In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Chris Regester, Chief Customer Office at Planhat about how to deliver customer outcomes through a value framework.
Achieving customer success is a long-term endeavor that demands ongoing dedication and collaboration with our clients. A solid foundation is provided by a company value framework, guiding businesses on this journey. So, how can we consistently deliver lasting customer value through a value framework embraced by the entire organization? And what are the initial steps to building such a framework?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Chris Regester, Chief Customer Office at Planhat about how to deliver customer outcomes through a value framework.
Achieving customer success is a long-term endeavor that demands ongoing dedication and collaboration with our clients. A solid foundation is provided by a company value framework, guiding businesses on this journey. So, how can we consistently deliver lasting customer value through a value framework embraced by the entire organization? And what are the initial steps to building such a framework?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
<silence> Hello everyone. I'm your host, Anika Bert , and welcome back to the next episode of the Customer Success Channel podcast, brought to you by Plan Hat , the Modern Customer platform. This podcast is created for anyone working in or interested in the customer success field. On this podcast, we will speak to leaders in the industry about their experiences and their definitions of customer success and get their advice and best practices on how to run a c s organization. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Chris Register , who is this chief Customer Officer at Plan Hat , where he ensures customers are central to everything they do. He has worked in SaaS for almost 20 years, focusing on building teams, strategies and processes in diverse markets around the world. On the rare occasion, he is not talking about customer centricity. He can be found chasing his dogs and daughters on the farm where he lives outside of London. Today we are going to pick Chris's brain on delivering long-term customer value based on a value framework that the entire company at Plan hat follows. As we know customer success doesn't happen overnight, but rather it is something that we work on with our customers for years to come. I'm excited to dive in deeper with Chris on how we deliver customer outcomes through their value framework. Welcome everyone to the podcast. I'm so excited to welcome Chris onto the podcast today. For those of you guys that don't know Chris , he's the chief Customer Officer at Plan Hat . But a little fun fact. Chris and I have known each other for a number of years already and he's the one that introduced me to Plan Hat as when I was a customer. He was the one that was really supporting me with it, but also Chris kind of started my whole podcast career, if we wanna call it that. He is the one that said that I should be on here talking with all the customer success leaders that I have. So it is an honor to actually welcome Chris 'cause he's the one that's told me to start doing this podcast and here he is. So welcome Chris , to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much for having me. Clearly I have an I for podcast talent , so , uh, yeah, thank you for having me. Very excited to be on. It's a great honor to be on the, the the Customer Success Channel podcast. <laugh> .
Speaker 1:That is too funny 'cause as someone who encouraged me to start it, I have, it's taken years, but we have gotten you on here and I'm super excited about it. I know you well, but I think some of our audience might not know you that well. So for their benefit, could you give us a little bit of intro into who you are? What is it you're doing at Plan Hat ? Give us the little lowdown.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So , uh, my name is Chris Register. I live on a farm , uh, outside London. I have two daughters and a lot of time with them and, and with my dog. And when I'm not with them, I'm typically doing , um, you know, customer success things at Plant Hat where I am Chief Customer Officer. And then that's a fairly broad role at Plant Hats. I , I get involved in , in many, many aspects of the business, but basically spend a huge amount of my time talking to, you know, CS leaders all around the world about the challenges they're having and, and things they're trying to solve and, and find it a very interesting space to work in.
Speaker 1:I love it. That's a very humble intro, but I love that, that that's you I guess in a nutshell too. But you have been working in customer success for no small amount of time and in the SaaS industry for quite a bit too. And customer success hasn't always been called customer success as we know it, but I feel like your previous roles all have led up to this moment of being Chief Customer Officer, which is a great title. I think a lot of us inspire to have it as well. But what inspired you to actually start working in customer success and lead to the trajectory that you are kind of on right now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're sort of giving clues to my grand old age , uh, in the , in the , in the setup there that I've been working in , in and around SAS for , you know, the best part of 20 years. I , I joined a , a company when it was quite small. It was a Norwegian company and a marketing technology company called Meltwater Way, way, way back in, in 2005. And , and back in 2005, you know, really there weren't that many SaaS businesses. It was still a very new concept. It was still a sort of idea, you know, maybe you can build a business with recurring revenue. But from day one, that was what Meltwater did. So very, very, very early on, relative to, you know, a lot of businesses, we started to understand the challenges of, you know, re maintaining your revenue and how quickly , um, your, you know, your renewal base became bigger than your new business pipeline. So in early 2006, I went and opened , uh, Meltwater in Asia and very quickly I owned that whole business. I ran, you know, all Asia and Asia Pacific, and we had offices from Sydney to Tokyo to Delhi and had everything in between. And it was just, just absolutely clear how important understanding customers and, you know, maintaining, retaining and growing, you know, customer revenue was to the success of the business. It's been in my d n a ever since I've been working has been just the understanding of how critical this all is .
