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The Customer Success Channel
The Customer Success Channel
Andrew Marks, Co-Founder of SuccessHACKER - How to build effective health scores
In this episode, our host Anika Zubair chats with Andrew Marks, Co-Founder of SuccessHACKER, about how to build effective health scores.
Today, most businesses are adopting some level of health scoring in order to track if their customers are healthy or not. So, what are some of the basic metrics that you need to put in place to understand health scoring? And when should a SaaS company consider building out a health score?
Check out SuccessHACKER: https://www.successhacker.co/
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 Andrew Marks from success. Hacker, Andrew has spent his career developing effective post-sales customer focused organizations. His passion for customer success shines through in our conversation today. He has more than 20 years of experience building and leading customer success teams, which ultimately led him to starting success. Hacker success. Acker is a customer success training program built for CSMs who wants to be better at what they do and accelerate their careers in one of success. Hackers courses, Andrew teaches CSMs how to build effective health scores, which is the topic we're speaking to Andrew about today. We will talk to Andrew about leading and lagging indicators and how to take that data and build a customer health score. So welcome Andrew to the podcast before we actually get into today's topic. Can you please tell our listeners a bit about yourself, why you started success, hacker and what it is you're doing there?
Speaker 2:Sure. We started success hacker because we wanted to build a business that allowed us to give back to the customer success community. My partner, Todd and I have spent nearly our entire careers building and running a successful post sales teams. And, uh, it's been very much a great ride for us. And, uh, we want to do something we were able to give back, uh, but also be able to share our experience, what worked, what didn't work, running these organizations. And, uh, we also realized that a lot of what we did as a former operational executives was, was a lot of coaching. A lot of teaching, a lot of educating our teams. That's how you get what you need from your team, so that they perform. It's not a, it's not a one person show, right? Uh, our ability to achieve success was very much based on our team's ability to achieve success. And so we felt as opposed to getting into another software type of solution, that it made more sense for us to go this route and build something where we could educate people. We could coach people and have a measurable impact on their organization, their teams and their careers.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I love hearing that as well, because obviously every day as a CSM in the CS profession, we are coaching guiding, training our customer. So I love how you took that and obviously made it into your business, ethos and everything that you guys do. So loved hearing the backstory on that, but you have been in the customer success discipline for quite some time now and, uh, training new and seasoned CS professionals all about the field. And like you said, how to really become successful at what they do. What's the biggest change that you've seen over the last decade or so you've been around in the game for a while. So curious, what's changed, especially probably in the last two to three years.
Speaker 2:I don't know if this is much of a change in customer success as it is just in general, but this realization, uh, by companies that the subscription economy is here to stay and how important customer success is to that business model. The entire sales process used to be this long drawn out approach, lots of evangelism, lots of, uh, demos and answering RFPs. And it was a really heavy lift on the sales side of the equation. That heavy lift is not, is not there anymore. Customers show up a lot more educated, a lot more informed when, when you have made the short list for a company vendor selection, that's when you find out, right, you're not, you're not introduced into a sales process and you have to do a lot of evangelism. A lot of teaching, there's not as much education because customers have been able to do their homework. They use things like Capterra and G2 crowd and their own, both personal as well as professional networks to find out about companies, right? So getting them into the door isn't as challenging and isn't as important as keeping them, right. It's all about driving customer lifetime value. It's all about CLTV and that is the role of customer success. Over the last decade. I've seen a lot of companies, a lot of CS leaders, a lot of CSMs realized, Hey, we actually play a critically important role in this now. Definitely,
