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josh Schachter 0:06
Hi, everyone. It’s Josh Schachter, CEO of update AI. I’m really excited about our episode. Today I’m here with the co founder and CEO of Nuff said, Chris Hicken. Chris, thank you so much for being on the show today. And thank you for including us, Josh. So Nuff said is doing some amazing things, you guys are out in market, now you’re helping to measure the value that’s delivered to customers. We want to get to a conversation about value delivered to customers about customer success, and how we can really expand the footprint of customer success, what what companies are doing and are not doing in that sense. And we’re also going to talk about product market fit, I really love you have a very interesting perspective on PN fit and an opportunity for companies and for the customer success function as it relates to product market fit. So our show is called Unchurned because it’s all about being raw, and all about ultimately building relationships. And so I want to kind of get us warmed up here a little bit with a rapid fire round so we can get to know, Mr. Chris Hicken. So let’s do it. Let’s go very quickly here. Yeah, let’s do it. Where were you raised? And where do you live now?

Chris Hicken 1:19
Right. So the first six years of my life, I lived in a very poor area of Caracas, Venezuela. So my first language was Spanish. My parents were peace and justice workers. So they, they did work with developing countries, especially in very poor areas. And the most of migrant, you know, let’s just say after six or seven years old, I was I’ve been in the States, mostly in California, although about three years ago, we got another place out in Salt Lake City, are reliving the mountain life now.

josh Schachter 1:53
With a lot of other great tech companies out there alongside you, alongside the silicon slopes, as I’m told it’s called.

Unknown Speaker 2:00
Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s an incredibly interesting area from a tech perspective, because unlike the Bay Area, where a lot of the hub of tech is centered around, like hardcore tech, engineering and product out here in Salt Lake City, a lot of the companies a lot of the core discipline, or functional strength is around go to market skill. So you get a lot of companies with, you know, strong products, but really, really good go to market engines.

josh Schachter 2:31
Why do you think that is? What’s the history of that?

Unknown Speaker 2:34
Oh, yeah, well, that probably the biggest thing is, you know, Utah, especially once you get out of Salt Lake City, is, has been, you know, very high percentage of LDS. So, Mormon religion, folks, and one one of the parts of their tradition as they do a year or two missions, where they traveled to other parts of the world, and they preach about their faith. And what ends up happening is, you have these young people going out and learning other languages and learning how to, you know, sell a difficult product or it’s hard to sell religion. And you know, people are very resistant, you get a lot of nose. And so people come back with a thick skin, they’ve come back with sales skills that come back with skills on how to work with people. And that ends up just making for really, really great customer success. People really good salespeople really good STRS really good marketers. So you just that that culture has just evolved naturally here because of the the traditions of the Mormon faith.

josh Schachter 3:45
That’s really fascinating. That makes so much sense. I would never have thought about that. But

Unknown Speaker 3:49
as you know, a lot of the tech companies here at no surprise are down in Provo, which is about an hour south, a little less than an hour south of Salt Lake City, which is right near BYU, which is the biggest kind of LDS focused university. So you’ve got kids who graduated 22 They’ve gone on their mission, they’ve acquired all these great skills and they’re ready to go to work.

josh Schachter 4:14
Right. And I know ancestry.com was one of the first big companies out in that area. I think they

Unknown Speaker 4:18
were Yeah, there’s Yeah, yeah. ancestry.com You got Pluralsight out here. You’ve got Omniture, which is acquired by Adobe. You’ve got a couple of other new upstarts like Domo, and I’m blanking on a couple others. We’ve got a lot a lot of cool startups here in Salt Lake. Cool. All right. We’re gonna try to go rapid fire here. What was your first Okay, yeah. That was a very rapid fire. Right.

josh Schachter 4:45
It was interesting. I like I wanted to dive deep. I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Caracas, Venezuela, like I wasn’t gonna just let go in a second, right.

Unknown Speaker 4:58
Alright, thanks. Rapid Fire question.

josh Schachter 4:59
Well, What was your first, okay?

Unknown Speaker 5:02
I worked as a landscaper for a guy that my parents mentored in Venezuela, who ended up really smart kid found his way to the US started landscaping business. And I worked for him when I was 15.

josh Schachter 5:18
What time do you go to bed?

