From Junk Drawer to Revenue Engine: How Psychology Transforms CS Teams

Hey, CS psychos, welcome to Psychology of Customer Success. Today we're gonna be talking with Rob Zambito. We're gonna geek out on psychology. Uh, he is the founder of Success Scaled Consulting and he's been a multiple-time VP of CS who also happens to have a background in behavioral and consumer psychology. So we'll discuss how buyers make decisions, how to keep your CS team from becoming the junk drawer of the organization, plus the underhyped skill that gets you buy-in with the C-suite. That's all coming up next, right here on Psychology of Customer Success. Stay tuned. Humans don't think or behave like computers. You can't just run a command and get them to do what you want them to do. So why are you still basing your CS strategy based solely on logic? I'm Rachel Provand, CS leadership coach, award-winning CS strategist, and certified psych nerd. I teach CS leaders how to build and scale world-class CS departments using a combination of strategy, leadership, and mindset using my secret weapon, psychology. Come join me every Wednesday for Psychology of Customer Success, where we'll dive into why people do the things they do, what motivates them, and the effect that has on your CS strategy, team dynamics, and executive presence. Make sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and make sure to share it with your CS bestie. Talk soon, and here's to your success. Welcome back. I am lucky enough today to have Rob Zambito, one of my favorite people to nerd out on psychology with, especially as it applies to customer success. And we're going to jump right in here. Rob, do you want to say hello? Say a little bit about yourself? Sure. Yeah. Thank you for having me, Rachel. Longtime listener on my side, but no, really, it's a pleasure to be here. If I haven't met anyone listening, I'm Rob Zambito. I'm a 3-time customer success leader. I'm a full-time consultant. I'm founder and CEO of Success Scaled Consulting. Small team, and what we do is we turn customer success teams into proactive revenue-generating engines. So we have a core 6-month program we like to run teams through. That's like our core thing. We also do on the side some advisory work and some product management advisory work, just because that's kind of ancillary to what we do. Some RevOps work as well. And I also co-host the Daily Standup Podcast, which I do currently repping on my t-shirt right now. If anyone is not familiar with that, you know, daily CS wisdom, small bites, really fun to listen to. I've been on it twice. I have a blast whenever I'm there. I think it's a great thing to incorporate into like your morning routine because you just get that little bit of, you know, news about what's going on in CS and perspectives and everything without it having to be a whole long thing that you have to listen to, and they're just really fun. So highly recommended. Okay, so let's show them what you can do. You have a background aside from all you've done in customer success, like myself, you have a background in behavioral and consumer psychology. How has that shaped the way you approach customer success? Yeah, for me, it's the foundation of how I think about customer success and kind of how I got into customer success too. I, in another life, kind of wish I were an academic, but that— I say this as someone whose wife has a PhD and whose sister is getting a PhD, like, that path is arduous and my hat's off to those people, but ultimately decided that wasn't for me. But so I studied consumer psychology, behavioral economics in college, and I was like honestly so lucky to study with just some really, really brilliant folks. Mostly I studied like judgments and decisions. So often when I say psychology, people think like abnormal psychology, and that's not really anything I've ever really spent. That's, that's my— I studied abnormal psych, which is so useful in everyday life. Let me tell you. No, I just armchair diagnose. No, I'm kidding. Yeah. Right. Yeah. No, for me, I actually like my college thesis was on what psychological effects and biases make people better at predicting future outcomes. Ooh, love it. Which, shit, yeah, it turned out to be really interesting when I got into customer success because while the kind of like entry point into customer success was Rob is a generalist who can do whatever for the company, but he seems to thrive when he's talking to customers. Same story that, I don't know if you know John Gleason, but yeah, yeah, smart guy in the industry. He actually had the almost the exact same story. So what started with that ended up with me kind of realizing that for me, psychology is the foundation of customer success in two ways. On the one hand, there's the more intuitive side, which is that the customer journey is founded on judgments and decisions, and there's a ton of different effects and biases and heuristics that go into that experience, which we could geek out on. But I also think there is the research methodology lens. I think studying psych for me taught me a way more rigorous way of thinking about the world, of structuring problems, of establishing a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis, which now we call A/B testing. You know, that was a term that I didn't know, you know, obviously in college. Right. And statistically measuring results, critically analyzing, is our sample size good enough and are these results good enough and is our methodology good? I think even somewhere by my feet I have a research methodology book that I could dig up if anyone wants to geek out on that stuff. But that's the other lens that I think has been really helpful. Yeah, it's so interesting because the lens you're looking through, to me, when you're looking at the research methodology part of it, it's gonna be really hard to have an appropriate sample size for accurate results. And never mind the fact that we can misinterpret accurate results based on the way we're looking at it and how we want things to go. I am a big fan of A/B testing, knowing that