Redefining Post-Sales: Alex Raymond discusses his new book, “The Growth Department”

Speaker A: Welcome to the Customer Success Pivot yout Career podcast. I'm Alex White and my co host is David Lokes. Our podcast is focused on people looking to get into the customer success profession or move up in customer success if

Speaker B: you're already in the field.

Speaker A: Today's episode is going to be a little bit different. First, this is a bonus episode. So we normally put out an episode every month. This one kind of comes in between and it's a very good episode and reason why we accelerated and get out there quickly. It's also our first solo host podcast. So yes, I'm Alex, but David won't be on the episode due to some scheduling conflicts, but David will be back on the next episode. Customer success teams have a high bar to reach and hopefully you own renewals and expansions. We'll talk more about that in the episode, but there's a lot to do. I read a LinkedIn article where, uh, someone posted the 75 things that they're responsible for and they have to manage within, uh, the customer success area. And then the comments started adding other things. So you have onboarding, QBRs, escalations, renewals, expansions, managing customer risks, engaging other teams in your company when it's needed, managing customer stakeholders.

Speaker B: Hopefully you have more than one because

Speaker A: if you have one, then you have a risk that goes on your wrist log because you need to have multiple people in case they leave and you have to have some more connections in

Speaker B: the company and it goes on and on and on.

Speaker A: You also have to have a tight collaboration with other departments in your company. Product marketing, sales, support everybody because they need to all, uh, have a customer success mindset and be helping keep customers and help continue to bring value to your customers. At the end of the day though, I love it. Working with customers on realizing the value your product can bring to their company to help them grow.

Speaker B: It can be incredibly rewarding.

Speaker A: The biggest issue in my opinion is most of customer success teams are underappreciated. Well, our guest, Alex Raymond has a roadmap for our listeners on how to change the narrative. I recently read his book and enjoyed it immensely. We need to change the way we talk about customer success and you can start tomorrow. I'm excited to share this episode with our listeners. Turn off your notifications on your phone and computer. Lock yourself away for the next 45 minutes.

Speaker B: It will be well worth your time with that.

Speaker A: Let's get started.

Speaker B: Our guest today is Alex Raymond. Alex is the founder of Amplify, which is the professional home for account management and CS leaders. Who want to run a stronger post sales function and and build a clear path to retention and expansion. Alex is also the founder and former CEO of Capta, which is a dedicated platform for account managers. Fresh off the release of his new book the Growth Department, we welcome Alex to the show. Hi Alex.

Speaker C: Hey. Great to see you Alex. Sorry I'm missing David, but excited to be with you.

Speaker B: It's great to have you here. I'm really excited about. I started reading your book on Wednesday. I'm about two days into it. I'm two thirds through the book. I can't put it down. I'm really enjoying the conversation and your perspective. I feel like you're like this expert communicator just from reading the book as well as looking at some of your YouTube videos are out there and you really articulate the change, your post sale mindset and also the actions you take to actually transition CS into a growth department. What inspired you to write the book?

Speaker C: Yeah, super great question. Thank you for asking. The book the Growth Department has been something I've been marinating on for a while. Although I did do a very dedicated like seven month sprint to get the book done. But let me tell you, the inspiration was I've been in the account management space for years so talking with both account management and customer success leaders and teams and I've probably talked to at this point thousands of individuals and uh, well into the multiple hundreds of companies. And I kept hearing the same thing over and over again which is I'm like the unsung hero of my company. I do all these great things. I'm responsible for so much revenue. I'm always like going the extra mile for my customer and solving a problem and doing this, that and the other. But I get zero recognition from the company, right? Nobody knows what I do all day. I get paid a quarter of what the salespeople get paid. We never get to ring the gong when something goes well. And so I kept hearing this idea of unsung heroes. And what I started to understand there was we had this team of people who is responsible for and a typical company, 73% of all revenue, right goes through the post sales team and yet they don't get resources or recognition or they don't get any love whatsoever. And I thought what's going on here? Why is this happening? How can you have so much revenue going through this team and yet they got so little juice? And what I realized was so much of the issue is around how we are thinking and talking about our roles specifically are we glorified support. So is post sales account management customer success just a glorified support role or is it a fundamental revenue and profit driving part of the business? And the answer is it is a growth part of the business. So I decided to call the book the growth Department for that reason. Why? Recognizing that if we can start to change how people think about their role, how people talk about their role, and then of course the behaviors that they're doing inside their companies, then that is going to give them the opportunity to amplify their impact and to really get out there and do by the way, great things for their company, great things for their customers. And it's going to be a win all around.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that resonated. You said thousands of people you talked to. It's thousands plus one, because I'm in there. There's a couple things in the book that I thought were highlighting which are really interesting and one of them was about the close rate of salespeople is actually going down, which now puts more emphasis on CS and how you look at percentages of salespeople to what they generate versus the number of people and resources for training. I just talked to a company the other day, they're like, we have no budget for, for onboarding our CS platform, so we're just trying to figure it out. And it's that whole thing, uh, if it was a sales product, they would have a consultant in there, they'd have dedicated work that they have someone work on. Instead it's just get this done along with all the other stuff you do.

