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Kristi Faltorusso:
We’re excited. Yeah. Right, Josh?

Josh Schachter:
What what what if what if Julio did not? We were gonna

Kristi Faltorusso:
kick him out? By up Then we would all drop off the call and let you run the podcast. Yes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Like, PG, which is Meet the

Julio Franco:
Josh Show.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The innovators of companies who have forged incredible customer relationships.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julio, Julio, you’re going like Yeah. They know the music is playing. Right?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Here’s your host, Josh Schechter. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

Josh Schachter:
Julio, don’t don’t worry about it. Just take my hand. I will walk you through this process. You will be fine.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Or you won’t, and that’ll be fine too.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’ll be a great episode if you’re not.

Julio Franco:
Imagine if it’s a train crash. That’ll be hilarious.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, most of them are. Yeah. But you don’t listen, so you wouldn’t know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
In our entire history, there’s only been one episode that we haven’t aired. Uh-uh.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Why did you have to say that? Because now I’m gonna wonder what’s that That’s the goal. That episode?

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. No. No. It’s like the Snyder cut. Right? If the Internet compels us

Josh Schachter:
Same more.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Not gonna

Julio Franco:
raise this.

Josh Schachter:
John. Go ahead.

Julio Franco:
Still not gonna put it.

Josh Schachter:
Like, you can’t intrigue. That’s click bait right there. You can’t treat people, but then not spill the beans.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Isn’t that how we get people to listen? The the the clickbait?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well, you know who’s never listened to the our our podcast show?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Is it Julio?

Josh Schachter:
Yes. It is Julio. That is our special guest today. So on that note That’s true. Perfect segue. I wanna introduce everybody to Julio Franco. Julio is the chief customer officer of Zappy, and, we’re gonna find out more about what Julio does and what Zapy does. Julio, since we didn’t actually take the time to introduce you to my cohost, I’m Josh, by the way, to Christy Falter Russo, the extraordinary queen of customer success.

Josh Schachter:
I hope that’s the best introduction, but that’s what I’m going with.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that. I’m gonna take it. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What’s he gonna say about me?

Josh Schachter:
And John.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. And John. And John. Kind of, like, sums up the last, like, 3 weeks of my life, Josh, by the way. Real quickly. Just Oh,

Julio Franco:
no. And John.

Josh Schachter:
Sidebar on that. Yeah. Okay. But John Johnson,

Kristi Faltorusso:
who is about me.

Josh Schachter:
Well, principal

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s not my title. My title isn’t nice. Well,

Josh Schachter:
I was gonna be product manager, customer success manager. And, actually, at at at user testing. And one of the most knowledgeable people that I know about customer success, and I mean that genuinely, John.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’ll take that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s what’s kept

Julio Franco:
going on.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Worth. We all bring a different perspective from customer success. Our you’ve got Josh who’s a founder of Update. You’ve got myself who’s chief customer officer at client success, and then John who has kind of mastered the IC role through a leadership lens at user testing. And so all 3 of us bring different and unique perspectives. We’re excited for the conversation today. Julio, you wanna tell us a little bit about yourself?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Let’s cut everything out up until that point. I think we’re doing good. No.

Josh Schachter:
We never do. We never do.

Julio Franco:
I don’t think you should cut it. I think that’ll be

Kristi Faltorusso:
We don’t cut anything, Julio. This is, like it’s just raw, so we’re just gonna go.

Julio Franco:
One take? I love it. Absolutely. I’ll tell you a little bit about myself as well. So as Josh mentioned, I’m the chief customer officer of a company that is called Zapy. Zapy is a consumer insights platform, which could mean a million things. But ultimately, what we help do, is make sure that large innovative organizations can bring the voice of consumers as they’re innovating and as they’re putting communications out. So we basically bring the voice of of consumers to the biggest organizations in the world.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Who are some of your customers? Are you allowed to say?

Julio Franco:
Yeah. Because some of them are I mean, we get on stage together. I was actually I was in New York 2 days ago on stage with, VP of Insights at PepsiCo. So that’s a big customer of ours we work with. All the organizations that do a lot of, b to c innovation communications Okay. Are kinda like the organizations we work with. So to name a few, PepsiCo, McDonald’s. We work a lot with SoFi, Rekopen and Keeser, Mars, just like the big, big b to c companies worldwide.

Josh Schachter:
What’s, like, the number one need problem that you’re solving for them, especially this year that that, you know, that you’re, yeah, that you’re solving?

Julio Franco:
So organizations of that caliber need to drive breakthrough innovation that is not gonna cannibalize their their, you know, their current book, and then communicate that effectively so that consumers will try their product and continue using their products. There’s a lot of innovation has set up, quite a bit because smaller organizations are able to innovate a lot quicker than the big ones. Yeah. Put stuff all over the place and kinda like like little ants eating up the heels of the big, of the big organizations. So they need to keep up with innovation to make sure that that does not happen and they won’t steal their market market share.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So you’re basically at the engine that makes your customers the anteater. Is that is that correct?

Julio Franco:
No. We wanna make sure we make our, our customers really fast elephants that we get to squash hands or buy them.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Let’s just stick with this metaphor, guys. So this is going great.

Josh Schachter:
It’s actually it’s actually the man eater. He he’s referencing hall and oats.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. That’s great.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Very interesting. So I

Julio Franco:
told you about my company. I didn’t tell about me. So, you know, as I mentioned before, I’m the CCO, which in my space is really interesting because my job Wait.

Josh Schachter:
My space is still around?

Kristi Faltorusso:
He’s Tom. Nice.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Everybody that’s listening to this podcast is like, wait. What?

Julio Franco:
I know. Right?

Josh Schachter:
I’ve dated all of us.

Julio Franco:
In, like, 1998, Josh, but that’s okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Hey, guys. You would all be in my top 8. That’s all I’m saying.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, samesies.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, Julio. You’re here to talk.

Julio Franco:
I don’t believe that, by the way. There is no chance I would make it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No, Julio. You’re definitely not in the top 8, but that’s okay. Like, he just wanted to feel inclusive. John is big on that. He wants to make sure that everyone feels like they are part of this conversation even though he very much would like to exclude you.

Josh Schachter:
I thought you said Josh. I thought you didn’t believe that you were here to talk based on all the the talking overview that we’ve done. But okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julio, tell us more about what it means to be the chief customer officer at Zappy.

Julio Franco:
Be what I wanted to make was my job is to bring our customers to the center of everything that we do as I’m helping our customers to the same with theirs, which is absolutely what I love about my job.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What does your organization look like? So what what yeah. Tell us a bit about that.

Julio Franco:
So I am responsible for everything that is post sale. So customer success we have a division called customer expertise, which is just, like, a very technically heavy organization because everything that we do is market research, and we have a a group of research specialists that focus on that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, that’s cool.

Julio Franco:
Technical support as well as an organization that makes sure that all the, we call it, field work. So making sure that all the surveys have all of the things that they need in order to drive the statistical relevance that our that our results require.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You’re speaking my language, and you you obviously know us, user testing.

Julio Franco:
Of course.

Josh Schachter:
Are you competitive?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I we no. I think that we are a vendor. There there is some overlap. I think some of the surveys, you know, we’re definitely focused on, things that haven’t been built built yet. And from what I’ve seen and kinda what I’m reading, you’re very much like, this is where the customers are. We’re building the experience, not necessarily from a prototype standpoint, but from an actual on platform, standpoint. So I think there’s some crossover, but, anybody that is, like, focused on customer experience has my attention. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’d love to hear, you said the words keeping the customer at the center. When you’re looking at it through the lens of customer experience or consumer experience, depending if it’s b to b or b to c, how do you how do you how do you encourage these folks that maybe don’t have a research background that, like, this is kind of like this is what I do every day. Right? It’s like, I’m not a researcher, but I talk to researchers. So how are you advocating for that centricity maybe outside of, like, core research, but, within your organization?

Julio Franco:
So we try to make it as easy as possible for someone to get the feedback and act on it. Traditionally, market research has been big, technical, and complex, where in order for you to do a piece of research, you needed to be a full researcher and know about sampling and all of these crazy crazy things. What we’ve done at Zapier is we’ve kinda, like, simplified it to a point where we have created different methodologies for a particular business objective they’re trying to achieve. So one of them could be, I have a bunch of ideas and I need to know which ones to throw away. So we have a solution that addresses that and very simply just tells you that, and we’ve made it very quick and very inexpensive. So no longer do you have a barrier of entry if you need to, I don’t know, test a new product that you wanna launch or a new pricing point or a new path. It’s all very easy to do.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mhmm.

Julio Franco:
Within 15 minutes, you, you know, you launch a research. A day later, you get results. All very actionable, and you can say, you know what? That pack can use these optimizations or our merger account. So we’ve tried to make it as easy as we can.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that. That’s great.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julio, is that through, like, is it through, like, surveys? I guess I’m still having a hard time, like, understanding, like, what is the technology delivering? Because I would think market research is still, like, interacting with people. Like, I’m still thinking of, like, the Coke and Pepsi challenge from the eighties where people, like, sat and tasted both Coke and Pepsi and had to pick which one. That was so fun. So, that’s not what you’re doing. So what is your technology like, how is it orchestrating what you’ve just described?

Julio Franco:
So if I’m gonna use your Coke and Pepsi challenge

Kristi Faltorusso:
Please.

Julio Franco:
It’s something similar, but everything we do is conceptual and at scale. So people are in some ways looking at Pepsi versus Coke but in an Right. But in a concept form, all survey based. So yeah. Let’s assume that you’re Pepsi. You’re gonna launch a new product. You put a concept together. You put it in our platform and then send it to hundreds of consumers that are gonna give you their feedback around your concept.

Julio Franco:
And then compare

Kristi Faltorusso:
it again. Telling you, like, do we think your idea is good?

Julio Franco:
Exactly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Before they move forward with anything. Okay.

Julio Franco:
That’s right. And then as you go through the process, you do that at every point in at every step. Right? So is this idea of, I don’t even know. Give me an idea for a for a Pepsi product, Christy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I would say, like, okay. We’re gonna do no. No. Okay. That was horrible. That didn’t, obviously, that didn’t land. For also people who were using MySpace, they probably also drank Pepsi clear. They’re probably drinking Pepsi clear while they were picking out their top 8.

Josh Schachter:
Crystal crystal Pepsi.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Crystal Pepsi. Crystal Pepsi. To us. Okay. So, like, let’s just say we wanna kind of rip off what Doctor Pepper is doing with all these, like, vanilla and lime, these dirty soda concepts that Utah has so dominated. So Pepsi wants to compete. They wanna throw some flavors together. They wanna do, like, a lime vanilla cherry combo.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay.

Julio Franco:
There you go. So you do that. So then you create a concept of your what did you say? Lime, cherry, vanilla?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Lime, cherry, and vanilla.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Dirty sodas. Dirty soda.

Julio Franco:
So we’re gonna call them dirty Pepsi’s. Exactly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And you

Julio Franco:
put all of your concepts of dirty Pepsi, and you’re gonna send them out to consumers of they’re called CSDs. Right? Carbonarian soft drinks, and they’ll give you their opinion. And then based on that, you’ll compare them to a large database of other ideas that you that you may or may not have.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And then decide which one we wanna move forward with.

Julio Franco:
That’s exactly right. And then Cool. You test the name, and then you test the pack to make sure that it sounds on the shelf and then the advertising associated with it. And then you can I can see where you guys are going? So then you’re gonna launch your ad for dirty Pepsi, and it’s probably not gonna do really well. You know? Yeah. You know, ideally, we’ll help you refine that so that when you, as a product manager for new innovations at PepsiCo, launches your product, it flies off the shelves and not get stuck there and you lose your job.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So what Yeah. Very good. So what does the account team look like to support some of these customers? Because it sounds like they are acting almost as an extension of the research department. So it seems like they’re they’re pretty embedded in these com in these customers. Right? It’s not just like, hey. We’re here to do a QBR. I hope that’s that’s not what’s happening.

Julio Franco:
Yeah. So it’s definitely not what’s happening. I want to make

Kristi Faltorusso:
an assumption.

Julio Franco:
Like the battle that we have, which is an interesting one. Our our folks, our customer success managers are very involved, in kinda like the day to day of of our customers. Mhmm. And make recommendations around how you can utilize our platform as best as possible. But the little trick that we always have to fight is our customers that come from a world of full service market research agencies will want for my team to tell them what to do.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right.

