Excerpt from a 2017 YouTube interview with Josh James (Domo/Omniture) about customer-success strategy. James describes intentionally taking on highly complex or large customers—assigning top team members to solve their problems—because solving one hard customer can unlock many similar accounts. He acknowledges the cost/risk (some large efforts fail) but frames it as a portfolio approach that yields long-term scalable wins and learning.
Chapters
Foreign.
Approach to customer success or being in the field with customers. Yeah, that's evolved over time.
That one we kind of. We got right at omninsure and we just 10x. We just 10.
You double down on it early. Right.
Which is.
That's the trick.
Anytime I hear any customer that's going to be a problem. Like you talk to like sales and marketing experts and they're like, you got to find the target customer and you only get that target customer if it's not the target customer. You shouldn't do it. You don't want to get distracted and do all these things and jump all over the place just because the customers are telling you that. You'll never have a strategy to a point. But like when I hear there's a customer that's breaking everybody, that's extremely complex that says there's no way we're gonna handle their business, I'm like, take our five best people, put them on it, let's fix it, let's make it work. And if we get that right, then we're gonna get dozens and dozens of other customers from that one example. So we look for the complexity.
That's my view. So you have a big customer that comes in that wants to push the limits on deal size and everything. If it's vaguely in your wheelhouse, you do it and you just put a team on it and learn from it.
Yep, absolutely.
I think the advice of like, those are outliers and don't do it. Distract is often terrible advice.
And they can be distracting. And you do. I mean it's like portfolio approach. There's some customers that you end up spending half a million bucks on and you don't get anything out of it and then the guy moves on and you lose the contract. I mean it happens. But if you think about you doing 10 of those, maybe three of them don't work out, but seven of them are going to be amazing and it's going to be your long term business. It.