Unknown Speaker 5:22
Usually depends on work. I mean, the way that we’re I’ve got a two year old. So I take care of the two year old of evening time, I’ve got the night shift. After he goes to bed, I put in a couple more hours of work. And whenever I hit the wall, that’s when I go to bed. And it’s usually 11 or 12.

josh Schachter 5:36
What’s your favorite hobby?

Unknown Speaker 5:40
Either scuba diving or Sport driving.

josh Schachter 5:44
And I saw your recent video of your Galapagos Islands expedition. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, thanks. It

Unknown Speaker 5:50
was amazing

josh Schachter 5:50
trip. Alright, last question for you here. Because our show and our trade that you and I are both in is all about building relationships. Outside of any of your family members, what’s the relationship that you cherish the most?

Unknown Speaker 6:06
Yeah, I have a I have a very long answer to this. But the short version is, I’m a big believer in mentorship. And there are different sides, there are different tiers of mentorship that I think are important. And so I have very strong relationships with mentors that I’ve developed over the last 15 years, and I very much cherish and I learn from those relationships, constantly. Let’s let’s,

josh Schachter 6:30
let’s we can we can dive into that one. Let’s call that out. So tell us about a mentor who’s who’s taught you a lot of stuff.

Unknown Speaker 6:37
Yeah, so the way that I think about mentorship is you should have someone who’s about at your stage of development. So someone that you can use as a sounding board, someone who’s two or three years ahead of us, so has the person who has the job that you want to have. And then someone who’s a lot older than you, someone who could take a look at the big picture and say, Look, big picture, this is what you need to be focusing on. And so one of the people that I’ll focus on is the person who’s, you know, a couple years ahead of me, a guy named Terry Flynn. He was a serial CEO, but interesting background, did some work in theater and did a lot of consulting work. And he’s just a really smart guy who’s process oriented, who can think like a CEO. And over the years, he’s helped me see around so many corners, that I wouldn’t have been able to see around myself, because I hadn’t gone through it yet. And so he’s, you know, as a first time CEO, you know, I’ve been an early stage executive, but I’m currently a first time CEO, he’s helped me see around a lot of corners that I otherwise would not have been able to see. Yeah,

josh Schachter 7:47
that’s great. So you were the president and chief operating officer of usertesting.com, you have been a mentor and advisor and investor in many startups. And now you’re the founder and CEO of your own of Nuff said, which is gaining traction in our market. So what drew you to creating Nuff said? What is your mission? As you guys see it?

Unknown Speaker 8:17
Yeah, the thing that started me down this path was at user testing, as the company was scaling, what I noticed was that people in every department, you know, as the organization got bigger, it got harder and harder for people to focus on work that mattered. So they were busy, everyone was working 1012 hours plus, but we weren’t getting work done that matters. So what started me down the path was I wanted to solve that problem. And I’ve always been very passionate about the customer success department in general, it’s, you know, near and dear to my heart, I’m, you know, I personally am passionate about customers. So we started with the customer success department first. And we had this roadmap of, you know, five or six products that we wanted to build for customer success. And one of them the one that’s taken off the most is a product that solves again, a problem that I’m very passionate about, which is that as a company scales up, everyone loses touch with the humans that are using your product. And we end up using data to try to guess what the customers experiences. And what I mean by that. We look at product usage data, we look at time to value we look at health scores. So we’ve got all these numbers to represent our customers. But we don’t have a way to connect with the human experience. And so Nuff said is solving that problem by making it possible for anyone at the company to be in touch with the actual customer experience is getting delivered and the humans that are using the products so and we don’t have to get into how that product actually works. Right now, but that’s that’s the problem that we’re going after. And that’s what I’m personally passionate about. Yeah,

