
This is Growth! · 2025-05-22 · 37 min
Jon Dick's path into customer success offers a masterclass in organizational alignment and retention strategy at scale. Coming from HubSpot's product marketing team, Dick leveraged existing product relationships to align HubSpot's product organization around a gross revenue retention metric - moving away from new business-focused feature development toward retention-focused product improvements. His core insight: retention is a long-term game requiring multi-year commitment and deep infrastructure investment, not quick wins. Dick frames customer success challenges not as CS problems but as systemic business problems requiring cross-functional solutions, particularly from product teams. At HubSpot's scale (250,000+ customers), he advocates segment-based differentiation with a "product-led, human-assisted" model inspired by B2C fitness experiences like Barry's Bootcamp rather than transactional onboarding. He emphasizes that small customers often pay the most relative to their budget, requiring exceptional digital experiences. AI's role in CS centers on breaking historical constraints - enabling truly personalized (not just personalization-tokened) communication at scale, solving the ambiguity that humans previously absorbed in enterprise sales models.
Start by helping product understand *why* retention challenges exist through data and framing, then partner on solutions. At HubSpot, aligning product and CS around a gross revenue retention metric (excluding expansion) created a direct, controllable line from product improvements to revenue impact, making retention a first-class product priority alongside new business features.
Organize your primary experience around segment (small vs. mid vs. enterprise), create differentiated experiences for each, then share solutions across segments as you solve problems. At HubSpot, down-market innovation pushes upmarket (improving enterprise UX), while upmarket features trickle down (giving small customers advanced capabilities).
The long game and complexity - retention work takes years to pay off and depends on multi-year commitment across complex systems. Also, it's easy to say ("we want good retention") but hard to execute because the required infrastructure investments and product team buy-in haven't historically been built like they have for sales and marketing.
Small customers often represent the highest software expense ratio relative to their budgets, creating a major expectation mismatch when companies offer lower-touch service. The answer is making the digital, product-led experience exceptionally good through product investment and design rather than reducing human support.
AI breaks historical constraints around personalization - enabling truly personalized (not just tokenized) communication and recommendations at scale, replacing humans' previous role of absorbing ambiguity through manual effort.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
In this episode, learn how to align Customer Success and Product to drive impact at scale. Join Daphne Costa Lopes as she sits down with Jon Dick, SVP of Customer Success at HubSpot, to explore how a business with over 250,000 customers builds systems, vision, and teams that scale without losing sight of the customer. You'll hear how Jon thinks about segmenting strategy across HubSpot’s diverse customer base, the frameworks he uses to connect CS and Product teams, and how AI is reshaping the way Customer Success delivers value. He also shares why strong opinions and clear conviction are essential to leading in a fast-growing environment. Whether you're building alignment across teams, navigating growth, or exploring how AI can power CS, this episode is packed with actionable insights and bold thinking. Tune in to discover what it takes to scale Customer Success with intention and impact. Links: Jon's LinkedIn RetentionOS Course Waitlist Unconventional Growth Newsletter
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: Welcome to this Is Growth, the podcast where we help you build and scale modern customer success organizations. Hello everyone, and welcome to the podcast. I am just back from a four week sabbatical. Um, I hiked Everest base camp, if you didn't know. It's all over my social media. I raised money for the Irish Heart foundation and I was successful in my pursu, both of reaching Basecamp, but also my fundraiser target. So if you donated. Thank you so much. I also took two weeks to settle into my new life in Spain. If you didn't know. I actually moved to Malaga in March this year. But I've been traveling and going places, so I hadn't settled into my new life. And it's been amazing to spend that time getting set in my apartment, in my neighborhood, in my new room routine. Um, that space has given me a lot of time to think and I have some great things baking for you, including a new course called Retention os. And in that course, I hope to help thousands of organizations to transition into a modern customer success organization that's ready for, for AI and it's ready to deliver value for customers. So go sign up, um, to the wait list. It is in the show notes. But this week I have a extra special guest, John Dick. John is the SVP of customer success at HubSpot. He is my boss's boss, and I've wanted to have John here in the podcast for such a long time. I have huge admiration for John. He has some great perspectives in customer success, but I wanted to let him, say, settle in his role. And that's because John comes from marketing. That's where he grew up. And the transition into customer success meant that he needed to learn some stuff from the ground up and form some perspectives and opinions. And I will tell you that the way that he thinks about customer success is incredible. So you are going to love this episode of the podcast. Go grab your running shoes, go grab your headphones and let's dive in. John, I am so excited to have you here in the podcast. You've had an unusual path into customer success. Tell us the story of how a die hard marketer becomes a customer success leader at a $3 billion business like HubSpot.
