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Josh Schachter:
I’m Josh, founder and CEO of UpToTheAI, cohost of this of this podcast with John Johnson. Christy is out. And we’ve got 3 very distinguished guests with us today. We have Jenny Calvert, Larry Lawrence Waldman. I don’t know whichever one to go with. Yeah. And Parul Bandhari.

Josh Schachter:
Did I pronounce your last name and your first name for that matter?

Jenny Calvert:
Pretty good. Pretty good.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. Jenny was shaking her head no. So

Jenny Calvert:
Well, Carl, we asked last night. Oh. Yeah. I asked last night the same thing. We’ve met a 1000000 times, and I said, I’ve never asked you how to pronounce your name, and I’ve been butchering it for months. So Same here. You did good.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
No. But she was gonna let me she

Josh Schachter:
was gonna give me a pass. Right?

Jon Johnson:
No. No. This is for Josh.

Parul Bhandari:
No. Fine. Okay. Sorry. That was totally wrong. No. I’m just kidding. No.

Parul Bhandari:
It’s Parl it’s Carl with the p is for the first name, how how I tell people. Just make it easy.

Josh Schachter:
Parl Banhary. Yeah. Great. So you guys, 3 of you are working on some really cool stuff in customer success. You are 3 leaders within the space, and you have some strong theses around CS and things that you wanna do with customer success. And, we wanna hear more about that. So, John, you volunteered to emcee this conversation.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
You have

Josh Schachter:
to go take a phone call. Because I have to go make a phone call, but I’ll be back in in 45 seconds, and I trust you. Nobody’s gonna miss me. But I wanna hear more about what these folks are up to, and I think it’ll be really interesting content for us to get because I think they really do have some strong, compelling hypotheses that I want our listeners, and I say this sincerely, I want them to hear, that point of view. So,

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
over to you.

Jon Johnson:
Lucky, Josh, because not only did I get your email, I read it, just now. So we’re good. Bye, Josh. No. It’s so great to talk to you guys. I have seen you individually kind of around the space, and and, Jenny, I know you and I have met before. I what I actually really love and what I hope that we kind of lead into this is customer success, if you’ve been in it, has always kind of been like a one size fits all, quote, unquote, bucket where you just walk in and you join a CS organization. And it’s been built by 9 leaders before you, and they’ve all been replaced.

Jon Johnson:
And you’ve got KPIs that came from a book that you read about Salesforce or something at Oracle or some consultant came in and said, here’s your triple metric, and nobody knows what the fuck is going on. And one of the things that I love about what you guys are kinda talking about is, like, the start of it is should always be on a daily basis. What is the definition of a successful customer? Not this title that we have with the hashtag and awards and champagne that we have to drink, but, like, truly, truly, when you come into a specific organization, how do you define the success of an individual customer and then build programs around it continually?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Am I am I on the

Jon Johnson:
right track here?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Absolutely. That’s really yeah. That’s why the 3 of us got together. We had had conversations before, but we realized we were all saying the same thing, which is that nobody really knows what great customer success is. Because it changes all the time. And it’s defined by, like you said, a hodgepodge of people who probably don’t have the best interests of the customer and the value that you’re driving for the customer at heart. And so we got together because we want to help people change that. Whether you’re a success leader, a founder, a CEO in go to market, an individual contributor, we our collective experience has shown us that we can help define what that means for you, for your customer, and for your company.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
And most importantly, we we can help you evolve it because what you’re gonna have as your definition of great success today is gonna be very different as you grow and scale or as you shift or as your customers shift or It’s not a big shift. Exactly.

Jon Johnson:
Yep. Hello, 2024. Exactly.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. Well, and I think it’s funny that, like, we got together after Gainsight Pulse, and we were like, what are your big takeaways? And we were all 3, like, that not enough has changed. Like, we’re still trying to solve the same problems. We’re still seeing leaders walk from org a to org b with their same playbooks and things that worked and forgetting that, like, it’s all different. Their customers are different. Their business models are different. Their sales model, like, everything is different. And so I think that is what makes it so complex.

Jenny Calvert:
But what makes this idea so exciting is that, you know, simplifying for where you are, where your customers are, where your product evolution is, and all of those things, not trying to be the mature organization that you see on LinkedIn telling you what to do. But really, like, we talked about going to, like, blank page of paper, and like getting obsessed with customer problems again, and then understanding the people in your organization, if you even have a team yet, which you play with founders who don’t have a success team yet a lot, and revising them on, like, what are you thinking about? What does this motion look like? And then as you grow and start hiring your first your second leader, what do they need to look like, based on what success means for your organization? And taking it really, I think, back to the roots, back to the foundation.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. You this idea of, like, success at stages is so interesting. I think, you know, you I’m seeing this trend of early stage startups coming in and hiring, like, a head of CS that is usually like a high performing IC that kinda takes that player coach model that probably only has, like, a bunch of experience working with accounts. Like, maybe they’re a little bit cheaper, which is great for a start up. They have some experience. They have some ideas. But I actually don’t know that that is the right solution. Because the problem at that point when you’re a seed or an a round, right, and we can go through all of the rounds.

