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Unturned is presented by UpdateAI.

Gillian Heltai:

We tend to operate with retention as the end goal, but the retention moment only comes around every so often, and it’s really important that you’re doing the right things, not at the renewal moment. so I it it can be really tricky to set up these sorts of scores when you don’t have tons of data to operate off of.

Interlude:

Welcome to Unchurned. A show about the leaders and innovators of companies who have forged incredible customer relationships and stories you can use to advance your own career. Here’s your host, Josh Schachter.

Josh Schachter:

Hey, everybody, and welcome to this edition of Unchurned. I’m Josh Schach, CEO and founder of UpdateAI. And I’m really excited to be here today with Gillian Helltai. Gillian is the chief customer officer of Lattice, which is doing some amazing things in HR tech that Gillian’s gonna tell us about. She owns the entire post sales user base at Lattice, During her time at Lattice, she’s seen the team that the team there evolved from around a 100 folks to around 600, and has 7 x ARR over that time. So lots to be learned from Gillian’s experience. Gillian, thank you so much for being on the episode today. Thank you so much for having me. said to be here. So before we get into the the meat and potatoes, which is going to be about what do we do in CS during a downturn or whatever kind of economic period we’re in right now. tell us a little bit is about Lattice. You guys are an HR tech company. you focus, I believe, largely on mid market customers as your base. Give me a little more. Yeah. So, for those of you who haven’t heard of Lattice, Lattice helps companies develop

Gillian Heltai:

high performing and highly engaged teams. We’ve got a suite of tools that really enable to stakeholders. One is we enable HR to run effective performance management programs, think performance reviews, goal cycle, compensation cycles, employee engagement surveys. So we enable HR to run these sort of top down organization wide cycles, and then we enable managers to coach and develop their teams. as you mentioned, we’re we’re focused on companies that are generally between a 100 to a couple thousand employees. we’ve got over 5000 companies that we work with today, and we’re approaching near a million employees on the platform.

Josh Schachter:

So we are currently recording this in April. Probably this episode will come out sometime later in the what are we in right now, Gillian? You know, we’re talking about this offline. Are we are we in a are we in a recession? Are we in a slump? Are we just in a, you know, what what are we in right now?

Gillian Heltai:

We’re we’re certainly in a tech downturn. so when you look at, I think, companies that you and I spend a lot of our time working with engaging with we’re we’re certainly in a downturn. I don’t know if we’re in your session. I don’t I’m a little above my pay grade, and I I feel like, the people who spend all their time talking about disagreement. It is very confusing from an economic data perspective, but certainly when you talk to leaders in software, leaders in SAS. We’re all sort of dealing with with, with new headwinds that didn’t exist. And, you know, obviously, we’re seeing layoffs and restructures, all over the place over the last 6 months in particular, which is, you know, certainly something that you know, we’re we’re dealing with the downstream effects of. Can you talk about that a little bit without giving out an investor report here? Whatever you’re able to comfortable sharing, What are some of the headwinds that you’ve seen either at Lattice or just more intimately within your sphere in tech recently? Yeah. So what I think about the big commercial trends both on new business, and I’ll, you know, I’ll probably spend most of my time on the lens of renewal and cross sell because that’s what my team is responsible for and what I what I think about all the time. There are there are two things that I hear universally when I talk to my peers and when I look at what’s happening at itself. One is budget tightening, and the other is finance involvement. And those things are obviously really interconnected, but when you think about sort of the glory days of the last couple of years, I think there was a lot of incremental budget to be spent on technology. finance was often uninvolved. Maybe there was a procurement function. Maybe there wasn’t. There was a lot of autonomy. And now what we’re seeing is a lot more budget scrutiny. we’re seeing scrutiny on renewals that really hasn’t existed over the last couple of years. and what that is sort of how that’s impacting us or or how it’s coming up in renewal cycles is, I think, 1, there’s generally an interest in minimizing the annual contracts spend. We’re not seeing a negative impact on interest in multi year contracts. which signals to me that companies have sort of confidence in their long term future, but they’re really trying to manage their burn. so companies really trying to pushing back on price in a way that we haven’t necessarily seen relatedly longer negotiation cycles on renewals. Renewals just got harder in some cases, they used to be very, very fast and, like, auto renewals were easy and were having more conversations going more rounds on renewals than we used to. And then the other thing that I’m hearing a lot of, we don’t always see it at Lattice because because of the nature of the lattice product, we tend to go what we call wall to wall. We go through an we sell into an entire organization. So we only have seat downgrades, fewer licenses being sold. If you’re on, like, a license based or per user per month model, We only see that happen when the company itself is shrinking, but when I talk to other revenue leaders, in the renewal space, there’s definitely a lot of pressure around fewer licenses. So so people thinking really critically of do I need all of my teams using this sort of enablement tool, for example, or can I limit it to just specific teams. So a lot of, focus on can we reduce the number of licenses to better control spend? So So, again, just sort of recap, like, 1, really trying to minimize annual spend without a necessarily negative impact on multi year, longer sort of more laborious renewal cycles and, down gross retention loss or downgrades because of fewer licenses being purchased.