Speaker 1:Awesome. I also just learned something new about you. I had no idea that you spent time in Asia. I obviously know Chris London-based Chris , but that's so cool. Another reason that it's exciting to have you on today, we did talk a little bit about your title and chief customer officer at a customer success platform. Must be a lot of things. And it's a title, I think a lot of people on this podcast that listen to it aspire to have some day . So what is exciting about the role? Tell us a little bit more about what it is chief customer Officer at Plan Hat is doing and maybe some of your biggest learnings for anyone that's aspiring to be that.
Speaker 2:So, so I , I I would say, you know, title aside, first of all, just working in CS is I think incredibly exciting. I think that, you know, customer success in its current form, it's got this sort of fashionable thing about it. But, but I think that, you know, and people talk about it being new and, and in , and in some respects its current iteration is new, but it , it really is, you know, it is as old as time. Definitely
Speaker 1:I couldn't, businesses should care about their customers. That's where it comes from.
Speaker 2:Exactly right. If you're , uh, you know, you're walked into a hairdresser, an ancient Rome , you know, that hairdresser cared about, you know, the type of hair that they would give you <laugh> and no hairdressing is the ultimate recurring revenue business. 'cause the hair always grows back <laugh> . So this is , this is just as old as time, this whole concept. And, and I think that the, right now it's got this sort of reputation as being this function, this customer success thing, and as all of these buzzwords around it. But in my mind, fundamentally, customer success is your business. It's how you run your business. It's everything about your business. If you don't do this well, your business will all fail. And whilst these days we have a function with this name, fundamentally it is the core of your business. So I think that, you know, for me as a , you know, c c O, it's trying to make sure that you know, that that is very much the philosophy at Plan Hat . What I typically see, and I, I talk to a lot of people as well, just because of the role and the nature of Plan hat , I , I typically see that CCOs do really, really different things. It depends on the size of the company, the function, you know, the, the vertical they're in and so on. For me, I would say I'm a connective layer in the organization. So internally I'm trying to connect how we work with our customers to how we work with prospects to what product is building and what, and what marketing is, is talking about. So I'm involved across all of those different functions. And then when it comes to our customers, you know, ultimately I've gotta make sure that I represent the customer internally and that goes everywhere else , uh, in the business. So they're kind of the key things I'm thinking about.
Speaker 1:Awesome. And as I already alluded to, I've known Plant Hat for a number of years, back when it was just a few people in a room, and you guys have had extreme success, very well deserved levels of success, and it has changed a lot. The company has changed, but the team as well, there's actually a customer success team now, and not just a few CSMs doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, which is every startup to scale up journey. So curious, what does the customer success team look like today at Plant Hat ?
Speaker 2:So, so the function of customer success, we, we sort of have it in separate divisions. So we have obviously CSMs, we have technical account managers, and we have support globally. It's about 60 people all in. It's broadly split 50 50 between the Americas and, and emea . A couple of people in apac. The idea we've had is that we want to hire very senior CSMs. So because we are, as you alluded to earlier, because we're CSS people doing CSS with CSS technology, you know, it's like the movie Inception. It's the dream within the dream within the dream. That's, that's where we live. So we felt that it , it makes a lot of sense that our CSMs have walked the walk before. So on the C S M side, we tend to have people who've previously been directors of CSS at other companies and then they join Plan Hat to really become a true expert in this, in this profession and, and really master it by working with other CS leaders and, you know, as their C S M at Plan Hat . Then we have technical account managers who are more on the data side ensuring the flow of data. You know, I always say that customer success, it, you know, it starts and it ends with data. You know , it is the most critical part of anything you do as your data. So we have a team dedicated to making sure data flows in your data's, where you need it, how you need it, doing what you need it to do. Uh, and then we have just this absolutely amazing supports team and you know, we have some incredible teams at Planet Hat , but our , our support team is just this group of incredibly charming, interesting, diverse people from all over the world who do just a tremendous job and get amazing feedback.
