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Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI.

Jon Johnson:
How often or do you have a CS manager that’s been, you know, a director of CS for 8 years, and they just are in a silo? They’ve only been in one segment or one department, and they’re missing so much opportunity to learn a different perspective from the customer.

Josh Schachter:
Joe, you were telling us also before the program that you recently had your leaders within your group rotate and take other roles, train in other roles temporarily to really get a sense of things.

Jill Sawatzky:
Yep. Yep. And it actually wasn’t temporarily. It was Oh. A permanent, move. But it was a pretty big risk. It could have blown up in my face potentially. So the learnings that each one of them has brought to one each other bonding together because they’ve run each other’s businesses.

Jill Sawatzky:
The things that they wish the other team had been doing better, well, this is their chance to live in those shoes.

Jon Johnson:
The best CSMs are the ones that come from marketing or go to product or come from support. And to your point, they have this empathy that is driving them to to work in those cross functional teams. And I and I I really love that you started this from a leadership standpoint.

Josh Schachter:
Hello, everyone. This is Josh Schachter, your cohost of Unchurned here again with John Johnson. John, say hi.

Jon Johnson:
Hey, guys. Happy Monday. It’s Monday. Right?

Josh Schachter:
Well, it’s Monday for us. Wednesday for them. You should know that by now, John.

Jon Johnson:
I

Josh Schachter:
That’s okay. That hurts.

Jon Johnson:
But, yes, happy

Josh Schachter:
to say it right. Expect nothing more. Nothing more. So, John, on this Wednesday morning, where are you right now? It Sounds like, your reception’s a little bit, thrown off.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I’m pulling a Josh Hector, and I’m, I’m calling in, for this, this episode. I’m on my way, on 95 North up to Washington DC to visit some, incredible customers up to Amazon HQ 2, to take out the AWS team to a fancy Cuban dinner this evening. Oh, cool. So I’m excited. I was supposed to be there about an hour ago, but somebody decided to slam into the wall. And it’s just car crash and traffic and and whatnot. So I’m calling in.

Josh Schachter:
Well, I’m hoping that this will lighten your day a little bit.

Jon Johnson:
It’s better than listening to a podcast. I’ll tell you that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Although, I I listened to an amazing one this weekend. We can maybe put it in the show notes. We We probably won’t actually put it in the show notes, but it was just let’s just be honest. But it’s it’s fun to say that. It was it’s called Acquired, and it was about Costco and about the history of Costco and how they have they are just dominating retail.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Know that they they produce they sell 500,000,000 chickens a year. That’s the fact

Jon Johnson:
that I

Josh Schachter:
pick away from it. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I I want to listen to that podcast.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
You know, I I used to push carts at Costco in Kirkland, Washington, which is where Kirkland Signature comes from when I was in high school. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
And and Kirkland Signature is the largest consumer package brand in the world and makes $55,000,000,000 in revenue every year.

Jon Johnson:
CPG, baby. That’s the future.

Josh Schachter:
On that note, we’d like to introduce everybody to Jill Sawatzky. Did I pronounce your name correctly, Jill?

Jill Sawatzky:
You did, Josh. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Entirely or are you being nice to hear? Okay. Wonderful. Wonderful. Jill is the CCO at Thought Industries. And, Jill, I want you to tell us a little bit more about that in a moment. Jill’s out of Raleigh, North Carolina. John, Wait. Raleigh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Exactly. In your neighborhood.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, I’m in Briar Creek. So

Jill Sawatzky:
okay. Well, yeah. Oh, is John in the fake Raleigh? You know that.

Jon Johnson:
No. It’s fine. No. But

Jill Sawatzky:
I’m in downtown Raleigh.

Jon Johnson:
That’s awesome. We’ll have to meet meet for coffee at the optimist or something. It’s,

Jill Sawatzky:
Absolutely. It’s, a block from my house. So

Jon Johnson:
That’s amazing. That’s so great. It’s one of my favorite spots in town. So I did not know that that was now I know where you live. Not Yeah. Not creepy.

Josh Schachter:
So let’s just let’s let’s roll with this. Let’s just pretend you guys are at the optimist and Yeah. Having coffee or introducing each other. You know? John has has bought you, Jill, a nice, macchiato with with oat milk and, banana walnut muffin.

Jill Sawatzky:
And I’m there

Josh Schachter:
with my dogs. And and you’re there with the dogs. Yep. Yep. Well But yeah.

Jon Johnson:
The questions that I wanna know because you’re kinda getting normally, I don’t know if you, my first thing that I always ask is, did you know what you’re getting into when you said yes to this podcast? But number 2, I would want to ask you if you heard the news about the recent merger of 2 customer success platform tools, Totango and Catalyst.

