Helping Sells Radio: Recent Episodes
Bill Cushard
Helping Sells Radio is the enterprise software podcast for people who want to help customers achieve outcomes with software. We talk to technology professionals who work all over the customer journey, from marketing and sales to customer success and professional services, to unpack innovative ways people are taking a helpful approach with customers. Brought to you by ServiceRocket Media.
helpingsells.substack.com
Andy Paul is the author of his new book, "Sell without Selling Out: A Guide to Success On Your Own Terms." Guess what we talked about. Andy hooked me very early on in the book when he said that the purpose of his book is to "turn your back on salesy behaviors," which is how he defines "selling out."
More about Andy:
His book: https://www.amazon.com/Sell-without-Selling-Out-Success-ebook/dp/B09G8464LL/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=selling+without+selling+out&qid=1646704184&sprefix=selling+without+se%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-1
His website: https://www.andypaul.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realandypaul/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
In this episode we talk to Mikael Blaisdell, executive director of the Customer Success Association about his Rocketlane Propel22 talk.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
In this episode we talk to Jeff Kushmerek, CEO & founder of Infinite Renewals about his Rocketlane Propel22 talk.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
Star Hofer is vice president of customer success at PartnerStack, multi-time top customer success influencer, and a customer success mentor coach at Catalyst Software.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
Peter Armaly is VP of Customer Success at ESG, advisor and board member and former customer exec at Oracle, BMC Software, and Eloqua.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
Rod Cherkas is the CEO of HelloCCO, a strategy consultancy and advisory firm to CCOs. His Propel22 talk is about packing services offerings to support fast growth.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
Irit Eizips is the chief customer officer and CEO of CSM Practice, the leading customer success strategy firm for executives.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
Donna Weber runs Springboard Solutions and is author of "Onboarding Matters: How Successful Companies Transform New Customers into Loyal Champions."
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
Mary Poppen is the Chief Strategy & Customer Officer at involve.ai, which helps companies prevent churn, grow revenue, and deliver customer outcomes with customer intelligence.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
My guest today is Kristi Faltorusso, VP of customer success at ClientSuccess, multi-time top 25 customer success influencer, advisor to numerous organizations, and founder of Keep It Simple, a content experience portal for customer success professionals.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
In this episode we talk to Ed Powers, customer success consultant, multi-time top 25 customer success influencer, and organizer of the Colorado Customer Success Meetup.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
This episode is with Kristen Hayer is the founder and CEO of The Success League, multi-time Top 25 customer success influencer, and fellow board member of the Customer Success Leadership Network.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
This episode is with Maranda Dziekonski, Chief Customer Officer at Swiftly, multi-time top 25 customer success influencer, and fellow board member of the Customer Success Leadership Network.
Register for Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category. We all know that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
This episode is with Emilia D'Anzica, Managing Director at Growth Molecules, the growth revenue advisors who delivers data-driven customer success strategies.
Register for Rocketlane Propel22: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Sri Ganesan is the co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane, the customer onboarding platform. We are doing a special series of episodes leading up to Rocketlane's Propel22, the world's first customer onboarding conference, in which we will talk to many of the Propel22 conference speakers to preview their talks and see what we can do to further the customer onboarding category and help you develop your own official onboarding methodology. Because we all know, that the best thing we can do the help customers be successful is set them up for success right from the start.
Rocketlane Propel22 is being held March 15 - 16, 2022 at a virtual location near you. Visit the rocketlane.com/propel to see the speaker line up and agenda. Please save your spot and register here: https://rocketlane.com/propel
More about Sri:
His company, Rocketlane: https://www.rocketlane.com/
Rocketlane Propel22 Conference: https://www.rocketlane.com/propel
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, I am sharing a recording of a webinar I facilitated about how software company CxOs should think about using customer education as a way to grow. I call it the Customer Education Growth Framework. The framework makes the process of developing customer training predictable. You just follow the steps. And when you do, you will know what goals to pursue, and what metrics to monitor on your way to growth.
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Jared Orr is senior customer success manager at Electric and founder and host of the Founders & Mentors podcast. We know each other from being connected on Twitter and Linkedin. We finally met IRL on Helping Sells Radio to discuss customer success, his podcast, and going all in on his career.
Side bar: I say we met IRL. It was on video. But I still say that is IRL. Only an analog native would think meeting on a video is not "in real life." It is real life to me.
More about Jared:
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaredorr10
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredsorr/
Founders & Mentors Podcast: https://foundersmentors.com/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, we share a recording of a webinar we did about how software company customer education teams should build annual plans and learn to forecast instead of asking for a budget. Forecasting is a critical capability to learn, especially as your company prepares for possible IPO. Forecasting is a way to create your plan and then go after your plan.
A budget is a license to spend. You don't want to be a spender. You want to be a forecaster. You gotta get good at this. And just to add, I did an episode with Debbie Smith who runs Smartsheet University, which is an excellent companion episode. So if you haven't listened to Debbie's episode go get it. Episode 327. She runs customer education as a P&L. She has to plan and forecast.
Be like Debbie.
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Paula Courtney is the CEO of The Verde Group, a leading customer experience consultancy. She recently ran a study of 9,400 consumers with Thomas Robertson from Wharton, to find out what customers consider "wow experiences." Harvard Business Review published an article to summarize the findings called, "Why Customer Loyalty Programs Can Backfire."
The key takeaway for me was the idea that our goal should not be to "surprise and delight" customers. In fact, if our goal is to surprise and delight customers, we end up creating an illusion of progress. After all, what surprises and delights customers changes. Regularly. What works today, may not work tomorrow. We end up chasing an elusive prize.
Instead what Courtney suggests we do is understand that whatever our value proposition is, the number one thing to do is consistently deliver on that value proposition. That seems more reasonable to me. And it's what customers actually want.
More about Paula:
Her company, The Verde Group: https://verdegroup.com/
Her HBR article, Why Customer Loyalty Programs Can Backfire: https://hbr.org/2021/05/why-customer-loyalty-programs-can-backfire
Her Interview on Knowledge @ Wharton: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/want-to-make-retail-customers-happy-give-them-a-wow-experience/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Diana De Jesus is the Customer Success Manager Strategist at Catalyst.io, which is a brand new role for her and for Catalyst. We talked about two of her Linkedin posts that caught my eye. One about her first year at Catalyst and another about what life is like using a customer success software tool, instead of a CRM, to do her customer success job.
More about Diana:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianadejesus/
Catalyst: https://catalyst.io/
Diana's first Linkedin post we talked about: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dianadejesus_customersuccess-workanniversary-activity-6862400251127455745-zRpr
Diana's second Linkedin post we talked about: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dianadejesus_customersuccess-saas-activity-6872573198999846913-b0oJ
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
This is part two in a two part series in which Mel and Bill talk about owning renewals, negotiating the renewals, and lessons learned building a customer success team that does own the renewal.
More about Mel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihabilge/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
This is part one in a two part series in which Mel and Bill talk about owning renewals, negotiating the renewals, and lessons learned building a customer success team that does own the renewal.
More about Mel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihabilge/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mel and Bill talk about customer advisory boards (CABs).
More about Mel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihabilge/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mel Bilge and Bill Cushard discuss defining and documenting the customer success process.
More about Mel on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihabilge/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Aaron Thompson, CRO at SuccessHacker, wrote a Linkedin article called "QBRs are stupid. Naturally, we had to talk about it. The problem is QBRs is that we say they are focused on the customer, but we deliver them as all about us. Aaron is begging us to re-examine the nature of our QBRs to make them actually about the customer and for the customer.
Here is a link to his article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/qbrs-stupid-aaron-thompson/?trackingId=PKMxzPJcSgCfxwMcYfhFcQ%3D%3D
More about Aaron:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/athomps/
At SuccessHacker: https://www.successhacker.co/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mel Bilge and Bill Cushard discuss implementing quarterly business reviews.
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mel Bilge and Bill Cushard discuss why net revenue retention is a north star metric and a growth metric.
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Debbie Smith is the senior manager of Smartsheet University and vice president of the Customer Education Management Association (CEdMA) and joins us on Helping Sells Radio to talk about helping customers beyond the product. This all started on a Linkedin post, which talked about how software companies should consider building the school that teaches the skill in its domain. Software companies can help people (customers and potential customers and just anyone) learn the skills necessary to perform the job its software is designed to help. And even credential people in that job.
It's a big idea.
Debbie is doing something incredible. Instead of creating the school from scratch, she partnered with the biggest "school" in project management; the Project Management Institute to teach project management skills and help PMI certified professional maintain their PMI certification.
Not only is Debbie building trust between PMI members and Smartsheet, she is helping PMI members further their skills and careers.
What a conversation.
More about Debbie:
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/debbiecareysmith/
Smartsheet University - https://smartu.smartsheet.com/
Customer Education Slack Channel - https://customered.slack.com
CEdMA - https://www.cedma.org/leadership
That Linkedin post that got this all started - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6871136448339423232/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A6871136448339423232%2C6871807844467953664)&replyUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A6871136448339423232%2C6871815549513420800)
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mel Bilge and Bill Cushard discuss the importance of account ownership in SaaS customer success.
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mel Bilge and Bill Cushard discuss high touch customer success and why being scalable and low touch isn't all it's cracked up to be.
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Steve Harper is the author of The Ripple Effect: Maximizing the Power of Relationships for Life & Business and creator of Ripple Central, a services consultancy that helps harness the power of human connection to transform your team, your career, and your life. Steve had me on his podcast, The Ripple Effect Podcast with Steve Harper, and now he's on Helping Sells Radio.
We talked about his Ripple Effect, listening for opportunities for starting ripples with customers, and how he came up with this useful concept for building meaningful relationships.
More about Steve:
About Steve and Ripple Central: https://ripplecentral.com/biopress/
His book: https://www.amazon.com/Ripple-Effect-Maximizing-Relationships-Business/dp/097686651X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1642559779&sr=8-1
His podcast episode with me:
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
This article originally appeared on the Customer Success Leadership Network blog.
We are thinking about customer success all wrong. We think it’s a function. A department. A post-sales team. The enlightened among us think customer success is a philosophy or even an organizational design principle. That’s better, but still not quite right. I mean, what am I supposed to do with “customer success is a philosophy?” I have no idea. After spending two and a half years running a SaaS business as a general manager with P&L ownership, I have come to this realization in my thinking: customer success is a business model innovation.
To understand what I mean by business model innovation, we must first define business model. According to Alex Osterwalder, “a business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.”
Notice the three parts of this definition: create, deliver, and capture value. All three are required in order for a business model to work. A mistake I see customer success teams make is focusing solely on “delivers,” ignoring “creates,” and “captures.” When a customer success team over-indexes on delivering value, the primary purpose becomes retaining customers, which seems like a noble pursuit until you examine the behaviors of a retention mindset.
The downside of a retention mindset
Retaining customers is defensive. The mindset is, “If we are going to retain this customer, we have to get them to log in more or get them to use the software more or build a better relationship with the champion or get them to understand the value they are currently realizing. We must compel or persuade customers to act in ways we want them to act.” When a customer renews, we are relieved that we got the renewal at the same price as the last contract. We celebrate it.
I know what you are thinking, “Bill, that is a good thing. We saved/retained/turned around that customer by delivering value. What’s the problem?”
I see two [business model] problems.
You didn’t create new value.
You didn’t capture a portion of that new value.
Here’s another way to look at it. A CEO came to me for advice on how to get her team to focus on net revenue retention (NRR) and said to me, “You know, I see my teams celebrate all these renewals, but I don’t see the value of the contracts going up. All of our costs are going up, including the raises everyone wants, but the prices we charge customers are not. This is not gonna work.”
This is what happens when a software subscription business focuses primarily on delivering value and retaining customers. There is no “what’s next.” No forward-thinking about how to continuously help customers grow.
The upside of business model thinking
Software companies that understand their business model get all of their teams rowing in the same direction by getting everyone involved in all three parts of the business model:
Create value
Deliver value
Capture value
The “what’s next” mindset is built into the system (your business model). There is no need to upsell or for account managers to sweep in to “close the deal” or argue about who should own the renewal or waste energy on debates about whether people can sell AND be a trusted advisor. You will understand how this is possible as you read further.
A well-designed business model answers the question, “What’s next?” It creates a flywheel effect of the following:
Step 1: Create “something” that solves a problem
Step 2: Deliver that “something” to a customer
Step 3: Capture 10% to 15% of the value of that “something” with reasonable pricing
Step 4: Repeat this process with existing customers. FOREVER.
Steps one through three are simple in the sense that most software companies already do this. The founder noticed a problem in the world, built a product to solve it, and found customers willing to pay for that solution. Step four is where the magic happens, where the flywheel can start turning, and where many software companies mis-understand their business model.
A well-designed business model answers the question, “What’s next?”
When you get to step four, I assume you have already delivered on the one main value proposition that new customers bought your product to address in the first place; and that the product has been designed to address.
Step four is about “What’s next?” More precisely: “What is the next value proposition you intend to help a customer achieve; and if we do help a customer achieve that next value proposition, how much of that next, new value will we capture?”
Pause and think about that for a moment, and while you do, let me ask those two questions differently.
What value proposition can we deliver next?
What offering (that we must create) can a customer buy in order to achieve that next value proposition?
To over simplify what is happening here. If we operated our customer success in accordance with the business model innovation, at each renewal cycle (ideally before) we would identify the next value proposition that we are positioned to help the customer achieve. Better yet, the customer would identify the next value they want to achieve. We create an offering (or select an existing one) that will help the customer achieve this next value, and we charge a price such that a customer is willing to pay because of the value they will realize. “If we do this, we will save $100, I’d love to pay you $10 to do that. Where do I sign?”
So the flywheel of the business model innovation (step four from above) is:
Create value
Deliver value
Capture value
Create next value
Deliver next value
Capture next value
Create next next value
Deliver next next value
Capture next next value
Repeat. Forever.
It is similar to what Rav Dhaliwal calls the continuous sale. What Dave Jackson calls the next best value. If you look through the lens of business model innovation, you transcend debates about who owns the renewal, the customer relationship, and a quota. The business model is designed more like an algorithm and less like a customer journey with owners and silos and hand-offs and confused customers, “Who are you again? My account manager? Then what’s my customer success manager for? Wait, I should call my technical account manager for that? When do I call support? Oh, I should have put in a ticket instead of calling you? Sorry. I’ll try to get it right next time.”
All of this noise and friction becomes unnecessary.
Business model innovation is a customer success algorithm
The business model innovation of customer success is an algorithm with the following rules:
IF a customer wants to realize this value proposition, THEN they need to buy that offering.
IF a customer wants to realize the next value proposition, THEN they need to buy the next offering.
Your job is to work with multiple teams in your company and write as many IF/THEN statements as you can, such that you can help your customers.
FOREVER.
We called it “first” value for a reason
We, customer success teams, just need to take one more step in our evolution. We are concerned with helping customers achieve value. One of our most important charters is to help customers achieve “first value” and help customers accelerate “time to first value.” All I am suggesting is that we don’t forget that we inserted the word “first” for a reason; because we know there is more value that we can create, deliver, and capture.
My call to action to you is this. Write down a list of value propositions that you could help your customers achieve over time. Then, prioritize that list using the model above, answering the question, “What’s the next value proposition I can help customers realize? And what is the next one after that?” Then write down the list of offerings you have (or need to create) in order to help your customers achieve those value propositions; and capture some of it.
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
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Asa Hochhauser is the VP of Sales at McGaw.io, which helps companies harness the power of Marketing Technology and Data. He is also a member of the Revenue Collective and founding member of Sales Hacker. He knows a thing or two about sales, sales enablement, and designing sales tech stacks.
Rolling out the right sales tech stack is the key to productivity. However, the stack is almost meaningless if you don't take the time to do two things first; 1) understand "the why" behind the need to assemble the sales technology; and 2) enable your sales team.
If there was a sales magic triangle, the three corners would be goals, enablement, and technology.
More about Asa:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asahoc/
McGaw.io: https://mcgaw.io/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Kay Formanek is the founder and CEO of Diversity and Performance, a company that develops conscious diversity leaders. She was managing director for 25 years at Accenture (though I did not meet Kay then, we shared time at Accenture) where she contributed to the agenda of diversity and inclusion and talent development. Kay’s expertise is in the neuroscience of unconscious bias and how to mitigate unconscious bias within an organization and within its leadership ranks. She collaborates with leading institutions and business schools like INSEAD and has spoken at forums regularly including TEDx.
Kay is also the author of Beyond D&I: Leading Diversity with Purpose and Inclusiveness.
You might be thinking, "Bill, what does diversity and inclusion have to do with helping customers?" That's what I thought. Until I read the book. The word "customer" appears on 58 pages of Beyond D&I, and there are many examples in the book of companies that implemented diversity and inclusion initiatives with the purpose of improving customer congruence.
Customer congruence? I'm sold.
I talked about that at length with Kay.
More abot Kay:
Her book: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-D-and-ILeading-Diversity-with-Purpose-and-Inclusiveness/dp/3030753352/ref=sr_1_1?crid=385UCMRRV845&keywords=beyond+d%26i+formanek&qid=1639164809&sprefix=beyond+D%26I%2Caps%2C572&sr=8-1
Her company: https://diversityandperformance.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kay-formanek-6389588/
Her TEDx talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/dirk_luyten_kay_formanek_united_diversity
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Maureen Burns is a senior partner in Bain & Company's Boston office and a leader in Bain's Customer Strategy and Marketing Practice. Maureen is out with a new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, with co-authors Fred Reichheld and Darci Darnell.
I asked how Maureen, who has a background in investment banking and serves financial services company clients, could sign up to co-author a book about loving customers. She told me that at first she was skeptical saying, "Fred, I can't go to my financial services c-suite clients and talk about love." What is most motivating about this exchange is the realization that the evidence is overwhelming that companies that prioritize enriching the lives of customers (loyalty leaders in their categories) outperformance the market by 3X or more. And, it turns out, Burns' financial services clients have been quite receptive to the purpose of enriching customer lives.
It's not just good for financial results, it's just plain the right way to treat people.
More about Maureen:
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Purpose-Unbeatable-Strategy-Customers/dp/1647821789/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=winning+on+purpose&qid=1638816110&sr=8-3
The Harvard Business Review article: Net Promoter 3.0 - https://hbr.org/2021/11/net-promoter-3-0
About Maureen: https://www.bain.com/our-team/maureen-burns/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
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Darci Darnell is the head of Bain’s global sales & marketing practice and an active leader in Financial Services and Strategy practices with nearly two decades of management consulting experience. She also has particular expertise in customer retention strategy, NPS®, and employee engagement. Darnell is out with a new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, with co-authors Fred Reichheld and Maureen Burns.
We talked about the original intent of net promoter system. As Darci described in the book, "NPS implemented correctly reveals how consistently a company lives up to its purpose of loving customers." Loving customers? Not all execs will accept this easily, even though the empirical evidence is overwhelming that loyalty leading companies out-perform the market by numerous multiples.
Darci's advice to me, "Be brave."
There's a life lesson.
More about Darci:
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Purpose-Unbeatable-Strategy-Customers/dp/1647821789/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=winning+on+purpose&qid=1638816110&sr=8-3
The Harvard Business Review article: Net Promoter 3.0 - https://hbr.org/2021/11/net-promoter-3-0
About Darci: https://www.bain.com/our-team/darci-darnell/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Fred Reichheld is the creator of the Net Promoter® , founder of Bain & Company's Loyalty practice, and the author of five books including the New York Times bestseller The Ultimate Question 2.0. Reichheld is out with a new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Loving Customers, with co-authors Darci Darnell and Maureen Burns.
The ultimate purpose of any business is to enrich the lives of customers. This statement appears antithetical to the broadly accepted purpose of a business enterprise, which is to maximize profits or otherwise maximize shareholder value. But as the authors point out, when we enrich the lives of customers, we create a multiplier effect of financial results. Why?
Customers who we enrich buy more from us.
They don’t buy from elsewhere. When they bring their friends with them, they also don’t buy from elsewhere.
There is a great story in the book in which Steve Grinshaw, CEO of Caliber Collision (they repair damaged cars), talks about purpose. “People work hard for a paycheck, they work harder for a good boss, and they work hardest for a meaningful purpose. Our purpose is to help get each customer’s life back in order— to restore the rhythm of their lives.”
What could be a higher purpose for a collision repair company than to help their customers, who just got in a crash, get their lives back in order?
More about Fred:
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Purpose-Unbeatable-Strategy-Customers/dp/1647821789/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=winning+on+purpose&qid=1638816110&sr=8-3
The Harvard Business Review article: Net Promoter 3.0: https://hbr.org/2021/11/net-promoter-3-0
About Fred: https://www.bain.com/our-team/fred-reichheld/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Too many of us think that go to market is a sales and marketing exercise (some think it's only marketing), but as Sangram Vajre, author of Move: The four question go to market framework and 3X Helping Sells Radio (Ep. 68 and Ep. 154) guest says, go to market requires marketing and sales and customer success to work as one.
Where most companies falter is on one of these:
They can:
Make but can't sell
Sell but can't deliver
Deliver but can't renew
Renew but can't expand
All four of these "motions" must work for a company to be successful, and that is where Vajre's four question go to market framework comes in.
More about Vajre:
The book: http://themovebook.com
The Valley of Death we talked about: https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/30/getting-to-50-million-how-to-avoid-the-saas-valley-of-death/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Jeff Coyle is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at MarketMuse, which helps marketing teams improve the effectiveness of their content. As Jeff says, "We do the the why for content." This is the right question to answer before entering into any content publishing initiative, and the answer cannot be, "Because my boss told me to write these 10 blog posts." The 'why' matters. In fact, the earlier in the process you are informed by data, the more efficient your content is going to be. After all, as Jeff says, "The plague is spending time writing content that doesn't perform."
I am beginning the believe that artificial intelligence and machine learning is getting to the point at which it can help us mere mortals make better decisions.
More about Jeff:
His company, MarketMuse: http://www.marketmuse.com
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffcoyle/
The blog post we talked about: https://blog.marketmuse.com/seo-content-strategy-how-to-bring-humans-and-search-bots-together/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Simon Severino is the founder and CEO of Strategy Sprints, which helps B2B founders double revenue and save time, money, and energy by systematizing "everything." We talked about the value of systems, and as he said in the podcast, once you have experienced scaling, you then understand systems. And until you do, you cannot really understand the importance of defining processes, documenting processes, following processes, and continuously improving processes. You put process development in quadrant 2, which means you never do it. "I'll get to that later."
Then later never comes.
Simon helps his clients see how systems will help them grow and have time to take a vacation one or twice or three times a year.
More about Simon:
His company, Strategy Sprints: https://www.strategysprints.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonseverino/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
This is one of those podcast episodes to which show notes don't do justice. I will say this, Barry Kelly, co-founder and CEO of Thought Industries and Rob Castaneda, founder and CEO of ServiceRocket, come on the pod to talk about the future of customer education, the constantly changing software learning landscape, and why their two companies came together to take this market trend head on.
More about the Thought Industries / ServiceRocket Partnership:
The announcement: https://www.thoughtindustries.com/blog/thought-industries-and-servicerocket-partner-to-grow-market-for-customer-learning-software-and-services/
About the relationship: https://www.thoughtindustries.com/blog/qa-with-thought-industries-and-servicerocket-sharing-expertise-for-customer-success/
Advancing customer education: https://www.servicerocket.com/post/servicerocket-partners-with-thought-industries-to-advance-customer-education
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
I heard about this book, The Expansion Sale: Four Must Win Conversations to Keep and Grow Your Customers, from Nick Mehta the CEO of Gainsight. Nick had tweeted about it when it came out in early 2020. It piqued my interested and when I read the description, I knew I had to read it.
And there it sat. On my wish list for 18 months before I read it. When I finished, I knew that Helping Sells Radio nation needed to learn more about this book.
On this episode, I talked to Tim Riesterer, chief strategy officer at Corporate Visions and co-author of The Expansion Sale. We all live in a world in which 70-80% of our revenue comes from existing customers. We should learn to spend more time and energy retaining and growing this revenue and The Expansion Sale is the way to learn that skill.
More about Tim:
His company, Corporate Visions: https://corporatevisions.com
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Expansion-Sale-Must-Win-Conversations-Customers-ebook/dp/B083FBFQ6M/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+expansion+sale&qid=1637363620&sr=8-1
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-riesterer/
More about ServiceRocket:
Visit ServiceRocket.com: https://www.servicerocket.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerocket/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/servicerocket
On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ServiceRocket/
On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/servicerocket/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Sasi Yajamanyam is the director of customer success strategy and operations at ServiceNow and author of Reimagining customer success: Designing organizations around customer value. Sasi has an extensive career in customer facing roles from senior consulting and strategy roles at IBM and Freddie Mac to product management and customer success roles at the CEB (Corporate Executive Board). And now at ServiceNow.
Sasi saw a problem with how customer success is being implemented, as a siloed department. Not as organization design. In his book he offers a framework for how companies can design their entire organization around customer success and customer value.
More about Sasi:
His book: https://www.amazon.com/Reimagine-Customer-Success-Designing-Organizations-ebook/dp/B09DX99TWD/ref=sr_1_1?crid=EQ5PQEIV0194&keywords=reimagine+customer+success&qid=1636682836&sprefix=reimagine+customer+success%2Caps%2C399&sr=8-1
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasiyajamanyam/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Wayne Mullins is the founder and CEO of Ugly Mug Marketing and author of Full circle marketing: transform your marketing and turn customers into evangelists. He is also a two time guest on the show (Ep. 198). In his new book, Wayne argues something incredible...that if you apply his full circle marketing approach, you only ever need three campaigns. And these are it:
Convert strangers into friends
Convert friends into customers
Convert customers into evangelists
After I get over the shock of only ever really needing three campaigns, I looked at the list again. One third of the list is about communicating with customers, turning customers into evangelists. Most marketing teams spend no time trying to covert existing customers to anything else. Once a prospect becomes a customer, marketing is moving on.
But a good marketing team knows, as Wayne says, that few things are more scalable than getting existing customers to evangelist your services. Imagine that...a marketing team spending at least a third of their time, resources, and budget trying to convert existing customers to evangelists. Now that is marketing that I can sign up for.
More about Wayne:
His book: https://www.amazon.com/Full-Circle-Marketing-Wayne-Mullins/dp/057897651X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=365LU89OXG03R&keywords=full+circle+marketing&qid=1636681375&sprefix=full+circle+marketing%2Caps%2C230&sr=8-1
His company, Ugly Mug Marketing: https://www.uglymugmarketing.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fireyourself/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
What can I say? Dave Derington, co-host of the number one customer education podcast, CELab, has just joined ServiceRocket as director of customer education. We recorded this podcast on his first day. It's part of his onboarding.
More about Dave:
His podcast (with co-host, Adam Avramescu), CELab: https://customer.education
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derington/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Dave Jackson picked a fight. He said NRR was not a measure of customers' success. In fact, he capitalized NOT. I say NRR is the ULTIMATE measure of customers' success. He posted this message on Linkedin (see link below) and mentioned me (among other experts including Dave Duke, Ross Fulton, Nick Mehta, and Kristi Faltorusso).
I responded the only way I know how...to have a debate on the podcast. So here it is. The question is: "What is the ultimate measure of customers' success?"
More about Dave:
His book, Customer-led growth: CEO's guide to building a SaaS company: https://www.amazon.com/Customer-Led-Growth-guide-building-company-ebook/dp/B09DBMXJK7/ref=sr_1_1?crid=26XFV5F8V8PT2&keywords=customer+led+growth&qid=1636389307&sprefix=customer+l%2Caps%2C1220&sr=8-1
His company: https://thecustomer.co
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Tyler Kemp is the chairman of the board and CEO of IntentFlow, which helps companies find new customers who are looking to buy using AI and intent data. He is also CEO of Leadroll.co, which helps companies get more sales meetings for high ticket sales.
We talked about what it takes to reach and attract your ideal customers in a world in which privacy is taking center-stage and personal data and cookies and tracking is being limited more and more. This is causing a lot of anxiety for marketing teams. Tyler suggests we need to urgently learn about buyer intent and leverage that knowledge to meet people where they are to offer relevant, useful, helpful content and other offers in the moment of need.
More about Tyler:
His company, IntentFlow: https://www.intentflow.com/thesis
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjkemp/
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Listen now | Jon Picoult is the author of From Impressed to Obsessed: 12 Principles for Turning Customers and Employees into Lifelong Fans. He is also the founder of Watermark Consulting and a noted authority on customer and employee experience. Jon helps companies impress their customers and inspire their employees, creating raving fans that drive business growth. Jon has personally advised the CEOs and executive teams at some of the world’s foremost brands, with his clients collectively representing over a million employees and more than $600 billion in annual revenue.
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Mary Ann Pruitt, the CEO and President of Mosaic Media, a collection of media buying experts and creative strategists who negotiate, purchase, and monitor advertising space and airtime. She’s on the podcast to share how the right media strategy can help you reach your customers in an ever evolving climate of media. You know what they say, "Traditional media is dead. Long live traditional media."
