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Elisabeth Zornes:
Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, they’re signing off. They’re signing off on here’s the value that you are going to deliver to me. You

Elisabeth Zornes:
Delivered. Though you

Josh Schachter:
have delivered them. Okay.

Elisabeth Zornes:
We have delivered. And that’s important. You know? We wanna we wanna make it real. You know? There’s all sorts of, you know, good intents and hopes when you start on a project, but we wanna make it real.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Customers have a very difficult time articulating how they’re defining value with software providers. Folks don’t know how to clearly articulate it, and so then, obviously, if we don’t have it articulated, it’s hard to deliver on it.

Elisabeth Zornes:
I would wanna know the answer to the question of what is the best conversation that I could have with my customer right now? I wanna wanna know the answer to that question. That’s a really important question.

Jon Johnson:
So I’ve talked to a lot of CSMs. They’re like, I just have to get all this information. They don’t answer my questions.

Josh Schachter:
Usually, I hit the record button on these guys as a, like, a surprise attack to jump right into the episode, but I’m not gonna do that. Attack. I’m not gonna do that.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. That’s very trust building right there. Thanks, Josh.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. No. We just don’t trust Josh, actually. That’s what we’ve learned. Yeah.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So You probably you might have reasons. I can only guess.

Josh Schachter:
Wow. Oh, she’s she’s she’s good at this. She’s got that’s that Munich humor, Elizabeth.

Elisabeth Zornes:
That’s the Munich humor. It’s coming through strongly.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of CS and BS. I’m your host, Josh. I’m your cohost, Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI, here with the marvelous Christy Falterusso, CCO of client success, and the amazing John Johnson, principal CSM at user testing. If you

Carly Clements:
were gonna say splash again,

Jon Johnson:
you were gonna get it wrong again. Josh has never gotten where I work correctly.

Josh Schachter:
At Amazon. That you were gonna

Kristi Faltorusso:
Maybe he’s just envisioning you in another organization doing something bigger and better, John.

Jon Johnson:
Aren’t we all?

Kristi Faltorusso:
He’s just like he’s projecting a future for you.

Jon Johnson:
Aren’t we all?

Josh Schachter:
Oh, man. Well, I’m really excited about that.

Jon Johnson:
Week, guys.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I’m well, we’re good. We’re good. We’re good. I’m excited about this episode because we have somebody really special to talk to, the chief customer officer at Autodesk, Elizabeth Zorns. Elizabeth was also previously the CCO at Zendesk. She’s held executive roles at Microsoft. She was at Cisco for way too long, and has a really illustrious career.

Josh Schachter:
So, Elizabeth, thank you so much for being with us.

Elisabeth Zornes:
It’s my pleasure to be with this, fantastic group. And when you say illustrious career, this this sounds really interesting and exciting, so I wonder what that might be.

Josh Schachter:
What career would be illustrious?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I don’t know. What what what do you wanna do what do you wanna do when you grow up, Elizabeth? What would be an illustrious career?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Well, that that’s a long time out. I’m just like I love working with customers. That’s, what I love doing, be it as your junior CSM, as you introduced me, or your chief customer officer. I actually held all of those roles.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. We’re gonna go right into this. So you you love working with customers, which is why as CCO for the past 5 years, how many customers do you work with? Or is your customer the board, the CEO, the the upward stakeholder?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. That’s, a very interesting, question.

Josh Schachter:
Twist that. Let me twist that. How does how does a CCO work with customers? Let’s twist that.

Elisabeth Zornes:
How does a CCO work with customers? Many different ways, I would say. Let’s just take a a step back for a second because CCO is a role that really came to bear, you know, not even 10 years ago, not even 7 years ago. It’s relatively new, and a lot of people are still wrapping their mind around what does a CCO do. So he here, unveiling. A CCO works with customers once they become customers. So part of the scope is really on, you know, helping customers to get started, to get value out of, leveraging the software and get good use out of it, to dream and imagine what they might be able to do and then making that a reality. And then as a little side job, we, of course, want them to stay with us. So that is, you know, the fiduciary responsibility we are all working with to make sure that our customers not only come join us, that we want them to stay with us, to grow with us, and be, you know, happy customers.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. This is a first on this podcast. So we are talking to somebody so important that her muscle just arrived.

Carly Clements:
Did her assistant just join us?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Can can we introduce we we don’t we we can’t we we can’t have, like, you know, visitors behind the curtains here. We need to introduce everybody. So, Elizabeth, can you introduce us to your esteemed this is the BS part of the program. Can you introduce us to your esteemed colleague, Carly?

Elisabeth Zornes:
So this is Carly Clements, and and I’m I’m I’m really hoping to get her hair

Jon Johnson:
like I was supposed

Josh Schachter:
to do

Elisabeth Zornes:
today as well. No? Okay. She did not do her hair. But besides that, she’s very fabulous. She’s my, communications director, and she, helps me to have good words. How about that?

Jon Johnson:
Carly, I have a question. I I need your opinion, Carly. And this is actually the reason that I’m glad you’re here. Where do we think Kate Middleton is?