Speaker B: Well, hey, Daphne, thanks for having me. Uh, everybody, I get to work with Daphne here at HubSpot. And, um, I know a lot of you have been listening to her for a while, but, uh, she, she's as fantastic to work with as I think you all have, uh, have come to realize she is through this podcast. And so it's a real honor to be here with you. Thanks for having me. Um, I, I, uh, love listening. So. Okay, so how did a marketer get into customer success? Well, it starts with, I just, I really love customers. How about that as a starting point? Uh, you know, I think though, the bigger story is like, customer success is really transforming. I, um, loved marketing because it was a real blend of art and science. It still is. And I really got into marketing, um, at a time where marketing was completely and totally transforming. And I found that transformation really invigorating. Um, and the whole push to digital, uh, really interesting. Uh, and CS right now, I think is like really a new frontier of that same transformation. Um, you could argue that transformation is long overdue. You could argue that, uh, you know, the reason it hasn't transformed is probably a mix of companies like not viewing retention as a growth lever and probably a mix of the technology not quite being there to be able to do CS in a transformative scale, digital way. Um, but I think that both of those things are changing. Um, you know, I think companies really deeply believe that retention is a very core growth lever to their business in the future. And I will caveat that to say that doesn't, you know, a lot of companies say over tension is a growth lever. And what they actually mean is I just want our CSMs to upsell constantly and I want every conversation to be an upsell conversation. That's not what I'm talking about. Although I do think CSMs have a very important role to play in expanding accounts. What I mean is keeping existing revenue, stopping downgrades and cancels. Uh, and, um, you know, I think that companies, you know, the best companies are now realizing that's an important way that they're going to grow. And of course, I think just the technology has like, I mean, it's, it's, it's amazing how fast things are moving. And so I think the technology to, to do CS in a transformative, personal way is, um, is, is kind of here now. So those are the reasons that I got into it was, uh, I thought it was going to be really exciting and invigorating. And I think a lot of the skills that I'd learned, um, in marketing were going to be really relevant to CS for this next phase. Um, so that, that's kind of how I got into it.
Speaker A: Oh, I could not agree more with you with how customer success is transforming. And honestly, I'm so excited about this as well. I think, in fact is the best time to be in customer success. Because finally we can stop being stuck in admin tasks and trying to band aid systems and actually focus on what we do best which is delivery, delivering measurable value for our customers. So John, as an outsider, what's been the most surprising thing about, about customer
Speaker B: success, how amazing the team is now? Uh, I always joke actually the most surprising thing about customer success is how hard it was to wrap my head around negative numbers. Uh, you know, coming from marketing for all these years it was always a bigger number was better. Uh, in customer success, bigger numbers, not better because it's a negative number. Uh, so that was, that was a little tricky at first. Um, wrap my head around it. I, I think the most surprising thing um, was probably two. One is just how much of a long game it is within a really complex system and the other is I think how easy it is to say and how hard it is to do. Uh, and so I think those are probably the two really surprising things about CS on the, on the long game and a complex system. Yeah, it's just um, you have to have real point of view and commitment to a multi year approach in, in customer success. At least within the software industry. Um, you know, maybe more transactional loyalty programs which, which are a version of customer success, um, have faster, you know, cycle times. But I feel like in software anyway, like what you start building is going to pay off years in the future. Uh, and so I think that is just one thing that um, I was surprised at how long the, the cycle times are and the other I think on easy to say, hard to do. You know there are things that I think every leader talks about, every leader talks about um, you know, you know, wanting to like transform the value their customer, you know, how they communicate the value their customers see. Sounds so easy to say. Everyone nods along. The actual process of building it can be so difficult. Um, and it's difficult because I think a lot of the found haven't been put in place for CS teams in the way that they have for sales and marketing teams historically. Um, it historically was a lot easier to get investment into um, data infrastructure to support marketing attribution models because they directly were $in, $out uh models and you could really justify the investment in customer success. I think CS teams have historically really had to advocate fiercely to get the level of investment they need in order to be able to do CS in an exceptional way. And even if they are successful at getting companies to be willing to invest, the team that you ultimately need to invest in it is your product organization and it can Be really hard to put a new priority onto a product organization that is really focused on, you know, shipping new product constantly and say, hey, one of the things that we need you to carve time out to do is get all of the product instrumentation, you know, built in a way that we can use it to, you know, have really value based discussions with our customers. Um, and so I think, you know, that's what has made it easy to say and hard to do. I think when it comes to cs,
