Account Management in Private Equity: How to Grow the Customer Base as an Asset and Win in the Boardroom | EP95

Speaker A: If you're an account manager, you already know the truth. You're the one keeping the business running. You own the client relationships, drive the revenue and solve the tough problems. But you also know that most companies don't give account managers the playbook or the recognition they deserve. That's what you'll learn here on Account Management Secrets. The strategies, insights and edge you need to win. I'm Alex Raymond and after working with thousands of account managers, I know what separates the best from the rest. This podcast is where we talk about all the stuff no one teaches you. How to handle. Tough client conversations. Drive renewals and upsells, improve your value every single day. No fluff, no outdated sales tactics, just practical strategies you can use right now to grow your accounts and accelerate your career. Let's get started. Welcome back to Account Management Secrets. Today we're looking at post sale through ah, a different lens, the private equity owner's view of the world. My guest is Alan Gonzenhauser, an 11 time CMO who has worked with private equity portfolio companies for the past five years and before that he was at Forrester and serious decisions advising CMOs on growth and go to market strategy. Alan calls himself a customer capitalist and his argument is is simple. In a PE backed company, the customer base is the asset. And your job as a post sale leader isn't just to manage accounts, it's to increase the value of that asset for the investor. In today's conversation we talk about why retention is a business issue, not a customer success issue. How to stop asking for budget and start framing your work as capital allocation. What PE sponsors are paying attention to during the five to seven year value creation window and why the CFO is the most important relationship a uh, post sale leader probably isn't building. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Account Management Secrets. Hey Alan, great to see you. Welcome.

Speaker B: Thank you Alex. Thank you for inviting me. Great to be here.

Speaker A: Yeah. You know, let me frame this a little bit. Uh, our audience are people, professionals in customer success and account management. Uh, so this is the post sales world. Now you have spent a lot of time in your career helping companies to grow, particularly uh, private equity backed companies and particularly on the marketing side. And so you've seen, you know what it's like to make these decisions and resource allocations around growth and uh, I think it's really important for our audience to better understand how PE backed companies think and how even some, the pe, the private equity firms themselves think but specifically around you know, building a, building the customer base as an asset, you know, and so, so this is something I think is really critical to that overall thesis. Uh, and so you know, I just wanted to start there and get your perspective on, you know, what is the thinking around the customer base as an asset. And you uh, know, how do people start to think about this?

Speaker B: Well, to me that's the biggest asset, uh, and it's tied to future financial results. Uh, every PE is different but um, I like to consider myself what I call customer capitalist because I think long term financial results, I mean, you know what your revenue and your profitability was in the rearview mirror. You've got that information. But if you're trying to forecast forward, um, most companies, when they get beyond a certain point and they have customers, the ability to um, retain and grow your customer base becomes especially as you get bigger and you move through kind of stages of problem market fit, product market fit, platform market fit. The more you progress, your customer base is a higher percent of your revenue and it's easier to grow with your customer base than always looking for, you know, new logos. So I, I think it's an extremely important part of growth. And what I try to counsel, um, private equity investors and their portfolio companies is to do maybe a better balance of short term versus long term investments to grow revenue over time. And what I mean. Well, um, some companies are very, very over focused on demand and the current quarter. And because only about 5% of any company is looking to make a purchase in the current quarter, if you over rotate on that 5% and you don't do enough to build your brand to get on short lists of uh, future pipelines, um, there's only so much you can do with a 5%. If they don't know who you are already and you haven't built your brand and built brand gravity which seeds demand early on the front end, you probably won't have the biggest chance of getting that 5% anyway no matter how much you invest in demand. So it's starting early. So there's before the sale and then there's after. I know you focus on post, but, but to me when I look at growth, I look at three really important things on the front end. I look at um, win loss ratio. And the more people know you when they're predisposed, before they get in the buying mode and you're on their short list, the higher chance you're going to have of winning deals on the front end. So that drives front end new logo productivity. But you also want to look at cohorts of customers and understand what segments have the highest gross revenue retention and net revenue retention. So ultimately, if you want to grow your business financially, you've got to find those customers that are easiest to get, which is win loss ratio, keep gross revenue retention and grow net revenue retention. And that's correlated to your future financial results. Um, the other thing is, you know, a lot of companies say they're customer centric and they pay a lot of lip service to it. If you look at the work that Fred, uh, Reichelt has done, Fred Reichelt, who actually started, uh, with NPS 20 years ago, um, he wrote a book called Winning on Purpose. And in that book he has a new model which is he's calling earned growth, which is net revenue retention plus the amount of customers you get from, um, your advocates as real growth versus ones you have to pay to become new logos. And what he says is only 5ish percent of companies really, um, have a wonderful, are completely customer centric and not paying lip service to it. And he's invested in the stock market with those companies that are really good with creating a unique, memorable and differentiated customer experience. So if you do that, especially as you grow and you get bigger, um, to the extent that drives your net, your net promoter score, your net revenue retention, your gross revenue retention, that is where growth is. So that's why I say balancing short and long term growth. Don't just focus on the current quarter. You're going to need growth next quarter and next year. So I like to think of it as a continuum that starts with brand, then acquisition, then retention, then upsell, cross sell of your customer base.

