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Hey everybody, and welcome to this week’s edition of The CS Insider [Un]churned report. I’m back here again with Kristi Faltaruso, Jon Johnson, Mickey Powell. And I’m Josh, your co host for today. Thank you guys for all being here. Let’s see. How’s everybody’s weekend?

Yep. What do you do Mickey tell

us I ran around with my daughter at the park. It was sunshiny in Orange County. So what’s not to love? Awesome. Yeah, we

took the kids to the zoo in Raleigh, North Carolina, which was pretty great. I will say, the zoo, it’s the largest. It’s massive. Like we went to the elephant enclosure. And it was like, there was enough room for the orphans to be elephants, which is very different from Santa Barbara Zoo, where we come from, where it’s like, it’s like a basketball court for those poor animals. Right. So it was really fun for the kids to, like, just see this like, massive, massive field where all these animals are just like running around. And so it was it was pretty great. And

cool. I went to I’ve been to a wedding at the Santa Barbara Zoo and a lot of weddings there. And they all they do. They’re all they do

anyway, at the Santa Barbara Zoo, and

they brought up the penguin. But they had to keep everybody away from them. Because did you know that the penguins are not nice? So they have like a hairdryer kind? Yeah, they’re very unkind. Yeah, there’s

a book that was written about one of the penguins at the Santa Barbara Zoo. He lost a flipper and Teva, the shoe company or is it temporary? Tivo Tebow? Yeah,

that’s a it’s a great debate doesn’t matter

put up upon it’s fine. Yeah. Tell us what you think listeners made a all you

Israeli listeners out there. Israeli Customer Success Coach, because I think it’s an Israeli company. You know, I always call them

TiVos. Yeah, but rubber. They made a rubber flipper for this, this little penguin. And they wrote a whole book about this, this penguin that has a rubber flipper. So my kids have it. It’s great. It’s wonderful. Anyways, Santa Barbara.

All right. I want to get to the elephant in the room here. We’ve seen Mickey all over social media in the past week, this guy has.

What do you do for work? Mickey? I’m curious.

That’s what I do for work.

Social media.

Yeah, sorry. What’s your question?

I don’t think it was more of a comment. It was it was. So what are you? What’s this? What’s this webinar series? Mickey? What’s all this chat? GPT crazy going on? And, you know, should we go? Should we talk about it? Or should we just go on to the next topic,

I’ll say this. I have lots of things to say. And I’ll try to keep it short. I believe that, that this is the biggest technological advancement of our lives, including the internet, iPhone, what have you. And I basically am taking upon myself to try to help our community, grasp it, take it in and learn how to use it. And also not be sheisty snake oil salesmen and be like, get my list of 10,000 Chat GPT prompts for 2999. Because well, that’s generally how customer success is. And also, I’ve learned so much from so many people that have given it away for free. So that’s what I’m doing. So I figured webinars was good, good ways to do it. Because I suck at writing church up is better at writing than me, but I’m good at talking. So yeah, I’ve been doing it a lot. I plan to do it a lot more. And people have really been blown away. I got an email from a guy in Nairobi, Kenya on Saturday that he watched and loved the webinar.

That’s awesome. But what are people getting out of it? What’s the what’s the what’s the intention of it? Like? How are you bringing jack up?

Yeah, great. I started that’s a way better question than my answer. So I think what they really liked is, and this is from what I’ve heard, is it kind of opened up their eyes to like, this is more than just a tool to write an email. Like it’s a very multifaceted tool analogy that came to my mind the other day, it’s like, it’s like the Swiss Army knife of like work like it can do so much. And so different areas. And people are, they literally told me that they were blown away, their minds were blown, they, you know, they it opened their eyes, and that they found my particular style of delivery, like very easy to understand and engaging and practical. So yeah, for those that are listening, if you haven’t seen that webinar, please will include in the show notes, you can also reach out to me and I’m happy to send you the recording. I’m doing a beginner session tomorrow, April 4 Josh’s birthday. And then I’m doing like a more advanced like productivity focused session, getting shit done with CSS insider on April 20. April 20 is a fun date for some people in the United States.

