you get bad inputs. Yep. So it only makes sense to measure the team's performance on the attention rate, if they get the right raw material, if they get the right customers but otherwise, yeah, I think that's, you can tell anything about the performance, right?

[00:10:13] Jason Whitehead: No, I think that's really important too. Cuz like you said. If the sales are selling anyone and it's not the right fit customer. And they're more work to, hire harder to close and higher costs to serve and to retain them in much more work and effort required to make them successful.

It's kinda like you're doubling down every year on your effort to keep a crap customer that's, we're gonna work really hard to keep these people that we never should have had to begin with where. If we could work less hard to keep five other customers, if they were the right fit for us and the wrong garbage in garbage out kind of thing.

[00:10:43] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, it's really insane that companies really still do this crap. So that's meant, the saints team they don't do it because they like it so much to acquire bad fit customers, but because they get these ridiculous growth goals and this growth goes that are really with a short term

[00:11:00] Jason Noble: mind.

Yeah. You've gotta, you've gotta change the way we incentivize teams as well. Don't we've talked before about incentivizing long term. Relationships lifetime value for customers, not incentivizing, just getting the new business in, but it's a big shift. And I love the way you've gone through the metrics.

If you me measure your metrics on retention rate, but you've got bad customers coming in, you're never gonna work. So it's getting those metrics all aligned and how you get customer working across the teams. I love that way of thinking. How do you see. So the customer value led growth.

How does that relate to net revenue retention rate? And is the kind of, how do you see that correlation?

[00:11:40] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, it's literally the connection it's the corresponding metric you could say to customer led growth because when your customer, when you growth, growth there also the NR growths.

Because the more value you produce for customers, the more they will buy it. Yeah. So you can literally grow your customer account value like five times or 10 times in the long run, but you need to focus on it. That's the important thing. Do you think everybody's to deliver on the promise you make to your customers?

Yeah.

[00:12:14] Jason Whitehead: I'm curious about something you came back to as well, where you were saying how sales folks are really incentivized around rapid growth and hitting really stretch goals and all that. Do you think that's more of a, just the result of a short term that, like, how do we hit our goal for the next quarter or the quarter after that?

Or is that. Coming from investors that are pushing for, let me quickly get, invest get some growth and get back out and is what's really needed more just to shift towards a longer term mindset of, you're not going to rapidly expand in an existing customer, but you will expand them when they see the value.

[00:12:44] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, it's different. Sometimes it comes from this CEO sometimes from the board, sometimes from investors. It's different in several situations. But the real problem I've identified is that today our society crew say is really addicted to instant gratification. So they prefer to close the deal.

Now, instead of have having the growth in the long term,

[00:13:08] Jason Whitehead: absolutely. So when you're working with your clients, then are you helping the CEOs and the board and above that to shift their mindset there, or where do you focus your efforts to really enact a change that you think is gonna help them?

These organizations?

[00:13:21] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, they're basically two different point of entry. So sometimes and of course it's the ideal situation is what a CEO approaches me. They say, I saw your methodology. I like this concept. I want to implement it into my company. But more often it's the CS leader of customer success or director or whatever.

Approaches me where we let's say you could say it's the the bottom up version of so where I'm helping the CS leaders to give them their, the evolution to influence their leaders in the company. So all my projects start with running and a custom analysiss. So that we can see. Okay. These are the customers that churned, why did they churn?

What do they have in common? And also at the same time, of course look at their existing customers who are the most profitable ones. What do they have in common? And most importantly, how much growth potential. Yeah. It's hidden within our existing client base. So if you're a CS leader and you talk to a CEO about your net promoter scores and stuff like this, they don't care.

Cause the company leadership cares about two things. That's growth and valuation, right? So you really need to shift the talk in these two directions. The best thing you can do it is with the data you've extracted from your analysiss.

[00:14:46] Jason Noble: So can those approaches find, I was gonna say, Marcus, which of those approaches do you find the Harding, whether you go or which the most successful going through the CEOs that have reached out to you or through the CS leaders?

Which of you found in your engagements have been most successful?

[00:15:02] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, it's absolutely way easier if the CEO starts initiative, but there are also CEOs that are really responsive to the inputs coming from CS leaders. But in many situations real, really to yeah. Create the awareness within the company leadership about all the growth potential, and that is really hidden the customer base, or even to to help them yeah.

Show the leadership that churn is not only cost after the purchase of the product. So there are companies really where the CS team gets all the blame for churn, which is right. Absolutely for, because the customer success team sits at the end and they rely on the inputs they get, which is the product that the customer If you have a better product or a bad customer, you're set up for failure in customer success. So you can never succeed on your own. You really need to align all the teams on customer success insurer. And they're both they're both running through the whole

[00:16:04] Jason Noble: company. I like the way you talked about the collaboration there and it is that cross-functional thing that we've said before.

[00:16:10] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. And Jason, you've spoken to this several times about what we call the, like the rule of threes. You, as a CS leader, you spend a third of your time working with your team and building out your CS practice a third of your time working hands on with your customers and engaging with them, and then a third internally on the alignment piece and all those and Marcus, I'm curious since you're right, that since CS is so downstream and they do the best with what they get and if they get garbage, then they're blamed for what goes wrong.

Do you think CS leaders should be spending more of their time on the internal alignment, getting that set up, so that everyone's focused on the customer value or do they need to be spending more of their time either with their team or with their customer? What's the right mix to really

[00:16:48] Markus Rentsch: get this?

I'm not sure if you can say there is maybe they need even less time, but there needs need to be more successful with creating alignment. They need to be more successful with influencing the leadership at other teams. Yeah, that's what I've meant before you need to fight the right angles to create these internal alliances.

. So when you talk to your sales team it doesn't make sense to, to discuss the sales to customer success, handoff, but rather talk about how this two teams could work together. To create better results. So I'm also a big fan of bringing the CS team up to the acquisition process.

Yep. For two reasons, because the customer success team is absolutely the most qualified team to determine whether customer is a good fit or not. But when you're working with the us of hundreds customers over years, you understand, okay, who is a. Sorry, who makes a great fit and who doesn't. And if you join the sales process, you can literally clean them out before we even enter And the second part, and also for sales, way more important is the customer success team can make an impression the customer. So if you can talk to the customers about possible solutions and then show that you understand the problem. You instantly build trust and it may be maybe the one thing that moves the needle for the customer to decide for your product instead of the competition, because you have the end of knowledge, you understand the customer problem, the use case, the solutions.

Yeah. And that's really. Yeah. It's really what customers want

[00:18:28] Jason Noble: to hear. As we've said before, it's about bringing the case studies, the use cases to life. You've got that experience as the CS team, working with customers, knowing how they're using the product, how they're getting value from the product.

And you can show prospects that in these meetings. And I think it's super critical. The other key thing I think we need to do is you need the sales leaders and sales team to join the implementation calls as well to make sure that transition is really be really seamless there you.

[00:18:57] Markus Rentsch: Alignment is so important.

It also works with other teams. If you want to create a strong alignment with the marketing team. You've just said it the use cases. So literally what you're doing, customer success, the work you're doing, the experiences you make, it's really it's the fuel for the marketing team. So you can and create content based on reality.

Instead of just what marketing thinks is interesting to the customer.

[00:19:23] Jason Noble: Exactly. What do you think what's the, what should customer success leaders be doing today with their team to get them to think differently about value and value led growth? How do they go about making that change?

Yeah

[00:19:35] Markus Rentsch: so one problem I also see is that most customer, the successful organizations have been built from a different different point of view. So it's it really looks like it's built back from in the days where customer success, where, or most companies still see it as a cost center.

So we have created these customer organizations that are built. From the internal view from the vendor's point of view and not from the customer's point of view. So it's really astonishing. I'm always asking customers to success leaders. Do you know whether the customers are successful and nine out of 10?

They don't know because they're measuring health scores and net promoter scores and using activity and feature adopts and stuff like this. But they don't know on whether a customer who have said, we want to increase our sales by 50%. They don't know whether they've achieved it goal.

[00:20:30] Jason Whitehead: That's amazing to me

[00:20:31] Markus Rentsch: that's a real problem, because we are not focused on the most important thing. That's customer success. Has to record that. That's what it's all about. And we need to measure it and we need to be the right way to help customers achieve it. Yeah. So I also hear obviously that discussion about high touch and low touch stuff, but that's also from the way point of view, because there's only one, one touch and that's the right touch, touches how much touch the customer needs to become successful. . Absolutely. So we can say it's high or low. Of course you have the limitations. If you have a customer who pays you 20 bucks a month, it's obviously not possible to deliver a high touch. Yeah, exactly. But really need to focus and customerize and help customers because customers see, even when you have customers that are with the same size.

They may start from completely different

[00:21:27] Jason Noble: starting points. I think that is critical there and it is we've. Yeah. It's that there is no touch that you tell a customer that they need it's the customer needs to define. What level of experience do they want? What are the outcomes they want, that defines where they should be.

And we've said before, you know the idea, there's a big surgeons now in digital customer success, but you've still got to listen to what your customers want. Another there's one of your quotes that you said, Marcus, that I absolutely love. You said customer success doesn't happen by accident.

It's engineered. I absolutely love that. And this isn't something that you can't do without investing in it without putting the right processes, the right, working behind it. Can you tell us more about what you mean by that and share as your insights in how we can go about engineering customer success?

[00:22:11] Markus Rentsch: Absolutely. The mantra in, in, in customer success today is to be proactive. But the thing is the pro proactive approach. It really? Yeah. It's really holding because it relies on on, on monitoring customers and reaching out when you think they, they need your help. What the problem is, what if you don't see it?

So you, you have a customer who is adopted or product features. The customers did. The users are active night and day. You think, okay. The customers perfect health, great customers, super successful. But what you don't see is that they are just trying and trying, but they don't accomplish anything, but they keep on trying and trying.

And in this situation you would never reach out to them because you have score says they are all green because. They're active have adopted everything, et cetera, et cetera. So that's, I think it's complete bullshit. What you need to do instead is when you acquire a customer, you need to understand, okay, what is the goal of the customer?

The next step you need to identify? Okay. Where does the customer start? Where are they in terms, performance, skill and knowledge. And then the customer success plan is literally. The gap in between. So your mission is to create the roadmap and lead your customers from where they're now to where they want to go.

That's what I mean by engineering. So you really move them through the process instead of providing material, let them work on their own and only reach out to them if a think of a problem, or if they reach out to you. Which you don't. Studies suggested I don't know, 85% of people who are of customers who are, who need your help, never reach out to just vanish.

[00:24:13] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, I think that's definitely the case. I'm working with a client now. Part of my business is helping customer success team. The other half is working with buyers of software and helping them drive change in adoption and success internally. And there's such a disconnect between what the software vendor sees and hears and does versus what's going on in, in the buyer's organization.

And. Having worked with many buyer organizations, you see this vendor has no idea that this customer is going to churn and that they're not getting what they need and they're not being successful. And that they're actively soliciting other, other vendors to replace them. And the current vendor has no clue and is not doing the stuff that they should be taking to, to preserve this.

And I think that happens all the time. And I think a lot of CS teams need to get better at identifying that, oh, this customer is not achieving their goals. We need to do something differently. We need to get right in there.

[00:24:59] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, exactly. There are so many companies who are taken by surprise from customers churn, but they could have easily known if they would've ever talked to these customers.

Yeah,

[00:25:09] Jason Noble: exactly. Exactly. That's the key thing, Marcus, look, this has been a really insightful conversation. A big thank you again. What we always like to do is give our guests one final question. What we call a bold challenge question. And the one that we'd like to give to you is what's the number one thing that business leaders can do today.

So an actionable thing that CU business leaders can do today to move to this customer value led way of thinking and working.

[00:25:33] Markus Rentsch: So the most effective and critical part is to align our teams on the same goal and the same incentives. And for me, the perfect metric for this net revenue retention rate. Why awesome, because there's literally no way to fake your way about it.

you can grow in the short term. You can grow by a hundred percent with 50% churn in the short term, if you have enough funding, but there's no way you get customers who are not successful to buy more from you and push your NR. So if you have the wrong customers support, you deliver a poor onboarding. You don't have a strong customer success process that really leads customers to their goal.

You, you can succeed. So you, I just recently I've I've read again that a company incentivized their CS teams on net promoter scores, and then yeah. What did people do they ask the customers to give them a high score, right? yep. But it's all natural. I would probably do

[00:26:37] Jason Noble: the same. It is it faces is the results.

Absolutely. Marcus look a huge, thank you, sir. This has been really great, please. Before we go, could you give a complete shameless plug to what you are doing at remarkable? Really promote what you guys are doing there.

[00:26:52] Markus Rentsch: Yeah, so I've recently started a new project where I'm really helping in new, we just interested in customer growth and.

And pushing the contribution to that revenue retention. So I've basically started a newsletter. I yeah, couldn't think of a better name. It's because it's actually not the newsletter. It's yeah. I'm yeah. Sending out indepth knowledge about my approach and my insights to help people move customer success forward in the companies.

[00:27:19] Jason Noble: Highly recommend a newsletter. Please, guys, sign up if you don't, if you have don't know it already. We'll share the links on the podcast as well. Marcus, a massive thank you once again, sir.

[00:27:29] Markus Rentsch: Thanks. Thank you. It's great to be.

View Details

Episode Description Join us with guest Kristi Faltorusso, VP of Customer Success at ClientSuccess, a leading customer success management solution, where she leads Customer Success, Technical Support and Consulting.

ClientSuccess is revolutionizing the way SaaS companies manage, retain, and grow their existing customer base, and their goal is to help businesses drive a “Culture of Customer Success” across your entire organization.

Guest: Kristi Faltorusso Kristi is an industry-leading and award-winning customer success executive and thought leader with experience in building, scaling, and transforming Customer Success organizations at hyper-growth B2B SaaS companies.

Over the past decade, she's helped many companies redefine Customer Success resulting in increased retention, long-term revenue growth, and customer advocacy.

Kristi is also the Founder of Keeping CS Simple, a content experience, supporting the simplification of Customer Success for Executives, CS Leaders, CPSs, and more.

CONTACT KRISTI FALTORUSSO

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiserrano/
ClientSuccess: https://www.clientsuccess.com/
Keeping CS Simple: https://www.keepingcssimple.com/

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason steak on podcast series with myself, Jason Noble, Erin, a blue sky is London. The skies are getting clearer and my counterpart Jason White had over in the USA say hello, Jason. Hi everyone. We are thrilled today to have yet another dare I say, infamous customer success guests with.

To talk about all good things about scaling customer success, but scale successfully, we've had a couple of really good conversations recently, but we've got another one today and I'm really proud to welcome Christie Pfaltz Russo to our podcast. Hey Christie. Say hello to everyone and welcome.

[00:00:43] Kristi Faltorusso: Hello everyone.

I am thrilled to be here. And what a topic for us out, everyone is talking about scaling. So I can't wait to

[00:00:49] Jason Noble: jump right in. It seems to come up in every single conversation you have with. Just for our audience members and listeners who don't know Christie, she's an award-winning customer success objective with a lot of experience building scaling and really transforming customer success organizations at that kind of start up and hyper-growth stage.

So a a lot of what overlaps with all what we're all doing, the organizations we're in and she's she spent probably the last 10 plus years helping organizations. Redefine what customer success really means and being really an instrumental thought leader. There's a lot of amazing content that you put out there, Kristy that I'm a huge fan of.

And we are so excited to have you here. You've got a lot of great experience with other organizations you've built led teams and managing the executive teams. I think it bright edge size sends better cloud IntelliJ shift. And now at client success where I know I've had conversations with.

But you also do a lot of work outside of your day job as well. And Europe, really you put together what you call keeping customer success, simple, which is your own blog, your own services there. That really, I, but it says it in a nutshell but it is how do we simplify this? Because I think we have a problem where we all do overcomplicate this.

I, and having someone that's leading that. So I'm super excited. As we said, the topic is how do we scale customers? But before we dig into that, Christie, let me go ahead and please introduce yourself. Let us from listeners that don't know who you are. Give a few more details about you, what you're doing and are your passions.

I don't know,

[00:02:20] Kristi Faltorusso: Jason, like you nailed it. That was the best anyone's ever me. I might teach you on my next job interview. All right. So Christie bell Russo, I'm currently the vice president of customer success at client success, which is a customer success management software. We help our customers from what we say.

New to renew. So from that initial onboarding post-sale process all the way through that entire life cycle management been here for just about a year. We'll be a year next month, I'm super pumped. And I have the privilege and honor of working with a ton of different customer success organizations, helping them do what we're going to talk about today, which is thinking about how do they build transform, but scale their efforts.

[00:02:59] Jason Noble: I think that all of those are hard to do. And I think the scaling bit is the hardest because every organization, in your work at client success with these incredible organizations and really hypergrowth organizations, how do you go about helping them really understand what they need to do about customer growth and scale for their customer success teams?

So how do you go about helping define what they need?

[00:03:20] Kristi Faltorusso: Yeah. So I think we definitely take a very interesting approach just because of the size and the, and who we serve. Our ICP of customers are that small to mid-size organization who are usually in that foundational stage of building and putting some process around customer success, operationalizing their business. So we can lean in a very From a more consultative approach. It's not about the technology. It's about learning about where they are, why they're in a place that they need to change what they've been doing and what that change looks like through their eyes. And then we lean in very much from the standpoint of we're going to help you design and define what those processes and best practices look like.

