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The Customer Success Channel
The Customer Success Channel
Wayne McCulloch, Global Head of CS (SaaS) at Google Cloud - The taboos of Customer Success
In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Wayne McCulloch, Global Head of CS (SaaS) at Google Cloud, about the taboos of Customer Success.
The function of Customer Success is still maturing, and most companies are currently evolving and growing their CS departments. That being said, there are all these unanswered questions that people don’t really mention or avoid. For example, is it okay to charge for CS, who should own the customer feedback loop, and should the CSM hold a revenue number?
Podcast enquiries: sofia@planhat.com
Hello everyone. I'm your host Nika, Zubair. 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 ACS organization. Today, we are speaking to Wayne McCullick. Wayne is currently the global head of customer success at Google cloud, and is also the best-selling author of the seven pillars of customer success. He has held numerous leadership positions at Salesforce, Looker IBM and many more. And today we are going to chat all about the taboos of customer success. Basically, we're going to talk about, is it okay to charge for customer success or who should own the customer feedback loop and should the CSM hold a revenue number? These are just some of the juicy topics that we will be talking about in today's podcast. Welcome Wayne to the podcast. Before we get into today's topic, I would really love for you to tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself, but also about the seven pillars of customer success, how it started. And why did you decide to write a book sharing the frameworks of CS?
Speaker 2:Sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here. I'm excited to be talking to you today. Yeah. Look for me, it was a journey of pivoting into the world of customer success. Like so many other people out there, and whether they're in support or sales or consulting, marketing, or not even in software and a lot of people move into the world of customer success. And of course, the first thing you do is like, well, what is customer success? How does it work? And what do I need to be doing? And what are the metrics? And there's, there's a whole bunch of questions. And as a leader, pivoting into customer success, I did what everyone would do. I read a bunch of books, went to webinars, blog, posts, follow thought leaders, you name it. And as a leader, I was still struggling with, you know, I really understood why customer success was important. I read Nick Mehta and Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy's book that everyone has like, I've read that. And then I've seen that there's great communities out there thought leadership around very tactical things like how to do a good QBR or you know, how, how to create a customer success plan. And I found tons of content. There's even certifications on how to be a great CSM, but there's this big gap in the middle, which is how do you pull it all together? How do you define, you know, who you are, what you do, how you measure it. And then the metrics that support that I realized that my struggle as a leader was getting that narrative and being able to be very confident in explain what that is. And so I said about writing a book really was about for me, like try to help myself be better as a, as a CS leader. And then I realized this is probably something that could help others. So it turned into a, something for me and became a book for everyone to look at and hopefully add value because as a success function, you know, personally, I believe we were really nice empathetic people and we've allowed ourselves to be pushed into various different roles that essentially plug gaps in the customer experience. And if it's a product gap we're helping with support. If it's a gap on customer experience, suddenly we're managing escalations. And that's why talking to my peers, I realized we're all doing different things. Our focus of our group is different. And now everyone in sales and marketing, and depending on what experience you've had, you have a different version of what customer success is. And we've kind of accepted that for a long time. And it's time we stopped doing that as CS professionals and say, this is who we are. This is what we do. And this is how we measure it. Anything else then becomes a, why is that a problem which function in the organization is not stepping up and it might be us, it might be another group, but ultimately we need to define what CS is in an organization and be confident that that's the right thing. And not just be the gap plugins that we are typically in solving a lot of problems. And, uh, hopefully this book gets us sort of accelerates us towards ultimately where we need to go as a profession.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I really enjoyed listening to that, especially some of the points that you just mentioned about building a framework and really holding ourselves accountable to that because as the CS industry has evolved over the years and also how much we've matured has really shown that, you know, there not only needs to be how to do a QBR, but where does it fit into a customer journey? How do you implement that at your organization and who is ultimately responsible for that? Which I really like that you highlighted that because Rob Dolly wall, who is a guest that I had on a previous podcast also mentioned how customer success is like becoming the everything department. And it's really great to have obviously the seven pillars of customer success that you highlight in your book, but also just frameworks, really to iterate what it is we're doing, which metrics we're finding important, and also how we're executing day in and day out and not just kind of doing anything and everything and being pushed around, like you said,
