UpdateAI – Zoom meeting assistant
This episode packs a punch.
In less than a half hour, LeeRon Yahalomi gives UpdateAI CEO Josh Schachter a handful of great insights on how to lead great customer success organizations.
And she’s speaking from experience. LeeRon recently joined Regie.ai as its head of customer success, after serving as VP of sales and CS at Textio for more than three years.
(Regie.ai – which LeeRon explained “Helps streamline content workflow for go-to-market teams” using both a combination of AI and “human touch” – recently raised $10 million in Series A funding.)
You can read below for a look at five essential elements of good CS team leading, according to LeeRon. But she touched on a number of other topics in her conversation with Josh – including her journey from Israel to the U.S., and how she succeeds as a natural introvert in CS. So check out the full “[Un]churned” episode wherever you get your podcasts!
When you’re leading a CS team, you need to always have the big picture in mind. You’re taking a macro look at the organization.
But you can’t lose touch with the day-to-day facets of your organization, either, as you move up the ranks. LeeRon was adamant on this point – she said every CS team leader should “Walk in the same shoes” as their team members.
Help with onboarding customers. And have a few account names assigned to you. It doesn’t have to be 30 names; you can make 3 work, though.
This is important for a few reasons, LeeRon has found.
“I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”
It’s perhaps a bit overused at this point, but that old quote from hockey legend Wayne Gretzky applies perfectly to CS.
Because as LeeRon said, there’s one thing all good CS leaders are: forward-looking.
Unfortunately, one staple of the business world – quarterly business reviews, or QBRs – goes in the opposite direction; QBRs typically look backwards. They’re focused on what’s happened. Reactive, not proactive.
That’s not what you want, LeeRon said. Instead, you want to be focused on where the customer is headed.
That means establishing clear objectives the customer wants to accomplish in the following quarter – and then putting a plan in place for how those objectives will be met.
And while the topic is at hand, let’s move from calling them “customers” to “clients.” This is something Josh is adamant about. He told LeeRon that the word customers has a transactional quality to it; clients, on the other hand, are people who are catered to – they’re treated with respect. That’s the goal.
Both LeeRon and Josh agreed it’s time to dump QBRs for Client Objective Reviews, or CORs.
Top CS leaders are able to get the most out of their meetings, LeeRon said.
For starters, she said to ditch the PowerPoint presentation whenever you can. Focusing on slides takes away from your ability to read the room and how your clients or team members are reacting. Overall, they’re a net negative.
Next, you need to be able to identify when a meeting has been successful. But how can you do that?
LeeRon said it’s when you can spot those “aha moments,” where someone has a physical reaction and you can almost see them think “I just learned something. You just gave me something of value.”
The trick there, she said, is being an active listener. Don’t just read from a script. Be mindful of how the other people in the room are reacting to the information you’re conveying.
Signs someone has had an aha moment include when customers ask questions – “Oh, tell me more about XYZ.” The other side of that coin is that you need to be engaged, too. That means asking questions yourself. It’s a two-way street.
This one ties together the two previous points: good leaders don’t waste other people’s time – especially their clients’.
LeeRon stressed that time is the ultimate gift. And by holding weekly 30 minute meetings where most of it is spent talking about things outside of work, you’re not honoring the gift they’re giving you. Add in the follow up email post-meeting, and now you’re taking up an hour of their time. With minimal return to show for it.
All this means is you should not be afraid to schedule meetings less frequently. Your focus should be on the quality of the meetings, not the quantity.
“People’s time is often not valued,” LeeRon said. “Give a gift back to them, don’t just take – Especially in CS.”
You can’t be rigid when you’re a CS leader. Flexibility is key.
In other words, you can’t be afraid to look for new and better approaches to how you’re doing things.
LeeRon, for example, wanted to see which meeting frequency seemed to correlate best with CS success. Was it weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly?
But she couldn’t just wing it. She needed the data to guide her towards success.
So she went ahead and enrolled 3 CSMs in a yearlong data gathering operation, where she looked at which approaches were connected to happy and productive client relationships.
You’ll have to check out the podcast for the full breakdown, but the results have helped guide her current approach.
That’s a byproduct of LeeRon’s curiosity and willingness to try new things, when presented with compelling data. Don’t be afraid to change it up.