Why know anything about that? How is that better than Josh’s birthday for?

I’ll tell you this, my my dad is a fan of the Grateful Dead. So he’s enjoyed many days like for 20 for many, many decades.

That’s amazing. No, I love it as somebody who’s who was with you on your last session. What something that I’m curious about is like you talked about, like the value that people get out of this, right. So using it as a tool. How does it change the industry, right? Maybe that’s kind of one of the things that we talked about. Out is like, what? What’s what’s going to shake up? Like, I know, there’s a lot of CSMs that are like scared that we’re going to lose jobs or, you know, tools that are going to kind of go away. But I know that’s not the right way to think about it. So

I’m so open, I’m going to answer that by sorting, citing a study that open AI actually did. And I’ll get to the link to the paper. But they, they estimate that on the low end 50 15% of all workers in all, they said, All workers could produce like, a massive portion of their work at the same or better quality faster. And they think that once we start optimizing and putting tooling on top of Chatty PT in the technology, that can be upwards of like, 50 to 60%. So I want you guys to stop and think about that for a second and think about yourself. If you were 50% more productive tomorrow, how would that change your life? Like, Christy, you’re an executive? If you were 50%? More productive? What could you get done? What could you do?

I mean, I would reserve the time back to sleep. Because I think all executives are lacking sleep. That’s my final answer.

I call bullshit on that. I don’t think you would, Chris, I don’t think you would either.

I probably actually end up running or some shit, because my husband would make me because I haven’t been properly training for our races coming up. But I would I would prefer to sleep. Now, obviously, I would probably take on some cool projects. I’ve got a laundry list of things that I’d much rather be doing. And most of the nonsense I end up spending my day doing. And I think that’s probably a true sentiment for a lot of folks.

I think that’s right. Yeah.

I mean, I think I think you’re right, I think optimization is this world that we’re in right now. You know, everybody’s talking about the industry. And everybody’s talking about the market and all this crazy stuff that we don’t control what we can control is our at our output. How do we justify how do we validate? And how do we provide the best service as an individual contributor as a manager to the systems that we’re trying to continue with our companies in our in our industries? Yeah, I

mean, personally, it’s probably made me two or three times more productive. Does your boss agree, Josh?

Yes, but But it’s so first of all, the answer the question, if you were 50%, more productive? How would that change my life? Oh, it would be it would be such a blessing. No, it has made you more productive. But that’s because I think you really just love it. I think it lights you up, it gets you out of bed every morning. It doesn’t it doesn’t hurt. Yeah, it’s fun. I mean, you’re I think you’re right, it is it is generational technology. And we are just at the very starting line of what it is going to do for transforming workflows and workstreams across so many different functions. So I’m very excited.

What I also love at the beginning of this, we are jumping into this, like there’s a lot of there’s a lot of in uninformed opinions about what AI and and the future of this technology looks like. And what I love about what you’re doing, and a lot of folks are doing kind of in this space is like, let’s also make sure that we’re talking about what it’s really going to do, and what it really could do so that there is not just this doom and gloom Terminator mentality that everything’s gonna get replaced with this all knowing, you know, Soran ask AI, but it’s actually like, how do we empower and improve life and you’re laying the groundwork with a lot of great examples. And I’ve loved learning from you. So I’ll stop. You know,

the one thing that Nikki hasn’t, hasn’t talked about yet, because it’s fairly new is last week, opening, I came out with information about their new plugin marketplace. Now you can now you can be able to tap other information sources into open AI into chat GPT. So it won’t just that data from 2021, you can actually build data models yourself. Yeah, build data models stuff, you can inject current information from the internet. I haven’t played around with this yet. But I’m really excited because like for CES, imagine a use case where and I don’t know how it’s going to all like like play out. But imagine you want to tap into the plugin to like Confluence or Google Docs or JIRA product documentation right. Now, listen, you’ve got chat GBT at your fingertips to retrieve information that you can provide to customers from all your Confluence product documentation, or you know, or your intercom articles or whatever like that that marketplace that is coming out soon or wherever it is in its lifecycle. I’m really excited about that. Yeah,