Speaker C: This is a major resource allocation problem. And I want to just start by saying this is not something that is like there's no malice here, there's no ill intent anywhere. There's simply structural problems around this. But what you're pointing to is there's a lot of research over the last five plus years and I've seen research from Pavilion, from ebsta, uh, from a bunch of VC firms, private equity firms. Basically everyone uniformly is saying that sales, uh, effectiveness is going down. People are just less efficient than they used to be. So win rates are down, deal cycles take longer, the initial deal is smaller, you have to talk to more people. Therefore you're putting a lot more effort into acquiring a customer. All this means your cost to acquire customers going up. When your cost to acquire customers going up, guess what happens? The need to retain them and get them over the payback period and turn them from an unprofitable into a profitable customer goes way up. So you have to do that stuff. Therefore, account management and customer success is more important now than ever because the sales teams are having a hard time meeting their numbers. The number of salespeople making quota is way down. The tenure for a CRO is way down. So all this sort of stuff are indicators of what's happening in the market. So if it's hard for us to acquire new customers, we've got to do our absolute best to keep them and to grow them in order to hit our revenue and profit goals.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And what is your thoughts on companies that have both an account management department and a customer success department? Is that like a red flag? Because that means, okay, CS doesn't have revenue. That's not a good thing for cs. What are your thoughts on structures like that?

Speaker C: Uh, people are all over the map on this stuff. Right. There is no right way to do the organizational structure. And you can tell because you walk into companies and they'll have CS over here, account management over here, technical Account Management, SalesPeople, SDRs, BDRs, Lead Gen, et cetera, and all reporting up to different executives. And, and what this is showing me when we have that is it's showing me we don't have clarity on what's actually going on here. What we're trying to do, what we're doing instead is we're throwing a bunch of duct tape and band aids all over the place to try to fix a problem. And if a company says the path to growth goes straight through the heart of our existing customers, which is a reasonable thing to say, especially now with the zero interest rate policies being over, money's more expensive. We've gotta grow from our existing accounts. Great. Super. If that's the case, I believe here's the organizational structure that frankly has put some people's noses out of joint. Okay, I'm going to just say this up front. I say the whole thing, account management, customer success and sales need to roll up to one person. And that one person is the chief revenue officer. And a lot of people say, oh, my God, I can't. We're not revenue people. Customer success doesn't. We don't do that sort of thing. We don't want to be thought of as salespeople. And they get very uncomfortable about this. But here's the thing. You can't have a chief revenue officer who's responsible for only the 27% of net new revenue that comes in every year and is not responsible for the 73% of existing customer revenue that comes in every year. So I see that As a way to start to control the chaos around post sale is have everything roll up to a single owner. The true, I call it the true CRO. And so if people have customer success and account management, what does that mean? Typically that means that there's a commercial responsibility with the account manager and then there's onboarding, implementation, training, just kind of general customer day to day stuff with cs. That sounds great, it makes sense. But there's some risk there that I'm sure you've seen and you know about yourself. The risk is from a career point of view, the closer you are to revenue, the better, right? At the end of the day, right? Like the more you can be seen to be influencing revenue in a positive way, the better. And therefore more juice goes to the people who are closer to the river of money. And so if you're as a customer success person saying, oh, I don't want to be associated with that, I don't want to be a transactional used car salesperson kind of guy type of thing, you may think that you're being virtuous, but you are setting yourself up for, I think, a more difficult series of conversations down the road. Let me put it that way. Does that answer your question?

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, uh, one of the quotes that you have in the book is around, if you're not a revenue generation, you're a cost center. And when you get on hard times, you're going to look at the cost center and say, we don't need this. We're fine with customers. They're not generating the revenue. We need to keep the revenue generating

