S3E10 - Modern Customer Success with Irit Eizips

Hey everybody, it's Richard Harris and Scott Lees with another episode of the Serpent sales podcast in 2022. The May session is sold out. We've still got some slots in November. There's two sessions back to back, so feel free to check those out@surfacesales.com also want to give a quick shout out to our sponsors. First of all, outreach IO Please always mention surf and sales when you talk to them. Let them know you heard about us. Let them know you love them as well as also want to thank Scratch Pad who's sponsoring as well as Sendoso. So if you're looking for things to improve your sales and revenue cycles and particularly today customer success cycles, please be sure to check out our sponsors. They'd appreciate it. We'd appreciate it. Super excited for this conversation. It's with someone who worked at Gainsight when gainsight was my second client ever back in 2011 or 12. It's and I, I know you and I'm still going to probably butcher it. ERI Ezips Did I do that right?

Yes, you did all right.

At CSM practice. Is that the, the company name?

Yeah, that's, that's my company's name. Timbiti consulting firm for helping companies to have awesome customer success practices at their businesses.

Well let's, you know and we're happy to give you the credibility and the shout out. Like help them understand what that means though. So you can go in and help a client do what are you a fortune company? Build out customer success? Are you looking with startups series A to D? Like what really? Where do you come in?

So most of my customers I would say are mid market enterprise companies. So they have at least 200 employees on average. My current clients, some of them have over 8,000 employees. Some of the I'm, I have one company that's like 150 years old, so definitely not necessarily startups and then one startup so kind of runs the gamut. But I would say most of the companies that come to me doesn't really matter like the size or how young or old they are. It's about do I have a unique business model that I can just read blogs and watch some YouTube videos and kind of figure it out on my own. That's where a consultant really can come in and make a difference. Because there's a lot of decisions to make. You don't want to make the wrong ones. Especially if you're a larger companies or fast growing companies. Every mistake is like really hard to correct. It can bring in an Expert that's seen a hundred of these kind of like, you know, when you go to the specialist doctor that's seen like enough of that sort of thing that you have and you can trust them in like making the right decision and the right recommendation.

Yeah. It doesn't mean like a heart surgeon isn't smart, but I'd rather have a brain surgeon if I have to have something on my brain and vice versa, that heart surgeon on my heart. So you, you've been at customer success since, you know, since the current modern age and even before that, what was it like? You know, before you went to Gainsight. Right. Which was 2011, 2010ish, I guess. What was customer success even at that point? Was it still called customer service? Like, you know, what were some of those early things you noticed that drew you to it? What made you go, oh, this is the part of the business I like being a part of.

Honestly, I was like mainly in professional services and implementation of software to businesses and kind of making sure that I understand what my customers wanted in terms of like business outcomes. But it would mainly impact how we would design the software. And at the end of it, we would never really ask them, so did we achieve your goals? We just assumed that by delivering to Scope they would have achieved what they wanted and that was it. So there was some parts of it, I suppose, but we would never like really have somebody that would unsure that the customer got value or even ask the question what else can we help? Unless it was like some sort of a notion that there might be an upsell opportunity there.

What drew me in is a particular person called Jim Eberlin, who used to be the CEO at Host analytics, the company I worked for just before I moved to Gainsight. Had a quick conversation with him on the phone and he said, well, I just got some investors. How about come working for me again? And I was like, I'm all in. So it was more about working for Jim again versus doing something in customer success. Just to be fully transparent, I know some people are like gung ho about customer success back then. I don't even know that we had the word customer success for it. The way he explained it to me back then was, oh, you know, we have this NPS survey and we're trying to understand who's like really unhappy with working with us as a software so that we can help prevent churn. That was how basic customer success was back in the day. It was just so rudiment.

Do you think the word churn was being used?

Churn was being used a lot because we make, you know, as he was, he was telling me as he was going up and down 100 one on, you know, the one on one route in California, like knocking on all those SaaS companies doors. If you weren't in SaaS, you weren't even listening to what you have to say. Like they weren't even interested in customer success, let alone services companies. Just to give you a sense of how much things changed, nowadays I get calls from companies that sell equipment to see if I can help them. Companies that like big, large companies that sell mainly projects. Yeah, they might have some technology, but they mainly sell and get revenues from projects and customizations. And so the world has changed a lot since then. But back in the day, the main issue was that SaaS companies were losing customers left and right because they were still doing business. Like it was an on prem software and it just wasn't working.

