Customer Success In 2020 And Beyond

Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Everybody can hear me okay? Great. All right, first of all, thank you for coming. There's a lot of great speakers out there all presenting at the same time, so I'm grateful and truly appreciative you chose to visit with me. I'm gonna do my best to make this worth your while, so when you walk away in a half hour, Hopefully you won't regret being here. Alright, so first I'm gonna just tell you, um, this is the slide usually where people will talk about all the wonderful things that they've done in their careers, and I'm not going to do that. I'm actually gonna do the exact opposite. Rather than tell you who I am, I'm gonna tell you who I'm not. Everybody remember Fred Astaire? One of the greatest American entertainers to have ever lived. And he was such a great dancer, he was said to have created his own dance moves. Unlike Fred Astaire, I will not sit here and take credit for anything that I'm about to show you today. Alright, I freely admit that most of what I'm going to show you here, if not all, I've read somewhere, I've heard somebody else say. What I can offer you though is my unique perspective based on my 20+ years of experience living in the customer success sort of world. Okay, so again, at the end of the half hour, if you walk away with at least one or two nuggets that that you can actually use. I'm gonna do my best to make this informative but also entertaining for you, okay? Sound good? All right. There we go. All right, so 5 things we're gonna cover. Again, the question we're going to answer today again is, what do I think customer success is gonna look like in the future, okay? Now the first thing we're gonna do before I can answer that question is we're just gonna take a look at, consumers today, and we're all consumers, and there's unique characteristics that we have. I wanna take a look at that, and then based on those characteristics, what is driving the decision-making process of to buy or not to buy, yes or no? Then we'll look at ideal profiles of customer success practitioners. I've done a lot of hiring in my life. I'll give you some insights as to what I found works and what doesn't. And then we're gonna talk about the idea of winning as a team and what that really means as far as setting yourself up organizationally for success and your customer success. And then last, one of the most important responsibilities I think of any customer success organization is the sharing of information. All right, so let's begin. Characteristics of today's consumers. All right, we're gonna cover 5 characteristics. Okay, number 1. Thanks to the internet, we are living in the information age, right? Information is readily available to anyone and everyone, any time of day, from all over the world. And as a result, consumers are more educated than they ever have been before. This slide is based on data done by CEB. CEB research shows that consumers these days are 57% along the way of the decision-making process before they are ready to engage with the consumer. Okay, it was not the case before the internet, right? Because in the past, a consumer that was interested in something had to then reach out to a vendor to learn as much as they could about that offering. Not the case any longer. Consumers again can research as much as they want before deciding to engage. Again, CEB research 57% along the way at the decision-making process. Alright, so more educated than ever before. Number 2, again, this is CEB's research. The number of stakeholders involved in the decision-making process is currently 6.8. Okay, that number has actually gone up. When CEB first released this data just a few years ago, it was actually 5.4. So imagine the complexity now in the decision-making process. Not only do I have really educated buyers, but I have more of them that I need to talk to. And each unique persona has their specific needs and wants. You have to tailor a message specific to them to make sure they're interested. Alright, alright, number 3. This is just human nature. This is not any CEB research. This is just basic fundamental human behavior. We're generally a very risk-averse lot, right? We want to avoid danger as much as we can because we don't want to be hurt, right, physically or emotionally. Back in the prehistoric age, you know, we did our best to avoid dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers because otherwise we would have gotten eaten. These days, we don't want to invest money in a solution and then have it blow up in our face and find out it was the wrong decision because then you have to answer to your CEO, why did you make this decision to buy such and such product, right? So we wanna avoid danger, we wanna avoid something, making decision that would ultimately come back and reflect poorly on us. Okay, number 4, this is my favorite. Microsoft did a study a few years ago, an average attention span. All right. So your average human being can only hold their attention for, on average, 8 seconds. And goldfish, on the other hand, are clocking in at 9 seconds. So sadly, humans are losing in the battle against goldfish when it comes to attention spans. Sad state of affairs, right? But why is that? Well, you know, we're distracted. We've got phones that are constantly buzzing and ringing. We've got texts, tweets, chats, you know, emails, phone calls, etc., etc. There's so much. I mean, some of you might be playing a game of Candy Crush right now. You've got a lot of choices, right? All right, and then last, we're extremely impatient people. We know what we want and we want it now. We don't want to wait for it. And why is that? Well— sorry, there's a delay on the clicker. There we go. We live in the on-demand society, on-demand culture. At the push of a button, you can get so many things these days. You can get books, you can get movies, you can get music, you can get TV shows, you can order a pizza. I use my phone to order Starbucks. I don't have to go to the counter any longer. I just go and I pick up what I want. I order just about anything I want off of Amazon. I used to go to Costco and I hated that. It was such a terrible experience. Now I just use Amazon Prime, punch in