Speaker C: people, we need to keep the revenue generated. That's what everyone's going to say. We need to keep the revenue generators and get rid of everyone else. And so guess what? If you walk around and you look like glorified support and you talk like glorified support and you act that way, then they're going to, someone's going to say, do we really need these people over here doing all this stuff? Uh, versus. And this is the point of the book, if you change your language and you change how you talk about this stuff, uh, you can make it very clear how you are contributing to the ultimate success of the company. And it's not hard. So let me walk you through what this process is. Okay? If you want to go through that shift, the first question starts with what is the point of the post sales team? Like why do we have a post sales team? And people are going to say, uh, because we need to do QBRs because we need to have a high net promoter score because we need to keep our customers, we need to make them happy. They're going to give you all these reasons. No, that's not correct. The reason that we have a post sales team is to help our company win. That's it. Help our company win. Just like in sports, everyone is there to beat the other team on uh, a sports team. So our job, no matter what your role, is to help our company win. Great. How do we do that? How do we help our company win? We help our company win by delivering profitable revenue back to the business. So sales brought in a bunch of revenue. We can get them over the hump of the payback period to turn them into profitable customers. That then turns into an operating contribution back to the company, which is what this is called in accounting terms. Deliver an operating contribution back to the company. That's what we do. Great. How do we do that? We m do that in three ways. We keep the customers that we have, we grow the customers that we can, and we make sure there's no surprises along the way. So the point of post sale is to help the company win. We do that by delivering profitable revenue back to the business. We deliver profitable revenue back through, keep grow and no surprises. If people just take that, that's all they take from this podcast here today, Alex. They are starting to understand how they can change their mindset and how they talk about this. And everyone inside the company is finally going to say, oh, I get what you do now. I understand what's going on here. Yeah, this is a really valuable thing. Let's do more of this.

Speaker B: Yeah, and that's so important. And that's the language that I think people need to learn and I think the old model, it's like looking over the history of how you install products, used to install products, uh, way back when I used to install PeopleSoft software and you'd go into these companies and they buy all these servers around the world and you'd install it and it'd be a several uh, million dollar installation. That sale isn't going to go anywhere in a year or two. They've invested that money for a good five, seven years, something like that, before they're going to really do anything with it. And you could be on another product tomorrow. Easy to export the data, upload it somewhere else and it changes that dynamic and the importance of post sales. So I thought that was interesting that when you start to talk a little bit about that and recurring revenue. I love your comments about Recurring revenue and why that term is poor. Can you explain on um, that a little bit?

Speaker C: Oh man. If there's one, if there's one kind of business adage I would love to just throw onto the bonfire is this idea of recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is a total myth and a total fallacy. And here's the idea. So you just talked about PeopleSoft. So back in the day, of course we had enterprise licensing one off. You know, you're just buying your PeopleSoft license as a one off purchase. So you're paying PeopleSoft $5 million and then that's it. Now of course, with subscription revenue, you're paying on a monthly basis or annual basis. And we did all that because we wanted it to smooth out revenue lines, have more predictable revenue growth and stuff like that. That's the big shift behind the SaaS and the subscription business models. But part then happened is people started to believe in this idea of recurring revenue, meaning, oh, we signed the contract, the only thing we need to do is get the con, the customer to resign it every 12 months or 24 months or whatever and we're golden. So therefore all, you know, I'm just going to put my feet up on my desk, I'm going to relax, kick back and wait for the renewals to roll in. So the idea there is that people were thinking revenue just grows on trees. So I need a customer success team to just make sure, check in with the customer every now and then. But for the most part, just make sure the revenue renewal comes in.

Speaker B: Keep your customers happy, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, keep your client, keep your clients happy. Take them, take them to a, take them to a baseball game or take them out to lunch. And once, uh, a year and we're good. That massively understates the amount of effort that CS and account management put into keeping and growing customers. And it does us a, uh, disservice because it makes our job seem small. If I say that recurring revenue just happens, I just literally put my hand outside and revenue falls into it, then people don't understand. They don't see the work that I'm doing, they don't fund the work that I'm doing. I don't get the recognition, I don't get the resources. And all of that means that we are therefore less effective. And if we can instead look at this myth of recurring revenue squarely in the eye and say, what's going on here? What's the actual point? Then we'll understand that what we're trying to do with recurring revenue is we're trying to smooth the revenue curve. We're trying to get to that. No surprises. I was just talking about. Great. So fine, we all want a smooth revenue curve. It doesn't mean that it's easy to get there. It doesn't mean that we aren't doing account plans, QBRs escalations, risk reviews, stakeholder mapping, all the jillions of things that a good CSM and account manager will do. All that's still happening. And one of the encouragements in the book is to make sure that that work is visible and understood by everyone else and that we don't rely on this idea that the revenue is automatic and recurring because that makes the work that we're doing seem much less important than it actually is.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you use the term it's re earned. So if you have a slide and you're presenting to the company instead, uh, of recurring revenue of X, re earned revenue, what percentage that you had, how much do you have, what's the expansion, things like that.