Speaker A: historically, I feel seen, I feel heard, I feel validated and I know that the listeners of this podcast will feel this way too. You know, that is such an important point about customer success. Too many companies hire customer success leaders and start a program and they want to see impact on their bottom line within three months. But the reality is that retention is a long term game. The work that you do today is only going to pay off in nine to 12 months time. So patience and conviction is key. So thank you so much for highlighting that. John. One of the most impressive things that I've watched you do since you started Your role as VP of Success at HubSpot is how you've built a tight alignment with the product team. In fact, you got them to own a retention number with us and sharing that goal has created a ton of traction for us to solve better for our customers. How did you do that?
Speaker B: First of all, one advantage that I had was that prior to joining, uh, the customer success team at HubSpot, I actually worked in the product marketing team at HubSpot. Um, and so, um, I not only had some depth of knowledge about what our product team was building and why they were building it, but I also had some relationships built with the product. Org, um, which allowed me to, um, do some level of context switching with them, uh, which was very, very helpful. And so I'll acknowledge that up front. Um, but beyond that, I think, um, it just kind of started with a realization that our product leaders want our customers to be successful. Like they are building this software to transform, you know, at HubSpot, millions of organizations, that's why they're building it. And they want those millions of organizations to stay and grow and succeed. And what I kind of realized early on was that we hadn't done a good job, I think historically of helping our product. Org understand, you know, why we had retention challenges. Like if you ask any product leader, I think they're going to say, of course I want good retention. And I think part of it, uh, this comes back to the earlier comments we were Just making is like without the right ability to communicate why retention is a challenge, then, you know, the product. Org isn't able to fully put the time and energy and effort into it. Um, and so I think it just kind of started with a lot of focus on the why and a shared goal of we want our customers to be more successful because that's our mission here at this company. And um, I think one of the things that I kind of committed to do for them was to put in the legwork to say, well, I'm going to really help frame up where these challenges are. And then we're going to partner really deeply on figuring out what possible solutions could look like. And then we'll work together to kind of, um, figure out how we roll those out for our custom um, and that has been really successful for us so far. And um, I do think it helps that product and customer success at HubSpot really aligned on a gross revenue retention metric. And um, as everyone I'm sure on this podcast knows, um, it doesn't account for any expansion or upsell. Uh, and that doesn't mean that I don't think CS should expand customers. They definitely should be a huge part of doing that. But something that was kind of interesting when I talked to the product. Org was that um, you know, they spend a lot of time building features for a sales Org. And I think that when you build features for a sales org, it is like slight. It is a few levels removed from the ability to see um, new revenue appear because you're like, oh, sales asked for this thing. I'm going to build this thing. And then a lot of times it's kind of like, well, I'm not seeing any change in sales trajectory because of this. And I think what was really powerful about um, product and CS aligning around gross revenue retention together was that we could have a direct impact on it. And it was directly in their control. And if they made changes in the product, it would literally improve usage of the product and it would result uh, in a revenue change. And so it was like kind of a more direct line to revenue for them than, um, you know, new business revenue for instance. Um, and so both are important of course, like product orgs, a huge part of what they have to do is understand customer needs and build new features, um, to make the product as competitive and differentiated as possible. So I'm certainly not advocating not to do that. But I think, um, aligning around this idea that like, there's a very direct line from I built, you know, I Improve product feature to help more customers use it and that actually results in a revenue improvement for the business was a very powerful connection to make.