More about Mary Ann:
Her agency, Mosaic Media: https://mosaic.agency
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When Ben Worthen, CEO of MessageLab, said it, I did a double take. He posed a simple question, "If you had an idea store, what would be in that store?" A simple question. Then he asked a follow-up, "...and how can you get repeat customers of your ideas?" Whoa. This is a different and better way (in my opinion) to look at marketing.
If you want to become relevant to a certain audience, how are you going to do that? If you sell project management software, how are you going to become relevant to project managers? If you sell digital transformation services, how will you become relevant to the C-Suite on the biggest 1,000 companies in the world?
We tackled these questions and Ben helped me reexamine how I think about marketing.
More about Ben:
His company, Message Lab: https://messagelab.com
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benworthen/
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Henry Trevelyan Thomas is the VP of Customer Success at Tessian, a human layer security platform. After beginning his career in corporate law, Henry joined Tessian as its first customer success hire in 2017. Since then, Tessian has raised over $120m from legendary security investors (Sequoia, Accel, March, etc) and grown from 10 to ~200 employees.
We talked about a blog post he wrote recently "Building a customer success team: 5 pillars of customer success."
And, yes.
We may have even talked about NRR.
Special thank you to Rav Dhaliwal (Ep. 208 and Ep. 268) for introducing us to Henry.
More about Henry:
His blog post: https://www.tessian.com/blog/building-a-customer-success-team/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-trevelyan-thomas-991a0861/
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Ben Bensaou is a Professor of Technology Management and Professor of Asian Business and Comparative Management at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France. His research and teaching activities focus on how to create innovating capabilities and competencies as a way to build an innovating organization and culture, and this led him to write, Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into your company's DNA.
We talked about the difference between execution and innovations, the difference between innovating and innovation, and how innovation is really about leaders because innovation is and should be about anyone, anytime, anywhere.
More about Ben:
His book: https://www.builttoinnovatethebook.com
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Sam Richter is the founder and CEO of SBR Worldwide and an internationally recognized expert on digital information and is considered the father of modern-day Sales Intelligence. He is a hall of fame business and sales keynote speaker and has won numerous awards and recognitions including, National Speaker Hall of Fame, Top 15 Highest Rated Speakers for Virtual Events, Top 50 Sales Keynote Speakers, Top 25 Most Influential Sales Leaders, Minnesota Speakers Hall of Fame.
I could go on.
He's even won a Codie, which is pretty much the Oscars of the software industry....for best ecommerce software.
We talked about how to get to know your customers using sales intelligence and the worst thing you can do is ask your customer, "What keeps you up at night?"
More about Sam:
His website: https://www.samrichter.com/bio
His software company: https://www.intelngin.com
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David Wachs is a serial entrepreneur. His latest venture, Handwrytten, is bringing back the lost art of letter writing through scalable, robot-based solutions that write your notes in pen. Developed as a platform, Handwrytten lets you send notes from your CRM system, such as Salesforce, the web site, apps, or through custom integration. Used by major meal boxes, eCommerce giants, nonprofits and professionals, Handwrytten is changing the way brands and people connect. Prior to starting Handwrytten, David founded Cellit, a leading mobile marketing agency. Cellit was sold to HelloWorld in 2012.
We talked about the importance of handwritten notes in a digital world and how it helps you stand out with your customers in a crowded world of digital information overload.
More about David:
His company, Handwrytten: https://www.handwrytten.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwachs/
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Mike Farrell is the CEO of Green Leads, a pipeline generation company. Mike is a veteran of the B2B Lead generation and Sales Development industries and IT Solution provider channel. A growth expert, Mike achieved a 7x revenue increase at BAO 15 years as COO, 2x revenue growth at PC Connection (a Fortune 1000 firm) in 4 years as SVP of Sales and 20x growth at Copley Systems.
I believe pipeline generation, as measured by the metric, pipeline creation rate (PCR), is the ultimate measure of how we can bring sales and marketing teams together and minimize the dynamic of throwing leads over the fence. Sales says the leads are good enough (or there aren't enough) and marketing says the sales team need to address those leads better. If pipeline is measured by the total value of opportunities and sales is the team that is creating the opportunities, then there is implicit acceptance that a lead is good. This is just one of the things we talked about with Mike
More about Mike:
His company, Green Leads: https://www.green-leads.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelfarrell24/
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Kris Rudeegraap is the CEO and co-founder of Sendoso, the leading Sending Platform that helps companies stand out by giving them new ways to engage with customers throughout the buyer’s journey. By integrating digital and physical sending strategies, companies can increase the effectiveness of their existing go-to-market programs and improve their relationships with customers.
We talked to Kris about the major pain companies have in sending things to customers, employees, partners, etc. It is a lot harder to send gifts to people now that the world is even more remote and distributed and Sendoso solves this problem.
My take away is that everyone knows that sending gifts to the right people at the right times makes a huge difference in building and maintaining relationships. But few os us do it well. The key is to make the process of sending part of what we do and not something extra to do.
More about Kris:
His company: https://www.sendoso.com
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudeegraap/
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Joseph is the CEO of Uvaro, a tech sales career accelerator, and of Kiite, a sales enablement platform purpose-built to provide sales teams with the information they need when they need it. A graduate of the University of Waterloo’s Computer Engineering program, Joseph’s a repeat Founder & CEO, and with multiple successful exits, and speaks frequently on the topics of sales leadership, diversity, and corporate social responsibility.
We talked about how he can run two companies, wow these two companies relate to each other, and the three sales skills we are not practicing but should be.
More about Joseph:
His company: Uvaro.com
Twitter : https://twitter.com/josephfung
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephfung/
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Verl is the CEO of Claravine, a company that helps leading brands take ownership and control of their data from the start, for better decisions, stickier consumer experiences, and increased ROI. Their platform, The Data Standards Cloud, makes it easy for teams to standardize, connect, and control data collaboratively, across the organization.
We talked about the importance of customer data quality and context and how to bring together customer teams with the data analysts to think about data more holistically.
More about Verl:
His company, Claravine: https://www.claravine.com
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/verl-allen-b83175
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David Jackson is the founder and CEO of TheCustomer.Co, which helps B2B SaaS companies profitably win, satisfy, retain and grow their chosen customers better than the competition. David is also interim chief customer officer at Deepcrawl, which is the #1 technical SEO platform for enterprise businesses.
Prior to founding TheCustomer.Co, he founded, led and grew customer feedback specialists Clicktools, where he served as CEO for 15 years. Founded in 2000, Clicktools was one of the UK’s first true SaaS companies and one of the first to recognize the importance of customer success, appointing their first CSM in 2005. He led the company through two transactions, selling 49.9% to Survey Monkey in 2010 and 100% to Callidus Cloud in 2014.
David has just launched a book called Customer-Led Growth: A CEO's guide to building a B2B SaaS company.
Guess what we talked about.
More about Daivd:
His Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DBMXJK7/?coliid=IZ2ZEVR3Y1VV5&colid=1MG6QN6554KZS&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjacksonuk/
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Dave Blake is the founder and CEO of ClientSuccess, which helps its clients deliver world-class client success, retention, and growth. Dave is back (previously on episode 52) and this time to talk about the relationship CEOs have with customer success. It is a complex one. On the one hand, CEOs know how important it is to retain and grow customers. On the other hand, many CEOs still focus time, energy, and resources on growth through sales and marketing. No wonder CAC is higher than CRC.
There comes a time when a company's customer base is delivering more revenue than new customer growth and sometimes companies realize this too late and they cannot fix the leaky bucket in time for the inevitable.
We talked to Dave about what CEOs need to know about customers success. Then we talked about how customer success leaders can persuade CEOs to give customer success the attention it needs.
More about Dave:
His blog post, What Your CEO Needs to Know about Customer Success: https://www.clientsuccess.com/blog/what-your-ceo-needs-to-know-about-customer-success/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davecblake/
His company, ClientSuccess: https://www.clientsuccess.com
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Peter Voss is a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI), and he coined the term ‘Artificial General Intelligence.’ He is also the founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist at Aigo.ai. For the past 15 years, Voss and his team at Aigo have been perfecting an industry disruptive, highly intelligent and hyper-personalized Chatbot, with a brain, for large enterprise customers.
We talked about chatbots with a brain, why most chatbots aren't helpful, and we went into real use cases his customers are implementing with his chatbot, Aigo.ai. We even talked about his favorite chatbot use case.
More about Peter:
His company: http://www.aigo.ai
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vosspeter/
On Twitter: https://twitter.com/peterevoss
On Medium: https://medium.com/@petervoss
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Theresa Lina is the author of the bestseller, Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More, and Have Customers Love You for It. She is also a long-time Silicon Valley business strategist and practitioner who specializes in helping companies become differentiated, innovative, and more profitable market leaders. As founder and president of Lina Group, Inc., she has more than 25 years of strategy, technology, innovation, and marketing expertise.
Theresa comes back on the show (her pervious episode is 277) because the last time she was here, we didn't have enough time to cover the second part of her subtitle, "...charge more, and have customers love you for it."
So in this episode we focus on that. After all, price is a refection of value, and we need to set our prices based on how valuable we are to our customers. Theresa shows us how to do it.
More about Theresa:
Her website: Apollomethod.com
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresa-lina/
Her book: https://www.amazon.com/Be-Go-Competitive-Market-Customers-ebook/dp/B088RKV1WF/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=be+the+go+to&qid=1631277389&sr=8-1
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I put two and two together this week to hopefully come up with five. This is an episode about the fourth habit of highly effective people: seek first to understand, then be understood. This idea is based on my podcast appearance with Kristen Hayer on Transforming Experiences in Customer Success and from a recent The Heretic Newsletter edition on listening. Or lack thereof.
Something for me to think about this weekend.
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Anita Toth is a churn crusher. In fact, she has taken her 20 years of academic research experience and created The Churn Crusher System for B2B SaaS companies to discover the real reasons behind why their customers churn.
We talked about her ultimate guide to customer exist interviews, having purpose with every customer interview, and how her background is academic research helps her dig deeper and discover what's underneath the reasons customers actually tell you they leave.
More about Anita:
Her blog we talked about: https://anitatoth.ca/ultimate-customer-exit-interviews/
The ChurnZero Webinar on Anita's topic. See video below:
Her website: https://anitatoth.ca/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitamtoth/
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Kristi Faltorusso is the VP of Customer Success at ClientSuccess and she is BACK on the pod to finish what she started on her last appearance (episode 283) when we started to talk about her seven reasons software companies need customer success software. In this episode, we spend the entire episode walking through each one.
And remember the deal, if I came up with an eighth reasons, Kristi would give me a free ticket to the next CS100 Summit.
Listen for the big reveal.
More about Kristi:
Customer Success Leadership Bootcamp Series: https://www.clientsuccess.com/resources/webinars/customer-success-bootcamp-webinar-series/
Her Partnership Kick-Off Meeting Blog: https://www.clientsuccess.com/blog/so-long-onboarding-kickoff-its-all-about-the-partnership-from-now-on/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiserrano/
CS Real Simple: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cs-real-simple/
ClientSuccess CS100 Summit: http://cs100.clientsuccess.com/
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Mike Arnold is the author of Slacking Off: A Successful Way to Work from Home. Mike has worked from home for 15 years. In fact, he calls himself a work-from-home entrepreneur. His career has put him in consulting roles with some nice brands like Cox Automotive, Verizon Super Pages and several major finance companies.
The counterintuitive book title acknowledges that we all slack off from time to time and it's OK. As long as you get back on track.
We talked to Mike about how in his book he aims to help readers who work from home become aware of favorite ways to slack off (he has an exercise to help you do this), how to use scheduling to make better use of one's time, and how to wield the power of saying "No."
More about Mike:
His book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RXFYMDZ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
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Ruben Rabago is the chief customer officer at Intelllum, and co-author of The Customer Success Professional's Handbook: How to Thrive in One of the World's Fastest Growing Careers - While Driving Growth for Your Company. I've known Ruben since his Gainsight days, and the moment his book came out I've wanted to get him on the show.
We spent most of our time talking about the intersection between three chapters of the book: chapter 2 on the role of the customer success manager, chapter 11 on how CSMs should help customers achieve their business goals, and chapter 12 on driving revenue growth.
Every CSM and aspiring CSM should read this book.
His book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B083XKZN8C/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubenrabago/
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Jeff Meyerson is the host of Software Engineering Daily and author of the book, Move Fast: How Facebook Builds Software. I am not a software engineer, and I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it because it is a book about management and strategy more than it is about building software.
Any business and any team can learn lessons from how Facebook organizes the entire organization around speed. Everything. Culture. Tools. Processes. And even how people join teams. After you read this book, you will think differently about how you might organize your team or company.
More about Jeff:
His book: Move Face: How Facebook Builds Software - https://www.amazon.com/Move-Fast-Facebook-Builds-Software-ebook/dp/B093HMJ4KB/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=move+fast&qid=1628641198&sr=8-1
His podcast: Software Engineering Daily - https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/
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As Theresa Marcroft shares in her book, 90 percent of companies that fail in the first five years did not concentrate foremost on the customer. A customer-centric mindset, therefore, is the antidote to failing as a business and a customer-centric mindset is the beginning of the path to revenue.
How does Theresa know?
The stats.
According to research from CB Insights, the number one reason startups fail is "no market need" (42%), and the number two reason startups fail is "ran out of cash" (29%). This is why, as Theresa describes in her book, The Path to Revenue: Secrets of Successful Tech Leaders, the secret to viability, sustainability, and growth is to embrace a customer-centric mindset and get on the path to revenue.
We talked about what that path to revenue looks like. Hint: the path to revenue is how you chart a course through the technology adoption lifecycle, advancing from one market segment to the next larger market segment, and adapting your messaging and your marketing strategy along the way.
The way Theresa puts it, I feel like I can design a marketing path through the adoption lifecycle and know what to do every step of the way.
More about Theresa:
Her book: https://www.amazon.com/Path-Revenue-Secrets-Successful-Leaders-ebook/dp/B08J8CD9P2/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=path+to+revenue&qid=1628278949&sr=8-2
Her company: https://www.market-savvy.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresamarcroft-cmo/
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Chris Aubuchon is the director of customer success at Cycle.io, which helps companies deploy modern cloud container orchestration. We each had a homework assignment for this podcast; to read the book, Product-led onboarding: How to turn new users into lifelong customers by Ramli John and Wes Bush.
Guest what we talked about?
More about Chris:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-aubuchon-a682707/
Cycle.io: https://cycle.io/about-us/
Cycle's Slack Group: http://Slack.cycle.io
The book we read, Product-Led Onboarding
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Howard Tiersky is the CEO and founder of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, that helps companies grow revenue across digital channels by supporting the customer journey and resonating with today's hyperconnected audience. He has a new book out called Winning Digital Customers: The antidote to irrelevance.
We talked about the three main themes in his book, which are understanding the customer, mapping the customer journey and design thinking, leadership and alignment.
One key takeaway for me is his notion that many customer journeys are emotional journeys. Howard talked about customer research he conducts with his clients, part of which includes interviewing customers about their experiences working with his clients.
He asks customers some form of this question, "What were you thinking during this experience/transaction/etc?" One of the most common responses from customers is, "I was thinking they (the company) don't care."
Wow.
Think about that.
It makes one wonder, "Do our customers think that about us?"
More about Howard:
His book: winningdigitalcustomers.com
His podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/winning-digital-customers/id1535975495
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiersky/
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Kristi Faltorusso is the VP of Customer Success at ClientSuccess where she is helping to shape the direction of customer success. Kristi is also a founding member of Gain, Grow, and Retain, advisor to numerous organizations and software companies, plus a top 25 customer success influencer. Prior to all of this, Kristi built and ran customer success organizations at the director and VP levels at software companies like BetterCloud, Sisense, and BrightEdge. She is also starting her own firm, CS Real Simple.
Kristi recently published a blog post and some playbooks around the idea of up-leveling your customer relationships with something she calls a "Partnership Kick-Off Meeting." We talked about her partnership kick-off philosophy, the 3 steps to a creating a partner kick off, and the 5 elements of running a successful partnership kick-off meeting.
More about Kristi:
Her Partnership Kick-Off Meeting Blog: https://www.clientsuccess.com/blog/so-long-onboarding-kickoff-its-all-about-the-partnership-from-now-on/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiserrano/
CS Real Simple: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cs-real-simple/
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This excellent Linkedin post from Ziv Peled, chief customer officer from AppsFlyer, shows a predictive relationship between NRR and future ARR. Specifically, the stat is 130% NRR predicts a 5X increase in ARR in 5 years when you add a 15% YoY growth in new bookings. The numbers Ziv also shared shows that NRR of 90% or even 100% related to single digital growth in ARR in 5 years.
I found this stat astounding.
Ziv posed a call to action that, as this stat reveals, increasing NRR should be a priority, and that the best way to increase NRR is to get all departments in our companies together on increasing NRR.
I don’t think bringing “all the departments together, and agree on the same goal - LONG TERM VALUE for your customers” is enough.
I believe companies should design a business model that prioritizes NRR growth so that “bringing all the departments together” as a unifying exercise is unnecessary. Because the business model itself prioritizes NRR.
Increasing NRR is function of business model innovation, not an alignment exercise.
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Frank Zinghini is the CEO of Applied Visions, a custom application development company that helps his customers build software applications. How do you persuade potential customers to buy software that hasn't yet been built and will not (or may not) deliver results for weeks or months or even years into the future? And how do you do this, when each project is custom, and you have not way to say, "Here's what we did for this other customer," because the entire project is different?
By earning trust.
Easier said than done no doubt.
This is the challenge Frank Zinghini faces with each customer. It was a fascinating conversation about trust, relationships, partnerships, just plain being genuine about helping customers...even if that means talking customers out of buying from you.
More about Frank:
His company, Applied Visions: AVI.com
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankzinghini/
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Mark Harari is the best-selling author of Lobster on a Cheese Plate: How to Stand Out, Attract the Best Clients, and Win Every Sale That Comes Your Way. In his 20+ years in marketing, he’s won numerous awards for web design, video, copywriting, print advertising, and more.
So, what’s his specialty? Simple: generating leads.
We talked about his metaphor of a lobster on a cheese plate and his approach for helping the market see us as the obvious choice in our field. Our ideal customers should find us and say to themselves, "they are the obvious choice for me."
Do your customers say that about you?
More about Mark:
The Book: https://bethelobster.com
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markharari
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Shreesha Ramdas is SVP & GM at Medallia, which acquired the company he co-founded, Strikedeck, a leader in Customer Success Automation. Shreesha is a multi-time company co-founder including LeadFormix (acquired by CallidusCloud) and OutJoin.
We talked with Shreesha about what it means for a customer success organization to be outside in versus inside out in strategy and orientation, how easy it is to fall into the trap of being too one sided, and why you must balance these two and create a hybrid approach.
On July 29, 2021, Shreesha and I are running a Customer Success Leadership Network event on this topic, which you can register for on the CSLN website. If you like this conversation, go register for our event.
More about Shreesha:
Medallia Strikedeck Website: https://strikedeck.com/
Shreesha on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreesharamdas/
Strikedeck Radio: https://strikedeck.com/strikedeck-radio-customer-success-live/
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Nick Amabile is the Owner and CEO of DAS42, a US consulting firm comprised of data analysts, scientists, business professionals, and engineers who provide end-to-end data services—including data strategy, tech stack integrations, application implementation, and enterprise analytics training. Nick’s FullStack Philosophy is centered around the two components critical to achieving data-driven success: building an effective data analytics environment and building a data-centric company culture.
We talked about helping customers become more data driven, the two components critical to achieving data-driven success, and the four maturity stages of a data driven organization.
More about Nick:
His company DAS42: https://das42.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/namabile/
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Theresa Lina is the author of the bestseller, Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More, and Have Customers Love You for It. She is also a long-time Silicon Valley business strategist and practitioner who specializes in helping companies become differentiated, innovative, and more profitable market leaders. As founder and president of Lina Group, Inc., she has more than 25 years of strategy, technology, innovation, and marketing expertise.
Her origin story begins early in her career at Accenture when she moved into a marketing role and helped build a new line of business from zero to $800 million in less than a decade. That experience was the seed that became her Apollo Method, which she describes in her book.
If you want to be the "Go-to" in your marketing, listen to this episode and buy her book.
More about Theresa:
Her website: Apollomethod.com
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Anthony Blatner is a tech founder, ex-IBMer, and the founder of Speedwork Social, a top LinkedIn advertising agency. After watching a lot of companies with great products or services fail because of ineffective marketing, Anthony started Speedwork Social to help those businesses unlock their B2B marketing potential and achieve explosive growth.
He says everything we want to hear on Helping Sells Radio. We talked about:
how marketing should lead with value not a conversion to a sale, though you do need a solid call-to-action
what he thinks is the best form of educational content that works on Linkedin
the minimum customer lifetime value you need to be successful on Linkedin.
More about Anthony:
His company, Speedwork Social: https://speedworksocial.com/
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonyblatner/
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David Duncan is a managing director at Innosight, where he works with leaders to create customer-centric teams, strategies, and organizations. David is a featured speaker and author on customer-centricity, innovation, and growth. He is the coauthor of two previous books, including the Wall Street Journal bestseller “Competing against luck: The story of innovation and customer choice, written with the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. A leading authority on the theory and application of jobs to be done, David has extensive experience conducting market investigations around the world.
He just published a new book called, "The Secret lives of customers: A detective story about solving the mystery of customer behavior." As David says, imagine if everyone in your organization had the skill of being a market detective and empowered to have insightful and mutually rewarding conversations with the customers they serve. How great could your company be?
More about David:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidscduncan/
The book website: https://marketdetective.com/
His company Innosight: https://www.innosight.com/
Follow Bill:
On Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/billcushard
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/billcush
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David Dulany is the founder and CEO of Tenbound, a research and advisory firm focused and dedicated 100% to sales development performance improvement. He is also author of "The sales development framework: How to build and scale highly productive sales development program." We talked about his book, naturally, but we talked a lot less about the art and science of selling than you might think. His sales development framework spends a lot of time on culture and leadership and being proactive, and building a plan. It's an exercise in speeding up by slowing down. His framework will help you see precisely how to set up a successful sales development team in your company.
More about David:
On Linkedin
David’s company, Tenbound:
The Book
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In this episode, Bill Cushard talks about the difference between defensive customer success and offensive customer success; and how to move from one to the other. Most software companies probably engage in defensive customers success, which is designed to retain customers. High-performing software companies engage in offensive customer success and grow customers. The question Bill addresses is how to move from being defensive to being offensive.
Two ways:
Step 1: Start measuring net revenue retention (NRR).
Step 2: Redesign the company business model so that value propositions on the business model canvas align to the revenue streams, so that all a customer success has to do is help customers achieve the value propositions, such that it naturally flows to purchasing additional products and services.
Enjoy the episode.
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Three-time Helping Sells Radio guest Donna Weber is back with her new book, Onboarding matters: How successful companies transform new customers into loyal customers. You know that expression, "an ounce of prevention is worth if pound of cure?" Well, that's what onboarding is; a proactive prevention prescription for customer success. Whatever your downstream customer problem, chances are you can follow the flow upstream to a solution of improved onboarding. Donna calls it orchestrated onboarding.
More about Donna:
Her book: Onboarding Matters: https://www.amazon.com/Onboarding-Matters-Successful-Companies-Transform-ebook/dp/B091BH8SZ1
Her website: http://www.donnaweber.com
On Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/donnaweber
Donna was on episode 109 and episode 38.
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Wayne McCulloch is one of the world’s leading customer success experts and a Top 100 Customer Success Strategist. Wayne McCulloch works with Google Cloud’s entire SaaS portfolio as the Customer Success Leader. He’s a keynote speaker and the recipient of multiple industry awards with more than twenty-five years of experience in customer-focused roles.
His new book is out; “The seven pillars of customer success: A proven framework to drive impactful client outcomes for your company.” We talked about implementing customer success in a variety of business models, what customer success is really responsible for, and how someone can use his book to implement customer success in way that fits their business.
For more information about The Seven Pillars, including downloadable templates and training and certification materials, visit www.cspillars.com.
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Here's a lesson in customer education. Coinbase is hiring a director of content to "Make Coinbase the place to go to learn about crypto in a way that is easy to understand and approachable."
Two observations:
Coinbase aims to "create a market" of crypto investors, Wall Street analysts, journalists, policy makers and regulators in order to grow the entire pie......AND build trust. Creating a market is the ultimate goal of customer education......which is outlined in the Customer Education Growth Framework. More here: https://lnkd.in/gX8hz8b
Coinbase is aiming to be the "Go-To" in the #cryptocurrency space. Something Theresa Lina describes in her book "Be the Go-To." I get to meet Theresa on Helping Sells Radio and discuss her book. Though we've had to reschedule because of me.
Assignment: Fill in the rest of this sentence that Coinbase put in their job description for this role: "Make ___(your software company name)______________ the place to go to learn about __________(your market category)____________" in a way that is easy to understand and approachable."
By the way......here is a link to that job description: https://lnkd.in/giGxcf7
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Mickie Kennedy is the Founder and President of eReleases, the small business leader for press release distribution, now celebrating 22 years in business. He is an expert at helping small businesses increase their visibility and credibility and he’s here today to share some valuable insights.
We talked about how to increase credibility using press releases, how PR helps you close more sales, and how to hone your unique selling proposition to make you irresistible to the media.
More about Mickie:
His company: eReleases
On Linkedin
Free master class: How to build a PR campaign designed to get massive media coverage
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This is Rav Dhaliwal's second appearance on Helping Sells Radio. See Episode 208. Rav is an investor and venture partner at Crane Venture Partners. He previously led customer success organizations at Slack, Zendesk, and Yammer, and before that support at Salesforce and IBM.
We talked about his latest article, "The missing piece of software sales" in which he makes the case that the way we create and service software products has changed, but the way we sell it has stayed the same. And it's holding us back. The missing piece of software sales is a business model innovation that Rav says more software companies need to embrace.
More about Rav:
His article: The missing piece of software sales
On Linkedin
Crane Venture Partners
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Jonathan L.S. Byrnes is a senior lecturer at MIT and acknowledged authority on profitability management. His extensive experience spans virtually every industry, including healthcare, transportation, software, retail, financial services, distribution, and others. He is chairman of Profit Isle, a SaaS solution that enables ongoing profit growth.
Jonathan is here to talk about his new book, Choose your customer: How to compete against the digital giants and thrive. We talked about a new way to segment customers and that is based on profit. He describes in his book three profit segments into which we should place our customers: profit peaks, profit drains, and profit deserts. Jonathan argues that the way to compete against the digital giants, and win, is to segment customers into these three profit segments and organize your entire management system around these three segments. Each segment requires a different approach, a different strategy, and a different team. Yes, a different team.
More about Jonathan:
Get the book.
His software company, Profit Isle
More about Jonathan at MIT
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Ian Bower is the founder of Graphic Rhythm, an innovative graphic design firm that helps small businesses build customer confidence and loyalty through strong visual content. We talked about the importance of bolting a design agency to your business, how to create images that convert, and most importantly for me, how to communicate effectively with a designer or design agency.
Ian and the team at Graphic Rhythm is offering Helping Sells Radio listeners $100 off their first month on any Daily Design Subscription. Just click here to learn more.
More about Ian:
Ian on Linkedin
His company Graphic Rhythm
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Anika Zubair is the VP of customer success at InSided, a customer success community platform aimed at customer success teams and community professionals looking to increase engagement, advocacy, and effectively gather product feedback. Anika is also co-Founder and community leader at the London Customer Success Meetup.
I'm not done.
She is host of two podcasts, InSide Scoop on Customer Success and The Customer Success Channel.
More about Anika:
Anika on Linkedin
The London Customer Success Meetup
The InSide Scoop on Customer Success podcast
The Customer Success Channel podcast
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Ross Fulton is the founder and CEO of Valuize, which builds customer success strategies and operations that help companies grow their customers and revenue at scale. We talked about product adoption as a means for helping customers achieve the value they sought when they bought our software. In other words, product adoption is not the goal. Product adoption is a means to the end of helping customers do that job they hired our product to do and realize the value they intended. The point here is linking product use with outcomes.
More about Ross:
His company, Valuize.
The first article we talked about: 5 keys to sustainably reduce customer churn.
The second article we talked about: How to create an ideal customer profile to increase retention.
Interview on ideal customer profiles with the Congruity Group.
Ross on Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Bruce Bower is the founder & CEO of Swytchback, an insights platform authoring lightning-fast, engaging & gesture driven surveys grounded in proven research principles.
We talked about how he pivoted his company from a wishlist product designed to connect people and sell products to an insights survey tool design to collect preference data. They took a design first approach to their survey product with a goal to get people to “love taking our surveys.” With completion rates in the 80s and 90s percent, I think it’s working.