Speaker C: Yeah, you got to re earn it. And so I think you need to take a much more active approach to retention. One of the biggest mistakes that a CSM will make is being lackadaisical about a renewal and just sort of popping up 30 days beforehand and assuming everything is okay. I think we need to take a much more, uh, proactive view of the entire process. We need to get better at forecasting, understanding the stages, the work that goes into it, getting the customer commitment, all that stuff. And that by the way, is a huge, what they call low hanging fruit for a lot of post sales teams. Right. It's just professionalize that a little bit and you're immediately going to see a bump up in your net revenue retention.

Speaker B: Absolutely. One of the topics that's hot right now, and you highlighted as well is nrr. And the key to this and what CS struggles with is they just get a bunch of things and problems and they're supposed to just figure it out. But a lot of the problems stem from other areas. Was it the right customer that we sold to? Was it the product feature that several customers are asking for, getting ignored? All those things. You're reliant on a team to be able to do that. And you talk about NRR is a leadership metric, it's not a CS metric. And the head of the company should be talking about that. And what we as a team and what I refer to as a customer success mindset, if you can talk a little bit about that, maybe where you've seen that drop down to a cs and you've worked with companies to bring that up a level and try to educate them on why it's not one department, it's a company for sure.

Speaker C: So one of the mistakes that a lot of people used to make and now, luckily being fixed is, is assuming that net revenue retention is purely owned by customer success, by that team, that it's just their metric. Where in reality, net revenue retention tells you a lot about the overall quality and durability of the business. So net revenue retention, just to define it for everyone, make sure they're aware, is at the beginning of the year, you had a book of business. You had a certain set of contracts. It's called a $10 million book of business. You then you use that as your cohort. You say, great, here's my cohort. NRR basically says, here's my existing revenue plus expansion. So we're selling new things and new services and whatever. So plus expansion minus churn. So some customers are going to leave, inevitably some customers are going to leave. These things happen. And then we divide that by our original amount. So original plus expansion minus churn divided by original amount. It's a percentage. And what a lot of investors and board members have started to realize, executives, is net revenue retention actually tells me about the quality of the business. Do we have a product that is sticky? Do we have customers that are sticking around for a long period of time? Do we have a system behind what we're doing to make the work smooth, to make the work predictable, to make the work so that we can forecast easily? Those are all things that are actually in that NRR number. Investors and board members and executives also then realized every single point of NRR that we add. So going from 105 to 106 or 105 to 110 or whatever has very substantial impacts on revenue, obviously profitability, obviously. But then the third one is company valuation. There's a huge difference between the companies that are have high NRR and what they're valued at by the market versus low in our medium, NRR and what they're valued at in the market. And so if the main goal of your CEO is to increase the value of the company, which it typically would be, then guess what one of the major levers is? It's net revenue retention. And so that's how you start to elevate the discussion from this just being a customer success team metric to this being something that the company should care about. So as a result, a lot of ELT meetings, SLT meetings, board decks are now including, if not starting with metrics around net revenue retention. So that's why it's getting everyone's attention, because it's almost like a proxy for how good of a business is this?

Speaker B: Excellent. I think that's great advice for people on how to maybe change that within their organization. If NRR is the metric that they're reporting on, maybe they should take a step back and with a leadership team, say, this is something we need to, uh, have presented by the CEO at our company meetings.

Speaker C: Yeah, you're not doing yourself any favors. If you're like, hey, we're just going to report this in our team and we're going to track it in our little dashboard that nobody else sees, then nobody cares. And to your point, yeah, like, how do we get this out to other people? How do we elevate this? How do we make this a bigger conversation? Because to the point you're making earlier, if we need something from the product team or the marketing team or support implementation or whoever, if it all ties up to this great big North Star goal of net revenue retention, then it's easier to get people to do stuff for you. It's easier for us to all agree. Here's where we want to go. Here are the problems that we want to fix. So, yeah, especially when it comes down to those internal negotiations, you want to have a common goal. And I think NRR makes a great common goal.

Speaker B: Yeah. So one of the things I've seen in my career, which I find interesting, I'm trying to figure out how to address it next time I fall into this, is trying to get the marketing department to realize that and the leadership team, that marketing is really important for building that pipeline and getting sales to have a good pipeline of potential customers. Getting marketing to think about marketing for existing customers, about functions and stuff, it falls back on cs. And CS has to go, hey, let me get some information. Let me figure out this thing, let me send this out, let me talk about it in a qbr, I know what it does. Instead of having a broader communication that allows us to set the framework, that then allows the customers to come back and ask you about it, but when you can also articulate it, you can point them to something. Have you seen that as a common thing where marketing doesn't really spend a lot of time on marketing internal customers, it's really all about the pipeline.