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny people say, oh, you know, we're responsible to prevention. Okay, well, what does that mean? Well, everything, any problem that pops up, oh, well that could lead to churn, put in CS. And when you have a framework, you say, actually this problem, it's not part of our framework. This problem exists because there's a gap in our post-sale customer experience sort of organization, and it could be support or services, or it could be training, or it could be, let's have a discussion about how to solve that as an organization, not the CS team will handle it. And that's just, you're right. I see that everywhere. And I realized that that's stopping customer success, really delivering the true value. And that's why some organizations struggle and they say, well, we didn't get enough funding. How do we, how do we talk to people about funding and value? And it's usually because they don't have a framework that sort of says, Hey, this is what we do. This is how we measure it. And this is how successful we are. And once you put that into place, the conversations become a lot easier and we don't become the everything function that's for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's so true. And I know you've had a varied experience in customer success. You've been at Salesforce. IBM Looker. Now Google, can you give us a bit of background on your CS experience and what did you do to get to where you are today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I wish I could say it was well planned and executed on my behalf, but it really wasn't as many things in people's careers, you kind of just find your way in certain areas. And you're like, wow, I didn't even design that, but that's how it happened. And I'm not sure that's good advice for the listeners. But, um, for me, it was, I spent a lot of my career early on, especially in the nineties and two thousands about education training, adoption, really about customers getting value from using the software, which to me is part of the customer success motion. One of my frustrations is customer success is a department instead of the entire organization of post first sale resources. And we have CSM. So people think, oh, well they own customer success. And I'm like, no, we all all do support training services, you know, advocacy, we're all customer success basically. And that really dawned on me when I was at Salesforce, I worked for a leader called Maria Martinez. I think the, probably one of the best customer success thought leaders on the planet. And she helped me really understand that customer success is that that is truly a philosophy. And it is a philosophy of at least the function she had as kind of like the pseudo chief customer officer at Salesforce. And, and I really started to understand that what we did in the software industry. And I bet most people listening here will sit there and listen to this and go, yes, I agree, which is we took this way of selling and deploying software on plant on prem perpetual licensing. And then all of a sudden Salesforce came along, created software as a service and bam. Now everyone's a SAS company and it's really easy to buy. It's real easy to deploy. It's real easy to leave. And, and so what's happened is the whole business paradigm, the whole purchasing, the whole consumption of value, paradigm change. You know, it didn't change our org design. We still have a services team and a support team and a training team. And now customer success, which kind of steps on the toes of other groups. And we're all like roles and responsibilities and handoffs. And there's all this craziness because we didn't stop to say, Hey, maybe we need a new organizational design on how customer success is actually achieved for a customer. Then if you think about it, you think about the journey. Like why don't we have an onboarding and implementation organization that's made up of customer success, support and training resources specific to that particular part of the journey. And then the customer moves into adoption, moves into value, you know, sort of realization and even value expansion. If you rethink how a customer journey happens in SAS, you probably wouldn't come up with these four or five siloed orgs and then try to work out why each org is optimized internally like professional services as a revenue and a utilization and a margin target and training has like number of people trained and sometimes a P and L, which, uh, you know, all vanity metric, nothing about the cust. None of these are about the customer's success. They're all about internal optimization of these siloed teams. And so when I looked at it at Salesforce, I'm like Maria was great at sort of making sure everyone had shared goals and objectives at this part of what they call the V2 mom. And you might call it a KPI or OKR or whatever your company does and having all these shared metrics so that they're tied together on the success of the customer, not optimizing for the internal. And so that's when it dawned on me, okay, we need to rethink what customer success really is about. And I got the opportunity to become a chief customer officer at Tony, where I was across all these functions. And I could actually start to implement some of these changes in the same at Looker was essentially across the post-war sales org, which was think about how do we integrate? Like why is support selling a premium service? And PS is selling a premium service and training, selling a premium service. And depending on what customers buy or can afford or how effective it's selling, depends on how successful the customer is that we got to stop doing that. We've got to think about what is needed for success, and if there's premium offerings, it should be all of the teams delivering a premium offering, not one part of the puzzle, because that creates a gap elsewhere, which typically CSS to go plug in a reactive way, which is inefficient. And again, the customer journey is not optimized. And so now at Google, again, just, you know, a really thought leading company and being very open to thinking differently about these traditional models we followed. And so that's, that's really the journey I've had across, um, the customer success world. And
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really liked that you shared about the shared OKR and everything rolling up into one. And also it really resonates with me when you mentioned that with not using vanity metrics, for example, internal metrics that are important for your team to succeed. But we have to remember that the title in our titles is customer success, not our success or not our company's success. It's our customer success, which is which metrics really are important to your end user or to your end customer. And like you said, the whole shift from perpetual on-prem software into the SAS market really shifted us thinking more about our end user and our end customer, and really building out a journey, any success plan or optimization of, of what they're looking to do based on their metrics and not ours and everyone holding an equal part of that rather than, you know, pre-sales holding one part sales and other professional services and other it's really so important for teams to have that unified view that you just mentioned, which I can really resonate with. But today I really want to talk about more of the taboos of customer success. That's going to be our juicy topic that we're going to talk about. And I think that some of the questions I have for you are probably the most common questions that people like to avoid in customer success, because we are bill super. Yeah. Let's say we're still growing up the department or the function of customer success is still maturing and we're still evolving, but there's all these unanswered or things that people don't really mention. So the first question I have for you is do you think CSMs are glorified sales? Are they supposed to be there to just upsell and cross sell and should they own the renewal number?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, you're definitely right. Like we are maturing org and I think back to when I was a teenager and there was a lot of awkward conversations you have to have. Right. But it's important to have