Jill Sawatzky:
I did not hear that. That’s actually news news to me, but that’s exciting and that, Yeah. Well, I’ve been to confess, I’ve been a long time user of Gainsight. I have used Tango

Josh Schachter:
Oh, I love spending money too.

Jill Sawatzky:
But but, you know, we’re always open to exploring opportunities and and new tools. And in fact, as our business has evolved and as, you know, tightening budgets like everyone is doing in software, we are very much looking closely at our spend for sure. And and as well as, you know, as AI is transforming the the whole space in general, looking to where we wanna go next based on that.

Josh Schachter:
I just want just a quick time out here, Jill. That’s very fascinating. John, like, if you were if you were if you were sitting down with Jill at the optimists for coffee, would you really be like, hey, Jill. Great to meet you. I love your dogs. And, you know, did you hear about 2, like, 2, like, 2 weeks ago? Did you hear there was a merger of 2, like, middle of the pack CSPs 2 weeks ago? Would that be how you would start your conversation with Jill? Like, come on.

Jon Johnson:
That’s literally how it’s every conversation.

Josh Schachter:
That that’s how you serve every single one. Because Jill did a really great job at responding to it. She’s like, I don’t I don’t fucking care, but she went with it anyways. Like, she really flowed with it well for you. But I think you owe her a better follow-up.

Jon Johnson:
Man, I’m just I’m just here for a good time, not a long time, Josh. Uh-huh. That’s that’s my goal. No. Well, so, I mean, first

Josh Schachter:
of all I’m sorry. I’m I’m being really mean and vicious.

Jon Johnson:
No. But, Jill, this is one of the things that we noticed when Chris isn’t here to keep us apart as Josh just kind of attacks me, which

Josh Schachter:
is great.

Jon Johnson:
It’s fine. I attack.

Josh Schachter:
Because Christy Christy protects.

Jill Sawatzky:
She’s the mediator.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. But the reason that I say that is because I also if I were sitting at a coffee shop with the CCO, somebody that I a role that I would like to inhibit at one point, I am gonna be looking for ways that it will benefit my career in the long run. So, but number 1, how do you like Raleigh? Like, what’s are you from Raleigh? Is that where you were, originally from, or are you a transplant like me?

Jill Sawatzky:
A trans plant. I’m from the DC area up where you’re driving right now.

Jon Johnson:
Okay.

Jill Sawatzky:
Grew up there in Virginia, Northern Virginia, and, went to University of Virginia. But I’ve been in Raleigh since 97. So

Jon Johnson:
Oh, so you see the here

Jill Sawatzky:
as well.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I’m going on 2 years, and I came from just, south of Santa Barbara, California. So I’m one of those Californians that moved into your area.

Jill Sawatzky:
And driving all the house prices up.

Jon Johnson:
I haven’t bought a house yet, so I haven’t been that one yet. So working on that right now.

Josh Schachter:
Jill, you were mentioning the well, basically, you were getting into the whole do more with less. I don’t think you called it that, but that’s what we all know it as. That unfortunately is a platitude these days, but a accurate platitude. So, like, tell us a little bit about how that is manifesting for you and your role as CCO. Maybe you could start out giving us a little bit well, first off, I said that you would I would ask you and I didn’t, but tell us a little bit about Thought Industries. What what do you guys do?

Jill Sawatzky:
Thought Industries is an education platform for customers to educate their customers and also to be an external learning management system. So not internal LMS, but really external facing. And, focused on helping customers with their own retention and customer engagement driving product adoption or professional training, you know, running their business on our platform. So one of the things I really love about it as CCO is our customers are trying to do the same things that I’m trying to do. They’re trying to retain their customers, drive adoption, etcetera. So it becomes very very meta and, very fascinating, interesting conversations.

Josh Schachter:
Now the challenge with that is that what’s also happening to your customers is their belt is being tightened

Jill Sawatzky:
in the same fashion

Josh Schachter:
just as yours is. How has that been playing out, and what have you been doing to counter it?

Jill Sawatzky:
2023 was not the easiest year, like, for

Josh Schachter:
Sure.

Jill Sawatzky:
As for many software companies, I’ll say that. There’s definite pressure that our customers are feeling to, combine their education systems if they’ve got, you know, multiple. They want them all as many as few systems as possible. They’re looking to see ways that they can, you know, reduce their spend for sure. The way that we have shifted things in TI is we actually had this big phrase of you said, you know, do more with less. Ours is do less, better together. And what that initiative is all about is really doubling down and focusing on a larger number of product enhancements specifically aimed at our customer base. So a little bit less on the, like, what’s the really cool, hot new thing we can do.

