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Josh
Hi everybody, welcome to this episode of [Un]churned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter. I’m also the founder and CEO of UpdateAI. Joining me today is Monica Trivedi. She’s the senior director of Global Customer Success at JLL Technologies, a subsidiary of the real estate company JLL. And these guys are responsible for all of the the corporate real estate software that helps JLL with their property management and everything that they do in the real estate world. Monica, why don’t you welcome to the show. First off,

Monica
thank you. Hi, Josh. Hi.

Josh
So I wouldn’t necessarily expect a company like JLL to have a technology subsidiary of you know, close to 5000 employees, perhaps that’s really interesting. So tell me a little bit about what your role within customer success, what your arm of your of JLL really is responsible for? Yeah, of

Monica
course. So prior to really joining JLL, I would like to give you a little bit of background. So I started with building engines, which was a startup and had about 300 people, and had a software that was legacy for about 20 years. And about three years ago, they decided to create a new platform called PRISM, which is a corporate real estate software platform from everyone in the building property managers all the way to tenants and engineers. And prism was very successful. And so last year, JL technologies acquired building engines. And so we’re now become part of JLL t. So we are just one of the platforms that JL T owns. They own software programs in sustainability across multiple different other verticals in real estate. So prism is definitely the core for JL T. And that’s how I am here. My role is really to focus on customer engagement, adoption, expansion, and all along the customer journey from post sales.

Josh
Who exactly is your stakeholder that you’re engaging, adopting and expanding?

Monica
So it’s everyone from a property manager to engineering tenant? So our key stakeholders are those that purchase that software for property management. So it could be owner operator, or it could be someone like JLL, that’s managing a property awesome.

Josh
I want to get into the meat of our conversation, which is going to be all about how do you build a greater seat at the table in the Customer Success world. It’s a topic that we hear over and over again, in the conference circuit. And, you know, just the, honestly the table, the dinner, dinner table conversation that I’ve had with CS leaders, so I’m really interested in hearing your perspective on this. To start things out, I want to just warm up the conversation a little bit, get uninsured and authentic with you and understand a little bit about yourself. Where were you born? And where do you live now?

Monica
So same place. I was born in Massachusetts, and I currently live in Massachusetts, a little bit right outside of Boston. So I am my true Bostonian Boston sports, Boston food, everything besides the accent, I think

Josh
I was gonna say you’ve done, you’ve done a really nice job to job to shed that accent. What’s something that that those that you work with are those that know, you might be surprised to learn about you.

Monica
So something that I probably haven’t done, and I would say 10 to 12 years, is I am a professional Indian classical dancer, I grew up doing that I performed, both here in the States and overseas. And it’s something a lot of people don’t know about me. But I think it’s a big reason about who I am. Because I love performing onstage, whether it’s in conferences and speaking or dancing in a show or recital.

Josh
Wow, that’s really cool. I love that. You you presented a presentation and a lecture at Big Rig at Trent zeroes big rig in DC in the fall. And the topic was three things to do to leverage your seat at the table as a Customer Success leader. So I want to go through this with you and break it down. What are those three things or you can start us off where you where you want. But you know, what do you do? What What’s the process for gaining and leveraging your seat at the table?

Monica
Yeah, and I think at this point, it’s almost more about leveraging, because if you are working with a customer, you should have a seat at the table. It’s your seat, you own it. It’s your power that you should be harnessing. And I would say the three key things is knowing your audience, for sure those that work with you and I’m talking internally, everyone from your CEO to sales to product, knowing your numbers, the financial aspect of speaking with everyone that is in that room and at the table with you. And then finally sharing the end impact, which I do find that ces maybe doesn’t necessarily do a lot of, but I’m a big proponent of sharing those wins and losses if there are so places where we can learn from as well,

Josh
knowing your audience, knowing your numbers and sharing your impact. That’s the trifecta right there. Cool. So let’s go into each one. When you think of your own experience at JLL, T, and pass companies, what does that mean to you knowing your audience?