Yeah, that's totally true. That's 100% true. So, so you, so what have you seen? Let's even say it from this perspective because you've seen all the evolution. I don't want to go through the whole history, but through Covid. Right. What really impacted customer success, you know?

Well, number one is that like everybody were, you know, before, like we had like three months when nobody was getting new business. Well, some maybe if you had like a unique software that kind of worked for Covid, like Zoom.

Right, right, right.

Okay. But for the most part, the. The rest of us, we're not getting any business. Even I had to give some accounts to some of my existing customers and everything else just was put on hold. So for three months, everybody understood really quickly that at the very least you have to preserve your customers. And that gave customer success such a big focus on what's the importance, especially in periods like that where you can just rely on keeping the focus funnel with new customers and just losing the existing ones left and right. So everybody got a lot better at customer success, doubling down on the investments in customer success. And I think the other thing, like if you zero in on customer success, like the things that changed in the way we do customer success is one high touch was no longer about go visit the customer on site. Just, you know, like we started relying a lot more on tools like Zoom to do online conferences. Personally I use WebEx, but that's a different story. Awesome solution. And then the other thing is that everybody started to understand, well, if we are going to go digital on our high touch, can we do more for our long Tail customers. And so I think in the last two years, you see a lot of companies doubling down on what we call digital engagement.

So what are some of the fundamental, basic, fundamental KPIs that people should be measuring who are implementing customer success function for the first time and might not know what it is?

Yeah, I mean, fundamental is like everybody's choosing the lagging KPIs, which would be like, if we did everything right, what should happen? And so the biggest KPI of all is what we call nrr, which is net retention rate. Some might call it like net dollar rate, but you know, that's not very global. So net retention rate is a great way of kind of like encapsulating are we doing it right, yes or no. And in that formula, you can break it down to other lagging indicators such as, you know, what's the renewal rate, how many people are churning or how many companies are churning, Rather I say people because I just had a consultation with a, with gyms. So for them it's really like that's how far customer success has gone, where gym owners are actually embracing customer success, which I thought was really cool. So I think the number one mistake though is that beyond looking at lagging indicators, not enough companies are also incorporating leading indicators, which I think is super important, such as.

You know, like, are we getting enough QBRs? Are we getting enough advocates? Is our satisfaction scores going up or down? You know, how many upsell opportunities are we finding within existing companies? So we might have like 100 opportunities that we find, but the close rate is really poor. So, you know, overall, the nrr, the net retention rate is not as we need to, but maybe there's something is broken with our upsell strategy versus finding these opportunities. So I think that by incorporating some leading indicators, that's also very critical in choosing the right KPIs. And the last group of KPIs is the behavioral KPIs. So really for companies to embrace KPIs for customer success, they should look at behavioral KPIs, leading indicators as well as lagging indicators.

So what behavioral KPI would be what, like usage of the product?

No. So that would be if, if I have a group of customer success managers. Think about it like in sales, okay, the more calls you make, the more deals you're going to close. So yeah, on the one hand you want to say, well, how many deals, how many deals did I close and how much revenue? But when you work with like more junior CSMs or junior salespeople kind of want to Say so for salesperson, you might say, how many calls did you do per week, per month? For CSMs, they also have behavioral KPIs that we know that if they do these things, it will result in higher retention and higher upsell and more advocates, et cetera, et cetera.

So like, how many accounts did you touch, for example? How many?

Correct.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Um, would you. How would you describe the difference in working in your space in helping somebody establish a CSM function for the first time versus like a, like a turnaround type situation where you go in and people have got a busted kind of situation that you have to fix? How do you think about the differences there?

Well, unfortunately, I have been helping with both situations. I can tell you that sometimes it gets busted because we haven't really set it up correctly for our business model. So basically somebody read some blogs or was brought in from a different business model and kind of tried to implement worked in a previous company, but now this company is not exactly the same.