Carly Clements:
Okay. I have a lot to say about that.

Elisabeth Zornes:
I have a

Carly Clements:
lot to say about that on a nonrecorded line. Absolutely.

Elisabeth Zornes:
This

Carly Clements:
is a first for me too. I have never interrupted a recording in my entire career. This is

Josh Schachter:
I I don’t think you’re really interrupting that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I thought you called me. Interrupting.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. We interrupted ourselves. We’re gonna get back to Elizabeth, though. It keeps

Josh Schachter:
talk to you in 10 minutes. We’ll be we’ll be back in a minute.

Carly Clements:
I I truly do apologize. I will I will leave very ungracefully, and hope that you can get gosh. I I truly this is a first for me.

Jon Johnson:
No. We love it. We love it.

Elisabeth Zornes:
The last night, no. I don’t. Has to leave. She’s gonna look for Kate, meanwhile.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I think she knows what Kate is, actually.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. Oh, I I can be a Kate look alike if you if I try

Josh Schachter:
to. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. In the blurry zoom, a 100%.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You look good in royal blue.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So I know. I know. I know.

Jon Johnson:
I love Carly. Please tell her that it’s okay.

Josh Schachter:
I do actually by the way, guys, I do know, like, what’s going on with Kate Middleton, but I’m not able to reveal that my secrets were my sources. We’ll use that in

Jon Johnson:
the we’ll clip that one.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So many others. Yes.

Jon Johnson:
Yes. Yes. Mhmm. Okay. So where were we?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Okay. Back to newness.

Jon Johnson:
What are we doing?

Josh Schachter:
I think I think, Elizabeth, I think you’re gonna run the show

Kristi Faltorusso:
We’re talking about the newness of the chief customer officer role.

Jon Johnson:
That’s right.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And that’s what we were walking through was that the fact that this role hasn’t been around for decades, and it’s fairly newer. So when we were asking her about what does a chief customer officer do and what is her involvement with customers, she was so eloquently walking us through that.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. That’s good.

Elisabeth Zornes:
There will be a quiz. So I hope you all listened well on what the different components of the role are. And this really has to do with you know, in the old days, people were selling software. You know, it was a transaction, then they walked away, came back, whatever, 5, 7 years later and did it again, rinse and repeat. Now it’s very different. So, with the SaaS business, with everything cloud based, with everything, you know, going towards platform, there is so much more that customers can do with the software rather than, you know, using it in a standard fashion. And that’s really a part of my role to help customers think about what is they wanna accomplish? What is the outcome they wanna drive? Do they wanna be more productive? Do they wanna accelerate their, you know, their development process? And we have some really fantastic examples of our customers that, you know, are using the software to say, hey. Can we, you know, design a car instead of, you know, multiple years, cut out 2 years of the production cycle and do it all virtually on the platform? And these are real outcomes that we are looking for to help customers dream about them and then make a reality.

Elisabeth Zornes:
And that is part of what my team does, helping customers to establish that, to advise them on how they can make it happen, and then really follow-up with them. We are kind of, you know, moving in with a customer. We are the advisors to give them, insights and advice on how they might do things better. And, you know, hopefully, they love it. They achieve their outcomes, and they grow, we grow, everybody’s happy.

Jon Johnson:
I love that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Can can I ask an interesting question? It’s not gonna be interesting at all, actually. So I would say that that’s probably the goal for most organizations. But in the conversations that we have with listen, less mature, less established organizations, maybe new new markets, customers have a very difficult time articulating how they’re defining value with software providers. So this is something it sounds like you’ve built a nice operations around, and your your team is orchestrating customers from defining value to that value realization. How have you structured such a process around that where they are really getting their customers to clearly articulate that from day 1 and then managing that life cycle. Because I feel like the conversations that we have with so many leaders is we get stuck on point 1, is that folks don’t know how to clearly articulate it. And so then, obviously, if we don’t have it articulated, it’s hard to deliver on it.

Jon Johnson:
That is an interesting question.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Christy for that. You just got on it. And that there is actually, it’s a new muscle that one has to really purposefully focus on and build on that is what we call the value management. And it starts with that conversation at the beginning with the customer to say, you know, why do you consider what what do you wanna improve? And it could be productivity, you know, cutting out hours. For example, in our case, we have customers that are doing building design that, you know, building bridges, waterways, you know, high rise buildings, and it matters to them if they can do that more effectively, for example, on the building design. Or they say, we want to have less waste because it’s a big issue in the building industry, to say, you know, we are designing for something, and then we make mistake. And all of a sudden, we have building materials that might not be the right ones. There is a lot of waste.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So there is, you know, actual measurements that are related to their business metrics to say we need to reduce material waste, or we need to increase our sustainability goals and targets. And with that, we need to be able to run simulations on, you know, how the building might be best positioned for light exposure versus heat, versus, you know, usage of the building. So the software can help with that. But the first step, Christy, you’re exactly right, is to help the customer even to get clarity for themselves, to say, you know, what is it we wanna accomplish? Sustainability goals, productivity goals, material waste reduction, faster innovation, and then establishing to say, what is it we think we can accomplish? And and the target, you know, can be an initial target to say, maybe we want, whatever 10% productivity increase as we are doing drawings, and then, you know, being able to measure that. And that’s what what the team is doing jointly with the customer from the beginning. We really quiz them. We we push a little to say, what is it you really wanna do? And that and in turn helps us to establish those value metrics that we follow-up on with them on a quarterly review. The team is tracking them.