Speaker A: So let's get into some of these. Yeah, well, I want to get into some of these, uh, numbers that you were just talking about. So you said you look at three things. You're looking at win loss ratio, gross revenue retention, and net revenue retention. Because NRR includes expansion. What are the benchmarks that you're looking at for what is best in class? What's average in these numbers?

Speaker B: As long as you have the right gross margin, gross profit, your company's looking for companies that are really good at this. Have a net revenue retention of 120% or more. If your NRR is 120% or more and the business you bring on meets your profitability objectives, you're a very solid company.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And how about gross revenue and win loss ratio?

Speaker B: Um, it really depends on a lot of things. It depends on the market, it depends on the average selling price, um, the level of competition in the market. So win loss Ratio is something you should always continuously improve. And with brand gravity, that's going to get brand gravity. If people know who you are and you're on their short list, that does a bunch of things. You're going to have a better win loss ratio on the front end, you're going to have more pricing power and it's gonna provide more uh, pipeline in future quarters. Um, but I'd say 100%. Obviously you wanna keep as many as you can that you have and then 120% net win loss is a little more um, industry and size of company and size of deal dependent. But I guess the short answer is you wanna make it as high as you possible and continuously improve it, understand

Speaker A: what's getting in the way, track it and improve it. Because at the end of the day, the whole game here is helping our company grow in value, help increasing the value of the asset. And the way that we do that is by optimizing all this stuff and delivering profits back to the company through our work in post sales. And you know, that's, that's something that I've been talking about for, for a long time. It's one of the main theses of the book, the Growth Department that came out in January.

Speaker B: Oh great.

Speaker A: And you know, to me, Alan, a lot of this comes down to do we have really good understanding of what our role is and are we communicating that effectively internally? Now you have some interesting stories and articles that I've read about, you, uh, know, specifically in the marketing field. But I think this also applies to post sale about, you know, people just really missing the plot when it comes to what is the C suite and what is the, you know, ownership structure, the board expecting from a leader in this area. And there's a lot of disconnect here. I talk to, I talk to leaders all the time who are just, you know, really focused on the minutiae and they're talking, you know, we did this many QBRs and we did this many account plans and uh, so on and so forth and they've lost the plot entirely. The audience is no longer paying attention.

Speaker B: And Max.

Speaker A: Yeah. So tell us about how you coach uh, people on this or what your frameworks are here.