Or there wasn't enough enrollment conversation internally with the executive team and other team members as well as with customers. And I think those are the two things that make a customer success organization unsuccessful. Besides, of course, like, so if you don't have the right enrollment conversation with the executive team, you simply don't have the right budget. You can really collaborate very strongly with other team members or other teams, period.

What goes into that? Like, you're trying to get people to walk away and go, oh, we should start asking these kinds of questions or having conversations around this topic in that moment, like, what are those things people should be asking if they're not doing it already.

In terms of getting the customer success function, the supporting.

Yeah. So that you avoid those mistakes.

Yeah. So I think I have two videos on my YouTube channel about what should you be doing in the first 90 days to your job. And I think those actually really apply to if it doesn't work, what you have right now, what should you be doing? So question number one is like really revisit why it's not working. And I would say start having conversation with the salespeople and ask them what's coming down the pipeline. Is it something different, what our new customers are asking for, that maybe customers a year ago weren't so that you can kind of get a sense, is the market shifting? Is the market changing? And should I revisit my strategy altogether? Because now we're going to get maybe customers from different industries or with different business needs or that are more mature and have more sophisticated requirements or needs for services. Secondly, you really need to ask everybody that your team might interact with what is working and what isn't and then really come up with a plan to address, propose the plan and get, you know, their, their validation that this is something that they want to collaborate with you on. One of the things that one of the executives that I was working with that she was really struggling with was just to get the buy in from everyone. And I asked her a simple question. When you explain what your team does to the person in product, how do you do that? And when she unfolded kind of like how she's pitching it, so to speak, she never mentioned anything that was really important to the product team. So what I asked her to do in terms of homework is to actually outline what are the KPIs of each one of the other team members that she collaborates with, like what is important to them and then what is her team doing right now to help them be successful. And then when she's talking to those other team members, kind of talk about what her team does in what is important to that other person, not what are they doing generically that might like make, make the products person roll their eyes and boredom like really be relevant to them. And I think and then she completely changed her executive tech. So when she was once a quarter projecting like what is, what did her team do and all of their accomplishments. Part of her KPIs were the KPIs that were important for the product team, for the sales team. Meaning how many upsell opportunities did we find for the product team? How many releases were we able to push out a new version, upgrades, were we able to push out whatever it is, right? Like she actually went through the like marketing. How many advocates did we find? And so all of a sudden everyone's eyes were on that team and she started getting invited to more, you know, initiative strategic initiatives within the company, get more budget, get more people. So a lot of the times it's just about how we speak about things and did we do the due diligence to be relevant to everyone.

What advice do you have for the, for the CSM who's struggling and they feel like they lack feature parity and they can't get there and the, and the customers, you know, are frustrated and the CSM is doing their best to work with that particular customer, but they're just like truly behind.

I'm curious what you would say to that particular csm. Much like Richard and I might get asked, what do you tell the Salesperson who's trying to sell something that is clearly behind and doesn't have feature parity with their competitors. I'm curious from your side of the table what that advice would sound like.

Yeah, listen, first of all, I think it's a real problem and I think that a lot of companies have that issue where the product is just not mature enough and we know for a fact and when that happens, the services side of the house needs to overly compensate for that and it's a real deal. I think it adds a lot of stress to those systems as well as salespeople. Right. If you have integrity and you want to sell something, you, you don't want to over sugarcoat it. And so what I would recommend, maybe not the csm, but the CS team or the CS leader to do is to actually have a lot of conversations with clients and see what else can they offer in terms of services to help, to help those customers. So for example, I had one company like that a few years back actually and the product was so immature. There were a lot of things that you needed to do in the back end and customers, just tips, didn't have the time to dedicate to just even learn how to use the solution because it was so complex or deal with all these issues. So what he did is just sit down. I'm not saying everybody should do it, but he sat down and he decided he was going to offer managed services.

And so basically he took all the pain points and pushed it back to his team to deal with. But it was something he could offer and I think in his situation it just worked because most of his companies were fairly large and they could afford it. And if they weren't, they would be more than happy to outsource it out. But it gave some alleviation to the issue until the product fully matured and was easy enough to use so that they wouldn't have to offer it.