Julio Franco:
So they will want our folks to basically say your dirty Pepsi idea is not a good idea, but that’s not the role. Right? The role is helping them using the data

Kristi Faltorusso:
that the

Julio Franco:
platform provides, Exactly. To get to that conclusion for themselves. So that’s a little bit of the of the of the battle that we fight where we’re an organization that is trying to scale, and that’s not how you scale because all of a sudden you become a tech enabled services company, which is not what we wanna be.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right. So what are you doing, and, like, what programs and processes are you putting in place to manage that? Because that’s not that’s not a unique challenge. Right? Right? I think there’s a lot of organizations that are kinda stuck like that. I know that I am. I know John talks about that a little bit too. So how are you guys building a model where you’re separating out we’ll do a little church and state here, but, like, the technology versus the services.

Josh Schachter:
Can I can I just say that that, like, if I was on Julio’s team, and I had no accountability for my opinion, because I wasn’t really supposed to give my opinion, that would be amazing? I’d be like, that idea is awesome. That sucks. You should be fired. That’s that’s a killer idea. You would just go around like strategists.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right? That’s

Josh Schachter:
that’s the strategy. Consultants.

Julio Franco:
McKinsey. Consult yes.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Just go around giving your opinion when it doesn’t actually matter. It’d be amazing.

Julio Franco:
The only problem is that you would need to back that up with numbers. So

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s not talk about numbers.

Kristi Faltorusso:
A lot of hand wavy the sharpest customer success.

Julio Franco:
Difference between the research that I do and John’s research clearly. Just like that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Whatever. This is tough. Over the fence. God. I love it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Real uncomfortable. Okay. So how are you making this magic happen?

Julio Franco:
We we started this business about 10 years ago, and we’re disrupting the an industry that is services first. Yep. And throughout those 10 years, we’ve we’ve learned a ton. And then when we started looking into our operational efficiency, we realized that the customers that we have, that operate with us in a systematic way are operating in a much more efficient way, but they’re also more successful. So what we are trying to do, and this is, like, very much something that I’m working on this year with me and, you know, a lot of people in the team, is we are re onboarding all of our customers. Mhmm. And it’s a that’s a tough challenge because we have something like, you know, 300 customers that we need to go and re onboard and basically tell them, hey. The way that we’re operating is not optimal neither for you or for us.

Julio Franco:
We need to make sure that we set up a system based on all the work that you have already done with us, which is fine. Right? It’s it’s honestly not rocket science. It’s just identifying a queue like a like a fee a few key things that they need to do and do in a recurring way. But it’s hard when it’s very comfortable. Right? You have a friendly and knowledgeable person that probably sees more concepts or pieces of advertising than anybody else. It’s nice to ask them their opinion. But the truth is

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt you.

Julio Franco:
All I was gonna say is He’s fine. Part of the reason why we exist is because when you leave your knowledge as an organization to your to your vendor Mhmm. You’re at a disadvantage. That’s not what we’re trying to do.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
You’re probably not the only person that’s, like, considering reeducation, re onboarding of their customer base. So, actually, it would be interesting if you walked the listeners through your entire thought process of going through that. You know, what what you what what what were the triggers of that decision? How you’re how you’re planning it? Where you are in that process right now, what the outcomes and the goals are for that process. I think that’d be really educational for folks.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh also likes whiteboards. So if you have a whiteboard that you can map this out

Julio Franco:
Yeah. I would love I love whiteboards as well. I used to have one in my old house in the kitchen, and then we moved, and we don’t have one anymore.

Josh Schachter:
Is this your house? Are you in your house right now?

Julio Franco:
This is my house. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
That’s so cool.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love the exposed ceilings. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And that brick?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Where do you live? What’s your address?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I live in Social Security number.

Julio Franco:
I appreciate your time.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mother’s maiden name?

Julio Franco:
Pet name? I live in Charlestown, just, like, outside of Boston. Mhmm. Oh, nice. Neighborhood. It’s a cool neighborhood. It’s called the Navy Yard, and many of these buildings are historical buildings. This building is called the rope walk, and it’s about 5 blocks long because they used to, within this building, they used to stretch rope, and then they made, you know, condos out of it. That’s why we have the break and the exposed ceiling.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, that’s so cool. It’ll be so nice when they finish building it.

Julio Franco:
Right? That’s what I that’s what I keep telling them.

Kristi Faltorusso:
View of the Charles from the Navy Yard? It’s

Julio Franco:
No. We don’t. We’re about a block away from the marie from Laika. It’s right north of the Charles. Okay. But not quite.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Cool. Christy, are you satisfied with the location?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I am. I just dropped a pin on a map, and we’re gonna try to see if I can Google Maps to go find his exact location.

Julio Franco:
Just find a really long building. I’m sure you guys. I just I trust you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The long building. Got it. On it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. But I wanna hear I wanna hear Josh’s answer the answer to Josh’s question.

Julio Franco:
So I’ll give you, like, the the the whole story. From for a long time, we’ve had this thing about customers that get it and those that don’t get it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right.

Julio Franco:
And those that get it tend to be the ones that, you know, in, like, 2, 3 years or whatever, they’re more successful with us.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mhmm.

Julio Franco:
Also, the ones that our teams love working with, and, you know, they’re the ones that we are we’re able to scale the most with. So then as we’re looking into how to scale our organization, we started assessing what does getting it actually mean. So what are those things that these customers have done in order to quote, unquote get it? And we realized that the that the that the key point was it’s organizations that wanna utilize our our platform to overhaul their innovation and advertising process. So it’s organizations that are not coming to us for one project, but rather for a system that will they they will use 200 times, 500 times. Because at the end of the day, the questions that you have to answer for 1 or for 200 are the same ones. What are the methodologies that I need to use? Who are the people that I need to survey? What do the results look like? Who do I wanna compare myself against? That’s basically it. But the problem was customers that didn’t get it were coming to us and asking those same questions the 50 times they would use us. Those that did get it were coming in, answering that question once, and then utilizing the platform 200 times.

Julio Franco:
So and then I ran a bunch of numbers. So I figured out what is the the average ARR, what is the number of, CSM hours that I need to manage a $1,000,000 and realize and then put them into buckets, and then realize that those that we call non systematized required 2 or sometimes 3 times the amount of hours that a customer that a systematized requires. So then, you know, we went to our board, and the board loved the idea. So it said, guess what? You’re systematizing all of your customers in 2024, and that’s how we started.

Josh Schachter:
How do you do that?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Because it seems like it’s a a lot of, like, education, because you’re changing like, you’re now responsible for being the change agents for your customers as opposed to your customers driving change in their own organizations. So, like, how are you driving that educational process with them? And then what do you do with customers that are resistant? I have so many questions.

Julio Franco:
So there’s a few things that we’re doing, and this has been a project that we’ve we’re we’ve been going through it since q 4 of last year, and then it really started in in January of this year. The first thing that we realized that we needed to do was tell our customers why do they care. They don’t care about our operational efficiency, but the truth is they care about theirs. So some of the some of the tricks that we’ve used is we’ve derived the amount of hours that it takes them to be able to utilize our system when they’re coming at it as every day is a brand new day and then quantify that for them. Some of the numbers that I remember are a user that is non systematized, they require about 11 hours of their time before they actually conduct the research. Somebody that is systematized requires about 30 minutes, And these guys don’t have the time. Right? These are teams that are overly stretched, understaffed. The whole thing within the insights industry right now is you gotta do more with less, and the reason why they do business with Zapier is for agility.

Julio Franco:
That’s our thing. Right? Like, we’re the quickest in the marketplace, but the truth is they were not becoming agile enough because they were in their own way. Because they were asking all of these questions over and over and over, so we just brought that to them, number 1. Number 2, we started using examples about let me take a step back. Not only do you become a lot more operation operationally efficient, the other thing about utilizing this in a systematic way is that your data becomes more valuable because you’re no longer answering the same question with different types of answers. You’re doing it the same way. So now an organization that utilizes our platform is able to look at 500 data points and make a bigger decision based on those 500 instead of, like, the data being all over the place. So we normalizing data is also something that organizations really want.

Julio Franco:
You we all we all know the whole thing with garbage in, garbage out with AI. So now you have a much more robust data asset. So those are all things that we utilize, and we we don’t have, like, a specific playbook because it’ll depend on that customer. For some of them, it will be the complexity of, you know, getting a PO, so we wanna systematize them because of that. For some others, it will be I only have, whatever, 24 hours to respond to a stakeholders. We go that way. So it really depends on the on the on the customer.

Josh Schachter:
Is there a part of it oh, sorry. Go ahead, John. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We all have so many questions.

Julio Franco:
No. No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But this is actually really good. You’re leading you’re leading us into a a pretty cool moment, I think, for this. You this was your board directive to kind of re onboard your entire customers for 2024. You’ve got a group of CSMs. You’ve got your your experienced consultants. I don’t I forget what you call them, the folks that are, like, the researchers Yep. And then and the folks under your team. So Yep.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I would love to hear how, a, you took all of this data. You got buy in from the board. You got buy in from leadership, and then you took it to your team. Yep. I think this is kinda where I’m trying to get to right now is how do we how do we roll this out so that everybody’s swimming in the same direction with the same kind of goals? Like, what are if you can, obviously, generalized information, nothing nothing secret here. But, how did you how are you encouraging your CSMs to to get this done? What are the KPIs? What are the what are the new, you know, MBO structures? Like, how are you Yep. How are you incentivizing folks to get on board with this across your whole organization?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I wanna add one more thing to John so, Julio, you can answer this with it also. But did you have to increase resources? So is there, like, an addition to subtract later? Because it sounds like you’re giving them a heavy lift to do this on re onboarding. So I’m just wondering, did you have to Yeah. Was there some staff augmentation or some kind of reprioritization of their time and effort right now to get that done so that eventually they can scale back?

Julio Franco:
So let me answer that one real quick. Of course

Kristi Faltorusso:
not. Sorry, John.

Julio Franco:
Of course, we didn’t get, you know, more talent. Wouldn’t it be nice if we just They didn’t just write you a

Kristi Faltorusso:
blank check.

Julio Franco:
You know? Let’s just get, you know, 50 people to be able to do that now. We we we didn’t have

Kristi Faltorusso:
them stop doing other things to do this.

Julio Franco:
So we we are having to do some ruthless prioritization. So the answer to that is yes. So let me tell you and and we are very much we tell our customers to test and learn, and we have to believe that. So initially, what I what we try to do was to bring in the account teams along. And the account team, my like, the folks under my responsibility are customer success managers, but we also have account managers that focus on the commercial side of the relationship as well. So we basically showed them all of this stuff and said, hey, folks. You should re onboard your customers. We started, an implementation onboarding team last year.

Julio Franco:
So say, you know, feed them through onboarding and implementation, and let’s get your customers operating as efficiently and as successfully as they can. That failed. We tried that for a quarter, and it didn’t work because, kinda like what Christie is saying, those folks are busy. Yeah. They’re really, really busy. They have to drive renewals for the account management team. They have to, like, wrangle a bunch of cats because there’s people you know, these are decentralized organizations, and that was really, really tough. And then CSM, same thing.

Julio Franco:
They need to answer the the question where Christy asks if dirty Pepsi is a good one. So it became really, really hard. At the end of the quarter, I had a I had a session in London. Our global headquarters are in London. And we met with the folks from the it’s the CE team, which is called customer expertise. And they include the implementation folks that do the onboarding as well as these research experts that I was talking about. And I I actually love this because they were the ones that said, you know what? We we can do it. There was a little bit of a nudge because one of our one of the members of our of of our board made a recommendation to have a SWAT team do it, and there is no better team than these folks because they have seen what good looks like.

Julio Franco:
So what we’re doing is we arm them with all of the data. So we have all of these criteria of something that, you know, that they will need to be systematized. So now they’re they monitor the data. They have targets associated with it, and they’re the ones reaching out to the account teams and saying, hey. Your customer is very close to being systematized. We just need to do these 3 things. Help me get a meeting with them. We’ll we’ll we’ll get them in place, and we’ll, you know, we’ll get them down that path.

Julio Franco:
So that’s how that’s why we’ve done it since the end of q one. And so far, I’m not saying, like, fully so good, but we’re I think we’re gonna achieve our targets hard as hell, and those guys are doing a fantastic job. But, you know, that’s that’s what we found successful.

Josh Schachter:
What what are your targets?