Elisabeth Zornes:
And this last year, for example, for our enterprise customers, our team has been tracking customer verified value of $1,000,000,000. And that’s not our currency. That’s customer currency where they sign off and say, you know, this is what we actually produce. And that makes not only us proud, that makes them proud. And that gives them a lot of a lot to talk about with their management chain to say, hey. We made the decision or I made the decision to invest into that software and automation and see this is really the impact we have been generating, and we can do more. It’s really, what I would say, you know, it’s it’s it’s really kryptonite in the relationship with our customers to be able to articulate that and enable them to articulate it. And we feel once we do that right, they wanna do more and more of that because it really helps us to draw a straight line from buying yet another piece of software to how do I transform the business.

Josh Schachter:
And that the $1,000,000,000 sorry. I missed that. That was that’s on a per customer basis, or that’s across your portfolio?

Elisabeth Zornes:
That was aggregate for our enterprise customers. That was the value they actually signed off on. And that is typically 2 to

Josh Schachter:
3 extracorporeal. On here’s the value that you are going to deliver to me.

Elisabeth Zornes:
You have

Carly Clements:
a covenant with them.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Have delivered.

Josh Schachter:
But you have delivered to them. Okay.

Elisabeth Zornes:
We have delivered. And that’s important. You know? We wanna we wanna make it real. You know? There’s all sorts of, you know, good intents and hopes when you start on a project, but we wanna make it real. How are we tracking? What is actually being delivered? And and then have the customer tell us what the actual impact is of that.

Jon Johnson:
Let me let me ask you a question on that just from the so I’m a I’m an IC, so I’m a principal CSM. You know, Christie’s

Josh Schachter:
You know, undersell yourself, John.

Jon Johnson:
I’m not. I’m calling it how it is.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Okay. Aspiring CCO. Right?

Jon Johnson:
Aspiring I don’t know about that, but you are.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I don’t know about that, John. It’s

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I and I’ve known Christy long enough to know that maybe not. Yeah.

Elisabeth Zornes:
To know, maybe this isn’t

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. So I actually know Tom Casia on your team. He’s one of he’s the principal over at Autodesk, and I’ve had a number of conversations with him. I’m he’s relatively new. Right? So, I’m curious what the individual contributors when when you’re talking about these customer values, right, this is a heavy value for you as an organization. What are the levers that these CSMs have when they’re running into those conversations with customers to empower them and to in increase those conversations so that they can actually get to that expected value and that outcome that they have?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. It’s a great question. And that goes then into the, you know, how do we instrumentalize that? How how do we actually do it? Right? So how do you get to the $1,000,000,000? And it starts with articulating the outcome. And then on the back of that, there is a customer success plan. So there’s actually a plan we do jointly with the customer to say, here’s where you where we start. This is what we’re gonna do next. And part of it might be, you know, making the software available to your team members, training them, rolling out, making sure they’re using. Then there might be a set of projects where we say, okay.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Now let’s see on how the workflows are changing. So there’s some change management and some transformation on the back of that. And all alongside, there is metrics and measurement. So we are coming back to the customer and saying, hey. This is actually how your teams are using it or not using it. This is actually how project a is performing over project b. And these are, you know, these are the areas where you might improve. So there’s a lot of, you know, driving the rollout, driving the adoption and the, change management transformation, but also measuring and holding the mirror back to the customer to saying, these teams are, you know, amazing, and, you know, they are delivering exactly what you’re hoping them to do.

Elisabeth Zornes:
There is more opportunity in those. We we see that these projects take longer. We see that there are design overlaps that, you know, are avoidable. We’re doing assessment on avoidable errors and things like that that we then bring back to the customer, and then they can act on it. And in most cases, it’s, you know, training matters. Right? Enablement matters so that people really know on what the best processes and the workflows are.

Jon Johnson:
So I I I love all of this so much. I expect that you’re relying heavily on data. Is there a balance between data and, you know, conversation? Earlier stage companies like Josh’s and others maybe don’t have the deep data lakes and metrics that they have for usage. So I’ve talked to a lot of CSMs. They’re like, I just have to get all this information. They don’t answer my questions. You know, that’s where data comes in, obviously. What is the balance there for you guys? How often are you updating what what data your CSMs have access to so that they can come to these conclusions themselves and say, oh, I see you’re using x but not y and and vice versa.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. It’s it’s an excellent question, and data matters. I often tell my team data is your liquid gold. Mhmm. So you you wanna have lots of it, but then you need to shape it into an insight. So it needs to become currency Yeah. Where you can actually do something with it. Data in itself is, you know, not very impactful, but you need to have an insight.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So we’ve been investing heavily in a couple of things. 1, creating the data foundation. If your data foundation sucks, you’re gonna have a hard time to get your insights. I tell you that. So that was one thing. You know, get the data foundation. That’s a forever job. You know? You you you wanna continuously improve your data foundation.

