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Josh Schachter 0:00
Hey everybody, and welcome to [Un]churned where we go behind the scenes of customer success and the customer led growth movement. I’m here today with Rachel Provan. Rachel is a CS leader and executive with lots of experience in the industry. She’s active in many of the different communities out there and is really helping to elevate customer success. So for First of all, I want to thank you for that Rachel, for your your heavy participation and activation in our community. And I want to welcome you onto [un]churned.

Rachel Provan 0:38
Oh, thank you so much. That’s so sweet of you. And honestly, I don’t think I could stay out of our community if I wanted to. I need people to geek out about CES with.

Josh Schachter 0:48
Well, now we’re all calling you in, right because you’ve built these relationships. And we know how much you’ve inspired us and many of your posts on LinkedIn. And in other sources of content. You just wrote an article for update AI for my company, right? And we’re going to talk about that. I want to jump in. And for those maybe that don’t know you yet. Let’s learn about Rachel. So we’re gonna go through our rapid fire round of questions. And then we’ll go from there. First off, where were you raised and where you live now?

Rachel Provan 1:17
Well, I was born in Manhattan in New York City. I was mostly raised in New Jersey, and like the summit area, and then came screaming back at 18 for school and never left. I’m in Brooklyn now. I was in Manhattan for almost 20 years and spent the last seven or so in Brooklyn.

Josh Schachter 1:42
A lifelong New Yorker. Yeah. What was your first job?

Rachel Provan 1:49
I owned a catering business starting at the age of 12.

Josh Schachter 1:53
At the age of 12. Wow, you were precocious? illegally. You weren’t you were working at that age illegally.

Rachel Provan 1:59
Yes. But people kept asking me to cook for their parties. I was something of a baker and my mom, you know, pimped out my services early on. And all of a sudden, people were asking for illegal ask me for the for my baked goods at parties. And you know, things like that. And my mom was like, She’s a kid. And I’m tired of paying for all these ingredients. So we’re gonna charge three times what it costs to make them and no one’s going to take us up on that. So it’ll be fine. You know, maybe occasionally we’ll do it. And everyone was just like, Yeah, okay, I’ll pay $50 for a cake. So yeah, that helps buy my first car.

Josh Schachter 2:38
Well, you’re a regular attendee at the customers because happy hours that we have at my place. So now that I know about this, these unsung skills, might expect a big treat next time. We did maybe it wasn’t your first job. I also know that you you had a long stint in acting I

Rachel Provan 3:00
did. I did that I didn’t start till I was 16. professionally. Yes, I was an actress for many years, both stage and screen, mainly a lot of nice independent films went to a bunch of festivals, it was really fun. But you know, when I turned 30, and hadn’t become famous yet, I was like, Maybe I need a job. I actually really started working in the CES field when I was 2425, or something like that. I was lucky enough that they that the company I was working with would let me you know, take off a month, month and a half to go shoot a movie, and then come back. So who wouldn’t want that? You know, they let me keep my health insurance. It was amazing. And, you know, I was basically basically doing like production and account management done, but moved my way up quickly in the ranks there, especially once I finished acting and got focused on CES.

Josh Schachter 3:56
And that was during a time when you really couldn’t hide from your company if they didn’t want to give you the time off. So it was great that you found that now I imagine there’s many folks working remotely who are taking a day or two there to for a shoot.

Rachel Provan 4:06
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was definitely not an option back then.

Josh Schachter 4:11
Yeah. What’s the most important metric in customer success?

Rachel Provan 4:16
Hmm, that’s a good question. I think customer health. But that’s a tricky one to get right. And if we’re talking about just solid numbers, net revenue retention,

Josh Schachter 4:30
and are and my underlying hypothesis about customer success, is that it all comes down to relationship building. And I’m always interested in understanding what what are the components of the best form of relationships outside of a relationship that you have with a family member? What’s a relationship that you have developed that you cherish? That I’ve developed what? Sorry, that you’ve developed that you cherish Oh,

Rachel Provan 5:03
you know, I have a number of friends who have been friends with my entire life. And they don’t have siblings, and they’re the closest thing I have to that, you know, they know me better than I know myself. So I’ve got two of those.

Josh Schachter 5:19
Good. Let’s jump into the CES content. Now the meat and potatoes of our conversation. I hear a lot from customer success managers across all levels from entry level into more leadership roles. That while we’re all really excited that customer success is continuing to grow. And it really is, I think, at this inflection point where it’s just starting to really hit its stride. There’s also this phenomena of burnout that’s occurring, because there’s this growth in the importance of CES and its mandate, and its its scale, but not necessarily the same growth in budget and resources. And even if there were things this would still be the case, what what are you seeing, hearing, feeling around this issue of burnout and fatigue, potentially, in the world of customer success?