Speaker 1:Them. Yeah, definitely
Speaker 2:To have them because it helps you grow and mature and yes, for too long, there are a number of topics that are kind of taboo. We don't talk about them or we shy away from them. This one, uh, this one's an interesting one. Okay. So I think customer success is the growth engine of a company. I don't think people kind of doubt that, but I don't think people truly understand what that means. So in customer success, we absolutely will agree and say, yes, we are a growth engine. Why? Because we help retain and expand customers that by nature is a growth engine. But what people don't understand is this notion of sales and, and we all get caught up in this. I do not, but let me be clear. I do not believe CSMs should sell should have a quota at all. That is not, their function is not their core competency. It's not their skillset. There is zero doubt in my mind that they, they should do any of that. However, in my book, I use this term up, right, right. Working with a lady called Zinnia at a company, helping them transform their customer success function. And she set up till one day and I'm like, that is perfect. Right? CSMs should be up telling value all the time. And an example could be, Hey, customer, we'd love that you're using this product. Did you know that if you use this other product we had, you could go solve this problem that I see your company is having. I've got two customers that are already doing this. Would you like to talk to them about what they're doing to see if this is a fit for you? Right. That's a classic uptempo moment. That is where you're looking at the customer opportunity for more value, a problem they have that your company can solve. And you have evidence that showed that that can be solved and you connect the dots for the customer that is called up telling. And for me, I'm like, this is exactly what CS should be doing. Now. We create them. What's called a CSQ. Well, a customer success qualified lead basically goes into CRM, follows the MQL or marketing qualified lead process for new customers, for example. And it goes to exactly the same governance and the same process of being accepted as a lead and worked as a lead. But the cool thing with CSQ ELLs when, uh, when a CSM up tells an opportunity and creates that opportunity for the customer to get more value, they close, typically a CS square closes around 85% or above, whereas an MQL close about 15. What happens then when sales sees a CSQ well, come in, they rub their hands together. Like this is like gold, right? It's almost like guaranteed sale because this person knows the customer, the environment that budgets, the timing, the politics, this is all known, which marketing doesn't have that advantage with an MQL, which is why they don't close as much. And it's way more competitive, but this is different. And so to answer your question, I don't think CSMs are they sell in the, in the nature of the word sell, like you think of in a software company. I think they up tell they cross tell value, and that becomes an opportunity. Yep. And then sales, who's skilled in commercial conversations, legal agreements, they're skilled in the art of nurturing and bringing a customer through to a conclusion. Let's let them do that because they're awesome at that. And we go back to looking for more opportunities for value expansion. And that's why I do not believe CSMs should have a quarter, should be targeted and do not sell, but their job is to create value, which then leads to another organization's ability to go sell.
Speaker 1:I totally agree. I think that's really nice to say uptown, like you just mentioned, but I do think that that's probably a more matured organization as well. So probably a little bit larger that has a set CS processes. It might be a little bit different for smaller organizations or startups, but I do like this whole uptown moment that you just mentioned. And I think that whether you're a smaller organization or you're a larger organization, that's able to pass back leads to sales, having an uptown moment, like you just described for us is just so, so key because you shouldn't be forcing money or you shouldn't be forcing your customer to upgrade, but you should be showing them the moments of where it makes sense for their business to use more feature functionality, whatever the case is, or really do. I like that. A change of word there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's a subtle difference, but important. And just on that point too, of scale. So here's a good example at looka. For example, we have a long tail of customers that would be more on the SMB side. And then we have the high touch model. Of course, what we've learned in the high touch model from upselling is I'll give you an example where inside a customer they're in the BDC space, they use look, uh, as most companies would use it to get data insights and make decisions across many departments. And the CSM says, do you know, by the way, you could use this for fraud detection on all of your transactions online. And the customer is like, oh, I had no idea. You could do that. And they're like, yeah, I've got two customers here and brings them in. And they explain how they use Looker to do fraud detection in their finance department. What we then can do is look at our SMB customers and say, okay, what customers fit that profile? What customers are in. B-to-C what customers are not using Looker in their finance department. We can then market to them. We can then send them sort of in the monthly newsletter or the update from the, the scale team to sort of say, Hey, did you know that look is used in blah, blah, blah. So you can actually start segmenting your SMB and then up telling them digitally at scale like thousand customers all at once and create opportunities for conversations that sales can then run with. And so you're right, unless you have a more mature model and a bigger team, you can't have a lot of those discussions and create the formal CSQ Wells, but you can apply the same concepts at scale.