Julio Franco:
We need to our book of business is made up of a good number of customers that are large. We define large as ARR over a $100,000 Mhmm. And then a ton that are long tail. We basically need to take all of our, our customers that are within 100 k, ARR within our ICP, so ideal customer profile, and systematize them by the end of the year. And it’s

Josh Schachter:
And do you have a hypothesis on the like, are are you tracking the outcomes for those customers pre and post?

Julio Franco:
We are, and we are and we’re doing it regularly. And it’s a little bit early, but the indication show, number 1, that we are getting more efficient, and number 2, that customers that are systematized are a lot more efficient and are growing higher than than No. That are not.

Jon Johnson:
This sounds, you did like, the age old question is, like, what’s valuable for the company, obviously, because this is gonna save revenue, it’s gonna obviously increase your, you know or decrease churn and increase retention and growth. Right? How what are some of the successes that your team has found with getting buy in from busy customers? I mean, change management is the hardest thing. Right? So, yes, it’s important that you reintroduce and reonboard, but I’m sure that a huge cohort within your, you know, large customers are like, I don’t have time for that. That’s great. Like, I’d love to, but I don’t have time for that. So how do you balance that? Like, CSMs are so good at doing everything and taking all of it on their plates. But, like, talk to me about that balance a little bit.

Julio Franco:
So it’s a it’s a time investment. You’re right. People don’t have time for stuff, which is exactly the reason. Now I’m giving you kinda, like, pitch if you’re a customer. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly the reason why they need to go through that systematization process. Yeah.

Julio Franco:
Right? So it’s it’s it’s been a wait, and we try to make it as easy as possible for them to the point where we’re doing this thing called and I don’t know if I should say this publicly, but I also don’t think that my customers lead

Kristi Faltorusso:
into this call.

Julio Franco:
We call it silent setup. We systematize them without without them knowing. Yeah. We already know the way that our their organization works. We’re not gonna ask them the questions. We’re just gonna tell them about it. Yeah. We’ve done that with a large QSR organization globally.

Julio Franco:
There were 2 teams that were using using our platform almost flawlessly. We just took that set up and then expanded across the board, and said, this is how you’re gonna use this. And Yeah. We saved them time. We enabled them to get the benefits that some of the other buying centers, that have And are they

Josh Schachter:
are they loving it?

Julio Franco:
They are loving it.

Josh Schachter:
Didn’t get that.

Julio Franco:
Absolutely loving it. How

Josh Schachter:
Sorry. That was a letter turn here. That was your everybody’s head. I’m getting out of the way now.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. Josh, we love you. It’s okay. I I’m curious how like, what is your you have CSMs. How many CSMs do you have, and they own renewals. Right? So they’re they have a or do you have renewal managers?

Julio Franco:
Yeah. We have the account manager actually owns renewals. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What, just like a just one one word answer, what do you feel when I say QBR, what do you say? That’s it. That’s all we needed.

Julio Franco:
There you go.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Next question.

Josh Schachter:
No. No. No. John, I was thinking, like, when I say QBR, you say QBR, but

Kristi Faltorusso:
We can’t say that right now.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That too,

Josh Schachter:
but then Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m told I need to swear less. So Oh, I can’t.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Who told you that?

Julio Franco:
Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Did I? I don’t know. Maybe the maybe the producer.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Feel like a mandate that came from Josh.

Josh Schachter:
No. No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
My from my side.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s fine. Moving on. Julio, what is you’re halfway through the year. You’ve got some key successes. Yep. You’ve got a target, and a bit of a looming deadline to the end of 2024. What are you taking into the back into into h two here, for your organization? Not just for your metrics, but how are you making sure that your people are, like, not burnt out and not dying on the vine here?

Julio Franco:
That that’s the key thing. I so I think we’re gonna achieve our our targets. I I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem, but we are working our folks really, really hard because we’re again, we’re doing a lot of investment right now and to what we expect will be and what we have seen early early shoots of it being really successful moving forward. But right now, we’re right in a crunch. Yeah. We’re in a crunch where we just need to get out of that really quickly. So I think that I mean, we’re we’re hiring a few people, and that’ll that’ll help a bit. But the truth is, it’s right now, we’ll drive that better performance and better work life balance for our folks because, again, you’re moving away from a customer emailing you 30 times a week to one that is not.

Julio Franco:
So that’s something that we’re taking, we’re taking with us. Now the really interesting one about this is we have a great relationship with most of our customers because because we’re there to answer their question.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Julio Franco:
So, you know, when Christy is the Pepsi co manager comes in and I’m her CSM and I got her, that’s fantastic. If we now all of a sudden live in a world of perfect systematization, I’ll never get a chance to actually build that relationship with Christie. So one of the things that I’m bringing in, probably not for h two, but rather for next year is, how do I do that and maintain that level of relationship building and trust without having the need? So, that is one where

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, man.

Julio Franco:
It’s bouncing around my head, which is what what do we do? So do we do, like, a white glove for the first 3 months, but then how do you adjust behavior? That’s something that is really, really important for me.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s interesting. I actually really love that. I feel like that maybe there’s a deeper conversation, maybe another podcast that we can do about this, but we talk about, like, reducing support tickets and reducing outreach and reducing effort and friction and all these things. But traditional CS has usually built everything around those friction points and those pain points. So if we’ve made everything as slick as, you know, the rain outside my window right now, then the CSM is sitting there going like, but I need to talk to them, but they don’t need to talk to me. Right? So how do you get them to want to talk

Julio Franco:
to you? That’s not really

Kristi Faltorusso:
the question that I’m asking you, but I love that you are thinking through that as, like, hey. If we do remove these things that have traditionally built out these things, what what are we gonna fill them in with? And I I like that you have moved this instead of, like, doing doing more with less, like, you’re doing better with what you have. And you’re looking at the tools that you have, and you’re saying, hey. We’re gonna do this better. Like, not just we’re gonna do more because we have digital or whatever, but, I think it’s a really intelligent approach. And I’m excited to hear in h one next year what you focus on, cap coming off of this year.

Julio Franco:
If I’m able to crack it, I’ll let you know. But it is a challenge. Right? Because in one hand, we need to drive operational efficiency because, obviously, we would like for our numbers to look as close to, like, a clean path as possible.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Julio Franco:
While at the same time, what I what I don’t wanna do is to throw the baby with the bathwater and, like, have a situation where our users don’t even know who we are or who our CSMs are. Yep. You know, right now, we have the benefit that, like, our customers really love us. They are advocates. They get on stage with us. It’s really, really nice. And then when you ask them, if you were to, right now, go and poll a 100 customers at Zapier, a 100 users, what they would say is that they love the people. So it’s a it’s a bit of a challenge because I’m trying to make sure that I make people more efficient without losing that human touch, and that’s that’s how I do that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Julio, how are you changing this in the sales process? So how how are you ensuring that you don’t have more customers coming in into the portfolio that have misset expectations on how they’re gonna work with you and your team?

Julio Franco:
That’s a good that’s a good question, Kristine.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I only ask good questions, Julio. So

Julio Franco:
We will determine we will I’m a researcher. We’ll determine that by the end of the podcast.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s amazing.

Julio Franco:
The expectation management is key. And one of the things that I do have to give credit to our head of sales and to the sales team is that they are changing the expectation. Because our customers are coming in expecting a tech enabled service, you know, service company, and what they’re saying from the beginning is that’s not who we are. Now that being said, we’re also introducing a professional services layer where if that is what they want, they can do that, but they

Kristi Faltorusso:
have people

Julio Franco:
for it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And that’s a different team. Correct. Yep.

Julio Franco:
And that’s the key. So the key is we can give you what you need, you just have to pay differently. So if you want to operate independently, that’s fine. We’ll get you implemented and ready to go. But if you need self if you need to full serve, within your implementation, we’ll incorporate that consultant that will come in and will do that for you. So we’re kinda like asking them to put their money where their mouth is.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Is that Do you guys work with any partners? Oh, sorry.

Josh Schachter:
Are they operating right now, that that professional services or you’re standing that up?

Julio Franco:
We are. We we have had it for a couple of years, but it hasn’t been seamlessly integrated into our offering. So we do have it, but it’s but it’s but it’s friction full because it’s, like, at a project level, so we’re changing that. So by September, we’re gonna be able to include it and make it seamless for everybody or at least, you know, that’s what that’s the intention, to make sure that it becomes one of the options of how you do business with us, not, fixed to when you have a problem.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Man, we’re man, I love this. You’re keying in on on things that has been, like, running around in my head. And, Chris, you talk about this too. It’s like, let the customer tell you how they need it. Like, truly, truly, truly onboarding, QBRs, data, reporting, just ask the customer really simply, and it it’s so simple. I love the way that you frame that, Julio. I’m sorry. I’m gassing you up on this, but, like, it it’s good to hear, like, that you’re in the middle of this and you’re seeing successes and, obviously, like, running into challenges.

Kristi Faltorusso:
How’s the team feeling? Like, are they are they starting to feel is if they’re just listening, the face that Julio made was worse than when I mentioned QBRs. So

Julio Franco:
They’re they’re stretched. They’re really, really stretched because there’s, you know, there’s a there’s a few things. Right? So we’re we’re driving double digit growth this year In some that’s that’s revenue based. In usage terms or, you know, some of other decisions and experiments that we’re do we’re we’re we’re driving, we’re running we’re running, like, 4 x to work that we were doing, so they’re actually really busy. Yeah. And we’re and we’re trying to reeducate the market. So they’re stretched. I’m just, you know, being completely transparent and honest about it, but I hope that they they stick to it because, you know, on the other side, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be a lot better.

Julio Franco:
Right? Like, they’ll be able to work with customers to get it. All of the customers should get it, and that just makes it a lot better because you’re not struggling and feeling like you’re hitting your your head against the wall, you know, reinvent reinventing the wheel every single day.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I like that this has this has, like, a target and an end date, like, a an end state. I know it’s not ever gonna be perfect. There’s always gonna be customers that you’re kinda working through this, but you’ll get into the habits. You’ll build the calluses and the stamina that you need to get them. Oh, you know what? We actually learned this. This is a customer that needs re onboarded. Let’s put them in the in that process. And maybe there’s, like, an intelligent segmentation that you do with different types of skills of CSMs that you can, you know, specialize in the future.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And if you do use that idea, please send me, some money.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wait, Julio. I have one more question on this. Are you guys, like, compensating your CSMs for this project? Like, do they have a spiff or some kinda, like, incentive or bonus, like, if we successfully complete this project by the end of the year? Because you’ve mentioned that they’re stretched many times. You also said how important your people are to your customers. Sounds like you guys are a people centric business. So how are you how are you going to help them feel rewarded for going above and beyond?

Julio Franco:
So we’re linking this to the variable compensation of the CET Mhmm. That are the ones looking into it and saying, hey. Let’s go through that process. We haven’t we’re not directly compensating customers based on based on this, you know, based on the systematization. What will come from that is they’ll be able to be a lot more efficient with their book, And, you know, they’re they’re they’re in this journey where the whole point of our organization is to scale, and, you know, that’s that’s the intention. They know that next year, we’re not gonna have a massively bigger team. We’re gonna have growth targets. That’s just the reality the reality of it.

Julio Franco:
And in full transparency, we’ve lost a few folks. Mhmm. We lost a few folks that, you know, are that and I get it. They just don’t they don’t wanna be part of the journey, but that’s the journey we’re in. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. And that’s fair. Honestly, like, I we have this conversation all the time. It’s like, we we want we need people to be in it, but you have to be committed to this. And this is what the work is, and this is what the role calls for. And if that’s not a fit for you right now, that’s okay. Then go find what is appropriate. Because I know that people be happy doing work that feels fulfilling and in line with what they wanna be doing than trying to force somebody to do something that just doesn’t feel good for them

Julio Franco:
right now. So Absolutely.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Awesome. Okay. So one of the things that we also like to do is kind of this future forward thing where we ask our guests, what do you that. Why are you shaking your head, Kristy?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m just saying, Julio, he makes these things up, and he’s No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I don’t. I we’ve we’ve asked. What

Kristi Faltorusso:
what do you what

Kristi Faltorusso:
do you wanna see? Oh my gosh. Okay. I’m gonna ask the question now, Julio. Is everybody prepared?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yes. Let’s go.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What do you wanna see in the future of customer success? Like, from your vantage point, is there a big swing or a big change or a stabilizing factor that you wanna see in the industry moving forward? Other than Christie’s dog stopping the barking.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Sorry. I

Julio Franco:
don’t know about your dog.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, she’s so bad.