Speaker 1:Definitely. I just, I love everything you said there. And you're so right. The recognition of customer success across business units, and that it's no longer a department, but a key factor, a key part of how a business runs and continues to be successful is net revenue retention or net dollar retention. And that is heavily the customer success team coming in there and being able to prove lifetime value of a customer and no longer is it just like you said, the sale one and done, and then you're moving on. It is now all about how long you retain that customer and how long you're able to actually build that relationship with that customer for the so I totally agree. And one other thing that I loved hearing is that it is now the job that everybody also wants. It's pandemic proof companies are now seeing that, Hey, we cannot go without a customer success team.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That was an interesting thing that happened last year during COVID sales, pretty much shut down for Q2 and Q3 of 2020. The shift entirely was to how do we keep our customers? And that's when people really, you know, especially leaders at these organizations who, you know, may have been iffy on customer sex success may have not really bought into it. Um, realized, oh my God, this is a critical, this is the thing, right? As you mentioned, we're, we're seeing, especially in our training and coaching programs, we're seeing a lot of people coming from other disciplines into customer success because they've realized, Hey, wait a minute, it's a lot more important to keep the customers these days. So we have traditional account managers moving into customer success. We have some account executives that have moved from sales, into customer success. Uh, we have educators, we have a lot of teachers that have been coming in, moving into customer success. And we have project managers, consultants. I mean, we have tons of folks that are moving into this new role and they get it. They're like, yeah, it makes sense. This notion of it's cheaper to keep your customers is nothing new. It's a concept. That's a century old, it's cheaper to keep them than go out and find new ones. But it's, it is absolutely critically important for a subscription business. And it doesn't matter if your software, your hardware, whatever you're selling, it's critically important to keep them as long as possible because we're not getting the budget upfront. Like we used to. Right. We're getting that over time. So, you know, in B2B software, for example, it takes 18, sometimes 18 to 24 months just to cover the initial cost to acquire the customer. It's not how it used to be, but because the delivery mechanism has changed and that that business model has changed the way we need to approach dealing with our customers has to change.
Speaker 1:Totally agree. And then, like you just said, it's cheaper to actually keep a customer rather than to acquire new ones, which kind of leads me into a good segue of what we're talking about today, which is all about health scoring and how to build out a health score in order for you to see those leading lagging indicators, to really keep those customers and making sure that you are proving value, but also that you're able to pay off those costs. Like you were just talking about really pay off the cost of acquiring a customer by keeping them for years to come. And usually most business stay are adopting some level of health scoring in order to tell them, Hey, this customer is healthy or this customer is not so leading into our conversation today. My first question for you today is what do you think is the number one mistake CS teams are making when they're even starting with health scoring,
Speaker 2:There's more than one. There's more than number one mistake. I'm going to pick one, but there's, there's a lot of, I think a lot of the time when you hear companies talking about the metrics that they use to track customer success, they talk about metrics which are company metrics, right? So they talk about retention and churn. They talk about upsell. They talk about satisfaction, right? Those are not tracking whether your customers are being successful. Those are trailing indicators, right? They move in a positive direction if your customers are being successful, but they aren't actionable. Right? So that they're the result of activities and actions that have been taken by your customers and your company, your customer success team, but they don't really give you insight into what you need to do to make the decisions about where you spend your time and be confident that you're spending it in the right place. That's right. Therefore, what we need is we need metrics that are focused on customer health that are actionable, and that have an effect on those trailing indicators. And we talk about this a lot in our training, the trailing indicators or van, we call them vanity metrics, churn, retention, NPS. Those are vanity metrics, but they're based on things that have already happened, right? So what we should be doing is focusing on the things that need to happen, right? Making sure that the right people are doing the right things in the right ways at the right times to help our customers move closer to their desired outcomes.
Speaker 1:And I think you just highlighted there actionable indicators or things that we need to do as CS professionals, in order to move the needle for our customers to become healthier, better, more adopted, reaching more with our product and ultimately getting to their outcomes. Like you said, which leads me to asking when should a SAS company even start thinking about these actionable indicators, when you have a first customer, when they're maybe doing a few things with your product, when is it that you should actually even start thinking or considering building out a health score with these actionable indicates?