And, with the very. Mindset, we don't build something and say, okay, great. This is set it and forget it. This is going to be your program forever through our technology and through the partnership, it's an ongoing consultation of great. Is this working? Is it really moving the needle?

Is it having the impact on the metrics? And we take that approach. So it's a lot of listening and learning that we have the bandwidth and the infrastructure right now.

[00:04:21] Jason Noble: Did you find that consultative approach works because there's a lot of organizations that will look to you, and say, tell us how to do it.

And it is like you say, it's iterative, it changes all the time, but do you find there's any challenges with using that approach or does it seem to fit with.

[00:04:35] Kristi Faltorusso: So I think our, again, our customers, because they are earlier in stage, they're not at a place of hyper-growth right where they're hiring hundreds of thousands of employees in customer success.

They're still trying to figure it out. So they rely on us to be that benchmark of what good looks like. Because it's what they need. And it's a service that we can provide. A lot of it is through the lens of what we're doing, so it's not, you can iterate on it because it's really easy to say.

Here's how we do customer success at client success. And here's how we can modify this to meet what it is that you do in your organization. And so it feels very consultative, but it scales because it's very templated based off of what our infrastructure looks.

[00:05:14] Jason Whitehead: That's a great one. So what do you see are some of the kinks key challenges that your organizations are facing when they're going through the scaling phase, especially those that are going through the hyper-growth phase and I guess relate to that.

Is there a difference between what with a typical organization trying to scale versus a hyper-growth organization? Yes.

[00:05:32] Kristi Faltorusso: I'm saying the hyper-growth ones it's like everything needed to be done yesterday. So I would say time. And speed in which you've got to put all those pieces of the puzzle together, but I'd say the biggest challenge honestly, is folks don't know what they don't know.

And there's a lot of reliance that people think that the best way to scale is just through technology and automation and this push of content. And don't realize that there is a whole ton of different avenues that you can go through and should be approaching and thinking through, when you think about what scale looks like and how that feels for your customers.

[00:06:06] Jason Noble: Do you, I think one of the webinars that you did recently of client success you talked about the partnership kickoff framework. I love the idea of that. And I, Jason, I have talked before about the transition that transition from sales to onboarding to customer success is an area that I think a lot of businesses really struggle with.

Could you share some of your insights for how organizations can go about doing this better and having they can use that to help scale, and then also give a bit more insight into kind of your partnership kickoff framework.

[00:06:37] Kristi Faltorusso: Absolutely. So you like hit on like my favorite thing to talk about ever. It's one of my, I think it's one of the few programs that have developed that I think does translate to almost any business and it really has a ton of impact.

So what we did is, for years, I'm sure like you guys have seen. Most companies, you go from like paperwork assigned, great. Let's get you started, let's build your product and just run. And I get that right. There's this huge need to just put a lot of velocity around that and get people moving their set time to value KPI that people talk about and it feels so intense.

And so really just want to get to it. And so after years of doing that, I was like no, we're doing it wrong. I said, we miss so much learning. That feels really awkward. To go and have these conversations when you were like 3, 4, 5 months into the partnership. So it was like we're going to slow down to speed up and we're going to actually have the right conversation with our customers from day one.

So I created what we call our partnership kickoff model. And this is an executive level conversation where we were. The executive stakeholders, key decision makers, even influencers that are part of the partnership to join from the customer standpoint. And from our side, we bring our account team. And so that's usually the CSM, the AAE.

Who's a part of it. If we had anyone from solutions or consulting, they'd be present, and then hopefully the executive stakeholder, which would be like myself for. We come together in a conversation that has a very formal structure, the decks and the frameworks that I create are very easily repeatable.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel. The deck has five modifications if I'm being honest. But prior to that kickoff, we do send a survey out to our customers where we ask a lot of very pointed questions. Why us, why now? What are you trying to do? What are your goals? What are your objectives? How do they map back to our partnership?

And we use that to facilitate a very good conversation. That's what it is. It's alignment. We set proper expectations. We understand who they are, why they exist, why they're focused on customer success. What does it look like in their business? What does that program look like? And then we dive a bit into.

You know what their goals are, how do we support them? So what are they expecting from us? What do we expect from them? There's a lot of, there's a lot of that. And then we spend a lot of time talking through change management. I'm very honest with you. We want to make sure that our customers are very clear.

By deploying technology. This is not solve your problems. And so your organization is going to fundamentally go through some change, and this is what it's going to look like. Here's a small piece that your technology provider will play in this overarching change and how we're going to partner with you through that, how we can support you.

We go into what onboarding will look like because we do want to set that stage and we really just. Wrap up with, like what are our next steps, right? Where do we go from here? And there's a lot of pieces that happen in between there. I'm not going to get into that. If you want to watch my bootcamp webinar on that, you can absolutely go check it out.

But yeah, it just, it refrains the partnership. And we'll go right into the technology. It's what are we doing here together? What is the purpose and how are we going to be successful?

[00:09:27] Jason Noble: You find, if you do that survey, do, is there any customers that might get frustrated? Cause they might think.

We've gone through the sales process with the AA we've given this information or. Or the question is phrased in such a way that, that it's not positioned like that.

[00:09:42] Kristi Faltorusso: Yeah, I don't think so. Cause it really does we go into bits and pieces of like their customer success program. For example, like I'll ask something, do you have a customer success journey?

And then usually it's going to be one or two answers. Yes or no, or it's in the works, right? What role do you see client success playing in the creation of your customer success journey? I just want to know how much they're expecting us to help guide them. So we're having the right conversations that we come prepared and we know where they are when we go into deploying these things into our solution.

So I don't think that there's a ton of overlap, maybe a couple of questions, but I think the customers understand that this information is super valuable and will allow us to tailor the conversations. We have to be more.

[00:10:22] Jason Noble: I love the way you've called it a partnership framework as well. Cause that sets from the outset, what you're trying to do, this isn't a short-term thing and it sets you up for success.

When you want to scale, you've got to get those foundations right at the beginning. If they're not right, you can't scale. It's that. Yeah.

[00:10:37] Jason Whitehead: I love what you're saying too. We in our group we do a go slow to go fast piece, which is both like that. But a part of it is intentionally designed to build trust and really get to know, make a connection with the other people first.

And there are three steps or you don't make the connection with them and really build trust and get to understand how to communicate with them. No. There's so many times talking with customers, you just go right past each other. If you don't invest that time, and then we talked some about the, what's our collaboration process.

How are we going? Who's going to be in the room. Must've looked like. And then the very third part is the content really. Okay. Let's tell me about your business and how we're going to work together and all that other stuff. And I think when people skip that and go right into. The tech or the process.

So many things come back to bite you in the ass later, that always gets you. But I'm curious though, when you have those calls with your partnership framework as well, too, how often are you finding a disconnect between within the client site itself? Oh, the executive said one thing, but you heard something very different during the sales process for the people down with.

Didn't have a clue what the executive was expecting through this process.

[00:11:35] Kristi Faltorusso: I think for us, it's, we're beginning, like I said we're selling to mid-market for the most part. So the organizations are smaller. They're not, you're 20,000 person enterprise. Companies where definitely there is a game of telephone and things are getting lost in translation.

So I don't think that we have that problem, but I could definitely see at scale and in other organizations where I've worked with larger customers, there is sometimes a disconnect, right? Because the buyer is not sitting down, justifying what they're doing and why they're doing it to the rest of the team.

That's going to go and execute it, which is why I think bringing these teams together in this type of a conversation, hopefully. In a very disengaging and then disengaging disarming way brings people together to be collaborative and I'll get on the same page because when you're not together having that proper conversation, there's a lot of like later finger pointing.

And he said, she said, oh, I'm not getting support this way. Get everyone in the same room, get everyone on the same page and you can effectively move. Yep,

[00:12:30] Jason Whitehead: absolutely.

[00:12:30] Jason Noble: That alignment is so critical. It does, again, it's building up from day one in the experience that you've had. I You mentioned earlier on kind of about people think technology and automation is what you need to scale.

It's not, it's a lot more, but what are some of the challenges and kind of gotchas that you've seen and mistakes you've seen organizations make when they try to scale, but don't do it success.

[00:12:50] Kristi Faltorusso: One people try to scale without having a program, a well-thought out program. I'm like, what is it that we're doing?

What are the messages? What is the customer experience? I just, we can break those all down into their own individual challenges, but just people think people move very quickly because there is a mandate that is coming top down to scale. And for folks that haven't scaled properly and effectively before.

They just think it's okay go push a bunch of stuff. Like we're just going to go and we're doing this and we're just, we're taking people out of the equation, we're going to try to do more with less. And you're not giving a lot of thought to creating a very comprehensive experience for their customers from start to finish.

And so I would say like the lack of focus around that would be my full pod. Number one. Number two. I think he's then going to proper head. Like that one's a meaty one, but I would say the second one definitely probably comes down to. Not getting a cross-functional support and realizing that in order to have a successful scale program, actually to have an effective customer success program, period, you have to have everyone bought in and supporting you.

But especially when it's, when you're thinking about scaling, when you think about scaling, right? In a lot of cases, you are maybe removing a lot of the human or manual work that was required otherwise. And you are automating things. You are doing things at scale, meaning maybe there's one too many programs, things like that.

Pull in marketing, right? Marketing customer marketing has to be a very big part of this program, your support team, right? If you don't have a CSM is talking to your customer once a week, support issues are going to come up, right? That might mean an increase in volume with your support queue. How are things going to be happening with, at any part of your business, it amplifies the need for everyone to be involved and to have the ability to scale with you.

It is not just scaling a silo with CS and most people think, oh, I'm creating a customer. Scale program. And so that's me and my organization. And it's definitely not. I

[00:14:47] Jason Noble: think you've hit the nail on the head there that it does, fundamentally for customer success. We've got to be collaborative. This is a cross organization function, but when you start to scale, it becomes even more critical when you've got a very small number of.

You can probably manage with a more siloed approach, but as you scale, it just doesn't work. It absolutely doesn't work. And I love the way you talked about that program as well, because you've got to think longer term, where are we trying to get to? What do we need to do? Not just, yes, you need to scale.

What does that mean? Double the number of you've got to think it through. What are we trying to get to? Where's the.

[00:15:21] Kristi Faltorusso: Yeah, Jason, that's my foot pod. Number three, people don't have the proper KPI. They don't know what they look like for this program. How are we measuring it? How do we know what's effective?

People are just literally going into this blind and doing a whole bunch of stuff.

Because they're all looking at data. That's telling them it's

[00:15:42] Jason Noble: not good. It's almost not to do with scale, but you still get organizations creating customer success. Cause they think they need to do it, but not while we've all been there. We've all seen these challenges and it is it's you can't scale unless you get any of these basic basics.

I think too many organizations try to scale too quickly before they've got these fundamentalism.

[00:16:04] Jason Whitehead: No, Christina, I'm wondering, I've worked a lot of organizations and you meet some folks there, whether it's the CEO or someone else at the executive level. And you're like, okay, they've really get it there.

There's going to be a little ups and downs of any program and we'll get through them. It's going to be wonderful. And then there's others. You can just sniff out This is not going to, and it's not just with us, just, this is not going to go well for them because of some misconceptions they have, or lack of resources they're willing to commit or other things along the line of your full pause.

What are the things that make you sniff out that these people might have unreasonable expectations are going struggle through this.

[00:16:34] Kristi Faltorusso: I think it's along the lines of the questions we dig in a good one to bring this down two ways, right? There's the companies that I join, where I, as a leader, I'm sitting in an organization where I'm running into that issue which I think we've all met Zach CEO at some point in our career.

And this is why I leave companies is when I feel like I'm justifying my job and my existence every day. Yup. After a certain amount of time of education and enablement up, I have to just move on, right? I need to be successful. So that is how I will handle that as an individual, when it comes into supporting organizations, we do a lot of this discovery, right?

I talked about the questions we ask in that, in the survey and the partnership kickoff, as well as conversations that I have, or Dave Blake, our CEO might have independently with the executive stakeholders we dig in and we ask a lot of questions with them. And when we hit. For little red flags, right?

Usually those things are around inflated, KPI, improvement numbers over short periods of time dismissive statements around the value output of the work that we do, right? Like you can, we, for folks that have been in a while you know what the, those little red flags are when we hear those, we definitely.

We try to unpack it with them. And if there's a gap in understanding, we do try to educate, enable, but I will tell you not everyone wants to hear that the work that we do does take a lot of time and resource and technology, and it's, if you don't want to invest in it, if you don't believe it, It's God, right there.

Jesus is a for everybody, like neither is customers and guests. When you read them, get it. You believe you don't

have a religious person, but like customer success, I believe in customer success. And I know. And I get it, but it's not for everybody. So that's okay. They're going to try to figure out a way to get there, either going to take a different path and that's their journey, but we do try to educate with you, try to help.

And would you try to support our leaders in helping them evangelize and tell that narrative up? It's you know, seeing is believing for a lot of people. So unless they've seen it or heard it from their peers, that this is what you do, and it works really well. We need more success stories to amplify that.

So more CEOs and more executives are bought into

[00:18:40] Jason Whitehead: the work that we do. Absolutely. Oh, I love what you're saying there, I've had some of those clients where you're like, But there's only so much you can do to protect people from themselves. You help them where you can and, and for me, anyways, I, you can sometimes see the, the car wreck in slow motion, what's going to come, how can I be a bit of an airbag here?

How can I prevent this a little bit? So that the next time after we get through this, they'll believe me a little bit more next time. And hopefully it will get them where they need to be, but it's definitely a challenge. I think

[00:19:05] Jason Noble: it is the frustration as well as is sometimes you have to go through it several times with the same organization to actually see it.

And it does it, it almost, it's an intrusive thing in itself that education process.

[00:19:17] Kristi Faltorusso: I will say one thing that, that I get, and I understand, but it's always, it breaks my heart a little bit is when I have other VPs or even chief customer officers or chief operating officers or whatever their role is, come to me to ask me to speak to their CEO.

And I'm saying the same thing that they are, but all of a sudden you have the third party or somebody outside their organization to repeat it like a parrot and all of a sudden it's oh yeah, do you hear what this person said? And the poor executive that you hired. But you trusted in your organization to come in, said the same thing and you didn't want to hear it.

That to me is it's it's very common and very disappointing.

[00:19:52] Jason Noble: I couldn't agree more. I'd be interested in hearing as kind of customer success leaders and exactly how do we bring our teams along the scaling journey? Cause that, your individual teams, it can be quite challenging.

There's a big period of change. They're going through. And it can quite a bumpy ride for him. So how do you, what are some of the insights you can give into how you can help your own teams to go through that scaling? So my

[00:20:13] Kristi Faltorusso: favorite thing to say is that people want change to happen with them, not to them.

So I put my team and I quite frankly, my team knows our customers better than I do. They're the ones speaking to them every day. They're the one engaging, they're hearing the product requests, the pain points they're hearing what works what's successful. I would be silly to think that I would be more in tune with designing what my customers need to scale.

Then bring know, bring them along for the ride. But as a leader, I don't like to delegate by saying, you're going to do this and you're going to do that. So I tell the team, here's what we're working on. These are the. If there's something that's of interest to you that you feel like you've got some level of expertise around or an area of interest lean into it and let's work together.

And so they're opting in to doing the work that creates these programs that are more effective because they were part of it and they're more likely to adopt it and evangelize it to their peers. And that has always been a very successful practice for me. It gets them to do. Work as a leader, they get to lead from a point of non-leadership and get a little taste of what that feels like they built the product or the process.

It's theirs. They put their name on it and it feel good. And honestly, from my standpoint, the benefit to me, I go focused on the other thing, right? Like we can divide and conquer. So I think if you've got, hopefully you're hiring smart, capable people. If they're not smart and capable, why do you hire them?

Empower them to go do great work with you. So I'm big on just pull the team along with.

[00:21:34] Jason Noble: Getting that buy-in is so important as well. And I, you say get them to do things that they want to do. I, a big part of the journey I think is super, super important. Christie, look this has been such an amazing conversation we could go on for hours and I have no doubt.

We'll invite you back to talk about more of these. We've already picked up on a few things that we could dig into a big thank you for having to come in on. One thing we always ask our guests to do. We give them a, what we call a bowl challenge question. And the one we'd like to give you is what do you see as the biggest challenge today when it comes to scaling success, customer success and scaling it successfully.

So the one biggest. I'm going

[00:22:14] Kristi Faltorusso: to say is my full pod. Number two is trying to do this in a silo, not working collaboratively, not getting that proper buy-in. And I'm going to, I'm going to overemphasize emphasize one area, build out customer marketing, do not try to use the same marketing tactics that work for building prospects at your customers, design a program that's exclusively for them, and that will help you scale, like nothing.

[00:22:36] Jason Noble: We've not yet done a podcast about customer marketing, but it's something that we've spoken before. Desperate.

