#279 Ejieme Eromosele - Elevating Sales with Customer Led Growth and Community Insights

Hello and welcome to Scale youl Sales podcast. I am Janice B. Gordon, the customer growth Expert recognized by LinkedIn as one of 15 innovating influencers to follow and I'm honored to be the revtech strategist of 2024. Proudly listed as number nine of 43 must listen to podcasts for every sales professional. The Scale your Sales podcast is your go to resource for actionable insights, proven strateg strategies and inspiration to help revenue focused leaders, CEOs, CROs sales leaders achieve sustainable growth. In this episode of Scale your Sales podcast my guest talks about customer led growth as the foundation for accelerating NRR in 2024 and beyond and very much utilizing customer led growth tactic in all aspects in order align sales, marketing, customer success and really accelerate growth within the organization. The go to market strategy of five years ago, what's required now is very different drivers and customer led growth is it? We also talked about her phrase assumptive advocacy and looked at community led growth as well. This is a really interesting conversation that I know show you will enjoy. My next guest is a customer led growth expert passionate about driving, retention, expansion and customer advocacy. Founder of Success in Black where she champions Deib in customer success. With experience at Accenture, PwC and New York Times, she has built a career on delivering exceptional customer outcomes and business value. Please welcome to Scale Yourselves podcast. Aisha May Selli thank you so much.

Shanna. Thanks for having me.

Yes, it's wonderful to have have you here. I cannot believe that I had to go all the way to Dublin when you were in London for like two and a half years to actually meet you. I mean that is nuts, isn't it? And now you've decided that you obviously don't like me, that you've gone back to New York.

I mean, I feel like that's how it works with networking, you know. And that's why I am part of these communities. Because you can be literally right next door to someone and may never bump into them. But if you're part of these shared networks and shared communities, that's what brings you together.

Absolutely. So talking about networks and communities, you're the founder of Success in Black. Now tell me more about why you founded it and you know, how you're growing the network and why, what motivates you.

Yeah, so I found a Success in Black in the summer of 2020 and if you can remember back, that was almost five years ago at this point, but it was in the middle of COVID it was in the middle of Black Lives Matter. And so I had many, let me say colleagues and acquaintances in the customer success community asking me how they can support for black talent in the professional setting. And especially in our domain, which was customer success, we didn't have a lot of options. And so I thought, let me start something. At that point I was already meeting with black professionals and professionals of all walks of life that were interested in roles and customer success or interested in advancing their careers in that function. And so it was just me having one on one conversations, informally mentoring and coaching people. And I thought, well, well it's just me as one person. What is a way that I can actually scale myself, scale my resources and actually get other people that look like me to give back as well. And so that was the formation of Success in Black. Since then we've grown to almost 600 members in our Slack community. We have a few thousand allies and advocates and followers on LinkedIn and some of our other platforms as well. And really our mission is to bring diversity, equity and inclusion to customer success. So it's not only for black talent. We like to think that we're advocating for better places of working, especially in tech and especially in the environments that we work in for all. Really proud to say that we've accomplished a lot. We were able to literally change the face of some of customer successes, biggest conferences, biggest awards and we have a lot more to come. So really proud of all that we accomplished. Published in almost five years.

Yeah, it's, it's certainly needed, you know like sometimes you need to like a magnifying glass, shed a light and really kind of focus in. So you know we're, we met in, in Dublin as I mentioned, which another network which is Wednesday Women and, and it's such a fantastic network to bring people together just like Success in Black and share experiences. The con conversations around the table are so much more valuable when you've got a collective network that has that commonality.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean we provide a space and a community on Slack, but many of our members now are meeting up in person. We've just launched local chapters in New York City and in Atlanta to foster that greater sense of community and greater sense of collaboration. So it's really great to be able to create this platform for people to connect.

Brilliant. So I'd like to talk a bit more about really what you do and you know, like using customer LED growth as a tactic to achieve, you know, NRR in excess of, of expectations in 2024. So let's share more about how, how you achieve that.