Elisabeth Zornes:
The second piece is to get really clear on what the insights are. And you don’t have to have everything of everything, from the get go. There are some really basic ones where you already know these will be leading indicators. We know if customers don’t onboard the first 90 days of their contract, the likelihood goes down that they’ll use, like, ever. So if you don’t entice them the 1st 90 days and help them over that hurdle and hold their hand and all that, then, you know, the likelihood goes down that something productive will happen. So there are a couple of leading indicators that will help you dramatically. And then once you have that, then the fund goes even further because there’s a little capability you might have heard of. It’s called AI.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Oh. Yes. Yes. This is

Jon Johnson:
I’ve been hearing

Elisabeth Zornes:
about that. On everybody’s faces.

Jon Johnson:
The robot cars. Right?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. But no. So AI is, our latest, toy and playground where we’re using AI to actually have it sit on the data and the insights and to come back with recommendations for the CSMs as they are reaching out to their customer to say, these are the 1, 2, 3 conversations you should have with your customer based on what I, the all knowing AI, can see in the dataset.

Josh Schachter:
Love that. What what are you using? Is this all custom baked, all this this data and AI intelligence?

Elisabeth Zornes:
So we are using a combination of off the shelf, like, you know, anyone, including yourself, could source. So we are using Einstein from Salesforce. We’re using Copilot from Microsoft. We are using, you know, some of the AWS insights. So we are we are testing basically the best of breed, if you wish, that’s available off the shelf, and that can already do a ton. So there’s already a lot out there without, you know, us trying to write code or what have you, to be able to to leverage that and to get us going.

Josh Schachter:
Can I can I stop you right there, Elizabeth? I’m sorry. Because I wanna go deep on this because I think there’s probably so many people out there that want to integrate AI into their systems at a more enriched level. It sounds like you guys are doing that. So who’s leading that effort when it comes to bringing together Copilot and all these other tools and services and actually making sense of it and making it actionable in your organization?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Grandmother’s tool rollout, where you’re like, oh, I buy a piece of AI, and I’m gonna roll that out to everybody, and I think you guys understand. It is much more rational experimentation. So we have defined jointly with the, IT organization, shout out to our fabulous, CIO, Prakash Koda. We we have devised, a set of pilots where we said, we have a hypothesis we wanna test, where we say we wanna increase productivity for, the CSMs for their customer outreach and cut down the amount of time that is needed to prepare them for initial call. And we said we wanna cut down by 20%. So that’s our hypothesis, our target. And then we actually have, like, a working team pod that includes out of it includes folks from his organization that work on the technology and folks from my organization that practically try stuff out. And then we have testing criteria, and we, you know, rinse and repeat.

Elisabeth Zornes:
And and, we do that until we get to a satisfactory result where we say, this is worthwhile working with and exposing more people to it. And then, you know, what we do from there, we are making the circle larger. So we’re including more CSM than the first initial trial CSMs, and we go from there and continue to improve. AI is nothing you guys know that. Nothing that comes, you know, off the shelf ready and you just turn it on. It’s really some rational experimentation you need to do, and it’s the art and the science of it. The science is obviously, you know, the code and the mechanics of doing that, but the art is asking the right question. And that comes back really to all of the business leaders to say, which question do I wanna ask?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Right. Why?

Elisabeth Zornes:
And that’s a worthwhile endeavor to take a moment to think about that.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Let’s take a moment to think about that. Tell us. Like, what what’s the yeah. What’s the what’s the question? What’s that I mean, Christy has always been wondering this. What’s that silver bullet question that you want to track as an insight?

Elisabeth Zornes:
For the answers.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I have a list of more selfish questions to ask.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I know. But this is a selfish question for me, Christy, because you know what Upstate AI does. So I’m literally conducting UX research right now.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Always selfish, Josh.

Elisabeth Zornes:
That’s

Josh Schachter:
the problem. That, but this is the this is my podcast that I invited you and John in to cohost, so that wasn’t selfish. That was very giving.

Carly Clements:
Oh, I know. This is this is

Jon Johnson:
this is know what you were getting into when you framed?

Elisabeth Zornes:
New friends. I’m deep inside here. Deep inside here.

Josh Schachter:
We’re we’re we’re we’re deep friends. We’re yeah. Yes. And say hi, Christy. Say hi to to Charlie, by the way. Yeah. We can hear the barking. It’s okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I think I got a package.