I'm so tempted to talk for another 30 minutes on this, right? Because it's so big because people just organizations. Yeah. We've got marketing team. If you've got a customer marketing team and start the it's such a different style, look, we will take you up on this. We're going to do another podcast on this because it's something that, again, organizations just aren't doing, they're not investing. I am massive. Massive. Thank you. This has been a fantastic conversation. I think really insightful for all of us. So a big, thank you from us. Yeah. Thank

[00:23:11] Jason Whitehead: you so much. And before you go, please give a shameless plug for, sorry. I forgot. You're choosing or your organization, whatever.

You're in the mood to shamelessly plug. We'd love to hear. Okay.

[00:23:19] Kristi Faltorusso: Shameless plugs. Here we go. I'm going to shamelessly plug myself first. So if you are following me, if we're not friends, if we've not spoken before, please go follow me on LinkedIn. I would love to engage with you. Have a conversation, virtual cup of coffee, maybe catch it.

And. Cause in-person is happening, guys. I don't know if nobody's citing my other shameless plug. If you don't have a customer success solution and you do need one, you think you might need one, you need one in the future. Please come check out client success. I'd love to give you a demo of our solution.

Shameless plug will be for my personal brand website, keeping CS real keeping CS simple. And it's all about the simplification. As Jason mentioned earlier of customer success, best practices, let's stop over-complicating things, break things down and make it easier and make everyone more successful.

[00:24:03] Jason Whitehead: Love it. Absolutely love it. Absolutely love that it links to be in the description below. Thanks so much. Thanks

[00:24:09] Kristi Faltorusso: so much guys.

View Details

Episode Description Join us with guest Alex Farmer, VP of Customer Success at Cognite, a global industrial AI Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company supporting the full-scale digital transformation of heavy-asset industries around the world.

At Cognite, Alex helps empower companies with contextualized OT/IT data to drive industrial applications that increase safety, sustainability, and efficiency, and drive revenue. Interests include turning red accounts green, mediocre jokes, and delighting customers. Guest: Alex Farmer Alex is a Customer Success executive with experience building post-sale teams to reduce churn and increase growth at high-growth B2B SaaS scale-ups. He’s the Founder and CEO of Customer Success Excellence - the world's first awards event dedicated to the Customer Success profession, with the first event planned in London later this year.

CONTACT ALEX FARMER * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderfarmer/ * Customer Success Excellence: https://www.customersuccessexcellence.com/

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Jason's take on podcast series with myself. Jason Noble here in London and my partner in crime, Mr. Whitehead, over in the states say hello, Jason. Hello,

[00:00:12] Jason Whitehead: Jason. Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us.

[00:00:14] Jason Noble: We're thrilled. We seem to have some really exciting guests on with us recently, and we can say exactly the same about today.

We're thrilled to have Alex Farmer with us today. Joining us to talk about customer success. Organization structures. And what that looks like in the bigger context or in terms of the organizational strategy, Alex, I'm sure most of you guys will know him. He's a customer success executive with experience building post-sales teams, really to help drive growth, increase or decrease churn in some really incredible high growth, really fast moving B2B, SAS scale-ups he's also the founder and CEO for customer success excellence.

The world's first award. Event, that's dedicated to customer success. And he's going to give us a little talk about that later on. And we've got the first event planned for this later this year. I believe Alex, which is really cool. So really excited about that. Alex, you're currently the VP of customer success at cog night.

Cognos are an AI software service company, really supporting digital transformation of, I think the phrase is heavy industry assets all around the world and really what you've done there you've come in from day one, built the team. I am really helping drive what that kind of, that data looks like, what it means for big industrial organizations.

So some really incredible things there to help turn around challenging customers, build around some really great value for them. Alex, welcome. We are super, super excited to have you here and I've known you for a good number of years, Alex, we met, I think a couple of years back, four years back, kind of one of the customer success leadership dinners in Spain and and I've stayed in touch. So I'm I love the journey you've gone on. We're just saying if you've been in the UK now for 10 years, which is ridiculous

[00:01:51] Alex Farmer: if we're rounding yes. And data and Jason, I remember when we met, you had the unfortunate dishonor of sitting next to me. So I had your ears for several hours.

So thank you for putting up with me and it's all come full circle here. A cost your ears. Once again, pleasure to be a guest on the pod. Would

[00:02:08] Jason Noble: you just go and introduce yourself for us and for our listeners that perhaps don't know you. And I don't think there are many of them, but just give a bit more inference your kind of your background and your journey, w how have you got to where you've got to?

[00:02:19] Alex Farmer: Yeah. I guess I'll go chronologically, not with my year of birth, but I guess the start of my career I actually grew up I will go back to my, your birth. I was born in the Silicon valley. So I grew up in the California bay area. And I spent about 18 years there and then went out to college in Boston.

And from there, got my first job as an implementation consultant at an HR tech scale up. I had no idea if I wanted to be in HR or in business. So I thought I should join an HR business and also helpfully. They gave me. I think November and I was graduating in may. So the pressure or taking the pressure off for, a good six months, don't quote my math there.

I think that is accurate. Yeah. Six months was also a privilege. So I did that and moved out to the UK, transferred out there with that company. And that's where I found. Fairsail where I had the privilege of being employee 32. Fair sale for those that don't know is a kind of a UK scale of success story, not my words, but a privilege to be a part of a, I was employee 32 when I joined on our support team for six months and then became our first CSM in January.

I think January 1st, 2015 is the transfer date that I moved into customer success, which correlation, certainly not causation is when some will say customer success came to Europe, let's say in full force. So it was right correlation, I promise. But it was. Right place at the right time.

And I spent four and a half years there. Th they were a Salesforce ISV that provided HR tech solutions on the Salesforce platform, four and a half years there building the customer success team. The company was exited in March, 2017 to Sage. We were Sage's first cloud acquisition. So from a small scale up I joined when we were million and a half pounds in ARR.

When I left, we were about 16 million pounds in ARR. So your full zero to 20 story. But then through that, we were say just first cloud acquisition. And of course they were 13,000 people in many different countries. An interesting journey and in some ways being a customer success for a cloud aspiration, As opposed to a cloud company is a very interesting time.

Let's put it like that. And then from there moved on to a series, a scale up in the legal tech space where I led the full post sale function, success, onboarding support training partnerships, and then also European sales for about three to four months, I think. Traded depth for a hell of a lot of breaths, let's say.

And then I found my home. It called night heavy asset industries is what we call it. Oil and gas, manufacturing, renewables, and power and utilities. The platform that we provide creates a context for disparate data silos, but for industrial companies that becomes even more important because.

Not just it data, but you have operational data, the live operating status of every single valve on an oil rig per se. So super interesting space and so big challenges to solve that are super relevant at the moment. It's a exciting journey. We became Norway's first unicorn in July. Putting them on the unicorn map.

So to say, and I guess it's lucky number three, in terms of building a post-sale function.

[00:05:02] Jason Noble: I said, Alex I love that journey and I think you've come from. Actually being starting an implementation that in support you've seen all of these kind of post-sales customer facing roles.

And I think it really brings us on nicely to talk about this. You've worked with some incredible companies that you've come into. You've gone through the acquisition. You're now in a unicorn company as well. So you've seen that growth. What are some of the, that the kind of go-to strategies and approaches that you've got as to how you build the customer facing organizations?

What are some of the big. Yeah.

[00:05:33] Alex Farmer: One day I'll come into a place where it exists or let's say and when I say exist, the customer success function or the CSM column in the org chart It's been interesting because each company is different domain. In some ways they were different contract values, right?

So mid-market for fair sale and in co-pro and then cognitive, super high enterprise very high touch. So that's been interesting as well, but I think there are some common threads really they coming in and not just going out. And listening to customers, there's the obvious, customer tour that you do to understand their challenges and understand the outside end view.

But I think more importantly, and maybe what gets underestimated for first time, CS leaders is the need to do the internal to around other functions and departments. I sometimes describe customer success as. I haven't gone this phrase somebody said customer success is simple is easy now is simple.

It's just not easy. And that resonates, but principally, because what I sometimes describe customer success as is we just took 20% of the most customer centric things that other teams in the org chart used to do and combine them into one role. And I think there's an element of that where.

What I need to say is there's a lot of change management that happens where the support case review that the support team used to do. You might be doing it an ABR now, right? So you carve off the top, let's say most customer facing 20%. So the customers have to navigate five different bits of 20%, if that makes sense.

And rather just as one person that they can go to that facilitates their journey to value with your company. So I think one of the biggest challenges or opportunities that. Lessons that I've learned is the need to really change, manage internally that we're not here to steal someone's power cloud or credibility.

If we start by saying customer success is an organizational philosophy and an organizational kind of mandate we're going to partner together to make that a reality and really finding common ground. So when it's with say. Driving references, making it. So the experience sells itself, right?

Removing friction for them to close deals as an example, if it's implementation, if it's support, finding common ground for them as well. So there's fewer support escalations that we get on top of things faster. I think that's going to be one, one of those principle lessons that I've taken in, in, and also made mistakes on.

And that's how you learn throughout that journey that I described earlier.

[00:07:47] Jason Whitehead: Wow. That's awesome. I love hearing about the internal change management because that's one that keeps coming up everywhere. We go. And with a lot of clients that I work with along that thread, I'd love to know what sort of things you found have been most beneficial, maybe other teams most want to collaborate with you as you're trying to change things internally.

And what have been the things that seem to put up walls for folks that you would advise people to avoid that?

[00:08:07] Alex Farmer: Yeah, I think. Th there's a lot of things that are hard about customer success, but one of the easier things is all you're doing is sharing the voice of the customer. So when you really boil it down to brass tacks, if you disagree with me, that's fine.

But if we really confront each other and it all comes to a head, you're the one who's advocating against what should be the opinion of our customer. And nobody doesn't want him, nobody wants to be not customer centric. So I think there's that, that, that should, that. The power of that message and the let's say the bully pulpit.

So to speak that you carry as a CS leader or a CSM should not be underestimated. I think the first thing that I try to focus on as we're setting up kind of the systems, the processes of customer success. It's just injecting customer data into the business, because with that information, I don't have to confront, I can influence if I provide customer data as a service, I'm not a marketing.

So see DAS is a terrible acronym, but let's not go with that. But customer data as a service for the business to make this. So examples, the common slack channel, where you can send customer news into one channel so everybody can understand what's happening. The highlights with your customers when customer health changes and you send a, you can send to a central slack channel that everybody is required to be a member of by the way why their health changed and the reason for red or yellow.

And then also one of the things that we do when we run a QBR, we'll summarize the qualitative feedback from our customers and then send that to our executor. And then I guess the last example is, customer survey results, NPS scores, NPS qualitative feedback. We'll send it to slack channels as well but the most important thing is.

As much as I would like to be in every I'm going to provide that statement before I even say it, I would not like to be in every single meeting room that or meeting that happens at a company that would be insane, but the customer's voice should be right. So doing, doing what you can to, there's a couple of examples where I remember sitting at a meeting and it was our engineering leader or a marketing leader that said, but customer X in this QBR that happened three weeks ago, said this, therefore we need to do that.

And just giving them the power to make, to ensure that decisions being made all the time are predisposed to serve customers. Ultimately makes our life a hell of a lot easier SES leaders, because we're not fighting fires. Then we can, of course, transition from that reactive motion, which is where unfortunately, most CS teams starting up find themselves into that proactive motion more quickly, which is critical.

[00:10:30] Jason Noble: And how do you go about, I was fascinating cause I've talked about this before and being. Now you're often the sole representative representing the voice of the customer. And sometimes it can be lonely challenging because people do disagree. But what are some of the ways kind of tools or methods you've used to get other people, other stakeholders, other leaders in the business to understand.

What it actually means what the impact is of what the customer is saying. How do you get them to take it the right way and to make it so that we can take actions based on it?

[00:11:00] Alex Farmer: Yeah it's always challenging. And I'll weave that. I'll say other Jason, I didn't fully answer your question.

I think earlier, as well around what some of the challenges were in, in driving this collaboration. So maybe I can answer both. I think. It's great. We get the voice of the customer. We surround decision-makers with customer voice that can influence, but it doesn't make them make decisions that are.

In the customer's interests, which I think is the crux of both of your questions. I, I think where I've seen the most challenges around, let's say know, KPI divisions, right? The classic who owns renewal, who ends up selling, what does that actually mean for, not just my involvement, but also my commission.

And I don't use that. Everybody in the go-to market or is usually paid with some variable. So that's not a dig at sales, it's a dig at collaboration. And how do we lower the. And I've made this mistake coming into an organization, trying to do. Yeah, there is no CS, so let's be the CS heroes and really be a bit of a bull in a China shop.

And it really backfired for us. And we, there was constant infighting. The words is the, of the voice of the customer were taken with a grain of salt because it was always pushing the agenda that CS should own more than they do. And it was really at the detriment, it's a lesson I certainly learned and we got over it.

We sometimes I think I now, when navigating that and use a little bit more tact in trying to compromise and, make sure people are mutually incentivized and also be a little bit more, I've never really worked in an enterprise and maybe this is why a little bit less I won't use the word impulsive, but I've just used it so you can apply what you like from that, but a little bit less w executed a little bit more A little bit less pace and a little bit more consideration.

And be a little bit more nimble about how you're trying to influence and not just shove change down people's throats. So I think that was one of the downsides or challenges and really making that those collaborations work. If that makes sense. Yeah,

[00:12:42] Jason Whitehead: absolutely.

I'm curious since you've worked in a lot of different organizations and gone through phenomenal growth and been acquired and all that good stuff, too, do you think in general more leaders are understanding what CS is and in the role it's supposed to play, or it's still a big black box for a lot of folks because, So a lot of the organizations I encounter some of the newer ones they're starting it earlier, but I'm not sure they get it more.

And some of the older, more established organizations, there's still a big question of what is the CS stuff you're talking about?

[00:13:10] Alex Farmer: Yeah. I'm not sure I have a perfect short answer to that one because it's so complex. My immediate thought is one of irony cognitive as an organization. We work with industries that are.

Early in their digital adoption journeys, right? Power companies, manufacturing organizations that don't really procure much software. And a lot of the software vendors in this space have a more, let's say traditional view of business alignment because they come from the more commoditized model and not the customer led grow SAS mindset that CS flourishes in.

So it's funny, you asked the question because. It's not just the organization, but the customer, you don't have to spend so much time aligning and saying, yes, this is what a CSM does. And here's what we're here to do alongside our services organization. That's going to help you deploy use cases on top of our data platform, so that alignment's been challenging.

And then of course, hiring has been a challenge as well. I've hired we've Forex our team From I think we're up to 20 ish now across the world there is involved in customer success in some way or another. And that's the CSM function just to be clear, our, our post-sale function is, over a hundred plus, but the CSM function we grew from five to 20 in about.

And I think I have last count, 123 pages of interview notes, just to give some context. But one of those people that we hired had CS in their job title before they joined our organization, because we're looking for this credibility that shows the customer as opposed to tells the customer the value they bring.

So that's why I am bemused by the question, but I still think there's a real. And maybe I'll get to it. Part of the reason why I've tried to launch, not try to, we are officially long, I've launched the world's first awards program dedicated to customer success is I'm worried about customer success, excellence his name, and I will have my shameless plug at the end.

I've been promise. But the reason I bring it up now is because I think that we as a function sometimes cause a bit of a self-inflicted struggle where we talk a lot about what CSS. The discourse hasn't matured. Like we want our function to and I think that's. Probably mostly a reflection that the majority of people in customer success continue to be new to the space.

So a lot of the content is the 1 0 1. Here's what CS is. And that's a good thing, right? We should all be bullish on the growth of our function but I'm still looking for the, this podcast excluded by the way. I've heard many innovative things here and in other forums as well.

But I think the main discourse is one that's still very I even say entry-level and the reason I founded this awards is to highlight those that don't talk about what they're doing. They just go and execute in an exceptional way. And then we're trying to share what that execution looks like back to the industry and the reason why I think it's relevant here.

That's what's, if some, if you're coming into a company and trying to establish customer success and the notion that they have in their mind is, oh, cS is not support, but then what is it? Because the conversation they've experienced to see us as not support, we're doing ourselves a disservice.

So part of the reason why we founded the awards is to have content out there. That's actually about that, what we're not, but the innovation that's out there that exists. So we can educate those within organizations to make it easier for a CS leader to step in and have a lane.

Maybe it's not the best answer to your question because it's such a diverse challenge in each organization, but I think the organizations that get. Are using that as a differentiator for hiring and acquiring talent, right? Because, especially in CS leadership, there's so much opportunity for leaders to find a, not just a CS leadership role, but one and an organization that really values the customer.

I just think, in the excitement of everyone's upward trajectory and customer service, Because the more supply of leadership roles, the more demand for leadership roles, the and limited supply means that, people are spending less years as an individual contributor and our function than others before jumping into leadership.

And in that enthusiasm, I think it's important to pause and really. Do some due diligence as to how the organization understands customer success before leaping in, and I've heard a lot of challenges from folks who maybe struggled to navigate that leap which has been hard.

[00:17:07] Jason Noble: I love that Alex, you've talked about so many key things there and it is, I think that journey for a lot of people in customer success is very.

We see a lot of new people come into it. They're looking for that guidance, that direction. What does the future look like in the organizations you've worked in and even the work you've done, with the awards. In, in your mind, what does, if there is such a thing, what is, what does the ideal organization structure look like for customer success and feel free to either go down the route of it's purely focused on CSMs or it's something as a CS leader, your role is broader, but I'd love to get your.