Yeah, so I Moved to London to be GM of EMEA for quick so platform that powers great customer experiences using AI. So we believe that AI and humans work best together and we work with some of the best brands in the world to deliver better customer experiences. So I went over to open our London office and to be gm. So what that meant was I led our entire go to market motion, from marketing to new business sales, business development, partnerships and alliances, and customer success and implementation as well. And so for me, being a customer success leader and now being an overarching go to market leader, it meant how can I really tap into the success that we're seeing with some of our customers in the region so that we can one distill down to what are the key characteristics that have made them successful? What do they look like, what maturity of organization do they have, what sorts of roles are involved in making them successful and how do we pattern match and then go find prospective customers that look like them? And the idea is that if you can take a successful customer, get them happy, get them advocating your likelihood of finding other customers that look like them and repeating that success pattern in motion is much greater. And so that's exactly what we did. You know, I'm proud to say that 100% of our customers in EMEA were advocates. And that means they were speaking on stages and conferences and keynotes with us, sharing their story, they were agreeing to public case studies, they were doing customer reference calls, they were making referrals to other parts of the organization. And that was a really great growth driver for us because we could take those stories and then go and say, hey, prospective customer, do these challenges and problems sound familiar? Do these things that you've tried to do sound familiar? Well, look at one of our customers who's been successful in achieving certain outcomes using our solution. So it was a really great kind of jumpstart and accelerator to getting into those conversations and enclosing new business as well.

Tech has traditionally been very much product led growth and many are talking more about customer led growth. So was it something. Yeah, talking more about it, whether doing it. I'm interested in did you have to transition from one to the other and what that was about or were you already on that track and you've simply developed it?

Yeah, I would like to say, you know, we were already on that track. So again, I was a customer success leader, so I was already running the motion of what do our customers need to be successful? What are those success outcomes that we're tracking against? And really taking that back to our Business, whether it's the marketing team, product team, new business sellers, and trying to have them better understand what success looks like so that they can infuse that in their work. So we were already on that path. I think the difference is when I now became the owner of that entire process, it was just a lot easier to action and to activate because I was the marketing leader, I was a new business sales leader. I didn't have to convince anyone to do that. It was already in my DNA. I think the thing that is challenging oftentimes is that we're all busy, we're all still siloed in our organizations, even if you're in an early stage business and we are heads down trying to make it happen. But I think to your point of more organizations are talking about customer led growth, if we can actually find the pieces and the commonalities and I think maybe the shared goals specifically that your leadership team can align on that is what makes it a reality. So a shared goal, for example for us has been what are some customer led MQLs and SQLs that we can then put in our pipeline? So where can we attribute that an existing customer, whether it's a mark advocacy activation, like speaking at a conference or referral, is actually adding to our pipeline. And what are some ways that we can have other shared goals like actually marketing activation? So shared case studies that we can align with marketing on to help us produce to broaden that story. So I think for organizations that want to do customer led growth, one of the things I would recommend is aligning your leadership team on some of those shared goals so that they're held accountable to actually putting your customers first.

What about the tech that kind of underpins that? Because often it's the silo, not just the people and the leadership that are at the tech that siloed and they're not talking to one another. So surely that has to be a foundation to enable customer led growth, otherwise customers are going to continue to fall through the gaps.

Yeah, I mean that's a great call out to be quite honest. I think there's more than my organization can do there. And we're still investing in and helping in technology that can connect the dots. But I really think it starts with process. Right. So you know, one of the things that we do that's a simple thing to do is to have a shared goals document. So are you actually tracking and mapping your customer goals and outcomes? Are you revisiting them with your customers periodically? How are you telling that story to leadership? You know I think starting with the mindset and the process and then to your point, getting the tools around it is only going to further accelerate progress there. I think one of the things that's really going to be interesting with tools these days, of course, is AI. Right. So your ability to, you know, record meetings and have it transcribe notes, ability to kind of put a few different, let's say, notes together and collate an account plan. That's actually something I'm working with my team on now, is how can we leverage all the disparate data points, all time, the all the disparate conversations that we have with our customers and that we have internally to put together a perspective of an account, and how do we use that perspective to be proactive in how we're working with that account going forward? So I'm really excited to see some of the way that AI, to your point, is helping organizations connect those dots and hopefully break down those silos.

Yeah, yeah, love that. Love that. I'm interested in investigating a word that you've used in assumptive advocacy. Can you tell me more about that? Because I know that's one of your terms.