That's very different than what we were taught. We were taught as salespeople, when there's a problem, don't talk to anybody. Just ignore it. Be an ostrich. Put your head in the sand.

We're taught. Do it anyway. Figure it out.

Figure it out.

Find a way.

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's a problem, right? Because people leave eventually. People have options. Good CSMs have.

Especially now, especially now when you can.

Work from anywhere doing anything. And if you have any kind of experience, you will get another job.

So if you're, if you're. Sorry to interrupt you, if you're a good csm, Or a great one.

What are some of the places that, that you can go and, and learn and network? I mean, I'm talking about outside of LinkedIn, because the rise of like the micro community has been massive for sales and revenue communities. I personally am unaware of any specific, like customer success micro communities other than like a channel inside of some other community. Are there any?

Of course.

Can you keep.

Go ahead.

Yeah. And I would say I'm part of, of some of them.

Awesome.

So I think number one community right now is Gain, Grow, Retain. You can find them on LinkedIn, all the information there if you're already there. Gain, Grow, Retain. It's an awesome, vibrant community.

There's also the Customer Success association that is, has a lot of information about customer success, us in general.

There's Modern cs, which is a group that I'm associated with, but it's by invitation only.

What is it again?

It's called Modern cs. I think it's Modern Sale.

Oh, it's Pete, because Angie's thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Modern cs. It's a great, it's all in email, but, you know, there's a bunch of other ones on Slack, but, you know, some of them are more vibrant than others. I think there's the customer network that Miranda Jaikonsky is part of.

And it's like there's one in Europe that I just forgot the name. And then of course there's my YouTube channel.

Right.

It's not a community, but, you know, you get a lot.

It is, it is, it is. It is a community.

Yeah.

That's great. I, I, you know, I knew Modern cs, I didn't know the other ones. So I'm excited to hear those are out there. I want to the people who are thinking about customer success. Right. Like, you know, traditionally it's been sdr, ae and then oh yeah, maybe customer success. Right. Or, you know, like it's never that sort of next part of the career. For people who are curious about customer success or those who are knowledgeable and want to know more, what are the attributes you think make up a great customer success person that may be different than an ae? It doesn't mean that one is better than the other. We're all on the same playing field. And I could argue in some cases customer success is probably more important than just the net new revenue, because that's where you get your funding. It's all about the retention. So what are those attributes you think about when someone says, okay, help us find somebody. What do we look for?

You know, what you're really looking. I think that it's more than an ae, although a really good AE has probably all the qualifications that a CSM needs, honestly and just being super, super blunt, the ones that know how to do value selling, those are familiar with that concept, are going to make great systems because half the job is to just up till customers on, you know, what else can they do with this, the solution and be very consultative to the customer. And I think great AES already doing that. And so that's a very transferable skill set. The main thing that's going to happen to an AE that transitions from an AE to a CSM position is a commissions are going to look very different, higher base, lower commissions. You may not like it, you may not. And then secondly, you're not going to be driven by numbers as hard as you would an ae. So just to give you an example, an AE or an account manager would like every conversation would be what are your numbers? Are you going to get them? What's the probability? What are the next steps to close that deal? When you do weekly status updates with your manager as a csm, it's never about that. You're never going to be asked what are your numbers, what are you going to, how many are you going to close, what you're going to do. It's not about driving towards a number, it's about how many customers are currently happy or how many of them are healthy. That means they're in a good state of mind, they're getting value and what else can we do to maximize value? And oh by the way, do you feel that means that there's an opportunity for expansion here? But it's very like it's not about driving towards a forecast plan, it's about like the account plan is really a success plan. It's like how are we going to drive value for this customer? How do we make sure that they are not only retained but also want to do more business with us?

You think most CROs know to do that, Scott? Do you Scott? Do you even think most CROs know how to have that conversation with CSM or, or if they come from a sales background, they're so metric data driven of deal, deal, deal.

I think most CROs at this point know how to have that conversation. I would hope so at least. I think there's a lot of people who are in their.

First VP or second VP of sales job that maybe don't and don't think about that way. But somebody who's in a CRO gig.