Speaker 1:I know no one can see my face 'cause we're recording audio, but I'm smiling as Chris is telling me about all these teams. 'cause as a previous customer plan had I have dealt with some of these people and could only nod my head and smile to how amazing some of these people are. When it comes to what you just said about the data, I still remember all those conversations about getting our data right before we even got our CSS tool in place. But also the number of times I would message support and, you know, bless them, the most patient people thinking, oh, I have another carrot and support that's asking the, the, the very typical question. But let me help Anik out. So <laugh> , I'm, I'm smiling ear to ear as you're sharing all of this, but I also kind of wanna ask you a little bit around the future of customer success. I know with running a CS team at a CSS platform, you must be thinking a lot around what the future of customer success has in store for obviously you as a business. But I'm curious what you think the future of a customer success manager role means, or director or let's just say anyone in the career trajectory and customer success.
Speaker 2:I think that's a , that's a great question and it's so interesting and I, I sort of trying to pledge in this podcast not to talk about AI when anyone mentions the word future because I'm so tired of everyone talking about AI at the moment. <laugh>,
Speaker 1:I'm too, we've had quite a few episodes around it . <laugh> , I ,
Speaker 2:I'm gonna , I'm gonna focus so much on , on the people as I talk about this. So I believe that people who are building their career in, in CS now are , are making such a good decision. If you look over the last 20, 30 years and , and probably longer, if you look at who's been running businesses, like who are CEOs, and typically it's people who are coming out of sales or finance depending on the size of the organization. And, and you know, obviously you get some technical CEOs as well and they come out of engineering, but they've really been the three key areas and it just seems so, you know, so clear to me that we're gonna see a generation of people who were CSMs and built their career in customer success becoming CEOs over the course of the next 10, 20 years. And I , and I think that's just fantastic because if you think about, you know, what is a C S M, you know, what is a really good C S M, it's at their core. They need to be a business generalist, right? You have to understand your business very deeply. You have to understand how your organization makes money, but you have to, to also understand all of your customers organizations and how they all make money. And then you have to understand products as well. And you also need to have an element of relationship skills as well. And you need some project management in there. You have to understand data and analysis and so on. So it is just this incredible training school for what you need when you want to be a C E O of an organization. So I feel that one of the key things that's gonna happen as , as we look ahead is we'll see a huge number of CEOs of exciting companies coming outta customer success, or at least having had significant experience in, in customer success. And that in itself is just this very exciting fueling cycle for the future of customer success, right? Because typically speaking, if your csuite doesn't believe in customer success, your company will do a terrible job of customer success. But I see this future where there's more and more people who've worked in CSS, who are in the C-suite can empathize with the challenge and that's gonna fuel this function , uh, in the organization for for many years. So I think it's a very bright future. I'm, I'm very optimistic.
Speaker 1:Oh , I love that. Same here. But I also just, I have to reinforce what you've just said around the future CEOs are CSMs today. Because even when I think early in my career, there wasn't even a chief customer officer title yet here we are, I'm chatting with one right now. And at the same time, it's like the possibilities seem endless within customer success. It's a tough job. Like you just said, there was like 20 traits that you just listed that A C S M is doing every day. It's not an easy job, but the possibilities are endless. And I think the future is truly bright. And I was thinking about this as well while you said it, and I just thought A C S M is a business strategist. I feel like that's just what we do every day , like you said, coming together with all those pieces. But I think it's also really important what you said around how customer success is, how you should be running your entire organization or running your entire business. It's not a department, it's not just, you know, you helping customers, it's how we do business. Coming back to your hairdresser example, I think it's a big philosophy at Plan Hat . How do you guys live up to that philosophy with your customers? Yeah .
Speaker 2:So, so if I can just make one comment on the business strategist piece. You said CSM is a business. I I think you're absolutely spot on, but, and I , I think that there's also sort of a , there's a, there's a warning in there for customer success. So we, we have a customer where their team, they actually said they don't wanna be called CSMs.
Speaker 1:Interesting. I've heard this before within different organizations too. And,
Speaker 2:And these guys, they said , look, you know, c ss m it's a bit of a fluffy title these days, <laugh>, it doesn't really have that value. It's like we , and what they actually said they wanted to be called was business strategists. Yeah. Um , and, and so I think you're totally right, but the , the danger that customer success has, and you know, this is something that our plan hat we talk a lot about because obviously we're, you know, we're, we're, we're an important company in this space, or we want to be an important company in this space. But it is, if customer success is too full of all the sort of rainbows and unicorns marketing and all the sort of, you know, somewhat fluffy thought leadership pieces that are sometimes out there, it, it, it's harming customer success as a function when it is the most critical function in the business. So I think you're totally right that the role could easily be renamed business strategist. And I think it's really important that people in, in the customer success community make sure that content that's put out there, the things that are said, like it has to be meaningful. It has to be thoughtful. It can't just be done for, for clicks and links and all of that stuff. <laugh> , I I very rarely write anything or, or, you know, put anything out there because I think it's, you've gotta make sure that things have a high caliber if you're gonna put them out there. Definitely.