For you. So if there is an ideal what do you think you should look like and why?

[00:17:47] Alex Farmer: So maybe I can briefly touch on both for startups, I see a real aversion to splitting roles early on, and I think it's ill-advised and what I mean by that is, you have the CSM that's responsible for onboarding and the training and the customer success management.

And maybe even the support. In some ways, set them up to fail because we're just giving them a bunch of reactive, transactional tasks. And then when they have a moment to breathe, they have to think proactively, but they've just spent the last 90 days onboarding this customer and showing the customer executive that they're the onboarding team, not the customer success team.

So I think splitting the org chart as quickly as possible. At the very least, a more proactive value centric layer at the top, which is usually the CSM function, maybe some customer marketing or community that's there to do the one-to-many with support onboarding and training.

That could be one role because I'm going to set you up. I'm going to make sure you can use the tool and help you when you get stuck. But really splitting reactive and proactive quickly is important. And then to touch on the second part of your question around the CSM function This is where I think there's going to be a lot of change.

And I think I see it already, cognitive pretty use case-based product. So we sell our data platform, cognitive data fusion, but a lot of our customers don't have the data science capability in house to leverage the contextualized data. So our industry solutions organization will help.

Understand their business pain points and create dashboards and custom applications on top of our data platform to drive business value. But that requires a huge amount of domain expertise and more and more, I see products out there that are, even like RPA platforms, that are growing very quickly, they require domain expertise because you have to know which processes are ripe for automation and the customer bought your tool because they don't really know much about robotic process automation. The CSM function I'm starting to see now, as SAS becomes a little bit more use case centric or generally splits of CS, almost back to the account management model.

And I don't purport to say, we need to go back to a model where, we're picking up the phone when there's a problem, right? We're still in this CSM proactive motion. But what I mean by account management model is, more proactive. But commercial acumen. And I think we've now maybe realized in the war for talent, especially given how hot the CS market is for CSMs.

It's hard to find that perfect combination of cuss, commercial acumen, technical understanding, and domain expertise. So I'm seeing now, almost a three-way split where you have these. I'll use my American analogy of quarterbacks who this who are the CSMs, right? And their job is to quarterback in pooled, the technical experts.

Maybe you're a Tam role. For example, then maybe sit one foot in support and one foot in customer success. But then also now pooled customer success consultants or pooled domain experts, especially for organizations that have a heavy domain specific. Focus, cognitive being one of them. But, there's plenty of software products that have split their offering or go to market into industry specific functions where it's hard to find, give my example from before, right?

Where one of the 15 people I've hired as a former CSM, it's hard to find, transferable CS skills with rich domain expertise, especially for complex software offerings. So I think that's where I see CSM going, where we continue to step away from. Being the everything department to coin the phrase that I think Ralph who we all know I'm going, but to be very specific in their role with still one owner that quarterbacks everybody in and everybody out, but it's going to require a lot more coordination to make sure it's not a customer experience with the different Cokes.

No. I

[00:21:21] Jason Whitehead: really like what you're saying too about the domain expertise. Cause we've spoken a lot of folks on the podcast and otherwise, and I find in certain industries you'd like security crypto, AI data, many times the customer doesn't have the talent or domain expertise in house. And one of these you said is as you're selling salute your technology in these areas.

And I think a lot of times software companies think, oh, we're selling technology and the solution in this area. The customer thinks they're buying. In this area and they don't know what they don't know. So I think you need to be able to bring in that mix of expertise and software and process, and you're upset.

I love the football analogy, quarterback piece there. Cause I think, making sure you can bring all those to bear for your customers is essential. And that's a good revenue opportunity for the software companies

[00:22:04] Alex Farmer: too, if they can deliver on it.

[00:22:06] Jason Noble: I think the thing you said about Alex as well about that commercial acumen, that's critical.

And we're beginning to see that shift, We talked, I think the other week, Jason, with the experience you get, when someone different to your CSM comes in just to handle the commercials is a really disjointed experience, but there's a lot of organizations still doing it because the CS team just don't have that commercial understanding.

And I knew that still is an area where there's a lot of debate around what's the right method. And it really does depend on the organization. But I think we are beginning to see that trend where. Customer success is becoming more and more commercial. Like you should be it's about value and outcomes for the customer.

And then that helps us internally.

[00:22:44] Alex Farmer: I think just quickly on that, because it's such a good point and, frankly, we're still trying to find the right balance it called night and I see a lot of organizations in that space. Yeah, to be able to participate in that conversation as a CS leader, you have to have the value stuff right.

First. And it's because CS is so new and organization, some large organizations are just starting out their customer success journey. Maybe we get a little bit too ambitious with the amount of things that we can own all at the same time. And I guess it goes back to my previous rare moment of self-awareness, saying that when we come in there like a bull in a China shop saying, this is mine, I'll take this.

I'll take. And some ways we set ourselves up to fail because, and I think, if I can make just one more comment about the state of our industry, I think there's a little bit of playbook repetition that it doesn't really help where, oh, we're supposed to own renewal cause good CS teams or commercial CS teams.

So we need to own the renewal right now, or, the health score method, the health score framework that we're gonna use is one that's on the internet that I found somewhere. But I don't actually think about what our customer needs to be healthy and what even health needs for our.

So I D I think. I'm happy now to see organizations as the definition of customer success maybe gets away from the very standard CSM role. And we start to specialize, frankly. There's probably more time for us to really think about, okay. Our job is to get our value for our customers.

We might be informed by some of these traditional playbooks, but certainly not just going to implement QPRs for the sake of it. And I think that's a, an important thing for our industry to consider as well. I love that too.

[00:24:14] Jason Whitehead: Cause I think there's so many places where you see common practice.

It's not necessarily the best practice or best for your industry or your organization.

It does a big disservice, I think, to a lot of organizations to go down that road without that critical analysis and thought I'm saying, is this the right thing here in this context,

[00:24:32] Alex Farmer: I love the way you phrased that because who defines best practice, right? It's a best practice because people talk about it, but then we're playing a game of telephone, right?

Where, I did a disorganization, therefore I say, it's the best practice on some podcasts. And then somebody else thinks I should do this too. And then we don't have the kind of don't step back, think about our individual customer and just be guided by those principles, as opposed to trying to take a script and rinse and repeat at every organization that you have.

That's the super

[00:24:57] Jason Noble: key thing. I think the risk where, there's a lot of now we're seeing some great industry standards in kind of CS training certification, but it's no dissimilar to idol prince to all of these methodologies. You. They're there as guides. This isn't telling you, this is how to do it.

And you've got to, you've gotta be. So remember that's so critical because if you follow them word for word, it's just not going to work. Yeah. That's stepping back, as you said, Alex, that analysis, what do our customers want? What does it mean? What are we trying to do with them? And

[00:25:26] Alex Farmer: if I may, just to to jump off of that, prince two is about project management, right?

Sales process methodology, whether it's, force management, medic whatever tool or training you use. That is about one concrete process, getting a customer set up or closing a deal. And then when you combine the fact so that simplicity it's a framework. We have to implement it into our own context, but then take customer success where, the definition is different per country.

Your job, ultimately, it's not, it doesn't really have to start and finish it's to tread water or ideally raise the altitude of the customer and help them grow to achieve their goal. But the momentum is completely different. So no wonder it's such a challenge because I can't just take a prince two course and then apply it to my 30 day onboarding.

I have to think about all of the different lanes, the CSS plan, which is a. It has so much breadth, which is why I think it's such an important thing that we start to specialize the function to really find some depth and effectiveness within our roles,

[00:26:22] Jason Whitehead: and I think the way it's that to what you were saying earlier of the the war for talent for CS folks.

So there's not a lot of overly experienced people. And you've got this, dearth of common practice in this echo chamber around we, we should do this, we should do that. Then when you actually get into a lot of organizations, the people who are making the decisions, they don't have enough experience or knowledge to challenge those decisions so that they start with what's making the most noise and just repeats on itself.

It's I am curious though. And I know we're almost out of time here, but with the. It seems that you've been building and developing you say, one person has CS on their resume. What is it that you're looking for when you're trying to find this is going to be a great person. And then when, what do you have to do to mold them and develop them into what you really need in your organization?

[00:27:05] Alex Farmer: Such an important question. And I think firstly I think what I'm looking for is tenacity and tenacity is important to me because. The candidate will fight for their customer. The candidate will use some sharp elbows once in a while to find the lane that they need to fill in, in the CSM function.

And also, tenaciously engage with other departments within the organization that needs something from there. And of course there's elements of needing to, it's hard to establish proactivity with a customer when they don't respond to your email. So how am I going to show value?

You get them to respond to me and then get them on the happy path. So tenacity is important for me. And then I think, there's, especially in our industry, domain expertise is critical. So we certainly look for that and then some commercial experience as well. I kinda mentioned the.

The Trinity earlier around technical expertise, domain and commercial. In terms of transferable skills, we hire for domain on the resume because it's, so it's going to be it's just so important to have that credibility with customers because digitalization, the span of what you can digitalize is so vast.

But in terms of transferable skills, it's tenacity, and then it really inability to learn and be challenged as well. I think one of the things that's really interesting for us is we're hiring. Yeah, the energy industry, for example, is going through a huge change at the moment and digital tools and digital transformation is critical for that change.

We have a real opportunity as traditional oil and gas companies, pivot to diversify their energy, and, bid for wind farms and create wind farms from scratch. We had a huge opportunity to engage with these cuts. To build digital first, right? So we don't have to transform your asset.

We can actually set it up in a way that allows us to see the live operating status of this offshore wind farm, for example. But that requires us to really. Get in the, become a partner and almost put our consultant hat on to make sure that we're designing these things with our customers.

So any cognates, maybe a little bit of a unique case, but it's certainly been it's been very interesting to try and evaluate and understand what works and also what doesn't. But I think that ability to be stretched and challenged is probably the most important thing.

[00:29:07] Jason Noble: I think you're seeing organizations go that direction as well.

And do I like the way you're talking to. The industry expertise. I think customers look for it in you, whether or not you've got it or the individuals in your team, but they are looking for it. And it's it's something that if you don't have it and you're coming into a business, you need to pick it up quickly.

Cause that proactive consultancy is a key thing.

[00:29:26] Alex Farmer: And I, in some ways have lived that experience. I've always been domain agnostic in my companies, and HR tech and legal tech the domains that we focused on. We could have, I could understand relatively quickly the leavers that companies pull on to drive the outcomes that are common.

I digital transformation for energy when I'm hiring, 20, 20 year process automation engineers on my team is a totally different beast. And I think one of the things that organizations. I should really be investing in our onboarding programs, not to train you how to be a CSM, but also onboarding programs about the domain and about the industries that we serve, and common business challenges or common outcomes the customers are trying to achieve. And I think there's a real opportunity to really pivot the traditional onboarding when we're going to go back to talking about talent acquisition, but also talent. Giving everybody the tools, not just to be a CSM, but everything that comes with it, we put you on a commercial training. Great. But how am I putting it? How am I helping you have credibility in front of your customer so that you can use those commercial skills so you can get into the room to use those commercial skills is exceptionally important. And go ahead. Sorry, Jason. Sure.

I was speaking to, to a board member of one of the companies I advise. And he said something that really stuck with me. And as I was saying to earlier not to break the fourth wall here, but I was saying to you earlier, I just came back from skiing and I caught myself skiing down a slope and thinking about what he said to me.

That's how SAS nerdy. I am, I was thinking about this as I was headed down a a lovely ski run earlier this weekend. Basically said, the first generation of SAS is to digitalize existing workflows and then the second generate and I'm paraphrasing, but the second generation is about replacing the workflows, just replacing them fully with software and yeah.

When I think about the domains that I've worked in and also organizations now moving to more of a use case based approach with more consulting required. It's interesting that, the digitalization of existing workflows probably requires domain less domain expertise because the customer is bringing that domain expertise to you.

They've set up their workflow, they know what's needed, they just need to automate it. And now as we move, if we accept the premise that SAS is eating the world we're seeing more of these generation two or three SAS companies that are actually challenging the workflows that we've come to know.

So near and dear, and that requires a lot more knowledge of the overall business model and a lot more knowledge of the domain itself. And I wonder if that's a trend that will continue connecting them back to what we talked about with the CSM am type approach within the pool domain experts and really it.

To, to the point that you made Jason and you both made it. So I can say just Jason that we require a a more nuanced approach to how we make our customers successful. Which, super interesting. And obviously it's a great time as always to be in customer success. It is indeed it

[00:32:07] Jason Whitehead: is, it's very exciting.

And for me, my company success chamber, we provide consulting and professional development services and coaching services. And increasingly we're finding organizations coming to us where they've been hiring for domain skills and that's been

[00:32:19] Alex Farmer: critical to their model. And now they're trying to layer.

[00:32:21] Jason Whitehead: CS expertise and a lot more interpersonal and just professional skills and those influencing skills that you're looking for. We help them do that, but it's even the last few months, I'd say that the demand for that sort of professional development has been huge and increasing about Alex, this has been a great conversation, really excited to have you here.

Before we go, we also like to end with the bowl challenge question. And I guess for you, this is what does the future of customer success look like in a. A lot of things are changing here. Go big, go bold. How do you see

[00:32:49] Alex Farmer: it? The future is it doesn't exist anymore. And that will be great. Because I think customer success created itself out of a need to.

Focus on why the customer is here in the first place. It's not to say existing departments don't care it's that they're too busy dealing with their small lens or small column in the customer journey and improving their internal process. So we had to take the 20%, most customer centric bits, as I said earlier, and combine it in a role that kind of span the horizontal to make sure that the customer is successful and renews their contract.

My hope is that. Over the next five years becomes either embedded in products, and not something that a person needs to do embedded into, digital touch. We always imply as long tail, but digital touch I think is here to stay and, look how marketing has changed, where, we expect all customers to engage digitally.

Now the same thing will happen to customers. And then also, the internal voice of the customer. I think the future chief product officers, chief revenue officers, and CEOs of the world come, will come from the customer success domain. And when that happens, especially as B2B companies have, as we say, B2B is becoming B to C where the customer expectation is now changing and raising or raising the stakes of what's expected.

So I think with all of those things changing. Former CCOs and VPs of CS, stepping into other adjacent roles that then almost eliminate the need to have somebody who has their seat at the table advocating for the customer because the organization does right. That's one future. If we do our job, and we stopped talking about what CS is, interpret, maybe talk a bit more about what CS is and can be so exciting. We'll see you back in five years. And we'll talk about it.

[00:34:28] Jason Whitehead: Definitely. Definitely. Thank you so much for joining love your insights. Love your story. I think it's gonna inspire a lot of people here, but before we go, we always like to invite our guests to give a shameless plug.

[00:34:37] Alex Farmer: please plug away shameless. Absolutely. It will be very shameless because we on June 15th of this year. Have a very exciting event. The first award ceremony for customer success excellence. So as I said earlier, customer success excellence. I had the idea for about two or three years now. But I think we all want to meet in person.

So I've held it back until we could do that. And what it is essentially is that meritocratic process to find the very best in our profession, whether they're a guest on a podcast or just putting their head down and executing for them. There are five award categories. You could find out all the information on our website, customer success, excellence.com.

And we will be running two awards programs, one for EMEA, and one for the Americas. EMEA. The award ceremony is the 15th of June, 2022 and applications for not or nominations open. We'll open in the middle of April and then we're planning to bring it to the Americas toward the end of 2022 or early 2023.

But it's, 75% is it's this meritocratic approach to helping our, find the very best in customer success. And 25% is so we can all dress up nice and have our own version of the academy awards. We certainly deserve it as a community. So I'm really looking forward to making this happen.

[00:35:49] Jason Whitehead: That, that's an exciting goal. I know a lot of people will be very inspired by it. So thank you for moving that forward. It's great for the industry. Everyone on. The Jason's a thank you so much for joining us and we hope you will come back for another episode. We have a few more great guests lined up.

We're very excited to be here. So thanks so much out of that. So

[00:36:05] Jason Noble: Alex really cool conversation that really appreciate it. I've got my audio working again there, but really cool. And I am super excited about the excellence awards. I think it is. It's the right time in the industry, and I know a lot of people are really looking forward to it, so great work there and a massive thank you for joining us today.

[00:36:19] Alex Farmer: Cheers. Thanks for having me.

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Episode Description Join us with guest Aaron Jone, VP of services and global partner strategy at HubSpot. HubSpot is a leading CRM platform that provides software and support to help businesses grow better. Our platform includes marketing, sales, service, and website management products that start free and scale to meet our customers’ needs at any stage of growth.

Today, thousands of customers around the world use our powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, engage, and delight customers. Today we’re talking with Aaron about storytelling and how to use it to really engage with your customers and your internal teams.

Guest: Aaron Jones Aaron Jones is a Professional Services and Customer Success executive, who has been responsible for the vision and execution of delivering optimal customer experiences at companies that include Adobe, Discovery Education, Network for Good, Sprinklr, and others.

Leveraging data, leading indicators, and strategic outreach, he has proven success creating engagement models that drive adoption, are predictive of customer retention and growth, and increase customer satisfaction and overall NPS. Aaron serves as an Advisor for the diversity and inclusion consultancy firm, Cook Ross.