Speaker C: I mean, for sure, marketing can get overly focused on acquiring net new leads. So that, and primarily this is about incentives. So a lot of the time their incentive is you got to generate 3,000 new leads a quarter or whatever and therefore that's where they spend their time and energy. I do see teams. I have seen a bunch of companies who hire marketers for existing customers because they realize their upsell opportunities, their cross sell opportunities and just general kind of retention stickiness. We want to have those sorts of activities going on so that our customers do see marketing messages. So there are companies out there, probably the ones that are farthest ahead have dedicated uh, customer marketing programs, customer marketing teams and stuff like that. Now where account management and customer success play into this is in the very important role of delivering information back through the company and being the ears out there talking to the customers all the time, delivering the voice of customer back inside of the company. Because when you're doing the pure lead gen stuff, marketing has a bunch of ideas about who is our ideal customer profile, what do they care about and so on. And they putting a bunch of messages out there. However, and so that's a, it's a low feedback, higher assumption part of the market. However, once we have existing customers we have much higher feedback, we have much more information about them, we have much fewer assumptions about the customer. Therefore we can provide better messaging, more tailored solutions to their problems, we can talk about it in their actual voice. And so a very important part of the CS team is, is to make sure that all the knowledge they have about the customers, what they care about, what they like and don't like and what's on their mind and all this sort of stuff gets back to the marketing team so that the marketing team can tailor the messages appropriately for them. So that's what I like to see is a very strong relationship there with marketing. Appreciating the feedback that comes from the CS team so they can further refine the message. Perfect.

Speaker B: And I agree based on where the company is, their maturity, are they at a very early stage where they're just trying to get customers? You want more marketing to really figure out that ideal customer profile and being able to build that versus when as they start to get that, where they start to shift resources to look at that and to your point, get the feedback from the customers not only into the product team but into the marketing team and making sure marketing's getting the same message, it's not just to the product.

Speaker C: Yep, great. And, and by the way, so once once we shift to all agreeing that net revenue retention is one of our top corporate goals, then that mobilizes a lot of activity because everyone understands how the work that they're Doing helps nrr.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So there's a quote in the book that I loved. I'm going to repeat it here. What drives retention is measurable results made visible. Even when it's bad news, it opens up the conversation. There's a lot to unpack in that, but I think it's very powerful.

Speaker C: There is a lot to unpack there. And here's what I know about the topic is, uh, a lot of people have been told, like, hundreds of times, go, you got to go create value for the customer. This kind of thing. Well, this is what we're told in customer success and account management. Create value, deliver value for the customer, deliver their outcomes, find out what their goals are, and then help them get there. Great. It's. That's definitely the right angle, but it's very hard to do. Easy to say, hard to do. And the model that I want to recommend is that we. Everyone gets very specific. What's the customer trying to accomplish? How do they define value? How do we then. How do we then make sure that we're delivering that value? And then here's an important part after that, measure it. Another important part in that, show them. Because customers forget. Customers make assumptions. Customers have day jobs. They have a million things on their plate. They aren't necessarily going to put all these pieces together. They're not going to connect the dots themselves. And so here's what that quote is telling us is, first is we have to get a very clear definition of what the customer is actually trying to do. And then we got to tell. We got to get them to say, well, what's this worth to you? Like, what are you measuring? How are we going to know when we get there? So they're going to tell you, it's going to help me save money or make money or save time or save risk or something like that. And we want to quantify it. We want to say, great, let's put a number on this. Is it going to be a 5% improvement or a 10% improvement or whatever the number is, but we just get them to agree. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. And then we go deliver our service, deliver our product. We basically, we do our thing, and then after that, we need to go back and say, did we get there? We need to measure our performance. And a lot of people get uncomfortable because they think, uh, oh, maybe I didn't. Maybe I didn't deliver. Maybe I didn't get to give the customer what they wanted. Maybe we had bad results, or maybe everything took Too damn long or whatever. But we still need to measure it. And then once we measure it, it's not enough to put it in our internal dashboard. We have to go back and show the customer, because the customer forgot already what we talked about. Just assume the customer has the memory of a goldfish because they have a million things going on. We got to go tell them, here's where we started, here's where we are now, here's the improvement. Now, in an ideal world, that all leads to revenue. And that's something I call the value revenue chain in the book. So ideally, all this leads to revenue, but that one point that you're talking about comes from, comes from research by Greg Danes. And he's spent a lot of time looking at this stuff and understanding what makes customers stick around or not. And it has to do with showing them progress toward their goal. And there's some really interesting findings in Greg's research, the most counterintuitive of which is even if you aren't getting good results, you still have to show your customer. So even if things are, we thought we were going to go up and instead we're going down. We thought we're going to save money instead of we're costing you money. Whatever, uh, we still have to show here's what's happening, here's what's going on. Why? Because then the customer can start making their own understanding and prediction about what's happening. And they can see movement. And they, by the way, they also see you as being more professional because you're actually measuring stuff for them and you're helping them figure out the world. And so you do that. And even if your results are underwhelming or they're not what you want them to be, your customer is still going to stick around with you longer because you're showing them what is going on. So it's almost like a trust building exercise of saying, here's where we're trying to go. Yeah, maybe it took us longer to get off the starting blocks or we're not getting the immediate results and so on. The customers understand this. They know that things happen. They know that there's a million things going on in everyone's business, but that you can start to piece together the story for them. That is, when they say, I see the potential here, I see what this might become. I also am aware of the amount of time and energy and money I've invested in this so far. I can see that there might be an outcome in the future makes them more likely to Stick with you.