Speaker 2:I think you need to start right out of the gate, just start thinking about it because what a lot of these things require some sort of data, some sort of data to be collected, some sort of data to be tracked, right? And you need to, you need to be looking at that from day one, right? That first set of customers you have initially a lot of it's a more retrospective, right? So what did we learn from this body of customers? What did we learn within their, in their customer journey that works, that doesn't work. It's something that I think you need to be focused on from the get go. I've been in a lot of situations where you got a company that's, you know, 3, 4, 500 customers. And they haven't been tracking enough information about what they're doing to help the customer achieve what they're trying to achieve. And when we say, okay, well, let's come up with some actionable KPIs. They're at a loss because they haven't been tracking anything. And it goes beyond usage. People talk about how usage is, uh, actionable, uh, KPI, I guess it is to, to a certain extent, but it's also, it's not, it's also a trailing indicator, right? Cause once again, usage, we need to actually have usage and then we have an indicator for usage, but that's based on things that have happened or haven't happened in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you just mentioned something really interesting. You said, look back retrospectively at everything and all the data points like you mentioned, um, and start doing that right away. So I guess if I have customer number one and I'm a company, what should I be tracking when it comes to some of those basic metrics that you need to put in place in order to understand health scoring? And also, I guess when do I then start looking retrospectively? Is it after onboarding? Is it after one year of them being a customer? What's the time scale on
Speaker 2:When you're first getting started? It's everything in any time. I mean, it's just, you need to be constantly looking at it right out of the gate. If you can capture everything that everybody is doing. So I I've always been a fan and people are gonna moan about this. I've always been a fan of tracking time am I want my people to track time? Not because I want to know that they're spending time on things. I want to track time because I want to know what they're spending time off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But it's also important to attract time to value as well, which is another great metric that then shows you how much time you're spending versus when a customer gets an outcome as well,
Speaker 2:A hundred percent agree. Yes. You want to track time to value. But I also want to know in order to set appropriate expectations with my customers, I want to know, let's say my customer journey is divided into five parts. I want to understand part one. How long did that take? What kind of effort does it take? Part two, how do these different parts of this five-part customer journey that I've laid out? How long does that time take? What kind of effort is involved by the different types of people based off of the different tasks that need to be achieved so that I can set expectations appropriately with my customers. We expect them to achieve that value,
Speaker 1:Tracking all that so valuable.
Speaker 2:I bet. Yes it is. And it's not just one data point does not create a trend. You, you have to do that over and over and over again after you have, I don't know, let's say you got 10 of them and they're all the same. You know, you want to look at the makeup of the customer, you know, are they in a particular vertical? Is there, what are the elements that make the customer who they are? And we're constantly needing to look at that information, look at that data, understand all those different elements, you know, before we can sit back and say, okay, what, what am I learning from this data that I'm collecting? What am I learning about these customers, these different types of customers, these different customers in different verticals. We need to be thinking about inquiry, questioning what it is more learning and what it means. And it requires us once again, to capture as much data as possible and then process that data on a regular basis. Also huge fan of customer success, operations, right? When you got five people on your CS team, you should be looking at the next hire to be a customer success ops person. And that ops person, one of their roles is to take all this data and start to look at it and identify, are there some patterns here that we're seeing? And by the way, with health scores, you can start really basic. You can say, you know what, let's let, because we don't have a lot of data. Let's start with some basics. Let's start with some transactional NPS scores, by the way, transactional NPS can be a leading indicator. Whereas relationship NPS is more of a trailing indicator, right? But what's interesting about that is transactional NPS. It's showing me what is my NPS score for each of these moments of truth, as we like to call them these moments of truth, these interactions that we have with our customer, as we're moving down the customer journey. And if those NPS scores are high, those transactional NPS scores are high. They're likely then to, to have a positive impact on your relationship NPS, if I'm doing these things well, then I'm likely going to have a trailing NPS indicator that we've done things well in the past. So NPS one of those, those few KPIs where there is some, uh, both a leading indicator component, as well as a trailing indicator component. But, but looking at things like that, looking at different elements of the data that you're collecting and looking at the customer and trying to figure out, okay, what kind of patterns do I see here? And then from that begin to build a health score and the health score just like customer success in general is going to evolve over time. The more customers you have, the more you mature as a company, the more your customers mature, uh, even as your product matures and grows, you're going to need to constantly be looking at an adjusting your health score. Another mistake that I, uh, I tend to see is over-complicating your health score out of the gate?