CONTACT AARON JONES

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronejones
Visit Hubspot website: https://www.hubspot.com

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Whitehead: Hi everyone. And thanks for joining us today for this next episode of the Jason's take on podcast. I am here with my co-host Jason Noble. Say hello, Jason. Hello, Jay. Well done, and we're very excited to say we have another great guest. We have Erin Jones who is the VP of services and global partner strategy at HubSpot.

Aaron's got a pretty large team all around the world, reporting to him and a lot of experience. And today we're going to be talking about storytelling and how storytelling is relevant for customer success as well as other professionals.

I'm really excited though. Aaron and I got acquainted when he attended in some of his team attended a webinar that, that success chain sponsored and hosted with our friend Chuck Goldstone, who was a master storyteller. And we caught up afterwards just to learn how storytelling applies at HubSpot and his views on it.

It was just such a fascinating conversation wanting to invite him to come speak with us today. Aaron, thank you very much for coming and welcome.

[00:00:55] Aaron Jones: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here with you.

[00:00:58] Jason Whitehead: Fantastic before we jumped in. Can you just go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit and share a little bit about your background and career journey and how you got to where you are and how you got to what you're doing now?

[00:01:09] Aaron Jones: Yeah, happy to so I am the vice president of global services and partner strategy at HubSpot, as you mentioned I started my career. And I was a computer science major. I started my career, very technical. I was a code writer, developer, Unix engineer JavaScript, or et cetera, like all the geeky stuff.

And it was a lot of fun and I loved it. But then I had an opportunity when I was working at the discovery channel to. Co-found they're a data science program and we built that out and I ran that for about 10 years. Started a consultancy and then. Got into the SAS world. Sometime around 2010, I joined Adobe, right?

When they were pivoting from perpetual licenses into software, as a service, I got to work with a lot of incredibly smart and talented people to figure out what the go to market motions are in a SAS environment. And we made some mistakes. We learned a lot of great things and we came up with what we believe was a really solid operating model.

As Adobe was building out their digital marketing cloud. I love

[00:02:16] Jason Noble: the fact that you've mentioned Unix there, errands but I go by years, but I can remember the days of doing Unix, scripting and all that from there. So I've just so deep you've made me, you made.

[00:02:27] Aaron Jones: All right, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with this tangent for a second.

[00:02:30] Jason Whitehead: I thought you started on punch cards.

[00:02:36] Aaron Jones: So I use a Macintosh, a Mac exclusively because I can go out to a shell. You've got the terminal, and I still use the VI editor.

[00:02:55] Jason Whitehead: That's awesome. I love that background of going from such hardcore technical to a role now, which is much more interpersonal and interaction led. It's just fantastic. Aaron, when we first spoke and I took notes of this, cause I thought it was really interesting what you were saying. You were telling me that.

You're constantly telling your team that they're storytellers. And you mentioned the quote I wrote, if you don't have a compelling story to tell it's hard to be successful. And I really thought that struck through and I really hit the heart of all. I think that a lot of folks don't necessarily know what a compelling story is.

So what do you mean by storytelling and a compelling story and why is it so important?

[00:03:29] Aaron Jones: Particularly today, like there's information all around us coming at us from all angles. And there's just a lot of noise out there. And you're getting alerts on your phone, your tons of email.

I don't think anyone really uses the telephone to talk that much anymore, but anyway, there's just so much stuff going on and there's so much information that's coming out and it's hard to keep track of a lot of information because the information. It's just that, right? What people remember that story, like everyone remembers a good story.

And if you develop that skill and become a good storyteller particularly in business, you're going to be a lot more effective because your words are going to, they're going to have a longer shelf life with the audience, with whom you speak. Yep.

[00:04:20] Jason Whitehead: Go ahead, Jason. Sorry. I was gonna say, I definitely agree with that when we've been working with clients and training folks, get some people who are so into, I'm going to build out the perfect PowerPoint deck and the perfect PowerPoint slide.

I'm like. There is no PowerPoint slide. That's going to change the world and people will forget the instant you're out of the room, but a good story or a good question. People will chew on that later, long after the meeting is done and being able to connect with them in that way that they're willingly giving their attention to focus after you're out of the room.

I think that's huge, just absolute huge.

[00:04:51] Jason Noble: It's a, I think an underused scale, lots of people underused. Not underrated cause people do it, but it's people don't know how to do it. One question for you, Aaron is when you've taught there about your technical background and a lot of the work you've done on data and how you've come into these new roles, how do we get?

So for our customer success managers and teams there, a lot of them still don't know how to interpret the data. What does it really mean? What can I tell what I said? What's the story I can tell. How do you. How do you help them understand what that means and how you can take them on a journey to make the dead data more meaningful and take, tell the story behind it and then tell it, take the relevant actions for customers.

How do you take people on that?

[00:05:34] Aaron Jones: I love that question. And it's something that I've been asked a lot over the years from folks around me, from managers that work for me and the path that I take. There, there are many paths to take but what's worked for me is first, you've got to understand what your customer's goals are or what makes your customer happy, bonus points. And this is something that I, as a tip that I give everyone, if How your customer earns their bonus, right? What do they do that they get paid their bonus on. It doesn't matter what you, what your software does. If you help your primary contact, earn their bonus, they love you. And they will retain you forever right now.

More like most likely. Whatever that thing is, it's going to be connected to the software that you're supporting, right? So one know your customer know what's important to them and what metrics are important to them and what they use to to measure their own success. And that's the starting point for your story?

Yeah. So you take the data points that you have connect them back to your customer's goals. And literally just tell the story around it and the story doesn't always have to be this glowing thing. A trap that I think that some people fall into is I've got to have a great story. And the data is in supporting a great story.

Sometimes the data just is what it is and if it's not pointing to this bright, shiny thing, That can be okay if you frame it in a good story, right? If you have some insights into why things are flat, or maybe why things have trended down and why it's going to get better or some actions that you can take.

You can craft that into a narrative that will resonate without getting stuck in that trap of I don't really want to show these numbers or present this because it's not what the customer wants to see. Just tie it back to their goals and how you can save them, or you can help them get around it, get around the obstacle if it's an obstacle.

And if things are looking great that's an easy story to tell because things are looking for.

[00:07:41] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. And I think there's something around that too, of especially if you have a bad data that appears bad on the surface and things like that, how do you find some of the best ways to get your audience?

Whether it's an internal executive or customers, some like that to it's like, all right, should I be worried or should I lose faith and cut and run now versus notes. It's time to stick with this. Any tips on how you can get people to stick with something through the hard times? Because I think that's something that people encounter a lot.

[00:08:04] Aaron Jones: Yeah, and there, there are a lot of variables that could factor in. And if you have. Context or insights into why that is. The lesson could be like, Hey, we know this is why things aren't looking great. So let's not do that. It ever again. We've learned never to do that. So it's not like it was a failure.

We just learned that's not what works. So let's pivot and go in another direction. So th that's one approach. If you don't have that context and it's things are just not trending well. And that happens at times having or coming up with a strategy or an action plan as best you can as to what will turn it around.

But the important thing is just not to ignore it. You've got to hit it head on. You've got to have that conversation. And always remind your customers that you're in it together, right? Like it's when customers feel like it's more of a partnership than a, like a vendor, client relationship, you get a lot more success.

You get a ton of success. Like a couple of other little things that I do. When motivating my team to like really establish that type of real trusted relationship back in the days before the pandemic, when you could actually go onsite and see customers, I don't know if anyone remembers that, but that was a thing once before.

I would always spiff my teams if they could get a batch from the client so that they can actually dispatch themselves in and walk in. That's when, you've got a great relationship is when a customer is Hey, you know what? I don't need to come in and come down to sign you in anymore.

We'll just get you like a permanent visitors, badge or a contract is bad. So you can just walk yourself in.

[00:09:49] Jason Noble: Yeah. When your teams is telling stories and the standard, how do you get them to make sure they're telling the right story? What is a good story to tell and how do they go about understanding what data they need to be able to tell that story?

[00:10:03] Aaron Jones: A great question. The, a good story is the one that resonates with the customer. It doesn't matter if I think it's a great story. If it falls flat with the customer, it's not a great story. There's something that, that about it. That just wasn't quite right, because it didn't land with the customer.

So a great story is one that's going to be. Insightful. So that's a key ingredient in create a key ingredient. It's gotta be insightful. It's it should be memorable so that the customer is walking away with something. And at the end of the story, the customer knows what they just heard.

It's it. I'm sure we've all been countless times where we've heard a story told and at the end of it, it's I actually don't know what to say. I don't know what I'm supposed to walk away with. And like I heard a lot of words and they had meaning I'm just not quite sure what I was supposed to distill from that entire thing.

So being concise with clear takeaways that are easy to remember and better still, it's easy for them to repeat.

[00:11:09] Jason Whitehead: I when I'm facilitating groups or training classes or whatnot I just put my notes in advanced and I actually put in their bullets up say this story here, say that story here.

Cause I've learned over time, which ones work and which ones don't. But many of those are stories. Specific to me, in my experience though, I did get to a point where some people on my team, they were delivering a couple of sessions and they repeated those stories and they just made it our customer.

My, my work and it was very, it was nice to see they saw the value there. And I think that was just something that was very helpful. Literally writing down a bullet point, prompt up. This is where this story fits

[00:11:42] Jason Noble: in the way you finish. That last point there, I think is really good. We do listen to people talking, speaking, telling stories, and sometimes you come away and you've not sure what the message is, what they meant, but how do you that there's a difference between speaking, presenting and storytelling, do you find that the people kind of gravitate to one or the other, some good speakers, not good storytellers and vice versa.

[00:12:07] Aaron Jones: Yeah, I actually, I really appreciate that. You called out that distinction. There's a big difference in presenting and telling stories. I work with some incredible presenters that We're less incredible. I tell a story. They were good. They were so good at telling stories, but just not as good as they were at presenting.

And I really think that it's a matter of focus. I think if you've got a good presenter, they have all the tools to become a great storyteller. They just haven't really made that connection that. I could present something or I could tell a story. And again, telling a story is a, an end to end process.

Whereas presenting is more of a methodical procedure, and really that,

[00:12:56] Jason Noble: sorry, I am for me, this is this is so enlightening really? Cause it is, I'm not presenting. I'm telling us. But that's got to be the, that's my big takeaway from this that for me resonates so much, there's such a difference and a very different way of thinking about Eddie, any speech, any presentation, any power you're on, what's the story I'm telling.

[00:13:15] Aaron Jones: Okay. So exactly.

[00:13:17] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Aaron, I'm wondering in your experience and with all the teams that you've worked with over the years, What is the best way to develop storytelling abilities and what should an individual do to improve their own storytelling abilities, but also as a CS leader, what should you do to improve it within your team or within others in your organization?

[00:13:33] Aaron Jones: There's the old cliche imitation is the highest form of flattery or it's the highest form of complimenting. Listen to people that you like have identified as being a good storyteller and literally study them. So if you notice it, executive a or individual contributor B is just really good at it.

Nobody study their habits. What there's actually an art to telling a story and notice those nuances. And when they refer back to drive a point, and then the other part is practice. You've got to get the, you got to get the at-bats and give yourselves if you don't have the opportunity, create the opportunity.

If you're tapped to do a presentation, make the decision. It's I'm going to do this presentation as a story and think of it as, instead of I'm going through from slide aids, it's like B to C that I'm gonna create this in a way. And I'm going to weave a common theme. Where there is a, there's a start, there's a middle, there's a climax.

And there's the resolution. But think about it in the form of a story.

[00:14:44] Jason Noble: That's right. I love it. It's really I'm spiraling. Cause that's just so it's obvious, but it's just, you've just got to think about it differently. The you in your experience, have you seen any kind of correlation between people who.

Present as a story and a really good storytellers and performance are the two related they're very high performance. If you're a good storyteller, you're a high performer.

[00:15:10] Aaron Jones: Yeah, absolutely. I've seen it in both the sales side and the post-sale side. Definitely on the sales side, it's all relationship driven.

Being a good storyteller, of course, having a great sense of humor and probably a high tolerance for alcohol help but But on both sides on the sales side and the post-sale side, like some of the highest retaining CSMs are the ones that are, they really are engaged with the customer and they know the customer story and they know how to connect to the customer story. And as they're taking data and information there, they're connecting it directly to the story that the customer needs to tell to their bosses.

And they're hiring.

[00:15:53] Jason Whitehead: Absolutely. So when you're looking to build out your teams or promote people do you particularly look for some storytelling ability and assess that as part of your weighting factors? Or is it just that's a bonus it's but it's not critical,

[00:16:05] Aaron Jones: It's, that's an interesting question because I've actually never thought about it that specifically until you ask literally right now.

So the answer is no, I have. However I have I got communication skills in general is a bucket, like how do you crap emails? How do you present to me when questions are asked of you, how succinctly and clear are your answers. So it's a, like a bucket of skills that I think through.

And, but I think now going forward, Storytelling is going to be its own separate line item in terms of my criteria when considering promotions.

[00:16:45] Jason Whitehead: That's great. I was speaking with a CS leader the other day and she was telling me some of her things when she's interviewing folks and one of the ones she does is ask right off the bat.

If you're coming up to interview with XYZ company today and we both get in the elevator at the same time and hit the button at the same. What do you do? Do you look down the floor? How do you engage me around that kind of thing? And just, I asked her, so what is it you're listening for there?

And she's I want to hear their ability to communicate and to engage, even with someone that they don't know where they're going to go. And I think it's very much the same thing. Do you have a story to tell? Can you bring me in

[00:17:16] Jason Noble: it's that engagement? Isn't it really is because it is, if it's someone you don't know.

And it can be a lot of people find that silences as being awkward, but you can use the silence, but it is about that engagement. How do I bring someone into that story? How do you, Aaron, how do you go about helping people develop these skills? These are not easy things to do and to do it at the level that we're talking about it.

It's easy to talk about it, but how do you, how'd you go about building it into an individual? How does a CS leader going about doing themselves, but then also. As a customer success leader, how do you get your team built up on it as well? How do you help?

[00:17:52] Aaron Jones: Yeah. It's a subjective skill, right?

Like it's not like a something that's easily quantifiable. Feedback is important, like clear, direct in the moment, feedback is off as much as possible and then creating the opportunity. And then giving feedback on how they are progressing in development, in developing as storytellers.

I just had my QBR is this week and I had to, like everyone had to tell their story and that's the way I framed my QVR. I was like, it's a business review but honestly each of you, each of my functional leads, your job is just to tell me the story of last quarter and tell me the story of this quarter.

That's coming and make it. So these are opportunities in ways in, at the end of each presentation, like I'll give feedback, and then I'll give deeper feedback in one-on-ones as well. But it's really to just like those little things, that's usually just small tweaks that will take something from being really good to being.

[00:18:54] Jason Whitehead: I, as I'm listening, I was thinking back I was on a long-term project, several years of working with an organization, helping them to set up and administer their user adoption, your change program. And the CEO was running this. It's a marathon hideous meetings all the way through it. And a couple of years into it, it got to the point where people are really feeling down and depressed that slog of the cycle and people are worried and there's trying to do some finger pointing and other things.

And the CEO was very gifted storyteller and he's just folks, wait a minute, let's just take a step back. And instead of just making a decision, addressing the short-term thing, he went back to the story of. Three years ago, hadn't they first started this initiative and what they were thinking and the problems they were facing and what they learned at each of the big milestones along the way and what they did and how all those decisions that got them to where they are made sense at the time they built on themselves.

And that this was just another issue that needed to be overcome and that their go hand, he also reminded them where we're going and how we're going to get there. And it was amazingly powerful, diffusing, the tension, reenergizing the group, and getting folks moved on, come forward. And it really stuck out for me.

A technique that was very good as a storyteller. So I share that by way of getting ready to ask. Do you know that of all the great storytellers you've encountered or even your own done, is there a favorite skill or technique that you've observed? He said, this is really powerful that I want to try and take on myself that I didn't think to do.

[00:20:13] Aaron Jones: That's a great question. Humor is always. In my experience, always a plus. So as, as much as you can inject humor as a tool to make something more relatable and to engage the audience. So that they're there just a little bit more relaxed and receptive. I think that I think it's an underrated skill as a storyteller in business.

I think that, in social settings, of course, like being funny is great. But leveraging humor and business is a way to to it's a sort of a combination of disarming the audience, but then also pulling them in and making yourself more relatable. I think it's powerful.

[00:20:59] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. I think that's very true. Especially if you've got some more people at a love or lower level, you in the organizational structure and hierarchy who may be intimidated by the role in who you are, and especially people early in their career oh, he's a nice guy. I want to go have a beer with him.

[00:21:14] Aaron Jones: That's great. Exactly. It's the more that we humanize ourselves, I think the more effective. Effective you are as a leader in Europe, more more, you're a better received storyteller as you humanize yourself.

[00:21:28] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Yeah. And authentic. And frankly, just more fun for us as the storyteller.

Excellent. I think we're at the point now where we want to ask you our bowl challenge question here, and, we love the conversation where things go and could continue this on. But what we'd like to do is what bold actions should see us leaders take to improve storytelling and incorporate it into their team's daily work practices.

So if there's someone out there, a CS leader who's really listing like, yeah, I want to do this in my group. And I needed to shake them up a little bit. What's the biggest bold action or actions you'd like to see.