Jon Johnson:
I’ve been through everything to, like, an e or an f to a merger acquisition. So we got a whole alphabet here to go through. But at the beginning, it’s very much like if it’s what do you you need stable revenue. Right? And and this isn’t how do we do product feature requests, how do we do do road mapping, how do we build customer, like, you know, coalitions. Like, none of that. Not that it’s not important. But the idea is, like, in that first round, those first few, like, years of a business, you need stable revenue and you need to I like what you said, Jenny, is working with your GTM leaders to say, what are the problems that we’re facing right now with acquiring customers and keeping customers? And that’s it. That’s it.

Jon Johnson:
That’s that’s number 1. Right? So how do we where did we go wrong? How did we get to the point where everybody has the same goddamn playbook that they just share PDFs about? And I’ve done it. I have my own. I’ve sold it online. But, like, how did we get here? And then how do we how are you guys kinda thinking through a little bit of that that shuffle to say, don’t think about it as here’s a 100 pages. Think about it as here’s a white sheet of paper, and we’re gonna solve the problems.

Parul Bhandari:
Well and I’m I think Jenny has a really good answer for this, but I have a I have to go back to what you were saying about what happens. And, like, when we when we have these early stage companies hiring that first out of CS, what is that person coming in and doing? They’re applying their playbooks to this new organization, but most of the time, it doesn’t fit. Right? It’s never gonna fit because you have to work through contracts or pricing or, like, who knows? It was this company was written on a napkin in Yeah. One, and, like, nobody can find it. And so you’re sitting there just doing a lot of cleanup. Mhmm. And how I sort of like And just

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
sorry sorry, Paul, but this is what we talk about. And then that becomes your customer success process.

Parul Bhandari:
Yeah. And that’s what people think of as customer success. They think, oh, wow. I got somebody in and they helped me clean up my Salesforce. Well, wow, that that that’s not the job that we came to do, you

Jenny Calvert:
know? Yeah.

Parul Bhandari:
Yeah. But but unfortunately, the bad habits start early. Right? So, like, that’s where we’re we’re I think what we’re talking about a lot of the times is like building good habits. And I this is I deal with a lot of early stage founders, building good habits on day 1 can really help you lead down the path of success when you are at your series a, when you are at your series d, when you are going to IPO. Right? Like, but building that culture of, like, hey. We’re gonna have we’re gonna have thought through our plans, you know, and not just kinda, like, throw things and see what sticks to the wall. Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
Well, I’m

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
sorry, John. You had a great point, though. Is that, like, why why I

Jon Johnson:
love it when people tell me that. Yeah.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
I mean, I’m just saying that to flatter you a little bit. Flatter you are.

Jon Johnson:
But but where’s

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
But you you said, like, why is it that people come in and they still can’t get it right? And it’s because look. It’s hard. Right? It’s not as quantifiable. You can’t have it’s not like sales where you’ve got a target, you hit that target, you don’t hit that target. You’ve got a pipeline. Like, these are all things that people are used to and even founders and CEOs sort of get. People don’t get it the same way. Customer success and a lot of success leaders don’t think like that.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
And you have to, as Jenny and Paul said, you have to customize it to where you are and what the value is that you’re trying to provide. So you get in this vicious cycle of, I’ve got this playbook. I know it’s gonna work. I clean up a bunch of messes, and then that becomes what customer success is until things start to shift and change, and then it doesn’t work anymore because the reality is you never really had anything to begin with. You were just fighting fires. We had a actually, earlier today, we had a whole bunch of great analogies about fires. It’s a little maybe a little too soon given what just happened. Yeah.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
You know? It’s it’s like, essentially, you’ve got a town where every building seems to catch on fire. So instead of trying to figure out why they catch on fire, you just hire more firefighters.

Jon Johnson:
Yep. Yep.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Right?

Jon Johnson:
And that’s My LinkedIn headline for years was theoretical firefighter. And I I put that as, like, a joke, but it’s, like, literally most of my career has been, you get on a call, somebody’s pissed, and you gotta you gotta put it out. Yep. And you get lost, and you never get to the point where you’re solving the problem. Whatever that problem is, who knows what it is?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
You’re you’re you’re literally just you’re solving a moment in time and then moving on to the next crisis. And that’s not we all like, in theory, you shouldn’t be doing that. You should be understanding how did they get there because the reason they got there is because there’s some sort of disconnect with the value, wherever that might have come from within the organization and from the company. But instead, you’re just solving it and moving on. And everyone feels great because you solved the problem, but you didn’t actually do anything.

Jon Johnson:
And you and and then we call it building trust, and then we call it, Right? And we call it all of these things where where they’re, you know, advocate and whatnot. But we’re really just, like you said, like, we’re just putting out that fire. And I don’t think I like, just to one of the questions that I do want to ask the group, Josh is still on a phone call, so, we’ll ignore him.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Even though he’s 40 5 seconds.

Jon Johnson:
It was longer than 45 seconds. We’re all better for it.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
So Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
I’m I’m kinda stuck in this big, like, kind of whirlpool of this, like, maturity mindset of not just with our customers, but also internally, like, how we identify what our customers need. And and generally, like, we’ve got pretty standard segmentation. Right? Whereas it’s healthy, red, yellow, green, that kind of stuff. Right? But we don’t necessarily, like, know how to, like, prescribe anything to it. We have we are fully in reactive mode for all of our customers. We just kind of show up when they come to us, and we have very little opportunity to really get in front of it. Now one of the things I wanted to ask you guys about, because you do kind of paint this picture that you’ve got, kind of some solutions or at least some processes that can be applied across, like, various stages, not just the early stage, but also late stage where, you know, how to work with GTM leaders, how to work with CTOs, how to work with CCOs, or even before you get to that point. How do you start thinking about or at least, like, identifying where the company’s maturity is so that that you can prescribe to them what you’re trying to sell to us, which is we’re not just gonna come in and clean up your Salesforce.