[00:00:00] Josh Schachter: Hey everybody. I’m Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdatAI and a host of [Un]churned. Joining me today is LeeRon Yahalomi. LeeRon is the head of customer success@regie.ai, which we’re gonna learn more about. Regie is West Coast based. They just closed their series A so congratulations, LeeRon. That’s a huge accomplishment.
[00:00:24] Josh Schachter: Really most respect for you guys for. And yeah. You know, Regie Regie’s motto here is that they help stream streamline every content workflow for the go to market team using the latest AI tools, streamline every content workflow for the go to market team using the latest AI tools. I’ll say it twice.
[00:00:45] Josh Schachter: What does that mean? What do you guys.
[00:00:48] LeeRon: What do we do? So we use AI to help go to market teams. So think about every piece of the go to market motion. Your SDR or your AEs are probably spending quite a lot of time writing sequences to get ahold of prospect. And while 10 years ago, we might have had people in their interview. Do a writing sample.
[00:01:07] LeeRon: We don’t really hire people based on their writing skills anymore, and most of us are, especially myself, but I’m sure others are not that great at writing, especially writing sequence cadences. So Reggie’s AI actually creates all those for you. We use persona. Value proposition and pain points to gather information from you about who you’re contacting with, using best practice that we have from the market about what kind of sequences you should create, and the AI creates all of that for you.
[00:01:37] LeeRon: If you are on the marketing team, you’re probably creating quite a lot of blogs and social posts, and more often than none, you’re staring at a blank screen thinking, how do I even get started and where do I go? Well, Reggie can actually create all of those for you within a matter of minutes by using ai.
[00:01:55] Josh Schachter: I, I.
[00:01:55] LeeRon: job is to help you in all those areas where you get stuck where you’re not sure how to write, use AI to create better writing content that has just better.
[00:02:05] Josh Schachter: I love that for a bunch of reasons. I mean, this is an area that, that I struggle with in my startup on our team. It is just the. It’s hard, it’s hard to write personalized content at scale. Of course, those by definition are just contradictory to each other. It’s hard to find people that are good writers, have the, the, you know, the proper grammatical structure and really, you know, dot every I and cross every t.
[00:02:37] Josh Schachter: But then also are affordable. And again, that you can assemble a group large enough to do it at. So I, I love the premise of what you guys are working on. So how exactly does this work, do you, where, where do you, where do you capture those, those persona buckets from? Like, where is that data coming from?
[00:02:57] LeeRon: Great question. I wish I could actually answer that. Lots of different data points from different. Methodologies that we have but the AI gets trained on how we collect all that information. How should we personalize for you? What are the best rates for open rates for different sequences? What kind of blogs get the most reaction and AI can get you about?
[00:03:18] LeeRon: 80, 85% of the way, you still need that human touch to really tweak and get everything there, but it can give you so much more than what you can do on your own. And one of my favorite pieces is just hearing from customers who use Reggie, it’s how much time it’s saving that, saving them in the day. So when you ask an SDR and AE who are needing to create sequences in their day, and they say that it saves them 70% of the time that they used to spend, because really quickly they can generate a sequence that would go out to their prospect and then just watch what happens or AB test it.
[00:03:52] LeeRon: Same for people in marketing that it saves them 70% of their time in blog creation. Think about the amount of hours you would get back in the week if you had that.
[00:04:01] Josh Schachter: That’s incredible. And, and, and presumably it saves you the time without compromising your conversion rates, the effectiveness.
[00:04:09] LeeRon: Absolutely. You can track them. You can take a look at the sequences you have today and refresh them. You can look at the data that you have for each one of them and see what results you’re getting and then run them again.
[00:04:22] Josh Schachter: Cool. Cool stuff. All right. Advertisement over. Although it was important to get context right for everybody out there. Cause I really do think it’s a very, really, really fascinating company and, and, and now my years are peaked to go check it out after this recording. So tell us a little bit, we wanna, the podcast is called Unturned.
[00:04:39] Josh Schachter: It’s unturned because we’re raw, we are authentic, and we wanna really kind of get to know you. So, so tell us a little bit about yourself. Where, where were you born, LeeRon, and, and, and where are you now? Where do you live?
[00:04:50] LeeRon: So I was born and raised in. And after I finished my military service, I kind of spent a few years traveling the world, seeing what the world had to offer to me, and I ended up here in the US in 2000. And currently for the last 16 years, I’ve lived in Seattle.