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:How , how does Plan Hat try and incorporate this philosophy? I think there's a lot of things you have to do internally to do it, really, right? So we've, you know, we have a big, you know, philosophy all around transparency , uh, internally. So obviously, you know, our product is available, everyone in the organization, you know, plan how we license it with unlimited users. 'cause we've always felt that, you know, the , the greatest way to kind of block a customer-centric culture is by having data silos in an organization. So everyone in the organization has, has full access to try and break down silos continuously. You know, we try and involve different people at different moments in the sort of prospect and customer life cycle . So customer success will very often be involved in deals as they're being worked through. We want the, the prospect to meet the people they may work with. We also want it to happen the other way around . So the C S M can be like, Hey, I don't think we can actually deliver here. We'd like it to be on both sides. But then equally when, you know, we have an executive sponsor program, our executive sponsors, they're not all commercial, you know, so our C F O , he's an executive sponsor of some of our customers. You know, we wanted to bring in our head of HR as , uh, exec sponsor on some of our customers. 'cause we want to have that kind of true customer empathy all across the organization rather than, you know, just in, you know, the people who are dealing directly with the customers. You know, there's a lot of things we're doing around that then , then there's a whole other set of things we try and do around communication. So on the one hand, you wanna make sure people have access to data, but you also wanna make sure there's a lot of transparency around communication. So we have Slack channels that automatically tell stories, things going on with customers, customer victories and whatnot. They go into Slack channels, but it's very important to be transparent and honest. So we lost a large customer on an all hands with the whole company there. We did a full breakdown of exactly what happened, how could product have done things differently, how could customer success have done things differently? How could sales have done things differently? How could everyone in the organization have worked in a different way so that, you know, collectively there was much better learning about what happened and, and, you know, really trying to engineer this empathy into the organization about the customer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's so critical. And like you said, you guys took the time to put the ego aside and learn from something as well, which I think is really critical and important in any business. But I think this year probably a lot of people are facing churn or loss or dealing with , um, reevaluating how they're working with customers as well. But you said something really great, which is sales, marketing, product, you name it. Everyone was involved from the entire customer lifecycle journey by the sounds of it. But whether you win or lose, you do it as a team, which I think you guys also do every day with following your value framework and how you guys work day in and day out. I kind of understand this value framework, but for everyone listening, can you give us a little bit more of a background of what this value framework is? How do you guys use it daily? Give us a little rundown of it.
Speaker 2:Our value framework is, I , I'd say it's kind of our core commercial model. Uh , at the highest level, its purpose internally is so that what we're building in product is the same as what marketing is talking about, which is the same as what sales is pitching, which is the same as what customer success is, you know, delivering or deriving value from. We wanted this consistency, you know, through the organization. Ultimately it's about how do you get your customers to outcomes. So the purpose of a value framework is it's a vehicle to drive outcomes for, for your customers and for Plan Hat , you know, every company has different challenges, but some of the things that are interesting about, about our space is , you know, first of all, plan hat's a really broad flexible product. You know, we have customers who are 5 million a r r growing super fast . We have customers who are a hundred million a r and growing super fast, and we have customers that are many billions of dollars of a r r and growing fast. So we have this enormous broad range of customers. We have customers who are SaaS, we have customers who are non SaaS, we have customers who are hybrid, we have customers that are on-prem and and you know, and delivered through the cloud. We have every kind of vertical you can imagine as a customer and, and all over the world. And all of that is possible because we've built this platform that's extremely flexible. One of the other challenges though that we see is that, you know, customer success itself is extremely broad. You know, if you get a hundred CSS leaders in a room and you say, Hey , uh, hey everyone, what is customer success? You know, you'll get a hundred different answers, right? It is this enormously broad, varied space. And what that means is you typically get a hundred different ways people want to achieve things. You also get a lot of relatively ill-defined objectives. And, and the third challenge we see is that people are really busy. Css people are so busy, it's unbelievable, but they want to get moving quickly. And historically in our plan hap like we've been really fast with getting people up and running, you know, smaller customers up and running with six to eight weeks large customers a little bit longer of course, but typically it's been a , it's been , uh, you know, fast momentum to get people re real value quickly. So what we tried to do is look at, you know, what are the outcomes our customers want to achieve, which is fundamentally they want to grow and retain their customer revenue. And then we said , well, look, what , what does that mean? Like, that's so high level . Like what are the real outcomes that you need to achieve that? And we looked at what our customers do. We talked to a bunch of customers and we saw that really there , there are really five outcomes in customer success that enable you to