Jon Johnson:
We’re not just gonna be firefighters. We’re actually gonna solve, like, the problems. How do you get through the bullshit of everything else that everybody is used to talking to you about? I was like, well, my churn numbers, and I don’t have a center of excellence, and I don’t have this kind of like, oh my god. Before you get there so welcome to the conversation, Josh. Can we start over? Nope. Okay. That was a great question, and they’re gonna do great. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I’m sure they are.

Jenny Calvert:
I think, one of the approaches that’s interesting is we’ve all heard of, like, a a 360 review. Right? Where, like, an individual, you get everybody else’s kind of perspectives of what they do well and don’t do well. Taking the same concept into an organization and and spending more time with the nonsuccess people is absolutely critical, and I think we shy away from it. I think customer success, like, as a space and industry and field, we love each other. Like, we talk to each other all the time. We’ve created this, like, group think of, like, hey, how are you doing these things? And how are we doing these things? And we’ve kind of insulated ourselves. And I think that’s caused more harm than good as we look to spread out and broaden within the organization. So understanding product, understanding the full entirety of go to market, which I do believe success fits under, we have revenue responsibility, commercial responsibility.

Jenny Calvert:
Engineering, get closer to engineers. They speak a different language. It’s a weird one. But once you understand it, you can do magic. So, like, learn their language, learn what they care about. Most often, when you start spending time with technical leaders, you realize that they actually want to know more about the customer and they are really curious, so they have more context as to what they’re building and working towards. And so there’s all of these different, like, opportunities to thread and synthesize organizationally what’s happening so that the prioritization of the customer success function is crystal clear, and you’re able to communicate the benefits to the organization. And guess what? Your customers benefit too because you’re always pulling that in where you should be.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Yeah.

Parul Bhandari:
Kind of to answer your question a little bit too. Like, today, we were talking about because we have our call on Mondays too. So we were talking about assessments that we do. So Jenny has an assessment. I have an assessment. And I was saying to the team, I don’t get to use my assessment very often because the people I’m talking to are so early stage. They don’t have any process for me to assess. Right? Yeah.

Parul Bhandari:
No. I mean, those listening, some of you do, but, you know, but, like and that’s okay. But that if you can go through that checklist and say you don’t have this, that can also be, like, yes, you’re in the early stage. Easy one. Right? I know. But I think from there on

Jon Johnson:
I know I know it’s

Parul Bhandari:
the easy one. That’s why I’m answering it with the easy easy easy way to answer the question. But, no, I think that from there on, like, we can take assessments like what Jenny has, like and I think, Jenny, I was looking at yours today, but you have, like, you have, like, what’s your organization size? And, you know, looking to maturity markers, there there is something that we are hoping to do as a group, which is sort of define out a framework of this. Right? And we actually started talking about this recently, but to find out a bit of a framework, is it gonna be a perfect, like, okay, you’re over $20,000,000. You go into the middle stage. No. But at least to find, like, some markers, as to when you, like, exit growth, early stage, you become, like, a growth stage company.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Yeah.

Parul Bhandari:
So I

Jenny Calvert:
mean, let’s be honest. I joined a series b organization that had none of it. So, like, you can’t go off fundraising stage. You you you gotta understand where they are on product market fit. And, Josh, I’ll look at you a little bit. But, like, you can go in and out of product market fit at any time. Right? So those signals are constantly evolving and changing. The market’s evolving and changing.

Jenny Calvert:
So what are or how are we synthesizing all of the inputs, and how do they change over time? And how are we adapting progressively forward instead of reacting? Johnny talked about it. Right? We’re still trying to do the same things that were solving the problems of a year and a half, 2 years ago instead of saying none of that actually matters anymore. We need to be thinking about moving in this direction because here’s where the future is. Right? If we’re losing a magnitude of revenue, no offense, your segmentation model is not priority number 1.

Jon Johnson:
Uh-huh. No. That

Jenny Calvert:
is not the biggest fire to solve for. It’s fun.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
It’s so important to have that whole organizational and company perspective because people don’t wanna hear that. Right? They they expect a customer success leader to come in and fix customer success. Yeah. But yet that’s not gonna fix anything other than maybe kick the can down the road because most of the challenges in customer success are organizational and company wide. And if you’re, again, you’re fixing the symptom, you’re not actually fixing the problem, which means you’re not gonna cure it, which is why you see churn in customer success leaders too. It’s also I hate to keep saying this because it sounds like a cop out, but it’s hard. Right? And no one wants no one wants to hear, hey. We’re gonna come in and do a full company assessment because we need to do that in order to fix your revenue motion, which is really what we’re talking about.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Right? Yeah. They’re like, no. I wanna know if you got a playbook. And I had a client say this to me about a month ago. It’s like, I want us to get to minimum viable good in 6 weeks. And I said, that’s not gonna happen.