Josh Schachter:

it’s a it’s a cheery, it’s a description.

Gillian Heltai:

Hey. It’s not all bad. You asked sort of a leading question.

Josh Schachter:

I I did. I did. I led you. I led you down that path. and I’m gonna lead you down even more. I I think there’s almost like a double jeopardy for customer success, right, because the the the tightening of the belt is affecting your renewals, but I I imagine that your own belt is being tightened too and that you’re having to go make make stronger cases for things that in the past might have just auto rooted on their own? Certainly. Yeah. I mean, we were obviously looking at our tech stack. We’re also just looking at our efficiency as an organization. I think this is it’s all in the same theme, but companies are trying to do more with less. they are not just thinking about growth. They’re thinking about growth and efficiency.

Gillian Heltai:

Companies have to really scrutinize their cash burn and their runway. And Lattice, of course, there’s no exception. We’re looking very carefully at where we’re spending, how we’re spending, what our commitments are, and we’re thinking critically about what is the return that we’re getting on all sorts of investments, but the fact that we’re doing that internally, you know, it makes us stronger because we understand that our cost merger doing the same thing. So it’s, you know, we’re all we’re all sort of in the same phase together, and I think evolving very quickly to meet the moment. So about a year ago, I think you were prognosticating

Josh Schachter:

all this stuff in many ways. You coauthored an article with Jake Sapper, I think, of pronouncing his name correctly, Yeah. Saper. Saper from, you know, emergence capital, top tier VC part of your family part of the family of Zoom and other, other distinguished companies out in Silicon Valley. And the article was, you know, writing a playbook for retaining customers in an economic downturn. Yep. Yeah. yeah, walk us through it. I mean, it’s a 2 by 2, your framework, which I love. I came from BCG. Boston Consulting Group. So we love 2 by twos. So, help us visualize. We’ll put a link in the notes, in the comments for for this this episode, but help us visualize and and walk through this this framework for retaining customers during

Gillian Heltai:

uncertainty economically. Yeah. Awesome. And I I think, yeah, I think I’ll I will try to paint the picture with my words, but certainly, for those of you that are listening, I encourage you to go and take a look at it so you can get a visual And just to set the stage, this was about a year ago, in addition to being a CCO at Lattice, I’m an operator in residents and emergence, and Jake and I sat down about a year ago, obviously, reading the tea leaves of as we all were in terms of the direction of the market and and what was happening in tech. And we tried to create a framework around how do we prioritize, and how do we think about retention in this more sort of challenging budget constraint market. And there are two dimensions on this 2 by 2. on one axis, we’re thinking about what is the value that that the customer gets from your product? What is the value that they’re getting from you, from you as a vendor? And on the other axis, or thinking about their own business health, which is what is happening within their organization that is gonna drive decision making, and sort of how how tight their budget might be getting. So those are those are the 2 dimensions of the 2 by 2. and as is always the case with the 2 by 2, there are then 4 quadrants. So we have, a different strategy depending on sort of which of the 4 quadrants they could be in. If they are getting a ton of value out of your product, and their business is really healthy. Obviously, the strategy with a company like that is going to be very different. from the strategy with a company who is getting virtually no value from your product, and their business is extremely unhealthy. You it is obvious that you wanna attack those things differently, but there are different strategies that you want to employ, depending on where the customer sits. And I think, you know, more than anything, in in my opinion, with a with a framework like this or with an approach. It’s really sort of about the effort of thinking critically about where your customers sit in this, sort of a framework. and being cognizant that your strategies need to be different based on based on where they’re at. So let’s start out with what you just mentioned there.