Speaker B: Pick three things, you're still going to do 10 things, but pick the most important three things that are going to move the bar. And I will also say, um, it's a couple other things that are really critical for success here. One is cross functional alignment. I've seen hundreds of companies in my travels that have been unaligned and I'll give you a stat there. So, um, I spent six years with serious decisions in Forrester mentoring CMOs. In the last decade, I've coached and mentored over 100 CMOs. As part of what I do. I also come on as an interim CMO and I help with projects like NPS 3.0 is one of the things I help companies with, which is related between marketing and customer success. Um, but one of the founders of Serious Decisions, a guy by the name of John Neeson, did a study early on of 400 B2B companies on the level of alignment in different ways that marketing, sales, product and customer success need to be aligned. And across these 400 B2B companies, the findings were companies that got to alignment and were able to maintain alignment grew 19% faster and we're 15% more profitable. So a lot of times the enemy is us versus the market or uh, versus competitors. If we get on the same page, that really helps. Uh, that's really important. Something else that's really important is picking out the right ideal customer profile. It's related to what I said earlier. Those companies that are going to be easiest to get, keep and grow. And that's not a marketing thing. It's got to be a general management thing. There has to be alignment around the icp. First of all, marketing, sales, product, customer success, um, retention is not a customer success issue. It's a business issue from the beginning. And if you have the wrong icp, customer success is going to have all the churn and downstream issues with that. Um, but not only picking the right ideal customer profile, but putting governance around it. So maybe people agree. But then at the end of the quarter, if, uh, sales does anything to make their plan and they bring on a lot of customers that are ultimately going to churn, they're acquiring debt, not growth. So it's really being aligned on the balance between short term and long term profitable growth, which is difficult for companies. They don't want to leave money on the table, you know, they can acquire customers, you know, and, and uh, yeah,

Speaker A: so I'm, I'm with you. And there's a lot of words here that I want to make sure that we have a clean definition of. So when you, so you just said, uh, alignment is one of them. So I want to talk about that like exactly what that means then secondly, you said governance and I want to know exactly what artifacts or standards we're referring back to, we're talking about there. And then thirdly, you said if we're acquiring Bad fit customers. We're acquiring debt, not growth, which I understand, but I want to make sure that everyone who is listening to you here understands. So let's walk through that. Let's walk through that. Let's start with alignment. So you said they're going to grow 19% faster and get 15% more profits. What does alignment actually look and feel like? How is it beyond just a buzzword?

Speaker B: Having the same icp, agreeing on what customers we want, what customers we don't want and actually executing, having an aligned planning process. So the annual plans are integrated between marketing, sales, product, customer success. So they're all consistent with where the company wants to go, having aligned strategic planning process. Where do we want to be three years from now? What are the goals and how does marketing, sales, product, customer success fit into that? And based on where we want to be, what things do we need to build over the next three years? And then having annual planning processes that are consistent with that, um, are, um, that move you in that direction over the, over the next few years. Um, having the same set of data, a common definition of what good looks like is really important. Not having you know, at board meetings, not you know, we uh, look at this data, marketing looks at this, sales looks at the, you know, having the same business metrics and KPIs that the organization looks to to define success.

Speaker A: Well I would add to that that part uh, of this implies peer relationships. So meaning when we're sitting down to do our alignment and everyone's talking about the three year plan like you're discussing, we've got the heads of these departments right now. In a lot of companies you've got sales at this level and the cfo, so CRO, cfo, COO are all kind of like the top dogs. And then if you have something called a chief customer officer, even though it's got chief in the title, realistically it tends to be kind of viewed a little bit farther down. And if you don't have one of those people, instead you're relying on a VP of account management or VP of CS or you know, something like that, then you have another huge gap right there. And that can make the alignment process very difficult because that's probably where a lot of people over index on growth from new customers, growth from new logos vs mining the gold we've got.

Speaker B: Right? And we've got to get beyond that because the real gold is mining the customer base in most companies, especially as they go beyond certain inflection points. You know, uh, but, but that uh, the, the investment and the emphasis often is over rotated on the 5% that are in market now and, and, and on demand. And we've got to get that's okay for short term, but even before that you've got to build some brand gravity so that 5% has an interest and you're on their short lists. If you don't do that, you could rotate more and more and more in that 5% and you know, not be very successful in your pipeline activities.