grow and retain your customer revenue. So we said, okay, well now we've got these five things that we can anchor around, we can tie metrics to . And we said , well, to achieve outcomes, you have to have inputs. So what are the things that our customers do to achieve these outcomes? And that's really the value framework is this model of what are the things you need to do in Plan hat where we've built best practices, templates, guides, et cetera, et cetera , so that people can drive plan hat to achieve these clear outcomes so they can ultimately grow and retain their customer revenue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love what you said earlier, and I wanna pick up on it too, because you mentioned how with this framework and how you guys are working and how you guys figured out these five outcomes that all your customers want in some degree, you mentioned that it's the vehicle to the outcomes themselves, but I was also thinking these five things can take a year, but it could also take many, many years to probably achieve all these outcomes that you guys are talking about, which I want you to share what those are too. But I believe, and I'm sure everyone listening also feels customer success is not just about one month or one year of customer success, it is years and years, if not hopefully, decades, of providing outcomes and value delivery for your customers for years to come. So how did you guys, when building this framework, and when you share a little bit more about it, how did you think about ensuring long-term value with those five parts that you just mentioned?
Speaker 2:I mean, you're clearly a , an expert in the space because you've actually, you know, summarized one of the outcomes itself. <laugh> , we'll come to that in a moment, but , um, what we've done is through this model model , there's maturity scoring all the way through it. So I think that there's two dimensions. So first of all, okay, Customer success is broad and you need to decide what your priorities are and your priorities will change at any moment in time. So it's really important that you decide what you wanna prioritize to begin and you really drive that home. So as we work with the framework with customers, we'll say, you know, for, you know , you know, what , what , what do you wanna achieve? And maybe the customer's like, look, we've got a real problem with onboarding now. So one of the values is onboard your customer systematically. And then we've got a whole bunch of different ways that you can use Plan Hat to do that. Best practices both in the technology and, and in your processes. We say , okay, well, you know, what else, what else Jen ? They say, oh , you know, we've actually, we've also got this whole challenge around our renewal and expansion processes, so that's another value. And so we say, okay, well, like why don't we focus on those things? We'll start with onboarding and your renewal and expansion processes, right? Um , you know, you could argue that's sort of the start and the end of a 12 month cycle with a customer for, for sake of argument. And then we'll, we'll go really deep with them on those things. And then we say , okay, look, we've achieved these, we've got these objectives, we're measuring these metrics. What do you wanna do next? Where do you want to go now? And then of course, over time, so this gives us one, we get things done, we accomplish things, we move on to other areas, but over time, the way they wanna on onboard evolves or best practice changes. So we can also go back to them. So we're always reviewing the values that have gone live to make sure that it's cutting edge and that it's still meeting the requirements of the customer. And then how we deliver each value is also scored on a maturity level. So let's say in a very simple example , uh, a simple onboarding would be you have one generic playbook to onboard all of your customers. And then a slightly more advanced version would be you have different playbooks based on the type of customer they are . And then perhaps a more advanced level would be you have segmented playbooks per customer cohort, and then you have adoption playbooks to drive change management at a user level with automated email sequences hitting the users at the right moment to drive change management and so on and so forth. That's sort of the way we've done it, is that you've got this framework that covers all of customer success and then built into it. There's maturity levels. One of the things that's really interesting is that then when we start working with a customer, we can help them understand and benchmark them from a maturity point of view. So based on what you're doing today and how you're doing it, like this is how you are versus let's say, other SaaS companies in France or other MarTech companies that are under 50 million a a r around the world. So we're gathering data from our customers and other people we talk to, and then we're able to benchmark, which, which in itself is such a fascinating and eyeopening , uh, eye-opening thing in this space. I
Speaker 1:Love that you mention the maturity piece because I think that's something that is almost, I don't wanna say forgotten, but a last thought. When you are mapping out value outcomes and you're like, okay, this is everything I wanna achieve with my customers, and this is how they're gonna get the most value out of our product, but most times we forget that like you said, you have customers that have 5 million a r r growing really fast and billions and growing really fast, and that customer at 5 million and growing fast is not gonna be looking at the same outcomes as someone with a billion in a r r . So you really have to scale things based on the maturity of their product, the maturity of their customers, the maturity of their market. And I think that's really important to consider when you are building out your own framework. You guys have five, maybe there's three at a different company, but some people who are listening are probably thinking, Hey, how do I even start with building a framework at my own company? And I would say it's thinking about maturity as a really big part of that, but you guys are the ones with framework, you're the expert here. So I'm curious, if I was starting a framework from scratch, what would you expect or what would you tell me to be doing or recommend for me to get started with?