Jon Johnson:
It’s gonna happen. Yeah.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
It’s not gonna happen. Yeah. Because, a, I don’t know enough about your organization to be able to do that. I can give you ideas and things that you need to do. But if I do that in a vacuum, all that’s gonna happen is you’re gonna have 1 group of people moving in one direction

Jon Johnson:
Yep.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
With everyone else moving in a different direction. And the people that I tell to do best practices for customer success are gonna be unable to do so because that means they have to stop doing something else, which means there’s a cascading effect. So, again, if you don’t start at the beginning, like Jenny said, right at the top, with the basics and the foundation, it’s not gonna work. But it takes time and effort, and it takes real commitment from your founder, your CEO, your board, whoever is leading that, or it’s not gonna work.

Jon Johnson:
Well, that’s you know, I think about you mentioned earlier, like, you know, kind of the friction points of what happens with growing businesses. Right? Pricing changes, pricing not even just like it raises or increase, but just the model itself changing. Like, the way that seats your platform access is kind of granted. Right? And very rarely do I see those things coming through the customer success org, starting from the customer success org. Right? I see revenue leaders saying, okay. Now go make this okay with our customers. Right? And I’m happy. I I having reported up to boards and working with VCs for, like, 15 years, like, I get the reasoning behind it.

Jon Johnson:
But there is such a gap to say I I work at a company called user testing. Like, we what what we do first and foremost is we get, like, early stage products in front of customers to make sure it works. And this is the lens that I think through where it’s like, anytime the board is like, hey. We’re gonna do this. We should go talk to our 5 biggest customers that are stoked to renew with us and say, is this gonna change the way that you’re stoked to renew with us? And if they’re like, oh, absolutely, then we don’t do it. Right? Then then that that’s data. That’s not like a slap on a wrist or just somebody’s wrong. That’s just saying, let’s go back to the drawing board, guys, because you’re not always gonna say everything is gonna go through them.

Jon Johnson:
But if you can, within a reasonable scope, have that validation of product and pricing and experience that goes through your customer base that is currently using you, you’re gonna see a substantial, like, risk like, reduction in unmitigated churn.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Yes.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. Mhmm. Yep. I think that that you you mentioned something really interesting, though, and that’s we we talk about this often is, like, at what point did we go too far from inside out operational models and less on outside in? And I think, like, in the quest for efficiency and scale that we, like, added complexity to benefit internal operations and business practices and who suffers as customer. And so we need to really evaluate some of those things. Do they make sense? Do they actually benefit the customer? Do they actually drive customer retention and expansion the way that they were designed to do? Or are they just nice to haves for us in our internal operational, you know, efficiency models? It it It’s

Jon Johnson:
it’s it’s always been really strange to me that sales goes out. Like, the typical joke is, like, sales will just sell whatever they want they they can in order to close a deal, and then we have to fix it and build it. The reality is is, like, product should be only building what our customers are asking for, and the salespeople are really good at selling things that don’t exist. So let them know what we’re building already. Right? And just flip that on its head where, like, they’re they can paint the future of what we’re already building instead of being the paintbrush that our product guys have to follow along with.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Okay.

Jon Johnson:
And I just don’t understand. There’s there’s so much more revenue in owned business than there is in net new, and it’s it’s it’s better money.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Exactly. And it’s baffling that it’s so backwards because like you had said at the end of your your last question, you know, then you have all of this churn that you’re it’s you can’t hear anything about. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Like, why would I pay you this when I pay you that? I’m gonna go somewhere else. Like, oh, shit.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Right. Right. Oh, gee. I guess I didn’t I guess I didn’t see that coming. Right? Yeah. Yet but yet when when someone’s bringing in a new CS leader, the first thing that they say is, look, I’ve got a churn problem. You really need to fix it. And depending on where you are, your your response is gonna be, well, of course, you know, I’ve got this great process.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
We’re gonna fix it. The reality is, well, do you know why you’re having that churn? Because my guess is that most of it is not because you have a really shitty customer success organization. It probably has a lot of other reasons that new CS leader, probably not gonna fix unless they do what we’ve said, which is really go back and have a more holistic view as to why you’re having those problems.

Jon Johnson:
Well, I think that’s why, like and this is a question that I have for you is, like, if you’re coming into these early stage companies to say, like, maybe you don’t need a CS leader, maybe you need a revenue leader that understands product, or maybe you need a product leader that understands revenue, or maybe you need, you know, somebody that’s focused on renewals because you really actually do need Salesforce to be cleaned up. Right? Like Yeah. And that’s gonna solve the problem that you’re building 18 months in the future. I think that’s where these kind of this model that you guys are building really comes in handy is not just, I’m gonna give you the playbook, you know, that you’re gonna use, and it’s gonna be 10 grand and you’re I’m gonna teach you how to do it. But it’s like, no. I’m gonna give you what you’re gonna look like in 18 months, and you’re gonna be really fucking scared. Exactly. Let’s, like, make sure that we do the right things now so that when we hit that mark, you understand what’s what segmentation means, where your revenue is, what risk actually is instead of whack a mole, play that firefighter card down the road.

Parul Bhandari:
Yep. Yeah. I was just gonna say, I think that what you guys were what you were talking about with unmitigated churn was, like, the story of 2023. Like, nobody could figure out what was going on until midyear. Like, oh, no. There’s all this churn. Oh, shoot. We need to look internally and, like, look at our own customers and try to protect them.