Julio Franco:
Is she? I think I’m sure she’s super cute. Anyway, my dog would been doing the same thing, but getting groomed today. I think you know what I would really like to see is so this this whole movement around digital

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Julio Franco:
Digital CS and all that stuff. Right? For a long time, I’ve had this thought, which is digital as a program is not a segment. We’re currently trying out digital with, you know, our kinda like that long tail of customers that we have, but in in a in a in a world where I have one CSM directly engaging with, I don’t know, a 150 users, all important from large organizations, some of those users are gonna be are gonna require more kinda like in person 1 1 than others. Right? So you think of a think of PepsiCo. Right? They have hundreds of insights users. Some of them will use it on a regular basis, some won’t. I don’t need for a CSM to start building a relationship with those that, you know, use our platform 7 times a year, but I do want them to be able to take whatever program we have with them and scale it to those folks and make it available. That’s still not as easy as I wish it were.

Julio Franco:
It’s it’s it’s still more complex. It’s not it’s not as plug and play as I would like it to be, and I think that we have technology that it’s getting there, but it’s still not to the point where I can just give a small tech stack to a CSM and say, replicate yourself in multiple languages to your users across the board. But how amazing would that be? Right? This person talks to the team leads, and then they have literally people that speak 20 languages. If there was something that I could do that will take a video that they record, and I know this somewhat exists, but translate it into a language, put it into a place within the platform that anybody can access it, then that’s how you can scale yourself in a digital way. I would love that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. You said digital is a program, not a segment, and I’m stealing that as well. I I love it, and it aligns with a lot of the things that we’ve talked about on this pod in the past. So, thank you so much for that. I appreciate it.

Julio Franco:
Is that when you get to send me money? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So

Kristi Faltorusso:
it sounds like you look even.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Just cancel it out. It’s a it’s a what’s that called?

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s a barter.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s a barter. Got any questions for us, Julio?

Julio Franco:
What do

Kristi Faltorusso:
you wanna learn? You got 10 minutes.

Julio Franco:
Can you tell me how to make that happen? So, no, I do have questions for you folks. No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I would no. But, honestly, the right thing is viewing digital as a program, not a segment. That is the right path. Like, unquestionably, looking at these things as how like, getting all of your customers off of the ground in the same way, That is the purpose of digital, and your people and your white glove are gonna be the nuances of keeping that plane in the air.

Julio Franco:
I I appreciate the validation. Okay. Let me ask you guys a few questions then, which is great because we’re all in this space. And I didn’t I

Kristi Faltorusso:
mean, Josh isn’t. He’s just paying for the podcast. It’s fine.

Julio Franco:
Strange, and toy. It’s fine.

Josh Schachter:
He’s a connector, man. Like, he

Kristi Faltorusso:
He absolutely is a connector.

Julio Franco:
Percent is.

Kristi Faltorusso:
A 100%.

Julio Franco:
And to be to be frank, I still feel like I’m an imposter in this world, in the CS world. Because I come from consumer insights. That’s what I’ve done. Right? So I’ve walked several miles in in the shoes of my customer, which treats me good. But I don’t know. It’s about this whole CS thing. So if you were in my shoes, right, needing to re onboard all of your customers, needing to drive growth this year in operational efficiency and next year, make sure that you, you know, maintain that love that your customers have for you. What would you what would you do or what would you recommend that I do?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I have a few ideas. Christie, do you wanna go first? Are you

Kristi Faltorusso:
Nope. Not touching that 10 foot pole. You wanna know why? I don’t know anything about your business, so I can’t sit here and validate it. There’s too much I don’t know Yeah. For me to say. I would be making assumptions. I think that your approach is right. I did a I did a webinar recently on reonboarding customers, so I think it’s a wonderful strategy that not a lot of companies redeploy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
In fact, we’re doing it again this year for customers who have been with us for a certain amount of years. So anybody who’s been with us for 24 months or longer, offering them an option to re onboard because their strategy probably has changed, personnel has changed, users have changed. So how do we just leverage that as a way to better align the technology to their strategy while educating and enabling them on some of the new functionality and features. So we’re finding that that is a really effective approach. I think it is difficult for us because we don’t have it as a sole focus right now, so we’re kinda doing it while we’re trying to do a bunch of other things. So it sounds like your team definitely has a a focus here because it’s a company driven initiative really coming from the top down with your board, so I love that focus around it. I wish I could have that same focus.

Julio Franco:
I mean,

Kristi Faltorusso:
I guess I could. I’m the leader. Right? I guess I could tell them whatever I want. Maybe I will make that other focus. But we do see a lot of effectiveness in it. Some Some of the challenges, though, that we’ve run into, and you can validate this and I think you have a little bit, but we do see resistance from customers who need it, but they don’t wanna make the investment in their time. Then there’s the lack of education. You know, we’re operating so my customer base, I work for a company called Client Success.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So we are a customer success management platform. Our customers are customer success teams, And we have a challenge of just, you know, maturation and maturity in the space. Right? You have leaders who just they don’t know what they don’t know. And so the education that they lack isn’t education on how to best use our technology. It’s about building their strategy, which to your point, that requires consulting and services that is separate from what my CSMs can provide. Right? Like, they need somebody who would help them design what their programs look like. So, you know, we run into different nuanced challenges that I’m just trying to figure out how do we best approach with the resources we have. Similar to you, I can’t I can’t add any more head count.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right? And in fact, trying to do 10:10 more things, with the things that, you know, with the resources I have today. So just trying to rethink how do we programmatically approach this and and kind of put those efforts where they’re gonna yield the best upside for the business. So, as far as I’m concerned, I love your approach. I think there’s a lot of value in it. I’m not gonna tell you what to do because I don’t know anything else.

Julio Franco:
So let me ask you a question on that, Charles. Let’s assume that it’s 24 24 months down the line for May. It won’t be a focus then. Right? If I need to continue this thing, it’s you know, I won’t be here. What are the things that you have done that you found successful with the approach you’re currently having or the ones that if you had to do it again, you wouldn’t do?

Kristi Faltorusso:
So it’s the investment in the education around customer success best practices and not necessarily just the focus around our technology. So we did make a concerted effort to educate our customers around this. So everything from designing best practice worksheets and providing all this information, it’s not about the product. And And in fact, a lot of the content that we create even just for the community is platform agnostic. So we’re not even saying that you need client success to do these things. We’re trying to offer people a framework around how can you be successful in thinking about designing customer success infrastructure for your business regardless of our software because it starts there. We try to educate them around technology is not your strategy. It’s the the mechanism that will operationalize your strategy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So we know that if this strategy is missing, they can’t be successful with our technology. I don’t care how many notes you log or calls you put in or pulses you update. Those are just tasks and activities, and tasks and activities aren’t results. So how do we get them to think differently about it? And there’s just a big burden around that education because, honestly, I just don’t have the bandwidth to go and educate all these customers the way that they need to because to the point that I responded to your question, everyone’s business is so nuanced. Right? So my education can only go so far without actually truly being a consultant and doing a deep dive into their business to figure out what is the proper design that’s required for them to be most successful. So that’s, like, the big that’s my big gorilla that I carry with me every day. It’s the it’s the weight of I wish I could be that extension for my customers who so desperately need that. But the challenge is is that all these companies, they have limited budgets.

Kristi Faltorusso:
They have limited resources. They can’t even make the investments to get that education or hire a third party consultant to come in and do it for them. Right? So they’re just we’re literally on this hamster wheel of just them struggling, and it’s either we make the investment at no cost because we know that the long term benefit is that they renew and they grow with us. And can we make that investment now? That’s really where we’re at. Right? Like, what is the cost of doing that today, and will that will that ROI actually be there for us, you know, down the line? And it’s it’s we don’t have the data to support if that actually will be the case. Like, if I do a, will it yield c? I don’t know.

Julio Franco:
Mhmm. So that’s where

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m, like, really struggling today, to be honest.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that.

Julio Franco:
Thank you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Do you

Kristi Faltorusso:
love that I’m struggling every day, John? No. I love that. When no one’s here?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, no. I I actually wish that, you start sending us Wordle updates at 1 o’clock in the morning. But,

Kristi Faltorusso:
So I don’t sleep because I have these problems that I’m trying to

Josh Schachter:
navigate.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Problems. I get it. No. Okay. But I did have one. I just wanted to to, like, tack something on. And and you may be doing this. You didn’t mention mention this in the in the podcast that we just recorded that we’re still recording.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What are you doing, John? I I’m losing the I’m losing the train of out here. One of the things that I found, with building that trust outside of those friction points is is reengaging our CSMs to go on-site with customers and to spend time with them, like, actually in the offices, in dinners, and in kind of, like, ground floor, get out behind the desk. And when you don’t have those friction points, like, I would encourage finding those opportunities to get on-site with your customers, especially as you’re starting to transition more into this, you know, digital tech touch, process to get everybody re enabled and then put the person in front of them that’s gonna help them so that they still build those trust and relationships. Have you have you found success, in that?

Julio Franco:
We have. I didn’t mention it because it’s not strictly part of this, you know, systematization process, but we are doing that. Good. You know, many of our customers are large organizations, and it took them a little little longer to kinda, like, get over the COVID hangover. But now that, you know, most people are actually in offices or at least they’re there a few days a week, we’re encouraging our folks to go and visit them. It makes a a massive difference. Right? Once you once you’re able to, like, spend some time as humans with your customers, it it’s just it makes a difference. Even the time that it takes for you to walk from, you know, the front desk to the conference room, that is something you just cannot replicate on Zoom.

Julio Franco:
Absolutely. And it makes a massive difference.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Absolutely. I love that. Awesome.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. Josh, what

Kristi Faltorusso:
do you got?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So for my advice, Julio

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, no. Buy UpdateAI too. That’s the other thing.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s my advice. And how You know

Kristi Faltorusso:
what I’m saying?

Josh Schachter:
Scale. Yeah. And insights. And and I have so much to say on this topic, but I I think we’re running out of time. So I think we should, you know, we’ll we’ll start off the next episode, John, with my insights. I love that. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julian, thank you so much.

Julio Franco:
That’s why I’m gonna have to listen to it, isn’t it?

Josh Schachter:
That’s your

Kristi Faltorusso:
that’s the hook.

Josh Schachter:
I was

Julio Franco:
about to get advice Yeah. And then we ran out of time, So now you can have to We

Kristi Faltorusso:
call it a click.

Julio Franco:
And hit the bell.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I also get to go and and look it up and chat GPT and figure out what I’m gonna say. So Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Ways.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The cheat code?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. We we, we need it. This has been so great. Out rough here. We didn’t know we’re gonna talk

Kristi Faltorusso:
about it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Awesome. Wait. It didn’t start out rough.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well Gosh. Mean

Julio Franco:
Positive. We

Kristi Faltorusso:
love you, Julio. Julio, would you recommend this podcast to a friend or colleague?

Kristi Faltorusso:
1 to 10. Live NPS.

Josh Schachter:
9 out of 10 guests recommended to other guests.

Julio Franco:
I don’t know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I don’t know. I’m gonna

Julio Franco:
listen to it. I’m gonna have to listen to it. You know?

Josh Schachter:
Delete these. Don’t listen to it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We have a, we do not have a promoter or a detractor, in YouTube. Passive.

Julio Franco:
Thanks. Passive. I’m a 6. Real.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Got some work here. I’m a 6.

Kristi Faltorusso:
7. This is like a strong 7a half. Okay.

Josh Schachter:
Josh, are you

Julio Franco:
just gonna cut it? I’ll give you the real answer. So I kinda would, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my team because then they’d be like, really? You’re talking about No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. No. No. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Don’t tell your team, but you could tell your peers who are other leaders.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, I just Slacked your whole team, Julio. So they’re, like, in the lobby.

Julio Franco:
Oh, don’t worry about it. They’ll they’ll hear it. They’ll if you see a a lot of I don’t know where you’re where you have your metrics or not, but if you have a lot of people that all of a sudden just, like, you know, fall out and

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Yeah.

Julio Franco:
I don’t know. 13, that’ll be my team.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. No. That will be a simple I hear

Kristi Faltorusso:
him talk already too much.

Julio Franco:
Yeah. Exactly. Well, thank

Kristi Faltorusso:
you so much, Julio. This honestly, this has been great. I I appreciate all of the insight. This has been a fun conversation.

Julio Franco:
Thank you.

Josh Schachter:
Thanks, everybody. This is

Julio Franco:
a lot of fun.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Thanks, Julio, and good luck

Kristi Faltorusso:
We’re excited. Yeah. Right, Josh?