Monica
So I would say early on in my career, even when I was in a leadership role, sometimes when you step into that leadership role, you feel like you need to do everything, right, you have to prove yourself for going in there, you know, you have your 3060 90 day plan, you think like, I’m here to prove myself, but essentially, you really need to know, who are you working with. And it is very similar to even if you take it to a group project, if I go back to business school, right, you might have an idea. But you need to work with your team members, you need to understand their strengths, what’s important to them. And when I joined both building engines and JLL, it’s about building those relationships. But not only that, what is important to them, and what are they being measured on. Because if you don’t know those two things, it’s going to be very hard for you to actually provide value, and figure out what you should be doing as well. So one of the first things I did was work with sales and understand what are they being measured on what is important to them. Same for my CEO, same for product. And what you’ll find, which might not be ideal is everyone is sometimes gold on totally different thing. You know, surprise, you’re working in an organization, and everyone’s not necessarily driving towards the same Northstar, even though you would think that is the case. And so it’s really important when you’re in this role to understand all of those folks that are sitting with you,

Josh
what does that mean? So like, okay, so, so know, my audience, so know that sales, but sales wants to sell more, right? No product product wants to know what to build and, and be able to build the best product marketing, what do they want, they want to know, I guess what the customer wants as well, and the voice that’s going to resonate the most. So, like, what, what insights do you have around? Specifically? That’s at a very generic level, right? What have you learned, let’s take JL LT, for example of what those groups are seeking, that you can then align your communication style and your your, you know, collaboration style with them.

Monica
Yeah. So for example, our product team, as I told you, we had a Legacy product for 20 years. And then we started creating a new product prism, which was about three years old when I joined. And it’s still in its, you know, when you think of it in as a new product compared to a 20 year legacy product, our product team wants feedback, they want to understand, do the customers like it? What is it that they want, or they’re enhancements that they need. And it’s just so simple, but customers would reach out to sales, CS support, have all these wonderful ideas, and they would go into that proverbial black hole, right? That, that hole in the universe where everything kind of dumps into and we have no insight into. And I’ve worked for organizations where they were voting processes and really complex kind of workflows around that. And I just worked with our product team to understand, okay, you want customer feedback, we want to be able to get back to our customers and provide them with an answer. So when they give us some suggestion, we can at least give them you know, it’s this roadmap, it’s not something we’re thinking about, but we’re gonna reach out to you when we start to, and that did not exist. And I think what ended up happening was customers were frustrated. product was also frustrated. And so very simple. It’s nothing fancy, it was an actual form Microsoft type form, we just asked the right questions with product, right product, what are the type of things you want to know, and create it all into one file? And the best thing about that is we plan for 2023, right? Our product team plan this year, they use that feedback, right? So they use that to create their product roadmap for 2023. And that’s what we want. And that’s the collaboration. So for me to kind of go in, say a year ago and say, Okay, I’m going to come in with my idea for what products should do to help my customer, I need to turn that around and think about what’s important to our product team and actually implement something that would help them

Josh
the whole to two ears one mouth thing, listen, listen more than speak and learn what what. Okay, that’s cool. So what what’s your process? Or you said, you have that form that customers fill out? I think he’s wasn’t the customer to fill it out. But you what’s your process for getting the feedback and like tactically speaking and handing it over to product? Yeah, so

Monica
customers don’t fill it out? Because we do want our teams to do some discovery, right? Ask the right questions. I mean, customers can come to us and say we want you know, a blue button. We want this field to drop down with 20 different choices. And really, that’s not feasible for a product team to really assess each of those. So customers provide the feedback, too. I like to keep through our customer success team, which could be anybody in our implementation team, our support team or customer success, we understand the use case, right, we ask those discovery questions which we should be able to do. And then we complete that type form that we’ve created internally, there’s master tracking of all that feedback. And it’s monthly. So monthly, the product team is able to see those ideas, and they start putting in updates, this is going to be on the roadmap next month, this is going to be on the roadmap next year, this is really kind of far out, 12 months out, and then we can get back to the customer that month. So within 30 days, the customer actually has a response. And Quarterly, we sort of review this with our teams to see what can actually be pulled in, because a lot of these ideas are actually something that our product team could probably pull into a quick sprint or a gap that they have. And now we can get back to the customer and say great idea we were able to deliver and those are the micro wins that make the customers. Yeah.