Parul Bhandari:
And if you did it right and you actually, like, went and looked at your customers, talk to them, and maybe change your road map to match the customer needs versus the market, you may have, like, had higher retention rates, right, as a result. I remember I was at CS customer success festival, and that was the topic, one of the topics about that. Hi, Josh. I miss you. I think you’re holding back.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Sounds like great.

Parul Bhandari:
But, yeah, but it was it was so important, and I think those are it’s like so simplistic in that way, but it was very it was very much missed because in the hunt for growth, it’s like growth at all costs. You know, you kinda run into that. You run into that issue of, like, are we actually selling what we make? Or do we have product are we selling to the right customer? You know? Yeah. One of the things that we talked about as a group early on in our journey to do this is also not just talking to CS people. Like, I think Reni was alluding to that, like, bringing in people to talk about customer success that don’t do it because we wanna know the perception because a lot of it I think a lot of us also live in, like,

Jenny Calvert:
this Yeah.

Parul Bhandari:
Works colored world of, wow, we support each other so much. I’m sorry to say, but others don’t.

Jon Johnson:
You know? Like, everybody’s LinkedIn post. Yeah.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
We’re very supportive of one another without a doubt.

Parul Bhandari:
Yeah. And it’s awesome. But, like, is that our reality? I think we wanna be educated more ourselves and educate others, you know, in that being.

Jon Johnson:
Love that.

Jenny Calvert:
That’s great. Thing I think is important is, like, we we’re talking a lot of early stage, but even, like, when you get later, do the things that we have done. Wow. Great language today, Jenny. Do the things that we have done.

Jon Johnson:
Good English.

Jenny Calvert:
I did good. You should see the text I sent these to earlier. I’m like, I don’t wanna. I’m gonna. I’m like, what is wrong with me? I’ve been pulled up in a house with 13 year olds for hurricanes for too long. Anyhoo, but do they still make sense? I keep going back to this. Did we make things overly complicated in correlation to the value it’s providing to both our teams and our customers? Most often, if you do an audit, it’s no it’s confusing. It’s complex.

Jenny Calvert:
It makes no sense. This is stupid. I’m not gonna say it that way, but you can realize that, like, we’ve made things messy and dirty that aren’t moving the needle that matters the most. Right? Especially going back to where we are. Where are we in the business? Where are we in growth? Where are we in our efficiency and scale? And so I think some of that is just the noise of people and what they’ve done. And, like, oh, I’m at this organization at this stage, and I’ve done these things and this, like, great. That’s that one unique scenario and situation. Unless you match all of the markers in that company, that organization, that customer, that product, that situation,

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
throw it

Jenny Calvert:
out the window. Doesn’t matter.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Yeah. Yep. You might be able to see some of the ideas, but you’re certainly not gonna be able to take the like we talked about, the playbook.

Jenny Calvert:
The playbook.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Yeah. Go execute this. You’re you’ll be great.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. But I think, you know, to your point, like, when we talk about 2023 where, like, nobody knew what was going on, we went through, like, an acquisition and merger during that year, and we prioritized a lot of, like, product stuff, which makes a lot of sense. Right? We’re gonna sell some more stuff. But the market really said, nobody wants to spend any money. Right? There’s all those layoffs, and nobody everybody was consolidating. Right? So the the price point was the big deciding factor. And for us to then do whatever I don’t I don’t know that we raised prices, but, like, if we were to go into that market and say, hey.

Jon Johnson:
We raised prices because look at all these new features that we build. Every single customer is gonna say, I mean, cool. That’s great. Like, so stoked. But, like, I can’t give you another $50. Like, what are you thinking of? Right? So this is kind of that that conversation that, like, I’m really interested in how we get senior leaders to say, like, we have to move this lever over and say, let’s deprioritize. Maybe don’t stop building things. But, you know, obviously, because this is us building market, we’re SaaS, and we’re it’s it’s America.

Jon Johnson:
Well, I think To the point where it’s like, how do we then say, okay. Like, we can’t increase price this year because we know that we’re gonna lose 20 or 30% of our revenue just on that chunk. So let’s kick our pricing updates to next year. And this is where those GTM leaders come in to say, like, what is the best path forward for today, which gets really, really difficult when you’ve got boards and VCs and PEs and all these other guys that have different metrics. Exactly. But getting that conversation started of saying, like, how many times have I had to, like, get on a call with a sales leader to say, guys, I don’t think that we can raise prices on this specific customer. And then we make an exception, and then we have to write all of these processes that get very, very difficult. And then the next year, it’s like, well, we told you we were gonna raise it up.

Jon Johnson:
And then the customer feels bad, and there’s just this, like, icky feeling when it’s like, aren’t we isn’t, like, the heart of what we’re trying to do is make this other customer successful? So why do we let all of these other things get in the way?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
And you had said before, you know, there John, there’s you know, sales has this or even early stage companies, growth at any cost. But growth at any cost also leads to success at any cost. Right? Meaning, you do whatever it takes to keep that customer. Your example of price increase right there is a perfect one. Right? We can’t increase this customer because they’re going to cancel if we do. Yeah. Okay. But, again, we’re now reacting as opposed to planning.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Whereas you said, we oh, look at that. I got a little thumbs up from you. I don’t even know if that was I don’t

Jon Johnson:
know why that’s there. It does that sometimes.