Speaker 1:Definitely, definitely. I want to bring it back to the conversation around actionable indicators that you mentioned earlier, and then also kind of metrics and data. So you were saying start tracking everything, which is super important and everybody should be tracking things and looking at it over a set period of time, like you said, throughout the customer journey and the timeline, but what sort of actual indicators do you think a SAS business should be utilizing in a health score to actually make it useful? Like, what are those indicators? You mentioned NPS being lagging or leading, but I guess which ones are those actionable indicators that a CSM can then go and do something with to make the customer healthier?
Speaker 2:Here's an example. And it varies. It varies from company to company solutionist solution. Here's an example. I had a customer that had, uh, a product that part of the onboarding process, there was a, a 90 minute live training that the entire team that they sold this to, uh, would participate in and they were frustrated because they had an adoption problem. And so what we found almost by mistake was that there was this 20 minute video. Anybody who went to that live 90 minute training had consumed that 20 minute video prior to going to the training. They got like north of a 95% adoption rate. It wasn't part of the standard customer journey. It wasn't mandated as a step that users needed to complete in order to attend this live training. And so the first thing I said was, you need to mandate this. This needs to be part of the requirement in the customer journey, but what this also can be is a leading indicator for you about the health of the customer. Okay? Because what you should be doing is you should be looking at what is the percentage complete across the entire user base? What percentage of folks actually completed that 20 minute video prior to attending the training? What you do is you make this into an indicator that is reported on two weeks prior or a week prior to that live training. So it can give you a flag and say, Hey, you know what? We only have 60% of the users have completed this video and we have this training next week. So the CSM could pick up the phone, reach out to the executive sponsor and say, Hey, listen, I know you want this thing to be successful, but you have less than 60% of your users have completed this 20 minute video prior to our training that's scheduled for next week. Right? So they use that on their health dashboard. They use that would throw a yellow flag or red flag, depending on what the, you know, what the percentage complete was. And would, that was something that was actionable. The CSM could look at that and say, oh, I need to go. And I need to call, but need to get in contact with this executive sponsor, get them to put the pressure on their people to finish doing this piece of work, because we know it's going to have an effect on them.
Speaker 1:I love that there's something to take away. Something actionable, something a CSM can do, because sometimes we're given these scores, which, you know, red, yellow, green, green can mean a number of things. Yellow could mean a number of things. Red can mean a number of things. What are you actually doing with that? How are you taking that away and then able to make your customers actually successful? Does it mean, like you said, checking to see if they've done their, their training before they get on a call or that actually utilized a module or that they've logged into the platform, whatever the indicator is it flags that, Hey, they haven't done it. So now you have to do X, Y, and Z in order to get them to move to the next stage, which is what a health score really should be showing you ultimately, which I really loved the, like you said, actionable indicators. I feel like that should be the new way of health scoring rather than leading in labs.
Speaker 2:And I think a good health score has a mixture of leading and lagging indicators. You can't look at just the high level, oh, it's green, right? You need to look at some of those, especially some of those actual leading indicators. But when you think about actionable versus non-actionable, the best thing to do is is you look at one of those KPIs and say to yourself, what can I do pick up the phone? Who do I call? Who do I send an email to when this is yellow, when this is red?