Speaker A: You might have noticed that my guest and I spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about quarterly business reviews. Let me tell you why. Done right, the QBR is the highest leverage meeting an account manager has. The people who run it well routinely achieve 100% renewal rates across their accounts. However, most account managers treat QBRs as a check the box meeting and they want to get in and out as fast as possible. Top performers approach QBRs as a totally different game. They get senior executives to attend, they don't get blindsided by last minute surprise churn and they get the customer to sell themselves on the renewal and on the upsell. Here's something you may not know. Besides hosting this show I run Amplify a professional community where account managers from around the world get better at this work together. And we've got a brand new flagship program starting in August called QBR Mastery that will teach you a whole new approach to QBRS. It starts August 19th. While you still have time to hit your 2026 renewal targets, head over to AmplifyAM.com for more details. So let's go, let's, let's move on now and talk about, about governance. So you said, you said we need to have governance. Uh, what does that actually, what does that actually mean? And you know, it strikes me that we get, we, you know, people go into a lot of meetings, everyone nods and says yes, you know, in September and then by the time January rol, everyone's forgot about it and there's new pressures and new ideas. Uh, and so what you're basically saying is not only do we need to have the alignment conversations, we then need a way of determining are we on track, are we adhering to the things that we all agree to?

Speaker B: Right? So for example, let's say everybody agrees on what the ICP ought to be, that these are the markets we want to attack, here's what we want to resource, here's where we don't want to go. But then it's a difficult quarter. Sales is trying to make their number and in the absence of Governance, they could just bring on stuff because it's easy to get, or whether it's, whether they're going to churn downstream or not. So that's what I mean by bringing on debt, bringing on churn instead of bringing on future revenue. Um, there are a couple of ways to handle that with governance. One is a very Machiavellian way where you say, okay, well, you bring on that customer, you're not going to get comped, so don't do it. Another might be you can bring them on, but you're not going to get any multipliers if they're not in the right ICP that we agree to. So if you really want to make your number and you want to have multipliers, focus on icp. You know, there are different ways to handle that. Um, but that's what I mean by governance. It's having a system of checks and balances to actually implement the strategy that was agreed to by the C suite.

Speaker A: And this is the foundation to the method of delivering durable compounding growth. Right. Because if growth is all over the place, if we're taking all comers, whoever wants to sign up, whoever puts their hand up or sign them up, we're going to have a churn problem, we're going to have a leaky bucket. The business isn't going to get anywhere. So let's tie this back to the private equity view of the world. Uh, when a PE firm is either buying a company, selling company, doing due diligence.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: How do they think about the customer base as an asset? What goes into those considerations?

Speaker B: Well, when a PE investor invests in a company, let's say they're there at the beginning, they generally have a five to seven year time horizon. And their most important metric is something called M MOIC which is multiples on invested capital. They want to grow the business as much as possible before they sell it off, either to a larger private equity investor or to a strategic buyer, say a competitor, uh, or you know, do an ipo. So their whole. And usually it goes in phases. Usually kind of the first phase is they'll see what's broken and fix it. And they may change some management, they may change some infrastructure people, process technology, um, data analytics, those types of things, brand, um, and then they'll try to optimize those processes and kind of the middle phase and then in the third phase, they'll dress it up for sale to try to maximize their MOIC or multiples on invested capital. So they're looking at this as an investment And I would say the customer base and the employees, employees are really important asset too. But the customer base, um, is one of the biggest assets that they're investing in. And that's why I say you really have to look at um, who you're bringing on and how you retain and grow them. And we all know that's often so much easier than bringing on new logos. Doesn't mean you don't bring on new logos, but if you bring on new logos and you're not keeping them, you have a churn issue that's a huge hit to your financial performance and that's going to hurt you in the future. So that's why I keep coming back to alignment, ICP killing churn, those types of, and balance between short and long term, um, initiatives.