[00:05:09] Josh Schachter: Do I, I’ve noticed this trend with, with Israel that, that there’s just so much strong, you’re the head of customer success. You’ve been in customer success and sales for, for throughout your career. I’ve noticed this trend just such strength in customer success products and people out of the state of Israel.
[00:05:26] Josh Schachter: Do you have any sense why that might be?
[00:05:30] LeeRon: I think it comes from an entrepreneurialship mentality that’s kind of brought up into us. So when you think about it, you take a group of individuals, you throw them in a location that’s mostly desert and say, figure out a way to succeed, figure out how to do it. It kind of breeds entrepreneurial behaviors and tendencies in people.
[00:05:51] LeeRon: I think there’s a lot. This is a generalization, so this the followings of my personal point of view, but I think Judaism really talks a lot about caring for others and making sure that others have as much as you have and giving more. And I think for myself, that is the aspect of customer success, caring and serving others.
[00:06:13] Josh Schachter: Yeah. What’s something, so you, you’re fairly new to Reggie. It’s been just a couple months. We’re recording this now in October. It’s been just a couple months since you’ve joined, We hope that all of your colleagues at Reggie are listening to this episode, this podcast. If you are, then share it with one more colleague at the company to get to lo, to get to know LeeRon.
[00:06:35] Josh Schachter: So you’re still meeting people, forming, norming, storming. What’s something that your new teammates at Reggie might not know about you and might be surprised to learn about you?
[00:06:49] LeeRon: I’ve used this before in a lot of when people ask that question, cuz I think when you meet me you’re like, oh my gosh, she’s such an extrovert and she’s got such a big personality and she’s so comfortable talking to people. Truth is, I’m an LeeRonvert. And my favorite place is a dark corner with just myself, my books, and maybe some music.
[00:07:09] LeeRon: I get people out and energy drained quite often, but I’ve learned that I can turn on this mechanism of being an extroverted when needed and that that helps people connect with me. So I’ll do it, but at the end of the day, it’s extremely draining for me, and I much prefer spending time by myself than with.
[00:07:30] Josh Schachter: I’m the same way.
[00:07:31] LeeRon: is crazy, right? Cuz I mean customer success and all you do is talk to people all day and be around people. But yes, it’s very, very draining.
[00:07:40] Josh Schachter: But that’s, that’s maybe the entrepreneurial side of you, right? That’s maybe not the, the natural side of you. Right? And that’s fine. That’s okay. You can, you can, you can, you know, it can, CS can appeal to different archetypes of, of folks, I think is the takeaway that I would take outta that. So so, so like you described, Reggie’s all about communicating with customers right?
[00:07:58] Josh Schachter: In, in, in written text. And, and those. So let’s talk about communicating with customers, specifically the types of conversations that you’re having with your customers. What types of conversations are you having with your customers at Reggie?
[00:08:14] LeeRon: So the first Kind of charter I gave to myself in joining a new company is I had to meet with every one of our customers. It was important for me to make a connection, to LeeRonduce myself, to hear about them and their company, to hear about their team what they’re trying to achieve with Reggie, what they’re trying to achieve overall, and start building those relationships.
[00:08:37] LeeRon: It has always mattered to me tremendously that no matter what your role or your title is in customer success, if you’re not talking to customers, You’re not doing your job, and so you should be talking to customers at all time and not just the ones that, well, you’re the executive sponsor or you helped close that deal.
[00:08:54] LeeRon: You should be talking to all types of customers throughout your day and having different types of conversations. I don’t wanna be the one that’s only brought in when there’s an escalation. I don’t wanna be beyond in only when I, you need the bad person or someone to be the bad cop or someone to kind of, here’s the person who can give you a pricing discount, or I wanna be part of all the conversations you’re having anywhere from prior to closing the deal and when we’re strategizing on becoming partners all the way through your onboarding and how you’re thinking about it to.
[00:09:25] LeeRon: What are your objectives and what are you trying to meet? And then let’s talk about how you’re tracking to meeting those objectives and then be part of your negotiation as well. But I think it’s important that we have different types of conversations with customers. And no matter what your title is, if you are leading a customer success organization, make sure that you’re part of those meetings with your team and that you’re adding value.
[00:09:48] LeeRon: I always tell my team, don’t bring me into a meeting if I’m just gonna sit there and smile. Put a stock photo of me, bring me in when I can bring value. My job is to add something to your meeting. Whether I help you or help the customer has to be about the value.