I think they know I would hope so. Like I said.

Do you think.

Do you think that Erie. What do you think?

Her eyes just got really big. Come on. Like, he doesn't think so. She's basically saying, nope, they don't.

I think it's politically incorrect to answer this question. No, it's not.

Come on.

I don't know. I mean, I personally don't think I could talk to enough CROs. I have had a client once that the CRO was the one that hired me to do customer success, and I think he totally gets it. But that's like. Like, I don't talk to a lot of CROs, so I can't speak to everyone. I think it depends on where they came from and how much education they have around customer success, how much pressure they get from the board. What's the renewal rate?

Right.

Some of them get it, you know, like, all right, you can't just. It's not on prem. It's not the 80s anymore. Welcome to 2022.

Yeah. Do you. If you think about CSMs, right.

Do you.

I mean, I think the ideal world is that, to me, at least, the great CSM would have had a AE role. Do you think that's necessary? Or do you see that when they don't have that AE role? Maybe those people are more like account managers. Not in the sense of upsell, cross sell, but just sort of the onboarding and navigating. Like, how do you see that? Or am I just making something up to be controversial?

No, I think. I think it's a great question. I just. I asked the same thing to one of my guests. I'm going to publish that video in like, two, three weeks. And she actually transitioned from an account manager or an account executive to a customer success role. And I asked her at the end of the video, well, do you think it's absolutely necessary to be an account executive or an account manager before you become a csm? And she said, absolutely not. And then I said, well, don't you. Don't you think it would be helpful to have some sales skills or be in that position first? She says, yeah, I think it would be helpful, but it's not necessary. And as a person that came from sales saying that, I think it adds a lot of credibility versus me coming from the outside wise. Was that her answer? I'm not really sure. I do think that, well, maybe there's an account manager is very similar to customers success manager, but like I said, the main difference is the focus. So I think that people in sales that Are just like a little tired about from the chase, but have the skills to connect, to network, to create relationships really quickly to understand how to do value selling. There are like great candidates to become customer success managers. Do you absolutely have to have a sales position before you become a customer success manager? Probably not.

Got it, got it, got it, got it. Cool. What don't we know about like. Oh, go ahead, Scott, go for it. You're on mute, buddy. There it is.

Missed your opportunity to make fun of me. Damn.

Yeah, Scott.

Oh, you have to show, you have to show areth your coffee mug because this is. I just did a classic Richard move.

Yes.

So says Richard. You're on you. Someone sent that to you? I just did it.

Yeah.

I have a question for you.

So many people have gone into business for themselves now, including yourself and Richard and me a couple of years ago. There's all these creator economies, all these consultants and coaches, all this stuff. Now what advice do you have for people like us to implement CS inside of our own, like boutique consulting, coaching businesses?

Love that question. I'm so happy you asked me. Like, I'm so passionate about that. I, I would speak about that, anybody, any day. Because, you know, most of the content out there is how to do it for a software company. And like, actually we need to do that even more, you know. And so one of the things that I started doing is started to implement it. So first of all, create a customer health score. What is your customer health score? What is a best in class customer do or don't do when they work with you, Scott, or when they work with you, Richard, what are you expecting them to do? How do like the best customers look like? And then tell them how they score every single month unless something is happening, like, especially if they're not doing well, you could say, hey, you know, you're actually in red with me. And they were like, what? I had these conversations with customers where I said, you're actually kind of like in red for me. I score you as a red customer. Like, what am I in red?

Right?

Like, they are paying me there in red. I was like, well, this is why you're not, you know, you know, doing this. You're not doing that. I have high concerns about this. This is how I think you can solve this. What do you think? Like there's a conversation. Can we rescue them from their own bad habits?

And can I ask another question on top of that, are you proactively reaching out to them saying, hey, so and so you're in red right now? Like, to talk about this. It's not a, it's not a response. You're not waiting for somebody to say, hey, how am I doing?

No, they will never ask me, first of all, is what I can tell you in my eight years of doing this. They never ask you how they are doing. They, they, in fact, if you don't bring it up, they think that if they're not doing well, it's because of you.