More about Bruce:
On Linkedin
Swytchback
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Bob Moesta is the founder, president and CEO of the Re-Wired Group, which specializes in demand-side innovation, changing buyer behavior and helping customers make progress. Bob is also an author and has written this book: Demand-side sales 101: Stop selling and help your customers make progress.
I first learned about Bob from a talk he gave at the Business of Software Conference. I was blown away by the nature of how he turns the perspective of sales from supply side (product first orientation) to a demand side (customer first orientation).
We talked about his book, how sales should solve for the customer struggle, how to see things through the customers’ eyes, and how to change from thinking of sales as a funnel to thinking of sales as a timeline.
More about Bob:
On Linkedin
His company: The Re-Wired Group
His Business of Software session
His book
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Emilia D’Anzica is the managing partner & CEO at Growth Molecules, which helps companies grow with strategic programs, scalable systems, and enabling teams to lead customers down the path of proven value. Emilia is also a co-board member with me on the Customer Success Leadership Network (CSLN). This is Emilia’s fourth appearance on Helping Sells Radio (episodes 15, 48, 79)
We talked about high touch versus low touch customers success, how she helps her clients think though these engagement implementation issues, and at the end Emilia had some great advice about sorting through issues and decisions by writing them down. Great advice.
More about Emilia:
Her company: Growth Molecules
That articles we talked about: 3 Building Blocks for a Successful Customer Experience
On Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Dana Alvarenga is the director of customer experience at SlapFive, a customer marketing platform that helps capture the voice of the customer and then spread it throughout our organizations.
We talked about customer marketing, which is a much broader and important discipline than most of us think. It involves advocacy, reference programs, and content creation. In just one story she told on the show, Dana has a customer that created 1,300 pieces of content in her customer marketing program in just a few months. This blew me away and inspired me to get going.
More about Dana:
On Linkedin
More about SlapFive
Her Linkedin post on customer marketing
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Chris Hickens is the co-founder and CEO ’nuffsaid, a workflow intelligence company working on some interesting things to help customer success managers and other teams sift through everything people are working on and decide what to focus on work on next. We talked about a blog post he wrote recently that really blew my mind called, “Is your low-touch model really just customer support plus?”
We talked about the various engagement models, high, low, and tech touch and when to use which.
I wish I read his blog 18 months ago.
More about Chris:
His company: ’nuffsaid
The blog post
On Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Guy Nirpaz of the founder and CEO of Totango, a leader in the customer success space. Guy has recently led Totango through a transformation from a sales-led to a product-led growth strategy and has seen tremendous growth of over 300%. He recently posted about it on Linkedin and that’s what we talked about.
More about Guy and Totango:
Totango.com
Guy on Linkedin
His Linkedin post
His blog post
His book: Farm don’t hunt: The definitive guide to customer success
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Security auditing says to your customers, “we are aware of the vital importance of cyber security, we are working on it, and we are continuously improving.”
Jenna Waters is a Cybersecurity Consultant at True Digital Security where she specializes in assisting clients with cybersecurity program development, cloud security, and threat intelligence. She collaborates with clients to create and execute strategies to assess, test, and improve cybersecurity strategies, controls, and compliance. She is also a dedicated consumer and data privacy advocate.
We talked about security and privacy and what tech companies need to be aware of, including incident management versus assessments, security as a pain avoidance exercise, and the two most important things to do in security, which is infested in the 80/20 rule applied to security.
More about Jenna:
On Linkedin
Her website True Digital Security
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mathew Sweezey is the director of market strategy at Salesforce and author of The context marketing revolution: How to motivate buyers in the age of infinite media. We talked about a changing world of marketing and how Mathew is proposing a new definition of marketing based on the shift from a limited media environment to one of infinite media. He calls this new world "the context marketing revolution" and to quote from the book: "Today helping people achieve their immediate goals is the only way to break through the noise and motivate consumers to act.”
That is very Helping Sells Radio. And now you know why we had Mathew on the show.
More about Mathew:
His book
On Twitter
On Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Marija Skobe-Pilley is customer success manager of EMEA at Intelex Technologies, founder and host of Women in Customer Success Podcast, Certified Customer Success Manager Level 4 (CCSM4) (the highest level), and a professional musician.
We talked about her shift from being a professional musician to a technical customer success manager how art influences her business and technology career and lessons from her podcast.
More about Marija:
On Linkedin
Women in Customer Success Podcast
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Founder of TextChat, a highly personalized live chat tool that brings the timelessness touch of human connection to the sophistication of AI technology. TextChat makes website live chat as sociable and easy as texting with a friend, so you can stop missing messages and start closing sales.
We talked about conversational design, conversational experience, conversational interfaces, chatbots, AI, live chat and how all of this actually helps customers.
More about Eric:
TextChat
On Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Brad Hamilton is the director of customer journey solutions at New Relic. He has held software leadership roles in technical training, partner enablement, product management, and customer success. He wrote a very good article called, A customer journey does not equal a user journey, which I think is funny because only product managers says user journey and only customer success managers call it customer journey.
We talked about why that is, what the differences are, and why they don’t mean the same thing.
More about Brad:
His article
On Linkedin
On Twitter
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Dave Lorenzo is the guy who can share all the inside business success secrets. Want to close a deal in 60 seconds? Dave’s the guy. Want to open the door to a Fortune 500 CEO, Dave’s the guy. Want to make more money and get home on time for dinner? Dave is definitely the guy. His book is The 60 Second Sale: The Ultimate System for Building Lifelong Client Relationships in the Blink of an Eye.
We talked about caring about our business colleagues, customers, and prospects, beyond the business that we do with them. And how to use what he calls the Relationship Score Card, which he describes as a forecasting tool to predict your financial future. Since I am obsessed with forecasting, we spent a lot of time on this.
Learn more about Dave on his website.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Holly founded Spark + Co. in 2007 after over 20 years in training + development roles. Since 2007 Holly has been the project lead on over 70 training projects, most with online or elearning components. She’s done this for corporate, public sector, and non profit clients in both Canada and the U.S.
Holly was recently acknowledged as an Articulate Super Hero by E-Learning Heroes, the world’s most empowering site for industry pros. Among the nearly 600,000 members of E-Learning Heroes less than 5% are awarded the ‘Super Hero’ designation that recognizes top contributors and their powerful influence on the elearning community.
We talked about how designing training courses for customers is different that doing it for employees, and how we should use value proposition design and game thinking to build customer profiles and job stories so we can build training courses for customers they will actually want to take.
More about Holly:
Her website
On Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Dave Duke is the chief customer officer and co-founder at MetaCX, Host of the Revenue Revolutionaries podcast and two-time Helping Sells Radio guest (Ep 95). Mathew Sweezey is the director of market strategy at Salesforce and author of the Harvard Business Review Press book, The Context Marketing Revolution.
We talked to Dave and Mathew about a new ebook they collaborated on called, The new north star: experience is the method, outcomes are the goal. In it, the research suggests a new model and strategy for moving an organization from an experience-focused orientation to an outcomes-focused view point.
More about Dave and Mathew:
Dave Duke on Linkedin
Mathew Sweezey on Linkedin
Link to the ebook
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Colin Bryar owned the P&L for Amazon Associates (affliiant links) and the Amazon Product API (the first commercial amazon SDK that allowed developers to build applications on Amazon. He left as VP and the COO for IMDB.com, subsidiary of Amazon.com
He is now an advisor, co founder of Working Backwards with Bill Carr and Co-Author of the book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon.
Learn more about Colin at Working Backwards.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Bill Carr is a former 15 year Amazon veteran who was the founder and world wide leader of Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Music. He is now an advisor and speaker and author of the new book, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, which is out now.
We talked about what it was really like to build and work the Amazon way. We also went pretty deep into all those well-know Amazon work processes that made Amazon so successful, and what the rest of us can learn and apply in our companies.
Learn more about Bill at Working Backwards.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Wes Schaeffer is sales trainer and marketing consultant, who also helps his customers implement software. He is a HubSpot Gold Partner and Infusionsoft partner of the year. Wes has also produced The Sales Podcast since 2013 and his latest book is called the Sales Whisperer Way.
We talked to Wes about:
Make it easy for customers to buy
How to succeed without selling:
B2B selling is still person to person
More about Wes:
His Website
The Sales Podcast
His book: The Sales Whisperer Way
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about making the case for customer success.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about the second greatest book of all time. Never lose a customer again.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about the inner game of customer success.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about how to be the most valuable employee you can be.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about seeking first to understand. Especially with customers.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about influencer marketing in enterprise software.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about account-based marketing as a customer strategy.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about helping your customers buy.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about letting customers go.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about this adage: Using the system you chose is better than choosing the right system.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In this podstorm, we talk about changing the way we sell by selling with the customer. Building a success plan with the customer during the sales process before anyone commits to anything…..and only then move on to the sale.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
Question: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change.
Imagine you are the light bulb.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we are going to talk about the value of being customer facing. This is more about you and your career and less about creating customer value. Though creating customer value is required if you want to create a disproportionately successful career.
They go together.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we will continue our discussion about why you shouldn’t spend one minute worrying about your competition. But instead focus on your customers. The best thing you can do is understand three customer focused concepts: value proposition design, Steve Blank’s customer development manifesto, and conscious capitalism is about creating value for customers.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we will continue our discussion about why you shouldn’t spend one minute worrying about your competition. But instead focus on your customers.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about why you shouldn’t spend one minute worrying about your competition.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about selling outcomes. But not in the way you think. Think if it this way, "Knowing why your company exists keeps your company in existence.” Jeffrey J. Fox.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about forecasting.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about knowing your numbers.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about vitamins and painkillers and hoping your customer will learn your software watching short videos while waiting at the dentist office. Is that how we should be enabling customers? I don’t think so.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about doing things that don’t scale. We are obsessed with building things that will scale, and that attitude is holding us back.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about empathy and how far we should go to help customers achieve their goals.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about how you treat employees is how you treat customers. If you want to build a customer-centric company, you probably need to build an employee-centric company first.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm. You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about why customer journey mapping fails and how to fix it.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm.
You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about the pitfalls of customer journey mapping, playing the infinite game with customers, and the go live is not the goal.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm.
You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about something we learned from Mike Weinberg, owning your sales process and that the procurement department is not your customer.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm.
You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about a simple way to help customers with data.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm.
You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about this nonsense that one cannot be a trusted advisor when in a sales role.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm.
You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about trend curation and the need to challenge customers by understanding trends in their industries.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
We are taking Christopher Lochhead’s advice and trying the world’s first customer success podstorm.
You’ve heard of a tweet storm. Well…this is a podstorm. 30 days of strategies and ideas to help you grow your customers so you can grow your companies. And maybe even grow your career.
In today’s podstorm, we talk about outcome selling. It sounds great, and we should be doing it, but it’s not so easy, as it turns out.
Don’t forget to visit helpingsells.substack.com and subscribe with your email so you never miss an episode.
A few shout-outs to friends of the podcast.
To our good friends at the Customer Success Leadership Network. If you believe customer success is a team sport and that it should be part of every one’s job, then you should join your new friends at customersuccessnetwork.com.
To my good friends at Business of Software, who have built an incredible and welcoming community of SaaS leaders to help you build a better software company with carefully curated online conferences and masterclasses. The content is just excellent. Go check ‘em out at businessofsoftware.org.
To my good friends at Strategyzer who have helped me innovate my business model, design value propositions that actually help customers, and set me on the path to build an invincible company. Check out Strategyzer.com and learn how they can help you do the same.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Tendayi Viki is a corporate innovation expert who helps companies innovate for the future while managing their core business. He is an associate partner at Strategyzer. And he is author of a new book called Pirates in the Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation. There are so many takeaways for this conversation. Here are just a few.
You must decide: Do I want to be a pirate in the navy? Self-awareness is key
Escape innovation theater
The product of innovation is the process not the product
It’s not innovation unless it creates a new business model and repeatable value creation
The question is not, can you do it? The question is, can you do it again (and faster and/or better)?
Just so you know…I have decided. I am an intrepreneur, and I have decided to be a pirate in the navy.
More about Tendayi:
The book: Pirates in the Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation
Tendayi’s website
Strategizer
His Forbes article: Can you do it again?
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a product management consultancy, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap.” She believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders. We talked about:
Misunderstanding value
Why product management is mostly about leadership
The difference between change agents and product managers. Which are you?
Her strategic deployment framework how I’m trying to escape the build trap
And most importantly, what to do instead of trying to come in, insult everyone, and change the product culture of a company over night. Yeah…exactly what I’m thinking.
More about Melissa:
The book: Escaping the Build Trap
Melissa’s website
On Twitter: @lissijean
Product Institute
CPO Accelerator
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Shawn Livermore is startup founder, entrepreneur, and tech consultant. With 21 years of consulting for over 34 clients, his body of work includes large-scale enterprise-level custom software implementations and high-volume web-based, cloud-based architectures & implementations.
I talked to Shawn about his new book, Average joe: Be the silicon valley tech genius and his Slow create framework, which anyone can use to become a genius in their field.
More about Shawn:
The Book: Average Joe
The Slow Create Framework
On Twitter: @shawnypants
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Kristen Hayer is the founder and CEO of The Success League and a board member of the Customer Success Leadership Network. Kristen and I argued about customer success budgets, plans, forecasts. And since it’s planning season, we thought we’d help you put your forecasts together and go get them approved.
More about Kristen:
Her website: The Success League
On Linkedin
One of Kristen’s podcasts: Strike Deck Radio
Kristen’s other podcast: Reading for Success
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Mark Donnigan designs and executes marketing playbooks that produce real business results for early and growth stage technology startup companies. We talked about go-to-market engineering (what’s that?), anchoring customers to you as a category king, Christopher Lochhead (my favorite marketing podcast), how to spend that money you just raised, and we almost got to the “self-organizing buyer," but ran out of time.
More about Mark:
His website: Growthstage.marketing
On Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Irene Lefton returns to talk about her latest article, Five Steps a VP of Customer Success Needs to Get Started. As a customer success influencer and advisor, Irene is asked regularly to help startups design action plans for a new head of customer success. After building numerous plans, Irene noticed patterns. So, she built a framework.
The first and biggest and hardest step in her framework is called, “Listen and Learn.”
It’s the first step because you’d be a fool to start making customer success decisions before you understand the lay of the land.
It’s the biggest step because it requires a lot of time and energy to meet with all the right people (fellow employees and customers).
It's the hardest step because a motivated, type A, hard-charging, action-oriented customer success leader wants to make things happen right NOW, not sit around listening to people for 90 days.
But, as Irene suggests, by slowing down in the short term, you can speed up in the long term and save yourself a ton of time. Not to mention avoid mistakes.
When starting anything new, don’t leap into action. Leap into listening and learning.
More about Irene:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irenelefton/
Five Steps a VP of CS Needs to Get Started: https://customersuccessnetwork.com/five-steps-a-vp-of-cs-needs-to-get-started/
Customer Success Leadership Network: http://customersuccessnetwork.com/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
The last time I talked to Nils Vinje, it was on Episode 197, and we talked about his new great leadership book,“The 30 Day Leadership Playbook: Your Guide to Becoming the Leader You Have Always Wanted to Be.” In it, Nils talks about four pillars of leadership. The third pillar is leading with communications, and this one got to me.
In particular, the part of leading with communications called “the power of frameworks.” I spend a lot of time asking Nils about framework-thinking on the last episode. So much so that Nils suggested we do another episode in which he would help me with one of my frameworks.
So that’s what we did.
A live coaching session.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been working on a framework to describe how we would grow one of our business units at ServiceRocket. I wasn’t calling it a framework, but I was using it as a mechanism for communicating our strategy, progress towards our goals, and to give the exec team a one slide description of how we would achieve our goals.
I kept coming back to it. Using the language in it. Referencing it. Showing it on every slide presentation I gave for months.
I showed it to Nils and he critiqued it. Asked me uncomfortable questions. And helped me think through how to use to more effectively too communicate.
That’s what this episode is: Nils helping me improve my leadership communication skills with framework-thinking.
When you listen to our conversation, you will think to yourself, “I need to do this. I have been struggling with how I can improve my communication skills, especially with my leadership team. This is it. I gotta learn this framework thinking. I gotta buy Nils’ book.”
I am sold on this framework thinking idea. And I think you will be too.
More a about Nils
Nils Vinje is the founder and CEO of 30DayLeadership.com.
Link to the 30 Day Leadership Quiz that Nils talked about: https://30dayleadership.com/quiz
To order a copy of Nils’ book, please visit: 30dayleadership.com.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
You are not getting the most out of your people team to deliver the best service you can to your customers. And Colleen Blake, VP of People at Dremio, is here to help.
Most leaders of customer teams are putting together hiring requests because their teams are overwhelmed. “My team is going to burn out if we don’t hire more people. Then we’ll lose them. And our customers.”
That’s how most of us hire.
That’s the wrong way to hire.
First of all, it is reactive. We should want to be proactive. I mean, the first of the seven habits of highly effective people is “Be proactive” for Pete’s sake. It’s the first one.
Second, hiring people because our current team is busy exposes that we have a complete lack of understanding for how our business works. How can we run a business, if we don’t know how it works?
We can’t.
So, Colleen Blake is here to help.
She offers two ideas for how to partner with our respective people teams to become more proactive, understand our businesses better, and deliver better service to our customers.
Idea #1: If your team is overwhelmed, it might not be a staffing problem
Colleen suggests you might want to question whether your team is working on the right things. You, as a leader, might need to simply give your team permission to prioritize some work and say ’no’ to other work.
Yes, manager.
That’s on you.
Your sales team might be busy bringing in customers, but are they bringing in the right customers? Your customer success team might be working hard helping customers use your product, but are they helping customers use the right parts of the product?
Really examine company priorities and ruthlessly make sure your team is working only on things that progress toward company priorities.
Idea #2: Develop a staffing model
The worst thing we can do is hire people because we are busy. If we don’t have a model for determining why we need to hire, when we need to hire, and who we need to hire, then we wake up one morning with too much headcount, wonder what happened, and have to lay people off.
Colleen suggests starting with the customer and work backwards until you know how many people you have in your talent pipeline.
That looks something like this:
Understand what it takes to get a customer up and running.
Look at your team’s capacity. How many customers can one person deal with successfully?
Look at current sales pipeline to see how many new customers might sign up and when and how people people you will need on your team and when.
Look at how long it takes to get a new employee up and running.
Look at your talent pipeline to know how many possible people you could hire and when.
Take answers from each of the above, do a little math, and “voila” you have a staffing model. One that will impress your executive team, and one that will help you partner with your people team better to get you the team you need to help your customers.
Start with the customer and work backwards from there.
More about Colleen:
On Linkedin
Her podcast (with Eric Quick): Bathtime 2 Boardroom
Dremio
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Rav Dhaliwal is an investor and venture partner at Crane Venture Partners, and he wrote an article recently called, There’s no such thing as post sales. You might be thinking, as I was thinking, “Wait a minute, of course there’s post sales. We have pre-sales (marketing and sales), which is everything that happens before the sales is made. And then there is post sales (customer success, professional services, support), which is everything that happens after the sale.”
Every software company has this.
We need both to be successful, don’t we?
We do. Dhaliwal says so in his article...
To truly have any chance of becoming a company that can grow to millions in (sustainable) recurring revenue, you not only need a great product that you can market and sell effectively, you really have to figure out (and invest early in) how you are going to keep and grow those customers forever.
Go to market is half the battle. Customer success is the other half.
See.
We need both.
But here’s where Dhaliwal’s article, and our conversation, gets interesting.
Customer lifetime value (LTV) is a critical number to know for each customer. It guides how much we invest in sales and marketing to find new customers, and how much we invest to retain and grow existing customers. In some sense, LTV is the ultimate team measure of success because it is a barometer for all of the following:
Did we sell to the right customers?
Did the implementation satisfy both the buyer and the user?
Did the customer achieve first value in a reasonable time frame?
Is the customer achieving the milestones in the success plan?
Is the customer showing signs of using the produce more, using more of it, and using it more often?
Positive answers to all of these questions generally leads to a strong and growing relationship with customers.
LTV goes up.
Positive answers to the questions above only happen when pre-sales teams and post-sales teams work like one team.
A tight alignment between sales and customer success is really the main point Dhaliwal is making. Customer success should be attending sales calls and pipeline review meetings. Sales teams should be attending QBRs and renewal calls.
Just two example of how a software company might bring sales and customer success together around the customer.
After talking with Rav, I am down with saying “there's no such thing as post sales. Just the next sale.”
More about Dhaliwal:
Crane Venture Partners
His Medium post: There’s no such thing as post sales
On Linkedin
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to. Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to. Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to. Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to. Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
I know, I get it. We should give gifts to customers. It shows we are paying attention. It shows are thinking a little more about our customers than just, “when can we close this deal.” It’s just that I have received too many emails from sales people saying, “I’ll give you a pair of headphones or a fleece jacket or a gift card, if you meet with me and let me show you our "wiz-bang, automated, AI, big data, digital transformation, IoT, machine learning, data lake product" that will transform how you deliver value to your customers.
I have taken up sales people on this offer twice in my life. For two reasons; 1) the gifts were excellent and irresistible (see it works); and 2) I had some interest in the product type they were pitching. After a discovery call and a demo with each, I decided I was not going to buy the products.
The gifts arrived.
I felt a little guilt.
Is gifting worth it?
Buyers feel guilty and sellers feel cheated?
Then, I spoke to Chelsea Martin, co-owner of Noms Bake Shop about gifts, and she turned me around.
There are many ways to give gifts that don’t require a quid pro quo.
We talked about gift giving throughout the customer journey. I like that. All of us spend a lot of time mapping out customer journeys and milestones. We should start adding gift giving at the right steps in the customer journey.
I can get down with that.
Then, Chelsea dropped a bomb of a story about what I believe is the best, creative, COVID-19-world gift a B2B company can deliver. One of her customers ordered cookie boxes to be set to webinar attendees.
Let me say that again: A gift box. To webinar attendees.
The instructions in the card were to wait to open the box until during the webinar.
When they ran the webinar, the host asked everyone to open their boxes, and they all did it together. What a creative, fun thing to do in a webinar to pull people in and bring people together.
I am sold.
You gotta listen. Chelsea is a genius.
Learn more about Chelsea and Noms Bake Shop:
Her website
Chelsea on Linkedin
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Peter Levitan knows something about adding value to companies. He spend 16 years in advertising at one of the largest ad agencies in the world, bought and sold three advertising agencies, and founded two internet startups, one of which was sold to Microsoft.
Levitan describes company value in a few ways. Sure, a company has value so it can be sold. You might call that the company valuation or market capitalization.
There is another element of value.
There is value in attracting employees who like what your company stands for and who want to come work for you and help you achieve your mission.
There is value in attracting customers who like you and want to come be your customer.
People need a shared mission.
Peter talked about a cyber security company called Clean.io. Cyber security does not sound like something that exciting. But Clean.io has a mission: to clean up the internet. Clean up the malware and phishing and social engineering and protect grandma from thieves stealing bank account numbers.
That’s a mission people can join.
Employees want to join.
Customers want to sign up.
Investors want to invest.
People need a share mission.
What mission are you on?
Learn more about Peter:
His Website
On Linkedin
His Book
Podcast: Advertising Stories
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Paul Reeves is a founding member and a governing council member of the customer success leadership network (CSLN). He has also built and led numerous customer success functions at software companies like ShotSpotter, TokBox, Zendrive, and Badgeville. And oh-by-the-way, co-founded Betterworks. I guess you could say he knows customer success.
Inspired by the book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, Paul and I talked about how we might apply principles in this book with customers.
You might ask, “How can we get our customer success managers to apply the progress principle with customers?” After all, customers buy our software to do some job or solve some problem or achieve some outcomes. Sometimes solving that problem is far off in the future. It’s hard to visualize. It’s daunting.
If we could help our customers break that long term goal into small wins that lead to that long term outcome, we could keep them motivated and proactively help them march towards that long term end state.
One very practical thing Paul talked about was a custom object he built in Salesforce to log and report on theses “small wins.” Each time a customer success manager helped a customer achieve a small win, she would log it in Salesforce on that custom object.
Over time, he could track those wins and link them with customer success and other outcomes you might want to measure (renewals, expansions, etc).
The point was to figure out and help customers articulate what they would consider a win (or multiple wins), help them achieve each win over time, and then log those wins when they happen.
If you do this, not only do you help customers march towards their ultimate goal, but you really get to know your customers well, because this level of help requires building a relationship.
This is what Helping Sells Radio is all about: Applying the progress principle to customer success.
I love it.
Learn more about Paul:
Paul on Linkedin
The book we talked about: The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
Teresa Amabile’s TED Talk on the progress principle
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What is the value of a certification program? Faez Ahmed, senior director, training & certification at ServiceNow and member of the customer education management association Europe (CEdMA), has a create answer. He says, ultimately, the market will determine the value of your certification program.
The question is, “Can a software company create that market of ‘buyers’ who will derive value from the certification program?”
As Faez describes, the answer to this question has three parts:
First, from the customer education team’s perspective, it comes down to good certification design and building a quality certification that make people want to earn it.
Second, from the perspective of the company buying the software, it needs to continuously enable its workforce to develop new skills and capabilities…just to stay competitive.
Third, companies need to recruit and hire new people with the right skills and capabilities in all of the various software technologies it uses to run the business. Think about this, two job candidates with the same skills and experience. The candidate with certifications has an edge.
This begins a virtuous cycle.
Product certification programs create a market of people who can use your software, so companies can hire those people, so that companies can buy your software.
Sounds like a win-win.
More about Faez:
On Linkedin
The CEdMA Technical Training Manager certification program we talked about
Subscribe to Helping Sells Radio on your favorite podcast app. Just search “Helping Sells Radio” on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Stitcher or Overcast. It’s show up, and you can tap ’subscribe.'
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Many enterprise software companies face the question, “Should we create a certification program?” To answer this question properly, a company needs to understand it’s customers well. Kevin Streater, VP of ForgeRock University at ForgeRock, joins Helping Sells Radio to help us sort this out.
Kevin is also a member of the British Computer Society Chartered Institute for IT and a member of the Customer Education Management Association Europe (CEdMA) and prior to ForgeRock, spent numerous years running education services at SunMicrosystems. Kevin is eminently qualified to discuss the topic of building valuable software certification programs.
Back to the question, “Should we create a certification program?”
There are two main things to consider:
Will customers be proud to display the certification?
Is the certification resume worthy?
If you are not prepared to to have customers answer yes to those two questions, you might not want to create a certification program.
Certification programs require vision, planning, and a long term commitment. You are not just helping people learn and use your software. You are creating a mechanism for someone to advance their careers, which is a meaningful endeavor to say the least.
If your goal is to help people learn and use your software, there is little need for a certification program. High quality customer training will do the trick.
If your goal is to create a market of people who will buy your software wherever in their careers they go, then you likely should create a certification program.
Learn more about Kevin:
On Linkedin
ForgeRock University
CEdMA
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When we sign up a new customer, we make a bargain that looks something like this: Our customer will hold us accountable for delivering the product, the service, the results that they expect when they sign up. We can all agree to this. Most customers are not shy about telling us when and how we are falling short. The customer will hold us accountable.
This is a bargain, to be sure, but it is a one-way bargain.
According to Wayne Mullins, founder and CEO of Ugly Mug Marketing, there is (or should be) a two-way bargain that says that your customer expects you to hold them accountable for “using” the product or service and for “getting” the results they expect in the use of your product or service.
Mullins calls this mutual accountability.
"It’s our responsibility to learn how to hold our customers accountable so that they are getting the results for which they came to us in the first place,“ says Mullins.
How many of us really think this way?
It is a hard pill to swallow because holding our customers accountable means we will need to:
Confront our customers
Challenge our customers
Risk offending and losing our customers
Going outside our core product or service offerings in pursuit of helping our customers
That is scary.
Mullins admits, "For the longest time, I was very afraid of the truth.” Of asking direct questions. Of challenging customers. Mullins turned that around when he accepted that the vendor / customer relationship is a two-way bargain.
Mutual accountability.
A seller has a responsibility to help a buyer achieve the results they came to the seller for in the first place.
Mullins goes on to tell a real world example with one of his own customers. Here are the highlights…which demonstrates the point of challenging customers.
A four year customer
Not getting sales results
But Mullins’ agency was driving high quality leads to customer’s sales team
Mullins told the customer, “Your sales team is not following up on these leads."
Mullins was so confident in the quality of these leads, he offered to assign his own sales team to follow up
Then he asked for a commission on all sales that came from these leads
Mullins never offered this service before
Lessons:
Confront customers
Challenge customers
Risk offending and losing customers
Going outside core offerings in pursuit of helping customers achieve results
Mullins could have waited for the customer to come to him saying, “We pay you all this money for marketing, and our sales are going up. YOU must not be good. We are switching agencies.”
Or.
Mullins could sit around the office with his team and make excuses, “We’re sending all these great leads to our customer, but they are not doing anything with them. What are we supposed to do? Make our customers do their job?”
