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 going to 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. All right, so first I'm going to just tell you. 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 going to do the exact opposite. Rather than tell you who I am, I'm going to tell you who I'm not. Everybody remember Fred Astaire, one of the greatest American entertainers to 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. All right? 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 plus 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 you. You can actually use, I'm going to do my best to make this informative but also entertaining for you. Okay? Sound good? All right, There we go. All right, so five things we're going to cover. Again, the question we're going to answer today, again is what do I think customer success is going to look like in the future? Okay, now, the first thing we're going to do before I can answer that question, is we're just going to take a look at consumer consumers today. And we're all consumers, and there's unique characteristics that we have. I want to 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 going to 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 going to cover five characteristics. Okay. Number one, 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 of the decision making process. All right, so more educated than ever before. Number two, again, this is CEB's research. The number of stakeholders involved in the decision making process, 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. And you have to tailor a message specific to them to make sure that they're interested. All right, all right, number three, 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. 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, 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 want to avoid danger. We want to avoid something making a decision that would ultimately come back and reflect poorly on us. Okay, Number four, this is my favorite. Microsoft did a study a few years ago and average attention Spanish. All right, so your average human being can only hold their attention for on average eight seconds. And goldfish, on the other hand, are clocking in at nine 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, emails, phone calls, et cetera, et cetera. 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, think about it as a solution provider, as an organization that again, is trying to 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 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, 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. Okay. 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? 2, 3, 4, maybe even 5. And if you do, that's okay 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? 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 when they do finally engage. What's happening when they do engage? Is that person telling me something I don't already know? 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. And again, chances are they're probably not going to buy from you. So what does this mean for salesmen? Right. Extremely challenging times. 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, 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 going to have to acquire new skills in order 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 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. 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. 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 Dickson 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 wanted 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 challenged 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, telling them about the monster that's sweeping 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 I'll share with you my thoughts on the typical profile, what type of individual she should 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, et cetera. 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. There was. 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 eight 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 eight 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 have studied 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, et cetera, and 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 as educated buyer, extremely challenging to communicate in a way that interests them rather than interest yourself 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 able to hit my 100%, I'm going to buy that Porsche, Turbo or whatever. While that may be true, the customer doesn't really give a shit. That's your problem. 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. Once you consider 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. And again, they're good communicators, extroverted, et cetera. 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 1000 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. It has to take that big churn hit in a year. All right, so, okay, now that you've got the right person, what can you do as an organization to help make them successful? All right, so now I'm going to work backwards. The end result for most organizations out there, you want to win new logos, you want to retain them, and you want to 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 renew and grow and buy in the first place? Generally, if people use 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. But it's not enough to tell you how to use something. If you're a fan of Simon Sinek, you want to start with why? 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, talking about use case. A VP of sales has very different interests than a VP of marketing versus a HR vp, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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 or she, 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, because then we're going to 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? I have a lot of customer success people that say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's not me. I'm not going to do that. That's just not who I am. You don't want to 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, and I'm not saying we want to 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 you'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 pre sale cycle. You can use Customer Success during the pre sale 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 actually do what you promised. So during the pre sales 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 certainly 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. 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 six 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 want to flow that back to your internal customers. Don't you want to help your marketing sales team come up with an ideal customer profile? Who's your most successful customers? Won't that help drive 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, et cetera. Because ultimately you all win. Come on. I'll get it right. Ok, 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 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 consult 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 going to call you and I'm going to 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 enjoy this.