Josh Schachter:
Send her send her our love. No. But, Elizabeth, what I but I actually I’m actually very curious about that, not only for selfish reasons because there is selfishness there. But, what are the like, what do you want? What would you really love for your your CS team to pick up from customers?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. So so one of the question, we want to answer and it again, you know, in the customer success organization, we have different roles. Right? We have customer success managers. We have customer technical success, aka the artist previously known as support. We have consulting, and we have, you know,

Josh Schachter:
a real I love that so much.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So, there are different questions for different teams. So for customer success, I would wanna know the answer to the question of, what is the best conversation that I could have with my customer right now? I wanna wanna know the answer to that question. And it’s a really important question because there’s only so much time I will get with a customer. And in each conversation, I wanna, you know, enlighten them, about, you know, the value they can drive. I wanna share, you know, some best I wanna, you know, help them to get to the next stage. But I need to know where they are right now. And, you know, ideally, you know, we can do that with very little prelude and, you know, a good, a a good, chance of having the right conversation very quickly in in in that dialogue. So that’s for the CSMs.

Elisabeth Zornes:
When I talk about customer technical success, we wanna have the right answer quickly in the dialogue. Because they’re typically in customer technical success, they either want proactive or reactive advice. So something is not working the way they’re hoping for, or they wanna do something even better, and they are not entirely sure how to. So for those, I wanna have answers early in the dialogue as opposed to giving them content. Today, even with your traditional chatbot, you know, chatbot vomits content. And it it may or may not address the question that the customer has. And what we are working on very actively is to get from content to answers in a conversational form so that the cast we can go back and forth with the customer and, you know, have a digital way of engaging with them and have the customer arrive at an answer as opposed to a pile of content. So these are just two examples.

Josh Schachter:
Those are great examples. Christy, over to you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thanks, Josh. Okay. Elizabeth, I wanna go back to something you said earlier. So you talked about the the pathway to getting to that value realization. You talked about articulating the goal, creating a success plan, metric management, making sure that all of that happens. Now I have to assume that you have a a decent staffed team to go and manage through that with your customers. And probably given the investment your customers are making, staffing against that accordingly makes a ton of sense for you. But in so many organizations where we’re strapped for resources and we don’t have, you know, a low leverage ratio of number of customers to CSMs, how might you think about approaching that same process at scale?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. No, Christy. And that’s that’s an forever challenge, I think, for all, for all of us chief customer officers because, you know, we do have a scale of customers. So they are the very large and Right. You know, they buy, you know, 100,000,000 of dollars of contracts and what have you. So they have, you know, a team that wakes up in the morning and, you know, rallies for their success. And then there are the very small customers. There might be a small architecture bureau or a small design shop for animation or something like that.

Elisabeth Zornes:
They might have, like, one subscription or 2, yet they still wanna be successful. So the question is, how do I build an approach that scales from the largest customers to the smallest customers, and how do how does one do that? And the answer to that is technology is your friend, to basically say, we still wanna ask the question, to say, what do you wanna accomplish? And that is really important, and we might ask that in person with the larger customers, and we will ask that when we are asking that digitally. On a platform for the smaller customers as they sign up, We are asking them, what would you like to accomplish? And in that scenario, then the the ability is to say, you know, to to retrieve. We can still retrieve the data. Are they using the software? Are they not using the software? What are some of the obvious things we can detect in the usage? We can still come back with with our insights and then remind them of the value and and drive emotion where we can affirm the value. So we have a platform in play where we basically populate, that information, and then and then, we we drive for that motion. Now do we have everything tick and tie yet? Not quite. So we’re still, you know, a a work in progress as well.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So, this year, we’re doubling down on some of the more scalable motions to drive more automation, but that’s the direction we are going. And we are finding that customers actually love this process. They do wanna engage. They they want to find out and have more clarity on how well I’m doing. And, you know, if one would sprinkle in a little gamification, then then it’s even more fun.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Can I ask what your tech stack looks like to support that process?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Well, we would have to to invite, my, my colleague this evening. Have to come back for that? Oh, okay. He might have to come back to that. And it it will be very interesting as well from an an AR perspective, to share some some deeper insights on how he’s running the pilots. But we are using, software by the name of, ecosystems. They are value management system, and it sits on top of Sales And, we’re having some good successes with it.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. We’re we’re in the process of looking at a value management software right now. I don’t remember which one it is, but we’re in the process of implementing, a VMO office as well, which is a really interesting trend that I’m seeing right now is kind of layering on top of customer success. Like, how do you actually track value in these huge global multinational organizations?

Elisabeth Zornes:
And that’s exactly right. So do we I have in my organization a team that’s called customer success design, which, again, is a forever task. And they are thinking about, you know, what should the experience be for an admin? They also have a team that is doing value management, plus, a set of, starting this year, we invested in a number of value consultants. So they go out to the CSMs and go out to the field and say, hey. This is how you do it. This is how you structure, and, the the outcome and the value conversations, and then, you know, they they help enable them accordingly. And, so far, you know, the uptake has been really good, and, and the feedback has been really positive.

Josh Schachter:
Elizabeth, you’ve you’ve mentioned a couple of things in this conversation. You’ve mentioned productivity and ways to enhance productivity, and you’ve also most recently mentioned value management and being able to validate the value that your customers are getting from your product. I want to introduce a new segment of update of of unjurned called this or that. Are you ready for it?