Yeah, I'm trying to make it a thing. Let's see, we're starting it here. You heard it here first. Yeah. So I'm a big believer in learning from other disciplines. And so I have historically not considered myself a sales leader. I'm changing that. I'm a sales leader now, but so I wanted to take a page from my sales counterparts and I started to understand some of their concepts. So there's a concept called the assumptive sale, and it's. You're taking a positive assumption that the deal is going to happen, the customer is going to sign, and you're putting that and weaving that in your conversations with a prospective buyer. So an example is, you know, or let's say still negotiating a contract, but you throw in there really excited to think about planning kickoff dates. We should think about this timeline and would be great to align our teams on a particular date in the future to kick off together. Right. You're still negotiating the contract, but you're putting an assumptive idea that we're already going to have this thing signed and we're going to have a positive outcome. So I wanted to take that lens into how we drive and foster advocacy because that to me is a holy grail. When your customer is so happy with the success they're seeing, they're achieving their outcomes and they're willing to tell others about it, you've, you've hit, you struggled. So I wanted to take that similar approach to advocacy. So assumptive advocacy is having a positive mindset when you're very early with assigned customer and already talking about them advocating on the great work. So I like to inject it in the kickoff. Right. So this is when emotions are high and positive. The customers just signed on with you. They're excited to kick off. You're excited because you just landed that deal and you plant the seed of, you know, in hopefully a few weeks or a few months when we're out and this thing is showing value to you, it'd be great if you could insert advocacy as, let's say, start to share your story with your colleagues internally or we have a conference coming up, assuming that you're seeing positive success and outcomes, it'd be great if you could and are willing to share that story more broadly with your colleagues across your industry. Right. So it plants the seed of, I know we're going to be successful together. It's also a confidence boost for your teams as well, and it helps set that mindset for your customer that they're the expert and that they're going to have a positive and a compelling story to share about your solution together. So that's the concept. I really think that it can transform advocacy asks instead of being an afterthought and something that we kind of scramble to pull together when we have a conference coming up is something that sets the tone in the customer journey and hopefully helps establish a sense of positive intent for your customer as well.

I love this. I love it in the language that you use. Assumptive sales is something that I use a lot of. And in advocacy, it was making me think of the way I do referral training. It's part of the sales process and it's the need that you drop in. You assume it's going to happen. You, you know, you're assuming that everything's going to be okay and what's great, you know, some of the pushback that I've had from salespeople is like the worry of, well, what happens if it's not great? And I said, well, the. That your customer's going to tell you really quickly. You said this, and this is what's happened. And that's what you want because you have an opportunity to put it right. And it's like, yes, you're absolutely right. I'm getting onto that now. You do not want them at the anniversary of the contract to leave quietly. You actually want them to be vocal. So you really need to set your stall out early on everything. And I think this is a wonderful concept, being assumptive everything and having the confidence of what you're doing.

Yeah, that's a great example too of, I think sometimes we're afraid to even assume positive outcomes because yeah, things can go wrong and look, they sometimes do. But if you're able to help a customer say well this seller told me that we're going to have a positive outcome and we're not having a positive outcome and they come to you and they say that that's actually a gift because you have the opportunity to. Course. Correct.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's what you want. It's a conversation and customers know everything is not going to be perfect. And that's, that's the contract, that's the partnership you have that you know it, we know it's not. But I'm going to do my best efforts to make sure that it. We're in this together.

That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm really interested in your unique or unexpected strategy that has successfully, that you've successfully used to enable buyers to engage and purchase with ease.