Speaker A: You're touching on something that I talk a lot about in this podcast, which is that the CS leader's ability to frame challenges, pain points and opportunities and then package that to other teams is really, really important because the reality is that CS is a conduit, but the majority of serious retention challenges actually lives somewhere else.
Speaker B: And I mean I think the other thing that I didn't say that I should have said is like, it helps that our product org@HubSpot just really deeply cares about our customers. Um, you know, I think that as companies like product always starts out caring about the customer, but I think sometimes as companies scale up they lose that a little bit. And that just hasn't happened at HubSpot, which I think is credit to, you know, the product or get HubSpot that they keep customers very front and center. And so when you bring up like roadblocks and roadblock processes and stuff like that is just bread and butter for this, you know, this team. And so, you know, and I think the difference was just kind of saying like, um, roadblocks are like features not doing what I need them to do and expanding that from just like, cool, I'm going to fix this feature to better deliver on customer needs to like I'm going to improve the percent of customers that adopt this feature. Like that's a good evolution for a product org to make and one that our product org has been making.
Speaker A: John HubSpot has over 250,000 customers. So when we say customer, there are so many types of business that fit that profile. They go from one man bands all the way up to enterprise businesses. As a leader, how do you create a vision for customer success that caters for so many different customer types?
Speaker B: It's a really good question and it's a good question and a hard, hard problem to solve. It's another one of those easy to say, hard to do. Uh, here's a few thoughts on it. You know, I think for any company, um, you need to kind of decide like there's lots of ways to organize a go to market and a customer experience. You can say, you know, I'm going to care the most about a uh, segment based experience. Like, you know, small companies are going to get a different experience from big companies, um, or product based, you know, where you say, uh, I think actually, you know, customers of this product that I have need a very different experience from this Product. Um, other ways to cut it are GEO and say actually you know, I think North American customers need a very different experience than EMEA customers etc. And I think every company needs to decide which of those is kind of their primary vector. Um, and all, all are important to customers. Um, but you have to kind of decide which matters the most for a customer being successful, um, with your business. And I think at HubSpot we've figured out that at this period in time segment is the most important vector to organize our experience around. Um, and in doing that it allows us to um, solve problems uniquely but then share them across segments as we solve them. Um, and so you know, I think down market we have a very different challenge than we have upmarket. I think most companies look at their small customers and say uh, well they pay the least so they'll get the least. But I think from a customer's point of view at least what we have found is that you know, our smallest customers are actually paying us the most for them, we are their biggest expense. And so um, there's a real expectation mismatch in that where companies say ah, they pay the least, I'm going to give them the least. And for a customer especially down market they're saying I'm paying you the most of any other software I'm buying here. I expect the most. Um, and so I think it kind of starts by just saying there's no way in a low end business not to have it be primarily digitally oriented. Um, but I think what that customer insight compels you to do is make that digital experience really freaking good. And I think it starts actually with the product which is like, you know, I don't believe that most like scaled CS teams can be successful without deep product buy in because you can send a lot of emails and you can you know, run webinars and that will help some customers. But to really make that customer experience exceptional at the low end it has to be product led. Um, and you know our mantra ah, at HubSpot is very much, you know, we want things to be product led, human assisted, um, especially at the low end and we want the product to be the main reason that customers are successful. Um, and then I think what we've realized is that as we solve those problems down market, we're going to push them up market. The amazing thing about HubSpot and getting to work across such a wide range of customers is it largely means that we um, uh, innovate for the experience down market and that pushes up and that means that our enterprise customers actually have a better customer experience in app, a better UX than they might otherwise have. And we innovate for features upmarket and push those down. Which means that our, you know, low end customers have access to probably more rich feature sets than they might otherwise have. Um, and so I think the whole, the whole game is all about saying, like, well, okay, I need different and unique experiences by segment, um, but I need to push the best of each experience across to the other segments, um, as we're learning and evolving.
