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Carie Buchanan:
The CSM’s original intent was to really focus on adoption and cost have been making sure customers are getting a return on their value. It’s turned into probably the catchall in a lot of companies where they’re doing support and they’re doing billing. Like, my my CSMs are doing billing. And I was like, why are you guys doing billing? I went to our CFO and I said, why are they doing billing? And he said, oh, because I don’t have enough people on my team to do it. And I’m like, so now the CSM is doing billing, and you’re yelling at me because we’re not retaining customers. And that’s because they can’t do their job because they’re doing support. They’re doing billing. They’re doing yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
And everyone, like, well, the CSM has a relationship. Have them do it. Right? So

Josh Schachter:
Oh, and by the way, you’re not giving

Josh Schachter:
me any more budget. You’re not giving more budget, but you’re taking

Carie Buchanan:
out that whole point.

Kristi Faltorusso:
With the accounts receivable team.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
Right. I know. So so is your CS team

Josh Schachter:
still doing billing?

Carie Buchanan:
The cost. No. No. I I told them to stop.

Josh Schachter:
Nice.

Carie Buchanan:
And it’s it’s a, interesting little interesting switch that’s happening right now.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh, see, you’re not mid banter, so it’s like you don’t know what to do. You’re kinda frozen in time here.

Josh Schachter:
I’m frozen by the silence and the seriousness, the levity. No. Not levity. The anti levity. The gravity of this conversation. Whatever. Okay. Let’s start.

Josh Schachter:
Now you threw me off, Christie. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unchurn CS and BS, starring myself, Josh Schacter, Christy Falterusso, and John Johnson, who is in absentia, this afternoon as we’re filming on Monday afternoon. He’s over in Seattle. Christy, what’s going on? How was your weekend? We’re gonna introduce our guest in a second.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Weekend was great. I actually had an opportunity to meet Emma Lowe, who is another customer success professional.

Carie Buchanan:
Her and

Kristi Faltorusso:
her husband flew into Long Island, New York, which nobody comes out here. You know that, Josh. So, you can imagine my surprise when they said they were coming out here and that they were also bringing another LinkedIn influencer from a a different part of the world, more like branding and community to come, and we all got together for coffee. So I got to, like, have this, like, really interesting, like, LinkedIn influencer kinda like, ah, you’re super cool moment of content I didn’t know existed out there. So that was that was my weekend. That was my highlight.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. Sounds like a really cool weekend.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wow, Josh. Okay. Well, what did you do that was so cool? How did you trump my weekend?

Josh Schachter:
No. My weekend my weekend is intentionally lame. I I caught up on Succession, so I’ve completed season 3 now, ready for the last season, see what happens.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Alright. You’re just on season 3?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. But I know that the old man dies because, I was walking to the park one I think I

Kristi Faltorusso:
don’t know.

Josh Schachter:
I was walking to the park one day with my dog, and they were filming a funeral for succession at the local church on Park Avenue. So, I think kinda cool. Yeah. Anyway, Carrie, what are you binging these days? No. Let let’s let’s let’s do a formal introduction to Carrie Buchanan. Carrie is the chief customer officer, and CXO also. Am I right, Carrie? At, or no. I’m sorry.

Carie Buchanan:
I’m I’m totally experienced. Officer.

Josh Schachter:
Chief experience officer. We’ll have to understand what that means in a second. The chief experience officer at Popmenu. Carrie was previously CCO at Pluralsight, and held executive level roles at In for, so big companies, ERPs. And then I also wanna talk to you about your experience at Salesforce because you were a leader at CS within Salesforce.

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. And

Josh Schachter:
I’d love to know what CS is like at Salesforce. But welcome, Keri, to the to the banter.

Carie Buchanan:
Yes. Thank you. I’m excited to be here. I I I was saying earlier, I feel very special to have been asked to be on this, so I’ve been looking forward to it.

Josh Schachter:
Well, it’s something that you’ll soon regret, but if not already.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I told her that

Carie Buchanan:
she said fine. That’s all they’re mad at us. So

Kristi Faltorusso:
She she’s super busy actually doing work all day, so that’s why she doesn’t have to, like, bother with all the LinkedIn noise that’s out there.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. Yeah. And who who’s the who’s the best out there at creating LinkedIn noise, Chrissy?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean, I would say I’m the noisiest. I wouldn’t say my content is the greatest, but I definitely like to make noise.

Josh Schachter:
But you make good noise. You make,

Carie Buchanan:
you know,

Kristi Faltorusso:
a, a hard bone exhaust. You’re very you’re very

Josh Schachter:
cacophony of others out there. Yeah. Carrie, I wanna talk about, work, but I also wanna talk about Atlanta. I think you’re the first person from Atlanta. You live in Atlanta right now. Is that correct?

Carie Buchanan:
Or do

Josh Schachter:
you live in the metro area?