Speaker 1:Definitely, totally agree. And coming back to your whole CS ops person and having an ops person to look at that data and flag those moments, I completely agree that when you have these sort of health scores built out and you have a certain threshold of customers interacting with the customer CS ops person should be looking to optimize your health score, moving forward, to make sure that you have takeaways or at least actions for your CSMs to then do something with those leading or lagging indicators. So really totally agree on that one
Speaker 2:Use not having an ops person as an excuse, whether it's the customer success leader or it's a project somebody on your CS team does, or maybe it's a project that everybody on your CS team, uh, looks at customer success is a team sport, right? So every, everybody should be thinking about what can we do to better deliver success to our customers. And part of that is, is making sure that we understand what the indicators are that, uh, you know, could lead us to a poor customer experience or something that we don't expect. Now, that being said, you could have the greatest health scores in the world. You can have the whole thing dialed in. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to avoid having a, you know, having a problem, having a surprise. Uh, well, we like to use the term a, a watermelon account. That's seemingly green on the outside, but red on the inside.
Speaker 1:I love that term ultimate health scoring term.
Speaker 2:I mean, but at the end of the day, there's no way for us to be a hundred percent sure about every single thing that's going on in every, every one of our customer accounts.
Speaker 1:Nope, totally agree. And I think we've been talking a lot around different leading lagging indicators, actual outcomes, number of data points that we have to track as CS, professional CS leaders, anyone who's building a health score, but I've also seen that companies tend to have multiple health models or multiple health scores. What's your take on that? Do you think someone should have multiple health scores?
Speaker 2:I think that you should try, you should strive to have a kind of single unified health score when possible, but sometimes it doesn't make sense. It may not make sense because you know, your, you have a, you have a diverse product line, you have different types of products, and it's hard to measure the health of your customers based off of a generic health score. A perfect example, before I had started success hacker, uh, I was interim head of customer success for a company called Voxer, which is an over the top push to talk kind of Nextel walkie-talkie type of app, uh, device and carrier agnostic. I actually think they still be around somewhere, but we had customers that would use our tool to connect and stay connected with their workforce, regardless of how distributed it was. And so we had everybody from, um, we had companies, uh, that did snow blowing on the east coast that used our product. We had companies that did events and they would use our product during an event. We had the San Francisco 49ers were a customer of ours, and we had, um, uh, hospitality and like senior living homes. And as you can imagine, oh, and we had the, we had roto Rooter as a customer and from a usage pattern perspective. And even in an adoption perspective, those were very, very different, totally different profiles of customers. So from a health perspective, we had to adjust, we had a group, those customers into different cohorts, and we had to adjust the way we were looking at them from a health perspective based off of that cohort. And that cohort could have been regionally based that cohort could have been industry-based, there's lots of different ways to do it. So yeah, there's sometimes it's necessary. You could even have a standard single product, but you're selling it to SMB mid-market and enterprise, and they're all using it and approaching it differently. And that may necessitate, uh, having different types of health scores or different types of focus.
Speaker 1:Definitely, definitely. And I think it's so important to make sure you as a CS professional or a CS leader, think about your customer cohorts and what outcomes those cohorts are trying to achieve with your product, because a self-service customer might have a very different use of your product and outcome that they're hoping to achieve with your product. Then a super high touch enterprise customer that is expecting a very different level of service, but also a very different use case of your product as well. So it's important to keep those things in mind when you are building a health score, because the leading and lagging indicators and actionable takeaways for those health scores are totally
Speaker 2:Yeah, very much. So there is no cookie cutter approach to this actually had, um, and was the only piece of the negative feedback I got from our health score course. Uh, and we do health scores and our level two training. Um, I had somebody who was complaining that I did not provide in the health score course, an actual, the actual calculation.
Speaker 1:Oh, interesting. But that's different for everyone.
Speaker 2:Exactly. It's different for everyone. And that's how I respond. I'm like, I appreciate the feedback, but you're not grokking what we're training that because it's very different. And you could have two companies that are fierce competitors that are going after the exact same markets that have the exact same product essentially, and have completely different.
