308: The Customer Success Series: Top CS Leaders From The 20% Podcast

Speaker A: Hey everyone. Welcome back or welcome to an all new episode of the 20% podcast. This is the show that brings you tips and tricks from industry professionals across all industries that you could implement in your current job. Today I'm your host, Tyler Mekkis. And Today is episode 194 of the 20% podcast. And this is where I'm going to bring you the customer Success series. Now, two episodes ago at 192, I gave you the sales series. Last episode, I gave you the marketing series. Bringing you together, bringing together some of my favorite moments from a sales and marketing perspective from incredible leaders across the board. Now today we're going to be talking about customer success. So our number one guest today from episode 130 is Brooke Simmons. Tell us a little bit more about this four quadrant chart that you're talking that uh, you told me about earlier on how teams should look at spending

Speaker B: their time of is, is this customer actually worth it or not? Which seems terrible, but we have to look at ourselves directly in the mirror with this.

Speaker C: Yeah, we gotta be honest. And I think this is like a company exercise too, right? Is you're not getting more resources, but the customers are going to grow. And so you really need to be smart about how your resources are spending their time. And you want to think about what are the customers we can make the most successful that have like the highest potential, right? They're the best fit, the best growth opportunity. They're going to be multi year customers, right? We want to keep these logos potentially for cachet and so of like really nice visual for this. I like is just like a four quadrant, right? Chart of like customers we care about. They might be icp. We want to keep them, um, they're good fit customers, good logos, whatever. Like we would regret it if they churned. Basically like that's your Y and your X is going to be customers we can make successful, right? Like realistically, can we make them successful? Have they onboarded well? Are they adopted well? Um, are they responsive? Do we have the right champion engagement model? Right. So you end up with like four quadrants, right? You have your top right quadrant. That's like successful ICP customers that kick ass. And these are the ones your marketing team wants to talk to. Everybody's like, these are the great customers that everybody wants.

Speaker A: Um, we want to put that big shiny logo on our website so that we could pump that and say, hey, this is what this team's doing, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, these are our marquee, right? Then you have your customers. That should be awesome. But they need more effort to get there, right? Like, maybe they could be great, but their adoption's a little low, or we just lost our champion, or they haven't really bought into the full suite of products yet and we could upsell them a product. So you could move them right in the quadrants, right? You could say, hey, with a little bit of work, they could be great, right? And then you have some customers that are like, they're awesome, they love us, but they're not like, the best fit ever. I'm working with a client right now that has a lot of legacy customers essentially that they've kind of moved beyond, right? Their product has evolved beyond, but they're still carrying these customers. They care about them from a retention basis. But realistically, that's not where their product is growing in the next five years. They're not the future customer, the past customer. And then you have your bottom left customers that are customers kind of like, you know, they're not doing great and maybe we can't make them successful, right? It would take a lot of time, money or resources, a bunch of pro serve, a bunch of help, an act of God to make them successful, right? And realistically, you can look at the logos and the ARR and the customer counts in these quadrants. And I would encourage you to do this. Cross functionally with products, with marketing, with the executive team. Get really honest about what trends are we picking out from analyzing these customers, and how would we move customers to the top, right? And then what can we actually do, right? What are all our ideas for moving customers into that best category? But what can we actually do with the resources we have? And then this begs the question of, like, what happens to the bottom left? Maybe they get something different from your team, a different service model, um, different support from your team, realistically, given that you're so resource constrained.

Speaker A: All right, next on today's list with episode 131 of the 20% podcast, Mr. Luke barrel.

Speaker D: Yeah, you know, in the military, in some ways it's harder because the stakes are higher, but in a lot of ways it's easier because you know what the mission is. And everybody has really bought in because it's about bringing people home alive, right? Like, you're not going to get a lot of debate when someone's like, hey, I know this may help me live, but I don't really want to do it. People, people are just going to do it. Uh, so that's the, uh, that's where I've seen the primary difference in the commercial World. Like, you have sales, you have CS and support. And I think those are the three that have to be working hand in hand in hand. And so I think there's really a triangle of customer needs. So, like, at the bottom, you have technical how to. And I think generally support lives in that area. Um, they. Oh, man, I just posted a triangle. I got to find this. But essentially you have. You have support down at the bottom. And however high they go, if they go level five and it's just like, technical how to. Well, then level four, I think, is really like the learning and education. Well, that's going to fall somewhere. The customer is going to get their needs met. And so then that will go to a csm. And then the CSM will have a hard time climbing to level three, which is probably, like, advisory. And then the ae, who would normally be at, like, level three or level two, where you're starting to get to evangelism and purchasing and pushing the. The solution out in the organization, they're gonna have a hard time getting to that because they're talking about advising and so, like, it really. Sometimes I think CS gives support a little bit of bad name because they're like, we're not support. And they're always banging on that drum. But, like, support is so important, and unless you have a great support org, you are not going to be an effective CS org.