I’m excited for the cup. Like literally like if I want to train it on your individual CSMs emails like go read Go Go read the last 1000 emails that I wrote or documentation that I personally wrote to you to learn from my voice right and add this personalization of automation which is really interesting. I use I remember guru do you guys did you guys ever use guru as a tool? Like I might I would the updating playbooks or knowledgebase articles like seamlessly across that’s still manual like with that type of plug in with this type of industry. It will allow that to just be magnified in a massive scale 100%

I mean, I’m sure the guys that Guru, already doing it. Yeah. Coming into bits. And you know, I spoke to a product manager at Google this weekend. And he was talking about he was just switching over departments. And I have a feeling this probably was a confidential conversation, but he never, he never told me never give the caveat. So, um, well, it’s just the three of us, just the three of us listening. That was a very cool, like, what’s your new, you know, group, but it was something like Google Labs or something of that nature. And he said, You know, I’m working on AI for Google and how AI is going to be basically, like, everybody’s going to get their own personal assistant. And then effectively, it’s like, I guess Google wants to own it. And by the way, like disclaimer here, like insert legal disclaimer, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Right? Now. This is like, paraphrasing, paraphrasing a bar conversation with a guy, right. So don’t like go and like buy stock and Google or whatever. But like, basically, Google is, is building like some kind of platform operating system, whatever we’re like, you’ll then have all your different marketplace apps on top of that, that will do each of the different tasks. And it’s like, it’s like the Okay, Google or Hey, Alexa. And I hope that people are listening to this, this this podcast right now on speakerphone and their machines and devices. But, right, like, and then it’ll be able to, it’ll literally be your personal assistant, like, okay, you know, Google, like, go, go book, the next flight to Charlotte, North Carolina for me, and then like, go and like, brings up kayak, and it just does it right, or like, whatever. So I think we’re just the very beginning. Yeah, I love it.

It’s I am, I was thinking about it in terms of like entrepreneurs and stuff. And I’m, I’m talking and working with one investor as a Customer Success base. And she’s really awesome. She’s got all this great experience, but like, she doesn’t know how to run marketing. She doesn’t know how to build the system. She doesn’t know how to build a landing page. And I was like, the one of the ways that this kind of appealed to me like personal assistant, Josh, but also like, it’s like you have your founding team without having to pay by a founder, and like, hire a founding team, you have, you have all these people that you can take your specific skill set, and you can amplify it. I’m a big fan of navall Raava Khan. He’s the guy that started AngelList. And he’s a big time like, technological philosopher. And he previously said before, even in chat, GPT came out that like, people are starting to realize that software as a leverage is a means to leverage, like, you know, there’s people, right, you can have people that work for you. And that’s a form of leverage capital, you can use money to create leverage, the software is also a point of leverage. And I was like, that’s awesome. But like, I don’t know how to code and I’m never going to learn because it’s totally beyond me. But now there’s this tool that can do so much of it for me, like I suck at copywriting. And it can do all that for me really well, and I can just tweak it. And so now I’m like, Oh, my God, we’re gonna see an in a further explosion of people saying, I know how to do this one particular thing really well. And then I can do all of the other things that I don’t know how to do well, and the system’s to scale that can be almost entirely built for me, I think, we’re gonna see this renaissance of entrepreneurship, which is kind of crazy, because like, there was already a massive boom of entrepreneurship, I think we’re gonna see even more of it. And I’m really excited by that. Because like, you know, people like Christy, and John, and Josh, and all these others that like, have entrepreneurial spirit. And it’s just the cost of $20 a month, you have access to people that are in, you know, somebody who’s in the 90th percentile of like, most tasks, which is nuts. It’s nuts.

By the way, Mickey is a big advocate of paying $20 a month for the premium

100% Every

time we get on call. Is it John, if you upgraded John, have you upgraded? Yes, I

have I text my brother, like twice a week of like, today. So

outside of like, I think it’s like the speed or like, what, what’s the thing you get for the 20 bucks.