Speaker A: Well, here's how I think about it and correct me if this is not on track, but here's how I think about it. Let's say we go out there, PE firm buys a company for $100 million or something like that, and there's a certain multiple they've paid. So they're paying either a multiple of revenue or a multiple of uh, EBITDA or something along those lines. Now they're looking to increase not only the value of the entity itself, meaning they're looking to grow profits, grow revenue. They also want to get a higher multiple because it's now a better run organization. Uh, and so, so the reason that this matters now for a post sale leader, chief customer officer whomever, is to understand you've got a bunch of levers you can pull here. Uh, first your only job is to increase the value of the company. It is to be a, uh, to increase MOIC for your investor. That's your job. And if you do that job great. And if you don't, then it's a different conversation. Uh, and so what can you do? You can prevent churn, so increase your gross revenue retention. And that can be process or technology or training or people or what have you. You can expand more which is going to be roughly the same set of ideas. So we're expanding within our customers, obviously geography or whatever. Yeah, obviously the sales team is going to bring in new clients so we need to keep them as well. But every customer we keep is adding directly not just to the revenue line, but more important to the EBITDA line. So it's adding profit to the business. It's a contribution margin to the business. So if my contribution margin uh, stays the same or increases and then the multiple on that margin increases because We're a better run company then I'm doing my job. That's how I think about it.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, totally agree.

Speaker A: And has that message gotten through to people? I mean you talk to C suite people all the time inside these companies. Uh, is that message landing?

Speaker B: Sometimes, yes. But I often see so much emphasis on the current quarter, so much on the current quarter and the next quarter and a reticence to invest in brand gravity. And I think a lot of that is maybe because how it's framed that oh, we should invest in brand, we need brand. I think it's important to frame things in business terms. Look, if we have brand gravity, that's going to result in future pipeline. It's going to not just this quarter but in the next few quarters in the next year. It's going to result in more at bats, it's going to result in people putting us on short list when they do go in market. It's going to result in better win loss ratios on the front end. It's going to result in more pricing power, ability to price and more flexibility because you know, it's building customer relationships that start when people first know about you and then onboard once you acquire them, onboarding how you treat them. Um, and another thing I've seen too, if it's related to this, I mean some people use Net Promoter Score as a vanity metric. Oh, we've got a good nps, it's great. But they don't use it the way Fred designed this statistic and that is as a method of continuous improvement to

Speaker A: really, it's really been bastardized. I mean NPS Score has developed a very bad reputation.

Speaker B: But it's wonderful if you use it right. I mean I've helped a, uh, few companies through, I call it NPS 3.0 is you categorize the input, you know, the promoters, the passives and the detractors. You categorize them, you build a cross functional team. There are a couple videos on my website of demand revenue where I did just that with one company called Fin Thrive. Um, and you understand what they're telling you and you make changes and then you tell them you made the changes. That you listen to them close the loop, that you close the loop and that gets you closer to being really customer centric. I'm not just talking about CMOs or CSOs, I'm talking about the CFO too, the CEO. Uh, a culture of customer centricity has got to come from the CEO first and it's got to be ingrained in the culture. So people really have to understand what the benefit is. And there's got to be that bond between being customer centric and employees understanding that that's.

Speaker A: So let's talk about this. So I've got some biases and assumptions around this topic. One of them is, boy, when you think about a private equity owned business, you typically don't think of customer centricity. You think about cutting costs and trying to squeeze out the margins and doing everything you can to get more efficient. Uh, and so on. You know, like kind of barbarians at the gate sort, sort of idea. Right, the old way of thinking about it. Um, however, I'm fully on board with the idea that customer centric companies tend to win in the longer term. But how do you reconcile the two? Is this just your conversation and the things that you're bringing to the table, or is this actually happening within these boardrooms of people saying we actually need to get customer centric?