[00:22:00] Aaron Jones: Oh, I, that is a great challenge question where I'll tell you what I think is really important is competitions.

I have worked well for me. It meant it in many instances, as long as it's like friendly, competitive competitions amongst the team, because like everyone, like who doesn't want to be on top of a lead report. Everyone enjoys that. And I would suggest if they haven't already to make it a competition about who's gonna, who's gonna lead the way in being like the most effective story.

And to allow, those that sort of step up to present at, if it's a weekly leadership meeting or whatever you have on your calendar, that's recurring to rotate everyone through that. As best you can, as much as I can scale to put their best pitch forward. And then at the end of the month or the end of the quarter, reward them with whatever the get the gift would be.

[00:23:09] Jason Whitehead: Awesome. Great.

[00:23:09] Jason Noble: Cool. I love that. Absolutely. This hour, and this has been brilliant. Really? I'm smiling because this is so cool. I've got some big takeaways. I've made some notes for myself on this. I really, and I'm going to, I'm going to put some of these into practice. I'll really like.

[00:23:22] Jason Whitehead: Fantastic.

So before we go, we might invite you to do a shameless plug for you, your organization and anything you want to share and let people know how they can get in

[00:23:30] Aaron Jones: touch with you. I'm happy to shamelessly plug HubSpot. HubSpot is literally. One of the best places that I've ever worked. The culture at HubSpot is unlike any other culture at this scale that I've ever been a part of, or even really witnessed tangentially.

It's a great company. We were just voted number two best place to work by glass door for this year. So shout out to everyone at HubSpot for making it such an incredible place. We've been in the. I want to say we've been in the top three for probably the last three or four years running. And it's, it just truly is a great place to work if you're at all interested in joining HubSpot our career page is full of opportunities.

We're growing at an incredible rate. Just shout out the HubSpot for being an incredible place. I just had my first anniversary in December and I am looking forward to many more years as a Hubspotter. Awesome.

[00:24:30] Jason Whitehead: Fantastic, Aaron, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Take care now. Bye.

[00:24:35] Aaron Jones: Bye.

Bye.

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Episode Description Join us with guest Philipp Wolf, CEO of Custify, a customer success platform designed for your B2B SaaS business that helps you better meet customers' needs, reducing churn and increasing lifetime value, and that allows you to see in-product usage insights as well as data from CRM, support, billing, and other systems in one place.

Today we’re talking with Philipp about the state of the customer success industry and where it’s going. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript Sponsors The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!

Philipp Wolf CEO - Custify

As the CEO of Custify, Philipp Wolf helps SaaS businesses deliver great results for customers. After seeing companies spend big money with no systematic approach to customer success, Philipp knew something had to change.

He founded Custify to provide a tool that lets agents spend time with clients—instead of organizing CRM data.

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Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Noble: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the latest episode of the Jason's take on podcast. We're thrilled today to have a new guest with us Philip Wolf from Costa Phi. And we're going to be talking about the state of customer success in 2022. I can't believe it's already nearly.

It is the end of January as the end day in January, but we're already a month into 2022, but we're going to have a chat with Phillip, just to talk through some of the challenges with. What are the, some of the changes that he's seeing in his experience? Jason, anything you'd like to say before we step in?

[00:00:30] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. Just thank you, everyone for joining us. We're excited to have you back for what's going on our third year now. So this is great. Very excited to be here. And Phil, thank you so much for joining us, but this is really exciting to have you here.

[00:00:40] Philipp Wolf: Thank you guys for having

[00:00:42] Jason Noble: Phillip look a big welcome just for our listeners.

If they don't know already, you're the CEO and founder of justify customize a customer success management plan. Really aimed at B2B SAS businesses. So really a lot of our listeners really ties in a lot with what they're doing. Your background is really development focus, which I thought was really interesting.

You've spent a good portion of your time before cost defy with a Vera building out their protection, antivirus products, a really interesting way to come into it, but just give an introduction for our listeners. Tell us a bit more about yourself, your journey, and what you brought you guys to create.

[00:01:15] Philipp Wolf: Yeah, absolutely.

So you're right. I was in a in a different industry. Let's say I was in the security industry for quite a while wound about like 20 years of my life, I would say. And Indiana, however, of this journey, I was spending a lot of time, like in Burrock management and building products. And that's also when I got in touch with other SAS companies with the leadership team typically, and in that time It came to my attention that these teams typically knew a lot about customer acquisition, typically by the send even like PPC teams and paid acquisition.

And then we do this marketing channel and answer force. And when it came to the question like, okay, what do you guys do? Actually, once the customer is a customer, it's Yeah we sent them some newsletters or this, so it was clear that there was this huge discrepancy in between what these SAS companies were investing and knowing about customer acquisition versus customer retention.

And that was the first, it was eight years ago or something. And that was the first moment when I actually started looking into this. And tire attention churn a topic for subscription-based businesses. Giving that already back then the market of subscription-based businesses was was already growing a lot, many traditional businesses, Adobe as the best example of bent from a classical approach into the subscription-based business.

So I knew that this market is definitely going to grow. And I didn't know it was customer success. The term I wasn't so familiar with it back then. But this research, when I started to look into what are the tools out there, what can people do? What can growing SAS companies use? And certainly the landscape was a bit different back then from the tools that are, that were available.

When we started custody, firearm. Five years ago. But that was the initial trigger to actually create something that helps these growing SAS companies that are not at the enterprises of the world to have also a tool in hand that is easy to use, easy to install integrate into their environment quickly.

So that was the trigger back then.

[00:03:10] Jason Noble: I love that. Cause it is, as you said, a lot of organizations are challenged with it. They struggle with it. What do we need? A lot of them are still trying to figure out what customer success means for them, for their customers. One of the things you talk about, a customize, how you guys have built a systematic approach to helping customers be successful.

I think your background building technology teams and product teams, and ultimately great products helps with this, but what do you mean by systematic approach there? Can you expand on that?

[00:03:36] Philipp Wolf: Yes. I would say the we have two sorts of customers when they come to us one they are very prepared.

They have a customer success strategy. They have all the daytime plays and the others. They need a bit more guidance. And for them we have established a a process over the years that we refine of course a bit, but it helps them to get this consulting. Component in the beginning when they start off.

So basically best practices or what's, what are other SAS companies doing? What could you also implement? And what we typically do is going as far as looking into their business. So they basically would in a zoom session, they would basically explain their product and their business to us, to our customer success.

And based on what we see there we will then give them advices on the tracking because one crucial part in and that's, I guess also something we can talk about when it comes to trends for customer success. One crucial part is data. And if the data isn't right the CS team make decisions that are.

Simply based on wrong assumptions or based on no data, meaning I cannot even take the uninformed decision. So that is approach here to help them really get the right data in the platform. That means we make sure that we connect to the Heights systems and their environment, like the CRM, the payment gateway, and these things.

But we also make sure that we get that data from the product. Because typically all these health scores and everything that is used to measure how likely this customer is to to new those things are typically based on data. They attach points on adoption that touch points within the product.

And if the CS team doesn't have this information typically it's very difficult for them to reach out to the right customer with the right message at the right time.

[00:05:17] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, I think that's really interesting too, because talking about having the data and the touch points, and when you said, when you first started, you're asking, what do people do after you had your customer help?

We send them a newsletter and it sounds very different of, oh, we have a newsletter to data to, to really customize the message and think about, and be intentional what we're doing. I'm curious in the five years since you've been around, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen?

Your services and ways of thinking and ways of working with customers and customer success in general.

[00:05:44] Philipp Wolf: So I would say the position got more and more as the position of a CSM is more and more challenging. It's a very demanding position knowing ourselves. We record of course constantly forward him.

And knowing that we've worked with other CS teams also knowing their pain firsthand. So I think the CSM position itself I wouldn't S I wouldn't say it's like a product manager, but I'd go security into this direction. For many of our customers, at least why you need to have a empathic part and a part that works, that likes to work with customers, right?

So you need to be empathic. You need to understand you need to be able to eat the home. You need to be able to deescalate certain things that, may maybe some support ticket, escalated, and so forth. So you need to be able to jump in there. So you have this human company. Then you have this business component there.

So very often after time, you need to understand your customer's business in order to help them best possible with your product. Every business is slightly different. No, typically none of the customers is the same. So we need to understand that part. So you have a business understanding a need for this position, and then you have.

Also this technical position, depending a little bit, of course, on the product that you are selling. But many of our customers, they have a software product and many of the times they have a software product where the audience is not necessarily technically. So that means you have a non-technical audience.

Supposed to use this tool, let's say a marketing tool or these kind of things that you need to help them to get to the the full potential. That means you also have this technical component there. You need to understand your product, which is typically a software product. So there are some technology components in it, and also the way that your customers are using the product and these three things combined.

Make a good CSM and that's actually quite, it's quite a, if you think about that's quite a demanding demanding position. And I wouldn't say that the demand was that high, let's say 5, 6, 7 years ago. So I would say the demand towards the CSM gets higher and higher. And that of course also means that our customers face difficulties in hiring CSM.

So the market market gets a little bit more uneasy there. And More and more SAS companies building these teams means of course even more demand of CSMs out there. That is something that we definitely saw changing over the last over the last couple of years, it was much easier.

I would say to hire a CSM five years ago, then it, Canada is now for the SAS company.

[00:08:07] Jason Noble: Like you say, I it is, CS has changed in itself over the last five, six years massively getting such a demand for these individuals, but also. People with experience that can apply to very different roles. It's not just about outreaches to customers and being proactive.

There are some organizations where CS means very different things. You will have an element of support. So it's finding the right individuals to do that. And I think one of the key things is we've seen, we talked an instruction in the last two years with COVID I think had been very different for everybody.

We've seen some huge changes in transformations in businesses and how businesses. And even how people work with this big shift now to, to remote working and even hybrid working. What impact do you think some of these changes now with how businesses have changed over the last two years are having on how we work with customers, with how we work as business.

[00:08:56] Philipp Wolf: Yeah, that's a good question. So the most controversial topic I think that we have when we onboard new customers and where there is no, still no clear strategy is the definition of a. Of the responsibilities of a CSM, I would say there is a future agreement on attention. Okay. So if you talk attention, then this is almost unarguably longing to see us, but then the question comes, who exactly does the up sell or the cost sell or the renewal talk?

Is that sales or is it. And we have quite controversial opinions there within our customer base. That's very interesting. And there's no, the only time that I can say for sure is that the I have a new responsibility that becomes a Q 10, so that a CS team is carrying a number and they have this debt, big debt becomes a bit more of a number, but a bit more of a 10, but I can still see that Many of the time, it says team would still be involved in upset cost cells, organ yours, then onboarding teams, I think, is something that we also see as a trend.

So splitting the CS team into someone that is specifically responsible for. And I'm coming back to your question regarding the, what changed in the pandemic. This is something that, that interesting enough has has changed in our, from our observation with customers. Onsite meetings that we typically saw, they are completely gone and everybody knows that.

And it's just like broadly accepted even in the larger customers that we have, like where onsite meetings has had been a must for the onboarding team or for the CS team. That is just not the case anymore. And I don't think that's coming back anytime soon or maybe probably ever It's amazing.

[00:10:40] Jason Noble: How customers have accepted that as well. Haven't they, people are seeing the benefit of it. There's no need to travel. And even, I think the other flip side is you could work from anywhere, and it really changes your mindset.

[00:10:51] Philipp Wolf: We, yes, we had however, some customers that it was quite a challenge for them because it was.

The the pandemic was introducing itself or, and said guys in six months, I'm there. So maybe you prepare your Botox. So we don't need to go onsite anymore. This came pretty quickly. And that was indeed a challenge for many of our customers that had this component of.

Onsite team coming there taking care of your team. And they had all processes tied around this this onboarding event. And all of a sudden they couldn't do it anymore. They still managed to do it, but that was certainly something that w impose quite some challenges on those companies. Not saying that this is the majority, but you would be surprised how many companies were still sending onboarding teams to customers even in the 2020.

[00:11:38] Jason Whitehead: Sure. So Filipino, I liked what you were saying about the controversy that always comes up around sales and CS and all that, because I find when working with CS customers, that sort of the rule of three is like a third of their time working with our CS team, CS leadership, a third of their time working directly hands-on with customers and a third of the time really doing that internal alignment where that needs to go.

I'm curious as to how you see most companies actually addressing that sales, CS alignment, and one of the biggest hurdles there to them. Getting this figured out. And how does that impact what you guys do implementing a CS technology address?

[00:12:09] Philipp Wolf: So I would say it depends a lot on the product that they have.

What we clearly see is that if the sales team is heavily involved in the purchasing process. So if they have a lengthy sales process and there's eventually even as a pre sales engineer involved, or these kinds of situations, then the sales team is typically also. Much more involved afterwards, if you have a situation, which is a morbid, like our own process in customize.

So of course we have a sales team and they take you through the demo of the product and they take you to the pricing and so forth, but then they do the handover. In, in, in our example in CACI five, we don't have a a salesperson involved anymore after basically the agreement is assigned.

But this is something where they're still a mixed situation within our customer base. This is the most controversial one. And the other one, and that's also that's actually one of our most clicked block articles is the difference between customer success and support. What, how much has the involvement of a CS person in.

It all in this not go active but active Sure. I'll customer questions. And it's also difficult to draw the line there for some customers, us included. We have a challenge there because the questions that our customers have are typically not be able to be answered by someone in the first level of support that you know, like a random person.

Why? Because for this question, you typically need to understand the business. Typically need to understand the history of this customer and so forth. So who's better in. In this information, then the CSM, right? So you tend, of course, towards getting the CSM drawn into this kind of conversations. We have we have a pretty good experience.

You said one third, one third, one third, I guess I would, in our case at put it probably in quarters and add another, a piece in the puzzle, which is this So pod component where if it's not something that the normal support person can handle in our case, at least the CSM is taking care of this.

Now this is absolutely debatable and you can probably have different opinions on that. We have a pretty good experience with this monitor, because this, the way that we can help the customer, if they have an issue is much more. Informed much more quicker and in much more depth, if we would versus handling someone in the support team, having this question answered there,

[00:14:30] Jason Noble: how are your customers reacting to that?

I Do they, are they come into kind of a consensus on what the CSM should be doing, that they agree with that way of working.

[00:14:39] Philipp Wolf: Do you mean if they implement our model themselves? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:14:42] Jason Noble: Say if they listened to it well, or rather than not, if they implement your model, but how they work with you guys, do they use your CSM is like you intending them to you.

Oh,

[00:14:50] Philipp Wolf: they yes. So they appreciate this of course, a lot. So for them, for the customer, this is of course the most convenient a way because I have one person that I can trust too. I know that any question that I asked this person already knows all my history and so forth versus I have anonymous chat where I don't know the other person and it.

Someone from a support center that let me look into your account first and takes them, I don't know, 20 minutes to understand the last support tickets and so forth. So for the customer experience, this is in my opinion something very good. The question is just if that matches your philosophy of CSS, right?

So this is the, this is a bit of a debatable question there

[00:15:30] Jason Noble: finding with customers that you have to explain what customer success is to them or. Oh do they have a very different understanding?

[00:15:37] Philipp Wolf: I wouldn't say that. No, but I would say that some of the customers, they have a customer success strategy, so it's not a hundred percent the strategy isn't clear.

So like questions of course, that our team has throughout the onboarding is like, how high touch do we want to get with customer? Because do we put a lot of focus on automation and send them emails? Or do we put a lot of focus on creating notifications tasks and so forth? So where are you there? All right.

So there's an many of the times you realize there's not the customer didn't really think so much about the strategy there. And it starts with this simple questions. It goes do you guys want to QB do QBR send your, so how long is the QBR? What kind of things do you want to discuss with the customer?

Do you have a segmentation of low touch and high touch customers? Where do you draw the line? And these are all questions that's are part of this strategy. And that is something not every customer has prepared or laid out completely, which is fine, which is also I guess, why they come to us so that we can actually help them to map this out.

And also we can say, okay, if you do it this way, you probably have advantages this and this. However, you also probably have to invest a bit more because. If you really go this high touch model, you cannot do this with two CSMs and you cannot have a CSM handling a portfolio of 100 customers.

That's simply that wouldn't scale. That wouldn't work. It is it's that

[00:16:53] Jason Noble: scalability. That's the hard bit. Isn't it? You can put in place the right processes, people tools. I would say we can implement custom . Hey, how do we make sure it scales? How do you think if we look a bit further out, we've talked a lot about kind of what we see as the state of customer success this year.

But if you were to look out over the next three years to say 20, 25, what do you see? Some of the big changes are in what customer success will be, what it means to businesses and how, and what impact that those changes would have on businesses or customers.

[00:17:23] Philipp Wolf: So I would say which is good for us as a business, of course, but I would say, which is not good for you.

And for me as a customer, most businesses don't have customer success implemented in the stage that they should have. We see clearly that many SAS companies, they start too late. They have a lot of processes in place. Already. Tools are not in the connector. It's hard to get the information in one place.

That's the worst. So they start at a very late stage. And that's one thing that I would say in the project in the five years, also from an investor perspective, what they will push down to the companies before they do an investment, is that this moment when people start implementing customer success, It's definitely going much more to the beginning of the company early stage.