So if you pay the 20 bucks, you get access to GPT four, which is much better than 3.5. Like, I don’t use five anymore. And you also get priority access if there’s capacity issues. And so that’s well worth the price of admission right there. Um, I have not played around with being but being by the way, it’s just using 3.5 and four under the hood. And I have not played around with Google barred. I signed up yesterday. I’m going to I’m going to play around with it this week. But from what I’ve read from people that are way smarter than me, Google is behind my guesses, they’ll catch up eventually. But like I would pay many hundreds of dollars a month for this tool. Like if if, if opening I came out tomorrow and said premium is now $400 A month, I would go to Josh and say I need you to expense $400 a month. But yeah, it’s well worth that value.

And did you put your affiliate link in the comments below?

No affiliate link No. Which

presented by don’t tell. I know this is a future conversation. Make you but you know, as we’re looking through these different webinars that we’re talking through, like I would really love to figure out how we can actually teach people how to build a case for not just like the everyday like, I’m gonna have this edit this email, but like how do you apply value? How do you track ROI for what you’re paying and the value that you’re getting out? Right? So because I think as CSM is like this is the thing that we do every single day is like we coach our customers to like, You got to tell the value of it. And they’re like, what does that mean? Most people don’t know how to do that, right? Like, they don’t know how to go back to their boss and say, I can do more.

John, if you can help us solve that equation, then then please come work. This is like, right, what make it Mickey and I are working on because we know we’re saving time with what we’re doing it update AI. But you know, the value equation and saving time as a starting point. That’s tough, right? Like no computers,

how do you benchmark Howdy, but then how do you like set these kinds of triggers for what is better? And what is worse? And what is like? Like you just said that, like if somebody if if they charge me $400 a month, I would pay it like there is this equation in the back of your brain that says like, I know that the value of this is x, right? But that is kind of intrinsic at this point, right? It’s not like you can just put that on paper and say now you’re the next person next to me, you should pay $400. Right. So that’s not the scalable model, right. But as we look into these apps, and plugin models, and how to train and these cottage industries that are going to come out of this, it’s like how do we start thinking about where this value lies so that we can know where to apply and implement these kinds of skills and upskilling that we have with this incredible knowledge model,

we need to because if you don’t, if you don’t apply value to it, if you’re not calculating the value, then it’s just going to be this mushrooming of all these apps that are going to pop up and they’re going to be useless, right. So like it shouldn’t be, we like we as products that are building off of off of TPT need to be accountable for providing value. Christie, I want to go into the next conversation, which is on this topic of value and ROI. This is not something that’s going to be in a CS insider report this week. But this is in a thread that both you and I are on on LinkedIn with other CS leaders, you know, that thread is the one that doesn’t stop. And And this morning, folks are talking Bob London posted a question posed a question to the group saying, hey, for all UCS leaders out there host sales? Are you making sure that your customers are calculating the value that they’ve received from your product? Not like these are the goals? And this is like the objective, you know, kind of passively stated, but like specifically after you’re using our product, are you quantifying the exact value and most people in this thread on LinkedIn that we have, who are very seasoned CS leaders said, No, our companies do not do that, which is not shocking, to be honest with you, but is like something that we all talk about? So I don’t know. Are you doing that client success? do you what do you see in the industry with others?

Okay, so here’s where it’s like, I get to cheat a little bit, because the competitive advantage that I have is that we actually use our product internally at client success in our customer success team. And so I actually have a solid understanding of what using our technology does for my team and what we can do as a result of it. That said, and and so I have to use those models, as I do a top down bottoms up analysis to get to our capacity planning, right. But what I don’t do today is I don’t pass that data on to our customers. And that that’s definitely a missed opportunity on our part. So like, no dancer, Bob’s question, no, we’re not doing that today. I think I have better means to do it than most of the folks that are in that group. But I’m just not. So maybe if I use chat, GBT and I saved myself 50% more time and I can be more efficient, then I could go and actually do that

goes full circle. I mean, but I think nobody is right. Like, I don’t think anybody is making sure that the customer knows, like the hard number. Even though you

know, when they do when the customers got to churn, that’s when all of a sudden you get this graph that pops up in a deck somewhere that says, But look what we did. Yeah, that’s, that’s when we that’s when magic numbers appear.