Carie Buchanan:
I do, and I’m I’m in the office today, back to work in the office. So it’s kind of exciting to, actually see people in person every day.

Josh Schachter:
So I actually I’m actually genuinely interested in this because my brother and my nephew and his wife live in Atlanta, and so I go there, you know, fairly often, and I’ve been wanting to do a customer success networking happy hour in Atlanta because I noticed there’s a bunch of folks that are in Atlanta. But I assume that it’s just gonna be tough in Atlanta that maybe they don’t have the density of of the tech world out there yet. But prove me wrong. Like, what’s the tech landscape of Atlanta?

Carie Buchanan:
Actually, yeah. It’s, it’s very techie here in Atlanta, and we have some great companies here. Google’s got offices now, Microsoft, of course, Salesforce. We have a ton of big customers here. Right? We’ve got Delta. We got, FedEx. Well, FedEx is Memphis, but close by UPS. So there’s there’s a lot going on, and events have actually been pretty good here.

Carie Buchanan:
I know I’ve attended some myself, and it seems like there’s a good turnout. And a lot of companies for whatever reason are starting to build in our midtown area, which is interesting. If you’ve not, if you’ve been to Atlanta, you’ll see a lot of the buildings going up there. So, yeah, you can call area? Yeah. It’s actually midtown is actually downtown.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, okay. Yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. So you’ll see a bunch of skyscrapers there. So, yeah. It you should come. It’s been I’ve had a lot of successful events here in Atlanta with customers around particularly around the SaaS world. So Will you

Josh Schachter:
help me organize the event if you

Carie Buchanan:
would shift the Absolutely.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Single handedly, Josh. She’s gonna stop what

Carie Buchanan:
she’s doing in her current role.

Josh Schachter:
Perfect. Perfect. She’s she’s too busy for LinkedIn, but not too busy to help Josh actor organize, happy hour and drinks.

Carie Buchanan:
I’m all about I’m all about the face to face. That’s, you know, bring bring people together, I think, is is super important. So

Josh Schachter:
Cool. And and now you’re the chief experience officer at Popmenu. And so it’s for restaurants. It’s Yeah. Tell us tell us what’s Popmenu.

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. I mean, it’s really kind of like a CRM tool for restaurants. You know? So we do everything from online ordering to marketing. We have a couple AI tools for answering phones, a lot of just reporting of your how while your business is doing. We build websites for our customers. And the role itself, this is actually a new role at at Popmenu. I mean, they’re still I would say they’re adolescent start up kind of deciding what to be when they grow up. And, they created this role, you know, it’s tradition it’s a traditional customer, chief customer officer role where, you know, I have onboarding.

Carie Buchanan:
I have design. I have support. I have, this the customer success manager. It’s not a big team about 50 people, but my role also is really tied to making sure that the overall experience, is is up to par. And so I own retention. I own the number. And then, you know, as part of that, I have to work with the product team. So I spend a lot of time with product making sure that the reasons why we might not be retaining customers that are, you know, due to the product.

Carie Buchanan:
The hardest or the more I’ll say the more challenging part is working with sales, you know, making sure we’re setting the right expectations when we sell the product.

Josh Schachter:
They’re always gonna have it by the next quarter, right?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. Oh, I get involved with some good ones and I will tell you I’ve this is the first time I’ve been in the restaurant industry, and it’s the customers are very, very different than, you know, an ERP customer. So, they’re they’re a lot more compassionate and, a lot less business savvy, a lot of really interesting, conversations around why, you know, why they aren’t staying with us. I of course, I can spend time talking to a lot of the customers that are are leaving us. But yeah. So it’s it’s, and I’m starting to see some companies start to do this with a chief experience officer. And I think the biggest difference in my mind from kinda where I was to now is we really own the listening strategy. So thinking about all the different points of feedback that you get, whether it’s through the product, whether it’s through MPS surveys, CSAT surveys, and really fight funneling all that together to determine, you know, what what it is we need to be doing about all of that data and then how do we actually then action on it and and then, get back to our customers on how we’re gonna fix that.

Josh Schachter:
So so what’s in Christy, did you wanna, I don’t wanna

Kristi Faltorusso:
kinda I’ve got a bunch of stuff, but I want you to finish your thought, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
So I go, then you go, then I go.

Carie Buchanan:
Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. That feels really

Kristi Faltorusso:
awkward and uncomfortable. But yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So, Carrie, like, you’ve got, like you know, what’s in your marketing mix? What’s in your tech stack? I wanna know. What’s in your listening stack? What’s in your listening mix?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. So we use Gainsight. That’s one of the tools that we use, and we actually use that for our surveys, which is great because, you know, if you guys have used Gainsight before.

Josh Schachter:
And what are your surveys? We’re talking, like, NPS surveys? Are we talking about customer satisfaction?

Carie Buchanan:
Do. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I’m more interested in that as opposed to, like, the Gainsight or client success.