Speaker 1:No, you can still at least apply the concept of up telling rather than upselling, which is where a lot of businesses, regardless of their size can probably adopt that model that we were just talking about. And it kind of segues into my next question actually, which I have a feeling I already know where you're going to lead on this one, but let's see, should the CSM do it all? Or do you think you should have segmented parts of the post-sales journey? Meaning you have an onboarding manager, then you have a customer success manager and then the account manager to handle the renewal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this one's a good one because it's relying on a different way of thinking of org models in general. As I said, I really do think that I think onboarding beginning, this is the secret, there's a bonus chapter in my book. I used to love bonus tracks when you get a CD or so I put a bonus tracking in my book. Yeah. And it's pillar number eight. And I kind of joke that it was too late to change the title to the eight pillars of customer success. So I put it as a bonus track, but basically I do think customer success as a, as a philosophy begins in the pre-sales cycle. And if you think about, well, how am I going to deploy CSMs in the presale cycle? The answer is you don't like it. It's just not going to scale. It's too complex. You don't know what deals are going to close. Why would you take your precious CSM resources to put on prospects that may not eventuate when you've got real customers that need help. But again, that's the rethinking the model. And so if you have some sort of onboarding team, an element of the onboarding team is pre-boarding and the onboarding team can get involved in the pre-sales cycle and actually say, look, if you close this business with us, if we become partners, we're going to go on this journey together. This is what it's going to look like. This is how it's going to be successful. We've done this a thousand times. We have so much evidence and use cases and, and logos that you can go talk to that actually will tell you how great this experience is. And this is how it's going to work. And basically when you come in, we're going to onboard you and it gets you settled. A CSM may be assigned, but has a very, very limited role other than helping to create a customer success plan with the onboarding team. I talk about in the book value, getting to value one what's the first, when you could have not the ultimate outcome the customer wants, because that could take three months, nine months, 24 months. You don't know, but what's the first when you can have so that your sponsor can go back to their boss and say, look, this we're already coming out of the gate. Hot. We've already got this great impact. We've already got value from this subscription that we're paying for, like help them promote themselves to their boss and managers and others. And internally we know we're on the right track. And so having an onboarding team that takes a customer through that initial getting started, how to work with us, and then the implementation that comes along with that, that is super critical. And then moving into adoption. And then there's someone who's responsible to make sure adoption of this implementation is now taking place. That value attainment is happening. And then there's specialties around, you know, value expansion in like upselling and stuff that CSMs a good, and then there's a renewals function, which absolutely should sit within customer success in a SAS company. If you don't have your renewals team in the customer success function, you're missing huge opportunities. I've personally seen this at multiple companies done, whether, you know, renewal sits in sales or renewal sits in CS, and I can tell you with it out of doubt and there's evidence and there's tons of research out there. Now that shows that it's much more beneficial to put it with your CSN or sorry, your CS organization. Yes. So the answer your question, I do think there are, there are specialties in the journey where people sort of take the lead, but the CSM is the common touch point across all. And there's a quote in the book from Scott Hutchinson, Walt Disney world just said the greatest, the greatest statement ever that I use and to think about every day in my job, literally every day, which is no one owns the customer, but someone always owns the moment in defining that journey and understanding what are those moments of truth that we need to show up and be great who owns that? And do they have it? And the CSMs role is to make sure that all of those moments of truth from all of the different functions and teams, whether it's marketing, finance, support services, CS, whoever is actually being executed on, and that's the role of CS. And that's how it becomes a company philosophy and not a
Speaker 1:Department. Yeah. I really liked that owning the moment and not just owning that one customer or the, you know, the one phase or anything is just owning that moment, which is probably really resonates with a lot of people listening to this because they are trying to find moments of wow or moments to excite their customers or moments to even bring value. And like you mentioned that onboarding team, really having that first moment where they are able to deliver value and show a return on investment and really just be that person to show that your tool is the tool that this business should be using. It it's so, so important for people to really value those moments and really highlight them throughout the customer journey. But we just talked about a few different functions, roles, people head count, which gets a little bit tricky as any CS leader who wants to add more head count into their team. If you have an onboarding manager, then a CSM and then an account manager renewals, you name, it costs that up. So my next question is all around cost of goods. And should you actually factor in a CSM salary into cost of goods sold or should it be separate? So basically are you charging for customer success or not? This is a very hot topic, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Uh, well, there's two aspects to this, the first mine, especially if you're in a smaller company, let's say your zero to$200 million in ARR, right? You have an opportunity to sit with finance and say, what is the goal of the company from a financial perspective? Are we trying to drive growth at all costs? Or are we trying to drive profitability? Like what is the priorities of the finance? Because then you can have a conversation about, do we want to put CS above the line and below line? Do we want to put it in cogs or do we want to put it in, in our packs? Right? Because the roles are so varied. You have the gray area to work with in financial terms. And so that gives you the ability to actually maneuver the