Speaker 2:The , the first thing to understand is that it's, it's very easy to create a slide and say, these are the outcomes our customers want to achieve, that we will help you. And put that slide into a sales deck and then say, you know, ta-da , now we have a value framework. Or to put them each as, you know , uh, links on your website and say, look how we're getting you there. First of all, you have to understand it's a, it's a really big undertaking, you know, for us, you know what we're using now. It was a good six to nine months of work to really build this out and lots of people and, you know, lots of thinking evolve , lots of conversations. The core of it is obviously, can you operationalize it, right ? There's what can you make that jump from, here's a cool concept with clear outcomes, and people get excited by it when they see it to, okay, wow, we're actually measuring the delivery of this thing over time and can see improvement and development at an operational level. So I think that's what you have to get to, you know, where do you start? I think it makes most sense to start at the top, right? You start with, you know, what are the outcomes that you know that our customers want to achieve? And you challenge it again and again and again, you know, and this is what we kept on doing. It's like, why does that outcome matter? Like , does it matter? Like why, why is that important and how does it influence the p and l if they can do this? How do you measure it? And, you know, if you can't measure it and it doesn't impact the p and l in some way, then it's not real. Uh , that was what we, you know, really came to. It's got to be measurable, it's gotta be tangible. It's , it's gotta be hard. And this is one of the exciting things that's happening in customer success now, right? Is that, you know, the, the tougher economy of the last, you know, whatever it is, 18, 24 months has meant that people are being forced to have this much deeper assessment of how they're driving value for customers. And you've gotta make sure that whatever you're offering, it's influencing the customer's p and l in some form or another.
Speaker 1:I love that. I think of it as r o i , making sure your product, like you show the r o i to your customer right away, but p and l is another great way of looking at it. But like you said, think of really why, like why is this important? Why is this gonna change the lives of our customer? Like not just the what is it and the like feature functionality of your product, but the why is a strong, strong lever. And then also, like you said, whatever revenue piece, whether it's the r o i of your product or how it affects their p and l, it's really critical. Which brings me good segue to my next question, which is around the whole economy right now, times are tougher than they've ever been. CSS leaders and professionals are being asked to really look tightly and scrutinize their budgets. And I've heard it more times, and I'm guessing you hear it more than I do, but I hear the quote, my C F O doesn't value customer success, or they don't wanna invest anymore in customer success, which is a pity, but I hear it and I'm curious, how do you handle situations like that? How do you advise people who have CFOs who just don't believe in what they're trying to build and do?