Josh Schachter:
What what what if what if Julio did not? We were gonna

Kristi Faltorusso:
kick him out? By up Then we would all drop off the call and let you run the podcast. Yes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Like, PG, which is Meet the

Julio Franco:
Josh Show.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The innovators of companies who have forged incredible customer relationships.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julio, Julio, you’re going like Yeah. They know the music is playing. Right?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Here’s your host, Josh Schechter. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

Josh Schachter:
Julio, don’t don’t worry about it. Just take my hand. I will walk you through this process. You will be fine.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Or you won’t, and that’ll be fine too.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’ll be a great episode if you’re not.

Julio Franco:
Imagine if it’s a train crash. That’ll be hilarious.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, most of them are. Yeah. But you don’t listen, so you wouldn’t know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
In our entire history, there’s only been one episode that we haven’t aired. Uh-uh.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Why did you have to say that? Because now I’m gonna wonder what’s that That’s the goal. That episode?

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. No. No. It’s like the Snyder cut. Right? If the Internet compels us

Josh Schachter:
Same more.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Not gonna

Julio Franco:
raise this.

Josh Schachter:
John. Go ahead.

Julio Franco:
Still not gonna put it.

Josh Schachter:
Like, you can’t intrigue. That’s click bait right there. You can’t treat people, but then not spill the beans.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Isn’t that how we get people to listen? The the the clickbait?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well, you know who’s never listened to the our our podcast show?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Is it Julio?

Josh Schachter:
Yes. It is Julio. That is our special guest today. So on that note That’s true. Perfect segue. I wanna introduce everybody to Julio Franco. Julio is the chief customer officer of Zappy, and, we’re gonna find out more about what Julio does and what Zapy does. Julio, since we didn’t actually take the time to introduce you to my cohost, I’m Josh, by the way, to Christy Falter Russo, the extraordinary queen of customer success.

Josh Schachter:
I hope that’s the best introduction, but that’s what I’m going with.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that. I’m gonna take it. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What’s he gonna say about me?

Josh Schachter:
And John.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. And John. And John. Kind of, like, sums up the last, like, 3 weeks of my life, Josh, by the way. Real quickly. Just Oh,

Julio Franco:
no. And John.

Josh Schachter:
Sidebar on that. Yeah. Okay. But John Johnson,

Kristi Faltorusso:
who is about me.

Josh Schachter:
Well, principal

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s not my title. My title isn’t nice. Well,

Josh Schachter:
I was gonna be product manager, customer success manager. And, actually, at at at user testing. And one of the most knowledgeable people that I know about customer success, and I mean that genuinely, John.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’ll take that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s what’s kept

Julio Franco:
going on.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Worth. We all bring a different perspective from customer success. Our you’ve got Josh who’s a founder of Update. You’ve got myself who’s chief customer officer at client success, and then John who has kind of mastered the IC role through a leadership lens at user testing. And so all 3 of us bring different and unique perspectives. We’re excited for the conversation today. Julio, you wanna tell us a little bit about yourself?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Let’s cut everything out up until that point. I think we’re doing good. No.

Josh Schachter:
We never do. We never do.

Julio Franco:
I don’t think you should cut it. I think that’ll be

Kristi Faltorusso:
We don’t cut anything, Julio. This is, like it’s just raw, so we’re just gonna go.

Julio Franco:
One take? I love it. Absolutely. I’ll tell you a little bit about myself as well. So as Josh mentioned, I’m the chief customer officer of a company that is called Zapy. Zapy is a consumer insights platform, which could mean a million things. But ultimately, what we help do, is make sure that large innovative organizations can bring the voice of consumers as they’re innovating and as they’re putting communications out. So we basically bring the voice of of consumers to the biggest organizations in the world.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Who are some of your customers? Are you allowed to say?

Julio Franco:
Yeah. Because some of them are I mean, we get on stage together. I was actually I was in New York 2 days ago on stage with, VP of Insights at PepsiCo. So that’s a big customer of ours we work with. All the organizations that do a lot of, b to c innovation communications Okay. Are kinda like the organizations we work with. So to name a few, PepsiCo, McDonald’s. We work a lot with SoFi, Rekopen and Keeser, Mars, just like the big, big b to c companies worldwide.

Josh Schachter:
What’s, like, the number one need problem that you’re solving for them, especially this year that that, you know, that you’re, yeah, that you’re solving?

Julio Franco:
So organizations of that caliber need to drive breakthrough innovation that is not gonna cannibalize their their, you know, their current book, and then communicate that effectively so that consumers will try their product and continue using their products. There’s a lot of innovation has set up, quite a bit because smaller organizations are able to innovate a lot quicker than the big ones. Yeah. Put stuff all over the place and kinda like like little ants eating up the heels of the big, of the big organizations. So they need to keep up with innovation to make sure that that does not happen and they won’t steal their market market share.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So you’re basically at the engine that makes your customers the anteater. Is that is that correct?

Julio Franco:
No. We wanna make sure we make our, our customers really fast elephants that we get to squash hands or buy them.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Let’s just stick with this metaphor, guys. So this is going great.

Josh Schachter:
It’s actually it’s actually the man eater. He he’s referencing hall and oats.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. That’s great.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Very interesting. So I

Julio Franco:
told you about my company. I didn’t tell about me. So, you know, as I mentioned before, I’m the CCO, which in my space is really interesting because my job Wait.

Josh Schachter:
My space is still around?

Kristi Faltorusso:
He’s Tom. Nice.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Everybody that’s listening to this podcast is like, wait. What?

Julio Franco:
I know. Right?

Josh Schachter:
I’ve dated all of us.

Julio Franco:
In, like, 1998, Josh, but that’s okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Hey, guys. You would all be in my top 8. That’s all I’m saying.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, samesies.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, Julio. You’re here to talk.

Julio Franco:
I don’t believe that, by the way. There is no chance I would make it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No, Julio. You’re definitely not in the top 8, but that’s okay. Like, he just wanted to feel inclusive. John is big on that. He wants to make sure that everyone feels like they are part of this conversation even though he very much would like to exclude you.

Josh Schachter:
I thought you said Josh. I thought you didn’t believe that you were here to talk based on all the the talking overview that we’ve done. But okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julio, tell us more about what it means to be the chief customer officer at Zappy.

Julio Franco:
Be what I wanted to make was my job is to bring our customers to the center of everything that we do as I’m helping our customers to the same with theirs, which is absolutely what I love about my job.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What does your organization look like? So what what yeah. Tell us a bit about that.

Julio Franco:
So I am responsible for everything that is post sale. So customer success we have a division called customer expertise, which is just, like, a very technically heavy organization because everything that we do is market research, and we have a a group of research specialists that focus on that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, that’s cool.

Julio Franco:
Technical support as well as an organization that makes sure that all the, we call it, field work. So making sure that all the surveys have all of the things that they need in order to drive the statistical relevance that our that our results require.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You’re speaking my language, and you you obviously know us, user testing.

Julio Franco:
Of course.

Josh Schachter:
Are you competitive?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I we no. I think that we are a vendor. There there is some overlap. I think some of the surveys, you know, we’re definitely focused on, things that haven’t been built built yet. And from what I’ve seen and kinda what I’m reading, you’re very much like, this is where the customers are. We’re building the experience, not necessarily from a prototype standpoint, but from an actual on platform, standpoint. So I think there’s some crossover, but, anybody that is, like, focused on customer experience has my attention. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’d love to hear, you said the words keeping the customer at the center. When you’re looking at it through the lens of customer experience or consumer experience, depending if it’s b to b or b to c, how do you how do you how do you encourage these folks that maybe don’t have a research background that, like, this is kind of like this is what I do every day. Right? It’s like, I’m not a researcher, but I talk to researchers. So how are you advocating for that centricity maybe outside of, like, core research, but, within your organization?

Julio Franco:
So we try to make it as easy as possible for someone to get the feedback and act on it. Traditionally, market research has been big, technical, and complex, where in order for you to do a piece of research, you needed to be a full researcher and know about sampling and all of these crazy crazy things. What we’ve done at Zapier is we’ve kinda, like, simplified it to a point where we have created different methodologies for a particular business objective they’re trying to achieve. So one of them could be, I have a bunch of ideas and I need to know which ones to throw away. So we have a solution that addresses that and very simply just tells you that, and we’ve made it very quick and very inexpensive. So no longer do you have a barrier of entry if you need to, I don’t know, test a new product that you wanna launch or a new pricing point or a new path. It’s all very easy to do.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mhmm.

Julio Franco:
Within 15 minutes, you, you know, you launch a research. A day later, you get results. All very actionable, and you can say, you know what? That pack can use these optimizations or our merger account. So we’ve tried to make it as easy as we can.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that. That’s great.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julio, is that through, like, is it through, like, surveys? I guess I’m still having a hard time, like, understanding, like, what is the technology delivering? Because I would think market research is still, like, interacting with people. Like, I’m still thinking of, like, the Coke and Pepsi challenge from the eighties where people, like, sat and tasted both Coke and Pepsi and had to pick which one. That was so fun. So, that’s not what you’re doing. So what is your technology like, how is it orchestrating what you’ve just described?

Julio Franco:
So if I’m gonna use your Coke and Pepsi challenge

Kristi Faltorusso:
Please.

Julio Franco:
It’s something similar, but everything we do is conceptual and at scale. So people are in some ways looking at Pepsi versus Coke but in an Right. But in a concept form, all survey based. So yeah. Let’s assume that you’re Pepsi. You’re gonna launch a new product. You put a concept together. You put it in our platform and then send it to hundreds of consumers that are gonna give you their feedback around your concept.

Julio Franco:
And then compare

Kristi Faltorusso:
it again. Telling you, like, do we think your idea is good?

Julio Franco:
Exactly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Before they move forward with anything. Okay.

Julio Franco:
That’s right. And then as you go through the process, you do that at every point in at every step. Right? So is this idea of, I don’t even know. Give me an idea for a for a Pepsi product, Christy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I would say, like, okay. We’re gonna do no. No. Okay. That was horrible. That didn’t, obviously, that didn’t land. For also people who were using MySpace, they probably also drank Pepsi clear. They’re probably drinking Pepsi clear while they were picking out their top 8.

Josh Schachter:
Crystal crystal Pepsi.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Crystal Pepsi. Crystal Pepsi. To us. Okay. So, like, let’s just say we wanna kind of rip off what Doctor Pepper is doing with all these, like, vanilla and lime, these dirty soda concepts that Utah has so dominated. So Pepsi wants to compete. They wanna throw some flavors together. They wanna do, like, a lime vanilla cherry combo.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay.

Julio Franco:
There you go. So you do that. So then you create a concept of your what did you say? Lime, cherry, vanilla?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Lime, cherry, and vanilla.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Dirty sodas. Dirty soda.

Julio Franco:
So we’re gonna call them dirty Pepsi’s. Exactly.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And you

Julio Franco:
put all of your concepts of dirty Pepsi, and you’re gonna send them out to consumers of they’re called CSDs. Right? Carbonarian soft drinks, and they’ll give you their opinion. And then based on that, you’ll compare them to a large database of other ideas that you that you may or may not have.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And then decide which one we wanna move forward with.

Julio Franco:
That’s exactly right. And then Cool. You test the name, and then you test the pack to make sure that it sounds on the shelf and then the advertising associated with it. And then you can I can see where you guys are going? So then you’re gonna launch your ad for dirty Pepsi, and it’s probably not gonna do really well. You know? Yeah. You know, ideally, we’ll help you refine that so that when you, as a product manager for new innovations at PepsiCo, launches your product, it flies off the shelves and not get stuck there and you lose your job.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So what Yeah. Very good. So what does the account team look like to support some of these customers? Because it sounds like they are acting almost as an extension of the research department. So it seems like they’re they’re pretty embedded in these com in these customers. Right? It’s not just like, hey. We’re here to do a QBR. I hope that’s that’s not what’s happening.

Julio Franco:
Yeah. So it’s definitely not what’s happening. I want to make

Kristi Faltorusso:
an assumption.

Julio Franco:
Like the battle that we have, which is an interesting one. Our our folks, our customer success managers are very involved, in kinda like the day to day of of our customers. Mhmm. And make recommendations around how you can utilize our platform as best as possible. But the little trick that we always have to fight is our customers that come from a world of full service market research agencies will want for my team to tell them what to do.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right.