So maybe your tens higher is a CSM. Okay. So in the right after support. You also think about customer success. You don't postpone this to CSA. So you have very early on that thing. That's mindset in the company because it's also a mindset. It's a commitment of top level management.

It's it's a proactive mindset. It goes through many departments and you guys know that property as well. When you talk to CSMs, they are typically very connected in the company that they talk to product. They need to understand that ultimately they need to communicate this to the customer.

Then they talk to sales. They need to understand eventually new pricings, upsell opportunities, et cetera. So they're there. They understand support. They understand SLA is so they are quite interconnected also in, within the company. So I think that is one thing starting earlier with customer success that, that becomes a trend down when it, when we look at the CSM position itself, I think that can, that we discussed earlier will also continue.

So it won't be easier to find CSMs, first of all. That's, that can goes on and the CSM position itself will also be even more demanding, when we think about the. Capabilities such a person needs to have Yeah, I think so that would be the things coming to mind earlier start and more systemized eventually start.

So you guys also know probably five, six years ago, there wasn't as much as content and education content there that it is now. So now you have a lot more there you have a lot more podcasts, you have a lot more people sharing their best practices. And that helps of course. Other other companies that don't have it implemented yet to get started quickly.

And the more efficient.

[00:19:36] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. In in my business, we do a lot of consulting and half of our customers are customer success companies coming in and working with the software vendors to put in their processes and strategy and develop their teams and all that good stuff. And the other half of our customers are actually the buyers of software, their prospects, and their customers, and they help the change management user adoption.

And we have a lot of them actually come to us after system's been live for a couple of years when people aren't using it. And. One thing that I find fascinating. There's still a big disconnect between what the softwares of how they approach CS versus the buyers, how they approach change and adoption and creating and perceiving value.

And it's still there. And what I'm finding as well as when I talk with buyers of software, they're like, we have 15, 20 different systems in here or more. That's even a small company and they're experiencing a lot of different flavors of customer success. And they're like, no, this one, I was on a call with their vendor the other day.

Didn't have a CS group, didn't have a clue about business outcomes. Wasn't focused on it. And it was painful. It was painful to, I could just see my customer going, got a thing. So I'm curious because one of things I've maintained is that as more and more software, come into the customer success world and start to invest in earlier and then really go out there.

Increasingly I think it's going to be a source of competitive advantage and they're going to be able to point to, oh, our customer success team will get you more value in this other perspective software company you should buy from us. And here's the proof to it. I'm wondering since you work with so many CST.

What are you seeing in terms of how they're differentiating their CS to some of their competitors or in the next three to five years? Do you see that becoming a bigger issue of if we don't have a really strong CS program and camp prove to it, it's going to slow down our sales.

It's definitely slow down our retention.

[00:21:09] Philipp Wolf: Okay. For sure. So let me ask you a question before I answer that question. So I'm sure that you guys also use some tools. Now, when was the, when was it. Was there a time, first of all, at all, where you had this experience that wow. Someone really proactively, like you had this moment where CS really mattered, like someone who actively reached out to you because you didn't onboard correctly, or you did have some questions there.

You didn't use the product. Did you have this experience?

[00:21:35] Jason Whitehead: No, I, I think I've had a few automated drip emails and things like that. I will say I had one company actually, it was Upwork, which surprised me of all things, where they did a very nice proactive here's how to get the most out of your Upwork experience can be, get on a call for 15 minute thing to get you there.

And they had a tight and right. And I'm like, this was really fantastic. 15. Onboarding that helped me move forward and actually spend money with their platform and their tool. But for the other tools that I've used now, I've actually been incredibly disappointed. Yep.

[00:22:01] Philipp Wolf: See, and this ask this question to almost anyone and the answer would always be that.

So that means there's still a lot of room for you to differentiate yourself from the competition by just doing, let's say best practice and customer success. And I think most of the customers They are, the CS teams are not necessarily so much aware of what their competitors are doing. At least not that we talk about it that much in our conversations with them.

But what they clearly want to do is getting this black deafness in the conversation, getting this human touch in the relationship. And then that probably already make the difference, right? Because this experience that you just told me, I can totally share it. I have probably I'm using 20 SAS tools myself.

And I had one really good experience last year where I was like, wow. Th that was nice. That was a proactive audit came in the right moment, but the right message I've fed personality care off. And I had also an issue and it was like soft immediately. It was like, magic was like, awesome. This was like in the book, but all the others I had, from well-known brands also where it's really not that great of an experience.

So I think to to make a difference there it's even not that hard for CS teams. If you look at what most. Companies are doing poverty included their competitors. Yeah. Are

[00:23:19] Jason Noble: you still using those other 19 tools?

[00:23:22] Philipp Wolf: Not all of them, but most of them, I have to say

[00:23:26] Jason Noble: that's the problem is I think,

[00:23:27] Philipp Wolf: yeah, I think pain might not be big enough yet,

[00:23:30] Jason Noble: but it shows a maturity, but also you think some organizations just aren't folks want us, if they put the effort in it and the investment in it, there's so much more.

Then they could get so much more value they could drive for you and I, to your point, Phillip, I don't think it's

[00:23:44] Philipp Wolf: difficult. It's not, it's really just a, even if you don't have the perfect process, even if you don't have the perfect team and you can take all the customers, pareto principle, 20% of the things implement, will probably already fixed 80% of the issues. And that's makes already a huge difference to most of what your competitors will do. So that would be also my advice like for the audience, if they haven't started doing those things. Offboarding things like I was, we did an experiment with with one of our customers about off-boarding and we really researched a lot in this topic.

Papa off-boarding almost no SAS company has a popper offboarding in place. It's so sad. It's not just to reduce the churn, but it's also I have so much to say about your product and you don't care. I left your product because I'm disappointed. And I have so many things in my mind that I would share with you so you can improve.

You don't care. You just let me go. Why is that? And it's also

[00:24:36] Jason Whitehead: sharing with you if they're not sharing with you though. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:24:40] Jason Noble: Yeah. It's a simple process. You should do it. People aren't thinking, we've got to think about the whole customer journey and part of that journey could be them leaving.

Let's make sure we do that. So they're saying the right things to our competitors, the market.

[00:24:52] Philipp Wolf: It's not even just about, like you're saying that I think is after and having, let's say split up in a good way. It's also the, all the learnings that you can take. Like, why did this, why does this customer there some turn that you will never be able to to They go out of business, they got acquired and the guys use another platform and they just, yeah.

Want you out. There are some things you cannot influence, but I would say for the, for a good portion of your churn, you can learn so much from this offboarding conversations because they will tell you exactly what went on. So you can do this. It's like gold is gold. That's out there and you just need to, you just need to take it and do something about it.

And it's really simple actually.

[00:25:30] Jason Whitehead: And I think I've never really thought a lot about off-boarding, but I'm going to definitely focus on that more too. But I think the other piece of that is for your customer, that's leaving, or you're a former customer. It's a chance for them to have a lessons learned about what they need to be doing differently internally with their next software vendor.

I think if you can, we're partying the ways and we're sad to see you go, but let's see how we both can get something from this exit process and how

[00:25:50] Jason Noble: the key thing is it's mutual. Isn't it? You want to provide feedback to them?

[00:25:54] Philipp Wolf: Exactly and there's there's we, then we get this excuses.

Yeah, but I have a low touch business. I cannot afford to go with off-boarding calls with all my customer. True you can't, but it's about a a portion of them, right? So of course you don't need to go with all of them, but at least start with a small portion of them. Because if you talk to probably a hundred of them, you don't need to talk to all the thousands.

A hundred will probably give you a very good picture of why are customers leaving you at this given point in time, what's wrong with the service, what's wrong with the product haven't even got to the moment of your products. Where's the problem. So this subset of customers that you need to talk to.

We'll all got to give you a good picture. Yeah.

[00:26:33] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. And if you don't take the time to learn that you're going to keep making the same mistakes and the definition of insanity is doing the same stuff over and over. You're not,

[00:26:41] Philipp Wolf: you will probably still figure things out because also existing.

They might not, they might have the same pain, but they might not leave you. So you might find it on QBR, but it's, it takes you much more time. First of all, it's much more expensive because the churn was there. It happened until you find out.

[00:26:56] Jason Whitehead: One of the things that we work with our clients too, is how to really set expectations during those kickoff in early stages and to.

Go over them is how do you set the expectations of here's we'll do a QBR. Here's what we're going to ask you to give us a reference use. We're going to ask you for this because we're going to ask you to participate in a product round tables to make sure we build out the other things. And I think part of that could be adhere at some point.

If you decide to leave, we're going to request that. Join us for this onboarding conversation. So we can both learn and improve and setting those expectations right up front, I think goes, it's like a prenuptial agreement before your marriage. Like here's how we're going to break up the right way.

Feel good

[00:27:29] Jason Noble: about it. Okay. Because I think there's certainly some say expectations. It doesn't, it says that I care about this. We as a business care about this and we've got a process in place. So if something does happen, we want to know why. And if there's something we missed, tell us. And as you said for a bus, how do we feed that back into the loop?

Yeah.

[00:27:46] Philipp Wolf: And this doesn't mean that you can't have a concept about in new subscription, right? So if you sell to small SMBs or you have to have this, you have to have the ability there anyway. But this means still that maybe in the beginning you have set the stage and you might not get everybody on the phone.

You might not be having time with everyone who gives you, but a good point again, probably 20% of the conversations will give you really good insights already.

[00:28:11] Jason Whitehead: And kinda like sometimes your employees leave your company, but come back. Sometimes your customers

[00:28:17] Jason Noble: know why they've left. There's things you can do.

So give them a call in a month's time. We heard you we've made some changes in product, or we've made some changes in this process. We'd love you to try it again. And people are willing to come back because you've done it that right way.

[00:28:31] Philipp Wolf: Exactly. You valued their opinion completely. Yeah. That's

[00:28:35] Jason Noble: huge for that.

Look super have conversation a really big, thank you for your. What we do like to do with all of our guests before leaving is give you one final question. Our bold challenge question, and the one for you is what one big change should we be focusing on this year? When it comes to customer success?

Start earlier. I love it for all of the stuff you've said as well. I was trying to think, what's he going to say? Cause there's so many different nuggets that you could pick that, but I love it. Jace we've said before we've done episodes on this space should be part of the sales process. You should be thinking about it.

And lastly, Phillip, please give a shameless plug for what you guys do at customer.

[00:29:16] Philipp Wolf: Absolutely. Yeah. So if you are looking for a customer success platform and you are a SAS business head over to customer.com, we have all the details there. Subscribe for a demo. Maybe you're lucky. I still do about 5% of the sales calls to just to stay in touch with the market.

That'd be lucky and you will catch me even there.

[00:29:33] Jason Noble: Fantastic. And we'll put links where we publish the podcast. Look a big, thank you for that. It's been really good conversation. Really good to catch up. That's exciting to start the year like this as well.

[00:29:44] Philipp Wolf: Thanks guys.

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Episode Description Join us with guest Guy Nirpaz, CEO of Totango, the fastest growing and most trusted provider of modular customer success software and author of the renowned book “Farm Don’t Hunt, The Definitive Guide To Customer Success”.

Today, we’re talking with Guy to learn about how the world of customer success is changing and evolving and some of the key forward-looking trends in the industry. Scroll Down for Episode Transcript Sponsors The Jasons Take... On is Sponsored by Success Chain!

Guy Nirpaz CEO - Totango

Guy Nirpaz is a Silicon Valley-based Israeli entrepreneur and CEO of Totango, a Customer Success software platform.

A pioneer in the Customer Success field, Guy established the Customer Success Summit and is a well-regarded industry speaker and community contributor. Guy loves people and technology and has dedicated his career to improving the way in which business is done through innovation.

Link

Check out the Totango's Executive Customer Forum Learn, network, and share proven strategies for uniting silos and unlocking customer WOW.

Leave with the knowledge and network to instill a culture of innovation, transform your company with agile customer success, and create deep and memorable relationships with their customers.

Learn more here. Read Guy's Book: "Farm, Don't Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success" Across entire verticals of the economy the new normal is the recurring revenue business. Charging customers on a monthly basis, firms with this model have to play by an entirely new set of rules, rules which generally favor the customer over the seller.

But this new model also opens up fantastic opportunities to provide and extract more value from the relationship as well. To create that value business needs to move away from a hunting mindset to a farming mindset. That change is the new paradigm of Customer Success.

See it on Amazon. Additional Resources Here are some related resources we think you will find helpful: * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." company page on LinkedIn * Follow "The Jasons Take On..." on Twitter * Read Jason Noble's Blog * Read Jason Whitehead's Blog (on Success Chain)

Subscribe Join our mailing list to get regular updates about all things related to customer success.

We share a weekly digest of the latest articles, publications, and events of interest to the customer success community.

Don't miss out - subscriber today!

Transcript [00:00:00] Jason Whitehead: Hi everyone. And thank you for joining us for the next episode of the Jason's take on really exciting to be here today. Today I'm here with my co-host Jason Noble over in the UK. Jason, go ahead and say hello.

Exactly. And we're really excited today to be joined by one of the great leaders of customer success and the industry guiding near past, who is, is the CEO of Totango and most everyone knows of Totango. And if you don't, if you're new, you must be new to the industry. It is one of the leading CS platforms that, that has been around for a very long time.

Totango has done some great things in the industry. Brought together. Some summits is brought to you in a lot of thought leadership and has really been leading the. But moving the field of customer success forward. So we're really excited to have guy here today and he's going to share some of his thoughts up a forward-looking trends in CS and how to move, how the industry is changing and evolving and what we can expect coming forward.

So guys, thank you very much for joining us for excited to have you here. Thank you guys for. Yeah. Awesome. And also for those who don't know, guy also is the published author of a book called farm don't hunt, the definitive guide to customer success. And we'll include a link to that as well in the show notes.

But guy, why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about your background and a little bit about Totango and just let everyone know how you got to be where you are.

[00:01:17] Guy Nirpaz: Sure, absolutely. I'm the founder and CEO of two tango. We started to tango originally in Israel in 2010. And since later years, we moved to headquarters in the U S and Silicon valley engineering in Tel Aviv and Ukraine from an acquisition of a company.

And we've been really pioneering this space of customer success, enjoying every bit of a moment because it's such a. Good cause to a root for both what we're doing, which is enabling companies to adopt customer success at any scale, small, medium, large and at the same time, seeing from the front row, how the, how markets are evolving into a digital center businesses, which leads to customer centered businesses and a lot of very interesting conversation, technological innovation.

So happy to share with you. We can talk about this for several hours about

[00:02:10] Jason Whitehead: absolutely. Let's jump right in. Since you have been here from the very early days of the customer success explosion what would you say are some of the biggest changes you've noticed over the past 10 years or 12 years since.

The tango and then let's move on to what is coming down the pike and what's new.

[00:02:26] Guy Nirpaz: Yeah. So I'd say that the first the first change is people actually recognize the words because when we started what are you guys talking about? Did you mean customer support? So I think we're a little bit beyond that and I think customers started at success transitioned from.

Focus of core group of people that recognize that the companies need to invest in their in their customers and drive outcome for the customers from a. More of a that's the right thing to do from a conceptual perspective to a company wide strategy where customer success is at the core of growth strategy customer success goes beyond just the customer success team.

It's a, it's an approach that the company takes. To drive everything grills by making sure that their customers are getting value from their products and services. And for that reason, they stay for longer and spend more money with them and recommend them. So I think that's the major change. I'd say one, one more thing.

I think also the conversation has moved from what is it? To how to do it best. That's you know, we're moving from this idea of you gotta evangelize for it too. You got to deliver on the promise of customer success.

[00:03:39] Jason Noble: I love that. And I think it is, it's moved now. Evangelizing, what we're trying to do, there is a broader understanding.

There are still some organizations, including customers that don't understand it. We're all rural, still getting those feedback Africa. Your support, your sales. So you've still got that, but there's far less of it. And I think it is it's now, how do we actually prove the real volume of it? And how do we show that to customers?

I gave a big fan of you guys have known you guys for years. I've read your book. I. Kind of, what do you see as some of the big challenges for us in this industry? As we come into 2022, we've got this greater understanding. The technology landscape is great. There are a lot of providers out there.

Some really well-established ones like yourself, like Gainsight, like some other ones. But what do you see some of the big challenges for organizations as to how they, how do they demonstrate that value for customer success?

[00:04:27] Guy Nirpaz: So I think first it started with macro, right? We're coming, starting like a third year.

On pandemic. And and I think clearly pandemic has accelerated digital adoption, digital transformation while teams are. Working from home while customers are remote. So a lot of the, let's say early days of customer success with, physical meeting, wining dining, all of these aspects of caring for customers is no longer there.

And I doubt if it's ever going to go back into the way it used to be. That's it. So I think the first is you've got to deliver outcomes to customers in a fully remote, fully digitized environment. And one of the services digitize or the services physical, but th the customer experience is fully digitized.

It's still the core of it. So from an implementation perspective in, in some sense it's much harder to implement. Customer success across the company because of change management, because of, getting together, making decisions and execute can decide to go on execution path.