We I will, I’m gonna we actually do this at user testing. So we have like, we actually implemented this organization within our team called the VMO Value Management Office, user testing last year, we actually have for like business analysts that work on benchmarking not just for industry standards, but also for customer standards. So when we’re looking at, you know, for those of you don’t know what user testing does, it’s UX. And you are, like research and design software. So we help people build things better. And we get data from their customers on the products, the digital and physical products they’re building. So what our team does is they go out, and they just talk to customers, right? And say, this is how much this person would cost outside of the software. So all of our CSMs are empowered. We’ve got these wonderful decks and calculators that show if you rip us out, you know, you’re gonna be spending x versus what you’re paying now, but we also have like payback periods, we go really deep into the weeds of showing, you know, for every $2 that you spend, depending on industry, it’s like $8 in value and vice versa. And we have those slides for every single CSM, so that when we’re before we get to the churn of it like halfway through the year, six months in three months in, we’re talking about the value that our customers are doing. And then we’re asking them to validate. It’s like, but it’s not.

Is it hypothetical? Are you giving them their actual numbers giving them their?

Their numbers? Yeah, yeah.

Have you ever been in a situation where you’re like, oh, shoot, you know what, like, it’s not so compelling. But I still gotta show it to these guys.

Yeah, so we actually did this is one of the things that with a couple of our key accounts, when we did this exercise last quarter, we had some really deep numbers on customer support, like the value is added for customer support, like reduction in support tickets, and all this kind of stuff. And what we didn’t actually factor in was the way that they validate those numbers on the back end, right. So how, like the cost center versus, you know, revenue revenue center, and they said, Well, this isn’t important to us, because it doesn’t affect my I don’t control those numbers. Like, why are you telling me that you’re saving for segments, you know, or for groups over money, you should go talk to them about that. And so we’re like, Oh, shoot. So we kind of had a misstep, but we removed that it wasn’t as compelling because it reduced, you know, the, the, quote, unquote, value by 20%. But it was still a compelling enough number. But that’s the thing is, it’s not a static number, you’ve got to be able to go to a customer, I think a lot of times you say I’m gonna wow them with my numbers, and they get like really deflated when they get like, oh, that’s wrong. It’s like, but that’s a really great conversation like that helps you understand your customer in a much better way to say, well tell me how I’m wrong. You know, give

me real time. Yours isn’t time savings. So Right.

It’s time and money revenue. Okay.

So for companies ago, we did do this at one of my companies, where we basically were able to help them understand their attribution models from from organic search, right. So like, if you paid for these, these words, right to bid on them through PPC, right, Google AdWords, here’s what this would cost you. But because you’re ranking top couple positions, here’s what that conversion to traffic looks like. And if you drive X amount of visits, here’s how many visits lead to a sale. Here’s your average sale value. So like, in that company, it was so easy. I won’t say it was so easy, but we had a formulaic way to actually say, Here’s the money you’re saving, and then here’s the money you’re making. And that was that was super cool. I don’t know that I have been intercompany that has had that that good have a grasp on that formulaic model. John, sounds like you, did you have it? Now? I don’t know that I have it. Because if it’s just time savings, I think that is tougher.

Yeah. I mean, and I think that’s, that’s what it comes down to is like, if you don’t have somebody looking at data models, you don’t have a look at inputs, like your assiette for your tool, like your CSMs what they do now how many hours they spend, I mean, you know, you go through capacity planning and you like, I

guess the attribution, right is like how much does each CSM on average make on your team? Right? If you save them X amount of hours, you just do the attribution back to headcount. Right? So yes, from that standpoint, you could do it. Okay, I’ll write that down. So I gotta go use charts up to so I can free up some time to get to that later.