it's not gonna be particularly representative. But just because otherwise you're stuck behind this wall of, oh my God, we have to roll this out to so many people and it's so overwhelming. And maybe we don't have over 100 people to roll this out to with the chance of it failing. But it's also, you have to think about the stakes. You know, if the stakes are about someone's mental health or like how they go home and treat their family or whether a medication works, yeah, you don't wanna be wrong. I mean, you don't wanna be wrong in your job, but the stakes are very different. And science, we have certain rules about what constitutes like a double-blind study. Is it repeatable by other people consistently? I don't tend to talk about the research side of it because I'm like, honestly, you're not gonna be able to live up to the appropriate scientific standards, you know? And that's my view of it. It's like we're gonna have small sample sizes and we're gonna have to just, kind of see, kind of guess, and pivot if needed. Yeah, I think that's especially true. So some companies I've worked at, the client base is enterprise and so different. A healthy client base might be like 10 customers. Yeah. And so if your customer is, if you have a customer, a client base of 10 customers, you don't have a lot of wiggle room and you've got to use a little bit of the, something closer to a case study methodology. Yes. Yes. No, I'm totally with you. But also you're not so overburdened that you need something so generalized that you, I think it's more for a scale situation. If you've got 10 clients, you can just ask them. Exactly. If something works for them, you know, it is, that's funny when you mention it, cuz like I, I've been notorious for getting into, oh, I read about this survey methodology and we should use this with our customers. And I see this on LinkedIn all the time too, which, yeah, God knows LinkedIn is the source of all truth in life. Oh my God. There are situations that boil down to, well, have you just asked your customer? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, ah, when it comes to like renewals and stuff, for example, this comes up often, right? I'm sure we've all seen this of people saying, oh, we ran this complex health score analysis and this predicts whether they're gonna renew. And like sometimes you just wanna feel like, but it doesn't. Yeah. Have you just asked? Have you just tried asking? Yeah. I think health scores are. Great and important and they can be great for early warning signals, but you're probably not gonna get more than like 80, 85% accuracy. And who knows with machine learning, but yeah, people are too unpredictable and too different from one another for you to be able to say with certainty, like, up, these people are out when it's like, well, no, their software tanked and they're maybe focused on that right now and not so much on our platform. You know, it's really hard to get that accurate. Yeah. Yeah. And to maintain it over time. Totally. Yeah. 'Cause to your point, there's other stuff that comes up. Yeah. And things change. And as AI moves through here, we're not gonna get too into AI, I promise. But as it moves through here, the way people use technology is gonna change. So obviously health scores are gonna be like, the usage numbers are going to be different. The way they interact is gonna be different. We have to be comfortable with the fact that it's, this is the best we can do for now. And there's a fair amount of guessing. Yeah. Yeah, it's actually really funny. In my last full-time job, RIP, my last full-time job, one of the interesting things we found was the reason usage didn't actually predict renewal was because of a couple of things. One of them was that like, if we just had like really deep engagement from a small subset of users, that actually mattered way more than broad adoption across the user base. So I think about, like, I know you and I, we're both familiar with the availability heuristic, which basically says we make judgments based off of the relevant instances that come to mind. And for our economic buyers, they didn't look at the broad statistical adoption across their entire user base. They just said, oh, I remember this one committee gave this one testimonial and that sounded really positive, so we're going to choose to renew. Which is crazy, right? I mean, there's so much storytelling that they were doing in their own heads, and I realized like, wow, if I can just connect with this storytelling that they're doing internally— exactly— that's way more important than me being a statistician here. Exactly. Because people are not— you know my thing— like, people are not acting logically. And if you try and approach it as, well, if we do this, they will do that— no, you don't know what's going on in their head. You don't know what convinces them. That's why these cognitive biases And heuristics can be used to our advantage. It's a matter of like, how shady do you want to get with that? But marketing's definitely already pushed that. I've always, I always hear you say like ethical. Yeah. Modes of persuasion. Ethical influence. Ethical influence. Yeah. I, my thing is if it's not going to benefit them as much as it does you, don't do it. There will be not just karmic implications, like someone will figure it out and start yelling about it online and you will not look good. Uh, books by my desk. Probably familiar with. I can't see it. Yes. This book, Yes. It basically is, it's 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive. Oh, don't know that one. I know The Power of Yes. I know, what was it? Get to Yes First or something. There's a few out there with similar names. Yeah. The key thing is the author here, Robert Cialdini, he says— Oh yeah, of course. Yeah. The daddy. Daddy Vincloch. So he says these have to, these are ethical ways to be Excellent. Yeah. Persuasive. And really what it boils down to is I, I think of them more as not even ways of influence, but more like ways of education. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, this is what works with people. The whole point of all of this is to solve people's problems and make their lives better. So if you're finding ways of getting them to do that, that's a positive thing. Mm-hmm. You know, and I use this analogy all the time of the personal trainer. Mm-hmm. Their mere existence and having an appointment with them is going to make me go to the gym. Whereas if I don't have that appointment, I'm gonna sleep through the alarm. I'm gonna be like, eh, not today. Yeah, totally. And you know, just that having that responsibility, having already paid them, not wanting them to think badly of me, all of those things factor in. So why not use that as a motivation? Like I'm manipulating myself. Absolutely. I'll take it. I'm not going because I don't know how to do a pushup. Yeah. You know? No. Yeah, it's not a knowledge barrier, it's an accountability one. There's— I read the book Carrots and Sticks. It's one that I read like a— I know a lot about it. I haven't read it since I've had children. I have only listened to audiobooks. They do not allow me to read. It's considered, oh, it's time to jump on mom if I have a book. You've got other things to worry about. I love books, but I listen to any audiobook I can get my hands on about psychology. But if there isn't an audiobook or if it's terrible, it's going to be like, all right, I'm going to see if ChatGPT can summarize this for me a bit, but I do miss just like diving into a good book. But I do know it's an old concept, that carrots and sticks. Yeah, it's one I'm digging into deeply with my dog because I have a puppy and he's 7 months old and he is very bitey. And everyone's like, positive reinforcement only. And I'm like, I don't want to give this dog a treat for biting my arm. Yeah, you know, right? And I don't want to yell at him or be mean, but the positive reinforcement is not working so well. Yeah. It's interesting. And I do believe in positive reinforcement. It is what I teach in leadership, but I'm constantly joking to my husband, you know what? Human-first leadership does not work on dogs. Yeah. Well, I think it's funny too, 'cause you know, just before we started recording, we were talking about both our backgrounds in the restaurant world where feedback in the restaurant world is nasty, brutish. Not friendly. Yeah. It's not, it's not a lot of positive reinforcement. No, no. You know, and I also come from the acting world, which is not a lot. Oh yeah, oh yeah, people tell you exactly what they think about you as if they are describing a pair of pants on a chair, even though you're like right in a room. That's— yeah, so I got out of that because I was like, I'd like to be treated like a human. And I got out of corporate because I'd like to be treated like a human. Yeah, yeah, welcome to the club. It's a pity, but that is something that, that is one of my purposes in life to bring more humanity and kindness back into the office world. Because I really believe, whether it's remote or in office, I really do believe that drives profits and that treating people better with respect, giving them buy-in, you know, giving them something to work on, helping them be part of the decision, giving them credit for things, all of those things make people work harder and make them get better results. Mm-hmm. And it costs nothing. I love that. It reminds me when I got my first job in SaaS and I was like, what even is SaaS? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I happened to look into a company, ZenPayroll at the time, which is now Gusto. Ah, which a lot of folks know. I use Gusto. Yeah. Yeah. And I remember the founder saying on some YouTube video I watched that he's like, our goal is to modernize and humanize payroll. And I thought that was such a nice and succinct way of establishing a company mission. Right. Modernizing and humanizing are two things I could get behind. Yeah. That's my like new motto. Like I have a whole mission statement that you'll hear at some point. I love it. That's very short, but it basically comes down to lead like a human. If you lead with humanity first, if you treat people like humans first and profit second, you're actually going to get much better profits, get much better results, but it's the only possible way. And that it's a trickle-up effect because when something actually produces better results and better profits, that's when it moves up. But most people just don't have any sort of training in how to do that. And so most managers are shitty. Forgive my language. And it's not their fault, but it sure makes for a lot of trouble. Yeah, no, I've been one myself. I— yeah, a shitty manager or a manager? Both. Me too. I have— I'm still on an apology tour with a few friends who somehow have not left me as friends. Even managed to show up to my wedding, some of them. But if they're listening, let this be once again another apology for having been such a ridiculous manager at times. Man, I've got so many stories. Oh yeah. I remember, you know, when I worked in food, my, my business partner designed this salad. I then made the salad and he looked at it and he said, that's not the salad. And I was like, what's wrong with it? And he said, if you can't tell, I can't help you. Send it back. I was like, oh my God, that's so mean. But then years later, I'm managing a support team and one of the new reps, the poor guy, still a friend of mine, thank God. He shows me a draft email response to a customer. He's like, how is this? And I said, it's not good enough. He's like, what's wrong with it? And I said, if you can't tell, I can't. Yeah. I was like, who am I? Oh no, it happened to me. But you see, this is what happens. It's what we see modeled and then it's what we do. Cause it's, oh, that's what a manager does. Yeah. Yeah. And so actually, at least they still talk to you. The people I first managed do not talk to me, and I do not blame them. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's actually really funny too, because in that process, I'm fortunate to be married to a psychologist. And my wife has helped me unpack so many of these biases that I have. God, yeah. So like when I was hiring a manager to replace me for that team, I remember there was somebody I was like, I really wanted for the role. And I kept saying this other person, you know, she was never going to be able to live up to the expectations. And my wife kind of brought it to my attention. She was like, do you think it's possible? Yeah. You're maybe indexing a little heavy on certain traits that maybe skew a little bit more towards people who look and sound and act like you. Yeah, I was like, damn, you're right. Damn it. And I was, and I was. And actually, I took— we took a bet on the other person, and she was phenomenal. She was the exact right manager for the team and led in a completely different way than I ever did, and it was exactly what the team needed. I love that. And you know, one of my other kind of foundational beliefs that I've come to out of studying all this stuff and talking about it so much is really that most of us, especially in our business lives are just stuck in fear. Yeah. Because we understand, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is how we get our food. This is how we get our shelter. So it's basically like living with a lion. I don't wanna piss it off. I don't wanna do anything different because I don't know if that's gonna lose me my job, my food, my shelter. Right. The fact that you were able to do that and do something untested, untried, I don't know if this is gonna work. Everybody agrees with that in theory. It's actually going out and doing it. Even though it feels so scary and so against— it feels like such a huge risk because our brain is interpreting that as this is a risk to your survival when it's really, okay, let's see how this person does. Like logically, our nervous system doesn't see it that way. So the fact that you're able to not only recognize it, but take the bet is unusual and very cool. Yeah. Still a work in progress. I mean, I think one thing I've done to help myself in that regard is to set sort of this is where that sort of research background helps, is when I'm taking those bets, I try to acknowledge what are my assumptions, what are my hypotheses, how much time am I gonna give this? Yeah. To determine whether it's working and what am I gonna check back on after that period of time to look back and say like, all right, this worked or this didn't. Yeah. A lot of times we end up getting caught in these like infinite loops, like sort of either iterative loops or we just get stuck doing the same things over and over again without a proper retro. Yeah. Doesn't really— Yeah. In the long run. I hate retros. I hate being like, where did I go wrong? Why did this happen? It's like, nah, let's just do it again. That's gonna turn out great. Do it harder, faster. We'll be smarter. We'll work harder than we did before. And no, it tends to turn out the same way. So yeah, that's another human thing. It's, I know what happened. I just wasn't dedicated enough. Right. That is not your personality type. Mhm. What is something you believe about CS that most people would disagree with? You know, I have multiple answers here. Of course. Um, and the ones that stuck out to me— there's a lot of people out there these days who are saying a couple things that I don't necessarily agree with, one of which is that you have to be quote unquote strategic in customer success, And I don't disagree with it, but I think it's very poorly defined. Vague as hell. Yeah. Yeah. The thing is, I had a CEO say to me once, she was like, Rob, everything this team is doing is strategic. We wouldn't be doing it otherwise. And while we acknowledge that there are certain things we're doing that are less strategic than others, if you're answering a support ticket, that is a strategy, right? If you're doing reactive work, that is a strategy. And I'm a little bit concerned that, again, this world of LinkedIn has built up this notion of being a CSM as basically being this hands-off keyboard armchair advisor who never really does the work. And no one's gonna treat you like that. Yeah. You know, companies aren't gonna trust you like that. And this is a problem that I've seen where that's put me in situations in the past where I have a CFO who's expecting me to improve margins. I have a CEO who's expecting me to upsell. I have a CSM who's on my team who's saying we're supposed to be strategic advisors. Mm-hmm. And then I have a customer who's saying, I just need someone to fix this bug. Yeah. If it's not you, who is it? Right. And I think that the other answer I had to this question is that I don't believe customer success is a monolith. I don't think it's a single thing, and that's okay. I think we've reached the point now where customer success has been around for long enough that we can say the same way, quote unquote, marketing is not just one singular thing. A field marketer is very different from an SEO marketer is very different from a content marketer. Yeah. I think we need that language, that shared vernacular and customer success to say, I call this the 5 personas of customer success. I'm working on something here. Love it. Yeah. But to be able to say there is the value-first persona, there is the commercial-first persona who focuses on renewals and upsells and dollars and cents. There is the support-focused persona, and there are other personas as well, and they're all okay. It's okay that they exist. They all serve their own functions. I think it's really important that teams align on what their core identity is and they share that internally and with their customer. You mentioned something about that previously about being like honest and authentic with— Yeah. I think it's so important that we do that as a team as well. Stay with us. We'll be right back. If you're listening to this thinking, okay, but how do I actually do this in my company? That's exactly why I created the CS Leadership Academy. This podcast gives you the psychology. The academy gives you the frameworks, the how-tos, and community of CS leaders figuring this out together. Plus, you get