Oh, Scott, this is so painful for you to hear.

Yeah, yeah. That's why I asked the question.

I know, but I love the fact that you asked it because I, I offline. I know what's going on in your business, and I'm sitting here, I'm working.

I mean, I'm literally working on some of this stuff right now.

Yeah.

I'm running three. I'm running three, arguably four companies at the same exact time right now. And I'm. And I've stretched myself and I'm trying to figure out and put in processes to, you know, do some of this CS work that we're talking about and scoring clients and all of this kind of stuff. So this is a selfish ask, Richard.

Yeah.

Oh, I don't think it's selfish at all. I think it's a great ask that I don't even think about it. Right. Like, I'm. I'm way more old school of like. But I, you know, I do different. Right. I'm not. Most of my clients are not sort of, you know, weekly engagements or, you know, it's. And then I'm out, which is different than your business.

But everybody. And I. And everybody here, I'm sure. But like, I have talked to so many people in the last few years who are running their own businesses, consulting, coaching, all this kind of stuff, training. Nobody ever is thinking about the CS part of it. They're all just like, where do I get new clients and how do I charge people? And, you know, that's the only stuff that they're. That they're thinking about. And so I myself have been guilty of that, and I need to transition that way a little bit, so I need to learn more and get better about it. As do you, Richard.

Yes. Right.

And then we, as people with somewhat of a voice, can help those people who are earlier in their journey so they don't make some of the same mistakes that we have. Right.

Correct. Correct.

So we should be doing so.

Yeah. How do you. Are you running your business by yourself? Are you. Do you have people behind you supporting you? Like what. What's Your status of companies.

So I have a team in place to help me out and I have one, let's call it an executive assistant that helps me with everything related to sales. And so.

She has become very familiar with the sales process. She's managing the pipeline. She's sending reminders to prospects about meetings, whatever it is that I need help with. She's reminding me of sales pipe, you know, sales pipeline deal. So I don't forget. Like if I talk to somebody in December and they said, well, right now is not a good time, Reach out to me in this, in February, February. I'll get a text from her and say, hey, don't forget to reach out to so. And so I have one that helps me with all client projects. So she's very familiar in updating our scores, making sure that we have monthly goals for every customers and then we update them on monthly cadence, taking action on any open actions that we owe. Remind their clients of action items that they owe, sending weekly status calls, all of that. And then I have about 3, 4, 5 people on the marketing team that help me with video editing, content creation, social media posts.

Yeah.

Translation, Richard. We do way too much on our own.

Yes.

Or we just ignore it.

That's right. Or we turn the blind eye to all of it.

So.

Which, you know, that's a whole other delegation discussion that I'm. I suck at. So, you know.

Well, I think that's why I'm so passionate about. Because I do think I, I do things a little differently. But I've had a lot of success in my business and I live very comfortably. Like, I have a really good work life balance. That is to say, like after 2pm I don't have any calls usually. And I have time to go to the gym or have hobbies like playing volleyball or poker or whatever it is that I want to do that afternoon or seeing friends. And I have a team that helps me out. Right now.

You need to go have a conference, charge us all $10,000 to show up so that you can teach us how to do this. Because that's the piece that I think is missing.

Yeah.

So many of our. The solopreneurs out there. Right.

Because we want to do that. I want to do a book. I want to create a software where you can just plug in and you can do my. How I run the business.

I'll play with the mvp. You give me the MVP and I'll play around.

Let's do it.

I warn you about writing a book.

I've written three and it is a labor of love.

Yeah.

At best. Yeah.

I'll probably do the software first, but I. I'd love to teach. I'd love to teach what I know and what works for me because I do think I do things a little. Like, I don't know, you guys have a cash flow worksheet where you actually update your cash flow projections.

No.

Like, one shakes yes, one shakes no. Right.

Yeah.

Most don't do it. It's because I used to be an accountant that I'm, like, running my business by the numbers like a mad.

Oh, wow. She would lose her mind if she saw the way that. Right. We do certain things.

Yeah.

We would be put in an accounting jail real quick.