what I want, boom, it's often at my house that same day. Think about what that is doing to us psychologically, how that's conditioning us where we want and expect things almost immediately. And when it doesn't happen, that's frustrating, right? That creates an experience that's less than optimal if someone's trying to engage with you and lead you along some sales cycle or process. So when you add all those things up, you know, think about it as a solution provider, as an organization that again is trying to, you know, gain customers This is a recipe for disaster, isn't it? How can you possibly win knowing the conditioning that we have and how it's contrary to maybe what you've been doing so far? Come on. There we go. So, again, all told, the power has shifted in favor of the consumer. It used to be that the vendors had all the power because they held all the information. Not the case any longer. So this makes it incre— incredibly demanding and challenging for organizations to win in dealing with today's educated buyer. Come on. I'll get it. Okay, so what drives the decision-making process then? What are consumers looking for when they do decide or investigating whether to buy or not to buy something? And by the way, b— before I show you this, we're all consumers here, right? I just want you to pause for a second and look in the mirror and ask yourself, are some of these characteristics true to you? Let me go back and just ask the question. Come on. OK, it's not cooperating. Suffice it to say, you should be able to self-analyze and ask yourself, do I have one of these characteristics, two, three, four, maybe even five? And if you do, that's OK, because again, not only Are you going to work and working for a solution provider and trying to gain customers? You, again, are a consumer, and there's times where you go out and buy, and you know the type of experience that you're looking for, right? So again, this is CEB's research. CEB concluded that 53% of the people that they surveyed said that it was the sales experience that drove their decision-making process. When they did finally decide to interact with a solution provider, what was that experience like? Right? Overwhelmingly, 53% chose the sales experience. So basically what they're talking about is, remember, consumers are 57% of the way along the buying cycle, right? When they do finally engage, What's happening when they do engage? Is that person telling me something I don't already know, right? Are they educating me? Are they somehow advising me? It's one thing to be reactive, but again, ideally, if you're talking about all the same stuff that that consumer already knows, the consumer will not find value in that, right? And again, chances are they're probably not gonna buy from you. So what does this mean for salesmen, right? Extremely challenging times for— if you're out there in sales and you're trying to win business dealing with this educated buyer that's extremely impatient and wants things now, now, now. So you've heard this idea that salesmen in the future, they won't exist any longer. So I don't think that salespeople will go away. When they talk about death to the salesman, I think they talk about guys like this. You know, the cheesy car salesman, the guy that, again, has his own interests in mind and really doesn't care about your interests. It's all about satisfying his or her needs, which doesn't do you any good, right? So I think this type of person will no longer exist. Instead— come on— I think it's actually more of an evolution. The sales reps of today are gonna have to acquire new skills in order to be, to adapt, again, and be more in line with what consumers are expecting today, okay? So instead, what they're looking for, again, as I'm proposing, and my vision of the future is, is customer success will start to bleed into more of the sales process. What consumers are looking for is, again, some person or an organization that can help go beyond the typical customer-vendor relationship and really try to form a partnership, right? An organization, again, that knows the consumer better than the consumer knows themselves and actually add value. So here is a piece of artwork that I had a friend of mine who's an artist create for me. This was inspired by the Challenger Sales book and Challenger Customer book by Matt Dixon and CEB. So this is what I'm talking about. Here's an illustration of what I mean, right? It's one thing, again, that when a consumer engages with you and asks for a certain something, that you provide it. That is certainly one good thing that a solution provider does. But again, what Matt Dixon talks about in his book and what I'm a big fan of is the reality is the customer is not always right. Okay. I think that probably came from the restaurant business where regardless of what the restaurant patron said, you want to just make sure you made them happy and you got them out of there. When again, the truth is customers aren't always right. And I have had more customers tell me that we have earned their trust and their respect when we actually challenge them and we told them, "Hey, I understand why you're asking for such and such." but based on my experience, let me show you that there might be a better way. There might be a different way. And customers, again, I'm telling them something they don't already know. I'm telling them about the monster that's sleeping under their bed that they don't know about. And being able to create value around something, again, that they didn't know could be potential danger for them. So, uh, I'll share with you my thoughts on the typical profile, what type of individual should you be looking for that possesses these skills, because finding a hybrid is very, very hard to do. Most people are either customer success orientated, and then there's other people that are just sales, hunters versus farmers, etc. There's lots of different terms you could use. I personally feel that I'm a hybrid, but that was developed over time. I certainly wasn't born that way. I've spent, again, my entire professional career in customer success, and sales was kind of like the final frontier for me. I did have an opportunity in 2015. The first 8 months of the year, I actually was both