[00:10:02] Josh Schachter: So, so, so you’re, you’re the team leader. You’re you’re not assigned directly yourselves to the accounts as the CS manager. Then help me understand functionally how that works. How, how do you, how do you get yourself into these meetings? Like which ones do you pick and choose from? What’s the protocol for inserting yourself into those daily conversations?
[00:10:24] LeeRon: So at Reggie right now, I’m not assigned to any accounts, but if you’ll talk to anyone who’s ever worked with me, regardless of what my title was, I’ve always carried a book of business. I’m a big believer that you should walk the same shoes that your team is walking. And while you might be the VP of customer success, I feel very strongly that you should have accounts named and attached to you.
[00:10:45] LeeRon: Maybe you’re not, well, not maybe for sure you’re not holding 30 accounts, but you could have. One each quarter and have one quarter of a break cuz it’s Q4 in your planning. But you should absolutely go through all the motions your team is going through. At Reggie. I have a list of all of our accounts and the different stages that those accounts are in, and I’ve asked my team to, for the first month and a half that I’ve been here.
[00:11:08] LeeRon: Add me to all the meetings that they’re having so I can LeeRonduce myself, and then I kind of choose and pick between onboarding new customers, ongoing trainings, qbr, or I like to call them customer objective reviews versus a quarterly business review. We’re here to review your objectives, not the business.
[00:11:25] LeeRon: This is about partnership and quarterly business reviews make me wanna break out in hives. It just feels plastic and it doesn’t feel like it’s the right motion all the way up to like your renal renewal and expansion conversation. So I make sure that throughout the week I’m having different types of conversations with different customers at different stages.
[00:11:44] LeeRon: That helps me understand where we need to go as a team, what we need to develop, where our processes might not be as fine tuned as they should be, where things might be falling through the cracks or where things are working Really.
[00:11:56] Josh Schachter: So if I’m gonna paraphrase what you said, so you, I mean, you guys are a seed slash. A company, so you’re still at a, at a place where you’re able to join a lot of the onboarding calls, right? This isn’t, you yourselves are not enterprise yet, so, but you’re able to join those calls upfront. You’re able to get the LeeRonduction of who you are, build that initial rapport with the stakeholders on the customer side.
[00:12:16] Josh Schachter: And by the way, I would call it client side. I think they’re your clients, not customers. Right. I think as a, as a universally, I think we’ve mislabeled the function of customer success. I think it’s client success. But in any case, I, I digress. So you’re, you’re, you’re making the LeeRonduction so that you, you know, later on, it’s not just a kind of a random sweeping in, during a time of escalation or renewal, or whatever the case might be. And then you were also assigning yourself to some of the accounts, generally speaking, just to keep yourself fresh and keep those keep those wheels turning. And, and I wanna go back to something you said, which wasn’t the intention of, of our conversation here, but a QBR or an EBR should be a customer objectives. a quarterly business review or an executive business review, cuz you’re right, that’s stale. It sounds plastic, right? It doesn’t sound, yeah, it is. It.
[00:13:10] LeeRon: what it does often, the way I describe it to people, it’s almost like, you know how when you get your bank statement in the mail and you’re like, here are all my expenses, or where I spent money. Well, some of it was an expense, but some of it was an investment. And when you look at it in the rear view mirror doesn’t matter.
[00:13:25] LeeRon: Like what are you benchmarking against? But if we take a look at your objectives and we review your objectives of why you bought the platform, what were you trying to achieve and how you’re tracking towards objectives. Now we’ve actually built a partner. because we’re not just reporting on outputs, we’re reporting on the work you are doing and how we’re helping you facilitate that work, how we’re working with you for you to achieve that success.
[00:13:48] LeeRon: Now we’re talking about a partnership versus a one side relationship where like, let me tell you what you’ve done. And so I don’t think that it should be a qbr. And EBR should be a review of the customer or the client objectives.
[00:14:04] Josh Schachter: Exactly. Client objectives review. I mean, the, the other idea is like a quarterly business review. It just, it sounds very backwards looking and, and, and in that sense, more reactive, which is, of course, we all get goosebumps on the CS side here, calling something reactive. We wanna be proactive. And when you, when you think about objectives that’s.
[00:14:23] Josh Schachter: That’s always gonna be looking into the future, you know? So it also lends itself, I think, to that forward looking atmosphere. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Let’s start the movement right now. Hashtag hashtag custom client objectives review.