Speaker B: Yeah. And a couple things there at the very beginning when you ask them, um, what are you looking to get out of here and what are we going to measure? I'm sure a lot of customers go looking to put the system in. You have to kind of. And it starts to raise the, uh, conversation because now they're saying, wait, you're making me think through this to think about my business more. Why am I adding this platform? What am I going to measure? Let me get back to you. And they go back and they come up with this measurement. But I think at the end when you talk about bad news, well, that opens the door again because now you said, you know what, we didn't reach what we thought we're going to hit. Let's sit down and figure out why. Right now you're helping them not only have a measurement that they didn't make, which like you said, there's a lot of things that go into it, but now you have the conversation about what could we do differently to get there, which might be a function of the product. It might be team availability, it might be process, it might be people, all those type of things. But now you're embedded into that conversation. That's when start to get that trusted advisor. It's more than just a product.

Speaker C: So trust advisors are really great thing to bring up here because what's the first element of being a trust advisor? You got to build trust. What is the best way to build trust? It's by giving trust. Your customers are not stupid. If your project is not delivering the results that you promised, they know, they are fully aware of that. And so don't hide, don't dissemble, don't like not talk about it. You show up and you say, uh, we thought we were going to be here by now. Instead we're here. Here's what we're going to do about it. Let's talk about whatever the things are we need to talk about. That builds trust because the customer says, okay, this person knows what they're talking about. They're showing up, they're giving me the real deal, real talk. And I see that there's a potential here. As opposed to trying to sweep everything under the carpet, which gives no respect to your customer, when you sweep someone under the rug, you are disrespecting your client. And so if you want to be a trust advisor, you got to give the trust. You've got to give them the respect. You've got to show up and prove that you're. That you are someone who is worthy to earn it.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So maybe the last area that we hit, uh, unless there's another area that you want to discuss about the book is moving to the expansion part. So we've installed our product, we're engaged with the customer they're renewing, but now really be taking a proactive approach to expansion. And you talk about asking the right questions, raising visibility into the company. Are you tracking things like people leaving, coming and going, those type of things, all those different things. So maybe if you could give some nuggets of knowledge to the listeners about that in your thoughts.