Josh Schachter:

incredibly important part of this is the assessment upfront before you handle them accordingly. How do you assess? Let’s assess the y axis first, which is the value that you’re bringing to the customer from your product. Yep. The the magnitude of that value. Yep. How do you do that? Yeah.

Gillian Heltai:

So there are a lot of ways you can do this. let me start with the simplest and I’ll, like, sort of work my way up to what is more complex The simplest way to know whether or not you are bringing value to a customer is to ask them and to make sure you’re asking the right person. You can do that through, an email based survey. You can do that through in product, surveying or pop up. You can do it through your customer experience team. You can have your CSMs as part of their journey rhythm asking the customer on a regular basis. How would you rate the value our company brings to your organization? Right? Very simple. so self report essentially

Josh Schachter:

is a very simple way that we should all be doing this. Now now what I’m gonna stop you there for one second. Self reporting, but who are you asking? Because we always talk about it well. It depends on who you ask. Are you asking the end user? Are you asking the team leader? Are you asking the the executive sponsor or decision maker? That’s a really good it it depends on your business. In Lattice’s case, we are targeting the

Gillian Heltai:

primary admin, the primary contact, and the decision maker. Got it. In some cases, depending on the nature of the product, you might if you have something that is, like, really focused on end users, you might wanna do that through, engagement directly with end users. Lattice does that as well, but it’s sort of it it depends on your own reflection and what where value needs to be delivered for the renewal to happen.

Josh Schachter:

You’re you’re gauging. You’re assessing the the key decision makers, the the budget holder — Yes. — and the admin effectively. Yes. You’re also in your organization in Lattice. You’re you’re understanding the value received from the end users too. Yes. Are you what are you doing with that from the end users? How is that affecting the process?

Gillian Heltai:

Well, the feedback that we get from end users is actually most used at Lattice in attributing value through the decision maker and the admin. So what I mean there is to be specific is We’ve got a lot of end user feedback about how managers and employees are experiencing Lattice. We use that in our conversations with our customers to say, hey. Look. How much value your employees are getting out of this? It’s a it’s a proof point. We’re sure of like an ROI related point that we bring to bear in, communicating to our customers what we think the value is that they’re getting out of Lattice.

Josh Schachter:

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s great. So it’s almost like that’s the input then you feed it into you feed it to your decision maker and the output is, you know, made up of a mobile packers. Yeah. Tell us you us. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Gillian Heltai:

So we use that to help sort of craft the story and and lead them to you know, them feeling like they’re getting a lot of value out of Lattice. But back to your original question, how do you assess this value? So one is you ask them, and you make sure you’re asking the right person, depending on what your what it who your company delivers value to. The next simplest is our simple product adoption metrics. In the vast majority of cases, it is not always true, but it is often true that there is a strong correlation between adoption and retention. So daily active users, monthly active users, some sort of simple metric that your company has at its fingertips around level of utilization can be an important signal of whether or not you’re bringing value for pretty obvious reasons. And then the sort of ideal state is that you’ve got a health score, and not just a health score that that exists, but a health score that is predictive of retention. And I’ve been on I’ve seen a lot of different versions of health scores, and Lattice is the first place where I feel like I’ve been where we’ve really done it right, and I’m happy to talk more about that. But you know, the the ideal state is that you’ve got a a metric that you believe in that allows you to really, really quickly plot customers sort of on a distribution of how much value do we think they are getting out of our product? Makes sense.