josh Schachter 10:04
I mean, I share that passion, that’s the product that we’re after do in a very different way, is about building those relationships, right? Like that touch point between the end of the day, we’re just humans connecting, right, whether you’re a company, vendor, etc. So I fervently agree with you. Let’s let’s shift over to talking about customer success at large. I’m, we are both embedded in the CS community. And one of the things that attracted me to customer success was just that, that outreach of the community, how they bring you in, and really welcome you. And I’ve seen that community growing over the past year or so that we’ve been really involved. And I also still feel like there’s something more right for customer success, that it’s, it’s just now starting where it needs to ultimately get to as far as its presence and clout and influence in the organization, I know, you share a somewhat similar view. How do you feel about where customer success is today? In respect to where it really should be? Or will be? Or is going? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 11:24
I do have a lot to share on this. And some of its good news. And I think some of its bad news. I do agree with you that the customer success community has grown. And I think the community is very welcoming to each other. And it’s a helpful community. Also, customer success has been developing as a function for over a decade now. And we’re starting to see some problems with how we’ve built the function. What I mean by that is, a lot of customer success leaders believe that customer success should not own a number, they should not be quota carrying back that might that might even be the dominant perspective now. But the end result of this thinking and the way that you know, our focus so far, right, what a customer success teams focus on, faster onboarding, better QBRs, better playbooks. You know, better health scores, better product usage data. As a result of that, the customer success team, in many organizations doesn’t own a number that the CEO or the CFO care about. And so the department is under funded. It’s one of the first departments where heads get cut, when, you know, when the tough economy comes. And the executive team doesn’t value the function in the way that I think it should be valued. And also, you’re starting to see some posts from you know, very prominent companies. But you know, snowflake right now, I think, among public companies has the highest net retention rate of any public company. And the CEO is on, you know, is on record publicly saying that customer success should not be at the department, Customer Success should not exist at all. And it should be a combination of sales plus customer support working together. I didn’t really so

josh Schachter 13:17
snowflake had an incredible, you know, NRR I think they were at like 160 160% or something like that. But I didn’t realize that their CEO is on record saying that. That’s an

Unknown Speaker 13:26
understatement. Yeah, so yep. And so and we’re seeing more examples now of customer success leaders who in the eyes of their CEOs aren’t strong enough. And so customer success is now just another arm of the revenue function. So that’s those are some of the challenges that the customer success team needs to face in the next decade. And I think it’s up to consultants, vendors, and thought leaders in the Customer Success category to help shape the way that customer success could evolve in the next decade. So it doesn’t become this, you know, group of nice people in the corner, who don’t really do much important, but they’re really good at being nice to customers. And unfortunately, that’s the, that’s the perception of a lot of executive teams, CEOs, CFOs and investors. So

josh Schachter 14:23
the nature of so it’s interesting, your comments here because it’s, it is a double edged sword, right. So what attracted me to customer success was how warm and welcoming the community was and how relationship focused. They are, we are, and at the same time, it may be it comes at the cost of being too nice in some way, you know, focused more on that humanistic approach, as opposed to like you’re saying, really advocating for yourself. Like, like sales is, of course not afraid to do and has made them so so. To recall, I think, what’s also interesting is, in my view, customer success has not gotten the credit that it’s due. Because it’s a multi attribution problem in many ways, you know, in sales, you convert, you sign a contract. And that’s, that’s a single metric of conversion, I salesperson, got this other person to sign on the dotted line, you know, converted that in customer success. It’s fuzzy. It’s fuzzy, what is conversion? I suppose its renewal. But also it’s preventing churn which is similar. But you know, but also, like you said, it’s also satisfaction and all these other things that are just a little bit fuzzier. And they’re correlated to more than just the customer success manager, they’re correlated to the product, the Korea to the overall experience. And yet we but we do still know how important customer success is inadequate Asian. So I, it is, it’s tough. I’m curious, like, what your thoughts are on what is that roll up metric that that could solve this? Or what are some of the ways that we can work around this?

Unknown Speaker 16:15
Yeah, well, I think, to kind of, I have two strong opinions about this. The first one is how customer success can drive a different operating philosophy, but within the company. And the second one is the measurement or the scorecard that customer success could bring to the executive team that the team will actually care about. And so do you care which order we go in the

josh Schachter 16:43
order that you listed on whatever order you want to go and works for me? All right.