CS function. You know, when it's on the balance sheet, the P and L all those things, you actually can maneuver it to free up money for the company. Most people are not really well versed on the financial side, in that CS. Well, they don't come from finance. They usually come from more customer facing functions. And so they're not really as familiar with some of the financial planning that you can do that actually could allow you to free up tremendous budget because people think, oh, I get a certain amount of money. That's it? Well, it actually is super critical whether it hits off X or if it hits hogs. Right? And so for me, I'm like, you know, we've got to get familiar with how the finances work inside our company, because you can leverage that to your benefit as a CS leader, which most functions can't, that's the first part. The second part though, is which is charging for CS. I believe ultimately customer success managers will be a paid for service. It will be a paid for service because it should add tremendous value that customers want to pay for that service. And people kind of go, oh, well, they shouldn't sell it because we want them to be trusted. We shouldn't charge for them because it's, it's our investment in their success. And I get that as an initial start, when you're anything new and you want to see it, you want to show value, but ultimately, you know, professional services charges for services and no one blinks an eye, you know, training charges for training and no one blinks an eye or certification, no one blinks an eye support while there's premium support offerings, I want better. I'll pay for it. And no one blinks an eye. So it's weird to me when I say, well, why don't we have a premium success service? And everyone's like, whoa, like suddenly I'm saying something evil and bad. And I, and I'm not, I'm saying you've got somebody who knows your product, knows your company and knows your industry inside out. They are in a unique position to help you transform your organization. You can digitally transform your business, using our technology into something that gives you massive competitive advantage or increases your revenue or decreases costs or increases loyalty or whatever, the metrics of success. Why wouldn't someone want to pay for that? That to me would be crazy valuable. And there are companies actually out there today that do this. And I know one particular, an identity management company who really worked this out early, which is we can have a level of customer success and especially at scale and doing all the right things, a customer success function should do, but because of the way that our business operates, the industry, our product, and how CSMs offer tremendous strategic value to a company, they're not just there to just say, or make sure people are getting trained and he's your usage. And he's my QVR. They're actually in there, like I mentioned earlier, you should be using this to do fraud detection. You should be doing this to do whatever, whatever it is that creates a value for the customer and customers actually would pay for that. They willingly pay for a Tam, a technical account manager, because it's so critical. Why wouldn't you pay for a CSM to do the same thing on the business side, it's super critical. And I think we're as an industry, as we mature, you'll see more and more of this happen. And now you start funding your success function, and it becomes less about how much budget do I have. It becomes more about how much value can I bring that I can generate revenue from that I invest back into my, my organization either through headcount or technology that helps me be better for all customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I really liked that you compared it to Tams and charging for our technical account manager, or even sometimes people charge implementation or onboarding fees and to one-off fee. But if you are charging for customer success, I think the only thing that I would have to add to everything you said, because yes, you can then now start adding value is that you really need to make sure that every year you are charging for something you are adding value year on year on year, because if you stop for any reason, your customer has every right to come to you and just say, actually, I wasn't getting value from that. So why should I continue to pay for it? Just like any other subscription. So I think anyone, anyone listening, if you are going to charge for customer success, it definitely has to be very intentional and really driven by a process that you are planning on bringing that extra value that you are charging for. Because unfortunately, I think everyone's kind of used to it being quote unquote free right now. So if anyone is changing to a charge model, you definitely have to bring additional. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And again, I go back to, but don't think in a silo, right? Think of what's the value. The post first sales organization can bring to a customer that you can monetize the whole Tam thing. I'm this, I roll my eyes. I'm like this again, this is just, this reminds me of software in the eighties and nineties, right? We haven't evolved the model to me, it's a technical success manager. It's not a Tam, like that's an old word and an old role and an old function based on an old paradigm of how software was sold and deployed, right? To me, you need a business success manager and a technical success management. And they should live inside the success function, not the technical one lives in PS or lives in support or somewhere else in the org. Right. It's part of success. And so if we renamed Tam to TSM, everyone would be like, well, why isn't it in the success function? You're like, oh, okay. It's like simply changing a letter people rethink, oh, that actually makes a ton of sense. And I could have a TSM as part of the onboarding and implementation team and that's free. And you could say, would you like this person to stay on and continue to advise and guide? Yeah, that's a TSM. Well, that's part of our premier success offering that gives you a business success manager at techniques or sex managers, some enhanced training offerings or initiatives here, some better SLS on your support and some administrative sort of what we call like a managed service, where our PS team can come in and do periodical things for you throughout the year to make sure things are updated running well. And it's all for this one price. I'm not saying that's perfect for everyone. I'm just saying, we've got to think differently about how we structure our orgs and the offerings we provide and stop being all siloed and selling individual pieces that you're just selling Lego to the customer and they want the finished product and