Speaker B: It's happening more. And not all private equity investors are the same. I've seen some that buy a company want to churn and burn. That's out there and that gives them a bad reputation. I've also seen some that I've worked with that invested a lot in marketing and branding and renaming because they want to build their asset for the long term and that's the smart way to do it. Um, no one ever reduced themselves into greatness. You know, um, you can cut costs and maybe there's, you know, maybe in the third phase we were talking about earlier, when you're dressing a company up for sale, hopefully by that time you've built the customer base, you have, you know, great customer relationships. But you may want to invest a little less in some of those things when you're getting ready to sell to, to, you know, bump up ebitda. I understand that, but actually buying companies to churn and burn and reduce costs only gets you so far. What we're talking about here is building long term value. And to build long term value, you have to create a great customer experience.

Speaker A: And look, I'm on the customer centricity team. I buy all this stuff. I agree with it. Um, interesting data that you were sharing earlier about how only 5% of companies are identified as being truly customer centric. How did they figure that out?

Speaker B: Um, if you get Fred's book, Fred Reichelt, he's father of NPS, he's been in Bain for 40 years. He explains it in the book. Um, and he actually said that he's invested in the stock market of Those companies that he determines really are very customer centric and he's made a lot of money in the stock market, but I wouldn't do it as much justice. But it's a fantastic book. I think every CEO and CFO should read it. It's called Winning on Purpose. Um, and, uh, as I mentioned, he's got a new metric in there he calls earned growth, which is net revenue retention, plus the new logos you get from advocates, which is a throw off of having a great customer experience versus paying for new logos and just investing. So, um, he has a process where he looks at that and he gives a lot of great examples in the book too, of cost of, of companies that are very customer experience and why and what exactly they did. So, Alan, I recommend that.

Speaker A: Great. No, it's a great super, super plug. Great plug. Uh, I will. I don't know that one. I've heard, of course, of that, but I've not read that. Not read that book. And maybe I'll try to get him on the podcast. Uh, he's great.

Speaker B: And he, he would admit that NPS has been bastardized.

Speaker A: It has.

Speaker B: Okay, just give you one example. I was buying my car, I was buying an Audi Q5 a few years ago and I met the dealership and the SVP of sales came up to thank me and he goes, oh, would you fill out our survey? You're going to give us a 10? Of course. And I said, excuse me. Uh, you really won't get much information or data if you try to, um, Jerry, rig the number.

Speaker A: Yeah, because they're incentivized on their score for their dealership.

Speaker B: So that's how it can become bastardized. So it's not a vanity metric. It's a method to continuously improve the customer relationship and experience, which will get you long term growth and financial results if you use it right.

Speaker A: I want to go back and just close out the conversation of how to adopt a mindset for winning. When you are operating in a PE owned company, there are specific constraints, specific ways of thinking, uh, and specific requirements on the leaders in that company. You have talked about something which I think is really interesting here, which is when you're presenting your plans. So this could be customer success, account management, sales, marketing, whatever. When you're presenting your plans, are you talking about this from an investment point of view or are you talking about this from a capital allocation point of view? And this hits on the themes that are most important to the owners and to the funders of the business. Help us get a sense of what that means, like what, what's going on here in there?

Speaker B: I said there are kind of three types of marketing investments. They're marketing investments that are for the longer term, that's going to create brand gravity. And then there are marketing investments in the midterm that will bring you other things. And then there's the demand in the current quarter. And, um, when I structure those, I talk about investments, what I expect from those investments. I don't talk about them as costs or ask for budget. I say, look, here's what we're trying to accomplish and here is the business result and how it ties into our other plans of revenue retention, growth, et cetera. Um, and I tried to couch it in financial and business terms rather than marketing speak. But I mean, it is, you know, it's investments that are capital allocations. I think they're the same. I mean, you know, the CFO and they have to make some tough decisions on where to put money in different places.

Speaker A: So don't just go hat in hand to ask for budget to do something. At the very minimum, make the investment case. And the even better way to phrase it is to put on your capital allocation. To put on a capital allocation point of view and say, here's what we're going to get if we invest here versus here. So the allocation part is what is the trade off? Why am I better off putting money in this bucket instead of in that bucket? And that's going to get the C suite's attention and respect, is if you show up that way versus saying, oh, I want budget for whatever it is.