Or.
Mullins could go to the customer and say, “We are sending you excellent leads, and you are not converting these leads into customers. Let’s fix this together.”
That’s the bargain we make.
Mutual accountability.
Mullins has a saying at Ugly Mug Marketing, "Results and excuses are mutually exclusive.”
More about Mullins:
His marketing agency: Ugly Mug Marketing
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If there is one thing I know about leadership and working and career is that when you interact with the CEO, or anyone on the c-suite, you need to minimize your time and maximize your impact. More practically speaking, you need to be the one who says, “I gotta run.” And then walk away.
“Well that seems counter-intuitive,” you say. “How can I maximize my impact, when I spend the least amount of time possible with the CEO?”
Easy.
The shorter your interactions, the more interactions you will have.
“What?!”
That’s right.
Think of every interaction you have in the office. There is always one person who you see coming down the hall, and you want to avoid them. Mostly because you have someplace to be and this person will talk your ear off.
CEOs have even shorter attention-spans and much less tolerance for the details about how difficult your last customer escalation was.
You do not want the CEO to see YOU coming down the hall and think, “Oh no. Here comes Bill to tell me how hard it is to get the product team to prioritize feature requests from his customers. How am I going to get out of this?”
This is tough love people. Don’t be that person.
I asked Nils Vinje, author of the new book, 30 Day Leadership Playbook: Your Guide To Becoming The Leader You Have Always Wanted To Be, about how we can stay out of the details when we talk to execs.
Nils had an answer: Framework thinking.
Nils has been on Helping Sells Radio four times now (Ep 5, Ep 84, Ep 121 (at the Gain Pulse conference), and this one.
Our main problem when we speak to CEOs is that we spend time on details. CEOs don’t want details unless they specifically ask. They won’t ask. And it’s hard for us NOT to provide details because that’s our life.
We have to speak to the CEO, convey useful information, without giving details.
When the CEO asks, “How’s customer success going?”
You should say, “The renewal ownership in customer success is going well. We already have 3 new expansion opportunities.”
You want to say, “I am meeting with Sally (VP of sales) next Thursday. No, wait….on Friday. She had to reschedule our meeting from Monday. But we’re planning to talk about transitioning the renewal process from sales to customer success. I don’t know how this is going to work. I don’t think customer success should own the renewal. We should be advocates for customers not sales people. You can’t advocate for customers and sell to them. Customers won’t trust us. I’ve been doing customer success since before it was called customer success, and I’ve never seen it work. I mean…maybe it can, and I am open to it. So that’s what Sally and I are going to talk about.”
It goes on and on and then you make the CEO cut you off so she can move on with their life.
The CEO likes you.
The CEO thinks you are productive. And professional.
But the CEO wants you to figure all those details out. The CEO wants you to not base your opinion on what happened in the past, but see the possibility of what we can create going forward. It’s called innovation for a reason.
And most importantly, the CEO wants you to say in 20 words, what you want to say in 200.
According to Nils, you can do that with framework thinking….and it is part of his leadership pillar number 3: leading with communications.
This was the most important part of our discussion.
Framework thinking.
Framework thinking.
That is me…talking to myself.
More about Nils
Nils Vinje is the founder and CEO of 30DayLeadership.com. He is a 4-time Helping Sells Radio guest, Customer Success expert, leadership coach, consultant, speaker, and author. Nils inspires people everywhere to become the leader they have always wanted to be.
To order a copy of Nils' book: 30 Day Leadership Playbook: Your Guide To Becoming The Leader You Have Always Wanted To Be, please visit 30dayleadership.com.
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Helping customers achieve outcomes from the products they buy from us is what services teams do. “Now...sales teams have to get on board with that,” says Steve Frost, vice president and managing director of revenue research and advisory for TSIA. “With all the uncertainty we are experiencing now, it's kinda hard to introduce something new to a prospect or customer. You’ve gotta provide some help and some guidance and value to the equation.”
Steve explains that services team have been on this path for a while now, and it’s more important than ever that sales teams embrace this philosophy of providing help, guidance, and value.
Easier said than do, sure. But it’s not like we have a choice any more. The way 2020 is turning out, it’s more important than ever to double down on helping our customers.
There is no one more suited to help us figure this out that Steve Frost. Here are three things I learned from him to help us come out of this crisis stronger than before:
Refocus resources to market segments scrambling to deal with the crisis
We talked about this also with Keri Keeling (Ep. 194) that we need to look at customer segments that are struggling to deal with the current economic crisis and figure out how to help them. Steve is suggesting our services teams might be more naturally inclined to do this. But sales can do this too, and it’s about time they do. They can call prospects in the pipeline and change the tone of the discussions with an offer to help. They can call existing customers and ask how else they can help, even if it means not selling them anything new. It might just mean sharing learnings from other customers.
Engage services in the sales process
A first step in sales getting on board with this approach to helping, guiding, and adding value is to bring services team members into these conversations. A sales person could call a prospect (or customer) and say something like, “….in our meeting, I’d like to bring in one of our customer success managers, who specializes in your industry, to share with you what some of our other customers are doing right now….”
Simple as that.
What customer wouldn’t want to take you up on that offer?
You are not selling anything. You are offering to help, providing guidance, and adding value.
Enable your sales team with outcome selling skills
I might be taking this a bit too far, but now might be the time to start selling money, not products or services. “You pay us $50,000, and we’ll give you $500,000.” Maybe I’m not taking this too far.
When Steve talks about outcome selling skills, he is taking about helping customers realize value when they use your service. And the value has to be in hard numbers. “Our typical customers increases revenue by $500,000 (or reduced costs by $500,000 or saves $500,000 worth of time from automation) during the first year using our product. Our product costs $50,000 per year. We can help you achieve these numbers, too.”
I am simplifying this to be sure, but this is a much different conversation and explain why your product is so good.
That’s the conversation I want to have.
Don’t you?
More about Steve
About Steve
Blog number one we talked about: Now more than ever, helping will sell, but selling won’t help
Blog number 2 we talked about: Spring cleaning for sales: Using the pandemic slowdown to make yourself better
Blog number 3 we talked about: How sales and customer success can come out of the crisis stronger
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We think we are so smart. We finally figure out that niching down on a narrow customer segment is the best place to start and then grow. It works. But as we grow, it doesn’t occur to us that our customers start to niche us.
What does that mean?
Alex Goldfayn, CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute, and author of the new book, 5-Minute selling: The proven, simple system that can double your sales … Even when you don’t have time, explains that our customers put us in a bucket for that thing we sold to them. They get used to it. When they discover other problems and opportunities, they will seek solutions in other vendors because that is not what we do.
That is how our customers niche us.
They buy one thing from us and that’s what they think we do.
If we don’t check in on them and ask them two simple but important questions, we might not be able to break out of that niche.
Alex is not telling us we need an entirely new sales process…just a new system for proactively following up with customers, when nothing is wrong, to show that we care and that we want to help.
Helping sells, and all that.
Alex suggests a simple follow up system of a certain number of customers every day (5 minutes worth) and ask two questions:
What are you working on these days that I can help you with?
What are your other software vendors doing for you that we can help you with?
Just two questions.
As Alex explains, if you follow up with 5 customers per day, every day, for a year, you will have huge results in your sales pipeline. And all you are doing to call to find out how you can help.
More about Alex:
The book
His website
On Linkedin
That LinkedIn post with the sticky note on the phone
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The world has changed dramatically since mid-March. One thing that has not changed is that you have customers to help. How do you help customers in a COVID-19 world? Keri Keeling, Global head, customer success innovation & Intelligence at VMWare and member with me on the board of the Customer Success Leadership Network, joins Helping Sells Radio to help us figure this out.
Keri reminds us that some of our customers may need us now more than ever. Some customers might even be killing it because the demand for their products is going up. We should help these customers and offer them something of more value that can help them even further.
Other customers might not be doing so well. What can we do to help these customers? We might not be in a position to help, but if we can, we should think about how we can help customers with extended renewals, change billing cycles to make it easier to pay, provide extensions, downgrade plans to address only what customers actually need for now.
Let’s be creative here. Our customers will remember.
As we figure out how to help these customers in different ways, let’s agree to this. Don’t just call to check-in. That’s a Keri pet peeve, and she wants us to stop doing that. Call with a purpose. Our customers don’t have time for a check-in.
More about Keri:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerikeeling/
Recap of the Customer Success Leadership Network (CSLN) Helpline session: https://customersuccessnetwork.com/talking-to-customers-during-covid-19-starts-with-empathy-and-segmentation/
Full article on servicing customers in a COVID-19 world: https://customersuccessnetwork.com/servicing-customers-in-todays-climate/
The Sandler Training webinar on services customers in a COVID-19 world: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/5445494471016829967
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Imagine if your sales calls were more like planning sessions. Imagine if you could work on a buying plan and a project plan with your prospect.
Mutually.
Together.
What if you did this, and your prospect was so bought in, because they helped create the plan, that they did at least as much as you did to get the deal through?
This is all possible with the Mutual Action Plan (MAP).
Tom Williams, co-founder and CEO of Dealpoint, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about Mutual Action Plans and how they will help you help your prospects buy. And buy an offering you know you can deliver. After all, you worked on the plan together.
Learn more:
That SalesHacker article about mutual action plans: https://www.saleshacker.com/mutual-action-plans/
The Dealpoint.io blog describing mutual action plans and the template: https://www.dealpoint.io/map/
Tom Williams on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdgwilliams/
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I know what you’re thinking. Influencer marketing is for celebrities on Instagram and that most of the time, these relationships are inauthentic. You might even know of the stories of influencers and brands not even using the products they are paid to promote.
This leaves a bad taste in your mouth all by itself.
Then you throw in the idea that influencer marketing can be used in B2B and you say, “OK. That’s it. I’m not buying it.”
Maybe you should buy it because Magda Houalla, Director of Marketing Strategy at AspireIQ, says that influencer marketing can work very well in B2B.
If you are authentic.
If you treat it more like building a community than just selling.
If you link it to a higher business strategy.
If you have specific goals.
If you have the right expectations.
B2B brands have influencers. These influencers are authors, your best customers, bloggers in your space, developer advocates, consultants, the list can go on. You just have to identify these people, make sure they fit your values, and you can work with them to build community around the topic or space or market in which you do business.
Magda tells a story about how SAP invited 11 influencers to one of their new events to kick it off. It was a test. And it was successful.
It can be successful for you, too. If you listen to Magda.
Learn more:
AspireIQ’s website: https://www.aspireiq.com/helping-sells-radio
Magda Houalla on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/magda-houalla-3484bb65/
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Thanks to my discussion with Rob Israch, chief marketing officer and alliances at Tipalti, I have a much different view of net promotor score (NPS) and customer advocacy. Customer advocacy is a lot more of a growth driver than we might think, on the surface. And NPS might be the ultimate leading indicator of that growth.
According to Rob, if you peel back the layers of why companies like Salesforce and Zendesk and Slack have been so successful, you will see they had a lot of word of mouth, high retention, virality, high NPS scores, strong customer satisfaction and a company culture that support customers in such a way that customers are eager to tell others about these companies.
Customer talk about you. How great you are. How great your product is. How great it is to work with you.
This is all customer advocacy.
And NPS is a really good measure because it asks people about their willingness to recommend. In other words, are customers willing to advocate for you.
NPS measures advocacy.
Advocacy drives growth.
Therefore, NPS is a leading indicator of growth.
Growth is way better than retention.
Learn more about Rob:
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robisrach/
Tipalti: https://tipalti.com/about/
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“Imagine a world in which people couldn’t wait to talk to a salesperson.” If all sales people were trained by Alice Heiman, that world just might exist.
The moment I read this passage from Alice’s blog, Customers for Life: The Art of Keeping your best customers for life, I knew I had to get her on the show:
Traditionally it was the salesperson’s job to land new accounts and keep them. Today, most organizations have separated the jobs and have salespeople looking for new business and account managers working with existing accounts to grow them. Some companies also have customer support people to assist customers. More recently, companies have started to have Customer Success departments. With all these people concerned about the customers, we should be able to retain them.
And yet somehow, it is not necessarily true.
If everyone owns the customer, no one owns the customer.
This is what Alice and I talk about.
Learn more about Alice:
On Linkedin
Her website
The two blogs we talked about:
Customers for Life: The Art of Keeping your best customers for life
9 ways to show your clients love
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Welcome to a special episode of Helping Sells Radio. Actually, It’s an experiment. The experiment is a series of episodes we’re going to call a Podstorm. Hat tip to Christopher Lochhead for “inventing” the term podstorm and giving us the idea to try it.
In this podstorm Megan Macaluso, VP of customer success and operations at ESG is BACK. And we are going to continue with our theme of ranting about work...and this episode: “Things That Drive Us Nuts at Work, But We Still Do Anyway. Except That We Blame Others for Doing It. Because Of Course We Don’t Do These Things. Other People Do.”
In this episode we talk about asking for a budget versus planning and forecasting.
In their book, “Simple numbers, straight talk, big profits: 4 keys to unlock your business potential,” Greg Crabtree and Beverly Blair Harzog write, “A budget is a license to spend; a forecast is your roadmap to profitability.” Saying that you don’t need a budget, you need a business model and a forecast you are willing to act on.
Reading that was a mind-blown moment for me. I wrote about it on Linkedin.
Megan and I hash it out.
The books we mentioned:
Simple numbers, straight talk, big profits: 4 keys to unlock your business potential
How to be a fierce competitor: What winning companies and great managers do in tough times
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
This is a special episode of Helping Sells Radio. Actually, It’s an experiment. The experiment is a series of episodes we’re going to call a Podstorm. Hat tip to Christopher Lochhead for “inventing” the term podstorm and giving us the idea to try it.
Our first podstorm is with Megan Macaluso, VP of customer success and operations at ESG. The name of this episode is called: “Things That Drive Us Nuts at Work, But We Still Do Anyway. Except That We Blame Others for Doing It. Because Of Course We Don’t Do These Things. Other People Do.”
On this episode, we talk about:
Contact hoarding
Adoption is a fool’s errand
Death By synergy
Basically, Megan and I just recorded what would otherwise be a normal phone call between us.
Enjoy.
Here is a link to Kerry Bondine’s Journey Mapping Workshop that Megan attended: https://kerrybodine.com/customer-journeys/bootcamp/
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If customer success is about being proactive and helping customers achieve outcomes and challenging customers to do their jobs better, then Rohit Bhargava’s book, Non-obvious Megatrends: How to See What Others Miss and Predict the Future, is the greatest customer success book of all time. I don’t say that lightly. I say that because Rohit’s book lays out precisely how to help customers in a more proactive and valuable way than you might be used to. It goes way beyond the usual "help customers use our software better so they can do their job and achieve their goals” mentality.
It provides a method and a discipline for helping customers see around corners and identify trends and navigate the market?
Rohit’s book will help you be an actual trusted advisor.
As much as we’d like to think we do, we [customer success] don’t really do that. In the real world, I think we still sell software and then help customers use it.
Non-Obvious Megatrends will help you add a layer of value you can provide customers above the help you provide with your software.
Rohit has written the Non-obvious report book every year for the last ten years. Several years ago I read the fourth edition thinking to myself, “What if I could apply this process identify trends in my customers’ industries? How much more could I help them?"
I had that idea because Rohit doesn’t just write about trends that he identified in his research. He spilled the beans on his trend curating process and shows you how you can do it.
Notice the phrase trending curating. Not trend spotting. Not seeing trends.
Curating trends.
Rohit defines a trend as a "curated observation of the accelerating present."
“Ah, so this is how I can become a visionary," I thought. "I don’t really have to see the future."
All I have to do is apply Rohit's process, exercise some discipline, and practice observance. Then I can curate trends, too. And if I can do this with my customers in mind, I can really think about my customers even when I don’t have to.
That’s being proactive: Thinking about my customers when I don’t have to.
Rohit and I talked about this.
I asked “How can I really be proactive with customers when I have to think about the customer who just called me and wants to have meeting tomorrow?”
Rohit suggests I think about being a great concierge.
A great concierge will be continuously out there looking for new and interesting things to do
Think about it.
It’s not just about googling a restaurant when a guest asks for a recommendation. It is knowing, ahead of time, that there is a great Italian place with outdoor seating by the park that has a 3 month wait for reservations…but you can get them in tonight because you built a relationships with the restaurant owner.
That’s being proactive and makes you prepared to be a great concierge. That’s being proactive. So that when a guest asks for a recommendation of great Italian restaurants with outdoor seating by the park, you have an answer.
It's how you can say to customers in your next meeting, “That reminds me of something you said the last time we talked. You said this, and just the other day, I learned that from another customer, and I think you might like the other thing…."
Be proactive.
Rohit says that most of us think that being proactive means being quickly reactive.
But being proactive is thinking about someone when you don’t have to.
How can we think about customers when we don’t have to?
Rohit explains, “When we prep for a meeting, we think about what they might ask and prepare for that. Instead, we should ask ourselves, 'What will it take, in the first 5 minutes of this meeting, for my customer to say to themselves, ‘Wow I’m glad I took this meeting?’’"
That’s a different kind of of question.
It's a question that makes you think ahead.
It’s not: What are they going to ask me so I can prepare all the answers.
It isn’t: Go through the check list and update the all one hour before the meeting.
It is: “How do I make them grateful that they even took the time to chat with me, in the first place?”
It is also: “That was an awesome use of my time?"
More about Rohit:
Of course you should get a copy of Rohit’s latest and final edition of the non-obvious trends book, “Non Obvious Megatrends."
Rohit also has a new ebook out…and it’s free. It’s called, The Non-Obvious Guide to Virtual Meetings & Remote Work (When you Just Can’t Be There In Person). Get that free book here: https://www.nonobvious.com/virtual
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As Jason Bradshaw describes in his book, It’s all about CEX! The Essential Guide to Customer and Employee Experience, in 1994 customer service was the differentiator. In the early 2000s it was engagement. Today is all about customer experience management.
Sounds good.
Here’s the problem.
Customer experience is one of those terms that sounds good, everyone knows it’s important, but no one really knows how to define it.
It’s too vague.
In his book, Jason gives us an excellent framework for measuring customer experience that I understand. And that I can use to design a strategy that I could execute.
Maybe CX is not so vague after all.
A framework for measuring customer experience
Here’s what I learned from Jason about customer experience. You can measure it with three things:
Success: You have to deliver on your promise. If your customer ordered something, the delivery needs to happen on time. If a customer requests to turn on the new module in your software, the new model has to be turned on. You have to deliver. Simple. Of course no company is perfect. Even Amazon deliveries get delayed on occasion. But most of us trust that when we order something on Amazon, it turns up.
Effort/Ease: Working with you has to be easy. Navigating your website, signing up, attending QBRs, paying your invoice, etc. Whatever it is, it needs to be as easy for the customer as possible. Think of your QBRs? What much work to you give your customers to get ready for your QBRs? Do you make your customer pull data and create slides? Some people do.
Ugh.
Human connection: Make a personal connection with people. Small companies might not be able to compete with the big companies on scale and technology and automation and recommendation engines, but, as Jason describes, small companies can differentiate themselves on human connection.
From my experience as a customer, this works. I’ve shifted much of my purchasing to small, local businesses and re-engaged with running stores and ski shops and the neighborhood cafe.
Jason said to me the local ski shop might not be able to compete with the massive sports retailer on price or automation, but they can call you in the fall and say, “Bill, I remember last year you saying you were developing a sore spot on your right foot…let’s get your boots adjusted before the snow falls.”
I have received that call from the running store, “You must be running out of trail butter, Bill. I can send you some if you like.”
Human connection built in to your business model
If I may make a connection to another business concept: The Business Model Canvas. Do you work for a software company that has a high touch relationship with customers or is it low touch? It might be both. It also might be intentional.
On the business model canvas, there is a box called “customer relationship.” This section of the canvas is about what type of relationship do you want to have with your customers? You could decide, quite deliberately, to have a “high touch” relationship with customers. This is fine. It is more costly to deliver than a low touch, “Go to our help center” if you want help approach.
But you can do it. Zappos chose that model.
You can design that high touch customer relationship into your business model and, in Jason’s words, differentiate yourself on the human connection.
More about Jason
Jason wants to give you two free chapters of his book. It’s a great book. And I learned a lot reading it and discussing it with him. Go to his website here and get your two free chapters: jasonsbradshaw.com/thankyou
Do you know who else likes Jason’s book? Jeanne Bliss (Ep 76). She’s been on Helping Sells Radio. She also gave Jason an excellent endorsement about his book:
It’s simple: customer experience matters now, more than ever, and in this book, Jason will help you accelerate improvements.
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I bet you’ve never connected the dots that accounts receivable is a business process that is so tightly connected with customer success. I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that. Sure, we know that collecting money on invoices is important, and we know cash flow is what makes our companies run and what makes the payroll happen. But don’t most of us think that invoices just go about and customers mostly just pay them?
Be honest.
I promise, after you listen to this discussion with YayPay chief product officer, Nicole Dwyer, you will have a new appreciation for the link accounts receivable has with customers and a new way of thinking about how you work with your customers in whatever business process your software addresses.
Let’s just talk about one example that we talked about with Nicole and one of her customers.
Accounts receivable is not just about looking at a receivables aging reporting and asking, “Why is this customer 3 days late on paying this invoice?”
That’s a transaction question. And prompts the company to reactively send a reminder.
Nicole wants us to understand that this is not a transaction. There’s a story behind that late payment, and we have to find out what it is so we can help.
Pause.
Can you imagine an accounts receivables team thinking that way? What’s the customer story and how can we help? Wow. This is how YayPay helps its customers think. This is what Nicole’s customer is telling her. That when they started thinking about why payments are late and how can they help, they discovered (for example) that a customer is opening up a new store and order more inventory, and frankly, their focus is on that, so they let some invoices slip.
Nicole’s customer says to Nicole (I’m paraphrasing), “If we know this, we can ask, “If we know the story of our customer's expansion, we can be proactive, and work with the customer to help them."
Accounts receivable as customer success?
Indeed.
More about Nicole:
On Linkedin
One of Nicole’s blog posts that will blog you away. It’s called, How Smarter AR Can Fix Customer Churn for Your SaaS Business? See what I mean?
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"Why don’t they just say no,” say customer success managers of sales executives who close deals with customers who do not fit the ideal customer profile. Now the customer success manager has to deal with customers who have expectations that do not fit with what the product or service actually does well.
We have just gotten off on the wrong foot, and this situation is not good for anyone. That customer, during the on-boarding process, is already expressing disappointment and is evening thinking about not renewing.
On day one.
Of course our churn rates are high. The sales team is selling to the wrong customers. Even after our CEO said in the last three town hall meetings, “We have published our value proposition canvases and ideal customers profiles on the wiki, and we have designed our product and are running sales and marketing campaigns designed to get more ideal customers.
So, I ask again, “Why don’t they say no?”
Think about this from the sales person’s point of view. They are on a quota, and they have a prospect who is willing to buy. How can an account executive say no to that?
Two reasons:
The obvious reason: They are paid on commission and have a quota.
The less than obvious reason: They don’t want to be told by the VP of sales, and especially not by the CEO, “Why did you turn that prospect away?” It’s easy for the CEO/founder or a VP of sales to turn prospects away because they don’t fit a profile. They are the boss. Not so easy for an account executive who has to explain herself in weekly pipeline review meetings.
What to do?
John Bertino is the founder of The Agency Guy (TAG), a collective of marketing execs determined to help brands find the best marketing agency or consultant.
In his experience finding successful matches between brands and service providers is a high predictor of long-term success.
John offers three principles to following if you want to find ideal customers and build long-term customer engagements.
Principle 1: Set expectations
If we want to acquire and work with ideal customers, we need to set proper expectations up-front. This includes communicating:
What we are good at.
How we can help a customer.
How we cannot help a customer.
How (and when) a customer will know if an engagement is successful.
Help the customer understand those expectations.
Sometimes this means we need to talk customers out of signing up with us.
John shares an example. This is how you might set expectations with a prospect that wants to hiring someone to run paid media campaigns, and wants to increase brand trust.
You would say to the prospect, something like this, “If you are hiring us to run your paid media strategy, you can expect to generate awareness and page views on your website. But if you want to increase trust in the market, you need design an earned media strategy. Paid media will raise your awareness. We’re really good at that. And we will bring more people to your website. But if you want to increase your trust score, earned media is better for that because earned media gets other people talking about you That earned trust. We don’t specialize in that. We specialize in raising your brand awareness.”
In this simplified example, we are educating and being consultative.
We are being helpful.
That’s one way to get ideal customers.
Principle 2: Offer more experience and higher rates
Anyone who ever hired someone on Fivvr to do a logo for less than $50, knows that you get what yo pay for.
Service providers that recruit experienced staff and sell services at higher prices are more successful because they can do more to help customers. Experienced people are better positioned to lead customers. To challenge customers. Experienced people will say to clients, “Based on this or that, what you should be doing is….”
Experience people lead.
That’s why customers hired you.
Inexperienced people wait for the customer to tell them what they want. Then work hard to give them what they want. What if the customer doesn’t know what they want.
To be successful over time, we need to increase the value we deliver to our customers. And change more.
Principle 3: Be niche
Another way to find more ideal customers is to be niche. You might turn away more deals if you stick to your niche. But you will have good customers because customers will know exactly why they hired you.
For that niche thing you do.
And you get a lot more referrals because people know precisely how to refer you.
“I need to find someone who can help me with my LinkedIn ad campaigns.”
“I know a guy. Bill. He specializes in Linkedin ad campaigns. I’ll introduce you.”
When you’re a generalist, no one knows how to refer you.
More about John:
The Agency Guy (TAG) Website: https://www.theagencyguy.com/helping/
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I work in technology. You might say I work on the forefront of some. But I must admit, when I hear someone lead a conversation with the statement, “We need an AI strategy,” my spidey-senses start to fire. Danger. Danger. Danger.
I don’t just mean AI. The statement could be any of the following…
We need a machine learning strategy.
We need a big data strategy. Let’s hire a data scientist.
We need podcast strategy.
When you hear someone in your company talking like this, you can sound like the trillion dollar coach, Bill Campbell, by asking the group, “What problem (opportunity) are we trying to solve?”
This very exchange is why I wanted to have Neil Sahota on Helping Sells Radio. I wanted Neil to save us from the insane conversations we’re having about all the different strategies these so-called visionaries are telling us we need.
Neil Sahota is an IBM Master Inventor, United Nations (UN) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Advisor, Faculty at UC Irvine, and author of the book, Own the AI revolution: Unlock your artificial intelligence strategy to disrupt your competition.
Even Neil says, in the subtitle of his book, that we need an AI strategy.
Spidey-senses.
So I asked him about that. “Why did you put that phrase in your subtitle?"
He answered with a story about a head of a major law firm who’s asks himself about artificial intelligence, "I know we should be doing something with AI. What is it?”
Neil helps this person reframe the question.
Most people think in terms of problem first, then leaping to finding a solution.
Neil says we need to insert “opportunity” between those two.
Problem > opportunity > solution.
He asked a simple question: “What keeps you up at night?”
The manager answers, “Talent. We are struggling finding the right lawyers to hire who fit us and are effective in court. We are losing too many court cases and our employee turnover is way too high. I wish we could be better at hiring.”
Problem 1: Ineffective hiring
Problem 2: Low business results (losing too many court cases)
Opportunity 1: Improve employee retention with better hiring
Opportunity 2: Improve win rate in court. Get new clients.
Neil goes on to explain to the manager that he can solve both problems and take advantage of these opportunities with AI. “Did you know AI can solve this today? With AI, we can build profiles of your candidates based on 56 phsychological traits and tell us which candidates are a good match for what you are looking for?”
“We can do that?” says the manager.
Now we can talk about AI as a solution, but only because we started with the problem and then got specific about possible opportunities.
Neil helped us get there.
More about Neil and his book
Neil was kind enough to create a special page on his website for you, Helping Sells Radio Listeners. If you want to learn about AI, without the distractions of the hype, Neil’s book is for you.
Check out his website here > https://www.neilsahota.com/helpingsells/
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Sales is changing. 90% of people won’t pick up a cold call and 53% prefer researching online. This doesn’t make things easy on the sales executive who is trying to help prospects make improvements in their businesses. How are sales execs supposed to communicate with prospects if no one is picking up the phone?
Matt Barnett, CEO of Bonjoro, says asynchronous video is the answer.
He created his company to help sales people communicate authentically with prospects. It seems to be working. According to SalesLoft, sales teams that use video have 20% higher close rates AND 30% higher deal sizes.
When I began talking to Matt, I was skeptical. Isn’t video hard? Don’t we need heavy software? Isn’t there editing involved? And what about audio quality? Not everyone is comfortable on video. How is this going to work?
These were all the questions I had for Matt.
I must admit. He turned me around.
It’s an asynchronous world. We don’t just call someone out of the blue, have them answer, “hello,” and have an 18 minute conversation….like we used to.
We send messages and wait for a reply.