Jill Sawatzky:
Of course, we have some of that for sure. But what are what are the things that have been the most key pain points for our customers that we can address that are really going to help them achieve more. So how can we improve our ecommerce or, you know, improve usability aspects so that they can get more done quickly? And,

Josh Schachter:
the

Jill Sawatzky:
team is

Josh Schachter:
a very cross functional that’s a very cross functional initiative. Right? That’s that’s not you doing it unilaterally. That’s between you and the chief product officer and head of sales and

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jill Sawatzky:
Yeah. The the I’m the cosponsor along with our chief product officer of doing this.

Josh Schachter:
And then on the other end of the corner, the other end of the the boxing ring is your your CRO. Is that asking for a new feature to sell for

Jill Sawatzky:
an account? Yes. Yes. Yes. But they can’t do upsells unless we’re retaining the customers in the first place. So, you know, everything else kinda depends upon that and getting great references too. So they they certainly have a stake in the game in doing this.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So there’s the product angle. So you’re focusing on doing less new the product road map is focused on what customers existing customers want and what we know is gonna improve their experience and their propensity to to retain, to retain, not churn. How are you capturing that information from your customers and handing that off to your product team?

Jill Sawatzky:
We have a community, and we have feedback within the community. So we get lots of suggestions and up votes on the things in the community. But it also, of course, comes in through our customer success team and the things that they’re hearing day to day from customers, and we track that and, submit actually requests into our product team that come through the CSM. So we sort of have, like, 2 paths for the customers to get their asks in.

Josh Schachter:
And then and then what and then, like I I wanna just get tactical because folks that listen to this program, they’re like, oh, you know, what exactly are leaders in this space doing? Right? So, so you’ve got the community forums and and community, user generated content, if you will. And then you have your the from the CSMs directly and and their input into this, the product team, do you align yourself and your cosponsor? Do you align in recurring meetings on, like, going through a list of what you’re hearing? Or does it you know, are you writing tickets straight into Jira or Notion? How exactly does it work?

Jill Sawatzky:
Well, there’s the big, you know, product epics, and, customer success is a key part of we have review sessions of here’s what’s gonna be in the next quarter tentatively. And we are part of those meetings and planning sessions for the the next quarter and the quarter after. So we get a vote and discussion in those. And so those are the big product enhancements. But then we also have a team we call our outcomes team. And our outcomes team is where smaller development items come in from customers, and we open up tickets that first get analyzed if there’s some sort of workaround we can do. If not, if it’s gonna need a code change, then they go into the outcomes team. And we have a pretty rigorous, prioritization process to determine which ones we work in what order.

Jill Sawatzky:
And we have a weekly meeting where we go over those and someone, you know, can, at that meeting, talk about why they might need something bumped ahead of the prioritization process because of, you know, whatever is happening with that customer.

Josh Schachter:
So you so you have kinda 2 swim lanes. You’ve got your big rocks, your epics, and you’re coordinating on that. And then you have your, I just had a

Jill Sawatzky:
I’m about to turn yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I just I’m about to turn 40, and so I had a a little senior moment there. Your outcomes team, which is more of your, your daily types of fixes and smaller tweaks and refinements.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
That makes sense. Yeah. Exactly. You’re focused on product and alignment with your your your your department there. What in other in what other ways are you doing less but better for everyone? I don’t think I got that exactly right, but what

Jill Sawatzky:
what was Do less better together.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. Yes.

Jill Sawatzky:
We’re also leaning more into digital customer success, like, you know, many other customer success organizations as well. So how can we, help out more of our customers in a more efficient way? So we’ve increased our office hours to customers to 5 days a week. We were doing them one day a week. So now any day, they can go and get on with technical experts and consultants and get questions answered.

Josh Schachter:
And how does that work? There there’s, like, a standing Zoom line or, like, what like, what’s the, you know, what’s the the mechanism for that?

Jill Sawatzky:
Yeah. They can submit questions ahead of time or they can submit them at the meetings. But, yeah, it’s a standard meeting that’s listed on our community. They can get those Zoom link and, call in whenever they need to. So it’s a, you know, a substitute for not meant to be support so much, but more consulting type of questions, and customers even answer each other’s questions as well.

Josh Schachter:
So it’s high touch, but it’s one to many as opposed to being high touch and one to 1?

Jill Sawatzky:
Exactly.

Josh Schachter:
Great.

Jill Sawatzky:
Exactly.

Josh Schachter:
Anything else that you’re doing as far as digital success or or or or, you know, what you’re looking into?