VP of sales and customer success for the organization I was with, and I was never again a bag-carrying sales rep. And despite not having that experience, I was able to use my customer success methodology, strategic sort of behavior, and guess what? I hit quota 8 months in a row. And by that metric, I was the most successful sales VP that organization ever had. Nobody had ever done that before me and nobody's done that since I did the job. And all I did again was try to focus on value and problem solving and not just known needs but unknown needs. That created, again, value that customers weren't previously aware of. So here's a type of characteristics that I find when I'm looking for hiring, and I've interviewed literally hundreds and hundreds of people over the years. Specifically, as far as disciplines, I look for people that maybe have studied communications. I look for people that have studied— come from marketing backgrounds. And also this one, maybe you've never heard before, is psych majors. I love people who study psychology. Although I didn't study psychology in school, I have spent a lot of time since then just reading a lot of books, again understanding behavioral economics, the human decision-making process, why we make rational choices versus emotional choices, etc. Having that basic understanding of the human psyche and understanding what drives our behavior, I think gives you an advantage. Again, when you are speaking with, again, today's educated buyer, extremely challenging to communicate in a way that interests them rather than interests yourself, right, in your organization. So I'll give you an example. I've met many sales reps that make it, known to their prospect that, hey, I've got a quota to hit, it's the end of the quarter, if you buy from me, I'm gonna be able to hit my 100%, I'm gonna buy that Porsche Turbo or whatever. While that may be true, the customer doesn't really give a shit. That's your problem, right? What does that do for them? Absolutely nothing. So instead, how do you phrase that conversation where the customer sees value in engaging with you and buying something from you? So for example, hey, it's the end of the quarter. I'm sure like other VPs, you have unused budget that if you don't spend it, you'll lose it next year. You know, won't you consider, you know, solution XYZ so you can use those untapped dollars? It's just an example, but the point is you're speaking in terms that interest the other person as opposed to terms that interest yourself. And I find that these people, these people with these profiles tend to be very, very good at it. Again, they're good communicators, extroverted, etc. The sports background that was popular for a long time, I don't always find is necessarily successful in this hybrid type role. Because what I find is if somebody just comes from a pure sports background, that competitiveness sometimes drives them to do things that maybe, again, isn't in the interest of the customer. So again, just because I can convince you to buy 1,000 users and you only need 100, what good does that do if a year from now you're churning 90% of those users, right? It's good for you, I guess, for your paycheck, but not good for the customer and certainly not good for your organization that has to take that big churn hit in a year. All right, so, um, Okay, now that you've got the right person, what can you do as an organization to help make them successful? Alright, so now I'm gonna work backwards. The end result for most organizations out there, you wanna win new logos, you wanna retain them, and you wanna grow them, right? Is that fair to say? In its simplest form. Now working backwards, what generally do you have to do to get people to to renew and grow and buy in the first place. Generally, if people use a certain something, they're more likely to continue to use it and pay for it, right? So the precursor to winning, growing, and renewing is just get people to use something, all right? But it's not enough to tell you that you, you know, how to use something, right? If you're a fan of Simon Sinek, you wanna start with why, right? What is the value? Why should you use a certain something? So the precursor to adoption utilization is value. Again, and today's customer success practitioners and the most successful people, again, have that ability to communicate value. But in order to have that value conversation, you must be an expert both in your product and in your consumer. Again, remember, they're more educated than they ever have been before. You have to be able to tell them something they don't already know. So I'm talking about persona, I'm talking about vertical, I'm talking about use case. A VP of sales has very different interests than a VP of marketing versus an HR VP, etc., etc., etc. I'm telling you in my experience, hands down, this is number one reason why organizations fail because they fail their employees. You cannot hire somebody, give them a laptop, and just expect them to figure it out on their own. They will not. They won't. And then when that person fails, you end up blaming them. Oh, he was a shitty salesman. You didn't try hard enough. Certainly, the individual is responsible for their own destiny, but also organizations have to, have to, have to enable their people. And this is what they need to know, because if they don't have the expertise, they will not be able to communicate anything of value to that consumer, and chances are you will not get what you ultimately want. And remember, CEB's research showed us that that's what consumers are looking for. Tell them something they don't already know. And if you don't know more than them, you cannot have that conversation. Okay, so further along, what does the future look like? So I get asked this question a lot and it drives me crazy. People ask me, okay, well, customer success, sales, who owns renewals, who owns upsell? And oftentimes people feel that it has to be an either/or. Answer. And, you know, I used to admit back in the day, this is— I used to think, hey, renewals, that's all customer success does. We're the good cops. Hey, sales, you're the bad cops. You go have those discussions. You talk about dollars and cents. We're not going to do that. That's