Speaker A: Honestly, I think this point of being product led and human assisted is the vision that every single company should aspire to. If you're using customer success as a band aid because your product is too complicated, too hard to navigate, then you're doing it wrong. Your product should be the main avenue that your customers leverage in order to do their work. The interaction with CS shouldn't be about where do I click to get something done. It should be about how do we do things better, how do we get stronger results? What strategies am I missing? I think we can learn a lot from B2C here. Think about the experience that you have with the fitness app. You start by telling the app your goal. I want to lose weight or I want to gain muscle mass. Then you share how much you want to work out, how often, the types of workouts. You talk about, how you eat, you talk about your baseline metrics, where you are today, where do you want to get to, and then the entire app experience is tailored to you. You still have to do the work, of course, but setting the app isn't the hard part. The work is. And I know in B2B things are more complex. You have organizations and not individuals. Goals are multifaceted, there are multiple metrics. But still, I think that trying to bring as much of that into the product is the way forward. What do you think?
Speaker B: Well, I mean, I think B2B. Historically, um, most B2B companies wanted to go enterprise. Uh, and so they didn't have that many customers. Um, and you know, they basically said, because we don't have that many customers, we're just going to put humans in to largely absorb all that ambiguity, you know, and they used humans to absorb all that ambiguity. And they said it, you know, we don't need to create an experience like that because we can just have humans fill the gaps. And that is actually quite profitable for us. Um, you know, you start dealing with a scale that HubSpot is at, especially at the low end, and that is not a Viable solution. And so the fitness analogy is a really good one and we use it a lot internally, um, with our product team and you know, when we started talking about product and customer success alignment, you know, we started obviously at the beginning, like, what, you know, how do customers get started with HubSpot? And I think that one of the realizations we had is that, you know, most software companies, um, operate more like, you know, what we would call in America Planet Fitness. Um, you know, it's kind of a mass market, mass market gym. Uh, um, you know, you show up, uh, and you, you know, the first thing you do is you get a tour. You know, once, once you sign up, they give you a tour, they show you all the different equipment around and then they say good luck and they leave you. And in many ways that is like some versions of historic, you know, software onboarding. It's like, cool, I'm going to give you a tour of the product and then I'm going to leave you on your way. And we got really inspired by talking to our customers and hearing that what they really wanted was what you described, Daphne. They want more of a Barry's Bootcamp, um, which is, you know, more of a, you know, you don't have a tour guide, you have a trainer. You know, you don't just get one off help, you get ongoing help. You know, you don't just, um, get told, here are features, features you can use. You get opinionated point of view based on what you want to accomplish and you actually book into a class to, um, improve the part of your fitness that you want to improve. And so, um, I think it's a good analogy and one that has really motivated us to think differently about what the scaled customer experience at HubSpot can be.
Speaker A: We talked about the scale of HubSpot a few times. How is AI helping you execute your CS vision?
Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think the most powerful way to think about AI, uh, is that for go to market teams. Anyway, um, and I have to give credit to HubSpot CMO Kip Bodnar for introducing this concept to me, but it has really stuck with me, which is just this idea that, um, one of the things that AI really does is it breaks historical constraints. There used to be a historical constraint in CS that it was very hard to do. Deeply personal automated communication. You could obviously do like personalization tokens. You could say, okay, I'm going to insert your name and what products you have and uh, your health score and send an email. But like, that's not really Personalized, like, uh, you know, it's, or it's certainly not personal anyway. Maybe, maybe it's personalized by, by marketing definitions. It's not personal. And I think like, AI breaks those constraints. You know, I, AI allows you to say, actually, like, I can generate a completely personal email for every single customer that has their context and provides actual personal recommendations. And so I think, um, you know, the thing that, that we have been doing, I think at HubSpot, is we've been trying to say, how do we look at all of the constraints that we used to have and challenge ourselves to think that they may not be constraints anymore. And what would we do if, if that was the case? Um, for AI and customer success, there's like, lots of different ways to talk about it. Daphne. I'll start with just like, I think what, I think the overall, like, the reasons for doing it are like, I think what's really cool is there's kind of a trifecta with AI in customer success, um, that customers get more value, and that value often comes in the form of speed. Um, they're able to get more, you know, more helpful, help more, more quickly. Um, you know, it helps reps because reps are able to, um, kind of move up the value chain, as you'd call it. They're able to specialize more, they're able to work on more complex problems. And companies get benefit as well in that they are often able to achieve some level of savings, um, by saying, you know, reps, uh, can be more productive. And so I think AI, like from a business perspective, it kind of hits on the trifecta, which is cool. Customers get value, reps get value, companies get value. Um, you know, I think we are using AI in a lot of different places in customer success. Um, and there's kind of three different modes that we think about. Daphne. There's, um, jobs to be done that we think can be, um, mostly AI driven, human assisted. There are jobs to be done that are really rep driven, AI assisted. And there are jobs to be done that we think can be mostly autonomous. A lot of frontline tier one support can be fully autonomous. Uh, and so we are trying to pursue that as a path. Um, you know, I think when you look at a lot of, you know, upmarket CSM roles and responsibilities, a lot of those jobs to be done are really rep assisted, you know, are rep driven, AI assisted. Um, and then if you look at our scale segment, you say, well, a lot of this is AI driven, human assisted. Um, and so, you know, we are playing in all of those buckets and trying to innovate in all of those.