Speaker C: There's a model that I present in the book. I call it the amplify method. And there are four, I call them arrows. There's four arrows of the amplify method in the book and these are related to all parts of nrr. So both the retention and the expansion part, and generally how to do your job. The four arrows are, number one, solve bigger problems. Number two, relentless curiosity. Number three, act like an owner. And number four, protect your energy. The first three are all external, meaning me in relationship to the customer. The last one is me, internal me, my role as it relates to my company and how I am resourced to be able to do my best work. So to. And you can apply all of these four arrows to really improve the results that you're getting. But there, there are the three that I think are most important here for this conversation are the first three. Solve bigger problems, relentless curiosity, and act like an owner. When it comes to expansion, one of the reasons that we get blocked or one of the reasons that we think there is no opportunity for expansion is because our customer puts us in a mental box. They say, okay, you're the people who do X, here's a box. You're the people who do widgets, you're the people who build websites, you're the people who deliver frozen food on time. Whatever it is, they put you in a box. And solving bigger problems usually means we have to break the mental box that our customer has around us, which means we need to go upstream to figure out what's actually going on inside their company. Because in many, many cases, I would say most cases, we can do more for our customer than we are currently doing. We've got a different product, we've got a different service, we have some expertise, we have whatever. There are ways that we can expand what we're doing with the customer, but we can't do that if they only think of us as the people who build websites. And so the first invitation is solve bigger problems. Figure out what is driving this current project, figure out what is on the board's mind, figure out what people are really, really care about and then say, how can we help you get there? So for example, are you building a registration page for an event that goes on a website? So are you doing that kind of marketing activity that's one way of looking at it. Or are you helping with the customer engagement function and strategy of this business? Same thing. You might be building a website, but very different positioning in terms of how you're thinking about it. So the more you can solve bigger problems, you're going to find that there's more opportunity. And guess what? That's where the bigger budgets live. Way bigger budgets exist for customer engagement strategy versus building a registration app, uh, page for the website. So see how even though the same company can provide both services. So that's one, right. The second one is relentless curiosity. Relentless curiosity means don't take the first answer as gospel. Keep going until you really understand the world through your customer's eyes. What do they actually mean? What's really going on here? What are their motivations? What are all those questions that you wish you could have asked them? Just go ahead and ask like get it out there, see what they have to say. Because your customers are, they're so used to canned discovery, they have these like walls built up around them. They have the little sound bite answers to give you just so that you can get, get on to the next question. So relentless curiosity means keep digging, keep digging, keep digging so you can see what's actually happening out there. And then the third one is act like an owner, which goes back to what we were just talking about. Act like an owner is here's an outcome that we are hoping to deliver. I'm going to be accountable for that. I'm going to show you how we're doing. I'm going to behave as though I am an equity owner in your company so that our incentives are aligned. We're on the same side of the table. So I'm not going to have this arm's length relationship anymore when I'm telling you what to do. But I'm not fully invested in your success. If I'm invested in your company, which is the mindset, then I'm invested in your success. I want you to get everything possible out of this relationship. I want this to be a win win relationship. I want us to really maximize what we can do here. That puts you in a completely different mindset and that Also helps you find expansion opportunity. So those were not tactical things. Those are mindset things that I just shared. But those mindsets are how you are going to find way, way bigger outcomes. And this is not like a 5% bump or a 10% bump. It's not even a 50% bump. There's examples in the book of one account manager who grew a single account by 2 200x by following this formula. So literally 200x growth started $50,000 moved to a $10 million annual contract. Total lifetime value of this single customer that started at 50k is now over a hundred million dollars because she went through that kind of formula, because she understood all those steps. And so as a meta message here for account managers and customer success managers who are thinking how do I do this? I want you to focus on the big winners. Focus on your winners. Go find the ones who have the opportunity to grow by 2 times, 10 times, 50 times. Go find those. You're going to make your career.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's not by accident. That person just keeps getting those type of results. It's a methodology that they're doing. And I think it was interesting where you talk about really looking at your portfolio and this is part both for yourself to make sure you're managing your own time but also to manage the expectations within your company. Is looking at customers about which ones are stable customers. They pretty much we've had conversations. They're going to be, we know we're going to renew because we're doing X, Y and Z. But they're not really going to grow that much. Where are the at risk ones? Why are they at risk? Are we not having the right conversations? Maybe even have that thing? How many people are you talking to within the company? Have they had any of these three things happen like leadership changes, blah blah blah blah. But then you have that group for expansion and spending your time there leveraging those relationships. I think was a good just mental model for me to think about that. And then it gives you clarity. You just don't go in saying I have 17 customers I need to re earn their trust and uh, resell our product to. But I actually have four that are going to be my growth customers are going to make the big difference. Here's my stable customers that uh, there'll be slight risk there but they're stable. I know them well enough and here's a few at risk. Is that at risk really a huge percentage of the revenue or does the company say the expansion way outweighs that and that risk we're willing to take that risk and you start managing the expectations internally. It just resonated so much with me personally.

Speaker C: I mean, uh, you've probably seen this yourself as well. Account managers and CSMs spend all sorts of time running around after the $50,000 customer that's going to churn anyway, and they're ignoring the half million dollar client that has another huge project because of their incentives or because of how they've been taught. And, uh, to really bring home this thing about portfolio thinking. The way that I've evolved my own thinking on this topic is account managers are stewards of capital. We are financial asset managers. At the beginning you think, well, how is that the case? Because here's what happens. You join the company and you get a book of business. Book of business is worth 5 million or 10m million, whatever it is, right? Here's a $5 million book of business. And then they don't say this, but here's what's implied. Don't shrink it, right? Make it grow. They're like, hey, like m, make sure that doesn't go away. And hopefully grow it is the point. And so when you start to realize, yeah, you might have 17 customers to your previous example worth $5 million, great, let's. How do we make that $5 million, $6 million by the end of the year, $10 million in the next 24 months, $30 million in five years or whatever, how do we get that? And so when I start to realize that my job is to be a steward of capital because the company has invested a lot of money in acquiring these assets. Customer contracts are assets and my job is to make sure it grows. Then I change my thinking and maybe I don't spend half a month trying to recover a tiny customer or where instead I could be spending my time unlocking some gigantic upside at a bigger account. And so that is something. Again, most people aren't thinking about it this way, but when you start to, then you become even more valuable to your company.