We schedule times to do video calls.
Everything is pre-arranged.
So why not used this trend in the sales process.
Matt turned me around with this scenario.
Imagine the sales executive who wants to get home a bit early to be with his family and friends for an evening BBQ in the backyard. It could be you. You want to beat the traffic home, but you still have a few sales follow-ups to make.
You decide to leave the office a bit early and get home.
When you get home, you help your family set up for the BBQ before your friends arrive, then sit down in the back yard and send a few follow-up videos.
“Hi Lauren, it’s John here. I just got home a bit early today to set up for a BBQ, and I thought of you. Have you reviewed the proposal? I’m asking because there’s a tricky part in section two. And I want to make sure you understand that we can be flexible on that. After you look that over, let’s schedule a time to talk it over. If we get that part right, your ROI will be very clear. Let’s schedule that call on Tuesday.”
Send.
That takes just a few minutes.
The sales exec [you] can send four or five videos like that, even while the kids are throwing balls at each other in the background.
It’s real life.
It’s personal.
It’s professional.
It shows caring in the sales process.
And best of all, as Matt describes, “It’s not about editing. It’s about being yourself and letting people know you’re there to help. And then asking them to take the next step in the process.”
Sales and marketing are becoming so automated that we might be losing the relationship aspect.
Video changes that.
They have a principle at Bonjoro: Automate processes, not relationships.
Anyone who listens to Helping Sells Radio can relate to that.
More about Matt:
This is the blog that got the conversation going: https://www.bonjoro.com/blog/post/why-video-is-sales-secret-sauce
Here’s how you can automate process, but not relationship. The video funnel playbook: https://www.bonjoro.com/videofunnelplaybook
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As Sam Horodezky so eloquently puts it: if you ask people if they would except anything less than the best user experience design, most people would probably say “No! I won’t.” But few of those same people are willing to do what is necessary to create the best user experience design.
And that is how we started this episode.
Loyal listeners of Helping Sells Radio know that I am not a designer. Far from it. I don’t understand it, and I could not recognize it if I saw it.
Basically, I am not really interested in it, so I don’t put the time in to learn about it.
It’s not my thing.
But when I had a chance to interview Sam Horodezky, founder of Strathearn Design, I jumped at the chance.
Here’s why.
He specializes in B2B UX design. This is a B2B podcast.
I know just enough about UX design to know that if a product is designed well, it can help customers be more successful with it.
The language on his website talks about helping customers achieve better UX outcomes.
That last reason is really the only reason I needed to want to talk to Sam about UX design.
I enjoyed our discussion and learned a lot. This is my reflection on four things I learned from Sam.
Be intentional
We talked a lot about intention: to make design decisions for specific reasons, and then live with those decisions. I asked Sam about products that have certain parts that are designed well and certain parts that are not designed well.
Most products have this.
We can all think of some.
I ask if good designers make those decisions intentionally, even making bad designs on purpose because they want to focus on one part of the product to make that part great.
He said that he mostly sees companies NOT being intentional. That it’s more likely the designers (the teams) didn’t even think about it [making those bad designs].
It is terrifying to think about. But it also makes sense. We can’t think of everything. Unless we are intentional.
Sam’s advice is to be more intentional about design decisions.
Make trade-offs
Being intentional brings us to a related topic: trade-offs.
No one has the resources to do everything. Even Apple…..which everyone knows prioritizes design….failed to make iTunes great software. iTunes is famously not good (yes, it’s an opinion), yet Apple's hardware products are famously well-designed.
Neither Sam or I were in the room at Apple when these decisions were made, but you can assume even Apple (with all the resources you could image) made trade-offs.
Focus on personas
How do you make those trade-offs and be intentional about it? In B2B software, it’s understanding personas.
Here’s an example of two personas.
Persona 1: Expense report submitter
Modern expense report software is awesome for a person, like me, who submits expense reports. I get a receipt at the airport coffee bar and before I put my wallet away, I capture the receipt in the app on my phone and the app does the rest. Captures the amount, the vendor, the category, the date, and even guesses the description text with incredible accuracy.
I love it.
But that’s all this app does.
What does our accounting manager think of using it? It probably sucks for them. They have to log into another system and somehow get my expense data in the ERP in order to process it.
Let’s flip the script.
Persona 2: Expense report processor
Our ERP has an expense module. We turned it on. We saved money because we don’t have to pay for this mobile expense app, which is nice. But more importantly, the expense module is tightly integrated with the ERP, making life easy for the accounting manager to process expense reports.
The ERP expense module sucks for me.
Now, instead of taking a photo of a receipt and moving on with my life, I now have to do a lot of downloading, saving to PDF, renaming files, uploading receipts one at a time, typing in amounts, vendor names, dates, reasons for the expense, set the category, etc, etc, etc.
Ugh.
Five minutes a month becomes two hours a month.
Our finance manager is happy.
Which persona should you design for?
The expense submitter or the expense processor?
What I learned?
There is no right answer except to say, take personas seriously.
Sometimes good documentation (or training) is better than improving the design
If you take personas seriously, you realize different personas have different needs and expectations.
Administrators of software are perfectly happy with many ways software is designed, as long as there is descent documentation or training. If you explain how to use your software well, some personas will be happy. So part of the user experience is how you help someone use the software as designed.
This is important because in B2B, software imposes a new way of working. No matter how good the software is, it is still different from how people work today.
People don’t like change. But you can minimize the resistance by providing good documentation. This can often be a better solution than redesigning the interface.
Faster and less expensive to implement as well.
Still not a designer, but...
I have a much better appreciate for the discipline of design. There is a process. There is a methodology. It can be learned. I’m glad I talked to Sam. I hope after listening, you are too.
More about Sam
His website: https://www.strathearn-design.com/
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/strdesign
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Should you target the decision-maker or the champion? I bet most of you would say, “Target the decision-maker. They sign the check, after all.” Not so fast, advises Garrett Mehrguth, CEO and co-founder of Directive, a performance marketing company for SaaS brands.
Think about how a decision-maker (the boss) makes decisions. They say the manager (the champion) who reports to them, “Let’s look into some options for this product. Go do some research, pick your favorite two or three, and I’ll help make a decision on those.”
The decision-make is not doing the research. The champion is.
If you are going to help this team, you need content that the champion can find. Once you are found and make the cut, you need a sales process that is targeted at the decision-maker.
Then, after the sales is made, you need customer success targeted at the champion again because that is who you will be working with.
Garrett says it perfectly:
"We make our point of contact (the champion) the star of the show. Our goal is that our contact gets promoted. Our goal is that they get a raise. Our goal is that they look good. Our goal is that at every meeting they have, they have the best presentation deck prepared.”
When is the last time you helped your customer create their deck for their meeting with their boss?
Think about it.
There is nothing more helping sells that helping your point of contact look good.
This is exactly what we talked about with Allison Pickens (Ep. 81), chief operating officer at Gainsight. That the ultimate outcome of any customer engagement is that your main point of contact gets promoted. Hey, Linkedin…we are calling on you to allow us all to call the job title change data so we can monitor the ultimate metric.: Promotions!
Some of you might still be thinking that you should target the decision-maker. Listen carefully to this part of Garrett’s episode. He reminds us that we, as sellers, have very limited access to our decision-makers. The boss, is good at managing up, not down. And let’s face it…the product or service we offer is down. It’s run and used by managers and the team that works for the manager. Our offering is not run by the decision-maker.
Running the business process that your software is designed for is why decision-makers have managers.
Make the manager look good, and you will look good.
More about Garrett:
His company, Directive: https://directiveconsulting.com/case-studies/
The Directive Institute: https://directiveconsulting.com/institute/
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OK. I get that you want to nurture your leads, but is your email newsletter really helping your audience? Or are you just trying to stuff as much information into that email as you can.
Be honest.
We’ve all done it. Added more topics to the newsletter to make it more informational. And just when you think you're done, the VP says, “Before you send the newsletter, add a blurb about the new professional services offering.”
Good grief.
The newsletter is no longer about your audience. It’s about you.
Emily McGuire wants you to stop sending your email newsletter altogether. It’s not helpful. You are angering your audience, wasting your time, and most importantly, you are not driving your business forward.
We talk to Emily about some alternatives to your newsletter. It doesn’t mean don’t send emails. Emily is an email marketing expert. She’s not going to tell you that. Emily is going to tell you about better ways to use email. Email that is both helpful to your audience and good for your business.
More about Emily:
Her blog post: “Stop Sending Newsletters”
Her website
On Linkedin
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How do you get your customers to use your software? To execute that onboarding plan? To implement the plan from your last QBR? Amy Bucher, author of "Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change," might be able to help. With the right design approach that is based on marrying psychology and design, you can help customers change their behavior. This is what behavior change design is all about. You discover what your customers value and help them realize that. It’s not easy. But there is a method. More about Amy: * Her book: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/engaged-designing-for-behavior-change/ * Her website: https://www.amybucherphd.com/ * Her work at MadPow: https://madpow.com/about/team/all * The Michael Metts tweet: https://twitter.com/mjmetts/status/1243020392731750401
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Maybe it’s not the only way to look at the jobs-to-be-done framework, but it might be the most clarifying way. Jim Kalbach, author of "The Jobs To Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs” suggests you look at it this way…when studying a customer’s job, ask yourself, “How would this job get done 50 years ago?” The point of this question is the remove the notion that current technology and knowledge does not exist and helps the product manager think about the job without the constraints of modernity. It helps the product look at the essence of the job itself. The product designer can go beyond the product. This simple technique helped me understand jobs-to-be-done better. This episode will help you understand better. More about Jim: 1. The book: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/ 2. Jim’s Talk at CS100 Summit 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdBYPX4Lw7M 3. On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kalbach/
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Maybe I am spoiling the end, but I can’t help myself. Michael Pollack, co-founder of Intricately, tells a story about how his team…using the data his product helps customers collect and used, helped his customer see a new opportunity, develop a new offering, and take to market. This is not even necessarily what his product helps customers do. His team went above and beyond the strict purpose of the product to help his customer achieve an outcome larger than their relationship required. There could not be a better manifestation of Helping Sells Radio. It takes Heidi Gardner’s (Ep 110). “Smart Collaboration” concept to the next level. It’s called customer success, not our success, for a reason. Learn more about Michael: 1. His Website: https://www.intricately.com/ 2. On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mpollack/
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Rob Markey, Bain & Co partner, author of "The Ultimate Question 2.0," and co-creator of the Net Promoter System (NPS) has a new Harvard Business Review article out. It’s called, “Are you undervaluing your customers?” I think this is the right question to ask. After all, the purpose of a business is to create and keep customers, says Peter Drucker. Yet, too often we get caught up in other pursuits…bookings, billings, revenue, earnings per share, churn, health scores, comp plans, reorgs, endless arguments over who owns the customer experience. I could go on, but I will spare you. This is not a dig. It’s easy to get focused on these things because there are so many important and urgent things to do. Plus. The financials are important. It’s just that customers drive the financials, so maybe we should start there. And as Rob reminds us. Focusing on customers IS about the numbers. His research continues to show that loyalty leaders (in their industries) grow revenue at 2.5x times faster than peer companies and product shareholder returns that are 2x to 5x higher over a ten year period. This data is not wavering. It’s possible too many of us are focusing on the short term (financials) at the expense of the long term (customer loyalty and financial results). That’s what Rob is arguing, and he offers three customer metrics that every business should start measuring and reporting. More about Rob: * The HBR Article, "Are you undervaluing your customers?” https://hbr.org/2020/01/the-loyalty-economy * Bain & Co: https://media.bain.com/customer-value/home/ * Net Promotor System: https://www.netpromotersystem.com/
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You might think the best way to respond to a customer or prospect’s description of a problem they want to solve is to explain or demonstrate how your product can help them solve that problem. After all, you product was designed to solve that problem, right? The problem is that leaping to a product solution might be an act of ignoring what your prospect or customer is really saying. Michael Tuso, director of revenue management at Chili Piper joins the podcast to talk about how revenue management is really about helping customers. Of course it is also about looking for ways to optimize conversation rates and revenue expansion..but it starts with helping customers. More about Michael: * On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeltuso/ * Chili Piper: https://www.chilipiper.com/
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ServiceRocket founder and CEO, Rob Castaneda posted a message in our Workplace from Facebook communication tool about books we read. His message was basically this…don’t tell me what you’ve read, show me. I am guilty of telling. Most of the time. But on rare occasional I actually “do” a book. After I read, Allan Dib’s book, "The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money And Stand Out From The Crowd,” I took action. immediately I applied his three phase marketing canvas on a few marketing campaigns. I have the Confluence pages to prove it and everything. So, when Allan agreed to join the podcast, I looked up my old marketing plans to have them ready to talk to him about. When I looked them over, I realized that I had actually used this canvas. But there was a conspicuous section of his canvas that I left blank. The “After” section. The “After" section is the part of the canvas that deals with what to do after the sale is made and someone becomes a customer. Wait. Marketing doesn’t deal with customers. That’s what I thought. That’s why I left that section blank. As I prepared for my discussion with Allan, I realized I wanted to talk about the section in his canvas that I left blank. There is so much we can do to help customers after the sale that we ignore. To our peril. More about Allan: His website: https://successwise.com/ His book: https://amzn.to/32UU01H
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What choice would you make? Hire someone with customer success experience but not industry experience. Hire someone with industry experience but no customer success experience. Or hire someone with neither. Of course, you’d hire someone with both. Or would you. Can you see the career matrix unfolding right here in front of you? We talk about this very trade off with Maranda Dziekonski, VP of customer success at Swiftly, board member of the Customer Success Leadership Network (CSLN), top 100 customer success influencer, and new advisor to the University of San Francisco MBA program. More about Maranda: 1. Her website: https://littlesaasy.com/ 2. On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marandaanndziekonski/
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There are so many nuggets in Kellie Lucas’s book, “The Customer Success Pioneer: The First 12 Months of Your Journey to Growth.” I didn’t know where to start. So I just made a list of things from her book that I wanted to talk about. The list looked something like this… You wrote this at the beginning: "This book will walk you through the first months of establishing a customer success function and philosophy which works in alignment with the rest of your organization’s teams to maximize your revenue growth engine …… your customer portfolio." We put customer success in because a VC told us to do it. Not seen as revenue target, but Customer Success should own revenue (gross and net retention rate) and track CAC AND CRC. Theme of the book: Their success = your success AND Customer growth = Revenue growth Your graphs in the book: Customer Success Inputs, Customer Success Processes, Customer Success Outputs. The key to success is understanding your customer’s reason for buying and using your service. The reasons why your customers buy your product is intrinsically linked to their required business outcomes. MOST PROFOUND STATEMENT IN THE BOOK: "After all, we know that one of the major indicators of a failing project is a lack of adoption. A lot of customer success programs are based on driving usage and consistent adoption, as a foundational route, to deliver the outcomes and success for which we’re looking." CS Ops was Kellie’s first hire. Why they bought your software? Ask them how they will know if it’s working? I asked her about all of these things. More about Kellie: 1. The Book: https://www.amazon.com/Customer-Success-Pioneer-months-journey-ebook/dp/B07YBBZVW5/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+customer+success+pioneer&qid=1582319022&sr=8-1 2. On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kellielucas/ 3. On Twitter: https://twitter.com/thecspioneer
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Jennifer Chiang and I just geeked out on customer success. Jennifer is director of customer success at Yup and just published a book called, "The Startup’s Guide to Customer Success: How to Champion the Customer at Your Company.” So, of course that’s what we did. More about Jennifer: * Her book: guidetocustomersuccess.com * On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennifer-chiang/
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If you are like me, you think of design as primarily what something looks like and secondarily how something works. But you probably don’t think about all the words used in a product as part of the design. This episode will change your perspective. I interview Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, co-authors of “Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience about how a lack of good word design in products can get users into trouble. In just one simple example, you know those error messages you get that don’t help you get out of the error or explain what to do next? Someone didn’t design that experience. This is what Michael and Andy do in their book…show you how to design for that experience…among many others. Learn more about Michael and Andy: * Michael is the senior UX architect manager (Conversation Design) at Allstate…you know…chatbots. And Andy is the UX content strategy manager at Adobe. * The Book: https://www.writingisdesigning.com/ * Michael on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljmetts/ * Andy on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awelfle/
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Empathy might be a soft skill, but empathy doesn’t mean passive. I means seeking first to understand, take someone else’s perspective, and understand their needs. With this information, we lead our buyers through a process. Not pushy. Leading. Sometimes it means leading a buy to the conclusion that our solution might not be a good fit. Britta Fischlin combines 25 years of business and marketing background in media and high-tech with a deep level of listening, years of coaching, somatic practices, and energy healing to help entrepreneurs and solopreneurs release any obstacles and heal their relationship to business, marketing and selling so that they feel comfortable creating marketing visibility for their business and achieving their desired business success. Find out more at https://brittafischlin.com Britta’s blog post, "Empathy is a critical Tool in our Sales Tool Box” - https://brittafischlin.com/why-empathy-is-a-critical-tool-in-sales-process/
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Do you have a community built around your product and services? Do you want to build one? If so, this is the podcast episode for you. And Jono Bacon, author of People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams, will help you avoid the mistakes that many other software companies make when building communities. The most notable mistake is building a community because it will benefit the company. That’s not exactly Helping Sells Radio approved, is it? We do things that benefit customers. Jono wants to help you build a community that benefits your customers…and whatever broader audience you want to serve. When you build a community…you have to provide value. Give people a reasons to discover your community, come back to your community, and help others stay in your community. Only then will your community thrive. Only then will you gain some benefit. Learn more about Jono: * The Book: https://www.jonobacon.com/books/ * Book Bonuses: https://twitter.com/jonobacon/status/1220083019458977798 * Jono’s Website: https://www.jonobacon.com/ * Jono's podcast: https://www.jonobacon.com/conversations/ * On Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonobacon
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Why is a mathematician, MBA, and Marketing Executive writing a book about the soul of business? For many reasons. But one reason in particular is that numbers are backwards looking, and if someone wants to be innovative, they need to look into the future. Innovation is forward looking. Rishad Tobaccoawala, author of Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the age of data, realized that the secret to business success is merging spreadsheets and stories. Companies that do this create value. Companies that do one or the other, destroy value. Wells Fargo and Beoing were so numbers driven that they got caught up in scandals and destroyed shareholder value. WeWork was all story and no data. We talked about a lot of examples like this. And we talked about what we, as leaders, can do about it. Learn more about Rishad * His Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Restoring-Soul-Business-Staying-Human/dp/1400210542 * His Website: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/ * Link to his linked Post: Davos searching for its’ soul https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rishadtobaccowala_activity-6625056999962927106-19oE
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It’s the chicken or the egg question of our times….What comes first, strategy or execution? According to Lauren Costella, VP of Customer Success at GoodTime.io, it’s probably execution. Yes, you need a plan. Yes, you need to know where you want to go. And yes, you need some idea how you will get there, but the bottom line is that you really don’t know any of that until you start executing. When you start executing. You learn. When you learn, you can execute better. And when you execute better, a strategy unfolds. Now you can document that strategy. Communicate that strategy. And rally your entire team around that strategy. And guess what…start executing that strategy. The modern day circle of life. A heavy topic. And note even the only thing we talked about with Lauren. Learn more about Lauren: 1. On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurencostella/ 2. On Twitter: https://twitter.com/lcostella 3. On the CSLN Board: https://customersuccessnetwork.com/about-us-lauren-costella/
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I never would have thought we’d do a show based on inspiration from a "renegade minister, a handyman turned political activist and naturalist, and an innovative educator and early feminist voice.” But we did. Thanks to John Jantsch, author of the new book, "The Self-Relient Entrepreneur: 366 Daily Meditations to Feed Your Soul and Grow Your Business.” Although this book was written for entrepreneurs, who John traditionally serves, the lessons in this book apply to anyone. We talked about that, too. Because in his book John writes, “You can experience a spirit of self-reliance and independence no matter your profession or job title.” This is what we learned from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. You know, those American transcendentalists. Learn more about John: 1. The Book: https://ducttapemarketing.com/the-self-reliant-entrepreneur/ 2. John’s Website: https://ducttapemarketing.com/
Special thank you to Todd Hockenberry, author of “The Inbound Organization” and Helping Sells Radio guest (Ep. 136), for introducing us to David. Link to Todd’s episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/136-todd-hockenberry-everybody-wants-to-grow-but-no/id1080713333?i=1000442760492
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I met Kris Bondi, CMO at LogDNA at the SaaStr Scale founders dinner in August 2019. She belonged there. I was an imposter trying to keep up. We talked about all manner of things, which eventually led to a discussion of what makes strong communities. One important factor is diversity and inclusion. She had evidence. According to recent Gartner piece on the impact of diversity and inclusion on performance, Through 2022, 75% of organizations with frontline decision-making teams reflecting a diverse and inclusive culture will exceed their financial targets. Diversity can improve performance and the evidence can no longer be ignored. I wish I had my microphone. I didn’t. So we did the next best thing. We got Kris onto the podcast, so we could good deeper into this topic. Learn more about Kris: * On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisbondi/ * On Twitter: https://twitter.com/kbondi * LogDNA: https://logdna.com/leadership-and-investors/
We talked about books. Two of her favorites: * Multipliers: https://www.amazon.com/Multipliers-Revised-Updated-Leaders-Everyone/dp/0062663070/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=multipliers&qid=1578701610&sr=8-1 * The Participation Revolution: https://www.amazon.com/Participation-Revolution-Change-Terrifyingly-Turbulent-ebook/dp/B07B5JWN37/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+participation+revolution&qid=1578701629&sr=8-1
Link to that Gartner article on diversity and inclusion and performance: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/diversity-and-inclusion-build-high-performance-teams
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I know what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing. “I work for an enterprise software company. We don’t have fans.” If it’s true that you don’t have fans, it’s because you haven’t created any fans. HubSpot has fans. Atlassian has fans. And to prove the point that any business can have fans, Hagerty Classic Car Insurance has one million subscribers to it’s YouTube channel. David Meerman Scott, author of Fanocracy: Turning Fans into Customers and Customers into Fans, told us the story about how Hagerty Classic Car Insurance needed to figure out a better way to sell. The Hagerty CEO told David, "We specifically went out to create fans. That’s how we drive our business.” Creating fans was a deliberate business model. It’s working for Hagerty. It’s working for HubSpot. It can work for you. Learn more about David: 1. David’s book: https://www.davidmeermanscott.com/books/fanocracy
Special thank you to Todd Hockenberry, author of “The Inbound Organization” and Helping Sells Radio guest (Ep. 136), for introducing us to David. Link to Todd’s episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/136-todd-hockenberry-everybody-wants-to-grow-but-no/id1080713333?i=1000442760492
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Learning how to learn might be the most important thing you learn in life. Especially now…in a world that is moving fast and conspiring to distract you. Our careers depend on it. The problem is that most of us never actually learned how to learn, and we cannot afford not to have a learning method we can trust. Scott Young gives us a method for learning in his book, Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career. To make this episode as useful as possible, we talked to Scott about how to apply his ultralearning principles to learning more about our customers and thus advancing our careers. Learn more about Scott: * Scott’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competition-Accelerate-ebook/dp/B07K6MF8MD/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=ultralearning&qid=1578179067&sr=8-2 * Scott’s website: https://www.scotthyoung.com/
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You know that stat…..that 57% of the buying decision is made before a buyer calls you? Well guess what…it’s baloney. That stat is made for sales people who want to sit around waiting for the emails to come in. Professional sales people don’t wait around for the phone to ring. No professional, in any career or job type, wait around for something to happen. They make things happen. Mike Weinberg, author of #SalesTruth: Debunking the Myths. Apply Powerful Principles. Win More New Sales, reminds us that professional sales people proactively work into accounts before buyers are shopping, seek to truly understand a customer’s needs, does effective discovery work, is motivated to solve a customer problem, tells a compelling story, and is committed to delivering valuable outcomes. His words, not mine. It’s true though. Isn’t it. The episode is a breath of fresh air to focusing on helping people as a means for improving our sales results…including, and especially, for people in a post sales role, like customer success. Learn more about Mike: * The book: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Truth-Mike-Weinberg/dp/1400217466/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=salestruth&qid=1576251808&sr=8-2 * His Website : https://mikeweinberg.com/about/ * On Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeweinberg2013/ * Twitter: https://twitter.com/mike_weinberg
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If you have listened to at least a few of the lat 30 episodes of Helping Sells Radio, you probably noticed I cite the invoicing processes as a step in the customer experience that is largely ignored by the chief customer officer because “that’s a finance thing.” And that there aren’t that many accounts receivable managers who think about the customer experience. That’s not really their job. Who could blame ‘em. Collections is kind of important, wouldn’t you say? But a bad invoicing process can negatively affect the customer experience. In this episode, I speak with Tim Teeter, VP of Business Development at Yaypay, and accounts receivable management tool that thinks of itself as a customer satisfaction tool. We talk about helping customers use software versus helping them do their jobs better, the negative impact of a poor invoicing process, and how we can sell outcomes instead of features. To learn more about Tim connect with him on LinkedIn and visit Yaypay.com.
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When I spoke with Resa Gooding, we talked about how to align sales and marketing teams together in service of how customer actually buy. After all, sales and marketing teams are notorious for not getting along with each other. There’s this tension. Marketing says, “Why can’t you close deals, we send you plenty of leads.” Sales says, “We’re not getting good leads from you.” The real problem is that the buyer suffers. The question then is how do we get sales and marketing to work together in service of the buyer. Maybe it’s about creating experiences, not generating leads. Learn more about Rosa Gooding: * Cacao Media: https://www.cacaomedia.co/ * Resa on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/resagooding/ * Resa created a special page for Helping Sells Radio Listeners: https://www.cacaomedia.co/helpingsells
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“But I’m not a sales person.” How many times have you heard that? How many times have you said that. Dr. Cindy McGovern went from college professor (the opposite of salesperson) to selling insurance and realized that although she never thought of her self as a salesperson, sales is what she had been doing all alone. She wrote her book, “Every Job is a Sales Job: How to Use the Art of Selling to Win a Work,” to help us mere non-sales mortals how to get over our “ick” factor and start selling at work. Like Dr. Cindy said in the episode, if you buy the book directly from her website, you get something extra……a bonus chapter on building your personal brand. A big part of also improving your selling. Use the phrase “helpingsells” at check out here: https://drcindy.com
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Rob Gallo, founder and CEO of CompLinks, joined us to talk about customer loyalty. Though he runs a white-label consumer engagement SaaS platform helping companies generate revenue from their customers, Rob reminds us that sometimes building loyalty starts with a very simple concept: build stronger relationships with customers and take a genuine interest. Pick up the phone. Call a customer. Go visit them in person.
Learn more about real loyalty from Rob. He created a special page for our helping sells community to help you learn more about customer loyalty: https://complinks.co/helpingsells/
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What people say and what people actually do are two very different things. When asked, most of us say we eat healthy. But if you look at what is actually in our kitchens, you might find a lot of Gino’s pizza rolls and bags of chips with the phrase, “Made with Natural Ingredients” on them. What does this have to do with customer experience? Rachel Lane, The Customer Queen and Solutions Principle at Medallia, tells us that the best way to understand our customers is to look at the voice of the customer and their actual behavior through signals and data.
After you listen to this episode, you can find Rachel on Linkedin with a simple search or go to the Medallia blog or find her on twitter @RachelLane.
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Sangram Vajre is the co-founder of Terminus, the company that has defined the category of account based marketing as we know it today. Sangram is also the founder of the #FlipMyFunnel movement, and get this...he is a 2X author and 2X guest on Helping Sells Radio (Ep68). Whoop! We talk about his knew book, ABM is B2B: Why B2B Marketing and Sales is Broken and How to Fix It.
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Tom Lipscomb of The Successful Customer, and advisor to numerous SaaS startup CEOs and customer success teams, shares what it takes to gain credibility as an executive beyond one's functional area and get a seat at the table.
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First there was direct touch customer success. Assign a smart CSM to help a smart customer. That's the first motion of customer success. Then there was tech touch. That is the second motion of customer success. Omid Razavi joins Helping Sells Radio to introduce the third motion of customer success: product success. Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.
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Tiffani Bova, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller "GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter about the Choices That Will Make Or Break Your Business" joins Helping Sells Radio to help us understand how customer experience is core to having a strong growth IQ. A positive customer experience is core to all other growth strategies. Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.
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Travis Marsh is co-author of "Reinventing Scale-Ups: Radical Ideas for Growing Companies." Guess what we talked about? Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.
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It was a Kristen Hayer's idea. That we should bring our podcasts together and do a live, joint podcast at a customer success meetup. Well, we did it. And we recorded it. Here it is.