Speaker A: John, thank you so much for sharing that because I actually think this is going to be a really useful framework for people. A lot of the content that's out there is too generic. It's like AI is a buzzword or it goes so far out in the future and away from what reality is for people today. Like it's about agents talking to other agents and executing on their behalf that I uh, think people are a little bit lost, you know. So I think it's, it's a really, really useful framework for people to start thinking through how they implement AI in their business.
Speaker B: Like any go to market leader. I have spent time, you know, as have you, Daphne, thinking about like, well, like what, what is the role of a human being in this business process in the future? Because yeah, if you read LinkedIn, uh, it's going to be all agents talking to agents and doing everything. And like, there's a couple things that I think stand out. I think um, human expertise is really going to matter in places where relationships matter. Uh, I think it's going to matter in places where people don't trust AI yet. I think it's going to matter in places where AI fails, where AI is siloed or um, where you need to connect the dots between different AI and so I think one way to say that would be relations, validation, escalation, consolidation and orchestration. Um, you know, is kind of my, my starting list, uh, that we in CS have been thinking about anyway in terms of like places in, in the longer term that we think human, you know, humans are really going to matter in the, in the, in the go to market process.
Speaker A: John, I want to shift gears a little bit. There's something about you that the audience doesn't know yet, but they're about to discover. You are known in HubSpot for your hot takes. You have strong opinions and honestly I love that about you. I remember when you first started in HubSpot, one of the things that was in your readme document was strong opinions held loosely. And I also believe deeply in that. I like opinionated people. I like conviction of perspective, I like a point of view. But uh, the other side of being opinionated is that sometimes you're wrong about things. How do you feel about that?
Speaker B: Okay, well, first of all, I can tell you as a leader in a large organization like HubSpot, I so prefer when team members have an opinion on what they are thinking. Um, that doesn't mean you Know, I expect that everyone can have an opinion on everything, but certainly of. Of the. The places that they're an expert, I think having point of view really deeply matters. Um, and so I, you know, I really look for that, and I think it's something that differentiates people in the workforce. So don't be afraid of it. Um, look, I think that, um, the key is to have strong opinions loosely held, as you said. And by that I mean, like, I think everybody just has to acknowledge, um, number one, they may not have all the context. Uh, number two, they may not be the decision maker. Uh, and, you know, through that lens, you just have to accept that a lot of things that you, you know, deeply believe or have opinions on just may not be the thing that your company ends up doing. Um, and you just have to not take that personally. I think I used to think, um, there's this concept, Daphne, that, um, Shane Parrish, who writes the Farnham street blog and publishes Farnam street, has, which is, um. I think. I think he. The way I remember it is be you want to be on the right side of right. Um, and by that, like, there were periods in my career where I felt like me personally being right was the thing that mattered the most. Uh, and that if I was wrong on something, that I was doomed or, um, you know, it would be a personal dig on me. And I think instead I've come to realize that what is more important is having, uh, uh, the sort of mindset where when presented with new information, more context, uh, you know, etc. That I. And I realized that my original point of view wasn't the right one, that I can shift that to be on the right side of right. Like, the most important thing is being right in the end, as a company about the things that you're doing. Um, and if along the way, that means that you personally have to change, you know, your opinion so that you can be on the right side of right long term. I think that matters a lot. And so, you know, uh, I, you know, I think it's important to have opinions. I think it's important to be open to change those opinions. I think, as always, it's important not to be abrasive in those opinions. You know, I think, like, you know. Yeah, so that's what I'd say on it.