Speaker 1:We need to do, yeah. They would rather have the whole package rather than you saying, oh, well this is a one-off charge for professional services. Or it's a one-off implementation charge. It's better to obviously look at it holistically, much like we do with success metrics and goals and outcomes for our customers. We should be looking at our entire organization in that way, when you are thinking of revenue and also the customer and also possibly charging for it all. But, um, I have another very hot topic that I think a lot of CS leaders talk about, which is customer feedback, who should own it, should it be success or product or combination of both, because I'm a believer in that, but I'm curious what you think. Oh,
Speaker 2:Okay. So collecting the feedback and presenting it into a company I think is owned absolutely by the success function, the action of implementing and making it right is definitely UPD engineering, product design people what's happened in the past. This is what I see in pretty much every company I've been in when I get there. And also my peers, when I talked to them, what happens is customer success is one of 30 inputs into the product team. Like, oh, we need these features, right? And first all we call them feature requests and that's wrong. Like call it, feature idea. Don't call it feature requests. If it's a request and it gets
Speaker 1:Denied. Yeah. I hate that new request. It's like, it automatically makes it sound like you're going to get it. It's not, it's not a request, maybe a conversation. It's an idea. It's a feature feedback, but it's never, it's never good to call it, right?
Speaker 2:No, I don't call it a request. Call it an idea. Um, I mean the request, it's a genuine ask from a customer, but you know, when you say no to 10 requests, then that kind of feels personal at that point. But anyway, what happens is, you know, we're one of 20, 30 inputs into the product and it's really hard for them. And we get frustrated as customer success managers and supporting our customers and saying, why isn't this being listened to why isn't this being done? This would help my customers so much. This could retain so many hundreds of thousands of dollars of recurring revenue over the next five years. And the problem is it's not the EPD people, uh, that don't care like they do. They honestly, that's why they build the product is to help customers. Right? So one of the things that I've learnt is rather than have all these disparate feature ideas coming in, we actually should coordinate bringing them all together and prioritizing them on behalf of our customers, to our internal team. And then the part that always gets me, some customers do that too, which is, I mean, companies do that, which is great. But the part we always miss is we should present it to the product organizations as I'm writing them as user stories, because that's how the product team designs the product, right, which is saying a person in this role is trying to do this thing because of this outcome. They're looking for, I'll give you an example at Looker, we asked for, I remember it was like 18 months. We're saying this customer is a huge customer of ours. They use our dashboards from the business analytics tool that we w we deployed there. They use it on the TV screens, in their call center to have real-time metrics that help them manage their business. But the font is too small. Can we make the font bigger? Can there be an option to increase font? Right? And we keep asking and the product team's like, no, we can't do that. Because when you change the font, you change the UI, you break the real estate and it impacts all the other customers. They never going to go do that. Right. So what we then did was when I got there, I said, let's put it in a user story, which is a call center is trying to display a dashboard on a TV so that all the people can see it and manage the, you know, managers and everything and manage, manage the call center. Right? So we didn't say make the font bigger, which was the customer ask, right. We just said, here's the problem. Now the EPD team gets it and goes, oh, I got a great idea. Why don't we create a type of dashboard called television? So whenever you're putting it on a television, you get to decide what are the key metrics and increase the font. So rather than change the base product, added a capability to do something different that solves this customer's problem,
Speaker 1:New mouse, like, look at the bigger picture. Like you just said, you don't need to add that one feature functionality or capability, look at the bigger outcome or what they are looking to get out of things and think of it in that way.
Speaker 2:Yep. And apt teams are really smart at working this stuff out. So when you tell them do it this way, invariably, someone's going to be like, well, that breaks all this other stuff. Would you don't know, you're just asking for this feature. And so let them do what they're really good at by framing the problem and allowing them to come up with the solution. So gather all the feedback into one team from support services, the community, customer success managers, and bring it together. And as an organization prioritize based on size of ARR, that's impacted in the customer criticality of the logo, sponsorship from the executive, but whatever the lenses are, you use prioritize it. And then present it to say, here are the 20 things we want in order of priority. And here are the user stories that attach to each one, tell us what you can do. You'll get a much better response from them. And they will have a much easier time in prioritizing their limited resources to help if you do it that way. And it's a small step and it is a little bit of work, but it makes a huge difference. And I really do believe that that is the model we should be working
Speaker 1:To. It's definitely a team effort. And also, like you said, there's part of the team that owns one part and another part of the team, like the product team owning the second part of everything that you've just discussed, but it comes together holistically as both teams gathering and then closing that feedback loop. So it doesn't live with one siloed department versus another. And I think that's so important when you are looking at customer success and not making it siloed is you really do have to take a cross-functional ownership of certain things like feedback, which is so key and critical to how you grow as a business as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One thing I'll say on that too, is that transparency. So when we're at county, which is now part of Tim and us, which is a large digital banking company, we deliberately put all of our feature ideas into the community, which I know companies do, which is great because customers then get to vote and have discussions
Speaker 1:What to have like a community feel. And people feel like they're really contributing to the feature functionality.