Yeah, I love using data to make, to help a customer make a decision and to be persuasive in how we help them make that decision. So as I mentioned, Quick is in the business of AI for customer experience and customer service. And so we're sitting on quite a lot of just conversational and transactional data with our customers. And so anytime we are establishing, let's say a business review or some sort of strategic conversation, I like to work with my CSM and try to unearth insights. When we say insights, that's kind of like a term that we throw around here. But I really want to dig and find something that's compelling that the customer doesn't even know about their business. Right. What can we teach them about what we know about their business to help inspire in action? And so this was with one of our larger customers in emea and we have a interaction where it's just a two way messaging, web chat based conversation. And we noticed that because this customer's contact center wasn't 24 hours, we wanted to understand what was happening when they didn't have agents that were staffed. What were customers asking for, what were customers not getting? Because we were able to see all of those conversations in our system. And so we spent a few days trying to go through and I had a hypothesis that customers were of course, if you don't have a 24 hour contact center. There's some frustration there. But in particular, what were they frustrated about and what were they looking for? So spent some hours digging through that and we found that customers weren't necessarily upset that they weren't able to talk to a human. They were upset that they couldn't just log a ticket or log an incident that someone could then follow back up with them. And so in our analysis, we actually had some really great verbatims of the customer actually saying this. And so we brought that to the customer. They weren't aware, they knew, like, yeah, there's some frustration around not being open 24 hours, but they didn't know the specifics of that and they didn't know what they could do to alleviate that, that specific frustration. So we brought that to them. And I'm not going to get into the technical details, but there's ways that our solution could help solve for that. So I think that, I mean, it's not even like a novel idea, but it's like, how do you take data that you are sitting on and that you know exists and use it to compel action that's going to be helpful for your customer and likely also helpful for your platform. So in that, you know, the customer bought more of a particular product that we had that can solve that specific pain point for them. But it really started with what is the pain, what is the opportunity, what data can we use to inform that and to help them make a compelling decision. So again, not a novel idea, but I think one that gets kind of missed a bit. And just like, how are you using data that you know about your customers to help them have a better outcome?

I think it gets missed a lot. And I think this is a great example because often we have a product or service and we're so focused on that that we don't realize around our product even if we don't stand to gain. But having that mindset that, you know, the kind of partnership and advocacy and you know, what more can we do for our customers even if we do not stand to benefit? I think that goes a long way. And often I think that we feel that the customer knows everything, the buyer knows everything and they know everything about their own organization. But often their organizations works in silos. And you having the overview of data or some insight or even leveraging other customer experiences that you have in your supply that you can use to support a customer is actually what they're looking for. And I think that if you're able to raise the game you become the expert, you become the trusted advisor that's going to enable you to continue and grow that relationship going forward.

Yeah. And I think to your point earlier, where a lot of organizations are still stuck on the product led growth mindset, look, at the end of the day, you know, we were trying to get them on this new product. Right. You know, it was a new AI product that could capture and create a ticket that then an agent can follow up on when they started their day the next morning. Right. But we didn't want to lead with that because if we were like, hey, buy this new widget, buy this new product. It's not compelling enough. We're not solving a problem, we're not solving a pain. So we wanted to find data to say that one, this actually was a problem that they had and we found that and that made it much easier to, to sell that new product because we were actually solving a problem that not only they had, but their customers had. So, you know, it really ties back to how do you be more customer led and customer centric in the way that you sell as well, and also.

Enable them to sell it internally as well because you've given them the ROI as to why they need it.

Yep. 100%.

Yeah, yeah. Love it, Love it. Okay. I'm really interested. You've been in the CEO role and you've had overview of an organization. So if you were advising another CEO or sales leader, revenue leader, about a roadmap to revenue success in 2025, 2026, what are the key elements that you would be talking to them about?

Yeah, I would say that CEOs need to be selling a more inspiring vision of their product. To be quite honest, I think, you know, there's a lot of software these days. Right? There's a lot of product these days. And that is our challenge, is that we are in an environment that is highly competitive. And so if you're not able to, obviously the product needs to do what it says it does. That's table stakes. Right. But it's quite easy to build good product. Right. Like, that's not always a challenge. It's how do you have a compelling vision of how your product does things differently? And is it something that's inspiring, isn't something that's purposeful? I think for us, you know, we try to deliver great customer experiences that drive great business outcomes and business value. Right. The customer service industry is oftentimes an afterthought. It's seen as a cost center. So our inspiring vision is that we want to uplift those individuals, give them more time, give them more ability to do higher order and higher value activities. Right. That's our inspiring call to action. So I would challenge CEOs to have that inspiring vision and call to action and to be vocal about it. You know, go on LinkedIn, talk about customers that are seeing success, talk about what you're seeing in the market. I think CEOs being able to, you know, inspire confidence and prospective buyers is huge these days. And so that's what I would compel them to do more of.