Julio Franco:
So they will want our folks to basically say your dirty Pepsi idea is not a good idea, but that’s not the role. Right? The role is helping them using the data

Kristi Faltorusso:
that the

Julio Franco:
platform provides, Exactly. To get to that conclusion for themselves. So that’s a little bit of the of the of the battle that we fight where we’re an organization that is trying to scale, and that’s not how you scale because all of a sudden you become a tech enabled services company, which is not what we wanna be.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right. So what are you doing, and, like, what programs and processes are you putting in place to manage that? Because that’s not that’s not a unique challenge. Right? Right? I think there’s a lot of organizations that are kinda stuck like that. I know that I am. I know John talks about that a little bit too. So how are you guys building a model where you’re separating out we’ll do a little church and state here, but, like, the technology versus the services.

Josh Schachter:
Can I can I just say that that, like, if I was on Julio’s team, and I had no accountability for my opinion, because I wasn’t really supposed to give my opinion, that would be amazing? I’d be like, that idea is awesome. That sucks. You should be fired. That’s that’s a killer idea. You would just go around like strategists.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right? That’s

Josh Schachter:
that’s the strategy. Consultants.

Julio Franco:
McKinsey. Consult yes.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Just go around giving your opinion when it doesn’t actually matter. It’d be amazing.

Julio Franco:
The only problem is that you would need to back that up with numbers. So

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s not talk about numbers.

Kristi Faltorusso:
A lot of hand wavy the sharpest customer success.

Julio Franco:
Difference between the research that I do and John’s research clearly. Just like that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Whatever. This is tough. Over the fence. God. I love it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Real uncomfortable. Okay. So how are you making this magic happen?

Julio Franco:
We we started this business about 10 years ago, and we’re disrupting the an industry that is services first. Yep. And throughout those 10 years, we’ve we’ve learned a ton. And then when we started looking into our operational efficiency, we realized that the customers that we have, that operate with us in a systematic way are operating in a much more efficient way, but they’re also more successful. So what we are trying to do, and this is, like, very much something that I’m working on this year with me and, you know, a lot of people in the team, is we are re onboarding all of our customers. Mhmm. And it’s a that’s a tough challenge because we have something like, you know, 300 customers that we need to go and re onboard and basically tell them, hey. The way that we’re operating is not optimal neither for you or for us.

Julio Franco:
We need to make sure that we set up a system based on all the work that you have already done with us, which is fine. Right? It’s it’s honestly not rocket science. It’s just identifying a queue like a like a fee a few key things that they need to do and do in a recurring way. But it’s hard when it’s very comfortable. Right? You have a friendly and knowledgeable person that probably sees more concepts or pieces of advertising than anybody else. It’s nice to ask them their opinion. But the truth is

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt you.

Julio Franco:
All I was gonna say is He’s fine. Part of the reason why we exist is because when you leave your knowledge as an organization to your to your vendor Mhmm. You’re at a disadvantage. That’s not what we’re trying to do.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
You’re probably not the only person that’s, like, considering reeducation, re onboarding of their customer base. So, actually, it would be interesting if you walked the listeners through your entire thought process of going through that. You know, what what you what what what were the triggers of that decision? How you’re how you’re planning it? Where you are in that process right now, what the outcomes and the goals are for that process. I think that’d be really educational for folks.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh also likes whiteboards. So if you have a whiteboard that you can map this out

Julio Franco:
Yeah. I would love I love whiteboards as well. I used to have one in my old house in the kitchen, and then we moved, and we don’t have one anymore.

Josh Schachter:
Is this your house? Are you in your house right now?

Julio Franco:
This is my house. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
That’s so cool.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love the exposed ceilings. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And that brick?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Where do you live? What’s your address?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I live in Social Security number.

Julio Franco:
I appreciate your time.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mother’s maiden name?

Julio Franco:
Pet name? I live in Charlestown, just, like, outside of Boston. Mhmm. Oh, nice. Neighborhood. It’s a cool neighborhood. It’s called the Navy Yard, and many of these buildings are historical buildings. This building is called the rope walk, and it’s about 5 blocks long because they used to, within this building, they used to stretch rope, and then they made, you know, condos out of it. That’s why we have the break and the exposed ceiling.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, that’s so cool. It’ll be so nice when they finish building it.

Julio Franco:
Right? That’s what I that’s what I keep telling them.

Kristi Faltorusso:
View of the Charles from the Navy Yard? It’s

Julio Franco:
No. We don’t. We’re about a block away from the marie from Laika. It’s right north of the Charles. Okay. But not quite.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Cool. Christy, are you satisfied with the location?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I am. I just dropped a pin on a map, and we’re gonna try to see if I can Google Maps to go find his exact location.

Julio Franco:
Just find a really long building. I’m sure you guys. I just I trust you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The long building. Got it. On it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. But I wanna hear I wanna hear Josh’s answer the answer to Josh’s question.

Julio Franco:
So I’ll give you, like, the the the whole story. From for a long time, we’ve had this thing about customers that get it and those that don’t get it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right.

Julio Franco:
And those that get it tend to be the ones that, you know, in, like, 2, 3 years or whatever, they’re more successful with us.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Mhmm.

Julio Franco:
Also, the ones that our teams love working with, and, you know, they’re the ones that we are we’re able to scale the most with. So then as we’re looking into how to scale our organization, we started assessing what does getting it actually mean. So what are those things that these customers have done in order to quote, unquote get it? And we realized that the that the that the key point was it’s organizations that wanna utilize our our platform to overhaul their innovation and advertising process. So it’s organizations that are not coming to us for one project, but rather for a system that will they they will use 200 times, 500 times. Because at the end of the day, the questions that you have to answer for 1 or for 200 are the same ones. What are the methodologies that I need to use? Who are the people that I need to survey? What do the results look like? Who do I wanna compare myself against? That’s basically it. But the problem was customers that didn’t get it were coming to us and asking those same questions the 50 times they would use us. Those that did get it were coming in, answering that question once, and then utilizing the platform 200 times.

Julio Franco:
So and then I ran a bunch of numbers. So I figured out what is the the average ARR, what is the number of, CSM hours that I need to manage a $1,000,000 and realize and then put them into buckets, and then realize that those that we call non systematized required 2 or sometimes 3 times the amount of hours that a customer that a systematized requires. So then, you know, we went to our board, and the board loved the idea. So it said, guess what? You’re systematizing all of your customers in 2024, and that’s how we started.

Josh Schachter:
How do you do that?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Because it seems like it’s a a lot of, like, education, because you’re changing like, you’re now responsible for being the change agents for your customers as opposed to your customers driving change in their own organizations. So, like, how are you driving that educational process with them? And then what do you do with customers that are resistant? I have so many questions.

Julio Franco:
So there’s a few things that we’re doing, and this has been a project that we’ve we’re we’ve been going through it since q 4 of last year, and then it really started in in January of this year. The first thing that we realized that we needed to do was tell our customers why do they care. They don’t care about our operational efficiency, but the truth is they care about theirs. So some of the some of the tricks that we’ve used is we’ve derived the amount of hours that it takes them to be able to utilize our system when they’re coming at it as every day is a brand new day and then quantify that for them. Some of the numbers that I remember are a user that is non systematized, they require about 11 hours of their time before they actually conduct the research. Somebody that is systematized requires about 30 minutes, And these guys don’t have the time. Right? These are teams that are overly stretched, understaffed. The whole thing within the insights industry right now is you gotta do more with less, and the reason why they do business with Zapier is for agility.

Julio Franco:
That’s our thing. Right? Like, we’re the quickest in the marketplace, but the truth is they were not becoming agile enough because they were in their own way. Because they were asking all of these questions over and over and over, so we just brought that to them, number 1. Number 2, we started using examples about let me take a step back. Not only do you become a lot more operation operationally efficient, the other thing about utilizing this in a systematic way is that your data becomes more valuable because you’re no longer answering the same question with different types of answers. You’re doing it the same way. So now an organization that utilizes our platform is able to look at 500 data points and make a bigger decision based on those 500 instead of, like, the data being all over the place. So we normalizing data is also something that organizations really want.

Julio Franco:
You we all we all know the whole thing with garbage in, garbage out with AI. So now you have a much more robust data asset. So those are all things that we utilize, and we we don’t have, like, a specific playbook because it’ll depend on that customer. For some of them, it will be the complexity of, you know, getting a PO, so we wanna systematize them because of that. For some others, it will be I only have, whatever, 24 hours to respond to a stakeholders. We go that way. So it really depends on the on the on the customer.

Josh Schachter:
Is there a part of it oh, sorry. Go ahead, John. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We all have so many questions.

Julio Franco:
No. No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But this is actually really good. You’re leading you’re leading us into a a pretty cool moment, I think, for this. You this was your board directive to kind of re onboard your entire customers for 2024. You’ve got a group of CSMs. You’ve got your your experienced consultants. I don’t I forget what you call them, the folks that are, like, the researchers Yep. And then and the folks under your team. So Yep.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I would love to hear how, a, you took all of this data. You got buy in from the board. You got buy in from leadership, and then you took it to your team. Yep. I think this is kinda where I’m trying to get to right now is how do we how do we roll this out so that everybody’s swimming in the same direction with the same kind of goals? Like, what are if you can, obviously, generalized information, nothing nothing secret here. But, how did you how are you encouraging your CSMs to to get this done? What are the KPIs? What are the what are the new, you know, MBO structures? Like, how are you Yep. How are you incentivizing folks to get on board with this across your whole organization?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I wanna add one more thing to John so, Julio, you can answer this with it also. But did you have to increase resources? So is there, like, an addition to subtract later? Because it sounds like you’re giving them a heavy lift to do this on re onboarding. So I’m just wondering, did you have to Yeah. Was there some staff augmentation or some kind of reprioritization of their time and effort right now to get that done so that eventually they can scale back?

Julio Franco:
So let me answer that one real quick. Of course

Kristi Faltorusso:
not. Sorry, John.

Julio Franco:
Of course, we didn’t get, you know, more talent. Wouldn’t it be nice if we just They didn’t just write you a

Kristi Faltorusso:
blank check.

Julio Franco:
You know? Let’s just get, you know, 50 people to be able to do that now. We we we didn’t have

Kristi Faltorusso:
them stop doing other things to do this.

Julio Franco:
So we we are having to do some ruthless prioritization. So the answer to that is yes. So let me tell you and and we are very much we tell our customers to test and learn, and we have to believe that. So initially, what I what we try to do was to bring in the account teams along. And the account team, my like, the folks under my responsibility are customer success managers, but we also have account managers that focus on the commercial side of the relationship as well. So we basically showed them all of this stuff and said, hey, folks. You should re onboard your customers. We started, an implementation onboarding team last year.

Julio Franco:
So say, you know, feed them through onboarding and implementation, and let’s get your customers operating as efficiently and as successfully as they can. That failed. We tried that for a quarter, and it didn’t work because, kinda like what Christie is saying, those folks are busy. Yeah. They’re really, really busy. They have to drive renewals for the account management team. They have to, like, wrangle a bunch of cats because there’s people you know, these are decentralized organizations, and that was really, really tough. And then CSM, same thing.

Julio Franco:
They need to answer the the question where Christy asks if dirty Pepsi is a good one. So it became really, really hard. At the end of the quarter, I had a I had a session in London. Our global headquarters are in London. And we met with the folks from the it’s the CE team, which is called customer expertise. And they include the implementation folks that do the onboarding as well as these research experts that I was talking about. And I I actually love this because they were the ones that said, you know what? We we can do it. There was a little bit of a nudge because one of our one of the members of our of of our board made a recommendation to have a SWAT team do it, and there is no better team than these folks because they have seen what good looks like.

Julio Franco:
So what we’re doing is we arm them with all of the data. So we have all of these criteria of something that, you know, that they will need to be systematized. So now they’re they monitor the data. They have targets associated with it, and they’re the ones reaching out to the account teams and saying, hey. Your customer is very close to being systematized. We just need to do these 3 things. Help me get a meeting with them. We’ll we’ll we’ll get them in place, and we’ll, you know, we’ll get them down that path.

Julio Franco:
So that’s how that’s why we’ve done it since the end of q one. And so far, I’m not saying, like, fully so good, but we’re I think we’re gonna achieve our targets hard as hell, and those guys are doing a fantastic job. But, you know, that’s that’s what we found successful.

Josh Schachter:
What what are your targets?