Josh Schachter:

on the other axis, x axis, how do you go about evaluating

Gillian Heltai:

the health of their business? which involves lots of externalities to your business. So, again, the simplest version is to ask them. Right? So this is something that could be a little bit harder to do via survey, but a customer experience team through CS, asking them what is going on with their business. The next simplest is you’ve probably got some indicators within your own data about how your customer is doing from a health perspective. I’ll give you an example at Lattice, Since we our our product when it is deployed is accessible to all employees, we’ve always got a really good sense of how many total employees a company has. So we can see when companies are downsizing because they’ve got fewer active employees. That’s a really important signal that we can use to understand the health of the business. Obviously, if a company has gone from a 100 employees to 25 employees, they’re they’re having some sort of a, they’re in an environment where their business is not particularly healthy at this specific moment. And then there is sort of a more macro level perspective that you can take, which is like, what is happening at a macro level in particular segments, in particular categories, Like, it’s fair to assume, a lot of companies in crypto have been struggling right now. Some companies in fintech have been struggling. Like, you can think about categorically where are there issues? The news also offers if you can set up alerts, can give you information about what is happening in particular sectors. And then Jake came up with a a nifty little methodology, which, he details in this this shared article that we built around how you can estimate their cash runway by looking at last fundraising date and having a kind of estimate of between 10.20 k burn per employee per month and employee account, you can get roughly out of LinkedIn. So if you wanna get a little fancy with it, you could try to estimate what a individual company’s burn rate is. and sort of back into sort of what position do we think they’re in from a from a business health perspective. I I love that back at the envelope math. I don’t think I would ever use it. I’m

Josh Schachter:

born out of a true, like, professional services. Did he come from consulting as well? Like, he he might have come from consulting. Yeah. That was not my contribution to this article. Yeah. No. It’s all good. It’s all good. It’s not gonna be from associate to consultant. I get it. So so you assess, what do you how do you memorialize, you know, who goes where? And before we talk about how you treat the different quadrants, How do you create alignment in your organization of who goes into what? Yes.

Interlude:

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Josh Schachter:

So you assess, what do you how do you memorialize, you know, who goes where? And before we talk about how you treat the different quadrants, How do you create alignment in your organization of who goes into what? Yes.

Gillian Heltai:

Okay. So I will say we spend at at Lattice. We spend more of our time on the value dimension than we do on the the health dimension. And I think the value dimension is is, if you’ve got a good metric in place, which we should talk about, it’s easier to plot customer sort of, like, on a distribution of really low to somewhere in the middle to somewhere that’s somewhere that’s getting a lot of value out of your product. I think on the business help side, Frankly, it, like, ends up being a little more binary where either you take a look at this company and you say, I don’t think they are in a healthy position based on the signals that we’re seeing from the metrics and from what we’re hearing, or based on our best guess, like, we’re not we’re not dealing with a customer here who is in crisis. So we put more of our calories into,

Josh Schachter:

sort of the measurement rigor on on the value side. And what’s the value metric for Lattice? What’s your what’s your moment of truth,

Gillian Heltai:

North Star Metric? well, so we have let me actually tell you a little bit about this. So we have a health score. our health score has 3 elements. There’s a product adoption element, a customer engagement element, the CSAT is pretty self explanatory. It’s self reported survey data from NPS or from end product. Customer engagement is based on number of high value touch points that we see logged through our CRM with a member of our CX team, also number support tickets, which are is actually not super correlated to retention, but that’s in there as well. And then there’s product adoption. Product adoption is by far the most important of the 3 when you look at correlation to retention within product adoption, and this is by the way where I think a lot of companies get tripped up. I have done a couple versions of product health scores that left me in a place thinking that product health or that that health scores in general were dumb and that it was a waste of time because I think a lot of times the way companies try to do health scoring is either they just have the CSM port it, like, a red, yellow, green. And there’s not a lot of rigor around the scoring. And then there’s all this, like, sort of not not bias, but it’s like, One CSM has a different grading score than another, and it’s just like it’s so, so, so murky. And you also tend to end up with, like, just heaps of yellows in that sort of a scoring method. The other thing you see companies do is they sort of operate out of their gut, which is not necessarily a bad way to start, but they look at their product and they sort of, like, come up their own weights. And they say, like, oh, I think, like, this should be weighted 25%, and this should probably only be weighted 5%. And you just sort of wing it. That only really works if you take the next step of validating whether or not this sort of gut based score that you’ve developed actually correlates to retention. I think another issue is sometimes when you do correlation based statistical analysis and you try to build a health score that way, you end up with this, like, super overfit model where, let’s say you’ve got, like, a red, yellow green, again, distribution, but you end up with, like, 10% greens, 10% reds, and then percent yellows. And, again, it becomes sort of an actual. So I’m painting a picture of, like, all the things that I have, like, run into walls with around the health score, particularly around adoption data at Lattice, we put a lot of effort into this, and we have the benefit of, again, 5000 companies, almost a million employees. So we have tons and tons of data in, you know, an earlier stage company might not have that benefit. We’ve got so much data. We need to put it to use. So we do deep statistical analysis on a regular basis to understand how the various products and combination of product usage within Lattice, impacts retention outcomes. And we’re a multi product suite. We’ve got, look, 5 or 6 skews at this point and products nestled within them. So our health score takes into account what the person, what the company has actually purchased, and then has sort of various waiting schemes based on what we have seen historically best drives or not best drives, best correlates to retention outcome. So we use an a, b, c, d, f, scoring, that plots customers based on their level of utilization of the highest, correlated products to retention. You have a data analytics or a data scientist person working with you? Yes. Yeah. We’ve got we’ve got a pretty good data science function in house, and we also use a third part. We used a third party to help us develop this, and they come back in and refresh it with us. And in the middle of refreshing it right now because one hypothesis is, like, maybe the bar has changed. Like, maybe the story is changing in this economic environment. The things that drive retention as it relates to to lattice utilization in this sort of a market, maybe it’s different than it was 9 months ago. So we since we’re since we have so many customers, You know, it’s different when you’re an enterprise. I came out of enterprise. You, like, staff in a way that you just can really hold, like, every cost from a relationship person so accountable to a, do you have an absolute pulse on the health of this organization? You don’t get to do that when you’re operating in the mid market. So we’ve gotta have a health score that we can really rely on for our own prioritization.

Josh Schachter:

And to correlate your health score to renewal retention. Yes. Is, I guess, I’ve never done this. Right? I’ve never actually been a customer success leader, practitioner. I’m just a fan boy. So, my my question is, like, how long how long of a study does that need to be to have significance? you know, renewal doesn’t come up every day. Yes. How how like like, tactically, how does that work?

Gillian Heltai:

I think we look over the last year, but again, we have, I mean, we’ve we have 5000 customers. We get lots and lots of at bats. Yeah. in terms of renewal, I think this is far trickier when you’re operating with a couple 100 customers, and maybe they’re on multi contracts, and you’re right. And then maybe you’re dealing with, like, 30 renewals a year. I think by the way, this is, like, one of the really hard things about customer success is, like, We tend to operate with retention as the end goal, but the retention moment only comes around every so often, and it’s really important that you’re doing the right things, not at the renewal moment.

Josh Schachter:

so I it it it can be really tricky to set up these sort of scores when you don’t have tons of data to operate off of. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that’s what I’ve always felt jealous about with sales is it seems like a much easier conversion metric to be able to correlate.

Gillian Heltai:

Yes.

Josh Schachter:

Yeah. Okay. So, this is good. Where are we now in our journey? I think we’ve defined the axis We’ve, talked about assessing who goes where, how to memorialize that, how to correlate that, that to the the outcomes that you wanna drive. Let’s talk about some of the actual, quadrants here. I like the let’s let’s let’s be on the the positive side of things here. You are crushing it. You are delivering a lot of value, and their business health is strong. You call that. You label that quadrant, reinforce the value. Yes. So what does that mean? What do you do? Yeah. So these are, again, these are your customers.

Gillian Heltai:

I mean, these are your best customers. These are the customers that are getting a ton of value out of the product. there’s no there’s no signal of major business instability. so as as you mentioned, call this section reinforce the value. This is where you are identifying champions. This is where you’re, like, trying to sort of elicit value back for your organization. This is where you’re finding advocates. these are the folks that are fostering your customer community. This is the place where you are really leaning into cross sell. there is a lot of interest in this sort of a market on how do we cross sell into the installed base? Cause new business is so freaking hard right now. if you think renewals are hard, new business is so hard in a business constrain in a budget constrained environment because everything is sort of one out if they’re gonna buy a new piece of software, they have to be retiring something else. So the this is where you can really sort of mind for growth opportunity. this is also a place, and I I think it’ll be helpful to put this in context of, like, where you are putting other priorities. I’ve got this hypothesis about this particular quadrant where this is a place where you could end up piling in tons and tons of resources, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I think customer success in particular is very drawn to customers in this quadrant. because they are happy. They are healthy. The relationships are good. You can, like, get into a nice, like, monthly or quarterly rhythm with these customers, and the calls are pleasant. So this is actually a place where you need to really think about how do we think about peeling back resources here in a way that doesn’t impact retention, that doesn’t negatively impact the customer satisfaction, but allowing you to sort of gather, resources out of this segment to be able to put into other segments. This is this is one of those where it’s sort of tricky to talk about because they’re they’re your best customers, and you wanna, like, really show them a lot of love and put a lot of your effort into that, but you need your sort of proactive energy.