Speaker 2:Yep. But they get ideas. They're like, oh, that's actually a really cool thing. We could use that too. And so you can sort of crowd source some stuff. And I'm not saying that the highest votes wins all the time. That's not necessarily what I'm trying to point out, but what I'm saying is you can be transparent. And then the cool thing about if you go to base camp.taminase.com and you look at the feature ideas section, it actually has. Here's all the feature ideas. And it literally, every single one says it's been submitted or it's been accepted or it's been delivered, or it won't be delivered. And it explains why. So not only is all of the ideas and requests that are coming in from all the different components of our customer base, getting put on display, we're being very transparent about saying, look, what we've been able to deliver. And you can search by all the ones delivered and get a huge list and go, wow, look at all this stuff they're doing based on our feedback as customers. And then when it's not being delivered, it's not a, oh, we're not going to do that. It's a, well, we're not going to do that because if we do this, it's going to break this and this and this let's brainstorm about how else we can solve it. Like it's very transparent. And it's a way to showcase that you're listening to customers and you care about what they're seeing in a very visual way and very visible way. And so for me, I would always encourage people to try to be transparent about it and not hide it. And most people want to hide it because most, you know, they feel like, well, it's always going to get no and that's going to make the customer angry. But I think being transparent and honest with customers actually is very helpful in smoothing over some of those requests that don't get put through and those ideas that don't come to fruition. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And we're all human. And we just really want to plan for eventualities are planned for what we want to build. And if we are using your tool to do it, it would be nice to know. Yeah. When is something going to happen and feedback doesn't always have to be, yes, we're going to do it or no, we're not going to do it. It could be just like, Hey, we've heard you, we want to be doing this, but maybe not today, maybe in six months. And even that is appreciated because you know, you're being transparent of the fact that, yeah, it's a great idea, but maybe not for now, for now. So it's so important to be that kind of level of transparency, like you mentioned with customers, but Wayne, listen, I have one more question to ask around the taboos of customer success. We could keep going all day, but this one I know is probably a very, very, yeah. Debated topic, which is, is customer success really the culture of a company. And how do you actually get a company to make its ethos or its main belief being customer centric.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So again, I was fortunate to be inside an organization early in my career that had been doing customer success longer than pretty much any company on the planet. It's sort of worked through a lot of these issues. So it's it's sales force, for example, it's called the customer success group. There actually isn't a customer success department and everyone kind of, sort of stops and says what like that doesn't make sense. Every company should have customer success. And I'm like, there's actually not a customer success like group like team within the post for sales function. The entire post first sales function is called the customer success group. And it's made up of professional services and consulting and all those sorts of things and support and training. And then they have customers for life, which is your CSMs and things like that. They worked out very early on that customer success is much bigger than just one team of CSMs, right? It's actually every organization or team that touches the customer once the deal is closed. And so in that way, you've automatically taken this huge chunk of your organization and made them customer success focused even though their title is not customer success, you know, it could be support for, or training or whatever education. And so that solves that problem. The second thing is when you think about customer success, you've got to think about what are the metrics of a company that's really important. So I've seen companies that say, okay, we're going to pay everyone as part of their corporate bonus based on NPS, which is like the silliest thing ever because NPS let's face it is, it's not a great tool. It's not a great thing to use for measuring.