your problem. Hey, just don't oversell them. Don't promise anything that doesn't exist, 'cause then we're gonna have to deal with that. There was this clash between sales and customer success. But I've lived and I've learned, I've grown up, and I am a firm believer in winning as a team. I do firmly believe that the most successful SaaS organizations today have a customer success team that are willing and able to partner with sales. In order to help not just renew accounts. Again, that certainly is important, but growth is a leading indicator of renewals, isn't it? So I have a lot of customer success people that say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not me. I'm not gonna do that. That's just not who I am. You don't wanna grow accounts, really?" But again, if they're growing, doesn't that mean they're liking the product? They're getting value out of it? So if you get them to grow, And I'm not saying we wanna turn customer success people into sales reps in disguise, not at all. What I do want to see is more of, again, become educating, creating awareness, having those conversations where the growth is organic. When consumers buy, it's not because you've called to talk about the blue light special. They're buying because you said something and the light bulb goes off and they're like, "Wow, I didn't know I could do that. I want that." Send me a sales order. It's that simple, right? And taking it one step further, I do believe customer success should be willing to partner with sales in the presale cycle. You can use customer success during the presale cycle as a differentiator, right? There's a lot of SaaS solutions out there that are very similar and you're looking for a differentiator and the ability to actually make your customer successful is valuable, right? Because remember, we're risk-averse. It's risky if I do business with you. I don't know who you are. You could be lying to me. I could sign up and then find out that you can't actually do what you promised. So during the presales cycle, if you can partner with sales, help communicate your wins. You know, you have your referenceable customers, the ones that will advocate for you. We made all these customers successful. We can make you successful too. Wouldn't you be more willing to buy if you had more certainty around your results, your ROI down the road? Of course you would. Okay, and then last, another major responsibility again in the spirit of winning as a team, customer success. Again, I just spoke about partnering with sales for growth, right? There's two types of customers in my book. There's external customers, they're obviously the ones that pay you money for your product or service. right? But there's also internal customers. Your VP of Sales, your VP of Marketing, your VP of Product Engineering. These are people that are teammates. You all work for one company. Yes, you're part of success, but you have to do what you can to help bring these other teams together. And one of the ways you can do that is act as a conduit of information that flows between internal and external customers. Example, your VP of Engineering let you know that the new release is coming out in 6 weeks, there's these great new features. You have to take that message and make sure that it gets to your external customers. Let them know what's coming, what the value is, right? By the same token, being on the front lines, customer success has really valuable information that they're hearing. You're doing surveys, there's various ways to get this information. You wanna flow that back to your internal customers. Don't you wanna help your marketing sales team come up with an ideal customer profile? Who's your most successful customers? Won't that help drive your, your go-to-market strategy in the future if you know who's successful and you should sell more to those people and maybe not so much to these others? So again, winning as a team, I'm a strong proponent of it. Customer success should be willing to partner with sales and taking it one step further, again, with marketing as well, product, engineering, QA, etc., because Ultimately, you all win. Come on. I'll get it right. Okay, well, that was the last slide, but there is one more thing I want to tell you. So earlier when I said that I can't take credit for any of the stuff that I showed you, it's true. Most of what I showed you is, again, stuff that I've seen or heard somewhere else, but there is one thing, there's only one thing that I can honestly say that was like an original, like, thought I'll take credit for, and only because I don't remember reading it or hearing about it anywhere else. And if somebody has, please tell me and I'll stop showing this slide. So again, in the spirit of what I've learned through studying psychology, you'd be amazed how a simple word can change the way you are perceived by someone else. So the term most typically used in customer success is customer success manager, right? Let me introduce you to a customer success manager. But what I found, and again, you're all consumers, so ask yourself this question, nobody likes to be managed, right? And I've created this term here, or coined the phrase, customer success coach. I asked, the customer success team to coach customers on how to extract the most value out of the solution. Just do that, and I guarantee that you have better results as far as, again, winning, growing, and renewing accounts. I've had so many customers tell me that that helped just the perception. It lowers their defenses. They don't see you as a sales rep in disguise. Again, remember, we want to become that trusted advisor, that consultant, consultant, somebody that's adding value. So it's one thing to react to customer inquiries, but as coaches we want to proactively reach out to customers, right? Even if you don't call me, I'm gonna call you and I'm gonna tell you about all the latest and greatest value that you can extract from this solution. And that's when you can go beyond the typical customer-vendor relationship and really form a partnership. And that's when you become a real valuable player. So that's it, everybody. That's all I've got for you today. I want to thank you for your time. Again, I hope you enjoyed this.