Jill Sawatzky:
You know, more of the the kinds of things like, proactively doing webinars on the most important topics and getting information out to our customers sooner. Since I run customer education as well, like, figuring out ways to really optimize getting that knowledge to customers so that they don’t even have to open the support ticket in the first place.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. That’s really awesome.

Jon Johnson:
To ask a question on that too. I I really love the idea. Obviously, do you wanna do what you do well. Right? How are you identifying I guess, let me frame this a little bit. How are you identifying what you take off of potentially CSM so that you can focus on on doing the best of what you can do. Right? So you’ve talked about digital. You’ve talked even just this outcomes, you know, kind of model when it comes to product road maps. How are you how are you identifying what to remove from the CSM’s plate or your your education’s plate so that you can kind of refocus.

Jon Johnson:
And what does that process look like for refinement?

Jill Sawatzky:
It does all relate to that outcomes process, and we have we’ve added a technical investigations team. What we found and it’s taken a while to evolve to this. It sounds simple, but it wasn’t that simple to put in place in reality. So we found that, 1, you know, customers were putting in support questions onto CSMs, and that’s not the right place. We have to push them back to to the support team. But there also are sort of gray areas that aren’t really exactly support questions, more consultative things, but the CSMs don’t always know the answers to those questions. And then where do those things fall? Is that a professional services engagement? Is it, you know, a paid engagement, a free engagement? Do we bring someone in? And so we’ve really built a means for CSMs to if they don’t know how to answer something, it goes to the technical investigations team, which is actually part of our support team. And they will do the analysis of, can I just answer this for the customer? Do I need to get on the phone with the customer? Do I need to open a support ticket? Do I need to open an outcomes Jira ticket so that a developer will look at this and do a code change or an enhancement, or it’s a problem ticket? And having that different path beyond just the usual straight support tickets has been really, really helpful for customers not to get stuck in sort of the black hole

Jon Johnson:
in between Yep. Spaces. That’s, like, everybody like, that’s the hardest part of any in like, independent CSM is when it has to go to support, and then they’re still in the middle of it. I I really love

Jill Sawatzky:
this model. Yeah. It it, it’s worked it’s working extremely well, and it gives relief to our CSMs who are really frustrated when they don’t know the answer to something. They don’t know where to find it, and they were spending so much time trying to pursue the answer. And now they have a way to get those things handled quickly for the customer. And it’s still their job to make sure that something’s communicated back to the customer and that things keep moving along the way. But that way, then they earn the right to have the conversation about their success plan and the objectives and how we’re really doing to drive value for them, which is, of course, where you want them spending the time.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Last last question when it comes to kind of this model. Are your CSMs are they dedicated named accounts, or are you in more of a pooled or hybrid model right now?

Jill Sawatzky:
We’re they were entirely dedicated, and we are just in the process of transitioning to more digital. So part of our customer base is now gonna be in a a pool model. So that’s what we’re in the process of building out.

Josh Schachter:
And and what’s what’s the structure? Like, what’s the count of of the folks in your team? We we never really kind of, got to that. Like, what does your organization look like?

Jill Sawatzky:
So I own our customer experience organization, which is all the post sales functions from professional services to customer success, support, and customer education. And, specifically, you know, I have a a VP of each of these organizations. And then, specifically, within customer success, we’ve got, I think, 8 CSMs now who are high touch dedicated CSMs, but, you know, also answering that the the pooled piece for our lower ACV customers.

Josh Schachter:
So you’re doing less better everywhere. I know I didn’t get it right, but we’re just gonna

Jill Sawatzky:
go with it.

Jon Johnson:
Doing less better together.

Josh Schachter:
Thank you, John. Thank you. And, John, you’re older than me. What what’s going on with yours?

Jon Johnson:
I take, fish oil.

Josh Schachter:
You can go haloba. The brain. Oil. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think that’s true.

Jon Johnson:
It’s not true.

Josh Schachter:
With that, if you’re able able to do that together, what would be if if you could, like, part of the possible, what would you have what would you love your CSM or anybody within the units on your team? What would you love for them to be spending their extra time on?

Jill Sawatzky:
I would love for them to be able to really consult and be strategic and look at how our customers are are driving that engage engagement, driving adoption with their customers, and really make recommendations of, hey. I’ve got this other customer that’s doing something, you know, really cool. They’re doing certifications for for theirs, and it’s driven their adoption through the roof. Have you thought about trying that? Or, you know, having the conversations that truly add that extra level of value that, you know, beyond. We can get AI to do the just basic problem solving pieces. Of course, you have to to get through those. They have to be solved, but the really, really helping drive it to next level where customers wanna stay with us because we’re not just a a customer education platform, but we truly are helping guide them along, like, what good looks like and are willing to be that partner with them. Yes.