Speaker 1:Yeah. More of like a, check-in not necessarily something that you should live and die by. Yeah. I think
Speaker 2:NPS is good for identifying advocates and maybe identifying some red flags and some things that need to be investigated. Certainly shouldn't be used to pay people. It shouldn't, we shouldn't be because it's all based on intent, not action. You know, I dislike my bank tremendously and if they sent me an NPS score, I give them a three every time. Yeah. I'm going to leave them. Right. Or it's not telling them that I'm just unhappy because you know, I'm always going to be unhappy with my bank because you know, it's the bank anyway. So, but my point is, you know, the metrics really, uh, around in our net revenue, retention, India, some people call it lots of names, but really it's about keeping customers and growing them. That's all that matters in a SAS company. That's what if you're public, that's what they care about. If you're a private, that's how you grow and get funding and be able to have a bigger impact worldwide. And, and so for me, um, if you start to align the different teams inside the company around metrics that matter, that that's what it's really all about. And that by default, you're seeing customers need to be successful. So they are embracing a customer success philosophy. And the example I give quite often would come up with more examples. Um, but the example I gave quite often is, you know, when finance sends the Hey 90 days from now, we're going to do a renewal, just a heads up, making sure everything's okay. You know, you're, you're ready to go. That's uh, from a customer success mentalities, why doesn't that email go over and say, Hey, we're, we're super excited about our partnership. We love the work we've done together in the last X, X, X years, you know, and your renewal's coming up, which is another opportunity for us to extend this partnership. We love the fact that we've achieved these huge value milestones in the last 12 months and it lists them and we just can't wait to get going on what that next journey is going to look like. It's, it's the same email to the same people, but if you embrace a customer success philosophy, it's all about celebrating wins. It's all about showcasing value. It's all about partnership and that should permeate everything we do. And so finance or marketing or legal is no different. We should put a lens of success on every organization. So to answer your question, it's a philosophy. Absolutely. And it should be embraced by all. And it's owned by everyone. And it starts with the CEO, the CEO, essentially the chief customer success officer of the company. And so we really need to CEOs to, to want to embrace it and not just lip service or sort of say it's important, but it's not demonstrated by metrics or, or the way we behave. Yeah,
Speaker 1:I totally agree. And I think that the only way for it to really become a company philosophy or ethos is to have everyone CEO or not, or everyone just on a leadership team to just really embrace that there's moments of success rather than seeing it as a, Hey, there's the renewal, like you just said with the finance people, it's like, we've had an awesome journey. This is everything we've accomplished. And actually, if you want to look into the future, we're planning on doing so many more brilliant things that are really going to change the game for how you use our software and how you continue to use our software. So it is super important to keep reiterating success, milestones and success, milestones, like you said, could start as early as the BDR and then booking that first call and then going through pre-sales and then do you know what I mean? All of those are success milestones, and it doesn't start nor stop with one department. It happens in renewals with finance. It happens when legal is working out a contract. It happens when the CEO is doing a webinar, all of these success moments happen throughout the journey. And I, I totally believe that. And I also totally, it resonates really well with all the organizations I've been at as well. So thanks for sharing those examples, Wayne, but we can keep going, like I said forever, but I do have a few wrap-up questions, which is the quick fire questions. So I'm going to challenge you to try to answer these next three questions in one sentence or less. Are you ready?
Speaker 2:I am ready. I'm fearful, but I'm ready.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can do it. I believe in you. So my first question is what do you think is next for the CS industry,
Speaker 2:A reimagination of the organizational design by which we support our customers success journey. Awesome.
Speaker 1:I love that. That was one sentence with a lot of commas, but so what sort of tool set does your CS team currently use? We're big
Speaker 2:Users of Looker because data plus human intelligence gives you the right answer every time. Love
Speaker 1:It. Also data super, super key. I think that's, what's coming up in the CS industry as well. And my final question for today is what is your favorite part of customer success or being a CSM?
Speaker 2:Okay. So I tell my team that the most important metric as a CSM is to get your sponsor, your champion promoted. Awesome.
Speaker 1:So do you love promoting, like getting your own customers promoted? Is that the best part about being in CS? There
Speaker 2:Is nothing more fulfilling than when you help someone in their company have tremendous success and grow their career
Speaker 1:Rewarding.
Speaker 2:That that is to me like you, uh, living the dream, if you can help take, you know, lift others up and you are helping them do that. Like to me, that that's just the best part of being a customer success manager for me. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I love that. I do love it. It's so much, like you said, just reward in a different way that you're able to help someone take that next step. So I really enjoyed that. Thank you, Wayne so much for all your words of wisdom and really having an open debate about all the customer success taboos out there. I'm sure there's more. And if people do want to get ahold of you, what's the best way to get ahold of you or where can we find you? Yeah. Yeah. So,
Speaker 2:Um, I put a website up, uh, www.cspillars.com where I actually put like all the content of the book, all, all the templates and stuff and diagrams in the book you can download. And it's a way to converse with me directly. So I have a lot of people sort of just asking questions about the book or just in general. And over the next few months, I'll be adding some more content there. There's some training materials, some coaching and mentoring type offerings, as well as links to all the podcasts and additional who knows maybe a ninth pillar or a 10th pillar coming soon. I don't know, but, um, that's probably the best place to go or tip me up on LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Wayne for your time. Really appreciate it. And thanks for all your insights.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, thanks for having me. I can't wait to talk more to boot topics again in the future.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the customer success channel podcast today. We hope you learned 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.