Rachel Provan 6:19
You know, I think it’s one of the most challenging things that we’re facing in the industry. And it’s something that a lot of people don’t talk about, you know, especially in the CS community, we’re all talking about how exciting it is, and all these things we’re doing. But nobody really talks about I’m working till 11 o’clock at night, I’m, you know, I have so many things that are my responsibility, it’s not possible to do them all and to do them well. So that’s something that I really work with new CS leaders on is figuring out those boundaries of, you know, what should I be doing in a day? How much can I focus on at once and still be effective?

Josh Schachter 7:01
And by the way, thank you for keeping me on that. I forgot to mention to folks that you, you do run leadership coaching for customer success. Leaders, proven success.com

Rachel Provan 7:13
Yep, I help new customer leaders, you know, get up speed fast, still have work life balance, have an awesome strategy, and teach them management techniques to run Rockstar teams that always hit their metrics and love coming to work. What

Josh Schachter 7:31
what do you advise to your clientele to other CS leaders out there CSMs. Around, you know, how they can avoid that fatigue and burnout and have a more balanced life,

Rachel Provan 7:43
you know, the, the first thing that I tell people to do is start protecting your calendar. If you leave it open, other people are going to take up all that time, because CES is useful to every other department. And that’s great. But if you let other people determine where your time is spent, is going to be spent on their initiatives and not your own. And you already have so many that the first thing that I advise is blocking off to separate hours in your day, not including your lunch, please still eat lunch, please do it not on a call. Yes, you can eat and take this time and still succeed, I promise you. So what I advise is, you know, blocking those two hours and using them for strategic initiatives, and actually labeling you know, time blocking, labeling which thing you’re going to work on, I suggest picking two to three strategic initiatives per quarter scheduling time to work on them every day. And just doing the very next step, whether that’s writing an outline, whether it’s writing an email, whether it’s writing the first, you know, the first play in a playbook, you know, you don’t have to think of doing everything all at once, but just be moving the needle forward a little bit. Because there’s always going to be something urgent, that’s trying to take your attention. And if you never focus on those initiatives on the, you know, the important but not urgent, you’re never going to make any progress. And I turned down a lot of meetings. I’m a big believer in that there are only four reasons to have a meeting. And that is to make a decision, solve a problem, share ideas, or to connect as a team. And those are all really important things. But it should never be a monologue. It should never be updates. It is a discussion. So it’s not going to be

Josh Schachter 9:36
Have you ever turned that sorry. Have you ever turned down a meeting from a client? Are these only internal meetings?

Rachel Provan 9:45
I mean, what I’ve done is I’ve managed expectations with a client. I’ve had clients you know, especially back when I was a CSM and eyes my CSMs on this sometimes if you got a weekly cadence going, check and see that they really want that If you don’t have agenda items to cover every week, and it’s more just like, so what’s happening? You know what’s going on this week? We all have things to do they have things to do. Sometimes it’s kinder to let them have that time. So if you find that happening, it can be reasonable to say, You know what, I see that we don’t necessarily have urgent items all the time, would you want to have this time back? I’m always happy to be here. But I want to be cognizant of your time and the things you need to get done. Is this something that you still want to do? And if so, you know, let’s be really clear on what we’re accomplishing here. Because I always want to be adding value when I when I meet with you.

Josh Schachter 10:42
Is it better to in that case, is it better, let’s say you have a you want to have recurring meetings with your customers, because you want to build a relationship, that’s a that’s a stake in the ground, that, that allows you to connect with them, right and build a relationship. And like we said, the building relationships, what matters? Along with a good product experience, but is it better to to then schedule that as a recurring session? And each week? Or whatever the cadence is, review it? And allow, is it better to have an opt out or an opt in effectively? Is what I’m saying? Or trying to ask?

Rachel Provan 11:19
That’s a good question early on, you know, the beginning of that relationship, I think they should be scheduled. And I think you have exact things that you’re going to be covering. And you should know, you know, sort of the product adoption trends of your product, if you’re just learning it, okay, you know, then you’re figuring it out along the way. But if you know, basically how long it takes not to onboard, but to adopt, that’s when you really want to be having those conversations, because nothing is going to build that relationship so much as trust, you know, following through on what you said it was going to be like getting them that result. If they know they can trust you, you know, they don’t need to talk to you every week, they know, you know, this person is going to help me get it done. I can trust what they say I can trust them to deliver.