Speaker 1:Definitely. And I think all those metrics are so different depending also what your company's level of outcome you're looking for. What are you tracking on a company level also then dictates what type of outcomes your customers are trying to achieve with your product as well, which I totally agree with. And I think we've been talking back and forth about a lot of leading lagging indicators, lots of metrics, lots of things that make up a health score. But I also think reporting is super important when it comes to health scoring and also reporting back to obviously key stakeholders within the customer success organization. But I do think there's a big use of how scores cross-functionally meaning reporting back to sales and marketing and product. So in your experience, how should someone go about reporting health scoring to different departments or how should you utilize the health score? Cross-functionally
Speaker 2:First of all, I think it's important that you explain the methodology behind the house score. What are we measuring? Um, how are those measured weighted to make up the health score? Why are we measuring the things that we're measuring? So right out of the gate, it's so important that we explain the methodology behind the health score, the reasoning behind why we built it the way we have. That's something that I think we need to remind them every time we're delivering data, because you're going to have new people that come in people aren't going to remember the methodology and you're going to adjust it over time. So super important that we're explaining the methodology, but we should be reporting on that as often as it makes sense. Maybe that's every quarter, maybe that's monthly, maybe that's twice a year. Honestly, I think you got to do it at least quarterly, uh, because what health scores also do, they help us surface where there may be challenges, Hey, you know what customers of this type or in this vertical, all we seem to get hung up at this aspect of, of our customer journey. So maybe what we need to do is stop setting this expectation or start setting this expectation, or, you know, we, we find ourselves always getting, you know, customers, always having a hiccup in this aspect of the product. And those types of things should inform product, should inform marketing, should inform sales on what's happening out there in the real world with our customers so that they can adjust so that they can adjust what they're saying. You know, how they're marketing to our customers, uh, how they're positioning, you know, sales, how are they positioning? And while expectations are setting and then co you know, be able to have some data to back up here are gaps in the, here are challenges that our customers are having is, you know, this seems to be something that we can fix with a deficiency in our product. And it goes beyond just, I have this feeling that this is a problem, and you're able to back up those challenges with specific data. And on the flip side of that, of course, here's all the stuff that we're doing really well. I mean, the health scores are not just about exposing the problems they're about showing, Hey, this is the, these are the benefits that people are getting
Speaker 1:Definitely. And I think highlighting all of that is super important. And, and like you said, if you really are making the customer, the center of your business and everything that you do do, you should be sharing all those wins as well as lagging things. So you can continue to course correct and make sure you are delivering a astonishing product or selling to the right market or marketing to the right people. But I think a combination of all of that really makes you customer centric as a business. So you definitely should be sharing that data regularly. So I have one more question before we go into our quick fire round, which is after having this conversation, what's one takeaway or one thing that you would recommend to anyone who's starting off with the health scoring. What's, what's the first thing, or the one thing they should be doing
Speaker 2:Start small, right? Don't make it too complicated. Don't have more than maybe half a dozen metrics that make up your health score and make sure it's a, a combination of, uh, it's actually mostly objective data, put some subjective data in there. I think that like a customer success managers gut-feel on how a customer is doing is a important part of a health score, good CSMs that are really in tune with what the customers are doing. Um, they definitely have a gut feel on the relationship with the customer. Uh, but at the same time, it also tells you, Hey, maybe, you know, especially if things start going south that tells you, Hey, maybe your relationship isn't as good as you thought it was, but don't, don't make it too complicated. Start small and iterate, keep it to the basic.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And that's so important. I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in, Hey, I should track this. Or the customer is doing this. Maybe I should look at that. Or, you know, my, my fellow CSM mentioned this was done in a QBR. So maybe that's also something we should be looking at. But really, like you said, maybe two or three metrics that are quantitative easy to track data points that are very simple. And qualitative data is always important because, you know, everyone wants to know how someone is feeling, not necessarily just how they're using the product, but both are a very, very important combination to start off with. Yeah,
Speaker 2:Yeah. And dispense with the customer, happiness, the customer happiness customer happiness score, quite frankly, it's all a bunch of BS, right? It's not about customer's happiness. Although we want them to be happy. It's about the customer getting value, right. Is the customer getting value?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are they paying for what they want and are they getting what they want out of that payment because ultimately they are paying for your services. So true. So, so true. Amazing. Let's jump into the quick fire round, which I'm going to challenge you to try to answer these next questions in one sentence or less. So let's see how you do Andrew. No pressure. Um, my first question is what do you think is next for the CS industry?