I’ll send you I’ll send you my VMO export. So you can take a look at kind of the guidelines that we do, because that’s what it comes down to is that, like, we know that a researcher costs, you know, $180,000 a year. And they Yeah, I mean,

like, we can use benchmark averages on SAS rolls, right? Even if we just said, industry, here’s what each of these people at these levels, on average, would be making and come up with compounds and then give an average, and then we have their average deal size, right? So they also kind of back into some other stuff.

And then when you get in front of a customer, you say these are benchmarks like well, you know, would you be willing to have that conversation about what your actuals are, so that we can give you a more focused number, right. And sometimes they’ll give you what their standard price costs are internally for your customers, sometimes they won’t. But if, like, I found that if you just kind of come to the table with a little bit of like guidance on what those bench markings are, most of the time, they just want to see what other people are doing, right? It’s less about where they’re at. And it’s more like, oh, how do we stack up against your other customers? How do we stack up against other leaders in the industry, the Amazons and the Googles? And the, you know, and Adobe’s out there, yeah,

the time savings one is interesting, because, of course, you can back out like, here’s the, here’s the hours you save, here’s the compensation that you say, here’s the percentage headcount that you’re saving. But it’s still not hard cash in a person’s wallet, right? And it’s still not at a certain level, there’s probably these like the step functions where it does become this way. But like, linearly, it’s not like you’re letting go or reducing your headcount by by point zero 1% Each day, right, like, so it is a harder type of thing. And this is something that Mickey and I talk a lot about, even though we know that you know, there’s value there behind it. Well, I

would flip that on its head to take Nikki’s perspective on like, what you can do a chat GPT like, if you look at it, saying I’m gonna reduce the workload of my CSMs by 20%. You know what I mean that they’re gonna have 20% Flex, it’s not so much what that dollar savings is in that 20%. But it is, as you’re looking at what expansion looks like, as you’re looking at for forward looking headcount and forward looking roadmaps like we just got acquired, right? So we’re going through kind of like the convergence of accounts, and I’m getting like $3 million more into my book Can all this kind of stuff and like, I wish like, you know, nobody get mad at me within my company for saying this, but I wish that we had this like mindset to say like, Oh, does this person have the percentage available to adopt the next workload of whatever’s happening happening next, right? So if you’re looking at the tools that you’re saving as a force multiplier saying, well, now these 10 people, we don’t need to go hire seven more people or eight more people, because I’m gonna dilute these other tasks. I know we’re talking to kind of big minded stuff, but like, these other tasks into these other people that now have the freedom like that’s, that’s kind of the thing is like, Well, what else does the wish your team was doing?

It gives you more leverage. Leverage ratio. So it’s funny because you make you think very much like on this, which is scary for you. But it’s like, is it is $1 savings, which are hypothetical dollar savings? Is it headcount savings, which is still HyperCard headcount savings? Or is it giving you more leverage to do the things that your team needs to do? So in our case, it’s giving additional ARR that your CSM is can carry underneath them, because they’re more freed up? If you building a product for I don’t know, a tax accountant. Maybe it’s similar, but it’s like they can handle more accounts per person. Because of that, right? Well,

you can also say like, what else do I want my CSM to do? Like, what are there other like, are there? Are there opportunities within this as the industry is changing? Like, do I need somebody to write playbooks? Do I need somebody to be a team lead? Like it’s not just account stuff? It’s also like, I need somebody who’s going to be able to manage this community or this Lunch and Learn to these things? And it’s like, how can we add more value as individuals, if we’re just more dumping more stuff on top of them without thinking about reduction in effort, Chad Kornfeld,

our friend Chad wrote an article last week, which I think is going to be in the report this week. That’s entitled Get over yourself customer success and own renewals. Christie, do you guys own renewals?

We do own renewals, we own all commercial motions post initial sale, I always say post initial sale because the sales team does the first sell and our team continues to sell

was it scared you remember the first time that you you like owned a renewal or that you had to manage renewal in your function? How did that feel?

I really enjoyed it. I like money. And I’m really good at my job. So I knew I would do well. I was the best CSM on my team. And I crushed it. I had the highest renewal rate the highest renewal value most and upsell attribution, so I was not scared.