I also think. I also think too, that, you know, for me, I never wanted to have quote, unquote employees. I never wanted to deal with that level of scale and thinking about their benefits and their vacation and all that. So I. I've probably hurt myself in terms of trying to grow my business.

But I created a belief system that's probably not true around.

Scaling. And Scott knows this about me. I'm a terrible delegator. Like, I'm sitting here listening to you and I'm like, oh, you want to know how you have a great customer success thing? You got to be willing to delegate a lot of shit, because if you can't, your customers, if you try to control it all your customer success, people are going to hate you anyway. So some of that's just an internal wiring of me.

That was the first thing that I was going to say. As you said your first sentence, you have a lot of assumptions and a lot of belief in that statement. And from experience, that's simply not true. So I'm going to break some of your beliefs and we can take it offline and I can help you, Richard.

Not only can we take it offline, feel free to record it and post it.

Yes.

My shit. Seriously, Like, I'm not the only one who's like this. I'd be happy to do that and, you know, pay it back to you of like, hey, here's some content that you could use to. To promote yourself.

Yeah.

Public.

Public teardown of successful business owner.

That's the title.

Yes.

I can join you, Richard, in case you feel alone.

Yeah. It's called the hot seat with the re.

Like, that's it. Yeah, yeah. It's just a mild shaming. Just a mild shaming, you know?

All right, we gotta.

We gotta.

This has been fun. This has been really fun. We gotta move to wrapping this up and a quick shout out to Sendoso, our sponsor, as well as Scratchpad and also to Outreach and it's click outreachio sales. That is a special URL. If you go there, click.com outreach IO slash surf. Actually that's it. Slash surf. There it is. So rewind that and hear it again. We want to thank.

This is why I don't read. This is why I don't read off those. I know URLs like that. I wouldn't have got it right either. Don't feel bad. I don't feel bad.

So. But anyway, thank you so much. And, and you know, for people who listen, you know the, what questions do you have for us? This is the kind of the fun part where we turn it to you.

You know, I think that a lot of folks in customer success are actually very curious about, you know, upsell and cross sell strategies and then how should they be working with a sales team in a better way. And I think in your end being like the sales expert would be really interesting to hear your perspective on things.

I think it would be a good idea for more people in CS to go through sales training inside of an organization specific to that company, that product, that motion, whatever that strategy is. So.

If you were, if I was selling for the Harris Consulting Group.

I don't think it necessarily benefits me as a CS person to go get like Sandler sales training. What would be good sales training to get would be Harris Consulting Group sales training. How the heck do you sell that? Why do you do it this way and everything? And I think cs, I think sales leaders should invite and welcome CS team members into those trainings. Role plays, you know, demo practice, cold outreach practice.

You know, email kind of workshop and how to write like a sales email the right way, that kind of stuff. That, that's a quick, easy, like olive branch if you will. I think, and I don't think that that happens very often. So I'd like to, I'd like to see that and encourage people to do that.

Yeah, that happened. So for me that does happen because I talk about it and I tell people you can bring your CS team and I'll talk to the CS team ahead of time. And you know, we're very conscious of like, hey, you know, I've got this program built for cs. However, if you want to come to this, know that it's going to sound like sales, but when we do the role play and the real play stuff, we'll talk about customer success. There are certain things I wouldn't want A customer success person to say that. I wouldn't want a salesperson to say, or I'd want them to shift how they say it versus what I'm teaching a sales team. And we acknowledge that and we talk about it. So I think that's one thing. I think the other thing too is.

Everybody in the organization. I don't care if you're the engineer or the product person marketing, everybody needs to be certified on case studies and use cases, period. Because that a lot of that comes from product marketing aligned with what we're hearing from customer success. Who then can tell us what are the new challenges and pains which then the CAE can do. And it sort of creates that. So for me, you know, I always encourage the. For lack of a better phrase, what who is your case study, you know, use case team. You have one person from sales, one for product marketing and one from customer success. And, you know, their job is to come up with, you know, one solid use case per month or maybe every six weeks. So that after, you know, six months, you got four or five things. Then everybody has to be. Don't have to be a hard certification people. Please don't go like, build it in your lms, like, don't be ridiculous. But people need to know that. And I think that's a really good spot.