Jenny Calvert:
That’s safe.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
That we were once again solving for a symptom, whereas you said, I knew that this was not gonna work beforehand. So rather than have the conversation of, we’re gonna raise your price. No. Sorry. We’re gonna cancel. Okay. Never mind. We’re not going to.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
It should have just been, we’re gonna hold course for this year to really make sure you’re getting value. Yep. We don’t we don’t think that far ahead. Right.

Parul Bhandari:
I have I have a gripe with this Bain article. Sorry. I’m gonna bring it up because I’ve already talked about it right now, and I talked about it this morning too. There’s a Bain article about how NRR has not, has been, like, 75% less than the previous period or not, you know, of of measurement and customer success is essentially failing. And I hate, like, the title of it in general because it just makes everybody feel bad. But when I looked at when I read the article, because I read it a few times and I was like, they’re not talking about gross logo retention. They’re talking about NRR. In the year years post pandemic, if that scenario you guys described played out, what would happen is people would turn.

Parul Bhandari:
But if you maintain that revenue and said, hey. Well, never mind. We won’t upscale you. We’ll we’ll give you we’ll give you the same thing at the same price. It might not have been expansion. It might have been, like, you know, even a downgrade, but you could have maintained that logo, And that logo retention is probably gonna get you value in the long run. I don’t think they dove into that. That bothered me a little bit.

Parul Bhandari:
So I was just, you know, thinking, like, you know, what you guys are talking about is very much related to that. I think we have to look at the whole picture too of what happened in the last couple of years and how we’re still recovering. Right? Everyone’s still

Jon Johnson:
Well, in this constant flip, like, again, like, our sales leaders have always tracked the same thing. Like like, what have they sold? What’s your book? Like, how much money did you make this quarter

Parul Bhandari:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Every single year for 40 years in software. Right? But for us, it’s NRR, it’s GRR, it’s usage, it’s brand, it’s it’s loyalty, it’s referenceability. Like, it’s all of these things that just get us to this point where those of us who’ve been doing this for 10 or 15 years, like most people in this room, are just like, Jesus. Like, can we just talk to the customer? Like, please. And can we just make sure, like, number 1, that every t is crossed and I is dotted, like, from day 1. And why is it so difficult to get everybody in the room together to say, did we meet your expectations? No? Where did we fail? Right. And that’s my job mitigation plan, and here’s a playbook. Right? Right.

Jon Johnson:
And that’s the point.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
That’s our thesis again is, why is it why is it so hard? Right? Why is it that so many customer success leaders continue to fall into that trap of having to defend something? Well, it’s because you never got internal alignment on what you’re supposed to do. And instead of having this soup of various different metrics, look, I’m not saying any of them are right or wrong. I’ve used

Jon Johnson:
They’re right for a reason.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
They’re right for a reason, and they’re right for a certain point in time. But none of it matters unless everyone internally is aligned on what that means and what’s reasonable for you to be able to do. Because if you can’t and you don’t, you’re gonna have a really bad conversation at some point.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
The other thing that I think is important is, like, short and long term thinking. So, like, right now, you talk about reactionary. That’s a short term response to a temporary pain. Right? It is it’s temporary. We know this market will shift. Data and history tells us it’s going to shift. So are we doing knee jerk reactions right now for what? For survival? How realistic is it? What are the opportunities? So what I love to do is also do a little, like, flip it on its head challenge. You’re giving option a or b.

Jenny Calvert:
What about c? In that example, John, what is the opportunity? There’s an m and a situation. How do we give them exposure to new incremental value without increasing prices knowing that we’re deferring incremental revenue? Maybe 9 to 12 months. But is that better than 1, pissing off customer and losing them, or 2, setting the expectation that they’re gonna have incremental spend next year and they’re gonna be thinking about that for the next 12 months and measuring every single thing against, is it worth what they’re going to charge me next year? Right? Like, we’re setting ourselves up for failure in a lot of situations by not thinking creatively about what is the long term goal. Oh, it’s revenue growth. Great. How are there different ways that we can approach getting there that are best serving us and our customer? And we don’t take the time to think about that. We’re just go.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Well, this kind of gets into, like, I think some of the maybe the nuance of kind of what we have gotten into as CSMs, right, every day, whether it’s a success plan or QBR, you know, or or any of these kind of things that we have in our back pocket. I I tend to like I think one of the most important things for a CSM to do in general, not just in leadership and as an IC, is to be able to forecast, not just, like, churn, not just growth, not just opportunity, but forecast, like, almost that maturity idea that that that thought of, like, where this customer is. And we talk about being strategic CSMs, and we talk about being able to do strategy and whatever the hell that means. But the problem is is, like, we’re so handcuffed where a a successful CSM that is making a 6 figure salary should be able to look at their book of however many accounts they have and say, these are the ones that can handle a price increase. Yeah. These are the ones that that we actually need to long term, like, build relationships with, and we can’t do shit until we get them. Right? And and not even, like, segmentation of, like, green, red, yellow.