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I was just following the Agile Australia conference hashtag (#agileaus) on Twitter when Sandy's name came up. When I read about her conference talk is saw words like self-organizing teams. OK. I know that one. That's what scrum teams do well. But then I saw the term self-selection. Self-selection? Does than mean I can put myself on my team at work I want? Mostly, yes, according to Sandy Mamoli. And Sandy knows about self-selection. She wrote the book on it, "Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel." Obviously, I had to get her on the show to talk about it. Sandy Mamoli is an Agile coach and founder of Nomad8, a small but perfectly formed Agile consultancy in Auckland, New Zealand. She's a former Olympian, a geek, a gadget junkie, international keynote speaker. She has a masters degree in artificial intelligence and knows quite a lot about Agile. As you can tell from the interview, I didn't know anything. This interview truly was about me asking Sandy a bunch of questions to learn how self-selection is creating organizations of the future.
Learn more about Sandy:
- About her session at Agile Australia: http://agileaustralia.com.au/2019/speakers/sandy-mamoli/
- Her company, Nomad8: https://nomad8.com
- Her slides on Holacracy: https://nomad8.com/articles/holacracy-slides/
- Sandy actually implemented this stuff: https://www.slideshare.net/smamol/how-i-tried-holacracy-and-lived-to-tell-the-tale-151317408
- A more detailed write up on Holacracy: https://nomad8.com/uploads/pdf/Holocracy_How_I_survived_to_Tell_The_Tale_article.pdf
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
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Harry Maziar may not be a technology professional as you and I would describe it. I don't care. He knows more about helpful selling than I'll ever know, which is why I wanted to talk to him on Helping Sells Radio. After a successful career in sales, then running sales, then as president, then as chairman of a publicly traded NYSE company, Harry wrote a book called, Story Selling: Sage Advice and Common Sense About Sales and Success. The book is full of memorable and useful advice, like "I must do something" will always solve more problems than "something must be done" and "self discipline is the original do-it-yourself job." After you read Harry's book, you can't help but call a customer and try to be helpful.
Learn more about Harry:
- Get his book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071GB716T/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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Fresh off the plane from the CS100 Summit in Sundance, Utah, Cole Sanders, senior customer success manager at ClientSuccess, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about what it's like being a customer success manager for customer success managers. Imagine that. You are serving customers who are doing the same job as you. No pressure, right?
Learn more about Cole:
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cole-sanders-40a72912/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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Fresh off the plane from the CS100 Summit in Sundance, Utah, Carlos Quezada, head of customer success at Aruba talks about how he had the instinct to build a customer success team with a data person first. "I wanted to know what I was looking at before implementing solutions." Carlos used data to understand the customer based, so he could segment customers, and design the right solution for each. There are major lessons here for how to build customer success at scale with a very small team.
Learn more about Carlos:
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cquezada/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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OK, so maybe agile and digital transformations are not specifically about helping sells. On the other hand, if our organizations and teams are not agile, don't respond to customer needs quickly, and are unable to adapt in uncertain times, we may not have any customers to help anyway. This is why I wanted to talk to Pamela Meyer, author of Pamela Meyer, author of Agility Shift: Creating Agile and Effective Leaders, Teams, and Organizations. She says the majority of executives say that agility is a critical organizational capability. That's you. The irony is that most organizations aren't agile. They aren't doing it. If they are doing it, it's coming from a mindset that isn't agile. That's a hard pill to swallow. Leaders know they have to be more agile, responsive, and nimble. But there is still a belief that agility is risky. "What if we make bad decisions?" This is the wrong mindset because actually agility is about minimizing risk while delivering value faster to customers. We talk to Pamela about how organizations can shift their collective mindsets and become more agile.
Learn more about Pamela:
- Pamela's Website: https://pamela-meyer.com/
- Her Book: https://www.amazon.com/Agility-Shift-Creating-Effective-Organizations/dp/1629560707/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431653481&sr=8-1&keywords=the+agility+shift
- The Agility Shift Inventory: https://pamela-meyer.com/agility-shift-inventory/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelameyerphd/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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Kristen Hayer and I were at the ClientSuccess CS100 Summit this week in Sundance, Utah. We used some of our time together to plan our live joint podcast. This is a recording of part of that prep. You may have heard about a live joint podcast I am doing with Kristen Hayer of Strikedeck Radio. Kristin and I will be at the Customer Success Networking Meetup on September 26 in Palo Alto hosting a live podcast.
Join the meetup here: https://www.meetup.com/customersuccessnetwork/events/263040347/
Learn more about Strikedeck Radio here: https://strikedeck.com/strikedeck-radio-customer-success-live/
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Scott Brown, author of (C)lean Messaging: A framework to help startup founders talk to humans, didn't actually turn acorns into gold. He was trying to explain to me how to apply one of the principles from his book. The key to being remembered is to combine a message with a picture and a story. One of the stories in the book is of a company that applied this principle and came up with, "We turn acorns into gold." It makes sense when you read it. To help me understand this principle even more, Scott turned the podcast around and starting interviewing me to help me create my own (C)lean Message. And this exercise is proof that knowing something is next to worthless. Applying it....that's an entirely different story. If you want more help, understanding what this (C)lean Messaging is all about....listen to the episode and wrap your head around this: Scott's (C)lean Messaging Framework, looks and operates like a business model canvas, but for crafting your message.
Learn more about Scott:
- His website: https://scottbrown.co/
- The book: https://www.amazon.com/lean-Messaging-framework-startup-founders-ebook/dp/B07KGKMGJ1
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sc0ttbr0wn/
- On Twitter: https://twitter.com/sbrown
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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Follow us on Social Media:
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Bill Cushard
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- Write a review where ever you get your podcasts.
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells.
- Comment below.
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I have two questions for you? First, if you wanted your customers to love you, what would you do? Would you call them more? Improve your service? Introduce them to others? Second, if you wanted your employees to love you what would you do? Get to know them at a personal level? Promote them? Pay them more? Help them advance in their career? In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, I talked to Steve Farber about his new book, Love is Just Damn Good Business: Do What You Love, In The Service of People, Who Love What You Do. Your first reaction might be a little like mine, "Customer love? Really?" Until you think about the questions above. That changes things. Those questions take a touchy feely topic and provides a way to think about operationalizing love as a business process. Steve shares several stories that demonstrating how much a business can improve results using love as a discipline.
Learn more about Steve:
- His Website: https://www.stevefarber.com
- The Book: https://www.stevefarber.com/books/love-is-just-damn-good-business/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevefarber/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
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Becky Flint, co-founder and CEO of Dragonboat.io, joins Nice Work to talk about how to bring strategy and execution together in the product development lifecycle using a process called Responsive Portfolio Program Management (Responsive PPM). Dragonboat has a tight integration with Jira, and if Jira represents the execution cycle, Dragonboat represents the strategic cycle. We dive deep into Responsive PPM and how it can help product teams deal with the onslaught of competing priorities that they deal with every day... and keep their sanity.
Learn more about Becky and Dragonboat.io:
- Dragonboat website: https://dragonboat.io/
- Her presentation slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CzE5pAjPnIz1WrNjk9uW06ufkcq4fc-PzZtcfHI2Oao/edit#slide=id.p
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beckyflint/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
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Product demos are broken. They are either a 60 minute feature dump or completely ignore the buyer's needs. We've all been on demos like that. Some of us might have even delivered demos like that. Well, not us. Other people. What makes all of this worse is that most companies hold their demos hostage behind a form, leaving potential buys to ask themselves, "Do I give them my email address and phone number so they can hound me for 2 months so I can see a 60 minute feature dump?" Customer wish they could just do a little self-demoing. They want to learn. And they want to learn on their own terms. Why don't we help them do that. Greg Dickinson, founder and CEO of Omedym, helps us understand how we can help our customers buy with self-demos. Free the demo and help your buyers at the same time.
Learn more about Greg:
- His company Omedym: https://www.omedym.com/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregdickinson/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
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Keith Mattes, senior program manager / Gainsight administrator at Pearson, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about how reduce support case resolution connecting Jira and Salesforce. Along the way, he also broke down silos by connecting development teams with customer support teams. He did this in the face of organizational resistance. As in most organizations, there are barriers to trying new things, especially connecting systems and integrating data across them. On the journey to overcome this resistance, Keith asked a lot of questions, questioned the status quo (politely, we might add), and got Jira and Salesforce connected. There is a lesson here in challenging the status quo with questions...it helped that Keith was new to the teach and could ask the "Huh" and "Why" questions that most people, who have been on a team a long time, can be afraid to ask. But this is how change is done.
Keith used ServiceRocket's Connector for Salesforce & Jira to do this, you can learn more about one the Atlassian Marketplace.
Learn more about Keith:
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmattes/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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Chad Sanderson has been leading sales and marketing teams to success for over 20 years through his proven and predictable ValueSelling Framework. Chad, who has been named a Top 5 Emerging Training Leader, has worked in sales, built teams, and achieved targets -- both within organizations and as a consultant. He cuts through the outdated, theory-based “fluff” so often attributed to sales training, and gets down to the nitty-gritty with a raw, no-BS perspective to look at what is working, what’s not working, and where there may be opportunities to drive predictable revenue growth through sales optimization.
Learn more about Chad:
- Chad's Website, ValueSelling Associates: https://www.valueselling.com/
- On Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/chadsanderson
- Chad's podcast, The B2B Revenue Executive Experience: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-b2b-revenue-executive-experience/id1242104988
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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The writer and customer success manager in me saw Torrey Podmajersky's (UX Writer at Google) new book, Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word, and said to myself, "OMG, let's talk about this." So we did and pressed record. You might ask yourself why this kind of writing matters. In Torrey's words, "we need to onboard people into our product experience" with the expressed purpose of "setting them up for success." Yes, the product design must be good. But if you are using the wrong words, you can very easily prevent a customer from achieving their goal. Bad customer success. It is not just about good writing. It is about the (this is gonna be tricky to say) right.....writing. Torrey talks about a virtuous cycle of transforming users. A UX writer does this by first considering the company goals, then the customer's goals...then figuring out what and how to write...so that both goals can be met. It all starts with goals.
Learn more about Torrey:
- Her book: https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Writing-Engagement-Conversion-Retention/dp/1492049395
- Her website: https://torreypodmajersky.com/
- On Twitter: https://twitter.com/torreybird
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/torreybird/
- On Medium: https://medium.com/@torreyp
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
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Change is great. You go first. That's the first thing I thought about when Todd said, "Everybody wants to grow, but no one wants to change." That quote came from Todd Hockenberry's book, Inbound Organization: How to Build and Strengthen Your Company’s Future Using Inbound Principles. What does this have to do with helping sells? Everything. The entire philosophy of inbound marketing is based on the premise of being helpful...producing helpful and educational marketing that gives value first, educates people, and draws people in. But inbound is not just about marketing. Or even sales. As Todd talks about on the show, what if you marketing and sales teams are practicing educational and helpful inbound marketing and selling techniques, but then customers sign up and the rest of the organization (think customer success, legal, support teams) do not? Easy, you start to lose trust with customers and might even lose their business. The entire organization must learn to embrace inbound principles.
"How?" You might ask.
Todd gives one good example. What if a legal team could ask themselves, "How could we make our terms and conditions easy for customers to understand and useful enough that customers would want to sign them?" This can happen. With the right attitude and the right organizational culture that embraces a helpful approach to all customer interactions.
This is how organizations can change, do something new, in order to find new customers and create new markets.
Learn more about Todd Hockenberry:
- His book: https://www.amazon.com/Inbound-Selling-Change-Match-People/dp/1119473411/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=inbound+organization&qid=1560274575&s=gateway&sr=8-4
- His website: https://www.top-line-results.com/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddhockenberry/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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The purpose of customer success is to turn customers, who desire value and have bought your product, into customers who are getting value from your product. This according to Rick Adams, author of Practical Customer Success Management: Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success. Since that is the purpose, customer success managers (CSMs) should focus their energy close this gap and help customers realize the value they were promised when they bought your product. Rick's book is written specifically for CSMs and lays out a framework for how a CSM can be successful at the job of customer success.
In just one example for a competency that CSMs should master, and we talked about this in the show, is that the CSM should proactively seek further sales opportunities. This is a critically important competence. It doesn't mean CSMs should have a quota, and it's not an argument for who should own the renewal. It does mean that a CSM, who wants to be good at their job and maximize their contribution to the organization, should constantly be on the look out for opportunities to expand relationships with customers and even bring in new customers. Even if all that means is they'd then introduce that existing or new customer to the sales team and say, "I think there is a new opportunity here. I'd like to introduce you to ________." This is what a professional CSM should be among the other competencies that Rick describes in his book.
Learn more about Rick Adams:
- The book: Practical Customer Success Management: Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success.
- Book comes out July 2
- Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Customer-Success-Management-Generation/dp/0367182769/
- Barnes and Noble - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/practical-customer-success-management-richard-adams/1130660095
- Rick's Website, Practical CSM - https://www.practicalcsm.com/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickadams01/
- Rick's Linkedin Article, The 14 Tenets of Customer Success: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/14-tenets-customer-success-rick-adams/
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio" and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
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Irene Lefton, customer success advisor and co-chair on the governing council of the Customer Success Leadership Network joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about the things we fail at creating and implementing customer journey maps. She wrote an article called, Five Common Failures of Customer Journey Maps. In this episode we unpack her article and one over arching theme is creating a journey detailed enough so we can create a predictable customer experience, but flexible enough so as not to become so rigid that we cannot respond to customer needs.
Learn more about Irene:
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irenelefton/
- Her Linkedin Article: Five Common Failures of Customer Journey Maps - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-common-failures-customer-journey-maps-irene-lefton/
- Customer Success Leadership Network: http://customersuccessnetwork.com/
Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
- Write a review on Apple Podcasts or where ever you get your podcasts.
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells
- Comment below.
Thank you for listening to the show.
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We talk about customer advocacy, but we rarely talk about employee advocacy. When you think about it, who has more of an affinity for your company than your employees? Why not enable employees to advocate for your company. If we really believe the mantra, "if we take care of our employees, they will take care of our customers," then why not advocate for our employees and help them build their personal brands along the way. Glenn Gaudet, founder and CEO of GaggleAMP, the first employee advocacy platform designed to leverage employees and supercharge your marketing efforts, joins Helping Sells Radio to help you help your employees take care of your customers.
Learn more about Glenn:
GaggleAmp website: https://www.gaggleamp.com/helpingsells
Glenn's book: https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Community-Conversation-Making-Business/dp/0615555160
On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenng/
Glenn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/glenng
GaggleApp on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GaggleAMP
We write about all of our podcasts! Check out the full posts and learn what we learn from our guests at helpingsells.com.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “Helping Sells Radio and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
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Mary Poppen, Chief Customer Officer at Glint (now part of Linkedin) joined Helping Sells Radio to talk about how she implemented a low-touch, self-service customer success model and increased NPS at the same time. It seems counter intuitive that a company can do this. Most of us might think customers would want more service, more hands-on service, and more personalized service. But guess what? Mary listened to customers and guess what they said. Just guess. They said, "We want you to help us be more self-sufficient." Mary listened. Mary delivered.
Mary also talked about this during her talk at Gainsight Pulse Conference. But we got to the detail.
Irit Eizips of CSM Practice helped and co-delivered the Gainsight Pulse Conference talk with Mary. We talked to Irit about it at Pulse. Here is a link to her episode (#120): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/120-gainsight-pulse-2019-irit-eizips-says-customer/id1080713333?i=1000439320196
Learn more about Mary:
- Her Linkedin Article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/happy-employees-customers-better-business-results-mary-poppen/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marypoppen/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Keith Mattes, Gainsight administrator and program manager at Pearson. Keith talks about how he connects Gainsight, Salesforce, and Jira together to improve the overall customer experience. Learn more about Keith: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmattes/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to David Sakamoto, VP of Customer Success at GitLab. At his conference talk, David gave people a recipe for “how” to instill a culture of customer success throughout an organization. And if it can be done at a 100% remote company, it can be done at yours. Learn more about David: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsakamoto/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Guilherme Lopes, co-founder of RD Station. He came all way from Brazil to be at Pulse for the fifth time to attend and to give a talk. He is part of the conference now. We talked to Guilherme about why he is stepping down as the leader of the 150 person customer success organization to lead a small group of 5 people inside his company’s product team. He made this switch because he believes strongly that he can capture his company’s next wave of growth by driving a product-led growth strategy. Just one more example of how customer success and product are colliding in service of the customer experience. Learn more about Guilherme: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guilhermefigueiredolopes/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Beatriz Datangel, who runs product at TruSTAR. The customer success category is expanding and Beatriz is at the leading edge….because as she says, “you cannot have a customer succeed with the right product.” Learn more about Beatriz: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bzdata/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Aaron Thompson, general manager at Success Hacker. We walked around the expo floor, talked to a few people and even had a cameo from Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight. Learn more about Aaron: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/athomps/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Mike Sasaki, Head of Customer Success at Mitek Systems. His company is participating in three conferences at the same time in San Francisco, and he chose to attend Gainsight Pulse 2019. Naturally. Learn more about Mike: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasakimike/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Sumeru Chatterjee, head of customer education at Gong.io. He is two weeks on his new job and took the valuable time to attend the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019. Learn more about Sumeru: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumo/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Star Hofer, director of customer success at eCompliance. She has been to Pulse five times and still has things to learn. She came this year to focus her learning on how customer success and sales can work together better. We also took a topic diversion…Star was scheduled to run a 50 mile ultra marathon in Ontario one day after Pulse. Naturally, we had to ask her about that. Learn more about Star: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/starbedwards/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Gereint Collier, customer success lead at ITGL. What’s different about Gereint’s customers role is that his company is an authorized Cisco partner so they do customer success for someone else’s software. What’s the same is that Gereint is supporting customers by helping them achieve outcomes. It helps that Cisco is driving customer success through the partners and ITGL is leading the effort. Learn more about Gereint: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gereint-collier-31bbab26/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Kolten Keeney, director of customer success at Comcate. Kolton talks about selling and servicing SaaS software to government agencies and how customer success plays a role in helping government achieve outcomes. Learn more about Kolten: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/koltenkeeney/
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talk to Nils Vinje, who has been to every…single…Pulse. That is rarefied air. Nils reminds us that in order to become advanced at customer success, teams need to master the fundamentals. This is an important point…Advanced = Fundamentals. Learn more about Nils: Glide Consulting: https://glideconsultingllc.com On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilsvinje
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We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things. In this episode, we talked to Irit Ezips, CEO of CSM Practice. She gave a talk with Mary Poppen, Chief Customer Office at Glint, about implementing a low touch, scalable customer success model and increasing NPS. Irit talked about her framework and Mary talked about how she applied it to increase NPS 40 points. Learn more about Irit Eizips: CSM Practice: https://www.csmpractice.com On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eizips/
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It's easy to say that we care about customer adoption, that our priority is to help customers adopt our products. The problem is that customer/product adoption is meaningless. Or at least it's too vague to be useful. It's not like we can run a report on adoption, can we? Megan Macaluso, VP of Strategic Development at ESG joins the show to talk about how we can measure adoption...more precisely. Not only does she lay out specific measurable customer adoption metrics, but she explains that the best way to learn what customers value (and therefore what to measure) is for customer success teams to pay attention to what customers are saying, look for patterns, and turn those patterns into hypotheses that the product teams (or data science team) can test. This is how we turn anecdotal data into objective data.
Too often we get dismissed when we bring up anecdotal stories like, "Customers hate the new green button." Product teams scoff and think to themselves, "You had two whole conversations about the green button? Wow. It must be a real problem." The right way to handle this problem is for the customer success team to say, "We have a hypothesis: This green button is causing customers to not perform that action. Could we test that?" A good product team should respond positively to that. But, advises Macaluso, we have to "pay attention to those indicators."
In short, pay attention. Be a hypothesis machine.
Learn more about Megan:
- ESG - https://esgsuccess.com
- Megan's Blog - How to Measure Customer Adoption: https://esgsuccess.com/how-to-measure-customer-adoption/
- Megan's Blog - 5 Questions to Gauge Customer Adoption: https://esgsuccess.com/5-questions-gauge-customer-adoption/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-macaluso-9a031a14/
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Win/Loss reason is a simplistic way to report in wins and losses, according to Alan Armstrong, founder and CEO of Eigenworks. What we really need to do is understand what was the decision, how was it made, what was the quest, how stable was that decision, were we at risk of losing, and in future deals like this, how secure can we be in our positioning? These questions help Alan get to the non-obvious surprising findings in both win/loss and churn/retention analysis. Let's face it, win/loss reasons never say you were outsold and win/loss reports from your CRM rarely tell the real story. In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, Armstrong explain how he digs deeper, talks to customers in the context of their story, to find out the real reasons they come to you or leave you. It is almost never the reason you think it is.
Learn more about Alan:
- Eigenworks: https://www.eigenworks.com/
- Alan on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awarmstrong/
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User adoption is not easy. We all know this, and yet we are doing ourselves any favors when we treat the customer go live date as the main goal of brining on new customers. Even if we are not doing it intentionally, we get so wrapped up in getting the customer up and running, we get to the go live date and allow ourselves to be relieved. "Whew! Now that that's over, we can move on to the next customer." We should be treating the go live date as the beginning, not the end. We talked to Jason Whitehead, CEO of Tri Tuns, specializing in customer success management and IT user adoption. He helps us understand how to break the mindset of "go live and go home."
Learn more about Jason:
- Tri Tuns Website: https://trituns.com
- The blog post we talked about, How to sustain high software user adoption: https://softwaresuccessblog.com/2019/05/how-to-sustain-high-software-user-adoption/
- Jason on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwhitehead/
Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
- Write a review on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/helping-sells-radio/id1080713333
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells
- Comment below.
Thank you for listening to the show.
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"Innovative, new products are difficult to understand and we have only seconds to help customers understand why they should care." According to April Dunford, author of the new book, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It, position is the way to do that. The way we look at this at Helping Sells Radio, positioning is a way to help customers discover that our product can uniquely help them solve a problem and/or achieve some outcome. Of course April says it much better that we can, and we had her on the show just to make sure.
Positioning has been around for as long as marketing has...which is to say, it is not hip and cool, like conversational marketing or customer success marketing. But. It is one of the most important things a company can do to help prospective customers find you. Here is the big time problem that April is on a mission to solve: almost no one deliberately positions their product, and that turns out to be a huge mistake because when companies do not deliberately position themselves, customers do that for you and lump you in to what they already know. Every time you are in a battle with a competitor. Customer customer keeps saying, "You're like [ insert competitor ] but you don't have this (or that) feature." And you keep saying, "But we're not like [ insert competitor ]. Really. We're not." Then, it's too late. The customer has positioned you. April's book is a call to action for anyone who wants to tell customers who they really are.
Position yourself or be positioned.
Learn more about April:
- Her book: Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It
- https://www.amazon.com/Obviously-Awesome-Product-Positioning-Customers/dp/1999023005/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=obviously+awesome&qid=1557267074&s=gateway&sr=8-3
- April's website: https://aprildunford.com
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprildunford/
- On Twitter: https://twitter.com/aprildunford
- The Medicine Talk Tweet: https://twitter.com/billcush/status/1103770476373925888
- The Uber for Cats Tweet: https://twitter.com/billcush/status/1103775904461803520
- We never position products deliberately: https://twitter.com/billcush/status/1103771010124247040
- Positioning helps customers understand why they should care: https://twitter.com/billcush/status/1103771625214754816
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We are all very smart people, and we want to use those smarts to help our customers. So, naturally, we define our customers' journey and then try to help our customers through that journey. Here's the thing. Just because we want this to be our customers' journey, doesn't mean it's the journey our customers want to take. Our customers have their own journey in mind, and they might not even know what they journey is yet. Go figure. Instead of defining the customer journey for our customers, Kia Puhm, founder and CEO of the DesiredPath, has created an intelligent framework for discovering and documenting our customers' "desired path" to using our products and then how to measure it. You will have many "ah ha" moments listening to this discussion and a few times you might even say to yourself, "Of course. It's so obvious now. I'm going to hire Kia's company to help my team do this."
And, I learned what a desired path is. It is a thing.
Learn more about Kia:
- Her new website: https://www.thedesiredpath.com/
- Her eBook: Scroll down the page on her website
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiapuhm/
- On Twitter: https://twitter.com/kiapuhm?lang=en
- On Helping Sells Radio Episode 41: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-41-kia-puhm-wants-you-to-end-product-sales/id1080713333?i=1000386231506
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I wanted to talk to Paul Rush, founder of Substantial, a digital product studio, because he has an important point of view on selling without being in hardcore selling. Like you, Paul does not come from a hardcore sales background. Although his background is computer science and your background is in post-sales, customer-facing roles, you both are selling everyday without being in sales. Whereas Paul is selling his company services to prospects, you are selling product features, service offerings, and especially selling renewals to your software. And yet we don't think of our selves as in sales.
Please, if you learn one thing from this podcast learn this: You are in sales no matter what your job title is. And it's not that scary. Selling does not have to be about convincing people to buy from you. It is more about creating an environment that draws people to you and want to buy from you. There is science out there that indicates people buy from people they like. So all you have to do is increase the frequency at which you engage with customers. Be engaging. Be helpful. Be likable. If you do that, your customers will trust you more, and they will likely buy from you again. You will start making warm introductions between your customers and account executives at renewal time and (dare I say) you might help make these renewals with up sells.
I can't wait for you to listen to this episode.
Learn more about Paul:
- His Company, Substantial: http://substantial.com
- Medium Blog: https://medium.com/substantial/tagged/blog
- Paul is not on social media. He prefers real relationship building. So no links to social media accounts will be shown here.
Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
- Write a review on iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/helping-sells-radio/id1080713333
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells
Thank you for listening to the show.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Philip Bourne, Non-Executive Director of CEdMA Europe, and former Senior Director at Symantec, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about his new book, Technical Training Management: Commercial Skills Aligned to the Provision of Successful Training Outcomes. The book is released on 8 April 2019 just in time for the CEdMA Europe Conference in London. CEdMA is the Customer Education Management Association. The main premise of Bourne's book is that we need to "develop and deliver results that provide the customer with an expected return on their IT investment (which, in case we forgot means investment in our products)."
Get the book:https://shop.bcs.org/store/221/detail/workgroup?id=3-221-9781780174808
CEdMA:
https://www.cedma.org/cedma-europe
Connect with Philip Bourne on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-bourne-01a4a32/
Connect with Philip Bourne on email:
Bournesinuk@btinternet.com
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Many of us are growing their teams, and if you are like me, our instinct is to hire people near us. Me personally...I have a slight fear of finding someone remotely. There is a lot of trust that is necessary, and frankly, since I do not have my processes documented as well as they should be, it is daunting to hire remote help and believe they can deliver what I need. Not because the remote worker is not capable because I am not organized enough to set the right expectations and provide the right resources for a remote worker to be successful. That is on me. But after I spoke with nathan Hirsch is the co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, I have an entirely new perspective and confidence that I can build and manage a remote team and grow like crazy. This episode is about helping you create a process for hiring, building, and leading a remote team. There is talent everywhere.
Learn more about Nathan:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathan.hirsch
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/realnatehirsch
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanhirsch/
- FreeeUp: https://freeeup.com/
- FreeeUp Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/outsourcingmasters/
- Nathan's calendar: https://calendly.com/freeeup-nathan
- Nathan's email: nathan@freeeup.com
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I could not believe my eyes. It said, in her post, that she quit her job to build the customer success community in Europe. She also said, in her Linkedin article, that she had no plan. Not many people quit something to start something new with no plan. Kate Forgione, CEO and founder of the Customer Success Network did. And you know what? I think the customer success community in Silicon Valley could learn a lot from what Kate is building out of London. In this episode, I talk to Kate about the customer success community in Europe, what CSMs can learn from the big four, five, or six management consulting firms about customer engagements, and how she built a growing and thriving community of customer success professional who host and run meetings across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Learn more about Kate and the Customer Success Community:
- Customer Success Network: https://customersuccessnetwork.org
- Customer Success Community: https://customersuccessnetwork.org/join
- Customer Success Network on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CxNetworkOrg
- Customer Success Network on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/customersuccessnetwork-org/
- Customer Success Network on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpTnIag_P6PPi6MAlGeHelQ
- Kate on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kateforgione/
- Kate on Twitter: https://twitter.com/forgiok
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I recently re-listened to this episode with Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow in the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School and author of Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos.
What blew me away (again) was the point she made about the need for us to be both a specialist in our field AND a generalist. The question was: "Should we be generalists or deep specialists?" Gardner's response was a direct, "Yes, And."
"I don't think we have the privilege anymore of being one or the other."
But there is a trend towards being specialists. We are all headed down that road. And yet, the world is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). In a VUCA world, there is a huge demand for multi-disciplinary perspectives to tackle complicated problems. Smart collaboration is the ability to bring together a group of specialists to solve VUCA problems. Those who can do that in service of customers are at a huge advantage.
Smart Collaboration is one of my favorite, most thought-provoking reads of the last two years.