direct coaching from me. If you're tired of figuring it out alone and want a real system for nailing your role as a CS leader, go to Provantsuccess.com/CSLA and see if it's a fit for you. Hope to see you there. Yeah, I feel I'm interested in this multiple persona because I do feel that CS teams have taken on so many different roles at this point that it's become very diluted. And well, diluted and deluded, but it's, you have to figure out like what's really possible. And the problem with customer success with the whole value model, like making sure that customers get to value with their product. I do think there is value in that because people are not logical and they're not gonna just go and use the product the way they're supposed to because you made it and it works. Hopefully, you know, some are. But not all, not to the extent that you're going to be happy with your renewal rate. I do think it's okay that they exist to be like, all right, almost like project managers. It's like our goal is to get you to this result and we are working with you till we get there. And once we get there, we'll see other ways in which we can help you. It's really working back and forth with that, and you really can't upsell much before you reach that value. None of that seems like it should be all that difficult. To understand to me, but the issue is you can't physically see that value. Mm-hmm. You can't put it in a spreadsheet, like, because it does require the human-to-human interaction to figure out where they're falling off. You know, it's, I don't know if my trainer has to figure out why I'm not showing up and call me and kick my ass and be like, right, come on, let's be honest, stop ghosting me and tell me what's really going on. And it's like, well, I don't like squats. Well, you could just tell me that and then we don't have to do them. But there is that psychological part that we do have to handle the human being a human. And I'm sorry, it's really hard to track that on a chart, but if you don't do it, you're not going to get any of the other stuff you want. I mean, it's even hard for us to know ourselves. Like, I think you might not in that moment recognize that it's the squats that are stopping you. It's like, I remember this time I was having this bad day and I, I tried so hard to unpack what was going on and all the way, like, Is this something to do with my upbringing? And it turns out I recalled this moment in the day when I started having a bad day and it was because a rock hit my windshield and it cracked my windshield. I was like, oh, wait a second. This is not a psychological existential moment for me. This is just a rock hit my windshield. And that's okay. Yeah, I wind up quite often in therapy being like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm just stressed. I don't know. One of these days I'm going to, you know, it'll be like, how are you? And one of these days I will not say tired, but It's very easy to get wrapped up in your head of, well, is it this or is it this? I've got my own stories going on while they've got their own stories going on. Yeah. And it's really hard for anyone to see clearly. Stories is the right word. That's a, that's a good one. Yeah. No, we all make up stories and we're not acting on facts. We all make up ideas about what the facts mean. So we're making up stories in our heads and then we're going around believing them true and acting on them all day long. And each of us in a different little, main character story, and it's like the most chaotic soap opera. Yeah, it's just not going to be logical. I'm sorry. I don't know if you've ever heard, there's a semi-cheesy like parable of these three bricklayers, and the first one says, "I'm laying bricks." The second one says, "I'm building a wall." The third one says, "I'm building a cathedral." And they're all doing the exact same thing, but they're all having wildly different experiences based on the story that they're telling themselves. Yeah. But that was pretty good. Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, I could go down a rabbit hole with that one too. I hadn't heard that one, but I am a cheesy person, so I enjoy that. Love it. You know, I was like, bring me the platter. The whole charcuterie board. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. One thing that I've noticed as a big problem when I'm talking to my newer CS leaders is that it's very difficult for them to communicate properly with the executive leadership team. You know, sort of the mind shifts that they have to have with that. And I talk about that on here, so I wanna hear what you have to say about that since you deal with executive leadership teams all the time. Um, how can we better convince them? How can we better get their buy-in as to the value and give us the time and give us the budget? Mm-hmm. It's such a good question. I was thinking about this yesterday cuz I was looking into goal trees, which is mm-hmm. Something I've used before, but I never knew that term, actually. Basically, what I've learned is that sort of the language that we use on the ground in customer success is often quite different than what matters at the executive level. And it's not that complicated at the executive level, even though there's a ton of mysterious metrics like payback periods and CAC/LTV ratios and whatever. Like, really, at the end of the day, these are people who are trying to save time, Save money and make money and save time, by the way, is just another form of— is a way of making money. So, so, so what I learned is like, and this is one of the cool areas that I get to help fill in as a consultant, is I can help sort of translate the language of the individual success rep or support rep on the ground who's doing the work and translate it all the way up to the big picture at the executive level. So that might look something on this goal tree, sort of like the cathedral thing. It's like that. The individual support rep might be like, I'm answering a ticket. But then the next level up is I'm making our customers satisfied. The next level up is I'm