The queen of customer success on LinkedIn latest,

super humble, I’m super humble. No, I honestly like listen, I when I first gotten customers, because I didn’t know anything about this stuff. But what I did know is that if I helped my customers see the same value that I saw, there was a previous customer of the product I went to work for. And if I helped them the same way and I help them be as successful as I was as a customer that I knew that like how could they not renew? I will tell you my first time I lost a customer was it was the limited I don’t even know if they’re still company anymore. But they were any commerce women’s fashion brand. I don’t think they exist. And but they had ended up you know, the limited short, but I noticed that the lemonade is a brand isn’t around anymore. Oh, they they ended up leaving, but it wasn’t because they were going to a competitive solution. They ended up obviously not being around anymore as a brand. But they were just cutting their budgets. So significantly, they couldn’t afford to keep a platform like bright edge and longer. So that was like my first time I lost a customer. And that was really disheartening. But they wrote an entire letter to my boss, telling them how amazing I was and how this had nothing to do with the value that they were getting and how great I was to work with. So I took that as a win. But

you know what, guys, Christy’s having a tough day today. Let’s give her a compliment just to boost as a Christian.

I don’t get enough of these, you know, as a leader, right? Like nobody sits around telling me how great I am. Hey, well, that’s

what we’re here for. We’re here to sit around and tell you this is yeah.

She found it out.

Thank God

no, but I mean, I agree with you. I think like renewals like this is. And it’s also growth and it’s upsell and all these things like we are whether we’re signing like the person sending out a DocuSign we are primarily in charge of the way that our customers see our platform, our product, our experience, and if we’re not invested in that renewal, if we’re not invested in the upsell financially, like we’re not getting the money back then we’re gonna we’re gonna lose sight of the ball. And this is one of those things. I do think sales folks, Gadsden AES should also take part in that first year renewal to keep them invested in the health of a long term customer meaning Yeah, they sold How do they make sure they sold a good customer is that that there with them through that that second year renewal so there is kind of a blended mentality here but the CSM is absolutely whether you haven’t renewal manager that you’re building off of for process. The relationship is the key to

that, you know, as a customer of many vendors, I have to say like I don’t like when the salesperson, like swoops back in and poops right as they used to call it and consulting.

But don’t do you think that they should get a kickback on that first-year renewal whether they’re on that call or not? Like that’s the thing is like, I don’t necessarily need them on the call but like, as a person if they sell the first year and they know that they’re gonna churn second year, they’re gonna lose revenue, but if they sell them first year without their eye on because you know, most payback periods is not 12 months with SAS.

Yeah. So I’m okay with like cutting their commission, right? You get 50% on the quote or certain like, right, like the topic 70 That’s fine, fine, fine 75% You get 75%. When you close the deal, you don’t get that other 25% of that commission until that customer renews after that first year love it. And the challenge is right. Like, everyone’s like, Oh, but salespeople turnover. It’s like, well, that’s their incentive to stay or to go. I mean, like, that’s money you’re leaving on the table, you want to stay great, if not by their seller. But I think that we we should be incentivizing that. I don’t see enough companies doing it.

He’s no, but what we’re all talking about is incentives matter. Right. And there’s a lot of things we can’t control for. But like, number one, it’s really inefficient to bring sales people back into the motion later, it is like it’s just dumb. Now, I will say this being the token chat deputy optimist that, like I think it’ll make that whole process easier. And this is actually something that Josh and I want to make update AI really good at and in the very near future. So that like, if salespeople if there’s a time where like, they’re in the in between and salespeople are involved, they don’t just swoop in and go, I don’t know what’s going on. Have you done this? And you’re like, I, we’ve been talking about that for six months back off, they’ll know what’s going on, they’ll have the context. The this you know, and I feel for salespeople, by the way, it’s not to it’s not to crap on salespeople, like they have other things they need to be doing. So let’s let them do those things. That’s actually why I’m so bullish on like update API is because we might open the name or something make you update. That’s right. Sales Team updated. That’s right. I think Josh and his, an early advisor, they they made sure that it was in the name, but like, it enabled them to go do something. And actually, this is going to segue into a question for Christie that that I’ve been pondering a lot is Do you feel you might feel differently because of your type of company, but just in general speak on on being an X CS executive in the industry? Do you feel like you have a seat at the table? That’s equal to, you know, the Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Sales officers, chief revenue officer, what have you like it for your level? Your peers in the industry?