Jon Johnson:
I mean, like, full on, I want an analysis of your book every quarter, and I wanna know what your plan is. And this kind of gets into what you guys are doing right now on a micro level, right, to empower our CSMs to truly be the CEO of their book, to say these 10 are gonna churn, and these are the reasons why. And I’m gonna bring in my sales guy to go resell them because we’re we’re gonna lose them for whatever reason, and I’m just gonna sweep them off the deck. Right? Or the other side of it. We actually need to go in and save, and here’s our save plan. Right? But we don’t that.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
We have Even when you do what even when you do, you too often have it in a reactionary way. Meaning, like, it’s the end of quarter. I need to present something. I need to yeah. I need to go through their book. Everyone, like, what’s what’s everything gonna look like? What’s the forecast look like? Instead of, hey. We’re planning for 2025. We’re planning for budgets.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
We need to forecast what we think we’re gonna have for growth and churn. I need everyone to go through, like you said, an account by account, book by book basis, and come up with a bottoms up approach analysis. Now can you scale that once you get big? Maybe not. But if you’re the CEO of your book, which I really like, it’s what I’ve always tried to have my teams do, then you should be able to do that without a lot of it should be like a massive exercise. It should be something I could stop you in the hallway. And for the most part, do people still do that anymore? I can stop you on a Zoom random call

Jon Johnson:
and tell me,

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
yeah, my top five clients. This is what’s going on, and this is how I feel about them. Because when you do it in reverse, like, we’ve all done and when people still do, that’s when you have those difficult conversations because that’s when you get into the board and the CFO saying, why don’t you make your number? Well, you’re not making your number because we don’t think we can do a price increase that you all counted on. But having gone through and said, only 30% of the book in aggregate, we think is gonna be right for that. Forecast that. Budget for that. Build that. And now you have something.

Jon Johnson:
Well, it’s like and I told you 9 months ago that I wasn’t gonna make my quota.

Jenny Calvert:
Right. Yeah.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
This quarter.

Jon Johnson:
And I have been telling you that sales needs to to pay attention, that product needs to pay attention, and engineering needs to pay attention, and they haven’t done anything. And then I get dinged.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Exactly.

Jon Johnson:
So and this is that thing where it’s like, I it’s not even about the dollars per se. It is if we are to be successful and if we are to be viewed with these NRR and GRR metrics that are technically success metrics, but we as individual contributors don’t have the lever to actually influence those, but we’re we’re we’re measured by it. It’s like what’s that old saying? Like, if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, everybody’s gonna think it’s an idiot. Like like, we’re just

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
I don’t know, but I really like that. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Probably just made that up.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
That’s good.

Jon Johnson:
But, like, that’s the idea here is, like, I I get so frustrated when I get to the end of the quarter. I was like, I I told my boss I was gonna 88%, and I told you why, and we all agreed why. And now I’ve gotta do all these exceptions. And now I’ve gotta do all this paperwork just so that I could get whatever I’m owed or whatever I’m earned. Right? When the reality is 9 months ago, there’s a bunch of other people that didn’t get to do the work that they want to do. And I’m not gonna say they didn’t do their job because they didn’t know it. It wasn’t a pipeline. It wasn’t a funnel for them.

Jon Johnson:
Right. I’m a big fan of these funnels of trying to figure out And

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
you can’t prioritize unless they’re doing that. Right? Because instead, what happens is when you go back to your product team and your engineering team, instead of prioritizing something they could have done that might have prevented your 12% of churn in your book, they’re prioritizing whoever was banging loudest on the table or whoever was the one who happens to know somebody or whoever called the CEO instead. Right? But you’re not making data driven prioritization decisions.

Parul Bhandari:
But you are saying something that’s very important is, are we all tracking that? Like, I talked about this last week at a I was at a panel, and we’re I was talking about how your product team might not know the impact that cutting something off the road map has

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Right.

Parul Bhandari:
Unless you are providing that information and, like, shouting it loudly. And, like, a lot of teams, CS seems like, oh, well, we talked about in the red zone meeting. Well, that’s not, like, the place that product’s coming to learn about what’s gonna cost churn. No.

Jon Johnson:
They’re rolling their eyes because you’re busy.

Jenny Calvert:
Why am

Josh Schachter:
I in

Parul Bhandari:
this meeting?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
You know? And you’re not quantifying

Jon Johnson:
it too.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
You’re not quantifying it. Yeah.

Parul Bhandari:
How much what’s the impact? How many customers? Right? So it’s like, I think there is responsibility on our end, and it comes in the form of, like, you know, not only just evangelizing the good, but also by evangelizing where, like, change needs to be. You know? Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. Yeah. Okay. We got 5 minutes on this podcast. So I want each of you, what is if you could walk into your favorite organization and take ownership over their CS team, what is the first thing that you would do, Larry?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
I would do what the 3 of us said in the very beginning. I would make sure that I got to understand everyone’s why and why they were doing what they’re what they’re doing. I would understand what the organization looks like and how it feels, but then I would go wider and start to figure out all the challenges that they might have, where who are the partners for me so that I can help solve that or at least help figure out how we prioritize what we can and cannot solve. Because, yeah, you’re not going to go into an organization, go like this, like we said, say, here’s my playbook and fix everything. But if you realize that one of the big disconnects is within GTM, within sales, or one of the big disconnects has been product or engineering, or maybe it’s internal and we just aren’t great at being able to really understand what our clients are valuing, then at least I could know. But it can’t just be a, I’m going to come in because I’ve got 25 years of experience in customer success, and here’s what I do, and here’s how I do it. Go do it. Right? Nobody’s gonna want that.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
They need they need to understand why they need to buy into it, and you need to have partners throughout the organization to be able to help you execute on that vision. Otherwise, it’s gonna fail.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Jenny, what’s the first thing that you would, you would do in this dream scenario?