Unknown Speaker 16:47
All right. Well, let let’s start with your question, which is what what number? Okay, so what numbers does customer success on today, if they don’t overdose while they bring time to value, health score, net retention rate, which a lot of times they don’t actually own it if they’re not doing renewals, which is another NPS or CSAT score? The thing is, none of those numbers appear on the CEOs, morning dashboard. None of those numbers are things that the CFO is going to give you budget for. So what are we doing? Like, Why do we exist? We own all these numbers that no one cares about. Certainly investors don’t care about any of those numbers. So what what do investors care about? Well, my take is that customer success, when it becomes more mature over time, should become a product market fit machine for your business. What I mean by that, as the customer success executive, should own product market fit for the business. And the reason why I’m saying that is the customer success leader is the only leader who has full the full view of the entire customer journey with your company. So they can see what happened in the sales process, what the experience is with the product, how they feel about pricing, how they feel about the company’s positioning, how technical debt and bugs and issues are affecting the customer’s experience in the customers journey, how our services to customers trust, the services that are being delivered to the are the best people assigned to the account, there are literally 50 different key experiences that each customer goes through and the customer success executive has visibility if they want into all of them. So what does it mean to be accountable for product market fit, the customer success executive can and should score the quality of the experience delivered at each point in the customer. If the customer service executive can do that, they can they can score each moment in the journey then the customer executive can also see okay, as a business, this is where where we are accumulating risk, relationship risk or churn risk. And this is where we’re accumulating opportunities for growth and expansion. So once a month, the customer says executive comes with their scorecard to the executive team and says product, I need more resources here. Services, I need more recess resources here. And oh, by the way, marketing, we’re starting to see this competitive risk creep up over here in the enterprise segment, or it needs some focus on that over here. So rather than being a reactive executive that owns numbers that no one cares about now, the CS executive owns the product market fit scorecard in his directing the resources of the business to improve net retention rate and the overall overall quality.

josh Schachter 19:36
I really love that. You’re, you’re suggesting for customer success to play air traffic control. And yes, our is customer success currently equipped to do that, or does that require a different type of skill set in some ways?

Unknown Speaker 19:56
I think customer success has all of this he’ll need it today to pull this off. It’s just about orienting the department to focus on running a better business, rather than running a better customer success department, meaning less focus and emphasis on, you know, time to value rather than going from 40 days to 30 days. Or rather than getting, you know, our health scores from 78%, green to 81%. Green. Well, let’s actually take a step back and look at what are the factors that lead to lower time to value, slower time to value worse health scores and use that data to drive internal decisions? So there’s, there’s very little new skill or capabilities or tooling needed for the CS executive to pull this off. Are you

josh Schachter 20:49
practicing this Enough said?

Unknown Speaker 20:53
We are indeed, we have our own product market. Yeah, so we have a product market fit scorecard. We’re measuring 18 points in the customer journey, our customer success lead scoring each of those moments. Every week, at our company huddle, we review what our company scorecard is on delivering value to customers. And we make frequent adjustments to address the needs of customers in real time. And that’s, that can really be across the board, product services, pricing, paying off technical debt, you know, competitive threats, all those things.

josh Schachter 21:35
My background is as a product owner, product leader. And so my first thought that comes to mind is okay, well wait. Are you are you trampling on other domains? Then? In some ways? I’m playing a little bit of the devil’s advocate here?

Unknown Speaker 21:50
Yeah, well, yeah. Well, I’ve asked this question to CEOs and CEOs, which is, who owns which executive owns product market fit? And the answer is always nobody. Now if you if you ask the executive team hones product market fit, you might get the marketing leader raising their hand, and you might get the product leader raising their hand, maybe. But when you start asking them questions like, Okay, well, how are you dealing with the problems about services delivered? Or how are you dealing with problems or pricing? Then the product leader realizes like, Well, yeah, you’re right. I’m not, I don’t own product market fit, I only own the product. And when you start asking the marketing executive, like, hey, what decisions are you making around, you know, tech debt, paying off technical debt, or feature roadmap? They realize like, oh, yeah, that’s right. I actually don’t I mean, I own positioning and branding and pricing, but I don’t own the whole customer journey. So there are pieces of this, where product and marketing might feel like, hey, that’s really my responsibility. And if I was in the seat of the customer, the leader, I’d say, you’re right, I’m not accountable for this. All I’m doing is I’m surfacing what customers are saying, so that you can take action with customer data, as opposed to a Gartner research report, or some highly paid person’s opinion.

josh Schachter 23:13
I think this is really important. I’m still stuck honestly, in the snowflake thing, Chris, because I remember watching Dave Kelloggs presentation on the importance of CES and correlation of NRR to enterprise value, and showing snowflake as the really golden child of that. And I’ve used that in my presentations. And I’ve used that in my VC pitches to show that customer success is on the rise. But then to know that the CEO of snowflake, who has the the ultimate benchmark, and that is advocating against CES, you kind of just shutting the world with that, that fun fact there.