Speaker A: All right, coming in at episode number 147. This was actually a solo episode from yours truly, and I was going over my account management playbook. Here's one of my favorite moments from that episode. Hey, everyone.

Speaker B: Tyler Mek is here, and I wanted to make a quick video this morning talking all about account mapping, stakeholder mapping, and making sure that you have all those key relationships that mapped out. Now there's a thousand different ways that you could do this. The biggest takeaway from today's. Today's video is make sure that you're just doing it right. Uh, I'll show you how I've done it successfully in the past, and hopefully you could take something from it. However, the bigger takeaway here is just make sure that you're doing it. It's really important. So we want to make sure that we're having relationships with our executive sponsors and our executive decision makers, our champions, as well as our power users as well. So this is how I've done, uh, it in the past. I'm a visual person, so I like to just highlight, um, some of this as well. You could do this in, in, um, in Salesforce. You could do it in a spreadsheet. Whatever is easier for you. Now number, uh, one, I like just taking out who's the main company, what's the company and what's their primary use case. And then what teams are we currently selling to right now? This allows us to understand who are we selling to and ultimately where is a potential expansion in this account as well. For this example we could say we were talking to Kevin, we're talking to the VP of Account management, um, Vicki. However, um, customer success isn't interested. We do have some areas in business development though that we could be going after and that's going to be one of the next things that I talk about. Um, now let's talk about executive sponsors. Now these are the people that you don't. These are going to be the ones who are just primarily signing off on the um, on the P.O. um and they're seeing the high primary goals, uh, or the primary business goals here that we're trying to achieve. It's so important to not just be friends with these people around renewal time with. We want to make sure that we're consistently building relationships with executives. Um, if we're more friendly with them and we develop a partnership, um, then we. It may be another potential way to reduce some of the churn as well. I think it's really crucial of let's have our CEO talk to their CEO or um, let's have our VP of Sales talk to their VP of Sales, depending on what your product is. Making sure that you have that alignment really provides um, a true partnership and ultimately helps with that as well. Next I want to talk about champions. These uh, are going to be the people who are um, owning the uh, owning the project, seeing its success and are really turning to our um, internal evangelists as well to really help spread the usage for us as well. Um, these are the folks as well that when you have a good relationship with them, um, you could get those customer testimonials that you could put up on your website and marketing is really happy about. The other thing that folks are really happy about internally is when you're able to get referrals to the net new business side of things as well. I'm um, really bullish on uh, account managers and customer success, getting qualified leads from existing customers so that they could leverage um, to those teams as well. So really important to be making sure that we're building great relationships with our champions.

Speaker A: And then finally we want to be

Speaker B: talking about power users. Right. This is the area where most teams fall short on uh, where they're building relationships with. But these are the folks who are going to help you understand how is the team currently using, um, the product right now? What percentage of the product are they actually using? And these folks are also our churn champions I like to call them, because those teams, if there is a potential churn risk or maybe the executives don't see, um, the true value of your product, these are the teams that you, you work with to fight internally to help reduce that potential churn so that they could keep that software as well. Um, and again, having built this trust internally, we could alt with some of these power users. It's also a great way over time to work your way up to some of those executives if those teams are seeing the true value in your product as well.

Speaker A: So that's a little bit about the

Speaker B: one way that I do account mapping and what I think about it. Um, but now I want to show you how I leverage LinkedIn, uh, sales navigator to do this as well. So you get some visuals. This is good, uh, from an existing business perspective and you could use this from a net new business perspective as well. So I'm going to use my friends over at sky as the example. So big shout out to Darren and the team there. Um, number one, I could, we could see here once it loads that uh, that Darren and Jessica are executive sponsors. I'm usually putting tier one is those people that are going to be signing the contract and those are the ones that are seeing the high level value of the tool. Um, number the tier number two is going to be our champions and our power users, those folks that we're working with. So, uh, big shout out to Lucas for being a great champion, um, and Justin for being uh, one of our best power users as well.