[00:14:39] LeeRon: review.
[00:14:40] Josh Schachter: Done. Okay, so so you’re, you insert yourself into these meetings and you have meetings on your own with customers. What’s the definition for you of a successful good meeting versus a meeting that’s, eh, wasn’t really too good, shouldn’t, didn’t have to be a meeting or, or was poorly performed?
[00:15:02] LeeRon: I look for those aha moments. Both for myself and for the client. And I’m gonna really make really conscious about using client now. You got me on this way, let’s do this thing.
[00:15:12] Josh Schachter: Yes.
[00:15:13] LeeRon: I want to see those aha moments, those light bulb moments that like just go up in people’s heads and you can see it. It’s usually a physical reaction that they have in the meaning of like, I just learned something, you gave me value.
[00:15:25] LeeRon: I often tell teams that I work with. People’s time is so often just not valued. When someone agreed to give you their time, they’re giving you a. They’re willing to give you their time to meet with you. Your job is to give a gift back, not just take, especially in a client relationship, especially in the world of cs, live, leave a gift behind.
[00:15:49] LeeRon: That means they’re gonna wanna come again, cuz they know they’re gonna get something from you. And a gift has to be in the form of a value. Values defined very differently for different. So you can leave value in different ways, but to me, a good meeting is when someone took value from the meeting, and a perfect meeting is with both us and the client got a gift of value.
[00:16:09] LeeRon: We learned something, something just clicked for us, and the same for them. Then I know that it’s a good meeting. Now you can go back and say, a good meeting has to have an agenda. It has to be agreed upon. There has to be structure, there has to be next steps. There has to be. , all of those are table stakes.
[00:16:26] LeeRon: But even if you had all of those and there was not an aha moment of a value realization, at the end of the day, the client’s gonna go, well, that was 30 minutes. That could have been an email, and next time Liran sends me a meeting request, I’m probably gonna just ghost her because I didn’t get any value.
[00:16:56] LeeRon: I lost your audio. I can’t hear you.
[00:16:59] Josh Schachter: I’m sorry that. We’ll cut all this out. I, I’ve been playing with my mute button and I’ve been, I think I’ve had it reversed. Okay, so, so how do you know when there is an aha moment? Both as an individual contributor, as the CSM running the meeting for your account, and also as the team leader at a higher level kind of swooping in with a higher purview of, of more meetings across your entire book of business?
[00:17:23] LeeRon: Yeah, so I think it’s about active listening. When you have that moment when you wanna say, Ooh, tell me more. Oh, I haven’t noticed that. Really listen to those cues and lean into that. Whether the cus the client said something and you’re like, I’m. Did not hear that before. Tell me more about what you mean by this, or how you approach this, or you heard something you didn’t know about them and vice versa.
[00:17:47] LeeRon: I love to stop and ask question. Even when we go through that customer client objectives review and they are surprised by something, ask them, was there something that you were surprised by? Was there something that you were expecting to see that you did? Ask really curious questions to kind of get into the depth of it, but actively listening and reading the room, you can watch how people react.
[00:18:09] LeeRon: I’m a big believer that most meetings, if not all, should not be run and managed by slides. Not only because I take pride in making ugly slides and don’t see the value in them, but you can’t see people’s faces when you’re presenting and when everyone’s looking at just. PowerPoint presentation. You can’t read the room and it’s really hard to do when you’re over zoom.
[00:18:32] LeeRon: When we were in real life pre covid, you could read the room you were presenting to and see how people were reacting. Today you have to do it in a different way, but when you’re presenting, you have to be able to see the physical reaction people have. Are they nodding their heads? Are they smiling? Is this resonating?
[00:18:48] LeeRon: Figure out what those moments where you gave them that gift of.
[00:18:53] Josh Schachter: I, I ask CS team leaders all the time, how often they’re. Talking with their customers, their clients on a recurring basis. Is it weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, et cetera? And the answer of course is, it depends. It depends on your setup, your configuration, the nature of your company. What, what does it look like for you at Reggie?
[00:19:10] Josh Schachter: And then in your previous roles because I know you have, you’ve had an interesting experience with really figuring out what that optimal number is or what that optimal cadence timeframe is. So how has that worked for you? How have you experimented it?
[00:19:27] LeeRon: I think it is a experimentation cuz each role in each company is a little different and also each person. So I’d encourage others to just take a look at your calendar. What percent of time out of your 40, 50, 60 hour work week that you have, are you spending being customer facing or client facing? How many of those are meetings with clients and what’s the optimal percentage it should be?