Speaker 2:I think that you're going to see more and more CS executives getting a seat at the executive table.
Speaker 1:Super true, totally agree. I also totally think that a chief customer officers are now the next route to CEOs almost because it used to always be chief operating officers or CRS or CTOs. And I think that also chief customer officers get a, a good option there as well, which is really cool to see the progression of where CS is going for career trajectory. Um, my next question is what sort of tool set does your team use at success factor?
Speaker 2:So we use a bunch of different things. We're, we're very immature when it comes to CS tool sets. We don't have an actual CS tool. We do a lot of stuff in track, a lot of things in HubSpot, which is our CRM tool. Hey, we're success hacker. So we hack together a whole bunch of different, uh, elements that make up, uh, customer success. We are, uh, are in the process of rolling out a new tools to help us with customer success. We use a, we're getting ready to roll a cast Cast app, um, to deliver information to our customers and their customer executives. Awesome.
Speaker 1:Um, and what sort of compensation do you think a CSM should have? Should it just be a base salary? Should it be a base salary plus a commission? It's a hot topic.
Speaker 2:So I think it should be a base plus a variable. I don't like using the commission term because it sounds to sales E even though we are selling, but we're not, we're positioning, right. There's a difference between selling what account executives do in selling and what customer success managers do in sales. You are making a promise. Um, you may be making that promise based on evidence from others, but you are making a promise of value in customer success. Once you've delivered that value, it's not so much a promise of value based on others. You've already demonstrated you deliver that value. So you're, you're saying that, okay, for this next piece of value that we're going to get from you, you know, we're going to, we're going to help you achieve these milestones. But that promise that selling that you're doing is based off of reality that you've already made for them that you've already created for them. So it's, I, I like the variable, uh, component and I, and I like somewhere between a 90 10 and like a 70, 30 split, you know, 90, 10 being 90% base, 10% variable, um, down to 70, 30, not much lower than that, because I don't want people. I don't think people should get into a sales motion. It's a different motion of customer success. It's a value realization.
Speaker 1:Definitely. Totally agree. I'm also on the, on the path of 80 20, which is right in the middle of your 70, 30, 90 10. But, so last question, which is, what is your favorite part of customer success or being a CSN
Speaker 2:Teaching people is, uh, probably my favorite part. We have these 12 week coaching programs. It's one of our offerings and I get to sit with people and teach them over 12 weeks, how to be good at customer success. And there's something incredibly, just personally rewarding to me as I hear them starting to apply what we've taught them. And here are the results of that. It is incredibly satisfying to me. I love that part of my job.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I love hearing that. Thank you so much, Andrew, for sharing your insights with us today, really appreciate you coming on the show today. If anyone wants to get in touch or maybe wants to continue this conversation, where's the best place to find you
Speaker 2:Check us out at success. Coaching that CEO, that's our coaching and training program site. Uh, you can, uh, of course, reach out to me on LinkedIn, uh, reach out and connect with me. If you are a customer success manager, enthusiastic, even just interested in getting into customer success, connect with me on LinkedIn. I've, I'm always publishing new content and we have twice monthly webinars. I have my own podcast that I do. And you know what? Reach out to me directly if you want at Andrew at success, hacker.com. If you have any questions.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you so much, Andrew. We'll make sure to put everything down in the show notes on the best way to get in touch with Andrew, but thank you again for your time. Really appreciate it. And yeah, enjoy chatting.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
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