making our customers so satisfied that they retain and expand and refer their friends. And then the highest level is I'm building a massive enterprise here based off of the fact that our whole customer base is having a thriving experience where they love to stay a customer of ours. Refer their friends and expand their business with us. That's a much better narrative to tell. And that story is to be told. It's just getting it in the numbers is a little bit tricky, but certainly can be done if you master the data. I love that. I love that. Yeah, I think it's tricky because I've found, especially in customer success, like we love nuance and we have a tendency to overexplain. Mm-hmm. Uh, and people at that level are just like, oh my God, get to the point. I'm begging you. Us overexplain? Never. Yeah, never. It's like, but no, you don't understand the exact nuance of this and why I did what I did. You might think I'd be wrong, but you'd be wrong because here's why. Oh God, help anyone who has to listen to my brain. Welcome to the club. Me especially. Me especially. When you go into these companies, what do you tell the CS people as opposed to like you're advising the executive leadership team on like how CS should be run, how it works? What do you tell the people on the ground? Yeah, it— there's— A wide array of things that stem from just a brief maturity assessment we often do. So, like, a lot of times when I start working with an organization, there's an overall, like, skills assessment we tend to do with the team. And I don't want that to sound like anything arduous or anything, like, threatening, but it's actually really helpful. I think a lot of people, a lot of orgs that I work with, they're like, we either don't have job descriptions or we haven't updated them in years or More recently, they've just spit out by ChatGPT, which is like meant to be some aggregation of all these. It's just pulling it from Wikipedia, man. Yeah. Or, and not, it's not just job descriptions. It's like maybe lacking defined KPIs, maybe lacking defined accountability charts or RACI charts, or I just learned this term rapid chart. That's like a new one that I just learned, but basically it's a chart, a chart of who's responsible. Swim lanes. Yeah. Yeah, fancy names for basically just saying who's on first. We all love our acronyms. Yeah, right? So, but the funny thing is I realize that in doing that exercise, there comes up an opportunity for a lot of transparency, a lot of identification of like, where are there skills gaps and coaching opportunities with the team? And then how do we build that into a scalable and repeatable process? So for me, there's 3 big things I like to focus on. There's Customer ops, so like what is the customer experience like and the customer journey and the fixtures around that, like customer advisory boards, voice of the customer programs. There's rev ops, so like how do we model that data in our systems and our CRMs and our CSPs. But then the most, maybe the most central piece of this is people ops, which is exactly this domain where if you don't have mastery over people ops in a lot of organizations, you're really not going to have a successful organization, a successful company without having successful people. And most people who start a company are not experts with people. They're experts with products, you know? And unless you hire like a professional CEO, and I've had some of those, and let me tell you, they're not— they're like— either. Yeah. But yeah, you know, and it's okay to know that is not your strong suit and to hire others to manage the people and report up to you and be like, here's what's going on. But like, to get the people motivated and get them to where they can perform their best and understand what's going on with all of that. It doesn't have to be the CEO, and most times it isn't after a while. But just understanding, you know, like, I should never be in charge of data. Never. There are certain people who should never be in charge of people. Never ever. Guess what? There are plenty of people who are good at each of those things. Mm-hmm. So that's why you don't do everything yourself, cuz not only is it gonna take you 10 times as long. It's just not going to be as good a result. Yeah, but so many of those things are so foundational, and people get scared about taking those kind of tests because it's like, oh, it's going to show I'm lacking. And it's— no, it's going to show you that the company didn't make something clear, and it's going to make your job so much easier. Yeah, yep, yeah, exactly. We talk about storytelling. It's one thing to view those moments as a threat versus as an opportunity. Sure, but I think most people, especially right now, view everything as a threat. It's, you know, am I going to get fired tomorrow? I have to do everything in my power. I can't make a mistake. I have to be perfect. I have to be rah-rah with whatever they're doing. It's not a situation that fosters people's best work because they just rely on, well, this worked yesterday and I don't want to do anything different. It's like, well, what worked yesterday probably isn't going to work today. Sorry. Yeah, it's tough. One of the things I'm lucky to have in my current line of work is I pretty much only get called into situations where teams are expanding, not downsizing. That's nice. Otherwise they wouldn't pay me because they'd be like, why are we wasting money on this consultant guy? I've, I would most likely turn down a situation where somebody says you have to come in and run a round of layoffs. I've never had that ask and I hope I never do. But yeah, I know that kind of leaves me with a little bit of a naively optimistic view of— No, that's lovely. I'm dealing with people who are dealing with layoffs all the time, and it's not everyone, you know, but it's a lot. It's a lot. And it's never been like it is today. No. I mean, I remember, geez, 3, 4 years ago, it was so taboo to have that open to work banner. I know. And now it's the norm. Yeah. And I think it's good that it's the norm. It's liberating