[00:19:49] LeeRon: I challenge myself to spend at least 50% of my time talking to our customers. I can’t lead a successful customer success organization. Without staying close to what our customers are saying you and I, Josh can be on the same call with the same client and hear different. Because we’re using our bias and we’re using our ears in a different way, and our roles are different.
[00:20:10] LeeRon: We each hear the things we wanna hear, but we also hear them differently. And so by not being as close to the customer as I believe we should be, I can’t fulfill my role. And so depending on when and where I’m at, and there are moments throughout the year and the quarter where it’s less than that, but on average, at least 50% of my time is spent customer facing.
[00:20:32] LeeRon: Because I wouldn’t know what we need to develop next or how our current roadmap is impacting our customers or the impacts of the economy and the market on our customers. Or how would I do a forecast if I don’t know where they’re at, what keeps them up at night, what they’re worried about. Not staying connected to them is, is a big risk that I see quite a lot of success leaders.
[00:20:54] LeeRon: Climbing the ranks and then stepping away from the customer and just relying on their teams or someone else of reading feedback or even listening to recordings. I do quite a lot of listening to recordings of calls after. It’s one of my favorite podcasts. It’s just randomly listening to what my team does.
[00:21:11] LeeRon: But it’s a very different approach. And when you’re hearing it live, and you can interject with another question and turn the conversation.
[00:21:18] Josh Schachter: Yeah, it is. I mean, talking to your customers for 50% of your time is certainly honoring the voice of the customer, so I think that’s wonderful. Have you experimented in the past with. Trying to optimize the cadence of those customer touch points from biweekly or monthly or quarterly. How has that worked for you?
[00:21:35] Josh Schachter: Have you done.
[00:21:36] LeeRon: I like to think that I’m a very curious person, and so I like to ask lot of why. And one of my least favorite things is when people say, oh, because we always have, then great, let’s challenge that, break that glass and just go somewhere else. And so often I would ask my team, oh, I see that you’re having weekly meetings with this customer.
[00:21:55] LeeRon: Do you have weekly meetings with every. Why do you have weekly meetings? What’s the point of the weekly meeting? How does that drive things forward or biweekly or when I’ve heard people say, oh, we have a QBR once a quarter. How do you know what the impact of those meetings are to the day to day? And when you do the math, just look at your team’s calendar.
[00:22:14] LeeRon: Choose one person on your team that’s actively engaged and look at how many meetings they have, and then look at how many hours they’re spending in those meetings. They have to be product. Otherwise, why are we spending all that time there? And so I took a look at some of the meetings that our team is having and took a look at the different meetings we’re having and tried to correlate them to renewal.
[00:22:36] LeeRon: And if a certain customer got a weekly meeting, were they renewing at higher rates or expanding at higher rates than someone getting biweekly meetings or a monthly meeting or maybe just a quarterly meeting. And when you look at that data and you all of a sudden, There’s no point in a weekly meeting.
[00:22:53] LeeRon: There’s no difference between having a weekly meeting and a monthly me weekly, a monthly meeting because the results for renewal are the same. That’s what led me to believe that some of these meetings just don’t have value. They’re just meeting for the sake of meeting. And if that’s the case, don’t waste the customer’s time and don’t waste your own time.
[00:23:11] LeeRon: You don’t need to have a placeholder. If you’ve got nothing to talk about, then don’t. If it
[00:23:16] Josh Schachter: I love this. I love this analysis. This is, this is such great analysis. I mean, the, the, the, the foundation of my company update AI is to help with your customer meetings, however, There could be no greater value, I think, than our company could provide than to eliminate your meetings. Right. To relieve you of un of unnecessary meetings.
[00:23:36] Josh Schachter: Of course, that’s wasteful meetings, right? Not the good ones. But so I love that you’re, that you’re questioning the status quo and just the momentum of Oh, well that’s why, because we, that’s just how often we have those meetings. Okay. So I actually wanted for, for any other team leaders, CS leaders out there listening I, I’m sure they’re interested in your methodology. How did you do it? You, you, you picked, you, you picked like an A and a B test of CSMs and then looked at the renewals. But like, renewals don’t just happen every day. So was this a, a, a whole full year long analysis? How did it work?