Speaker 2:I mean , and it comes back to you have to influence revenue and then a customer success. It must be in the organization, either directly responsible for or indirectly measuring its impact on revenue. Um, you know, we always say, you know, why does plan hat exist ? Plan Hat exists to help companies retain and grow their customer revenue. That is why customer success is a function ultimately needs to exist. And you can spin that sentence a million different ways. You can say, oh , you customer success exists to surpass their customer's wildest dreams, or all of these kind of fluffy things, but fundamentally you exist to retain and grow customer revenue. And so you've gotta make sure that you are doing that, you're responsible for that, either with a direct metric or that you're tracking it. So I think that for organizations where they have that challenge, that there's two things they need to do, first thing they should do is get the C F O in a meeting with customers. If you can do that, that's a wonderful way to build immediate empathy and understanding. So if you can do that, great. Oftentimes that's hard. But the real thing you need is you need data showing , uh, your impact on revenue, and you need that data over time, right ? You have to show that historic impact. And I think a lot of people who haven't worked in customer success, they, they don't understand the, the, the , the challenges around time in customer success. It's so much different to sales where you typically have a pipeline and a quarterly forecast, and it's, and it's somewhat more predictable, but in, in customer success, there's this continuous lagging effect, which makes everything so much harder to show, you know, to show direct r o i . So I have a great example of that where, you know, a company that, you know, I know fairly well, fairly large company, the c e o read , um, the great Frank Lipman's book and , uh, decided that , um, you know, they didn't need a customer success function anymore, so they closed it down, and this was in Q one of this year, and in Q two of this year, their churn and net retention was pretty good. They're pretty happy with like, Hey , we made a great decision, but you know , lo and behold, what happened in Q three, they've now had, you know, 4, 5, 6 months of ultimately a mix of sales and, and pro service people managing the customers, what happened? Their results absolutely tanked because this is lagging effect in css. And the customers were feeling it two quarters later and they were like, Hey, you know what, this, this isn't working for us. So now they're having to rewind and , and undo everything. So how could that have been avoided if there would've been clear data on the impact of CSS on revenue in the organization to show the C F O and also data about the impact of time and how things have a lagging effect in customer success? Yeah,
Speaker 1:I think that's another critical thing. And coming back to long-term customer values, it's in the name you, it's long-term , it's not gonna be today, tomorrow, next month. And using the data, but also making sure that you are very mindful that even though you're budgeting may be just for 2024 right now, CSS doesn't happen in a year, it's a longer term , it's a bigger project. And also factoring that into the conversations that you are having with whether it's your C F O or your wider executive team or even the board, it's, it's a lot bigger than that. And I think sometimes we get so bottlenecked into thinking or tunnel vision of, hey, this is just, I got a plan for this quarter or this year, but you're thinking about your a r r five years from now or your n r r five years from now as well. And that's not gonna happen with the conversation on just this quarter, or like you just said, Q one versus Q two, they had a different idea. So thanks for sharing that. I have one more question around the frameworks, which is a lot of people are gonna be building out frameworks or thinking about it as well as we go into a , a new year. And I was amazed when I saw your guys' framework for the first time, but I know that probably didn't happen overnight, and I know that it probably took many iterations of getting to where you guys are at now. But curious, what were some of your biggest mistakes, learnings? What did you guys figure out while building out this long-term customer success outcome-based framework?
Speaker 2:So what we use today, this is V two value framework 2.0, and I think we've learned a huge amount from the first version. And I, I think I've spoken a little bit about some of those things already, but the first version was conceptually made a lot of sense and it gave, you know, directionally made a lot of sense for customers. Like, yes, I can relate to this, this is what I wanna achieve. It gave us direction, but it didn't tie out enough at the top to real business outcomes. So we weren't so good at saying, Hey, we've done all of this work on this thing. Look at what's changing in your business. And the second side of it was internally we didn't really operationalize it enough. So it became the thing of, you know, I'm helping my customers improve their onboarding, but one CSM was doing it this way, another CSM was doing it that way, another one was doing it a third way. So we were losing that collective education of how things are done. So in the version we have now, one of the things that , and there's so many things that are cool about , uh, about having a value framework, it's just this sort of ocean of interesting data and knowledge that you can use in an organization so much. But one of the things we've done is we've built it out. If I take the onboarding example again, you know, we've looked at all of our customers and talked to all of our team about all the different ways people want to onboard, and then how do we actually build that out and plan out what's the best way of doing it? What are the best ways of approaching these different, you know, different types of onboarding? And now we've got it all documented, right? So any new person who joins Plan Hat as an employee, they can come in and look at it and they're like, oh, look, they , here are all of these interesting ways that you can onboard companies and customers. And very quickly they're getting the knowledge about onboarding that most CS people would only get in a , you know, over a lifetime because it's collected from all these different organizations that we've worked with and , and have experience with.
Speaker 1:I love that. And I love that you just said that operational piece because I think a lot of times we get held back by theory rather than doing, but like you said, there was V one and you realize there was operational issues and then you went and corrected that. Like, you don't have to just wait for perfection. And I think I'm always one to believe that progress over perfection, but more so when you are building customer success because you're gonna have to try, try, try again, and it's not gonna be perfect. But as you said, it's, it's endless possibilities of what you can be doing with this framework .
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. That's so exciting. Amazing.
Speaker 1:Well, listen, we could keep chatting about this, but we do have to wrap up with our quick fire questions where I challenge each one of my guests to try to answer the next few questions in a sentence or less. It's almost never the case, but I'm gonna challenge you. Are you ready?
Speaker 2:I'll do my best. I'm not, I'm, I'm not very good at short answers as you probably noticed. I'm, I'm brilliant. <laugh>,
Speaker 1:Your answer to my question right now already is indicative of what we're gonna get, but we'll try. The first question kind of leads back to what we were talking about earlier, but what do you think is next for the customer success industry?