Jill Sawatzky:
Exactly.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Thought leader, thought partner. Awesome. Okay. I wanna leave the the better together, and I wanna go into the next chapter as it were of our episode. And, John, you’re you’re in the car right now. You’re somewhere on the Beltway. Right? That’s not what they call it?

Jon Johnson:
I think so.

Josh Schachter:
I think so. Yeah. Joel would know. It’s the Beltway, right, in that area in the DMV. If you’re

Jill Sawatzky:
up at Baltimore, you’re probably past the Beltway.

Jon Johnson:
Okay. Well I’m I’m on asphalt. That’s all I got for you.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. I I don’t is that a euphemism, John? I don’t know. Okay. So, John, you’re on your way to meet a customer. And Jill was saying before we press the red button on this program to record that she is all in on in person interactions with customers.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
So, Jill, I wanna hear more about that vigor you have to to meeting customers in person. What was it like before? When did you see an inflection point? And then let’s talk about kind of where things are now.

Jill Sawatzky:
Well, I’ve always I’ve done this for years. I started out in customer success in IBM in 2011, I think it was. So I’ve been doing this for quite a while and did on sites with customers really right from the beginning. And there’s just no substitute for meeting with a customer and having them tell you about proudly about the purpose of their business and why your product is so crucial to their career. And, I mean, I’ve been to wildly different places from Starbucks headquarters to Nike to, you know, a small customer who’s providing, education on to kids on STEM and making sure that they’re performing better in school. So, like but yet for each one of those customers who’s running that program, if they don’t are not successful with our platform, they could potentially get fired or not be successful or promoted. And so seeing that passion and what they’re doing, there’s just absolutely no substitute for it. And, it’s gotten a little bit harder with COVID and post COVID now.

Jill Sawatzky:
Customers are starting to come back on-site, but sometimes they’re like, oh, we’re all distributed. But if you can get them to come together for, you know, one time meeting to have that discussion and have them show you what they’re doing. It you don’t have to meet in in together on-site after that, but you’ve gotta have, like, that first

Josh Schachter:
The first

Jill Sawatzky:
kickoff Yeah. Meeting in person. No.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. This this has actually been a big focus of us. So with user testing as well, we’ve we’ve kind of been given the the green light to spend as much time with the that we can with customers. And to your point, it’s been very difficult because most of our customers are distributed. Right? So I’m on my way up to h q 2 for Amazon. And one of the benefits that I found and with these working sessions has been, yeah, you may not be able to get together on a Monday or Tuesday, but if they’re planning these working sessions already where they do bring everybody together, there’s a really great opportunity for you as a vendor to come in and support them in these moments. And you get that cocreation, which is one of my favorite parts of this whole thing, right, is getting in front of people and not just like, hey. I’m gonna buy you dinner or I’m gonna give you a presentation or anything like that, but actually building something.

Jon Johnson:
At your level, what are the levels what are the types of conversations that you’re having? What are who are the who are the, like, what are the titles of the customers you’re meeting? Are you staying at the executive level, or are you getting in the weeds with with ICs and and some practitioners?

Jill Sawatzky:
Generally, it’s a mix because we’ll we’ll since we don’t get together all that often with customers, it’s usually some sort of, you know, all day meeting where we’re gonna delve into the details, and we’re gonna meet their whole entire team. And then, you know, I’ll have, separate conversations with the executive sponsor, you know, separately as a part of that. We’ll talk at dinner and potentially sit next to each other and talk about where things are going. But, really, I wanna make sure that their the customer executive is seeing what our team can do. And to your point, like, if you can do on-site, like, some real deep into the product configuration and show them live, like, wow. It’s easy to use our product. Here’s something that you can quickly produce. Like, that goes a long way with the executive rather than just talking at the 30,000 foot level about what they’re trying to do.

Jill Sawatzky:
And then you build their trust, and then they’ll really share with you of where they’re trying to to drive the business strategically. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
I love that.