The Book: https://www.amazon.com/Smart-Collaboration-Professionals-Succeed-Breaking/dp/1633691101/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=smart+collaboration&qid=1553030427&s=gateway&sr=8-1
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Donna Weber, President of Springboard Solutions, is back on the show to pile on the bone picking with too many software companies that don't listen to their customers. This is especially true during and sooner after the handover from sales to service. Donna argues that marketing and sales organizations are good at leading customers through a buying journey, and that when a deal closes, there is no equivalent or leading going on in services. Well Donna is leading the charge to change that by helping companies create orchestrated onboarding meant to bring internal teams together and lead the customer through the success journey.
Donna's blog posts we talked about:
- Customer engagement is the killer app: http://www.springboardin.com/blog/customer-engagement-is-the-killer-app
- Customer success starts with empathy: http://www.springboardin.com/blog/customer-success-starts-with-empathy
- Whoever understands the customer best wins: http://www.springboardin.com/blog/whoever-understands-the-customer-best-wins
Donna's company (Springboard Solutions): https://www.springboardin.com/
Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
- Write a review on iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/helping-sells-radio/id1080713333
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells
- Comment below.
Thank you for listening to the show.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
After Nils Davis, author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook, and I shared a panel at the January Customer Success Network Meetup, it seemed natural to further the discussion on the podcast. We go deep into how product management and customer success team can work better together in service of the customer. My favorite part of our discussion had to do with how to say "no" to customers. Actually, we don't say "no." It is more a matter of prioritizing, how to communicate that to customers, and more importantly, how to listen to customers and dig into what they really want when they ask for a feature. Hint: It's not always the feature they are after.
Learn more about Nils Davis:
- His website: https://secretpmhandbook.com/
- All the Responsibility Podcast: https://alltheresponsibility.com/
- YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsfRtYYC4198qAsUVllDg6w
- The Book: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Product-Manager-Handbook/dp/1983838934/
- The Persuasion Course: https://secretpmhandbook.com/persuasion/
Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
- Write a review on iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/helping-sells-radio/id1080713333
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells
- Comment below.
Thank you for listening to the show.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
As Paul Henderson describes in his book, The Outcome Generation: How a New Generation of Technology Vendors Thrives Through True Customer Success, "customers buy technology products and services to achieve an end outcome. Success comes for a customer when they achieve that bigger outcome. Therefore, customer success programs should focus on enabling that bigger outcome." And yet....as many of us know, few technology vendors focus on helping customers achieve those outcomes. We've been picking this bone with the customer success industry since we launched Helping Sells Radio. Paul is a rare voice advocating for customers...for helping customers deliver the results they're after...which is why they bought your software in the first place. If a customer buys your marketing software and their pipeline does not go up, why keep your software...they should just hire a marketing agency. If this marketing company wants to keep this customers, it better help the customer increase the pipeline....not just "use the product." Who cares if they use the product and sales don't go up?
The Outcome Generation is the best book on customer success. If you want to deliver results. If you want to be ahead of 95% of other customer success leaders, you must read Paul's book. Then you must "do" Paul's book.
Well, actually. Listen to this episode first, then read the book, then do the book.
Then you might even get promoted.
Learn more about Paul:
- Get the book: https://www.amazon.com/Outcome-Generation-Technology-Vendors-Customer/dp/0648216101/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=outcome+generation&qid=1551221943&s=gateway&sr=8-1
- Paul's Website - Outcome Leaders: https://outcomeleaders.com/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulhenderson5/
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David Apple, Gemeral Manager of US and VP of Customer Success at Typeform joined the company to run sales. It wasn't long before Typeform didn't have a problem generated new sales. People were signing up for Typeform like crazy since it was such a good product. Typeform wanted to turn it's attention to retention and expansion and asked David to build a customer success function. David was deliberate about what he created, a customer success organization with six distinct teams: support, customer education, customer experience, customer outcome managers, sales, operations.
In that order.
Don't let it breeze by you that customer education came second.
David described this structure quite well on the OV | Build podcast (link below). Of course, I wanted to take the discussion with him about his customer education team further. That's why he's on this episode of Helping Sells Radio.
So, listen it.
p.s. Notice he called customer success managers, customer outcome managers. We didn't talk about that on the show, but that title is worth pondering. Hard.
Learn more about David:
- Listen to that OV Build Podcast we talked about: OV Build Episode 30: https://labs.openviewpartners.com/how-typeform-leveraged-customer-success-to-scale-to-over-3m-users-podcast/#.XGH2uM9KjWU
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/appledavid/
- On Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidcapple?lang=en
Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
- Write a review on iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/helping-sells-radio/id1080713333
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells
- Comment below.
Thank you for listening to the show.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Thales Teixeira, Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, has a new book out TODAY, as of February 19, 2019, called Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption. The book is about digital disruption, but not in sense you might mean. It's not about inventing new, blow-our-minds-innovative products. It's more practical than that. It's about (my words) "interrupting" the customer journey and insert yourself there, and introducing your product or services to one single step in that journey. Win there. Then expand. I loved the framework, and you will notice when you listen to my conversation with Thales, I was a little blown away.
Learn more about Thales:
- Get the book on Amazon: Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption
- His Website: http://www.decoupling.co/
- On Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThalesHBS
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thales-teixeira-391587/
Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd:
- Write a review on iTunes. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/helping-sells-radio/id1080713333
- Tweet us using the hashtag #HelpingSells
- Comment below.
Thank you for listening to the show.
Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com
Adam Avramescu is back on the show for the third time to discuss his new book, Customer Education: Why Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter. Adam offers some important advice. If you are thinking about building a customer education function, Adam wants you to ask yourself, "What is your customer education charter?" This matters because education can make a direct contribution to any and all steps in the customer journey. And when you are starting out, you don't want to try to address everything. You want to pick one of the steps, then go make friends with the team that owns that step in the journey (for example, marketing or sales or customer success or support) and together define clearly how education can make a difference. We need to work more collaboratively in service of our customers.
"Make friends with the teams that are actually out in front of customers," explains Adam. "If you don't, you don't have empathy for those teams or for the customers they serve."
Effective customer education requires empathy.
Learn more about Adam:
- Adam's book
- Adam on Linkedin
- Adam on Twitter
- Adam's first appearance on Helping Sells Radio (Episode 4)
- Adam's second appearance (with Dave Derington) on Helping Sells Radio (Episode 101)
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If you sold sales software to sales people, and the software promised a specific outcome, how would you help customers achieve that outcome? You might publish that outcome on a dashboard in your product and place it in a highly visible location so your customers can see it every day. You might also overlay a target on the dashboard so customers know the number they need to achieve and the gap between current state and goal state. You might also color code the dashboard to make it even easier to understand current state. This is just what Adam Honig, founder and CEO of Spiro.ai does in his CRM product. The outcome Spiro is designed to help customers achieve is having more meaningful conversations with customers. Sales people spend 40% of their time doing administrative work in CRMs when they should be spending more of that time on high value tasks, like talking to prospects. While conversations with prospects does not necessarily lead directly to new sales, it does put sales people in a position to succeed. So Adam's goal is to help customers have more of those conversations and help them track towards that outcome.
Learn more about Adam Honig:
Spiro: https://spiro.ai/helpingsells/
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Here's the problem with consulting. An expert comes in, advises, and leaves. OR. If more than advise is needed, a consultant is hired for a long term engagement to actually do the work. Months and months of billable work occurs. Call it staff augmentation that is very expensive. Eventually the consultants leaves, the engagement is over and very little of the capability remains with the client. This is a good short term solution to a problem. Andrew Marks and Todd Eby, co-founders of SuccessHacker don't think is approach is good for the consulting firm or good for the client. They don't consider a client engagement successful unless they teach a client what they need to know so they can continue to do it themselves. "We don't want to be there for a long time. We want to come in, teach clients what they need to know, and help then get on the journey." SuccessHacker approaches consulting with an education mindset. How do you approach engagements with your clients?
Learn more about Andrew and Todd and SuccessHacker:
-SuccessHacker: https://www.successhacker.co
-Outcomes Community: https://www.customersuccess.community
-Andrew Marks on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmarks/
Andrew Marks on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CSuccessHacker
-Todd Eby on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddceby/
-Todd Eby on Twitter: https://twitter.com/toddceby
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Customer Success has taken the world by storm. And customer education is a pillar of customer success, says Dave Derington, Director of User Enablement of Azuqua and Adam Avramescu, head of customer education and training at Checkr. Think about it. Customer success is all about figuring out how to keep customers happy and get them to use more of our products. If that is customer success in a nutshell, then Dave and Adam argue that customer education is the answer to those questions. Said another way. Education sells more product. It brings more customers back. It fosters loyalty. It gets customers excited about your product and your company. It builds community. Customer education cannot solve all of your problems, but it can set customers up for success.
We also talked about Dave and Adam's new podcast CELab: Customer Education Labs. It focuses on customer education and their first episode is about how to get started with customer education.
Here is a link to the first episode:
- CELab: https://customer.education/podcast/episode-1-getting-started-with-customer-education/
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Sue Duris, director of marketing and customer experience at M4 Communications, comes into the studio to talk about the similarity and differences between customer experience, customer success, and marketing. We started with customer experience. Sue says her favorite definition of customer experience comes from Forrester, which says that it's every interaction or touchpoint a customer has with your brand. Every. Interaction. Bill had to ask, "Doesn't that include the experience our customers have when we send them invoices? What if the invoice looks like we created it manually. What if it was sent from a "no-reply" email address? What if the customer has a question about the invoice and no one gets back to her? Does the accounts receivable manager need a promotion to customer experience manager?" These are the kinds of questions we talk about with Sue on this episode of Helping Sells Radio.
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Helping Sells Radio reaches across the pond to speak to David Jackson, CEO of TheCustomer.co following his recent talk at Gainsight's Pulse Europe 2018 titled, How to Construct a Predictive Health Score With or Without Usage Data. David gave that talk with Charli Rogers, Vice President, Client Success at Yext. The subject alone is more than enough reason to have David on the show. But digging further, David has a unique perspective on product-led customer success, which is timely with Gainsight's acquisition of Aptrinsic, and his views on simplifying customer are music to our ears.
Learn more about David:
- David's company: https://thecustomer.co/
- On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjacksonuk/?originalSubdomain=uk
- On Twitter: https://twitter.com/@tweetdavej/
- That blog post on simplifying customer success: https://thecustomer.co/2018/10/19/simplifying-customer-success/
- David's product-led customer success eBook: https://thecustomer.co/2018/07/17/product-led-cs-ebook/
- More on the Gainsight / Aptrinsic acquisition: https://www.gainsight.com/blog/gainsight-just-acquired-aptrinsic-heres-whats-next/
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We talk about the customer journey. But the term journey implies there is a path, and customers take the path. If customers are unique, and most of us think they are, then wouldn't they take their own path? And if each customer takes a unique path, then how are WE (software companies) supposed to manage that? The answer is: We aren't. That's why I like that Ellie Wu talked about moments. Ellie Wu, Senior Director of Customer Success at SAP Concur and a top 100 Customer Success Influencer, joins Helping Radio to talk about owning moments (not the customer). WE talk about a lot of other things too, including fawning over her Linkedin videos, whether to hire a customer success executive or a customer success manager first, and we even talked briefly about Olympic skeleton racer, Noelle Pikus Pace and how she overcame the possible destruction of her Olympic dreams with one statement from her doctor in her darkest moment.
Learn more about Ellie:
- Ellie's latest Linkedin Video. When you see it, you will know why I like them
- https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6466691004526325760
- Link to Noelle Pikus Pace's TEDx talk on overcoming her injury
- https://rgs.usu.edu/tedxusu/portfolio-items/noelle-pikus-pace/
- Ellie's Website: http://www.elliewu.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elliewu/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/EllieWu_
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What would you do, if you could split off a small team of developers and could direct them on changes to the product that customers hound you about every day? This new team, your team, would work in parallel to the product development team, unencumbered by the restrictions of the product roadmap. No more begging the product team to listen to you. No more making the case that this customer is special and this feature is important. No more explaining to customers, "I promise, I'll pass that along to our product team." What if you could make those changes happen? What if you could be a true voice of the customer? This is what Mel Bilge, customer experience led at Learndot by ServiceRocket can do. Jealous? In disbelief? Well, we talk to her about how it works, why she did it, and why Mel thinks this could be the future of the product / customer experience mashup.
Learn more about Mel:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihabilge/
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Jay Gibb is the founder and CEO of a B2B SaaS company called CloudSponge and a partner at a distributed software engineering consulting agency called Arizona Bay. Arizona Bay builds software products for its clients, usually SaaS products. Roughly 10-20% of Arizona Bay's customers are "ideal customers." An ideal customers in this case is defined by someone who comes to Jay and already has pre-sold an unbuilt software product. Think about that. Jay's customer has sold, to their customer, a software product....then they go to Jay and ask his firm to help them build it. Jay, his customer, and the customer's customer get together and start making it happen. But this isn't even the best part of the story.
The next level of customer that Arizona Bay gets is someone who wants to build a software product, knows what they want, but they do not have pre-sales. Jay helps them get pre-sales, so they can become an ideal customers. "I'll give them a bunch of mentoring and advice, and I'll send them down the path of getting pre-orders, and I'll help them do that, at no charge, because I'm trying to be helpful," says Gibb.
Strangely enough. Some customers reject that help. They already know what they want and are perfectly happy to say, no thank you to that help. Jay tells them, "Thanks but no thanks." That is not going to create an ideal customers, and these arrangements can lead to headaches for both parties.
Some prospects love Gibb's helpful approach and very often turn into customers. "The sales process is fun for me," says Gibb. "And when the customer is ready to get started, there is no competition. There are no bids. We are do deep into this relationship that we are just going to get the project."
We talked about many more things with Jay. But that was my favorite part.
My question for you is this, "How you do help your prospects become ideal customers?"
Learn more about Jay Gibb:
- Cloudsponge: https://www.cloudsponge.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaygibb/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CloudSponge
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If you are a regular listener of Helping Sells Radio, you know that whenever we have a guest on the show to talk about customer success, we challenge them (I'm putting that nicely here in the show notes) on the idea that customer success is really not yet about customer success and more about "our" success. I ask, "When are we going to change that and actually start talking about customer success?" I'm still waiting for the right answer. Well, we have two customer success guests on this episode, and they have an answer to the question. And the answer is: business outcome management. Dave Duke, Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at MetaCX, and James Scott, General Partner of the Customer Success Practice at SuccessHacker explain that business outcome management is a core customer success competency (or should be) that provides a team a methodology for helping customers achieve business outcomes.
We are one step closer to living up to the promise of customer success as a discipline.
Learn more about Dave Duke:
- High Alpha - That accelerator Dave mentioned: https://highalpha.com
- Dave Duke on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveduke26/
- Dave Duke on Twitter: https://twitter.com/djdukeiu
James Scott:
- SuccessHacker: https://www.successhacker.co
- James Scott on the Outcomes Community: https://www.customersuccess.community/members/517725
- James Scott on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ukjamesscott/
- James Scott on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ukjamesscott
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Sarah E. Brown, author of Power to the Startup People: How to Grow Your Startup Career When You're Not the Founder, wants to help people evaluate whether and how to build a career in startups. As we talk about on the show, most of what is written about startups is for the founder. Little-to-none has been written to help employees. Until now. Working at a startup can be fun and exciting and enriching and lucrative. Working at a startup can also be stressful and purposeless and cliche and unprofitable. To make matters worse, one startup might be a perfect fit for you, but a terrible match for your best friend, who you think is so much like you. In other words, working at startups is not for everyone. The point is to evaluate what you want out of your career and see how that matches up with what startups can offering. You need to look for a fit.
The most valuable part of Sarah's book is that it helps you think about this evaluation process. You quite literally could use Sarah's book to make a check-list of criteria and use it to evaluate your current role and possible next opportunity to determine the right fit build the right startup career.
Learn more about Sarah:
- The book, of course, Power to the Startup People: How to Grow Your Startup Career When You're Not the Founder: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Startup-People-Career-Founder-ebook/dp/B07HYDGYDN/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1539691710&sr=8-1
- Sarah's Website: https://sarahbrownmarketing.com/power-to-the-startup-people-book/
- Sarah on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SEBMarketing
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Chris Yeh joined Helping Sells Radio to talk about his new book, Blitzscaling: The Lightening-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies, which he co-authored with Reid Hoffman. Blitzscaling is written for entrepreneurs who want to grow their companies to massive sizes and understand how to navigate the transitions from small company to medium company to large company. It's not all roses. As Chris explains, "You start off building a company and dream about a day when you've got it all figured out, and it's all going to be smooth from there. It turns out that time never arrives." What happens instead is that once you do have it figured out, you almost have to start again from scratch because your company is entering a new stage of its lifecycle and the new stage requires a new set of beliefs, operating principles, and processes, and sometimes even people.
Companies go through stages. At each stage the company is completely different. And the company should be treated differently. This means founders and executive teams and even employees, need to make certain transitions so that the company can continue to grow and succeed into the next stage.
Peter Thiel helped us go from Zero to One. Reid and Chris helps us go from Zero to One Billion.
Learn more about Chris:
The book, Blitzscaling. Get it: https://www.amazon.com/Blitzscaling-Lightning-Fast-Building-Massively-Companies-ebook/dp/B0791239V7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539046843&sr=8-1&keywords=blitzscaling
Chris's website: https://chrisyeh.com/
Chris on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisyeh
Chris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrisyeh
The Masters of Scale podcast and Chris's cameo appearance: https://mastersofscale.com/#/arianna-huffington-what-great-founders-do-at-night
Chris's other book with Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha. The Alliance: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JTJ84EW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
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We sure do sound like an expert at work when we educate our peers and stakeholders about best practices in our industries. After all, our executive teams are asking us to implement best practices. Our customers expect us to follow best practices. The conferences we attended attract us with sessions on best practices. We learn them. We implement them. We are praised when we do. But did any of us sit down and think, before we charged down best practices hill, "Is following these best practices right for us?"
Jay Acunzo, keynote speaker, founder of Unthinkable Media and author of the upcoming book, Break the Wheel: Question best practices, hone your intuition, and do your best work, helps us change how we think about best practices. Jay tells us, "We are starting to lose sight of how to make good decisions at work. We think it's about finding that best practice. But here's the deal. Finding best practices is not the goal. Finding what works best for you is the goal.
Big difference.
So this begs the question. How do you (your organization) find out what works best for you?
That is the question Jay helps us answer on this episode of Helping Sells Radio.
Learn more about Jay:
The book: http://jayacunzo.com/book/
His website: http://jayacunzo.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jayacunzo
That Medium post we opened the show with: Confessions of a content creator: I don't care about data
https://medium.com/unthinkable-creativity/confessions-of-a-content-creator-i-dont-care-about-data-3542c2d9a3a5
(I post the URLs rather than just linking the text, in case some of these podcast services doesn't pick up the HTML. At least you can copy and past the URL if you want to get it).
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There is a first time for everything and this episode has two first times. First, we took Helping Sells Radio on the road to visit Dustin DeVan, founder and CEO of BuildingConnected at his office to talk about disrupting the construction industry with collaborative software. Second, Sarah E. Brown, founder and long-time co-host of Helping Sells Radio and director of content marketing at BuildingConnected, joins the show as a guest host AND a guest. She even took over the show open.
So, this was an exciting shows on multiple levels.
Riddle me this: How does a mechanical and aeronautical engineer with no aspirations to get into construction or technology, start a technology company for the construction industry? Think about that there for a moment.
In this episode you will learn how Dustin got into the construction industry, and while he was working in it, how he discovered that the construction industry is one of the most collaborative and also one of the most fragmented industries in the world. And with the gigantic number of construction projects around the world, organizing a seemingly endless number of contractors and sub-contractors and suppliers...none of them are connected in any modern collaborative sense. Dustin saw a need to create a network of contractors and sub-contractors to help all of these people work together better. For example, to help sub-contractor win more business, help contractors find the right sub-contractors, and ultimately help build better construction projects.
Learn more about BuildingConnected: https://www.buildingconnected.com
Dustin DeVan on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dustindevan/
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Here is the question of the day: "How far do you go to help a customer adopt your software?" I ask this question to many of our guests, and there isn't one right answer. As you can imagine, there are many answers. In other words, "It depends." My favorite answer now comes from Arjun Devgan, VP of global customer success and services at Percolate. His answer is to create a methodology for adopting the software and then publish an eBook describing it and also publishing tools customers can use during their implementation or digital transformation.
This is just like the question I received after my talk at CS100 Summit 2018 run by ClientSuccess about what courses one should start building if there is nothing today. The second course topic I suggested is to create a course on your rollout methodology. The idea is to help a customer with a proven process for getting up and running on your software. Presumably, you have such a process. Why not teach customers how to do it?
Percolate codified their process in "The Percolate Adoption Framework." Which anyone can download. Take a look. It will inspire you.
The Percolate Adoption Framework: https://learn.percolate.com/software-adoption-framework-enterprise-percolate/#
Arjun's Gainsight Blog, "The Customer Success Identity Crisis." https://www.gainsight.com/blog/customer-success-identity-crisis/
Arjun on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arjundevgan/
Arjun on Twitter: https://twitter.com/arjun_devgan
Arjun at Percolate: https://percolate.com/team#
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It is the the sixth and FINAL in the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack, so it is appropriate that we finish this series with Dave Blake's episode. The CS100 Summit Preparation Pack is a collection of past Helping Sells Radio guests who are also speaking at the 2018 CS100 Summit put on by ClientSuccess. When the agenda came out, it was glaringly obvious what a high level of speakers ClientSuccess attracts for their conference, we noticed five speakers were past guest of Helping Sells Radio. So we go together in the studio and decided to re-air all five of those episode just before and during the conference.
Enjoy the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack.
From Dave's episode:
One of the biggest obstacles to this customer-centric evolution is the buy-in of executives. According to Dave they believe in it because it's "THE" thing to do, however they don't invest the time and resources to make it truly happen. So they create CS teams within their organizations, yet they don't give them the ability or power to impact change within the organization to truly deliver a CS experience to customers. For example, if a product enhancement request comes from the CS team to the product development team, however there is no mechanism for the development team to prioritize the enhancement in their workflow. Worse yet, there may not be a way for the CS team to even speak to the development team to submit the request!
Only when executives break down the barriers between teams and departments and give accountability for CS to the right spots in the organization can it truly become a CS-focused company culture. "Until you turn the perspective outward, from outside to inside, that won't change," Dave said.
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It is episode five in the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack. The CS100 Summit Preparation Pack is a collection of past Helping Sells Radio guests who are also speaking at the 2018 CS100 Summit put on by ClientSuccess. When the agenda came out, it was glaringly obvious what a high level of speakers ClientSuccess attracts for their conference, we noticed five speakers were past guest of Helping Sells Radio. So we go together in the studio and decided to re-air all five of those episode just before and during the conference.
Enjoy the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack.
From Kristen's episode:
How can B2B companies get better with data?
To improve their relationship with data, B2B companies should plan out their data collection processes from start to finish, advises Kristen. "Leverage the people they have in place in high-touch customer roles," she said. To augment what they're going to do with technology in the future instead of with people, she went on to explain.
Tech tools can help B2B companies increase their one-to-many customer relationships and reduce the amount of people involved in maintaining the relationship on a regular basis. That's not to say companies can reduce the number of CS staff, but rather, deploying their staff in higher value tasks and let the technology take over the lower value ones.
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It is episode four in the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack. The CS100 Summit Preparation Pack is a collection of past Helping Sells Radio guests who are also speaking at the 2018 CS100 Summit put on by ClientSuccess. When the agenda came out, it was glaringly obvious what a high level of speakers ClientSuccess attracts for their conference, we noticed five speakers were past guest of Helping Sells Radio. So we go together in the studio and decided to re-air all five of those episode just before and during the conference.
Enjoy the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack.
From Nicolle's episode:
"Is it possible to monitor Customer Experience just by looking at data? Can we do that?" Bill was curious, since it can be hard to get customers to tell the truth when asking for feedback.
"In some organizations it's possible," Nicolle replied. "But I wouldn't recommend it." She explained that the data is only one part of the equation. It only gives you some of the information you need to create a positive CX for customers. At some point you'll need to speak to the customers to get the information directly from them. "You still have to talk to people to see what they're doing, how they're feeling, how they're using your products," she said. After all, you may discover your customers are using your products in a completely unexpected and unintended way that works!
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It is episode three in the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack. The CS100 Summit Preparation Pack is a collection of past Helping Sells Radio guests who are also speaking at the 2018 CS100 Summit put on by ClientSuccess. When the agenda came out, it was glaringly obvious what a high level of speakers ClientSuccess attracts for their conference, we noticed five speakers were past guest of Helping Sells Radio. So we go together in the studio and decided to re-air all five of those episode just before and during the conference.
Enjoy the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack.
From Todd Eby's episode:
Customer Success is simple. But the simplest things are often the hardest.
Todd's customer success philosophy: "Understand what Success looks like to your customers. Make it your mission to deliver the direction, guidance and experience necessary for your customers to achieve their definition of success and you’ll be successful. It’s as simple as that. " Is this really simple? If it is, why aren't more companies doing it? Or are they? Every company is like a snowflake; there is no cookie-cutter approach. That's why companies struggle.
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Although this is Helping Sells Radio Episode 85, it is episode two in the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack. The CS100 Summit Preparation Pack is a collection of past Helping Sells Radio guests who are also speaking at the 2018 CS100 Summit put on by ClientSuccess. When the agenda came out, it was glaringly obvious what a high level of speakers ClientSuccess attracts for their conference, we noticed five speakers were past guest of Helping Sells Radio. So we go together in the studio and decided to re-air all five of those episode just before and during the conference.
Enjoy the CS100 Summit Preparation Pack
From Nils' previous episode:
Nils has developed a model for building great customer success organizations. He calls it the 4 P’s of Customer Success.
- People
- Purpose
- Process
- Platform
We talked through this model and one of the most interesting parts of that discussion might have been the most controversial part of the interview. When it comes to purpose, a customer success team can have a primary purpose of satisfying customers or driving revenues, but it cannot drive both. Nils tells us we have to choose what to focus on. It is not to say teams cannot have both, but you cannot focus on both.
If you want to learn more about the 4 P’s of Customer Success, you can download the eBook that Glide Consulting has put together.
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This is first in a series of podcasts in anticipation of ClientSuccess's annual CS100 Summit Conference. We are calling this series the CS100 Summit Preparation pack. To kick off the preparation pack, Nils Vinje from Glide Consulting and CS100 Summit speaker, is back on the show for the third time. We talk to Nils about customer maturity impact on what level of services you provide, what he's talking about at CS100 Summit, and you are much better off spending 30 minutes documenting a process rather than perform that process over and over from memory. Because if you take that process and multiply it across a team of customer success managers, you will develop a lot of inefficiencies and deliver widely varying customer experiences.
Even if you cannot make it to CS100 Summit 2018, this episode gives you a taste of Nils' talk.
Learn more about CS100 Summit:
http://cs100.clientsuccess.com/
Go download those resources Nils talked about in the show:
https://glideconsultingllc.com/
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Are you creative? Most of us business people do not think of ourselves (or our professions) as creative. When we think of creative people, we think of artists and musicians and actors and writers. This is just one of the mistakes we make about creativity. Allen Gannett, founder and CEO of TrackMaven and author of "The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time," explains that anyone can be creative because creativity can be learned. He did the research and provides a way of thinking that will help any of us believe we can be more creative.
In just one example, Gannett explains that being creative is not just about the technical skill of whatever it is that we do. That skill could be painting or software sales. The technical skill of painting or selling is only one part of being creative. As Gannett explains, a creative person is good at three skills: the technical skill of the act, timing, and communicating and distributing your ideas. In other words, if you invented a new painting style or a new sales technique, it means nothing if your timing is off or if you cannot get that new idea out into the world.
If you want to be a more creative painter or sales person or customer success manager, I suggest you listen to this podcast and then go read "The Creative Curve."
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How well do you know your customers? Do you know their lingo? Do you use their lingo in your communication with them? Do you really? Jeffrey Shaw, author of the book Lingo: Discover Your Ideal Customer's Secret Language and Make your Business Irresistible, joins Helping Sells Radio to help us, help our customers say to themselves, "They so get me." One tactic Shaw suggests is for us to use self-identifying questions so a customer can screen themselves to us. He calls it to help "customers how up 80% positioned." Shaw explains, "When you know your customer so well you really embody their emotional triggers that you can pose questions in your marketing and on your website that ring so true for your ideal customers their typical response is "WOW! It's like your in my head."
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You want outcomes? Allison Pickens, Chief Customer & Corporate Development Officer at Gainsight, has outcomes. In fact, she is perhaps suggesting the ultimate customer outcome a customer could have after using your product. That outcome? Getting promoted. Think about it. Someone...an actual person bought your product. They stuck their neck out. Convinced many other people in their organization that buying your product was a good idea. The your product is a promise to make some meaningful improvement. People agreed and green-lighted the project. Looking back...someone is going to ask, "Was that a success?" If it was, perhaps your customer now looks so good, he or she ought to be promoted. Right? So, how many of your customers have been promoted? I think that might be the ultimate customer outcome. Put that in your dashboard and smoke it.