Elisabeth Zornes:
I don’t know, but go ahead.

Josh Schachter:
Deloitte just published a report on the state of AI in customer success and customer support. It looks like maybe you’re familiar with it? Okay. So and we know from Mark Twain and others that all statistics are lies and things like that. Right? But let’s like, Deloitte is a very oh, wow. You literally have that on your bookshelf. Yeah. Everybody lies. I love it.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Just, you know

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So kindred spirits here. 2 of the stats that they quote, one of them is around productivity, and it says that 33 percent 33% of a CSM’s time on average is spent on curating materials and driving follow ups post customer meetings. That’s 1.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Okay.

Josh Schachter:
The other one is that 6666 percent of technology buyers are eventually not satisfied with the value they realized from their purchase. So you got 3366. So I want this or that. Which one do you buy the most, like, believe in the most of those two statistics based on

Elisabeth Zornes:
your search? The 33. It’s even understated. I think probably the share is more than 33%, but that’s right. On the 66, you know, it’s like putting everybody into a mixing mixing pot. I don’t know if it’s true for all the software. I’m I I would believe based on our research, our customers are thinking more highly of us.

Josh Schachter:
Well, by the way, I was not implying Autodesk. That was a generalization there. Okay. So so with the 33%, that’s a lot of time. 30 per 33% of time being spent on follow ups?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. Yeah. On on preparing and follow ups. Both.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. Both. Yep. What makes you think that?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh, did you pay her to give that response?

Josh Schachter:
No. I did not. We did not

Kristi Faltorusso:
rep sponsored response? Okay. I’m just checking.

Josh Schachter:
No. No. No. Thank you for just checking, but nope. That was not

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. We can do better than just assuming, you know, my best CCO’s best gut feel, but, we can do better than that because we actually measured it. And part of it was really trying to weed through the plethora of data and trying to connect data from different data sources is incredibly difficult.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Elisabeth Zornes:
And, then the ability now to have a more, you know, aligned data model, have the insights, and then sitting AI on top, I’m, very bullish on that. And our first, first pilots and the first insights are, you know, super promising on that.

Josh Schachter:
So you you measure the the the time allocation of your team?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. Yeah. As one does. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
As one does. What was your process for doing that? Was that was that

Jon Johnson:
were you bringing this to the team?

Kristi Faltorusso:
You say that, and I’m

Jon Johnson:
like, oh, they do. I’m like, okay. I’m gonna go talk to

Josh Schachter:
my boss about something.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s why you haven’t gotten promoted yet, John.

Jon Johnson:
That’s why I haven’t invited my CCO onto this podcast. Looking at you, Matt.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. You say that very nonchalantly, but I don’t know. Maybe there is one that does that, and that is you. But so what was the process for doing that? Because that sounds like an interesting project.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. So so, typically, we do wanna understand, you know, how we can do better. Also, yeah, I will say that out loud for the CSMs. That’s not their favorite part of their day, honestly. And, John, you probably can attest to that when you go, like, let’s let me get into the data and try and make sense of it. It’s not that enjoyable part. Similar, like, for the customer’s technical success people to say, like, let me weed through a whole bunch of material to try and find an answer for this. It’s not the most enjoyable part.

Elisabeth Zornes:
So we’re basically, you know, trying to figure out, you know, time per case. What is it allocated to? Again, our time in the day for the CSM. How many contacts do they have? So we measure that. How many outreaches and how many conversations did they actually have? And, you know, what’s the output of those conversations, and then where is the rest of the day going towards. And to a great extent, it’s the the prep and then and the follow-up. And, what we really wanna strive for is, you know, to relieve the CSMs from a lot of the cumbersome stuff that is not the fun part of the day and give them more time in the fun part of the day. And, actually, while doing that, have more contacts, more meaningful conversations with customers.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I love that. Mhmm. Perfect. Well, you can I can ask

Josh Schachter:
more questions? I’m trying to be respectful here. You can tell.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Did I did I break your this this and that? This or that?

Josh Schachter:
No. No. I think what would you guys would I

Jon Johnson:
kind of

Josh Schachter:
yeah. We could do more of this for now, but I’m not sure how

Jon Johnson:
When you presented, like a new segment, I expected it to be like peanut butter, crunchy or smooth, coffee, hot or cold. You know, like you went really, really deep and and then it was like, give me 4 paragraphs of an answer. So, like, let’s tighten up the the the segment.

Josh Schachter:
This is why I need I need you both.

Jon Johnson:
I do I do have actually a couple of questions. So, when we were talking earlier, let’s see. I took my notes. I gotta pull up my notes, because I just based on the segment that we just went through.

Josh Schachter:
BMW or Mercedes?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Preparation for this, podcast?

Jon Johnson:
No. There will be a summary, posted later though. Okay. Don’t worry. Okay. So adoption management. This is something that, so I work in our key strategic accounts at user testing, and we have, you know, 5, 6000 users within one account. I’m sure it’s similar to some of the big accounts that that you guys have.