Josh Schachter 12:05
I think you make a good point there, I think there’s an opportunity. Even if you have to cancel a meeting, the way that you do it is really important. And and that can, that can even be an opportunity. Like you’re saying to build trust, you can turn Hey, I’m so sorry, I can’t make this meeting. We have some things that stuck, or we’re still investigating. And here, if you’re very candid and transparent, what I found in very recent experience, by the way, is I’ve done this to a couple of folks recently. And the response that I got back from the meeting cancellation, assuming that the cancellation is not five minutes before the meeting, which always happens too, right. So that maybe that’s one rule, if that’s the first rule of of this right is be prepared and that, but I’ve gotten a response back. And folks, thank you so much for being transparent, I really appreciate it looking forward to rescheduling in two weeks or whatever the case might be. And you could and it was nice because it was like, Oh, wait, that’s cool. That actually worked, I built trust, and I didn’t have to go through and make a meeting with them or take take up either of our time.

Rachel Provan 13:03
I mean, if you have something crucial that you’re supposed to be discussing, outline the high points in in a note, again, these things should be discussions, or building that relationship, because that is a reason to have a meeting. But you know, if if you have a relationship meeting, and you need to defer it, you know, send them an article that that you thought would be useful to them, that’s that’s relevant to their field, you know, connect in that way and say, you know, I can’t wait to talk to you in X number of weeks, I’m still thinking about this thing that we talked about the other day, you know, those are ways that you can move that forward without taking up an hour of somebody’s time. Yes, it’s great to be on the phone with you to build those relationships. And you know, if it were possible to have effective ces without that we’d all kind of be in trouble, probably. But it’s it’s a fine line, you don’t want to be you always want to deliver value, you never want to be seen as a time suck. So if you can bullet the things that are updates, you know, just here’s the facts, here’s what you need to know, and then use your meeting to discuss them to say, here’s how this applies to you. Here’s what we can do with the strategically What questions do you have, then, you know, you’re really respecting their time now.

Josh Schachter 14:21
You mentioned agendas earlier. Yeah. What’s the magic to those? How do you structure

Rachel Provan 14:28
so this is something that it took me a while to develop, but I get really excited about because it was such a game changer for me and my team. So keeping in mind that these are not going to be for updates, but updates still need to happen. I create an agenda. You know it’s going to be the same week to week we start with weekly wins one personal one professional, and that’s the connecting part. And you can be as open or you know or not with that as you want. You can talk about your family you can say I had the best sandwich of my life the other day here. was what was on it? You know, it doesn’t have to be intrusive. But that’s the way these are internal these 100% is I’m sorry, this is a team meeting. Yeah, yes, my team. Yeah, that’d be a little weird to, you know, talk. That beats the weather. Whenever you’re building those relationships, but for the internal meetings, the way I’ve set it up is, when of the week, everybody goes around, then we have specific things that we’re going to discuss, generally looking at, what are those strategic initiatives that we’re working on? Are we coming up against any roadblocks? We’re looking at our metrics, how we’re doing versus how we’re supposed to be doing better or worse? And then we’re saying, Do we see any trends here? What is looking at these numbers telling us that both teaches the team and a lot of times it will unearth things that as the leader, you didn’t know, because they’re there in the trenches, and they hear someone else mentioned, oh, well, this has been going on with my client. And then you hear Oh, mine, too. And it starts to uncover trends there. Beyond that, I like to talk about, you know, here’s something that worked really well for me this week, here’s something that crashed and burned. So we don’t make the same mistakes. And it also helps develop psychological safety to see like, okay, you can say this didn’t work, and no one’s mad at you. And that’s something where as the leader, you have to go first there, when you’re bringing that forward, you can say, hey, I, you know, maybe I try this format, and maybe it crashes and burns, but you know, what, you never learn if you never try. So. And finally, what I what I do so that people are able to get those important updates in is a few days before the meeting, the agenda is available to everyone. Everyone is expected to put their updates in a read only section, it has a spot for their name, your say like, this is the project or this is the, you know, the thing I’m updating you on, here’s the updates. If anyone has any questions on those, then they can write them beneath, if it starts to look like okay, this is something we need to discuss, you move it up into the regular agenda, because we need to have a discussion. But this way, it’s not, you know, people droning on about projects that maybe everyone’s not involved in. But you know, if it could have been an email, if you can read it, that to me, that’s so much better, and so much better for async being able to take that information.