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Maybe you've never heard of value engineering, but it's been around. A while. According to Stephen Morse, there is a direct correlation between a company's success and the focus they bring to bear on getting Value Engineering right. And on this episode of Helping Sells Radio, Morse helps us get it right.
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She tried. And she succeeded. Naturally. Emilia D'Anzica, founder of Customer Growth Advisors, joined Helping Sells Radio intending to take over the show and interview Bill about his book. We did that at the end of the show, but before we did that, we spent time talking about Emilia and her work with customer success teams. Very early on in the show we talked about on-boarding pitfalls because we all want to avoid them. One of the pitfalls Emilia wants us all to really get is that we assume our customers will just learn how to use our software. And this is not true. Customer needs our help in on-boarding to understand why and how to use our software. But that does not mean turning on the fire hose and try to show the customers everything. Emilia urges us to make sure the on-boarding training is laser focused on the fewest most important task that get customers to perform the one thing they bought our product for...whatever that it. Don't do more that because customers will forget it anyway. Just get them to the one thing first. Then build on that learning later.
Oh, and we also talked about Emilia and the book she wants to write one day. We're going to check in on your Emilie. Write that book!
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Michael Redbord, General Manager of the Service Hub at HubSpot, joined Helping Sells Radio to talk about making customers successful. Software companies have to focus on building trust, adding value, and helping people do their job better. But how far should we go in helping our customer be successful? Asked another way, "Should the gym employee come to my house and throw away the cookies?" While Mike doesn't think the gym should go to people's houses slapping cookies out of their hands, we should try to help customers do their jobs better, not just get them to log into our software. Just think about how HubSpot does his. A lot of it is with education: educational blogs, HubSpot Academy, and the book "Inbound!" Speaking of books, Mike thinks the topic of making customers successful more than warrants a book. We agree. Write it, Mike.
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Matt Cameron used to hand write letters to prospects to get into their office for a sales call. After granting Matt a meeting, a global company CFO said to Matt, "I need to believe that you know something that I need to know now."
Whoa!
How many SDRs are thinking like that?
Not many.
At least in part, it seems this experience has driven Matt on his mission to help sales people learn executive acumen and become experts in the domain into which they sell, so that they can help prospects create value. Matt is well on his way. He founded SalesOps Central and created the SaaSy Sales Management boot camp to do just that. His background is as a sales leader at Salesforce and Yammer, two sales juggernauts to be sure.
Are you helping your sales teams development executive acumen and domain expertise?
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I bet you have heard of the golden rule. You may have even followed it a few times in your life. There is nothing wrong with the golden rule. I think it's great. But if you think about it carefully, the golden rule is inherently selfish..."treat people the way 'we' want to be treated?" Jeanne Bliss has another idea. An idea that is more personal but less selfish. The idea is to treat people the way you would want your mom to be treated. Whoa! Think about that there for a minute. Then, think about it in the context of business. For example, answer this question: "Would you turn your mom's warrantee down 3 days after it expires?" Not! But companies do that to customers every day. And it's a shame.
Jeanne Bliss, 5-time chief customer officer and 4-time author has a new book that I think threatens the golden rule's reign. We will soon all invoke the "Make Mom Proud" rule for how to treat our customers. And that is the name of her new book, "Would You Do That Do You Mother: The 'Make Mom Proud' Standard for How to Treat Your Customers."
Jeanne joins us on Helping Sells Radio to help us apply this new rule on our businesses.
Here is a link to her book. https://www.amazon.com/Would-You-That-Your-Mother-ebook/dp/B074YL5DPP/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1530545099&sr=8-1&keywords=make+mom+proud
Learn more about Jeanne Bliss and her work: http://www.customerbliss.com/
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According to Ari Hoffman, customer success is kind of like being a professional sports coach. The coach's number 1 priority isn't to fill the stands with fans, help the team get new sponsors, or worry about the price of food at the concession stands — it's to help the players win games. Help the players succeed on the field (or court, or wherever they play).
It's just one of the reasons why Hoffman, Customer Fanatic at MindTouch, spends his days listening to and sharing stories with customers, colleagues, other people in the tech industry, and even his friends and family. He wants to hear it all because he's curious about the stories that "engage people and raise the bar for everyone."
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This episode is so good we had to re-air it. Plus, we are going to experiment a little by going back into the archives once in a while and pull out some gems and bring them back to the front of the line. We'd love to know what you think. One of these gems is of course the episode with Catherine Blackmore, GVP of Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud. Three things we learned from Catherine are 1) education is a critical part of customer success. You cannot help customers be successful unless you help them learn. 2) Obviously, education is not all of it. With any software project, people have to change how they work. We have to help our customers through that change. Change management is part of customer success too. 3) There seems to be an endless debate about who should own the customer. Lost in this debate is how and whether sales and service is converging. Some signs say, "Yes." This is also a fun episode because we reminisced about stealing one of Catherine's ideas, which by the way, led to two new customer. Maybe you should steal this idea, too. We hope you like the re-broadcasting idea. Tell us if you do on Twitter using #HelpingSells.
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The first thing they did is insult me by telling me my data sucks. Actually, Your Data Sucks: Join the Club was the name of their talk at the 2018 Gainsight Pulse Conference. Patrick Lawler, Director of Customer Success and Services and Dave Derington, Director of User Enablement both from Azuqua join Helping Sells Radio to help us understand how we can use data to help our teams help our customers. Better. That sounds like a worthy endeavor because figuring out how to deliver customer success in a scalable way cab help our companies grow.
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It is always a treat when guests come into the studio because in-person interviews are so much more conversational and, therefore, better. Jessica McGlory, director of paid social at the online marketing firm Jellyfish, joins us to talk about how paid media can be helpful. Most of us don't think about paid online social advertising as being helpful, but when it is targeted the right way, contains the right message, and offers something useful, it can definitely help people achieve outcomes.
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What would you do if your CEO came to you and said, “We need to 10X the number of customers who complete our training in the next twelve months. Product use is down and churn is up. I need your plan by next Thursday.” After your panic attack recedes, you probably say to yourself, “How am I going to do that?” If you can relate to this exchange, then keep calm and attend this session. In it you will learn how to be ready for that challenge with customer education strategy design. In this special recording of a Gainsight Pulse Talk, Bill Cushard shows you how to design your customer education strategy and actually start working on it. Right here in this session. If you are responsible for on-boarding or helping customers learn your product, this session is for you.
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CSO Insights found that of companies that push through a CRM software implementation, less than 40% of organizations achieve full scales end-user adoption. That is what Brandon Bruce, COO and Co-founder of Cirrus Insight, tells us in this episode of Helping Sells Radio. We talk about why software projects fail and how to turn them around. He details all of this in his book, "The Shelfware Problem: A Guide to CRM Adoption."
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We spend all of our time on Helping Sells Radio talking about how to help customers achieve outcomes. In this episode, we're talking about how to help employees be their best at work. Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Atlassian, talks about how creating inclusive workplaces helps teams perform at higher levels and do the best work of their lives.
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Sangram Vajre, CMO and Co-Founder of Terminus, joined Helping Sells Radio to discuss how to drive revenue through account-based marketing. Sangram is also the author of Account-Based Marketing For Dummies and is the mastermind behind #FlipMyFunnel, which is on a mission to build the largest and most connected vendor-agnostic community of B2B marketing, sales and customer success professionals by leading them to become masters of their craft and heroes in their organization.
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Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow in the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School, joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss her book Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos. Her research has shown that when professional services firms bring multiple teams in to help clients achieve outcomes beyond the original engagement, in many cases without billing some of the early discovery work by the additional teams, that the firm can actually increase revenue per client. This has staggering implications for customer success and professional services teams who should focus on helping customers beyond the singular reason they were hired in the first place.
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In this episode we spoke to Tom Gerace, founder and CEO of Skyword, a leading content marketing platform and services company. Tom is a longtime entrepreneur and co-author of the book Storynomics: Story-drive Marketing in the Post-Advertising World. Tom joined us to discuss approaches to marketing and selling software in a post-advertising world.
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Josh Harcus, renowned author and sales leader, and Kyle Jepson, Inbound Sales Professor at HubSpot Academy, joined Helping Sells Radio to talk about increasing revenue by teaching sales teams to call customers and ask, "what can I help you find?" In this episode we explore why most sales teams pitch themselves into a corner and how to re-frame sales conversations into helping opportunities.
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Founders know that to have success, they need to sell — a lot. And quickly. Which is why their first hire is usually a salesperson. They want an expert to capitalize on any traction or buzz their early stage company has. Whitney Sales, General Partner at Acceleprise Ventures and creator of The Sales Method, joined Helping Sells podcast this week to talk about early-stage companies and why founders must learn to love selling.
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In this episode we spoke to Tony Ulwick, Founder and CEO of consulting firm Strategyn, and pioneer in Jobs to be Done Theory and the inventor of outcome-driven innovation. He also holds six patents related to the processes around outcome-driven innovation and has helped clients generate billions of dollars in revenue growth using his methods. Ulwick joined Helping Sells Radio to share how to build new products and services that win in the marketplace by helping customers get a job done better.
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Kristen Hayer, Founder and CEO of "The Success League," a customer success consulting firm that works with executives who are ready to build and develop a top performing customer success team, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about why CSMs need to embrace data and learn to use it to create a seamless customer experience for their customers. Easier said than done, but Kristen has practical tips for CS teams keen to grow their impact.
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In this episode, we chat with Close.io CEO and Co-Founder Steli Efti about how today's SaaS companies win by building software for the end users, not the buyers. Steli also discusses why so many organizations struggle with hiring really good sales leaders, how to convert a services business to a SaaS business, SaaS industry trends for 2018, and more.
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Steve Portigal has interviewed everyone from high-finance traders to rock musicians, regular families to medical professionals, all in search of finding out how to make products better. "Great leaders are not territorial," he said in this episode of Helping Sells Radio. "They're looking for everything and anything that can help make their products better."
In his book, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, Portigal starts off by stating that "you are not the user". That is, that interviewers are not the users of the product and so shouldn't be involved in the user research experience.
"The whole purpose of the interview is to understand someone else's point of view, belief structure, the language they use, etc. in order to embrace their perspective," says Portigal.
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In this episode, we spoke to Ken Hirsohn, past president, current treasurer, and longstanding board member of the Computer Education Management Association (CEdMA). Ken talked to us about running customer education operations at Alien Vault, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Veritas (Symantec). He has run multi-million dollar education operations with education as a P&L, and in this episode, talks about the ever-evolving role of training and integrating customer training with the entire customer experience.
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Keynote speaker, storytelling coach, and bestselling author Paul Smith joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about his book SELL WITH A STORY. If you want a practical explanation for how you can use stories to help your customers, this episode is for you. Paul provides many examples of how to use stories in the sales process, with existing customers, and even how brilliant it is to tell stories about people who are not even your customers.
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Marty Cagan, founder and partner of the Silicon Valley Product Group and author of the book, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about the new edition of his book, why product managers should fall in love with the problem not the solution, and whether Ben Horowitz is as hardcore in person as he is in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers.
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This week's episode of the Helping Sells podcast features Boaz Moar, currently the VP of Customer Success at OpenGov. Boaz has spent more than 25 years leading customer success teams in a variety of industries and developed a new index metric CS pros can use to zero in on the customers that will help your grow and increase revenues in the future.
In this episode of Helping Sells, Boaz sat down with Bill and Sarah to talk about the Customer Maturity Index (CMI) and how companies can use it to help their customers be more successful with their products.
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Greg Warner, Senior Technical Consultant at ServiceRocket, joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss how he helps customers avoid hurting themselves in their software projects. Or as Greg puts it, "Stopping them from running down the hallway with scissors." Greg also talks about how he helped a manager see his grandkids for the first time in months by helping him set up his work processes in Jira. Now that's an outcome.
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Irit Eizips of CSMPractice explains that customer success is a two-way street between the customer success manager and the client. Both are accountable for achieving desired outcomes sought by the client.
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In our latest episode of Helping Sells Radio, Nicolle Paradise, Senior Director of Client Experience at ADP explains how she uses data and customer feedback to help guide how ADP deals with customers. Nicolle is a "big fan" of looking at customer data to discover how they're really feeling about her products and company. She combines what customers tell her with what the data to get a holistic view of the customers.
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According to ClientSuccess CEO Dave Blake, most customer success teams were focused on tactical activities like onboarding and renewals. But what about the in-between? In this episode, Blake shares how companies who want to drive value and successful outcomes with their customers can do so by working on the entire customer lifecycle.
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Marcus Sheridan joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss his book They Ask You Answer: A Revolutionary Approach to Inbound Sales, Content Marketing, and Today's Digital Consumer, which is a call for entrepreneurs, marketing and sales professionals to answer customer questions as a means for helping customers, building trust, and driving sales. It is a simple approach that most of your competitors would not dare dream of implementing.
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Adam O'Donnell, co-founder and CEO of Successly Live, joins Helping Sell Radio to share what he learned from interviewing more than 200 customer success leaders. Adam and his team discovered some surprising insights about how many teams are using CS platforms (hint: it's way less than you probably think), the maturity of the CS industry, the most common reasons CS initiatives fail, and more.
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Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré is a SaaS Consultant and Customer Success Evangelist, who takes startups from problem/solution fit to product/market fit, all the way through growth marketing and scalable customer development. We invited Nichole on the show to talk about why product managers should include customer success milestones in user flows and how product management can work better with Customer Success and use Customer Success milestones to help customers achieve their own journey.
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Emilia D'Anzica, VP of Customer Engagement at WalkMe, has returned to Helping Sells Radio to talk about what to do when customers want to take an approach that customer success managers know will not lead to success, and how to educate customers on why they should take a different approach. In other words, Emilia wants CSMs to lead customers to success.
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In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, Chris Doell, VP of Customer Success for the cloud security division of Cisco, talks about the importance of evaluating software vendors on four post-sales criteria in addition to price, features, benefits, and product fit, which most software buyers already focus on. Doell says these four criteria are hardly ever in RFPs that he receives from buyers, but you can bet they are in all of the RFPs that he sends to vendors. We dive into these four criteria with Doell to help you improve how you evaluate software companies.
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In this special episode of Helping Sells Radio, a panel of customer education executives at open source software companies share how to run customer education as profit-and-loss-focused businesses at global scale. Panelists include Cloudera Vice President of Customer Success Sarah Sproehnle, MuleSoft Head of Education and Certification Richard Huie-Buickius, and Couchbase Vice President of Learning and Strategic Development Peter Childers. This panel was recorded at the Business of Customer Education Conference (BOCE), which was co-located at the Gainsight Pulse Customer Success Conference in May 2017.
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In this special episode of Helping Sells Radio, Gainsight Head of Training Dave Derington and ServiceRocket Learning Platform Product Manager Jesse Miller tackle an issue that befuddles most customer education teams: how to link customer education activity with business results. They clarify the process for answering the question, "What impact did customer education have on customer satisfaction, NPS, product adoption, renewal rates, and even product sales?" Answering these questions can turn customer education leaders into rock stars in their companies because they have the potential to turn education from overhead to a profit center that contributes directly to company growth. This talk was recorded at the Business of Customer Education Conference (BOCE), which was co-located at the Gainsight Pulse Customer Success Conference in May 2017.
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In this special episode of Helping Sells Radio, Atlassian's Director of Training Sherry Quinn shares how to scale customer training and address different customers' needs by starting with a core curriculum and repurposing it into multiple formats. This is a recording of her talk at the Business of Customer Education Conference (BOCE), which was co-located at the Gainsight Pulse Customer Success Conference in May 2017.
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In this special episode of Helping Sells Radio, Director of Workplace by Facebook for the Americas Monica Adractas gives a talk about how Facebook thinks about educating employees of enterprise customers, many of whom do not have email and do not sit at desks. Deskless workers interact with colleagues at work primarily through an app in their mobile phone, which requires a whole new way of thinking about educating customers at scale. This is a recording of her talk at the Business of Customer Education Conference (BOCE), which was co-located at the Gainsight Pulse Customer Success Conference in May 2017.
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In this special episode of Helping Sells Radio, ServiceRocket Founder and CEO Rob Castaneda gives a talk at the 2017 Business of Customer Education Conference (BOCE) about how to use eduction to proactively help customers. ServiceRocket co-located its BOCE Conference at the Gainsight Pulse Customer Success Conference as a track dedicated to helping software professionals help their customers learn their software and achieve business outcomes.
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In this episode of Helping Sells Radio we're joined by post-sales expert Kia Puhm. Kia is an entrepreneurial executive who has held chief positions in customer success, services, account management and support at companies such as: Oracle, Eloqua, Day Software (Adobe), Intelex Technologies, and Blueprint Software Systems. Kia has pioneered the art of customer experience by leading businesses through the transition to customer-centric organizations. Kia explains how to end the product-sales-customer success-support tug of war.
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On this episode of Helping Sells Radio, Stratejos Founder and CEO Scott Middleton talks to us about how artificial intelligence (AI) is already changing project management. Chat bots are so smart, they can understand project performance and even tell who the highest performing people on the project team are.
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On this episode of Helping Sells Radio, Rachel Orston, CEO of UserIQ talks about a new role she has hired called customer growth architect. She explains that even though a customer architect is about customers success, it is not a customer success role. We found this interesting and dug into the purpose of this role and how it will be measured....right down to the metrics.
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Donna Weber, Principal at Springboard Solutions Consulting, joined the show to talk about the need to align customer education to customer because because no matter what you call it, customer success is about the entire post sales customer experience. That includes training.
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Chad Horenfeldt is a Customer Experience and Customer Success executive with 15+ years experience developing Customer Success teams with companies of all sizes. At Bluecore, he serves as Vice President of Customer Success and manages a CS team of CSMs, client onboarding, Support, technical services and education. Chad joined the show to discuss specific tips for hacking Customer Success at your own company.
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Ed Powers has been a practicing Customer Success consultant and community organizer for the past several years in Colorado and recently became Vice President of Customer Success at simPRO, an Australian company making business management software for trade contractors. Ed joined the show to discuss the psychology of Customer Success, applying neuroscience in the customer journey, what matters most to Customer Success leaders and practitioners in 2017, and building a Customer Success community based around learning and helping outside Silicon Valley.
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Nir Eyal, author of the bestselling book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and founder of the Habit Summit joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss how to design products products to help customers achieve outcomes.
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Tara-Nicholle Nelson, CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights, joins this episode of Helping Sells Radio to discuss how we should pay attention to how our customers want to live their life differently, and how we can help them achieve that. In her new book, The Transformational Consumer: Fuel a Lifelong Love Affair with Your Customers by Helping Them Get Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser, Nelson writes about how you can be successful by helping your customers achieve their goals, personal or professional.
Anthony Kennada is the VP Marketing at Gainsight, building and leading the Customer Success industry. He is responsible for managing the company’s global marketing strategy, from demand generation to brand marketing, and is credited with creating the “Pulse” community of Customer Success leaders. Today, over 3200 executives attend the annual Pulse conference in Oakland and the over 30 chapters of PulseLocal communities across the globe. We chatted with Anthony about the Business of Customer Education, Pulse Conference 2017, and the future of Customer Success.
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Customer Success veteran Amy Mustoe is an expert at building Customer Success functions from the ground up. At companies like SendGrid and The Reed Group, she created teams responsible for delighting customers–and generating millions in revenue. In this episode, Amy joined us to discuss how she's building a Customer Success function at Cloud Elements incorporating lessons learned from her past roles, and baking customer education and enablement into her team's success strategy.
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In this episode of Helping Sells Radio we talk to Jocelyn K. Glei, author of the book Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done, about how being effective at managing our team, overcoming email addiction, and how getting real work done is the new competitive advantage for people in the workplace.
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Throughout his career, Steve Frost has helped companies like Google and Netscape define their go-to-market strategy and business development tactics. Steve is dedicated to helping technology organizations implement new sales approaches that are helpful to customers as well as optimizing services touchpoints to drive new leads, increase revenue, and provide better customer outcomes. Steve joins us on Helping Sells Radio to dissect how to sell more software by fostering a helpful approach and aligning sales, services and Customer Success.
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This episode features Dailius Wilson, a Director at TrustRadius, a community of professionals sharing software reviews and best practices. Dailius is also an investor and strategic advisor to more than 65 companies around the word and founded his own startup in Sydney, making a list of 30 under 30 entrepreneurs in Australia. We talked to Dailius about how he's built his impressive career via a "helping sells" approach and why telling the truth is great for selling SaaS products.
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User onboarding expert Samuel Hulick joins the show to talk about how incentives actually prevent good user onboarding, why software companies should focus their onboarding efforts around helping customers get their job done, not on how to use the software, and why everyone is (or should be) in the onboarding business.
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In this episode, Apto's Customer Success Director Camilla Calhoun and Vice President of Sales Kerry Hudson join us to talk about how their SaaS company delivers Customer Success to the underserved commercial real estate industry.
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On today's show we're joined by ServiceRocket Chief Operating Officer Erin Rand. Erin discusses scaling tech companies, leading with people and process and how to build a more inclusive company.
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Hiten Shah, renowned entrepreneur, startup advisor and co-host of The Startup Chat podcast, joins Helping Sells Radio to chat about building a remarkable career focused on helping others, and how competing in today's SaaS market requires building remarkable self-service and helping customers help themselves.
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In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, Sarah and Bill are joined by Pat Durante, Senior Director of Education Services at Black Duck Software and President of the Computer Education Management Association (CEdMA) to talk about the continuously blurring lines between technical marketing, customer education, software adoption services, and customer success. No matter what you call it, it's all about helping customers use the software effectively so they are successful and they renew.
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ServiceRocket Founder and CEO Rob Castaneda joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about software adoption, the future of learning, and why it took us so long to get him on the show.
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Today's episode features Sujan Patel, founder of Webprofits, a content marketing agency that helps companies like Linkedin, Salesforce, and Zillow and others grow their businesses through content marketing. Sujan joined us to talk about why most marketing and sales teams are not aligned and how content can be the catalyst for bringing sales and marketing together to provide useful information to prospects and customers to accelerate the sales cycle. As Sujan says, "You don't need to be the creator of the information, but you need to be the source of information. Now that's a helping sells approach.
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Today's episode features Aaron Fulkerson, founder and the CEO of MindTouch, a provider of cloud-based software that uses product and support content to drive customer engagement and success. Aaron joined us to discuss how to crush it at sales through a no-selling approach, how to hire teams focused on doing "important work," building a culture of sales leaders and why companies should approach the sales cycle as a "success cycle".
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Today's episode features CrowdRiff's Head of Marketing Amrita Chandra. Amrita shares the importance of embracing the fundamentals of marketing and why talking to customers in a more personal way is more important than ever in B2B SaaS marketing. She also discusses the importance of building customer success-focused marketing programs--including the surprising insight that creating a frictionless cancelation experience can actually accelerate your sales cycle.
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ShareRoot COO Misha McPherson joined Helping Sells Radio to discuss how to create world-class sales teams. McPherson offers insights for building inclusive, highly effective sales functions and extols the virtues of adopting a helping sells approach.
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In today's episode, customer success visionary and Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta joins us to discuss growing a massive tech conference focused on helping customers achieve outcomes, the evolution of the customer success industry, and his new book.
In this episode, Oakland-based novelist and strategist Eliot Peper joins us to discuss his fourth novel, Cumulus, a dark, gritty science fiction story set in a near-future San Francisco Bay Area ravaged by economic inequality and persistent surveillance. Eliot shares how his entrepreneurial background and embracing a "helping sells" approach has helped him become a highly successful self-published author.
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Joining Helping Sells Radio is Matt Doar, Chief Toolsmith at ServiceRocket and author of the O'Reilly book Practical JIRA Administration. Sarah and Bill talked to Matt about why he considered laziness as a means for driving him to write books, how technical consulting is more about helping people than it is about configuring tools, and the great big question, "What should schools be teaching that they're not?"
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In this episode, Bill and Sarah take the audience to the Customer Success industry's premier conference, Gainsight Pulse Conference 2016. Guests interviewed include MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson, Cloudera VP Customer Success Sarah Sproehnle, WalkMe VP Customer Engagement Emilia D'Anzica, and Glide Consulting founders Nils Vinje and Alex McClafferty. Hear insiders' perspectives on the future of customer success and helping customers love your software.
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Aaron Ross joins Helping Sells Radio for Episode 14. Aaron, with co-author Jason Lemkin, recently published a new book, From Impossible to Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue, which is a follow-up to the widely read and implemented book Predictable Revenue, which has been called the sales bible of Silicon Valley. Sarah and Bill talk to Aaron about two main topics. First, we talk about why we should not tell people what we do for a living, but describe how we help people. Second, we talk about the new book.
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Catherine Blackmore, GVP of Customer Success at Oracle Marketing Cloud, joins the show to discuss the importance of training, change management, and business transformation to customer success. We also discuss whether the prominence of customer success is causing a convergence between sales and service. And yes, Bill did steal one of Catherine's ideas.
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Todd Eby is the Founder and CEO at SuccessHacker, editor of the Customer Success Journal, Advisor to Trak.io, and has been named to multiple Customer Success Influencers lists including The FrontLeaf 50 and the MindTouch 100 Customer Success Influencers You Should Reach Out To. Today, we chat with him about why achieving real Customer Success is the hardest simple thing to do.
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Technology marketing expert Geoffrey Moore joins the show to
discuss his new book, ZONE TO WIN: ORGANIZING TO COMPETE IN AN
AGE OF DISRUPTION. Moore’s life’s work has focused on the
market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. In this
episode, Moore shares how established enterprises and startups can
compete in an age of disruption.
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In today's episode, we speak to Danielle Tomlinson, VP of Global Education at Plex Systems. Danielle has built education functions from scratch and built mature ones into optimized functions. At Business Objects, SAP, Hortonworks and other fast-growing software companies, Danielle has honed running a business education department to achieve outcomes like increased renewals and revenue. Hear her approach to customer education that helps customers while driving revenue.
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In this episode, we talk to Katie Rogers, VP of Client Services at SalesLoft. After admiring Katie's work from afar, Bill and Sarah met Katie Gainsight Pulse Conference 2015. Katie joined us to talk about how she grew SalesLoft's customer success function from scratch during a period when the company grew 2,000%. Listen to learn how she did it while retaining her characteristic high energy and keeping sane.
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In Episode 8 of Helping Sells Radio, we talk to Ryan Battles, co-founder of Harpoon, a financial goal-setting, time-tracking, and invoicing app for freelancers and consultants. Ryan is also author of two books: SaaS Marketing Essentials: The Ultimate Guide to Launching and Growing Your SaaS Application and Using Periscope for Business: How to Engage Your Audience with Live Streaming. Ryan discusses SaaS marketing trends in the context of the helping sells approach and how businesses can use Periscope to help their audiences solve problems or otherwise be better at what they do.
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Today's episode features Tom Krackeler, Senior Vice President of Products at Zuora and Rachel English, Director of Customer Success at Zuora. Tom and Rachel joined us to discuss the future of Customer Success in the subscription economy.
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In this episode, Anne Janzer, writer, content marketing consultant and author of SUBSCRIPTION MARKETING joins us to discuss Value Marketing, Customer Success, and lessons from working with a hundred technology companies, serial entrepreneurs, industry thought leaders, and technology pioneers.
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This week Nils Vinje, founder of Glide Consulting, joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss where customer success is headed and how he helps SaaS companies build high performing customer success organizations.
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This week Adam Avramescu, Head of Customer Education at Optimizely, joins Helping Sells Radio to discuss optimizing web experiences. A/B testing, Bloom’s Taxonomy, how to educate customers on a product they don’t actually have to use (perish the thought), and what’s happening at the Bay area Customer Education MeetUp.
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Today's guest is Joshua Zerkel, Director of Worldwide Account Management and Training at Evernote and founder and CEO of Custom Living Solutions, one of the Bay Area’s premier productivity and organizing consulting firms. At Evernote, Joshua leads a global team and oversees all onboarding, training, retention, and customer success programs for new and existing Evernote business customers. Listen to learn how to help your company, your team and your customers to become more productive.
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In today's episode, we interview Lincoln Murphy, Gainsight Customer Success Evangelist and Founder of Sixteen Ventures. Lincoln, an expert in customer success and SaaS growth, shares about Gainsight's approach to helping customers at Gainsight and through consulting at Sixteen Ventures. Lincoln discusses Customer Success University (CSU), Gainsight's wildly popular Pulse Conference, and how he embraces a "helping sells" approach to enable SaaS companies to accelerate their growth across the Customer Lifecycle, from customer acquisition to retention.
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Welcome to Helping Sells Radio, a podcast about helping customers discover, adopt, and thrive using your software. In this inaugural episode of Helping Sells Radio, co-hosts Bill Cushard and Sarah E. Brown talk about what Helping Sells Radio is, why we are doing a podcast, and what listeners can expect in upcoming episodes.
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