Speaker A: What I love about what you said is that openness to change when presented with more valuable information. And I think that's a requirement for anyone because nobody knows everything. And if you get stuck in an opinion, and that is More important than the progress, then you're doing it wrong. One thing I'd like to add to the conversation is that the quality of the opinion matters. You mentioned someone who is an expert in their area and they are close to the work that their opinion matters. And I agree because they're going to have high quality opinion about their area of expertise. They've lived their experience, they have the data, they have the feedback. So their opinion is going to be really valuable. It's not just something that they woke up and thought one day or read online. It's thoughtful, it's considerate. And that's what I think a few people miss. In this concept of strong opinions, is that the process that you use to arrive at an idea or an opinion that, that matters, that needs to be solid. Because you could have the wrong idea for some reason. Maybe you missed something, maybe you didn't have the full picture. But if your process is solid, then the trust is there. But if you arrive at an opinion with a really flawed thinking process, if you're just repeating things that you've read online, if you're not thinking about it, then that is when trust will erode, when you're wrong. So now, John, it's time for you to tell me your hot takes. What are some of these big ideas, strong ideas held loosely that you have about customer success right now?
Speaker B: Well, I think product alignment matters more than sales alignment. Although I do think sales alignment matters. Uh, but I think that over the past couple of years, uh, my observation was a lot of CS teams swung too hard at, um, you know, expansion, revenue and I think that was because companies were struggling with new business and they said I have to grow from somewhere so go all in on it. But I think it actually hurt. Um, I think it probably hurt a lot of customer relationships and it hurt the brand and it probably resulted in more long term churn than it, it resulted in benefit. Um, so I think product line, it matters more than sales alignment. Um, I think uh, you know, a second hot take. You know, at HubSpot we have the concept of the flywheel, Attract, engage and delight. Uh, and we've been talking about that for seven, seven or eight years now. Um, I think delight isn't the right term anymore. I actually think it's deliver. I think delivers the new delight. And the best way to delight a customer is to deliver exceptional value. I think a lot of people looked at delight and thought, oh, okay, so I just need to like, um, you know, throw events and like, you know, send swag and do stuff like that. And if I delight my customers, that will keep the flywheel spinning. And I think that over the last few years particular, it's become very apparent that if you're not delivering value, it doesn't matter how good your relationship is, doesn't matter how many events you've invited somebody to, uh, they won't stay as a customer if you're not delivering value. So I think that's, that's kind of another hot take. Um, and then I think a third hot take I have is just that, um, you know, uh, software companies in particular with AI, I think switching costs are going to go down like a, a decent amount. And it really means that, like, you need to have a CS and a product org that are deeply committed to, um, ensuring that customers are, are getting value from the product, um, and are using the product really effectively to drive results. Um, so those are a few of my hot takes.
Speaker A: Oh, those were some spicy takes there. But honestly, that last one, I don't think it should be a hot take. We are not the customer happiness department. We are customer success and delivering real value to our customers. So I'll take that off as a hot take. John, that is where we're going to wrap the podcast today. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy, busy schedule for being here in the podcast today and for sharing your knowledge with CS professionals around the world.
Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Daphne. Thanks for having me. Uh, and if I can help anybody out there, please reach, uh, out to me on LinkedIn and, uh, let me know.
Speaker A: If you enjoyed this conversation and want to support the podcast. Make sure to hit, follow or subscribe wherever you listen. And if you're feeling generous, please share with your colleagues or friends. That's the best way to help me spread the word. And finally, if you're loving this content, don't forget to sign up to the this is Growth newsletter. It's a weekly email that hits your inbox on a Friday with practical tips on how to build and scale modern customer success organizations. Thank you for listening and I see you next month.
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