Josh Schachter 17:39
So we’re talking about internal team meetings and how to get them running it running it all cylinders. It sounds to me like you have a Google Doc that you set up that people can just input in, or what’s the actual format

Rachel Provan 17:53
I used, I used a program that is now defunct, but you can do it notion, you can do it in Google Docs, anywhere that you can all see what’s happening there. And where you can tag people will work for this.

Josh Schachter 18:10
Okay, so we’ve arrived to the meeting, and we have a sense of of our conversation that we want to have, and you’re helping to cultivate and curate what people are bringing to the table, and then ultimately have that discussion. I’m interested actually, also to go back to what you said about friends. And And folks, I take it that’s really just an open discussion, like you said that you’re developing psychological safety, you’re making the room just very transparent, open, honest. And then you’re just discussing things that come up, how are you documenting those trends,

Rachel Provan 18:44
we’re taking notes during the meeting, you know, it, obviously, it’s much better if you can have a tool where you can just be clicking a button and getting an insight written down, you know, I find that that documentation of these things is probably the most tedious part of customer success. So really, any way to automate that and get it into a system of record is obviously ideal. You know, and it’s it’s only been recently that we’ve really been able to do that that’s always been customer facing. People haven’t thought to use it internally yet. And it’s such great use case.

Josh Schachter 19:22
Yeah. You said something earlier about this note of documentation, I know that that you strongly believe in well documented things. And I’ve seen I’ve seen from you in the past. comments and posts and things of that nature about how we can document our personal wins as accomplishments and store those over times. And I think I’ve actually done that in the past. For myself, I my last job false Consulting Group. It was a very rigorous type of, of process of review. And so I said, Okay, well shit, I’m going to start documenting my own stuff so that when it comes to filling out that hour long form of what did you do the past six months, I remember it. Talk a little bit about your your strategy and philosophy around this because I think it’s interesting, I think it’s really helpful for folks that are maybe a little bit younger in their careers,

Rachel Provan 20:22
something that made a huge difference in my career that got me promoted again and again, got me raises. And it’s just, it’s just an Excel file that I have. That’s an accomplishment tracker, I have it on my website probands success, you can download it for free. But basically, it as you said, you sometimes you don’t remember all the good stuff he did. There’s something called recency bias, where the stuff you did most recently seems more important than the stuff you did before. Because the way that it made your life easier back then you now kind of take for granted. So what this is, is, you know, once a week, you spend 10 minutes, you know, on a Friday, at the end of the day, you say what did what did I accomplish this week? And you write down, you know, sort of the what you were working on? And you don’t? Yeah, once you just look at what you’ve accomplished, or what you’re working towards, you’re not gonna have a huge win every week. But what are you working towards, and then you document the situation, like circumstance, what you’re what you’re working on the task, the actions you’re taking. Situation tasks, how you’re how you’re going about it, like the challenge, I would say the situation is the challenge task, what you have to do, the actions you’re taking, and the results you get. And results are especially important, because you want to say there, hey, this is how we were different after I did this, it’s great if you can have some sort of metric to talk to that some sort of numbers. And I think this is something that scares most people. They’re like, I don’t have that information. You know, I don’t know, to what extent that increased productivity, I don’t know, to what extent we made more money, ask, ask for an estimate, say, you know, hey, I know we worked on this, I just want to make sure that it was valuable, you know, how much time would you say that it took you before we did this? Okay, and how much now, that’s all ask a couple people, you know, no one is going, you know, so long as you’re not making things up out of whole cloth. And doing a reasonable estimate. That’s, that’s all you need. So having just a summary of what you did, why it matters. And the the outcome is really useful, because then by the end of the year, whenever you’re having your review, you can pull out this document that says, you know, kind of organize it and just say, here are my biggest accomplishments this year, here’s why I feel really good about them. Here are the results I got for the company. And especially during an economic downturn, you want that in your corner, you want to be able to show people like, Hey, I’m a huge asset here, here’s the things I’m doing for you in this short amount of time. You know, the time I’m saving you the money, I’m bringing in the money I’m saving. And it’s also something you want to do, because it helps you update your resume. You now have all of your accomplishments and metrics that can go right on there. Whenever you need that, or even if you just want to update your LinkedIn with them so that maybe someone else sees maybe you’re ready to move to Director, maybe I want that person as a director. It’s never, it’s not bragging, it’s not bad. You’re giving people the information. But don’t shortchange yourself and focus on everybody else’s stuff. And not take 10 minutes a week to you know, to be able to bookmark your progress. And you know what, some days, we all have really, really crummy days. And we feel like we’re terrible at this or that it’s never going to work. It’s really nice to be able to refer back to that accomplishment tracker and say, You know what? Okay, I did all that. So, clearly, that’s not 100% reality of what I’m feeling right now. So lots of uses for that. Yeah, I really