Speaker A: And then finally tier 3 I'd just like to have is our potential prospects

Speaker B: for those areas that we want to try to break into as well, just from an organization standpoint. So Gabriel and Gail, I'm coming to reach out to you because we see the true value in our product.

Speaker A: So that's a little bit more about

Speaker B: how I think about account mapping and why it's so important to make sure that we're having really tight understanding of who our executives sponsors who are champions and who are our power users. I would love to hear how you're doing it as well, um, and share your thoughts below.

Speaker A: All right, fourth on today's list is an incredible customer success leader, Mr. Rob Zambido from episode 1 49.

Speaker E: Leadership has to make a conscious Effort to invest in customer success and net revenue expansion. So what that means is number one, CS teams need uh, I don't want to call it permission, but they need at least a yellow light to when they see a deal, go close it. Right. I think that that's where there's a lot of gray area for customer success teams and they don't really know how to act. Right. And I even, you know, was working with a client recently who said uh, the CSM was like, well, I don't want to sell until I know what I get in return from that. I didn't really agree with that philosophy but I think it brings up a good point which is there also needs to be a correct incentive alignment. Right. CS should have some variable component and it doesn't have to be a variable. It doesn't even have to be like, you know, base ote structure. It could just be a pure spiff, like uh, you know, a hundred dollars for every demo that that customer success sets that gets held or something like that. Um, stuff like that can really get the team moving. But it starts with leadership. Right? Leadership has to be willing to make that commitment to turn their uh, you know, quote unquote relationship developers into demo setters.

Speaker A: To finish up today's episode, from number 154, this is Jay Nathan.

Speaker F: My parents were entrepreneurs. They owned their own, uh, they had their own businesses and I worked in those businesses, mostly retail, um, and learned a lot about what it means to interact with customers and um, count money and you know, deliver a quality product through those experiences. That started when I was very, very young. Um, so technically that was my first job. I stood behind the cash register and rung people up in my parents store and got, you know, got their food, got, got their treats and you know, hopefully made them all very happy. Um, so I always had that customer service, customer experience kind of mindset growing up and that my, you know, my mom was very, she was always focused on quality, the quality of what she was selling. And that's sort of ingrained in, in me and um, and the kind of things that I think I stand for now. Um, but you know, growing up I had once I sort of, sort of got sick of maybe working in my parents businesses. I had all kinds of jobs. I was a lifeguard. I worked at a skating rink where you know, you were one of those referees that wear the jerseys, you have the whistle and I was like all powerful at the skating rink. That was a fun job. Um, let's see, what else did I do? I Worked in restaurants. I waited tables. Actually, uh, one of my first restaurant jobs, I worked in a restaurant in our mall in High Point, North Carolina. And, um, I started out busting tables. But then I saw these kitchen jobs. I was like, well, that all looks really interesting. So I volunteered to start in the dish pit. And I learned that and got really good at washing all the dishes. Pretty much the most lowly position you could have in a restaurant. And then I. They moved me onto the line, and I got to work the fryers, and then I got to make the salads, and then I got to work the saute and make the steaks. And ultimately I was. I mean, I was 16, 17 years old, and I worked my way all the way up in that kitchen to where I was running what we called the window. Or like, basically the guy who was making sure that all the pieces of the meals came together at the same time. And that was, I guess it's sort of just reflective of the way that I've always treated everything that I've done, whether it's, you know, semi professional kind of jobs growing up or my career. And it's. I've always wanted to learn new things and wanted to, uh, to figure out how the business worked and how the operations work so I could, you know, take on more and more and be more and more valuable to whoever I was working for.

Speaker A: All right, everyone, thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this show, please don't hesitate to head over to Apple and

Speaker B: leave a rating review.

Speaker A: Or if you want to learn more about these incredible customer success leaders, listen to the full episodes, which I will drop down in the comments below. All right, the other thing is, if there are incredible customer success leaders that

Speaker B: you'd like to hear more of, you'd like me to interview on the show,

Speaker A: send them my way, send me a DM on LinkedIn, and I'd be happy to accommodate again until next week's episode. Thank you so much and have a great rest of your day. Thanks.