No, I Okay. So I’m removing myself from my company. In my situation, I will say no. And I can say that confidently, because I literally have these conversations with folks all the time, who are struggling with this. And it’s not that they don’t have, listen, it could be a dumb thing, right? Where it’s like, they haven’t learned how to take advantage of the visibility that they have. Right. And so they don’t know how to control the narrative. They don’t know how to own that spot. But I will definitely say for the leaders that I speak to, they definitely feel like second class citizens when it comes to marketing and sales and CTOs. And like your product people, they don’t feel like they’re getting the same, the same support. And the same, will just leave that support for now. Why not? It’s a multitude of reasons. But I sometimes think that because I don’t like to play the victim role, right? So I always say like, if something’s not working, do we take a moment to reflect on what we might not be doing? And how we can do things a little differently. And I do see similar trends behind what’s happening. And so like I said, I think that folks don’t do a great job of talking about the value that their organizations bring, I don’t think that they do a great job of advocating for the work, I don’t think that they are managing up the way that they need to in many accounts. And so like I hate to say it’s an OSS thing, but if I am just speaking as a CS leader who sees other CS leaders do what they do every day, I think that we could be doing things a little bit

differently a little better, a little bit. Could you I agree. And I think that’s awesome. Could you give us maybe an example of how you’ve done this, and I’ve seen success,

okay, like, I don’t know that I’ve had tremendous success in other companies, which is why I decided that I didn’t want to be in those companies any longer. Because listen, someplace that you can convince folks. And I think that I listen, I come to everything with as much data and education and conviction and passion as possible. However, some people don’t give a shit. And like, that’s the reality. And I’ve had plenty of leaders who told me that sales oversee us 100% of the time, and they’re like, it’s almost without using that exact statement have said that through their actions and everything else. Yeah, the reason why I transitioned into the role that I’m in is because I finally found an organization, right? I mean, we have to be customer success focused, we are customers because of software, I had to find a place that understood what I did, and the value I brought in order to feel like I do have fair representation at the leadership level. And I will say, for the first time in my entire professional career, not only do I almost feel like I have more than sales, more than marketing more than anything, but I do believe that that’s a product of the environment in the market that I work in. Now, if I was going to take my same thing and go somewhere else, I’m going to tell you like I I think it’s just a problem with our inability to showcase value and that ROI and the way that you do a renewals growth, right? Advocacy, we don’t do enough job like enough work around promoting advocacy and what that actually does for people, right, like sales, pipeline, marketing, everything that that does, right, like second order revenue. I don’t see anybody spending enough time focused on things like that. And so I think that’s the big problem. I’m is that until we can get really tight articulating stories around the metrics and the value that we bring, we’re never going to have fair representation.

That was brilliant. Yeah, it’s almost like your assumption needs to drive the organization’s growth. Otherwise, why the EFF do you exist,

and they believe it. Listen, every leader I talked to you, like believes in, they know why they exist. They have they’re struggling internally with whether it’s personalities, or beliefs or lack of education, to just get there, right. And it is hard what we have to do because we have to sell ourselves in these organizations that aren’t bought in. And for folks that haven’t done that, or they’re not comfortable doing it, they’re going to struggle all the time. And it’s sad, because I keep seeing a lot of CS teams being dissolved. And every all the work that we do kind of being distributed, whether it goes back to sales or marketing or a little bit over to product or support or wherever. And it’s only going to continue to happen if we can’t we can’t prove our value, guys. I think we’re at a time I thought just because of the conference room. And then

we’re also, you know, 40 minutes or so. So it’s the confluence of both things here coming together for me. This was a great chat. We’ll do it in two weeks. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you. Thank you. Bye, guys.