Because it's customized sales training, so to speak, for all the teams, as well as the communications of it. Right. You can even have someone from the engineering team, they are the product building team, so that they can explain certain pieces of that.

So.

Those are the things that I think happen the most and where I see it, and I do know there's a couple of people out there. I don't know whatever happened to Lincoln? Lincoln Murphy used to be sort of like this great customer success guy, was really well known and then he decided to go and try to be a professional wrestler in Brazil, I think. And you know, just he was super like, in my mind, I don't know the guy well enough to.

Sounds a lot more exciting than what we do for a living, for what it's worth.

So. Yeah. But he. In my mind, he was the forefront of customer success in a social networking capacity and which was very different in 2014 and 15. And so it's. So he was the guy that I would sort of go to for some of this stuff. And I think he actually had some programs at some point. I don't know if he still does.

He still does. Still working. He still does. He still publishes blogs. I just think that he Kind of lowered the exposure to maybe like grand media gestures on LinkedIn and Twitter. But he still does his thing. He's a great guy.

He's a really smart guy. He knows it.

Really super sharp. Super sharp. Super nice, too. Yeah.

Good personality.

Very, very nice person. And by the way, I agree with both of you that great suggestions. And Richard, I didn't know you had training sessions for customer success that are very similar to sales because I actually. A hundred percent you don't. You do. You don't.

Yes, he does.

Yeah. No, that's amazing. I should bring it to all my clients because I think that's like the piece missing.

Like, that's like the one thing. So this is, you know, to the conversation where you chastise me. It's like, richard, why isn't that on your website? Was like, oh, have that program mentioned. So, you know. But.

I'm sort of delighted to hear your suggestions. I think they're just so great. And probably what we should do next is bring you guys over to my channel to just zoom in on some of these suggestions because I think there's a lot to be said about how sales and customer success a should work better and then how customer success.

Can train their teams to be better at up telling customers what else they can do with a solution they don't necessarily need to close the deal. Not every customer success team needs to have sales skills. It's okay to share customer success qualified leads with sales. I'm not like gung ho about having customer success team do the upsell transaction as well. In some cases it makes sense. But I do believe that all of your suggestions are super, super valid and you absolutely know what you're talking about.

I think the biggest thing I would say that I see from customer success is that it's not a lack of, but building upon courage and confidence to do this thing. And I also think the word sell or upsell or selling still has a dirty word connotation for some people in customer success. They're not comfortable with that because they don't want to be seen as a salesperson because that's not their role. And it just carries this negative connotation, unfortunately. So for me, a big piece is like, well, hey, let's create a mind shift here so you understand what this means, right? And that's usually when the click comes for them that they're like, oh, yeah, I got it. And then the most successful CSMs, to your point, they don't care about that. They get it right. And if they come from sales, then that's why, like, they carry this confidence of courage of, like, it doesn't bother me. So that's what I see.

Right.

But I'd love to. Come on. I'd love to do it. I'll volunteer Scott, too, because he's got plenty of time, so.

Yeah. Separately or together?

Whatever. Whatever.

All good. Whatever you want.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. Where can folks get a hold of you? What's the Easy.

Oh, a hold of me.

They want to talk to you, or they want to, you know, hire you. Whatever.

Hire you?

Yeah, hire me. Hardly, honey. Yeah. Okay, so I'm. I'm pretty fully booked for the most part, but if somebody still wants to see if I may have availability, they could go to csm. He's laughing.

All right, well, they could go to.

We're gonna get. We're gonna chastise you for about 30 seconds.

Yeah, yeah. After this. Once the recording is over.

Yeah. Because a salesperson, you should not be saying that because you always have, like, a little bit of availability. Right. So honest to God, if somebody wants to learn more about my services, they could go to csmpractice.com and if they want to learn more about customer success, they should go to customer. So they should go to YouTube.com forward/csmpractice, where I post all my videos and I educate the community about customer success by either sharing my own thought leadership or interviewing others, which I think is always much more interesting.

There you go. That's better.

Edit out everything else that I said.

Thanks so much for joining us today. We appreciate it.

It was fun. Thank you.

You guys are awesome. Thanks for having me.