Julio Franco:
We need to our book of business is made up of a good number of customers that are large. We define large as ARR over a $100,000 Mhmm. And then a ton that are long tail. We basically need to take all of our, our customers that are within 100 k, ARR within our ICP, so ideal customer profile, and systematize them by the end of the year. And it’s

Josh Schachter:
And do you have a hypothesis on the like, are are you tracking the outcomes for those customers pre and post?

Julio Franco:
We are, and we are and we’re doing it regularly. And it’s a little bit early, but the indication show, number 1, that we are getting more efficient, and number 2, that customers that are systematized are a lot more efficient and are growing higher than than No. That are not.

Jon Johnson:
This sounds, you did like, the age old question is, like, what’s valuable for the company, obviously, because this is gonna save revenue, it’s gonna obviously increase your, you know or decrease churn and increase retention and growth. Right? How what are some of the successes that your team has found with getting buy in from busy customers? I mean, change management is the hardest thing. Right? So, yes, it’s important that you reintroduce and reonboard, but I’m sure that a huge cohort within your, you know, large customers are like, I don’t have time for that. That’s great. Like, I’d love to, but I don’t have time for that. So how do you balance that? Like, CSMs are so good at doing everything and taking all of it on their plates. But, like, talk to me about that balance a little bit.

Julio Franco:
So it’s a it’s a time investment. You’re right. People don’t have time for stuff, which is exactly the reason. Now I’m giving you kinda, like, pitch if you’re a customer. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly the reason why they need to go through that systematization process. Yeah.

Julio Franco:
Right? So it’s it’s it’s been a wait, and we try to make it as easy as possible for them to the point where we’re doing this thing called and I don’t know if I should say this publicly, but I also don’t think that my customers lead

Kristi Faltorusso:
into this call.

Julio Franco:
We call it silent setup. We systematize them without without them knowing. Yeah. We already know the way that our their organization works. We’re not gonna ask them the questions. We’re just gonna tell them about it. Yeah. We’ve done that with a large QSR organization globally.

Julio Franco:
There were 2 teams that were using using our platform almost flawlessly. We just took that set up and then expanded across the board, and said, this is how you’re gonna use this. And Yeah. We saved them time. We enabled them to get the benefits that some of the other buying centers, that have And are they

Josh Schachter:
are they loving it?

Julio Franco:
They are loving it.

Josh Schachter:
Didn’t get that.

Julio Franco:
Absolutely loving it. How

Josh Schachter:
Sorry. That was a letter turn here. That was your everybody’s head. I’m getting out of the way now.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. Josh, we love you. It’s okay. I I’m curious how like, what is your you have CSMs. How many CSMs do you have, and they own renewals. Right? So they’re they have a or do you have renewal managers?

Julio Franco:
Yeah. We have the account manager actually owns renewals. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What, just like a just one one word answer, what do you feel when I say QBR, what do you say? That’s it. That’s all we needed.

Julio Franco:
There you go.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Next question.

Josh Schachter:
No. No. No. John, I was thinking, like, when I say QBR, you say QBR, but

Kristi Faltorusso:
We can’t say that right now.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That too,

Josh Schachter:
but then Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m told I need to swear less. So Oh, I can’t.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Who told you that?

Julio Franco:
Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Did I? I don’t know. Maybe the maybe the producer.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Feel like a mandate that came from Josh.

Josh Schachter:
No. No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
My from my side.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s fine. Moving on. Julio, what is you’re halfway through the year. You’ve got some key successes. Yep. You’ve got a target, and a bit of a looming deadline to the end of 2024. What are you taking into the back into into h two here, for your organization? Not just for your metrics, but how are you making sure that your people are, like, not burnt out and not dying on the vine here?

Julio Franco:
That that’s the key thing. I so I think we’re gonna achieve our our targets. I I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem, but we are working our folks really, really hard because we’re again, we’re doing a lot of investment right now and to what we expect will be and what we have seen early early shoots of it being really successful moving forward. But right now, we’re right in a crunch. Yeah. We’re in a crunch where we just need to get out of that really quickly. So I think that I mean, we’re we’re hiring a few people, and that’ll that’ll help a bit. But the truth is, it’s right now, we’ll drive that better performance and better work life balance for our folks because, again, you’re moving away from a customer emailing you 30 times a week to one that is not.

Julio Franco:
So that’s something that we’re taking, we’re taking with us. Now the really interesting one about this is we have a great relationship with most of our customers because because we’re there to answer their question.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Julio Franco:
So, you know, when Christy is the Pepsi co manager comes in and I’m her CSM and I got her, that’s fantastic. If we now all of a sudden live in a world of perfect systematization, I’ll never get a chance to actually build that relationship with Christie. So one of the things that I’m bringing in, probably not for h two, but rather for next year is, how do I do that and maintain that level of relationship building and trust without having the need? So, that is one where

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, man.

Julio Franco:
It’s bouncing around my head, which is what what do we do? So do we do, like, a white glove for the first 3 months, but then how do you adjust behavior? That’s something that is really, really important for me.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s interesting. I actually really love that. I feel like that maybe there’s a deeper conversation, maybe another podcast that we can do about this, but we talk about, like, reducing support tickets and reducing outreach and reducing effort and friction and all these things. But traditional CS has usually built everything around those friction points and those pain points. So if we’ve made everything as slick as, you know, the rain outside my window right now, then the CSM is sitting there going like, but I need to talk to them, but they don’t need to talk to me. Right? So how do you get them to want to talk

Julio Franco:
to you? That’s not really

Kristi Faltorusso:
the question that I’m asking you, but I love that you are thinking through that as, like, hey. If we do remove these things that have traditionally built out these things, what what are we gonna fill them in with? And I I like that you have moved this instead of, like, doing doing more with less, like, you’re doing better with what you have. And you’re looking at the tools that you have, and you’re saying, hey. We’re gonna do this better. Like, not just we’re gonna do more because we have digital or whatever, but, I think it’s a really intelligent approach. And I’m excited to hear in h one next year what you focus on, cap coming off of this year.

Julio Franco:
If I’m able to crack it, I’ll let you know. But it is a challenge. Right? Because in one hand, we need to drive operational efficiency because, obviously, we would like for our numbers to look as close to, like, a clean path as possible.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Julio Franco:
While at the same time, what I what I don’t wanna do is to throw the baby with the bathwater and, like, have a situation where our users don’t even know who we are or who our CSMs are. Yep. You know, right now, we have the benefit that, like, our customers really love us. They are advocates. They get on stage with us. It’s really, really nice. And then when you ask them, if you were to, right now, go and poll a 100 customers at Zapier, a 100 users, what they would say is that they love the people. So it’s a it’s a bit of a challenge because I’m trying to make sure that I make people more efficient without losing that human touch, and that’s that’s how I do that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Julio, how are you changing this in the sales process? So how how are you ensuring that you don’t have more customers coming in into the portfolio that have misset expectations on how they’re gonna work with you and your team?

Julio Franco:
That’s a good that’s a good question, Kristine.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I only ask good questions, Julio. So

Julio Franco:
We will determine we will I’m a researcher. We’ll determine that by the end of the podcast.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s amazing.

Julio Franco:
The expectation management is key. And one of the things that I do have to give credit to our head of sales and to the sales team is that they are changing the expectation. Because our customers are coming in expecting a tech enabled service, you know, service company, and what they’re saying from the beginning is that’s not who we are. Now that being said, we’re also introducing a professional services layer where if that is what they want, they can do that, but they

Kristi Faltorusso:
have people

Julio Franco:
for it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And that’s a different team. Correct. Yep.

Julio Franco:
And that’s the key. So the key is we can give you what you need, you just have to pay differently. So if you want to operate independently, that’s fine. We’ll get you implemented and ready to go. But if you need self if you need to full serve, within your implementation, we’ll incorporate that consultant that will come in and will do that for you. So we’re kinda like asking them to put their money where their mouth is.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Is that Do you guys work with any partners? Oh, sorry.

Josh Schachter:
Are they operating right now, that that professional services or you’re standing that up?

Julio Franco:
We are. We we have had it for a couple of years, but it hasn’t been seamlessly integrated into our offering. So we do have it, but it’s but it’s but it’s friction full because it’s, like, at a project level, so we’re changing that. So by September, we’re gonna be able to include it and make it seamless for everybody or at least, you know, that’s what that’s the intention, to make sure that it becomes one of the options of how you do business with us, not, fixed to when you have a problem.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Man, we’re man, I love this. You’re keying in on on things that has been, like, running around in my head. And, Chris, you talk about this too. It’s like, let the customer tell you how they need it. Like, truly, truly, truly onboarding, QBRs, data, reporting, just ask the customer really simply, and it it’s so simple. I love the way that you frame that, Julio. I’m sorry. I’m gassing you up on this, but, like, it it’s good to hear, like, that you’re in the middle of this and you’re seeing successes and, obviously, like, running into challenges.

Kristi Faltorusso:
How’s the team feeling? Like, are they are they starting to feel is if they’re just listening, the face that Julio made was worse than when I mentioned QBRs. So

Julio Franco:
They’re they’re stretched. They’re really, really stretched because there’s, you know, there’s a there’s a few things. Right? So we’re we’re driving double digit growth this year In some that’s that’s revenue based. In usage terms or, you know, some of other decisions and experiments that we’re do we’re we’re we’re driving, we’re running we’re running, like, 4 x to work that we were doing, so they’re actually really busy. Yeah. And we’re and we’re trying to reeducate the market. So they’re stretched. I’m just, you know, being completely transparent and honest about it, but I hope that they they stick to it because, you know, on the other side, it’s gonna be it’s gonna be a lot better.

Julio Franco:
Right? Like, they’ll be able to work with customers to get it. All of the customers should get it, and that just makes it a lot better because you’re not struggling and feeling like you’re hitting your your head against the wall, you know, reinvent reinventing the wheel every single day.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I like that this has this has, like, a target and an end date, like, a an end state. I know it’s not ever gonna be perfect. There’s always gonna be customers that you’re kinda working through this, but you’ll get into the habits. You’ll build the calluses and the stamina that you need to get them. Oh, you know what? We actually learned this. This is a customer that needs re onboarded. Let’s put them in the in that process. And maybe there’s, like, an intelligent segmentation that you do with different types of skills of CSMs that you can, you know, specialize in the future.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And if you do use that idea, please send me, some money.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wait, Julio. I have one more question on this. Are you guys, like, compensating your CSMs for this project? Like, do they have a spiff or some kinda, like, incentive or bonus, like, if we successfully complete this project by the end of the year? Because you’ve mentioned that they’re stretched many times. You also said how important your people are to your customers. Sounds like you guys are a people centric business. So how are you how are you going to help them feel rewarded for going above and beyond?

Julio Franco:
So we’re linking this to the variable compensation of the CET Mhmm. That are the ones looking into it and saying, hey. Let’s go through that process. We haven’t we’re not directly compensating customers based on based on this, you know, based on the systematization. What will come from that is they’ll be able to be a lot more efficient with their book, And, you know, they’re they’re they’re in this journey where the whole point of our organization is to scale, and, you know, that’s that’s the intention. They know that next year, we’re not gonna have a massively bigger team. We’re gonna have growth targets. That’s just the reality the reality of it.

Julio Franco:
And in full transparency, we’ve lost a few folks. Mhmm. We lost a few folks that, you know, are that and I get it. They just don’t they don’t wanna be part of the journey, but that’s the journey we’re in. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. And that’s fair. Honestly, like, I we have this conversation all the time. It’s like, we we want we need people to be in it, but you have to be committed to this. And this is what the work is, and this is what the role calls for. And if that’s not a fit for you right now, that’s okay. Then go find what is appropriate. Because I know that people be happy doing work that feels fulfilling and in line with what they wanna be doing than trying to force somebody to do something that just doesn’t feel good for them

Julio Franco:
right now. So Absolutely.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Awesome. Okay. So one of the things that we also like to do is kind of this future forward thing where we ask our guests, what do you that. Why are you shaking your head, Kristy?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m just saying, Julio, he makes these things up, and he’s No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I don’t. I we’ve we’ve asked. What

Kristi Faltorusso:
what do you what

Kristi Faltorusso:
do you wanna see? Oh my gosh. Okay. I’m gonna ask the question now, Julio. Is everybody prepared?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yes. Let’s go.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What do you wanna see in the future of customer success? Like, from your vantage point, is there a big swing or a big change or a stabilizing factor that you wanna see in the industry moving forward? Other than Christie’s dog stopping the barking.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Sorry. I

Julio Franco:
don’t know about your dog.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, she’s so bad.