Unknown Speaker 23:52
Well, and you also have to mass times that at kinda set Redpoint, who also published an article about a month ago, maybe six weeks ago, that showed that customer success probably is not a needed function. When you’re dealing with enterprise accounts, you know, it’s more valuable when you’re talking about mid market and SMB, but probably not necessary in the enterprise. So there’s there is a movement right now, to shift resources away from customer success and give more resources to account management and to customer support. And if customer success isn’t proactive right now. It will be a much less important department in five years

josh Schachter 24:37
at the end of the day doesn’t matter. You know, I don’t know it customer service has done so many wonderful things. If if it’s if it gets absorbed by other functions, but it’s still able to deliver the same outcomes, then maybe it doesn’t matter. I don’t know.

Unknown Speaker 24:56
Here’s the you know, It means it actually matters a lot. And so I’ll get to my second point here, which is that the world of software needs a new operating model to grow their businesses. So if we take a giant step back, what do investors care about? You know, for him for you, Josh, your investors put money into blog.update.ai. And they said to you, I’m putting money into your company, because I expect you to grow the value of your company, and increase the value of my investment. So in the eyes of your investors, you are a value creation machine, they want you to double triple, quadruple 10x 100x their investment. So you are highly incentivized to grow the value of your company. In the early days of SAS, investors, rewarded CEOs who grew their businesses at any cost. Right. And so that led to a sales led growth motion, where companies were pumping, sales and marketing full of tons of budget, like, who cares how much you’re spending, because the only thing that investors care about is top line growth, and who cares how much money you’re burning. And then right around 2015, Wall Street started, you know, these IPOs started happening and Wall Street’s like, man, guys, it’s too expensive to grow these Sass companies. So there’s this you know, the shift, you know, you start seeing the rule, the rule of 40, what came out in 2015, and boom, now all of a sudden, Wall Street values companies that can grow efficiently. And no surprise, shortly after that product led growth became the new operating model, we’re now because of network effects and having products that are stupid simple to install, and use and get value. Now, suddenly, you’ve got this whole category of product led growth. The problem is that most software companies, I would say 95% of software companies that I might, that might actually be a little bit low. Most software companies do not have a product that’s appropriate for product lead growth, that requires integrations or training and onboarding, if you if you have an education department, if you have an onboarding team, if you have integrations, you are not product lead and you never will be. So most companies don’t have a product that’s appropriate for product lead growth. But Wall Street is still only rewarding companies to grow efficiently. So a new operating models needed to drive growth. And I, I have coined that term, customer led growth, although the reality is this movement has been happening for a while and I’m just giving it a name. And in the customer led growth movement, a business oriented itself kind of like a product led growth company around obsessing around the value that they’ve delivered to customers. And so all of the company’s metrics, the way the company makes decisions is around value delivered. And if you and the reason why I’m bringing this up is if you don’t have a team at the company, who is not only measuring value delivered to customers, but obsessing about every day, if you don’t have that team, then what you’re left with is a sales lead growth motion. People on the company who only care about the transaction growing the account, they don’t care about the customers receiving values. That’s the thing that I’m worried about. If the customer success department gets minimized over that

josh Schachter 28:22
makes so much sense because you have you mentioned update AI right. So so we we get investors, immediately you’re on the clock to grow revenues. And no investor is asking, oh, wait, right. And not that NPS is probably the right. Metric anyways, but oh, what’s the NPS of your customers? Oh, Are they satisfied? No, who gives a shit? If they’re satisfied? Are you growing revenue? What are your numbers, the emails that I get to write from these investors, which are the most annoying emails in the world to get, and you just kind of put them off until they until their junior associate, you know, nudges you to respond, right? But what is that email? It’s what are your numbers this month? Are you on track? And it’s not? Are you on track one on customer value delivery. And so then that becomes that that pressure goes downward? You know, that cuts downward to the head of sales and then to your sales team. And then it percolates across the entire organization. And it’s not pure, it’s not pure. And I think saying is Yeah, good.

Unknown Speaker 29:25
Well, it, you’re right, you’re right. If the focus is just sales dollars, then you’re going to do stupid stuff. If the focus is valued delivered, then you’re going to create this wonderful ecosystem where customers get value. They tell their friends, they are happy to be references, their accounts grow over time. So you have this kind of natural growth that happens almost like product lead growth, but you’re not doing it through a simple to use product. You’re doing it through ensuring that you’re

josh Schachter 29:54
like this, this movement that you’re creating, you’re labeling it love that your career In this category, customer led growth hashtag customer led growth sign me up for that.