Speaker B: Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. I encourage all the people to go out and get your book and read through it. I just enjoy it. It doesn't feel like I'm reading a book. It feels like I'm going to class and learning and that's very rewarding. So absolutely recommend the book. One of the things that we do with all our guests at the end is ask them about their LinkedIn profile. Not yours specifically, but just in general. When you look at LinkedIn and profiles people have out there, because our podcast is about people getting into CS or moving up. Is there anything that you recommend people do within LinkedIn and maybe their profile or any pet peeve that you've seen as like, you should really not do that. That's probably not helping your cause for getting another role either one. If you have any advice for our listeners.

Speaker C: So, uh, first I'll just share. I've been on LinkedIn since year one. I was something in the first 100,000 people to join LinkedIn ever back in, I think 2003. So I've been on LinkedIn for a long time. I have almost 30,000 followers or something like that. I have done hundreds of thousands if not million dollars of revenue just from LinkedIn because of connections I've made, people I've known, messages I've sent, messages I've received, and so on. And so LinkedIn is a place where we all should be spending more time. If you don't have a current photograph, go get one. Go put one up there. My goodness. Like, put your face up there. I don't want a slogan. I don't want one of those. Just random avatars. Similarly, don't put a picture of the city you happen to live in on your banner. I see a lot of pictures of the Rocky Mountains or the landscape of such and such place, or the outline of the skyline of Denver. No, nobody cares about that. Either find two or three interesting things about yourself and put those in your banner or put a picture of you speaking on stage or, or you meeting with customers or you had a team meeting or whatever. Like use something there to humanize the person. Those are things that I super highly recommend. And you don't even. You don't have to change these up very often. Just get those basics done. And then in terms of things like the titles and the descriptions that people use me, I value plain speaking. Just say what it is. You don't need to be a guru or a ninja or, uh, this, that, or that. You don't need some kind of fancy words in there. You don't need to make stuff up. Just say what you are and what you're doing and make it very clear so that people can organize you. When they see you, they want to put you in a bucket. They want to say, oh, what kind of person is this? Could they be useful? Are they interesting? Do I care? Do I not care? Those are the decisions that are going on in people's minds. Make it just quick. Boom. Um, okay, I understand where this person belongs. They're an executive. They're early Career, their late career. They're this, they're that. They care about SaaS, they don't care about SaaS, whatever. If you are looking for a job in logistics at a such and such level, like literally just put that there. Here's my experience. I've been an executive in this kind of thing. Be very clear about what you've been doing, who you are. Use the about section. Make sure your profile stuff is built up enough. I think people are woefully under using LinkedIn and for me in the past when I've done hiring or when I'm recommending people and stuff like that, if the LinkedIn profile isn't awesome, I'm likely to just skip over it. Which by the way includes if this person hasn't posted in the last month, I think, well, maybe they don't have anything to say, maybe they're not going to help me that much. Maybe they're not that interesting, maybe they're not that interested in what I'm doing. So I'm likely to skip over them as well.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: How does that match to your experience?

Speaker B: Yeah, part of it makes me think about my own profile all the time. I think that you, uh, always have to re evaluate and relearn and do all those type of things on there. But I absolutely agree with you. Being visible out there, having a point of view. I think it's very intimidating for people to post something because what if someone disagrees with me? It's almost like what we just talked about, delivering bad news to the customer. It's okay if they disagree with you, you might learn something, but put it out there and make it consumable. So those type of things. Absolutely. I think you hit on a lot of it. I try to get it down to basics, basic wording like you said they have. They're going to look at that probably for 10, 15 seconds. If you have this long sentence that goes on for a paragraph, they're going to skip over it, they're going to go to other things and they're going to find the thing that you didn't mean to highlight, but you only had a few words for it and they're going to put you in that bucket. So yeah, absolutely.

Speaker C: And the last thing I'll say on that is, for the love of God, do not use AI comment generators. My goodness, don't do that. If you're even thinking about it, stop. If you've been doing it so far, go unsubscribe. Never do that again. Write your comments by hand yourself.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Okay, Alex, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to come out. And again, to our listeners, please go out and get the Growth Department book by Alex Raymond. And thank you for your time. Appreciate it.

Speaker C: Awesome. Super glad to be here. Appreciate the conversation. Great.

Speaker B: Thanks. Well, I hope all our listeners enjoyed the episode as much as I did. Remember to go out and purchase the Growth Department by Alex Raymond.

Speaker A: We've touched on a few parts of

Speaker B: the book, but there's a wealth of information we didn't talk about. Uh, enjoy it. We hope you have a great day and we'll talk to you soon.