And but on the other hand, it's even simpler. If you adopt fully the concept of technology that drives engagement, right? So w I think we've seen herself more so than ever before is is a technology that enables company. To implement customer success strategies. And as you implement customer success strategies, it's never a one and done, there's a lot of change that needs to be made first and foremost again, because the world is changing so fast and than ever before customer expectations are changing and also the learning is a mountain. Into like new realizations and new insights and that you want to implement faster. So that cadence itself, though, the clock is much faster.

So we see the role of technology provider to tango in the market is to enable companies to realize that. Customer success ambitions. And if you look today, it's how companies implement customer success. What is the, what standard of what's good versus let's say even five years ago, it's significantly better, right?

It's like a, it's a whole new set of experiences that are becoming standard. So I think even now it's even much harder to try to cobble everything together. To hit a reasonable standard that your customers are, will actually appreciate and see that this is a value being delivered.

So I think the role of customer success technology as an enabler for customers with this strategy is becoming more and more important. And I think. For companies is basically you take advantage of technologies, take advantage advantage of principles and implement this very quickly. And we can talk about implementation momentarily, but I think from a very high level, his ability to change very quickly.

[00:07:19] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, that's definitely a huge one in my business doing coaching consulting for the CSPs. And we specialize in the change management. That is really the area where we find most of our clients struggles. The how do we get our internal people to play? How do we change how we engage with our customers and move that forward?

It's really a big challenge. No. I like what you were saying earlier about one of the biggest changes going from what is customer success to, how do we do it? And I've definitely seen a wide range of expectations with software vendors in terms of what is customer success? What do we actually mean when we say that?

What do we actually do in our teams? And I'd love to know from your experience having worked with so many customer or customer success teams, what are you seeing as the things that differentiate the companies that are doing it well, versus those. Yeah, not doing it well or doing it just, okay.

[00:08:04] Guy Nirpaz: The companies are not even doing it then just

[00:08:08] Jason Noble: talking about it, playing lip service to it.

[00:08:11] Guy Nirpaz: Yeah. So I'd say, while you were asking this question, what jumped into my mind? You know what they say about good design is a design that is invisible, that you don't know that the design exists. I think it's, similar fashion it's customer success, right? When you, when a customer is buying or making a decision on product or service, I think their expectation is that they're, the they're going to realize the value of their investment.

As quickly as possible as efficiently and as effectively as possible without any friction, right? They don't want to wait for anyone. They don't want to ask anyone that just needs to work. And they want to, basically the question want to ask their vendor or even the community, how can I make more use of it or get more value out of it.

So I think good customer success or good customer journey implementation is. The dissipates, the next the next need, it's proactive. It's a very responsive, it's very timely. And it's very self-service and it's in its nature because that's what we all expect from our consumer experience.

Who is your customer success manager for you? That's

[00:09:18] Jason Noble: lower slights like Netflix, apple, they, that they're thinking about this, but very differently. And it's in the product in the service.

[00:09:24] Guy Nirpaz: So I think in the brand, if we think about our companies as brands or you think about your companies as brand, the customer success is part of the brand, meaning that brand is focused on the lift.

The value identifying gaps in value, being delivered versus valid being purchased and and solving for that. Now I know that this is like utopia, so that's going to break it down to one level, one level down, which is you're ready to think about your customer journey, the digital journey, the customer experience, or the customer life cycle onboarding adoption, race comanagement renewal obstacle, escalation referrals, and.

Be really good at any part of the journey by continuously setting it up for sure. That's important. And then continuously iterating and improving the performance of phone boarding and never be satisfied. Did measure always, experienced measure performance, right? know, Let's take an onboarding as an example, Seth clear, critical goals for onboarding, which.

Immediate and time to onboard a customer, what is a reasonable timeframe to get them live? If it's, project based onboarding or what is the immediate to get them activated, if it's digital and boarding, it doesn't really matter what should be the experience and what should, what is the definition of done?

What should be the right level of adoption as they exit on boarding or the minimum level of adoption is the exit onboarding and continuously measure ourselves against that and continuously improve the activities that you're doing. That will involve a lot of automation that will involve a lot of a data-driven engagement.

Not like everyone gets the exact same content at the exact same time, just because people have different. But not only for onboarding doing this for every step of the customer journey. So deconstruct the journey, focus on one block at a time. And then build and optimize a great customer journey.

And that's what I mean, really the operating model of agility is what differentiates the great from the rest of them.

[00:11:25] Jason Noble: How do you talk about value there and outcomes, but how do we make sure that we understand what value is for our customers and how do you measure it and measure it so that it demonstrates success to your customers?

Quite often is a tricky thing to do. And you've got, there are still gaps within the sales process where people are not capturing what they are, but we'd love your kind of insights to how you've seen work best.

[00:11:47] Guy Nirpaz: So I think there are like two, there are two let's say two levels of language that you can work.

One is clearly, why did the customer purchase, what was their initiative? What was it about what were they're trying to do, and then capturing that, and that's super important, right? Capturing the reasons for purchasing and then making sure that as you go along with the customer journey, you co you have a cadence, whether it's a QBR or whether it's a different model to validate, is this still the reason why.

Is this still the objective of your initiative and how are we doing against this? And so that's one dimension, which is very customer centered. The second one, which I've seen a lot of customers do, because, you can't have a goal per customer, which is a unique, if you have a thousand customers or 10,000 customers or a hundred thousand customers, so there are some. Categorical objectives in the products and services that you're selling. And you can allow for a love for the customer to choose you came for, you came to the tango in order to reduce churn or scale customer success operations, or get more referrals. But it's not that you came to the tango.

We know that to record a podcast. Because of the time it doesn't record cloth gas it's doing something else. So this idea of scaling the objectives and selecting from a library of objectives and mapping every customer to, or every segment of customer to specific objectives also allows you to look at metrics in your products and services or even health, to determine whether or not those objectives are being met. And along the customer journey. Some objective and, some products are simple where they say it's a zoom which I'm pretty familiar with. Your objective is to a rotten meat run, a remote meeting.

Okay. That's that simple to capture, but if the reason why someone purchases zoom is. Do a an entire academy online, then the success of that is a little bit different. It varies. And I think the key is not being afraid of, setting up objectives right.

Or setting up customer objectives. I think a lot of people I think the reason they shy a little bit away from let's be specific about objectives because Daniel. Very clearly say, are we meeting them or not? Then, people hate rejection. So if we're not. Yeah, so

[00:14:07] Jason Whitehead: you don't get anything.

So you've mentioned too, as we look forward to the future of CSS, the need for CSP, more agile and evolve quickly and be able to compete with, I also believe that as more and more software buyers get used to their vendors, offering different levels of CS support and services that they'll start to look at that and you need to be competitive on the CS front.

When you think of agile CS what does that mean to you? And what specific things do you look at? And I guess related to that is, I know a lot of folks are looking at how do we automate as much of CSSP possibly can, whether it's a low touch approach or other things in there. How do you remain agile when you're trying to really bake in some structured automations as well?

[00:14:45] Guy Nirpaz: Yes, my, my background is, before I started to tank, I was like an engineering, right? The engineering and product. It was around the time where, you know, when I was there where the waterfall is transitioned into. Agile software development with iterations and spreads and, things along those lines.

And in the recent years, we've all heard about dev ops and, th the need to release to production. Most of our listeners, I'm assuming have some sort of a digital and software experience, so releases and released to production and iterations, and, thinking about the problem is the life cycle versus thinking about the problem is that.

It's a one and done a one and done experience. And when you think about this. We are all developers. Now we use different tools, but we use digital technology to basically code document, but code in a system, what we want to happen, right? When you write the success, play into tango, which is who's doing what, when like a workflow where, driven by data, it's basically codifying behavior.

Last mile could be a person picking up the phone, calling the customers on, picking up the zoom and calling the customer. You get my point. So I think the same principle apply, which is you've got to incorporate change into your mindset. So it's better to iterate very quickly and think about incremental releases of your program versus.

One and done to be able to anticipate change. It's also working much better. It's also this sense of accomplishment when you work on a smaller sprints. Things are moving forward now specifically about your question patient I think that, the way I'm thinking about this is that people.

NCS and people in the front office are intelligent and they want to do the work that actually brings their their best to the front. So they're done with it. Don't want to do repetitive work. They don't want to, provide reminders to others. They want to be able to solve problems.

Brainstorm with their customers, takes things to the next level. From a program perspective or from a customer outcome perspective. So everything else that's technology, right? That's this is where automation comes in. So if you want another way to look at that there's self-driving car, but the older modern cars have driver assist.

So all the things that you hate to do, look backwards when you pull back. You got a camera that shows you what's around and you've got sensors that are telling you if you're going to hit something cause you, as you're pulling back and so forth. So we'd like to think about automation as surrounding so on one hand programming, right?

Defining the key dance and who's doing what, when it's documented there. Co-defined codifying the program. That's from a program perspective and from a engagement or CSM lifecycle perspective is basically a surround a CSM with all the older technology that allows them to focus on what's really important, which is problem solving.

And now analyzing situations, coming up with creative ideas, collaborating internally and moving the boat for. Which is not like mundane or repetitive.

[00:17:47] Jason Noble: I think it's such a great idea that it's something that I think we're beginning to see more of, but there aren't many people talking about agile customer success.

And I think to your point, it's about change and being responsive to that change. So as it's really great ideas, they've guy I'd love to talk about your book for a second. I, as. Love it, farm don't hunt. I think for all of us in CS, it means that it really shows where the focus is. And with this, drive now for customer success, really to be the growth engine for business.

Can you just talk to us about what was your motivation to, to write the book and how do you see the farming versus hunting debate?

[00:18:22] Guy Nirpaz: But my motivation was I. I'd like to be lazy. I think it's the most efficient way to do that. I think after repeating and we to mention the period in the market, though, for evangelizing, where you had to explain.

Many times why customer success and what do you really mean by saying this and so forth? We, I thought that the best approach would be to just, organize all my ideas in a book more specifically about the concept is this idea that we all think in metaphors and if we can introduce a new metaphor.

Into the business, right? The previous metaphor was old funnel, right? Everything is a funnel. And all you care about is putting leads or prospects at the top of the funnel them, and then closing them. And that was the metaphor in which companies operated on. And we had to look for a new metaphor that, which is the the tree that grows or the Grove that grows that you nurturing that you grow your oranges and once a year you pick them up, but you still need to nurture them because it's not a one time.

Thanks. So we were looking for me and Fernando that helped me write the book for a very simple metaphor that allows all the other evangelizers of customer success to, get into their companies and basically explain the concept of lifetime value, which is it's not. 90 days of cell cycle or 30 days or sales cycle.

And you're done it's the next three years, five years, seven years, 10 years of lifetime value and what you need to do in order to maximize this life, that value. And we are all, hopefully all of us are surrounded by trees and we understand how agriculture works and we we can appreciate that this model is a better.

Wait, if you the re the new relationship between companies and customers, especially in cloud digital, recurring revenue, lifetime. I

[00:20:09] Jason Noble: love that. Absolutely love that.

[00:20:11] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. I love the metaphor too. I, so having grown up on a farm, I can definitely relate to you though. It's all. Yeah, actually I grew up on a dairy farm and I wrote my masters around introducing technology into the U S dairy industry.

And it's just fascinating how technology changes even in an industry such as farming, but that's a discussion for another time

[00:20:29] Guy Nirpaz: as well, too. So we've got something in common. I grew up on a farm as well, so I guess we need to look at their correlation between people that grew up on a farm and working in customer success.

[00:20:38] Jason Noble: Yeah. I wonder if we're onto something here though. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder if it does change your mindset now, this is what we did with growing. Yeah,

[00:20:46] Jason Whitehead: absolutely. Got One of the things I'm curious about, and I can just listen to you all day, but the way things have changed into the industry and it's gone from, what is customer success?

How do we do it better? But I think there's still a lot of folks out there and a lot of organizations some new and some existing ones that still haven't quite embraced or don't even know what it is. If you're talking to the CEO of a company. It doesn't really get it. Doesn't know what it is. How do you articulate what customer success is and really what they should expect as they go down this journey to really embracing a customer success philosophy and an operating model?

[00:21:19] Guy Nirpaz: Yeah you're making a, actually two points. But let's start with the first one. So I think anyone that looks at a business model for. Over several years very quickly sees the impact of retention or churn and growth, right? So you know, the number that covers them, both net revenue retention, which is growth minus churn is a very impactful metric.

And if you put this on a model business model and you just play with the numbers, huge differences between 95% net retention, which means that your customer base is shrinking. And you've got to fill in with new customers versus 120% of that driven retention, which our success is your sorry, customer base is growing.

So you got the growth from your existing customers, which are compound growth because it's over the total customer base. So if, say one year, your customer base is a hundred million. So 20% and 120% in. $20 million out of that. And then another a hundred at 20% of the next year, it's another another $24 million.

And if you add a new customers that came in, growth becomes exponential. So any CEO that looks at that business model gets it. I think what they need it's a little bit more encouragement is that you can control it. You can make an impact. This is not. Happening, you can make it happen.

And the way to make it happen is to really carefully design customer journey and focus on every part of the journey because you're losing some customers in onboarding. You're losing some customers of not paying attention on the next 90 days. You're losing some customers that have gone through change and you didn't have the early warning system that detected those risks because you didn't take the action on time and so forth.

So if you optimize. This journey by really boarding programs in place you can be very successful now the way, one of the other, I think elements that I feel has been slowing down with the market. Was that the perception that the customer success you're getting started as super difficult, and I've heard this from many people, especially in the young companies saying, okay, I'm not ready for customer success.

This is it's too complicated. I want to go small. And I agree with them and this is why, we've been on a mission for the last three years. To really simplify everything about customer success. So we deconstructed customer success into modules. We call them success box. We made sure that every successful comes with 90% of the content in it.

So it's like plug and play. You download that. You make some customization for your business and you get going. You don't need to do everything all in once, right? You don't need to do the entire journey at once. You can start. At the most critical pain points that you have right now, whether it's onboarding or customer 360 or detecting risk, and then add the rest of them.

And I really think that our mission, if we think about enabling customer success for the math. He is basically you're reducing the friction for companies to adopt. I don't know if you've noticed, but we released that a community edition, which is completely free. Our products have all of them have free trials that allow companies to start.

So small company can use the technical free for several months or several years until they hit the limits and all of that. Then the, in the context of there's. Oh, the approach that many went to market with customer success was a very academic approach. So books, guilty as charged, books and courses and change management and training and so forth versus which is what we're doing right now.

It's learning by doing, because I don't think it's complicated though, the concept is not super complicated. You make sure that the customers get value and you're going to get you're going to get the outcome. So the complex is not complicated is where do I start? What do I do first? What do I tell my team?

It's things along very kind of basic basic starting points. I think we're going to removing friction that's core to extend the adoption of customer success technology into the, the majority of the market.

[00:25:24] Jason Noble: This has been such a cool conversation, as we said at the beginning.

We could talk for hours, someone like you with the kind of experience you've got, what you guys do to tango. I think I'd like to give you one last question. What we always do with our podcasts, do what we call a bowl challenge question. The one I want to give to you is what's the number one thing you'd like to see CS leaders doing differently now in 2020 is we're going through all these changes.

We're coming out of the pandemic, we've got the world, thinking about agile customer success, but what's the one thing that you think people should be doing.

[00:25:54] Guy Nirpaz: Aim high as you can. Let's get B2B experience to be as as good, if not better than B to C experience, right?

Let's aim super, super high. There are no, today there are no limits. You've got the budgets, you've got the technology. You got the mind share of the customers. You've got the Mindshare of the leadership in the company. Aim high, go as high as you can from creating experiences to customers, prove out that, when you do it super well, it works exponentially well.

[00:26:26] Jason Noble: I love that. And that you're so right. The experience thing. When we talk to everyone about the B2C experience and we're all ultimately consumers, how is B2B providers? Do we meet that? And it's not easy, but that's what expectations.

[00:26:39] Guy Nirpaz: Absolutely. we see our mission as enablers for people to, whether it's ideas examples, techno enabling technology, everyone should be able to create the Uber experience, the door dash experience all of these experiences in, in, in their businesses, because there was no there's no reason, it can be done.

It has been done. Just believe that you can do it yourself.

[00:27:05] Jason Whitehead: It that's fantastic, guys. Thank you so much before we go. We always like to invite our guests to give a shameless plug for your company or your book or any initiatives that you have or any resources you'd like to share, you think could help people out.

Let our audience know how they can benefit from reaching out to you guys.

[00:27:21] Guy Nirpaz: Absolutely. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I like to invite the audience to just try out two times and go to a website and sign up for. A free account. All of the ideas that I've discussed in this in this podcast, like the breaking down the journey into modules, we call them success blocks getting started super quickly and getting value to be able to sell to your organization or actually start engaging with your customer is all there.

So I hope that this experience is going to do the actual work. So all you need to do is go to detangle.com and sign up for to tango.

[00:27:57] Jason Noble: I love it. What a, what an intro as well, just come and sign up brilliantly. Easier.

[00:28:01] Guy Nirpaz: Exactly. Simple.

[00:28:06] Jason Whitehead: Thanks for being with us. We really

appreciate

[00:28:07] Jason Noble: it. Great conversation.

[00:28:08] Guy Nirpaz: Really appreciate this for having me guys. It was a pleasure. Take care.

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