Josh Schachter 24:08
liked that. I really liked that. I mean, it goes back to the saying, If you don’t believe in yourself, and who will it you know, it’s not it doesn’t have to be boastful or braggy. But just being able to document those little wins, they they add up over time. When I was doing this in my last role couple years ago. And after this conversation, maybe I should start to bring this back into my workflow. I actually would would have a I don’t think I use Excel. I think I use Google Sheets. And that way I could actually have a bookmark on my bookmark bar on Chrome. And if there was something that just came up in the moment, oh, let me just go click on the Google Sheet and just add it right now. And you know, it wasn’t even like, I had to set aside 10 as a data to think back it was just In that very moment, let me let me go and document that. And I agree with you. Now do you do you advocate to be continually refining and updating your, your, your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your CV, those sorts of things

Rachel Provan 25:13
I do, because it’s less overwhelming when you decide that you need that information. It’s also good for your accomplishments to be out there. You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re looking for another job. But I think there’s nothing wrong with you know, certainly don’t put every single accomplishment on there, that gets to be a bit much. But you know, maybe take your top three per year, and throw it on there, when you’re looking at updating a resume and maybe taking the top three in different areas that you excelled. And using those as bullet points for your resume, you know, just just really tune the biggest accomplishments, the biggest highlights instead of okay, these are the ones I remember from recently.

Josh Schachter 25:56
I want to round this out in the conversation with a last question for you, we’re, it’s crazy to say we’re almost in q4 right now, of 2022. As we turn the corner to towards the end of the year, what excites you the most about what you’re seeing in customer success?

Rachel Provan 26:17
Because I tend to look for look for the things that we can be making better look for the things where we’re not being honest with ourselves. Because honestly, like, everything is super rosy. online and in podcasts, and I don’t like to contribute to that narrative and make people feel like everyone’s winning at this. You know, it’s like, here’s what winning actually looks like that, you know, it’s like, it’s like looking at Instagram and thinking that’s supposed to be your life, you know?

Josh Schachter 26:47
So what, how would you tell the community that up for you?

Rachel Provan 26:54
What’s something? What’s a trend that you’re noticing in customer success? You know, what is? What is something you think needs to be talked about more in customer success? Something like that?

Josh Schachter 27:06
Yes. Let’s do that. Let’s do that. Okay. I want to round us out here with this last question. And I want to ask you, Rachel, what’s something that maybe is not discussed, as much as it should be, that you’re seeing or feeling? You

Rachel Provan 27:26
know, that’s something that I think about all the time, because there there are many things. But I think, really, something that is not necessarily clear, is what actual success looks like in the real world. You know, we have a little bit of an echo chamber going on in the CES community, because we all are really excited about it. We know what we can do with it, we know what it can do. It’s so exciting. And we want other companies to be excited about it to be using it more, and they are. But what’s happening is, they’re not understanding what goes into that. And just as we need to give realistic expectations to our customers, we need to with our CEOs, and we need to with each other, we need to tell each other this is what success looks like, here are some of the stumbling blocks. You know, if your CEO doesn’t get it, and they think you’re supposed to be able to, you know, take it to positive NRR from you know, 50% churn in six months. That’s not anything you’re doing wrong. You know, it’s it’s a matter of setting expectations and showing people customer success is complex. It takes time to build properly, like a house, and you can’t expect to be building the roof while you’re working on the foundations. So I think it’s important, I think LinkedIn can become very much like Instagram, where everything looks perfect. And Rosie, and we don’t see that people are struggling. Whenever I’ve said anything about you know, I know a lot of people who are struggling with mental health, I see people, I think the that I heard the the average term for a customer success leader is one and a half years. That’s short for leadership position. And it’s because we’re burning out or unrealistic expectations of what we should be able to accomplish in that time. So we need to put up those boundaries. We need to say here’s what’s realistic, you know, yes, you can get there, not tomorrow, here’s what it’s going to take. Here’s you know, the manpower the tools. This is what’s involved in getting you the result you’re talking about. It’s it’s going to require more than you know one CSF

Josh Schachter 29:49
it’s a great point. We all want to elevate the function because it is part of a movement behind customer led growth and movement into this this this business model that we know to be so Active. But patience is a virtue. And we need the resources to get there as well.