Jon Johnson:
And when you’re tracking adoption with such a a wide variety, it’s, I mean, it is whack a mole. It is every analogy that you wanna use of, like, how do we drive engagement. Right? So when you’re looking at some of these things and and specifically around adoption management under the CS banner, What is the thought process around the control that a CSM has, and how do you, manage and maintain an individual? Right? So whether it’s MBOs or comp or whatever that kinda looks like to drive that adoption, which is what is gonna lead to the successes in the long way long run.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. Yeah. Great great and very practical question. So adoption management, we established earlier. It’s one of, the leading indicators, you know, for a great, retention and as well growth. Right? If customers are not using, then you’re kind of not in a good place.

Josh Schachter:
Yes.

Elisabeth Zornes:
It’s, renewals come around to say, hey. Do you need more? So it’s it is a great leading indicator. The way we are driving that is is really, you know, with the data foundation and saying, you know, how many users have been onboarded. You asked about the leverage, and there are 2 things I would call out. 1 is you need a plan. You need a customer success plan. And the second part is you need a signed off customer success plan with a customer where they agreed to. And with that, a counterpart you can work with.

Elisabeth Zornes:
It’s very difficult to impact a user on an individual basis, you know, if they are not onboarding or not adopting. There’s some in product messaging you can do. And, you know, there are there are interesting ways of, you know, encouragement and reminding people. But when it comes down to a business has signed a contract and they wanna see a return on invest on the investment and having a counterpart, the right person to engage within that customer and reflecting back to saying, you know, we see more activity here, less activity there. Your region a is doing better than region b. On product 1, we are doing better than on product 2. Here are some recommendations. That is a very powerful place to be, to have that conversation and to drive that rollout accordingly and then, you know, highlighting that.

Elisabeth Zornes:
And then, you know, you can sprinkle in some product, in in product engagement. You know? That’s, in my mind, the icing on the cake to remind people like, hey. I haven’t seen you, you know, the last couple of days. Or, hey. I see, you know, you’re struggling at the same point or with the same step. You know? Can I recommend, a a video, you know, or do you wanna schedule a call to help you with that? So these are this is the icing on the cake, I would say.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. And we’re just starting to kinda play around with some of that automation. We use Pando, for some of those behavior

Elisabeth Zornes:
Oh, yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Triggers. Yes.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Thank you.

Jon Johnson:
Huge, huge fan of

Elisabeth Zornes:
the tool. Yes. Yes.

Jon Johnson:
But what you just said too is, like, are you stuck? It’s almost like, let let me get you out of that hole that you’re in. Right? Most of the time,

Elisabeth Zornes:
it’s with

Jon Johnson:
these complex tools. People don’t really know where to go.

Elisabeth Zornes:
They they don’t know. And, you know, Autodesk is in the same boat. Our tools are very, very powerful. And with that, there are very, a lot of, you know, capabilities. And sometimes, you know, the users are not aware of all the powerful capabilities. So there there is an opportunity, you know, to not nudge them, to remind them, and then, you know, invite them either to a learning session or even, you know, there’s microlearnings on the spot with tiny videos, people like that, and, you know, overcoming some of those hurdles.

Jon Johnson:
Cool. Then, I guess, you know, last kind of topic. I know we talked a little bit about AI Mhmm. And using it as, like, to help with data and to help recommendations for what our CSMs do, let’s cast our vision forward a little bit. Like, where do you see or where would you like to see AI being implemented for our customer’s sake and also for our businesses’ sake?

Elisabeth Zornes:
Mhmm. Mhmm. I I think, AI is, you know, a general capability is is has a number of broad use cases. And granted, we are still going through the hype cycle. Yes. We all know that. Right?

Jon Johnson:
People still are figuring it out. Yeah.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Of course. Still figuring it out. We haven’t been at the highest point of the hype cycle there. I my personal belief, there is more to come, and then, you know, people start, realizing on what it’s good for. But there are a couple of things we have our views set on, you know, as a company. And I will start out with saying, you know, we have been using generative AI and generative design for the last 10 years. Not as marketed as now, but we had capabilities where we would, you know, allow our customers to do rapid simulations on what is the best position of buildings on a lot, for example, or for parts design. What is the lightest, version of the parts you could possibly generate for a racing bike, and having the right stability and things like that.

Elisabeth Zornes:
That has been around for a while and will we are continuing to hone that. What we are doing now, just for an example for my organization, we’re using some capabilities to build out on how customers could improve their set of projects. So customers typically don’t do just one project at a time, but there might be, you know, if I’m an architecture bureau, if, you know, if I’m, building you know, have a number of building projects or if I have a number of animation projects or whatever they might be to say, you know, what is the most effective way of doing that? And are there parts in this that could be fully automated? So where where I have, you know, some of the design drawings that are being done, what could be automated of that that is, you know, more repetitive that, you know, a machine could do and where the human could really lean into the creative part of the work and the innovative part of the work as opposed to, you know, the repeatable and the mechanical part. So these are some of the things we are exploring. It’s, it’s a lot of fun, I will say, and, there is more to come.