that it's the norm, but it really sucks that it's the norm too. Yeah, because it just speaks to how much we've slashed what felt like so amazing 3 years ago, you know. And it's like, oh, but, you know, CS is doing so much work, it's not working. It's like, well, when you cut the number of people that you have doing it in half and don't give them the right tools, that's gonna happen. This is not— we're not ATM machines, you know. Yeah, well, the right tools. And then I think one of the things that's been on my mind a lot is the right charter for the organization. Oh God, yes. Yes. Right. Focus. Speak about charter. I'm so passionate about it. Go for it. Yeah. Look, so when I talked about those 5 personas, it basically stemmed out of me realizing that most CS orgs don't have a defined charter of what their team does. And you forget even how they do it, but why do they exist? What's the mission and the vision for those teams? What is the reason for being? And because of that, CS becomes this junk drawer. Mm-hmm. And that junk drawer will do everything down to— I talked to a friend 2 days ago and his CEO had just recently said to him, I bet you didn't think you'd be doing collections when you took this job, did you? And he's like, you know, you know what? I didn't think I'd be doing collections, but the CEO was like, well, you know what? I guess that's the job. And that's like a, the prime example of CS becoming the junk drawer where you might take that job thinking I'm here to be a strategic advisor and to run renewals and upsells. And the next thing you know, you're chasing down delinquent payments. That's not a fun experience. And that's why as a CS leader, at least you have to be able to push back gently. But be, but be able to say, I understand that this is something that needs to be done, but here's why you don't want us to be the ones to do it, because you're shooting yourself in the foot. You know, even if you get that particular round of collections, they're never going to talk to me again because now I'm someone who's hounding them for money as opposed to someone that they're actually going to trust. Yes. In advising them. That's what billing is for. Yeah. I think it's okay if they ask us how to write the emails because sometimes they're not the most friendly. Maybe write a more friendly email, but be like, here's 3 emails, here's a sequence, your job. I'm a big fan of being able to like show, look, here's all the things on our plate. Here are the 3 that actually move the needle. Can we focus on these, please? You know, I say this recognizing, you know, this comes out of a place of companies not having the luxury to, you know, maybe you're like, like me, I don't have a billing department. So if I ever have a client who's, you know, behind on invoices, then I, as the strategic advisor, I do have to become the pseudo collections agency. And, you know, sometimes that's just duty, duty just calls. But I do think that we should be taking proactive measures to make sure that if and when that happens, we're at least saying, okay, this is a defined deviation from the long-term proper end state of what we're doing. Yes. So we'll do it for now, but we need a long-term permanent solution. Because when we get out of emergency mode— and my issue is like, okay, how is how that group is being measured going to change? Yeah, because you're now taking them away from what's going to get them the results that get them their bonus. You're messing with their money. So if you want to keep them motivated and doing their job well, it's hard to convince someone to do something that is actively taking them away from what's going to make them money. You know, in the same way that we can't tell sales, well, don't sell to those type of people. They're not going to be like, sure, okay. You know, it's like, that's, it's against their own interests. So it's like, yes, we can do this, but then we're going to have to reduce what we can give you in terms of retention. And, you know, it's like, which money is more important? Yeah, actually, you're coming back to that same topic we had before around carrots and sticks. I think one of the interesting perspectives I can help bring to some orgs that I work with is incentive misalignment. Ah, 100%. Which is all of it on the receiving end of that, especially where we see these situations where like customer success and sales are arguing over who should own what and why this handoff was so bad and why the other one is such a pain. Meanwhile, product's sitting behind the scenes and they're like, why are you both such a pain? And marketing's out there playing with their toys or whatever they're doing. I know marketing and sales, they have their own issues. Yes. Marketing, whatever. There's issues all across the board, but a lot of it stems from lack of incentive alignment. And then the worst thing is when the customer feels that. Well, of course the customer feels that. Like, here, I'm a huge believer that as someone who has started a business— you are someone who has started a business— I bet people pushed EOS on you. Just hire one person, they go after one metric, they completely own that, and that's their one thing, and they are completely responsible for it. And that works to maybe $2 million, maybe even $5 million if you're lucky. But what you realize is the impact it's having on the customer. You start to notice churn, and that's when you bring in CS. And CS comes in and they're like, guess what, we have to blow up your entire organization because everything you're doing, every mistake that's happening along the way, is impacting the customer. You can't just be like, well, CS, now it's your job to make none of that have happened. It is more difficult to align everyone, and you can't just be like, well, you all get a bonus based on how we do this year. That doesn't work either. It takes a lot more work and a lot more consideration. But I do think like EOS does not work past a certain threshold because it punishes the customer because no one's thinking about them. Somebody said to me, don't let the