Julio Franco:
Is she? I think I’m sure she’s super cute. Anyway, my dog would been doing the same thing, but getting groomed today. I think you know what I would really like to see is so this this whole movement around digital

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Julio Franco:
Digital CS and all that stuff. Right? For a long time, I’ve had this thought, which is digital as a program is not a segment. We’re currently trying out digital with, you know, our kinda like that long tail of customers that we have, but in in a in a in a world where I have one CSM directly engaging with, I don’t know, a 150 users, all important from large organizations, some of those users are gonna be are gonna require more kinda like in person 1 1 than others. Right? So you think of a think of PepsiCo. Right? They have hundreds of insights users. Some of them will use it on a regular basis, some won’t. I don’t need for a CSM to start building a relationship with those that, you know, use our platform 7 times a year, but I do want them to be able to take whatever program we have with them and scale it to those folks and make it available. That’s still not as easy as I wish it were.

Julio Franco:
It’s it’s it’s still more complex. It’s not it’s not as plug and play as I would like it to be, and I think that we have technology that it’s getting there, but it’s still not to the point where I can just give a small tech stack to a CSM and say, replicate yourself in multiple languages to your users across the board. But how amazing would that be? Right? This person talks to the team leads, and then they have literally people that speak 20 languages. If there was something that I could do that will take a video that they record, and I know this somewhat exists, but translate it into a language, put it into a place within the platform that anybody can access it, then that’s how you can scale yourself in a digital way. I would love that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. You said digital is a program, not a segment, and I’m stealing that as well. I I love it, and it aligns with a lot of the things that we’ve talked about on this pod in the past. So, thank you so much for that. I appreciate it.

Julio Franco:
Is that when you get to send me money? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So

Kristi Faltorusso:
it sounds like you look even.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Just cancel it out. It’s a it’s a what’s that called?

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s a barter.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s a barter. Got any questions for us, Julio?

Julio Franco:
What do

Kristi Faltorusso:
you wanna learn? You got 10 minutes.

Julio Franco:
Can you tell me how to make that happen? So, no, I do have questions for you folks. No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I would no. But, honestly, the right thing is viewing digital as a program, not a segment. That is the right path. Like, unquestionably, looking at these things as how like, getting all of your customers off of the ground in the same way, That is the purpose of digital, and your people and your white glove are gonna be the nuances of keeping that plane in the air.

Julio Franco:
I I appreciate the validation. Okay. Let me ask you guys a few questions then, which is great because we’re all in this space. And I didn’t I

Kristi Faltorusso:
mean, Josh isn’t. He’s just paying for the podcast. It’s fine.

Julio Franco:
Strange, and toy. It’s fine.

Josh Schachter:
He’s a connector, man. Like, he

Kristi Faltorusso:
He absolutely is a connector.

Julio Franco:
Percent is.

Kristi Faltorusso:
A 100%.

Julio Franco:
And to be to be frank, I still feel like I’m an imposter in this world, in the CS world. Because I come from consumer insights. That’s what I’ve done. Right? So I’ve walked several miles in in the shoes of my customer, which treats me good. But I don’t know. It’s about this whole CS thing. So if you were in my shoes, right, needing to re onboard all of your customers, needing to drive growth this year in operational efficiency and next year, make sure that you, you know, maintain that love that your customers have for you. What would you what would you do or what would you recommend that I do?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I have a few ideas. Christie, do you wanna go first? Are you

Kristi Faltorusso:
Nope. Not touching that 10 foot pole. You wanna know why? I don’t know anything about your business, so I can’t sit here and validate it. There’s too much I don’t know Yeah. For me to say. I would be making assumptions. I think that your approach is right. I did a I did a webinar recently on reonboarding customers, so I think it’s a wonderful strategy that not a lot of companies redeploy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
In fact, we’re doing it again this year for customers who have been with us for a certain amount of years. So anybody who’s been with us for 24 months or longer, offering them an option to re onboard because their strategy probably has changed, personnel has changed, users have changed. So how do we just leverage that as a way to better align the technology to their strategy while educating and enabling them on some of the new functionality and features. So we’re finding that that is a really effective approach. I think it is difficult for us because we don’t have it as a sole focus right now, so we’re kinda doing it while we’re trying to do a bunch of other things. So it sounds like your team definitely has a a focus here because it’s a company driven initiative really coming from the top down with your board, so I love that focus around it. I wish I could have that same focus.

Julio Franco:
I mean,

Kristi Faltorusso:
I guess I could. I’m the leader. Right? I guess I could tell them whatever I want. Maybe I will make that other focus. But we do see a lot of effectiveness in it. Some Some of the challenges, though, that we’ve run into, and you can validate this and I think you have a little bit, but we do see resistance from customers who need it, but they don’t wanna make the investment in their time. Then there’s the lack of education. You know, we’re operating so my customer base, I work for a company called Client Success.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So we are a customer success management platform. Our customers are customer success teams, And we have a challenge of just, you know, maturation and maturity in the space. Right? You have leaders who just they don’t know what they don’t know. And so the education that they lack isn’t education on how to best use our technology. It’s about building their strategy, which to your point, that requires consulting and services that is separate from what my CSMs can provide. Right? Like, they need somebody who would help them design what their programs look like. So, you know, we run into different nuanced challenges that I’m just trying to figure out how do we best approach with the resources we have. Similar to you, I can’t I can’t add any more head count.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right? And in fact, trying to do 10:10 more things, with the things that, you know, with the resources I have today. So just trying to rethink how do we programmatically approach this and and kind of put those efforts where they’re gonna yield the best upside for the business. So, as far as I’m concerned, I love your approach. I think there’s a lot of value in it. I’m not gonna tell you what to do because I don’t know anything else.

Julio Franco:
So let me ask you a question on that, Charles. Let’s assume that it’s 24 24 months down the line for May. It won’t be a focus then. Right? If I need to continue this thing, it’s you know, I won’t be here. What are the things that you have done that you found successful with the approach you’re currently having or the ones that if you had to do it again, you wouldn’t do?

Kristi Faltorusso:
So it’s the investment in the education around customer success best practices and not necessarily just the focus around our technology. So we did make a concerted effort to educate our customers around this. So everything from designing best practice worksheets and providing all this information, it’s not about the product. And And in fact, a lot of the content that we create even just for the community is platform agnostic. So we’re not even saying that you need client success to do these things. We’re trying to offer people a framework around how can you be successful in thinking about designing customer success infrastructure for your business regardless of our software because it starts there. We try to educate them around technology is not your strategy. It’s the the mechanism that will operationalize your strategy.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So we know that if this strategy is missing, they can’t be successful with our technology. I don’t care how many notes you log or calls you put in or pulses you update. Those are just tasks and activities, and tasks and activities aren’t results. So how do we get them to think differently about it? And there’s just a big burden around that education because, honestly, I just don’t have the bandwidth to go and educate all these customers the way that they need to because to the point that I responded to your question, everyone’s business is so nuanced. Right? So my education can only go so far without actually truly being a consultant and doing a deep dive into their business to figure out what is the proper design that’s required for them to be most successful. So that’s, like, the big that’s my big gorilla that I carry with me every day. It’s the it’s the weight of I wish I could be that extension for my customers who so desperately need that. But the challenge is is that all these companies, they have limited budgets.

Kristi Faltorusso:
They have limited resources. They can’t even make the investments to get that education or hire a third party consultant to come in and do it for them. Right? So they’re just we’re literally on this hamster wheel of just them struggling, and it’s either we make the investment at no cost because we know that the long term benefit is that they renew and they grow with us. And can we make that investment now? That’s really where we’re at. Right? Like, what is the cost of doing that today, and will that will that ROI actually be there for us, you know, down the line? And it’s it’s we don’t have the data to support if that actually will be the case. Like, if I do a, will it yield c? I don’t know.

Julio Franco:
Mhmm. So that’s where

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m, like, really struggling today, to be honest.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I love that.

Julio Franco:
Thank you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Do you

Kristi Faltorusso:
love that I’m struggling every day, John? No. I love that. When no one’s here?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, no. I I actually wish that, you start sending us Wordle updates at 1 o’clock in the morning. But,

Kristi Faltorusso:
So I don’t sleep because I have these problems that I’m trying to

Josh Schachter:
navigate.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Problems. I get it. No. Okay. But I did have one. I just wanted to to, like, tack something on. And and you may be doing this. You didn’t mention mention this in the in the podcast that we just recorded that we’re still recording.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What are you doing, John? I I’m losing the I’m losing the train of out here. One of the things that I found, with building that trust outside of those friction points is is reengaging our CSMs to go on-site with customers and to spend time with them, like, actually in the offices, in dinners, and in kind of, like, ground floor, get out behind the desk. And when you don’t have those friction points, like, I would encourage finding those opportunities to get on-site with your customers, especially as you’re starting to transition more into this, you know, digital tech touch, process to get everybody re enabled and then put the person in front of them that’s gonna help them so that they still build those trust and relationships. Have you have you found success, in that?

Julio Franco:
We have. I didn’t mention it because it’s not strictly part of this, you know, systematization process, but we are doing that. Good. You know, many of our customers are large organizations, and it took them a little little longer to kinda, like, get over the COVID hangover. But now that, you know, most people are actually in offices or at least they’re there a few days a week, we’re encouraging our folks to go and visit them. It makes a a massive difference. Right? Once you once you’re able to, like, spend some time as humans with your customers, it it’s just it makes a difference. Even the time that it takes for you to walk from, you know, the front desk to the conference room, that is something you just cannot replicate on Zoom.

Julio Franco:
Absolutely. And it makes a massive difference.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Absolutely. I love that. Awesome.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. Josh, what

Kristi Faltorusso:
do you got?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So for my advice, Julio

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, no. Buy UpdateAI too. That’s the other thing.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s my advice. And how You know

Kristi Faltorusso:
what I’m saying?

Josh Schachter:
Scale. Yeah. And insights. And and I have so much to say on this topic, but I I think we’re running out of time. So I think we should, you know, we’ll we’ll start off the next episode, John, with my insights. I love that. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Julian, thank you so much.

Julio Franco:
That’s why I’m gonna have to listen to it, isn’t it?

Josh Schachter:
That’s your

Kristi Faltorusso:
that’s the hook.

Josh Schachter:
I was

Julio Franco:
about to get advice Yeah. And then we ran out of time, So now you can have to We

Kristi Faltorusso:
call it a click.

Julio Franco:
And hit the bell.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I also get to go and and look it up and chat GPT and figure out what I’m gonna say. So Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Ways.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The cheat code?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. We we, we need it. This has been so great. Out rough here. We didn’t know we’re gonna talk

Kristi Faltorusso:
about it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Awesome. Wait. It didn’t start out rough.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well Gosh. Mean

Julio Franco:
Positive. We

Kristi Faltorusso:
love you, Julio. Julio, would you recommend this podcast to a friend or colleague?

Kristi Faltorusso:
1 to 10. Live NPS.

Josh Schachter:
9 out of 10 guests recommended to other guests.

Julio Franco:
I don’t know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I don’t know. I’m gonna

Julio Franco:
listen to it. I’m gonna have to listen to it. You know?

Josh Schachter:
Delete these. Don’t listen to it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We have a, we do not have a promoter or a detractor, in YouTube. Passive.

Julio Franco:
Thanks. Passive. I’m a 6. Real.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Got some work here. I’m a 6.

Kristi Faltorusso:
7. This is like a strong 7a half. Okay.

Josh Schachter:
Josh, are you

Julio Franco:
just gonna cut it? I’ll give you the real answer. So I kinda would, but I wouldn’t recommend it to my team because then they’d be like, really? You’re talking about No.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. No. No. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Don’t tell your team, but you could tell your peers who are other leaders.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, I just Slacked your whole team, Julio. So they’re, like, in the lobby.

Julio Franco:
Oh, don’t worry about it. They’ll they’ll hear it. They’ll if you see a a lot of I don’t know where you’re where you have your metrics or not, but if you have a lot of people that all of a sudden just, like, you know, fall out and

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Yeah.

Julio Franco:
I don’t know. 13, that’ll be my team.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. No. That will be a simple I hear

Kristi Faltorusso:
him talk already too much.

Julio Franco:
Yeah. Exactly. Well, thank

Kristi Faltorusso:
you so much, Julio. This honestly, this has been great. I I appreciate all of the insight. This has been a fun conversation.

Julio Franco:
Thank you.

Josh Schachter:
Thanks, everybody. This is

Julio Franco:
a lot of fun.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Thanks, Julio, and good luck.