Josh Schachter:
I’ve never I’ve never attended an on-site customer success meeting. I’m I’m a I’m a child of COVID when it comes to CS. I’m a I’m a COVID baby in customer success. So I’m, like, trying to visualize it, and it sounds amazing. And but I’ve never actually seen it taking place. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
That’s, like, the last since you’ve met me, Josh, that is pretty much all that I’ve done, flying across this country with my solution consultants, getting on-site. It’s some of my favorite things

Josh Schachter:
sitting in the office

Jon Johnson:
and building. It’s expensive. Isn’t

Josh Schachter:
it expensive? Yeah. I mean Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Once you get into it’s yeah. Once you get into the enterprise and and global business I mean, you know, Jill, when it comes to, like we don’t need to go into specifics about contract value, but if a company is spending $500,000 to a $1,000,000, like, that isn’t that isn’t that’s like an invitation for you to give that bespoke model where most of what we’re doing is digital. Like, 80% of the problems that we’re solving is coming from bots and support tickets and all these things, and you can really make a a heavy, heavy impact by budgeting 10 10 to $15,000 a year to go on-site with your customer. And it’s not even the dinner or the wine or whatever it is. That that’s the relationship building. But it really is getting everybody in the room to get on the same page, and that’s the hardest thing with this digital world that we live in right now because everybody’s calling in from a different time zone and a different, living room or or co working space, and it’s so hard to have a unifying moment that we used to have in the offices. And these on sites are so powerful when you can actually find that moment together and then send them on their way home. And it’s absolutely worth the expense, of course, within, you know, reason and with responsible budgeting, of course.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. It’s also if

Jill Sawatzky:
you have a a troubled a troubled project or, customer situation, it’s the best way to turn it around

Jon Johnson:
Yep.

Jill Sawatzky:
Is to get in a room and really understand what’s what’s causing the differences, you know, where are the the communications missing each other.

Jon Johnson:
And I think it’s really oh, go ahead, Jill.

Jill Sawatzky:
Oh, so you can do it on on Zoom too. It’s just, you know, you have to really build the personal connection on Zoom as you’re doing it, which is is is definitely harder to do. And make sure that you’re consistently remembering, like, they have a dog or a, you know, whatever they’re interested in. They’re interested in cycling or finding that shared connection, but it’s so much easier in person.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Well, and to your point too, it’s I think when we are only digital boxes on a Zoom meeting or a podcast recording, it’s really easy to forget that I’m a human talking to another human. And there’s value drivers that are outside of this little digital box. And it’s really easy to say no over Zoom. No. I don’t need to buy that or I don’t need to implement that again. But when you’re sitting across from somebody in an office or at a table or at a dinner, to really, like, see the value and and the problems, to your point, even for, like, a challenging relationship, it’s a lot easier to really dig into what those core reasons are, whether it’s mistrust or if it really is pricing, which it hardly ever is. But, like, getting in front of somebody and having them actually say no to your face is a lot harder than just closing your laptop and moving on to your next meeting.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm. True.

Jill Sawatzky:
Absolutely.

Jon Johnson:
I just took a wrong turn and I got lost. And this is so funny because I’m trying to map quest my way back to the freeway while having this really cool conversation. So this is multitasking.

Jill Sawatzky:
Well, one one last, trick for you when you do on sites is if you can, bring someone with you from another organization that is not necessarily customer facing. Yeah. Because we’re, you know, an engineer or a product person or even marketing, for them to get to hear the customer’s story and why it matters to them. I mean, there’s just no substitute, and they can’t hide behind. Oh, well, you know, I see the customer’s having a problem, but it’s 5 o’clock on Friday. Gotta go. Like

Jon Johnson:
Yep. I love that. That’s that’s great that’s great advice.

Josh Schachter:
Joe, you were telling us also before the program that you recently had your leaders within your group rotate and take other roles, train in other roles temporarily to really get a sense of things. Tell us a little bit about that program and what the goals were of that initiative.

Jill Sawatzky:
Yep. Yep. And it actually wasn’t temporarily. It was a permanent, move. So this was a a pretty Oh,

Josh Schachter:
so you’ve hoisted your low performers off in other groups within the organization. Is that what I’m doing?

Jill Sawatzky:
All within my own organization. So not I did not. But it was a pretty big risk. It could have blown up in my face potentially. And, you know, Thought Industries is it’s not a huge company. This might be harder if you were in a IBM or Microsoft somewhere for sure. But, within thought industries, it’s worked really well. And what I did was I took the person running professional services and moved her.

Jill Sawatzky:
She is now the VP of customer success. And, our head of support, I moved him. He had been in PS at one time, so I moved him to professional services, and I moved our presales leader to lead professional services. And then I the, best one that I did was our leader of customer education moved him to lead our support team. So the learnings that each one of them has brought to, 1, each other bonding together because they’ve run each other’s businesses. They know they have complete empathy. They know the team members of the other teams, and they bring the skills that they learned on those other teams and things that they wish the other team had been doing better. Well, this is their chance to live in those shoes and drive it.

Josh Schachter:
It sounds like, it sounds like recreational, like, gym class volleyball. You you right? Like, the the coach blows the whistle and, okay. Rotate. Rotate. Now so the question I have is who was left out? You know? But no. That’s, but that

Jill Sawatzky:
left out.