customer feel your org chart. And I think about that often. Spicy. I love it. Let's see. I'm going to see if I can squeeze in one more. Is there any trend in customer success that you think is underhyped? Hmm. Oh, interesting. There's a lot of hype. What do you think, like, why aren't people just focused on this? I feel like there are multiple answers that come to mind, but the one that's stuck on my head right now is forecasting. And I say this for a couple reasons. Number one, I feel like that's honestly, that was the thing that helped me get a seat at the leadership table. Yeah, I was like complaining, why don't I have a seat at the table? Why don't I have a seat at the table? And then one day I was like, I have a forecast. And then everyone's like, forecast? Tell us. Yeah, tell me more. And frankly, like, it wasn't good. But what it did was it basically said, no, I'm not just the happiness department, just maintaining customers, keeping things warm. This is a financial revenue-focused function that can help foresee what's going to happen in the future. And what I was doing there was, if you remember, I mentioned like, this is what my college thesis was on, although that was about forecasting like political and economic futures for the world, which turns out that's a lot more complicated than forecasting SaaS outcomes sometimes. But, but yeah, it was actually really helpful for me to do that. It forced me then to learn the economics of customer success in a bigger way. And I've been geeking out on that with, I don't know if you know Mickey Powell. But yep, I know everybody. Yeah, I know you do. Nikki is— Nikki and I have been talking for months about using machine learning to forecast SaaS futures, which we think is really interesting. But we kind of have this idea of building something that is akin to a prediction market for customer success and customer outcomes, and we think that's possible, and that might be the most potentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That might fundamentally predict the outcomes of the overall companies. Yeah. That, you know, that we work on this with. So that would be incredible. Working on that, we're like, keep me posted. That pulls in a lot of psychology because the things that make people predict the future, there's tons of biases, of course, in that process. You can't, you can't avoid it, but you just got to be willing to call a number and know that Yeah, you might be wrong. Guess what? Sales is wrong all the time. You know, they're not going to be like, well, you're fired because you were 5 points off. Like, we based it on this. Everyone agreed that made sense at the time. We didn't know this data point. Now we do, and we're going to pivot. Yeah, right. It's the best we can do. Yeah. And I think having that, like, intellectual honesty as a, as a team and as a company to say we were incorrect. But we recognize why we were incorrect. Yeah. Here are the steps we're taking to mitigate that risk in the future. That's such a liberating experience to go through when it's part of a healthy company culture. It's just a bunch of grownups in a room trying to figure stuff out. No one has secret magical powers because they have a title, you know, uh, unless they're like sometimes some kind of brilliant economist, then okay, maybe listen to them. Yeah. But most likely people are like, Well, here's what I think and here's why, and here's what I think would be a good idea. Poke holes in it. What do you guys think? And if everyone around the table is like, yeah, sounds good to me. If you come back and you're like, well, that didn't work. You really can't get in that much trouble for it because everyone was agreed. No one was like, yeah, I can see this is gonna fail and here's why. And you didn't listen to them. But this is so much fun. You know, I could do this for hours, but Our listeners do not get to hear all of that. So we gave them a taste of it today and I'm sure we'll have you back sometime. I always love talking about this stuff with you. You have the best perspectives. Like what? And where can people find you if their company wants to work with you? You know, if they just want to pick your brain on— well, not pick your brain, but if they want to pay you to pick your brain, how can they find you? I have no problem doing— we often do like a complimentary customer success maturity assessment. Okay. Basically assess where is the org today? What are the missing playbooks and pieces that can help drive revenue? But yeah, LinkedIn's the best way to find me. My email is hello@robzambito.com. So just my name, really easy. Based in Boston. If anybody's local, feel free to let me know. Come hang. I go to New York often as well. Yay. But yeah, go Knicks. By the time this publishes, I imagine they're going to be eliminated. But anyway, I have no idea. I, you know, sportsball is not my, my strong suit. Yeah, I've, I can talk about the psychology of sports another time cuz I, I just find humor in a lot of it at this point, but take it seriously nonetheless. But anyway, regardless, yeah, LinkedIn, email, and feel free to drop me a line. I'm always open to making new friends. Amazing. Do it, people. You will thank yourself for it because Rob is just an amazing guy and super smart and super kind. Thank you for the kindness of taking your time to be with us today and sharing your knowledge with all CS Psychos, and we will I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Rachel. All right. Thanks. Bye. All right. That's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for joining me. There'll be links in the show notes for everything we talked about today. And if you're interested in leveling up your CS strategy, team leadership, and executive presence with me, make sure to get on the VIP notification list for the CS Leadership Academy so that you'll be the first to know when the doors open back up. So that's probandsuccess.com/waitlist. And until next time, take care of yourself, get some rest, and make sure to share this with your CS bestie. Talk soon, and here's to your success.