Speaker B: And I'm always big on the relationship between the CMO and the cfo. I think that's a very, very important relationship and it's one I wish would happen more. I mean, maybe it's easier for me because I started in finance. My degree's in finance. I've taught grad courses in marketing and finance coming together. And there are other people in the industry that are really interesting doing that kind of stuff. But I've always felt that was, I mean, when I was at went to serious decisions in Forrester, the first research brief I ever wrote was the relationship between the CFO and the cmo. I think that's just really critical. And it's even more critical. Uh, it's critical in every company. It's even more so in private equity portfolio companies because if you don't have a good relationship and you don't speak the language, the CFO is the window to the board and the private equity Investor. Uh, and I've had CFOs tell me. Oh, I haven't heard marketing people speak like that before because I talk about long term growth and I talk about customer experience and why it's so important. Important?

Speaker A: Well, uh, this is what I want the post sale leaders who are listening to this to come away with is that you can do this, you can have this conversation. All right, last piece, I saw something from you where you were talking about retention, customer retention churn and stuff like that. And uh, you were answering the question of, well, who owns retention? Right? Like whose job is this? And in the article you said something, and you're either way ahead of me or I've certainly not caught up to this particular point of view here. Alan, you said the CMO should put up their hand and say that they own retention. The CMO, it should be the CMO's job because of the ICP, because of defining the best customers and so on. They're the ones who should own retention. Of course, I think that the Chief Customer Officer or VP of Account management or Head of growth as I call them, should be the ones who own retention. Uh, let's talk about that. How is it that, uh, how is it that in your construction the CMO is the owner of that?

Speaker B: I don't remember saying that. Maybe I did. You know, and thank you for looking at my content.

Speaker A: I do. I did the research. Yes.

Speaker B: The way I would answer it now is the CEO is responsible for the customer experience, retention and growth. Now the CEO can delegate it to a CMO or a CCO or a CSO or a Croat, as long as they engender the culture that we care about keeping and growing customers. It doesn't necessarily have to be the CMO. But what I will say is CMOs should not just be focused on the front end, they should be focused on long term growth in addition to, um, new logos. Doesn't mean. And I think the entire organization is responsible for retention. You know, it shouldn't be, oh, that's something in customer success or that's in marketing. It should be. It's so important that the organization has to be decked around it. You know, I think retention metrics and KPIs should be on every, every board meeting, every C suite meeting. So whether it's the CMO or the CCO or CFO or whomever, it's gotta be, um, managed on a cross functional basis. CMOs are sometimes the conveners in chief and getting people together. So from that standpoint, sometimes it makes sense that it's the cmo, but it doesn't have to be. It does have to be the CEO as a major priority for his.

Speaker A: Well, I mean, especially if NRR is the number. If NRR is the North Star metric that we're all looking at, then it is something owned by the CEO.

Speaker B: Yes. And to get to nrr, you kind of need grr to begin with, right? Indeed, your path to get. So I don't know if I should say. No, I would not say that it's got to be the cmo. It could be anyone. But it's got to be cross functionally, um, aligned and managed as a priority.

Speaker A: Alan Gonzen Hauser, thanks for being here. Uh, appreciate the walkthrough on the mechanics of how to work with a PE owned company. This is, you know, maybe new language for people, new way of thinking about, about how to interact with this group and to understand what their needs are. But I think we now have a much better picture about this. Any last words of advice you would give to someone who's in a post sale role at a PE backed company?

Speaker B: First of all, thank you for inviting me, Alex. It's been a pleasure to be here with you. Um, all I would say is what you do is really, really critical to the long term financial well being of your companies. So um, you should feel great about what you're doing to help drive, you know, uh, the post sale experience.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks for being here.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Account Management Secrets. If you're ready to boost your career and sharpen your skills, come check out Amplify. Explore our elite community of top performing account managers. Packed with courses, tools and a vibrant network@armplyam.com. thanks for listening and I'll see you next week.