Josh Schachter:
No one was left out. Nobody left behind. I love that. I’ve never heard of anybody doing that. It sounds very reasonable, very logical, very wise, but I I gotta imagine it’s one of those things where, like, every executive leader would love to do that, and yet they would they never actually do. It takes a lot of gall and a lot of bravery to actually pull the play the plug on that pull the trigger.

Jill Sawatzky:
Yeah. I mean, I had to I had to have some real heart to heart conversations with each of my leaders and realized that, like, the whole thing hinged on I wasn’t gonna on each one of them agreeing to it separately. I wasn’t gonna force anyone to do it. I really needed their buy in. So, you know, a real where do you wanna go with your career? How it would be so helpful to your resume to have tried other areas. Look at how, you know, marketable you’ll be in the future, having spent time in services or spent time in customer success and and support. And, you know, amazingly, they all bought into it. And some of it may be the culture at Thought Industries where everyone really truly pitches in to help each other, but I think they also each saw it as an opportunity.

Jill Sawatzky:
And the one I wanted to mention that was really useful is having a support leader who also does customer education because he has great incentive to deflect tickets to the team by making sure that, you know, our documentation is all up to date, when as he hears problems coming in through support, like, how else can we address this? Where where can we, else can we manage this and do things better and, like, quickly get those updates in? There there’s no disconnect there. Like, they’re all one team. And in fact, he’s the one who built that technical investigations team. And so, he took, you know, some really strong technical people on the team to build that model where they can be really the heart of TI and where things get distributed and happen, and because he, manages those multiple functions there. So that one, paid dividends in ways I never even foresaw coming.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, give yourself some credit.

Josh Schachter:
This is this is part of your vision.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. And I I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that too because, I mean, as you’d like, what you just said, I think a lot of times in customer success, we become so insular where it’s like, I have to be a CSM or I have to be a senior CSM. But the best CSMs are the ones that come from marketing or go to product or come from support. And to your point, they have this empathy that is driving them to to work in those cross functional teams. And I and I I really love that you started this from a leadership standpoint to say, you guys are all running these organizations. All of these people most of these people are customer facing. And now you’re gonna have a little pivot into what it looks like in the future. How often or do you have a CS manager that’s been, you know, a director of CS for 8 years and they just are in a silo? They’ve only been in one segment or one department, and they’re missing so much opportunity to learn a different perspective from the customer.

Jon Johnson:
I’m really excited to hear how this goes, you know, as you kind of mature this process. But, I wanna commend you on that because there’s a lot of wisdom in in kind of trading places. And like you said, calling switch and letting the center take this fight position, whatever analogy you wanna use. I never played volleyball, so I don’t know.

Jill Sawatzky:
And we’ve had quite a few we’ve had quite a few team members who have really taken an advantage of this too and run different moved to different roles within CX and outside of CX, but particularly within CX. So we’ve got people in support who were in services and, you know, vice versa. And, one thing that’s very helpful, especially when running a services business where you’ve got a p and l that you’ve gotta work on, and you have to manage those ups and downs. So if we have a a peak in services, well, we can pull team members in from other teams, or if we have a huge spike in support or someone’s out sick, we can pull people across from services to help with it because they many of them know each other’s business and really understand how to do multiple roles, which is, you know, extremely useful to be able to handle those peaks and valleys.

Jon Johnson:
That’s incredible. I didn’t even think about I didn’t even think about that process. I was just talking to another CSM about how she wishes she could lean on her support agents because they’re understaffed on CS folks, you know, just to handle some of these other tasks that they’re doing. And and this is a brilliant way to have some of that cross training that is just natural to kinda tag people in without it really becoming a burnout process, which is what’s happening right now is we’re doing this do more with less model that sucks kind of most of the time. So it’s awesome. It’s great.

Josh Schachter:
It keeps it interesting for everybody as well, something fresh.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
How long have you been running this, Jill?

Jill Sawatzky:
Started it last fall.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So I’ll call it 6

Jill Sawatzky:
months. November ish, almost.

Josh Schachter:
A little bit less. And Yeah. You said it’s permanent. You said it’s not temporary. But is it permanent? Like, what do they know the time horizon that they sign up for?

Jill Sawatzky:
There there’s no end time horizon. I mean, other than, you know, the only thing certain and

Josh Schachter:
Well, how many leaders have come back to you begging at your door saying, let me back in my old role?

Jill Sawatzky:
Not not one.

Josh Schachter:
Not one.

Jill Sawatzky:
Not one. I I mean, you might have to ask them directly, but what they tell me is that they’re really excited, and they said I didn’t. One of them said I didn’t even realize how burnt out I was until I took this on. And now I’m just really newly invigorated and excited about the changes that I can make.