Josh Schachter:
I just had a an image in my mind of, you know, most products that you plug into the prompt. Did I spell the world word potato properly and it gives you an answer? With Autodesk, it’s, you know, what type of material should I use as the foundation for this skyscraper in the middle of New York? So there’s much more, much more value on what we’re we’re playing in. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like yeah.

Elisabeth Zornes:
And and it’s, you know, it is, allowing to have simple answers to complex questions. That’s really the future of AI. Right now, AI gives you simple answers to simple questions. And what we are we wanna get to is simple answers to complex questions.

Jon Johnson:
Well, I I love that you’re looking at customer data, you know, of course, within privacy and protection reasons for sure. But, you know, one of my favorite things is and the the way that I envision it is just for a CSM to come in and look at his dashboard, whatever that is, and say, what should I do today? Like, what’s gonna Yeah. I need to drive x outcome, and it’ll do its magical things in the background. And Harry Potter magic will come out, and it’ll say, go talk to Mark. He’s gonna upsell because he needs to do this thing or he needs implementation or he needs this. And it just gives you, like, intrinsic data as well as just like an auto prompt. Like, we’re using it right now. Right? And that’s a future state where everything kinda works in harmony, and there’s a ton of implementations and integrations that go into that.

Jon Johnson:
But I do see a future where Mhmm. We as CSMs are empowered within our lanes Mhmm. To just say, like, look. I’ve done all of the rest of the stuff. It’s Wednesday. I got a little bit of time. What should I focus on today?

Elisabeth Zornes:
That’s exactly right. And that is totally within reach. So these are solutions we are working on today, that, that are, you know, I would say near future, where we would be able, you know, to give that guidance and give those insights to, again, you know, allow then the CSM to focus on what they do best as opposed to the minutiae of weeding through data and hoping for the best on, you know, I have time to call 2 more customers, which one should I pick? Right? So instead of the randomized, I have a more targeted approach.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. That’s great. Mhmm. Awesome. Well, that’s all my questions.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s it. I mean, I have to say, Elizabeth, we’ve had many leaders on this show, and we’ve had other, you know, CCOs of of large companies too. And I think you get it more than most More than well, sorry. I think you get it more than any other leader that we’ve spoken to on this show. It sounds like you

Kristi Faltorusso:
guys are really pages of notes.

Jon Johnson:
Wow. Pages,

Elisabeth Zornes:
and they’re all sticky. It doesn’t get any better. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. You can send her a bill, Elizabeth,

Josh Schachter:
after she for that. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m not pen and paper gal. Okay? Leave me alone.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. But can Christy, I mean, is Elizabeth not the perfect person

Kristi Faltorusso:
to be on your show about female genitalia? Privately. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I know. But, like I’m

Jon Johnson:
just gonna

Kristi Faltorusso:
send her a note. We have put it out. She’s captive. I don’t want her

Josh Schachter:
Carly Carly’s not here. We’ll stick her

Jon Johnson:
out so

Josh Schachter:
you’d be able to have that opportunity. I mean, Elizabeth,

Jon Johnson:
she has very people call your people.

Josh Schachter:
She’s gonna yeah. If if she comes to the I think

Elisabeth Zornes:
I think Jolie would be in favor once she’s done her hair. But she would be in favor.

Jon Johnson:
That was one of other than the insights that you added into this, her coming on red faced.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh my gosh. I know. I felt she was so embarrassed. Amazing. It wasn’t necessary for her to be so embarrassed either. We welcomed her.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Yeah. But she is the most fabulous, fantastic, communications leader. I’m very, very happy that she’s working with me.

Josh Schachter:
No. It’s good because, like, she was embarrassed because she thought that we are a serious program. And had she not thought if she had known the truth, she wouldn’t have allowed you on this show. So the fact that she was embarrassed, right, like, that’s what led you here today is that you thought you were coming into something serious minded. That being said, we are the top show for customer success.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I one of the things that I always ask at the beginning

Elisabeth Zornes:
after this episode.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, yeah. After all, 100%. I always wanna know if our guests knew what they were getting into when they agreed to this show. And so far, I think we’re pretty much every single person has said no. I had no idea what to expect. So did you listen to the

Kristi Faltorusso:
other episodes? I’m briefing my yes too much, and there’s no element of surprise. Maybe I’m doing too much upfront. Maybe I should just drop a just book calendar time here.

Jon Johnson:
I love it.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Then you would get less defined. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Well, thank you so much for your time, Elizabeth. Truly, truly appreciate it. And the work that you’re doing is incredible. Like I said, I I do know a a few folks on your team, and they really love, what you’re doing, over there. And and I cannot wait to see where you take the rest of, this year, and, we hope to hear from you again.

Elisabeth Zornes:
Thank you so much. That was a lot of unexpected fun, so thank you much for

Jon Johnson:
it. Perfect.

Josh Schachter:
We aim to please. Thank you, Elizabeth. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you,

Elisabeth Zornes:
Mike. Yep.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thank you so much. Bye bye.