Josh Schachter:

the, like, real effort and stamina and sort of deep strategic thinking going into some of the other segments. I mean, the job of a CCO is all about allocation of your team, right, where they spend their time. Yeah. So that’s what you have to be thinking about. Okay. Let’s let’s flip it over, to the exact opposite. So they’re their business is not so healthy, and you’re not really driving that much value. And and you tell people to walk away. That’s the label of that quadrant. What are some tactics for doing so? So this is all about identification

Gillian Heltai:

and giving people the authority to away. Like, we were very deliberate in what we called this quadrant because it is so hard for a service personality type to do this to just say like, okay. I’m just gonna give up on this one. but you really and again, like, it isn’t about deprovisioning access. Right? It’s not like, oh, we’re turning off access to chat or you’re no longer gonna have a CSM, it’s about where are you putting your proactive calories This is not a place where you can be spending tens and tons of time because the likelihood of success is so incredibly low. So tactically, this is really just about being able to identify these things, these accounts with relationship managers, whether or not the they’re the account manager, the customer success manager, maybe put them on some sort of automated journey of emails where they’re getting some sort of touch point through outreach or you know, Gainsight automated emails or through, like, whatever, tool you like to use to, you know, put things sort of on autopilot, and really shift your, proactive attention into other segments. But again, this is about, this is mostly about permission and acknowledging that they’re gonna be some customers where you just can’t continue to sink in a lot of a lot of resources.

Josh Schachter:

Will your product management team be the first ones to tell you that.

Gillian Heltai:

no. Not really. Because these are also not generally very loud customers. you know, a lot of times when they’re getting low value, they also tend to be disengaged. So the these are customers that are sort of fading into the background, and sometimes you have give permission to, you know, maybe you give it a swing or 2, and then you gotta be willing to let them go. Got it. So that question was actually leading me to my next question, which is how do you

Josh Schachter:

make sure that these processes, these quadrants, these definitions are adhered and consistent across the organization, cross functionally.

Gillian Heltai:

Yeah. That’s a really good question. So, I mean, so first of all, there, we operate, intensely around our classification within CX. So within customer experience, which is the department I run, we’ve got customer success. We’ve got customer onboarding. We have customer support, which we call customer care. we have account management, which is the sales function into the install base, there’s a lot of coordination effort that happens across these, and we use the language of our health score to help with prioritization and decision making. So for example, if a low health, like, let’s call it a DRF health score, product option health score customers writing into care, customer care is gonna leverage that moment of interaction to try to inform them, ensure that there’s awareness of the products that they have access to, and try to get them to refer a call or take a call with our scaled customer success team. So there’s a lot of different plays that are sort of architected within CX. off of this sort of acknowledgement of of a customer’s level of health. when you take a step up and look even, more holistic within Lattice and other departments in the way we use this. I I think there are 2 things that come to mind. 1, the the acknowledgement that adoption is critically important and that it is correlated to retention drives a lot of healthy conflict and, strategy around our product roadmap. Product, our EPD team, has their number one goal is retention just like mine is. So they’ve got they really take this lens of what can we do? What can we build to drive recurring utilization adoption and value for customers. So they think about health and the risks and rewards of that in much the same way we do. And the other thing that we’ve recently been doing is actually using this as sort of a feedback loop and reinforcement into the sales team. So we just wrapped up a big project focusing on sort of our, like, upper, let’s say, quartile of customers, our top 25% ARR customers, to learn from what what sorts of profiles? What do we hear in a new business cycle that, you know, a year later or 2 year 2 years later leading to a high value customer engagement. Right? So when I’m not talking about retention, but I’m talking about health, like, a lot of times these larger deals are or these larger contracts are, you know, 3, sometimes more year deals will look 1 or 2 years later and see who’s healthy and who’s not and what could we have done differently or how differently could we have approached the new business cycle