Josh
Oh, that’s dangerous, right? They’re just oh, just throw it into a gap you have in your sprint? Don’t it’s?

Monica
Yeah. I know coming from. Yeah, but like

Josh
the spirit. And do you do this all asynchronously? Or do you have a specific ceremonies where you’re aligning with the team in person?

Monica
No, I mean, it’s through slack. It’s, it’s, it’s a file, it’s shared. The first month, we pull all the feedback we posted in Slack, we give the product team two weeks to kind of review it. And we check it periodically. And everyone’s really good about it. Because I think we’ve just gotten to this ritual. And then we kind of get back to the customer by the 25th or 30th of the month, whatever kind of works with the team.

Josh
Let’s move on to the next part, which is know your numbers. Yeah. What does this mean? So I

Monica
think when I even when I first started in CES, you know, it was okay, no, NRR? No, you know, your NPS, no customer engagement. But when you’re in this role, where you’re at the table, you need to know, your p&l, you need to understand your cost, you need to understand your budget, you need to understand how are you going to ask for more resources, from leadership to actually deal with the capacity that you need to provide and the value needs to provide. And especially now, in the climate that we’re in, it’s really important to be able to be pretty crisp on what you’re asking for, why you’re asking for it, and the value that it’s going to deliver on the flip side. And so one of those things, and you don’t need to go through a formal kind of finance class I actually sat with in my last company, I sat with our CFO, and I said, please explain to me, you know, I saw a line item in my budget, because I was not involved at my last company. And I said, Wait, why am I a lot of this much? And for what reason? So that’s when I said, No, I need to go sit down with him understand where this is coming from. And then I can actually, for the next year, project, what I want, and if you don’t ask for it, you’re not going to get it. No one is doling out money for headcount or resources, you really need to ask for it and explain why.

Josh
And then how do you prove your case around those service versus

Monica
financial modeling, get comfortable with it, practice with it, start putting in things like do you need x number of CSMs, and they’re going to manage X number of accounts. This is the X number of revenue. If you add 10 More, this is what this is going to do. If you take away projecting out an understanding this is where you have to work with your sales team, what are they projecting for numbers, you can’t project your numbers until you know what sales is projecting for the following year as well. Right. So those are the things that you need to get comfortable with. And that’s, that’s exactly what I do now. And I did in my last role as well.

Josh
Your third pillar here is share the impact and I think this is an area where, quite frankly, a lot of CSMs CS leaders are still getting more and more comfortable with and maybe they’re not completely comfortable with it just yet. But really standing up and being proud about the results and communicating those results in a way that grabs attention and says yeah, you know, we’re here at the table but we want you know, we want to be recognized as well for all that we’re doing. So what’s your approach towards that sharing impact

Monica
so my approach is getting in there and demanding the spotlight and not only you know, it’s at all hands meetings and I think in that was something that I did pretty quickly when I joined it building engines to an JLT as well is I want to be able to share customer success wins because these are contributing to our numbers as well right references that we’re getting leads that we’re getting expansions that we’re getting tie it all back to a revenue number as you know, when you’re on an all hands call. That is right what we normally see sales showing this is everything that we sold, even marketing showing the conversion leads that they have so it’s on customer success. And I asked for it because when you’re sitting there your team also wants to see that and one of the things at building engines which I was thrilled about was a few Two months into me joining I presented a customer success win that my team put together right so I have them actually presented, I’m just there to facilitate that. And they were thrilled because they had a voice at this all hands company meeting, which had never happened before. And that is what you as a CES leader need to do for your team, because that’s going to help them and every month we have customer success when that we present at our go to market meeting without fail or it’s a customer success, you know, room for improvement, something we can do better, but very, very important to make sure that whatever you’re doing not only as a leader, but as an individual contributor, you are constantly sharing that value.

Josh
Monica Trivedi three steps for leveraging, not necessarily gaining because we’ve already got the seat but leveraging your seat at the table. Thank you so much for being on this episode.

Monica
Thank you