[00:24:12] LeeRon: I looked at over a year long of data at three CSMs that had three similar book of business. So you can’t say, oh, well it’s different in enterprise than it is an smb. We can even look at cohorts within those segments and take a look and then take a look at the behaviors of those CSMs and see, okay, here’s an account where Josh has had weekly meetings, and here’s an account where Josh.
[00:24:36] LeeRon: Monthly meetings. They both renewed early. They both renewed in a healthy, so then I start asking Josh, really, again, curious questions. What’s the difference between the customer that has a monthly meeting with you and the one that has a weekly, what is the agenda? What are you talking about and why do you think that makes an impact?
[00:24:53] LeeRon: And a lot of the time, the CSM would say back to be, well, they asked for that Great. Then challenge. Say, we actually found that it is more productive when you and I meet once a month and we use this agenda so that you have your time and I have my time, and in advance I send you this information and then we proactively work on it versus meeting once a and shooting the breeze and talking about what you did this weekend.
[00:25:16] LeeRon: How are your kids for 10 minutes, and then, ooh, there’s a feature coming up. I should send you some information. That was 30 minutes. There was a follow up. After that, there goes an hour in your. So that meeting wasn’t productive. It didn’t help anything. And if we can get the same results with less meeting time, then why have so many meetings.
[00:25:36] LeeRon: And so to me, that was given my team a gift back and given them time back into their day by helping them analyze and evaluate what effective meetings are and how often they should.
[00:25:48] Josh Schachter: I, I mean, that’s a huge gift back and it’s helping you increase your coverage ratio of, of more, more customers that you’re able to then have touch points with. So did you, did you go ahead at the beginning of this year, set that up with your, with your Cs? That you were gonna, you know, put into those experiments.
[00:26:01] Josh Schachter: You say, okay, you’re, you’re talking weekly, you’re talking biweekly, you’re talking monthly, or did you retroactively go and kind of dig out the data?
[00:26:08] LeeRon: So I went retroactively and dug th rough to finding out what they do. So one of the things that’s really important when you build really
[00:26:15] Josh Schachter: And by the way, I’m sorry. So, so, so after finding out what they do, so, and, and this is not at Reggie, this was at your past role, but did they was there any like. Was there any were there any guidelines for them of what they should do or they kind of had the jurisdiction themselves to figure out what the cadence should be?
[00:26:31] Josh Schachter: Each person on their own.
[00:26:33] LeeRon: So when they started, I took people at the cadence that they told me they had. So if you told me I love having weekly meetings, great, keep going. I’m gonna measure and test and analyze why and figure out how your impact on your customers. And then someone else on the team was only having monthly meetings and that was great.
[00:26:49] LeeRon: So instead of pushing you to something you were comfortable with and then coming back and presenting you with the data to. Hey, we could all still be successful. We can reduce the meeting time. You can get back this much time in your life and you who are only doing monthly meetings if that was the result, you’re doing a great job.
[00:27:06] LeeRon: Keep doing that. You’re on the right track. You didn’t win more time back, but you get a gold star for doing the right thing. Now, Reggie, the way I’m thinking about it today is I think there are different parts also, which is something I did not think about previously when I did this analysis. The more you do it, the more you think about things you didn’t.
[00:27:25] LeeRon: Evolution is a great thing. But I think at different points in the life cycle, you should have different cadences of meeting. So I don’t think it’s one size fits all. And so while I think that you are in your early stages of just coming on board as a new customer, you might need more touches that are human touches with meeting to just stay on cadences, and then you can expand those into longer time periods if needed.
[00:27:49] LeeRon: And then you want to increase those again at about the mid-point, which is when we. Decisions are made a better, whether you’re renewing or not. Pick up those meetings again. Make sure that there’s value in them, and then kind of go up. I think it’s an ebb and flow versus constant line at all times. So that’s what we’ll be testing moving forward.
[00:28:08] Josh Schachter: That’s really exciting, really exciting stuff. LeeRon, this was a really fascinating conversation. My takeaways here are with your teams like you’ve done. Always seek to be learning and improving and let’s change EBRs and QBR to cs. Yeah.
[00:28:34] LeeRon: Yeah. Always, always work to improve. Challenge yourself. Never stay constant. Continuously learning and innovate. Experiment. Stay on top of it so you don’t go stale.
[00:28:48] Josh Schachter: Thank you so much for being with us today.
[00:28:50] LeeRon: Thank you.