Josh Schachter:
And will they rotate again?

Jill Sawatzky:
There’s no plan for it, but, you know, anything’s possible. If things get stale again or we need to really implement things in a different way, I could absolutely see that happening. And, you know, with the transformation that’s happening across customer success and customer education, I could see that being something that could be needed again in, you know, another year or 2.

Josh Schachter:
Is there any ways Josh, what?

Jon Johnson:
No. Go for it, Josh. Your wife said, oh, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Or oh, gosh. Josh. Well, you know, my nickname was was Oshkosh. Josh. So yeah. I don’t know. Jill, speaking of the futures of 1, 2 years from now, like, if you’re looking in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years from now, do you think that there’s a world in which those roles are all married together into the customer team?

Jill Sawatzky:
I think it’s possible. I just, you know, you guys are in the the Josh, you’re in the business of of AI and understanding the transformation that that’s going to drive. It’s hard to foresee all the ways that it will change the business. But if you think about, say, training customer education, it’s probably gonna wildly change the industry and and how jobs work there and roles work and and the same thing with customer success. It’s really going to morph that. So I can see having people who are more flexible and could handle multiple different roles and, just have those high level kind of consultative strategic skills where they’re really adding value because AI is taking care of kind of the the more basic problems and solving those.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. No. I I mean, I I agree very much so. My last question on this is how much ramp up time did you think it would take, and how much did it actually take? I assume did you do this all at once? Did everybody just kinda like, in volleyball, did everybody just shift at the same time and

Jon Johnson:
He’s a good person. A lot.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Like, was this during you started this during the holiday season when it was slower. How did it actually play out?

Jill Sawatzky:
Yeah. I started it, you know, early before Thanksgiving and really had to carefully plan out. The communication plan was the biggest piece of it. We I I moved all 3 at the same time, and we had to kind of plan out how we could do that transition because none of them could just leave their current role. So they almost were in, like, a half and half state for a number of weeks. Right. And then we had to communicate it to the teams in the right way so that they didn’t feel like they had been left behind, but rather that they had more support rather than than less support. And then there is a period of time where you kinda lose, you know, not as productive as we were before.

Jill Sawatzky:
I’d say there was sort of a month in there where everyone was just in flux and trying to figure out what they wanted to do and driving strategy. The timing actually worked out well because they had the holidays to kind of think about things and then roll into our sales kickoff at the end of January. So everything had to be, like, really nailed with plans and what each department was doing for the sales kickoff. So it was great to have that deadline that, like, we had to get there and move forward. And now it’s executing on our 2024 plans from here.

Josh Schachter:
And was this inspired by any other organization that you had seen done this before? I guess what I’m trying to understand is, seems like such a great move, but also kinda higher stakes. It’s something that you could kinda, like, live or die on by. Right? If it works, then amazing. You’re a genius. If it doesn’t work, you’re the CCO, and you’ve just intentionally muddied everything up across the entire, you know, groups within your org. So, you know, was this one of those things like, where did this come from? What was the impetus and the driving force to do this?

Jill Sawatzky:
Well, really, the the challenges of 2023 and, you know, customers all having the pressure to downsell or, you know, buy less. And so with that, like, I needed to make some sort of serious change. You can’t just, like, keep doing the same thing and hope for better results. Right? So

Josh Schachter:
Yep. That’s what they say the definition of insanity is. Don’t they?

Jill Sawatzky:
Exactly. So it seemed like it seemed like for 2024, we really needed a new approach.

Josh Schachter:
Love it. I love it. Jill, we’ll leave it at that for right now. Thank you. This has been such an enriching conversation, your thoughts on on in person meetings and on this rotation system that you have going. Thank you so much for spending the time, being here with us today. John, it seems like you may have parked, so I’m glad you’re at your destination. I hope you’ll crush

Jon Johnson:
it. No. I I just made it to the capital, so I have almost arrived at at my destination. But I’m so thankful, Jill. And, I’m gonna I’m gonna message you when I’m back in Raleigh, and I’d love to have that conversation at the optimist.

Jill Sawatzky:
Yeah. Yeah. Let me know. We’ll walk right down the street.

Josh Schachter:
Make sure you started off on the right track, John.

Jon Johnson:
Talking about mergers and acquisitions.

Josh Schachter:
Tell us about that merger. Tell us about that acquisition that nobody cares about. Alright. Jill, thank you so much. John, thanks a lot.

Jon Johnson:
Thanks, John.

Josh Schachter:
Thank you. Thanks, John. Everybody.