Speaker 2:I think there are a lot of very exciting and inspiring younger people moving into customer success at the moment with interesting backgrounds that are gonna really help professionalize the space. And I think that that's very exciting for the next 10 years. I've been meeting a lot of people over the last couple of weeks and just been so inspired by the backgrounds some of these people, recognizing the customer success is the core of the business and really wanting to get their hands on it. But coming from consulting, vc, private equity engineering, all different roles. So I think there's sort of a young , the next generation of CSS people is, is a very exciting generation. I'm, I'm very inspired by some of the people I've met, obviously not talking about AI
Speaker 1:<laugh> , I love that too though, because early in my career I didn't even see people do that transition that you're just talking about. And I've come across teachers and doctors and lawyers that have transitioned into customer success as well. And I'm just like, it makes such an interesting pool of people that are all working towards the same thing, which is the outcomes of our customer. But it's again, a very interesting mix of personalities, people and, and traits that build customer success. So that's really cool that you see that too. My next question is, which SaaS product can you not live without? Obviously Plan Hat can't be one of them. We can't be biased, but gimme another SaaS product that you can't live without.
Speaker 2:I use Loom a lot. I think recording video , super handy, super simple, very tactical, but just gets the job done and it's , it's a great product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think Loom is like at every CSMs toolbox. I feel like they could be video for CSMs at this point. Next question is, what is your favorite CSS learning resource?
Speaker 2:I sort of alluded to this earlier , I think there's some great CS content out there, but I also think there's, you know, some stuff that, that isn't so great and, and does more harm than good. I try to have one-to-one conversations. I, I think it's very interesting people's background and how they get into css. A lot of the questions you've asked me, I think I love talking to people who've come, you know, sort of sideways moves mid-career into CSS and talking to them about it. One thing I think that more people should do is they should read broadly, read about other functions in the business and apply the learning back to css. So don't go and read, don't kind of doom scroll your, you know, customer success blogs and whatnot. Don't read that article on five tips to improve onboarding. Don't read the six pillars of customer centricity and all of this stuff. Go out and learn about personalization and marketing. Go and learn about data analytics and take that learning and apply it to your day-to-day because you are the center of the business. You gotta learn outside of , uh, outside of the world we all live in.
Speaker 1:I'm trying not to laugh so hard 'cause the marketing team at Plan Hat is gonna probably give Chris the hardest time for that answer. But I agree, I think we do have to take concepts that are outside of customer success, outside of our typical blogs. And I agree, like I read a book on in sales about storytelling and that I think that applies so much to customer success and we don't do it enough. So completely agree on that, but I'm just smiling ear to ear thinking about the poor plan hat marketing team that's gonna give Chris a hard time for what he just said. My last question though, Chris , is who is inspiring you or whom do you think we should have next on this podcast?
Speaker 2:So my , uh, my eldest daughter, she , uh, she wants to come on. So she has a lot of opinions. Uh, her business, the three Bs, it's bracelets, bookmarks, and um, badges. Uh , their customer success she tells me is outstanding <laugh> and he wants to come on. But if that's not okay, I think we should get sluman on. I think that Frank Sluman should come on and we should talk about what he said. 'cause uh , I think his philosophy is absolutely spot on . I just think that the way he's talking about executing it is a little bit off His philosophy is the customer has to be everybody's responsibility and that's absolutely spot on . It would be great to get him on.
Speaker 1:That's a great suggestion. But I also like your former suggestion. Why didn't your daughter have a cameo in this conversation? <laugh> , I would love to learn how she is killing the customer success game in HER three B business. <laugh>,
Speaker 2:She , her agenda is far too busy. We , she, we, we didn't schedule this right. She's busy <laugh>.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well thank you Chris , so much for coming on here and sharing all your insights. If anyone has any other questions or anything else they wanna follow up and talk to you about, what's the best way to get ahold of you?
Speaker 2:I am very simple. Just chris@planhat.com and, and love talking to people about all the things and topics on this podcast.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Customer Success Channel podcast today. We hope you learn something new to take back to your team and your company. If you found value in our podcast, please make sure to give us a positive review and make sure you subscribe to our channel as we release new podcasts every month. Also, if you have any topics that you would like me to discuss in the future or you would like to be a guest on the podcast, please feel free to reach out. All my contact details are in the show notes. Thanks again for listening and tune in next time for more on customer success.