That's interesting. It's almost that the converse of that is that they're not inspiring. They're not, they don't have a big vision.

Then that's a bigger problem. Yes, very much. I would add too in that I think what is inspiring often is telling your customers success. Right. And storytelling that, you know, to your point earlier, customers and prospective customers want to see people that look like them being successful. We're all humans at the end of the day, we want to see that person's hitting their goals, they're getting promoted, you know, they're, you know, know cheered on by their peers in the industry. So as CEOs and go to market and revenue leaders can really channel storytelling their customer success, I think that that can go a long way.

I think it's interesting because it's brought, I feel it's brought it full circle in that we started by talking about community and networks and it's a. Is the role of the CEO to actually create that internal community and network, but then to project it out upwards?

Absolutely. I mean, I'll throw another term and buzzword out there, but community led growth. You know, I think, you know, the idea that what we sell and the markets that we're in are bigger than us as individuals and bigger than us as companies. And if you're able to tap into the broader conversation, again, not salesy. Right. Add value, add perspective, have a point of view that can be contrarian or complimentary. Adding to that greater conversation and helping teach and helping learn, I think can really help organizations that are selling to businesses.

I'm smiling because literally I've just fired off a message to somebody and my MBA, I saw a post of this person that's teaching MSE people the what is the seven Ps and extended it to 23Ps and I thought, oh my gosh, I finished my MBA in 2002, which is when I did this, you know, the, the P's and I think they're teaching sales honestly, I was, I was seething with. I, I was, maybe I shouldn't have fired off that email. But, you know, this is a really.

Tough top.

Master'S program, and I think this is 24 years later and they were proudly promoting this and thinking, oh my gosh, is this how far sales has come? And there's a lot of that in, in our industry where there's real laggards. And it frustrates me so much. And, you know, what we're talking about is really being future focus and focusing on our customers and all a sudden of all of those things that are just perfect for where we want to be and what we want to talk about. Well, when I see something like that, I was literally fuming.

So, yeah.

Frustrate you when you, you know, you're kind of like looking forward and you're constantly pulled back to these real laggards.

Yeah, I mean, some people still need to learn the basics sometimes. Right. But I think the challenge we're seeing now is the basics that used to work, work, I don't know, even five years ago, are no longer working. Right. If we think about what it's like to sell to businesses, you know, no one's opening email, prospecting is dead. Right. All these things that, that used to work to get people to hear you pitch them your product are no longer working. Attention spans are shorter. You know, it's bye, bye committee. Right. All these factors in the market. So I think if you're not, not thinking about future tactics and strategies, then you're missing the boat because the things that used to work even five years ago are now being critically challenged.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I was right to be infuriated.

We're right. And hopefully they get on board quickly.

Yeah, I hope so. Hope so. They'll probably block me. Eddie May, I really would love to know what's one personal value or belief that has really shaped your leadership mindset?

Yeah, I believe in just human first. You know, we sell AI to enterprise and we're high tech and all of that, but it's still humans on the other side of the screen or the table. It's still trying to connect our customers with their customers who are also human. So. So I try to take a human first approach. That means I try to be pretty authentic, pretty direct, but at the same time empathetic and compassionate. We realize that we are just one small drop in the bucket of our customers and our prospect stays, and so we should be respectful and mindful of that. I try to lead with respect and care in terms of dealing with my internal teams and dealing with my colleagues and with my customers as well. So, you know, work is hard. Life is hard enough. You know, I just try to make sure that I'm leading with those values first.

That's beautiful. So how can listeners get hold of you as you may?

Yeah, so the best way is via LinkedIn. You can search by my name. E J I E M E. Not many people with that name on LinkedIn, so I'm pretty easy to find.

You're very unique. Unique. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience. And thank you for being on Scale Yourselves podcast.

Thank you so much, Janice. It was great to finally be on and hopefully I'll see you soon in London.

Yeah, hopefully. If you enjoy this episode of Scale Yourselves podcast, explore other episodes of insightful guests conversations, or watch the Caption show on YouTube. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode filled with strategies to help you scale your sales. I love to hear your thoughts, so please share your views and leave a review on itunes. It helps us reach more revenue generators just like you. So until next time, keep scaling your sales.