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. Similar to Larry, I definitely we’re on the listening tour that everyone talks about, but very much from, like, a retro perspective. What’s going well? What’s not going well? What do we need to stop? What do we need to start? What do we continue? And then the second thing layered on that is I would actually look at kind of the organizational rhythm, if you will. And that is outside of the CS function. So I wanna understand the pressures and the energy in, you know, the technical team, in the go to market team. I wanna understand and synthesize all of the various inputs because at the end of the day, as we talked about, they flow downstream to us. So so how do I understand what’s going on, you know, above I hate all of the, like, flood references we’re making today and the fires. Like, it feels very destructive.

Jon Johnson:
I’m in the sun’s room this morning from the floodwaters. So

Jenny Calvert:
Ugh. I’m sorry about that. But I mean, it is. You know, we do get the byproduct of a lot of things that flow downstream organizationally. So how do I go up and get a good pulse on what’s going on? Where are they coming from? You know, what, what are the trends in the baselines organizationally that I need to keep in mind and or then think forward to, as Larry mentioned, when I’m going to kind of work cross functionally, to start creating plans.

Jon Johnson:
Got it. What about you, Paul?

Parul Bhandari:
Yeah. I mean, I

Jon Johnson:
I can’t just say what they said either.

Parul Bhandari:
You guys said all the good stuff. Okay. Alright. Well, here, I’ll tell you one of my favorite things that ever happened and it it it it’s not possible in every company, but I wish I could do this in every company. In the first, like, 2 weeks of being there, you have to meet with every team. And the leader of every team has to meet with all the new hires. So we, like, set up these calls that they would, like, be there on once a month, and you’d have to go and do it. And I think no matter what level of the new people coming in or you being that new person coming in, there was so much learned about the functions in the company.

Parul Bhandari:
There was a baseline of, like, respect that we all gained of what people do. Because many times people will say to you, like, what do you do in customer success? I don’t even know. You take take take that time if possible upfront to educate your new hires, and that would be me. I think that is, like, super valuable, and it it goes along with the listening to a right. But, like, you’re also just maybe starting to ask questions like, what are you incentivized by? Like, do you know what what’s your goal on the on the scorecard? Because most of us don’t ask that question and don’t pay attention. And I often had, like, team members that would be like, I’m frustrated because product’s not listening to me because they won’t build this. We’re we’re talking a lot about product teams too. Sorry.

Parul Bhandari:
It’s not on purpose, but, you know, like, people get frustration. It’s like, well, do do we know why? May maybe they have a different goal in mind. Right? Yeah. Maybe just taking time to understand that.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Well, they I feel like there’s a whole another podcast about, like, how we can just, like, teach our CSMs to stop kicking things over to product because I do think that we, we start making, our lives very, very difficult when we stop teaching the customers, how to use our product the way it was built today and not how we will build it for them in the future. Yeah. And I think there’s a huge opportunity in that space. Not that we shouldn’t take feature requests and all that kind of stuff, but, I mean, so many CSMs have this gripe. Right? Yeah. That’s what I would do is I would just shut off the funnel of feature requests.

Jenny Calvert:
We’re gonna do that we’re gonna do that episode. Episode. But when you drill into the bottom of it, John, it’s fear driven. It is. We’re driven by a lot

Jon Johnson:
of fear

Jenny Calvert:
in this function.

Parul Bhandari:
Just think about Oh my god.

Jenny Calvert:
We need to prevent churn. Right?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
We talk

Jon Johnson:
about this a lot.

Jenny Calvert:
Or are we driving success? Just think of those two phrases.

Parul Bhandari:
Which one makes

Jenny Calvert:
you feel better?

Jon Johnson:
Driving success. Driving success.

Jenny Calvert:
Or preventing churn. Right? Preventing churn is, like, get in my little cubby. Like, let’s just insulate and and try to, you know, do our best. So

Jon Johnson:
Say brother.

Jenny Calvert:
There’s a lot of fear in the space, and I think it goes by not necessarily having the things we’re talking about, a foundational definition of what success is, what does great success look like, what are we actually striving for? Not all of the things, but if we got really clear and concise on what we’re doing right now, how are we measuring it, and why does it matter for the business? And let’s just get really great at that. And let’s say no to some other things.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Yeah.

Jenny Calvert:
That was great. We’d have some space to actually do our jobs well and to do what we all got into this industry to do.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. That’s perfect. I think that’s a great place to end. Guys, thank you so much for your time. We’ll put this in the show notes, but where can we find more information about you guys? You have a URL. I know you’re all y’all are all over LinkedIn, but, where can we go to, send folks for you?

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
To success by stage. So we have we’ll we’ll put it all into the invite. We have a, a LinkedIn and we have a nascent website that we are working on. But the best thing to do is you can just email us at success at, success by stage atgmail.com.

Jon Johnson:
Perfect. Awesome. We’ll put those in the show notes as well.

Jenny Calvert:
Yeah. Awesome. Thank you

Jon Johnson:
guys so much. I’m actually really looking forward to that next conversation about about product.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Schedule it.

Jon Johnson:
We’ll have to get that scheduled. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for listening.

Jenny Calvert:
Thank you, John.

Jon Johnson:
Johnson. Thanks, John. Failed on me, so, I’m gonna say goodbye.

Parul Bhandari:
Bye. Bye.

Larry Lawrence Waldman:
Bye, everyone.

Jenny Calvert:
Bye, guys. Bye.