Josh Schachter:

to either better set up the customer for success or disqualify a customer that probably wasn’t gonna be a good fit for the product. Interesting. I wanna ask you one one last question. I’m gonna put you on the spot. The 1 well, we there’s 2 quadrants we didn’t hit, but that’s okay. One of them is called be their hero. When you’re delivering a lot of value, but the customer is in trouble. Their business health is weak. Yep. Can you remember a time when you

Gillian Heltai:

were or your team from Lattice or from Talkdesk or your other companies have been your customer’s hero. Yeah. I mean, we’re I feel like we’re doing that daily right now. Honestly. Oh, that’s a cop out. That’s a cop out. No. No. I’ll give I’ll give you a real example. I mean, I’ll give you I’ll give you some specific examples. So I was on a call with a customer this past week, a real champion for Lattice, someone who’s and by the way, like, a lot of what I’m like, what comes to mind for me is very commercially focused, right, because I think CX is always, I’ll be their hero. Right? Like, how do we, like, do these heroic things that make them look awesome? Like, that is not the story. I’m gonna tell you. I’m gonna talk about, like, really the commercial element of this, because, again, this is a quadrant of customers who are like, they love your company, but their business is crisis. Like, what do you do for those? Like, generally speaking, those customers don’t need, like, a pat on the back. They need you to help them commercially. get through this sort of storm that they’re in. So I was on a call with a customer. Oh my god. I hope my VP account management doesn’t help me for putting this on a podcast, but I wanna call with a customer a couple days ago, and she was telling me, you know, the renewals coming up in July. And I was just checking in with her, and she’s like, oh my gosh. Like, my CFO has told me I need to cut 20% of my HR tech stack. Like, I’m trying to figure out where it’s gonna come from. I think I’m gonna get a little bit here and a little there. And I’ve really tried to entirely protect the Lattice budget, so I’m really gonna be asking that you all aren’t increasing my rates. And I asked her, like, tell me about your appetite for multi year. She said she’d be okay with doing multi year. And then she said, but Lattice, what are the products that Lattice has? is this product called grow, and it’s like a competency library individual development plans. It basically helps it solves the problem of an employee not knowing what is expected of them in this role or the next role. And she’s like, I’m just so upset because I really wanna buy this grow product And there’s just no way I’m gonna be able to budget it in, and I know it’d just be so valuable for my engineering team. So my step coming out of that is to find a way for her to have that product for some period of time. I don’t know if it’s 6 months. I don’t know if it’s a year. I don’t know if it’s for the full 3 year contract she’s about to sign. but it is in Lattice’s best interest right now for her to be retained, for her to be retained on a long contract, and for her to have this extra product because she’s telling me I’m gonna get so much value out of this. So I think we’ve come out of these years where you could, like, raise rates and, like, you sort of can sort of nickel and dime for things, although I don’t think that’s ever really been the way Lattice has operated, but right now, we are just getting so focused on logo retention and retaining cost customers that are advocates for us. And sometimes that’s going to mean being more flexible on price. Sometimes that means gonna be giving a product away for a free for a portion time, which is something that we generally haven’t done before, but we have to, like, really shift our mentality about how do we help our customers through this time when they feel like they’re between a rock and a hard place. I love it. Gillian.

Josh Schachter:

Thank you so much for being on the show. This was great. Awesome. Thank you so for having me, Josh. Hey, guys. It’s Josh. Don’t hang up. If you enjoyed this episode, you know what? Even if you didn’t, I’d for you to give us a rating in iTunes or Spotify. And after you do, email me josh@update.ai with the name of your favorite charity, and my company UpdateAI will make a donation on your behalf. I’d love to connect with each of our listeners. send me a LinkedIn request, and I’ll accept it immediately. Just go to www.update.ai/linkedin, and it’ll redirect my profile. Thanks.