Carie Buchanan:
Right? Yeah. We do.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
So we do n we do the traditional NPS where you’re actually sending that out quarterly, but we also collect it through the product. So we give customers the opportunity anytime that they wanna give us feedback, they can through the product, which is always interesting. And then we’d have the traditional, CSAT where after onboarding, we’ll send out a survey, support as well. We’ll send out a survey. One of the things that, I’m starting to do a lot more of is pulling customers together, in focus groups and, obviously visiting customers that you I think you can learn a lot more talking directly to customers than through the surveys. And they tend to be a lot harsher when you actually talk to them. I mean, you

Josh Schachter:
said you’re you said you’re a face to face person. Are you are we talking like you’re actually, like, going to the drive through and you’re, like, you’re pulling up and you’re you’re, you’re having a heart to heart?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. Sort of like that. Yeah. Usually, usually, we’re not at the drive through. Usually, it’s the customer sitting at their counter at the restaurant,

Josh Schachter:
or bar. But you’re actually going in person and speak to your customers?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. Holy shit. That’s what a novelty that is. Yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
Some of the bigger the bigger ones for sure. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
I know it’s crazy actually talking to the customer directly. It’s it’s, you know, kinda what we used to do a long time ago before we all make it sequestered in our home.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Call call you old fashioned, but, you know, actually talking to customers face to face.

Carie Buchanan:
I know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I mean,

Josh Schachter:
I’ve got a 1000000 more questions around, like, what do you what like, how do you share those insights with the rest of your organization? Who gets what type of information? But I I wanna let Christy go because I think she’s got some good good thoughts that she’s been noodling on there.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh, you know where I’m gonna take this. Right? So if you reviewed yes. You do. If you look at Carrie’s background, then you would know she was a consultant. Yeah. She was.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, she was a consultant. Go figure. And she’s a successful c suite leader. Yes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So, Carrie, if you’ve not listened to any of our previous episodes, then it’s totally okay. You don’t have to you you didn’t have to. It was in a prerequisite for you to be here today. But so many of our guests have actually started their careers in consulting

Carie Buchanan:
Mhmm. And

Kristi Faltorusso:
have been grown into customer success and customer experience. And so I have this hang up that Josh is very well aware of now that I feel like I’m missing this foundational part of my career because I didn’t go through the consulting world. So I wanna know, based on your experience, how do you feel like consulting has prepared you for where you are today?

Carie Buchanan:
I mean, I think it’s the number one reason why I’m here today. I think, 1, just having worked so close to customers when they’re actually trying to use a software or build a software. You know, I started yeah. I was 20 years at at Accenture, and, yeah, I started back before we actually had SaaS. So it’s been a while, but, but really kind of seeing things from their perspective. I think the other thing, and this is I’m actually doing a internal talk on this tomorrow, is that as a consultant, you spend a lot of time kind of peeling back the onion and digging in to really understand why customers want something. And, you know, you have to as a consultant. Right? Because you’re building a system or you’re putting together a system.

Carie Buchanan:
And a lot of times they’ll ask you for things. They’re kinda like, that makes absolutely no sense, why you would want that. Right? And so really kind of digging in there. And then I think just how you structure working with customers. Right? It’s like, you know, I’m very like plan oriented. Right? And I think, you know, if you’ve ever done I’m sure you you’ve you’ve done a lot of, work around kind of the customer journey, but really kinda understanding, like, what that customer is going through and all those different cycles. It’s kinda similar when you’re doing a consulting project. Right? You’re trying to, like, understand all the different stages and what they’re truly trying to achieve.

Carie Buchanan:
And so and I we just I think, you know, consultants in general, and I do think it’s a skill you can you can build. So there’s still hope for you, Christie.

Kristi Faltorusso:
There’s

Carie Buchanan:
hope for me. See, Josh, if you

Kristi Faltorusso:
hear that, there’s still hope for me yet.

Carie Buchanan:
But it but it and it’s a very, like, you know, I think it depends on how long you’ve been in consulting, but it’s just your your there’s such a a way that you think about problem solving that kinda gets ingrained with you. And so you’re always like, you know, when you’re running into customer issues and problems, you kinda think of that problem more like a mini project and how are you gonna, like, figure out what’s going on and then how are you gonna solution on it, you know, then how are you gonna follow-up later to measure it. So, I I like to hire a lot of consultants as well maybe because that’s how they, you know, the the they think similar ways. But I I do think it’s it’s for me personally. I think too that, especially at the c level, having had, you know, a lot of a lot of teams have implementation. Right? And that that to me, that’s like a really big area where if you don’t do that right, you’re not setting that customer up for success later on. So even when you get to the success world, you you might not solve that. Right? So I really focus, especially once that sale happens, on my onboarding and implementation team to make sure that they’re setting the customer up for success.

Carie Buchanan:
Because that’s And

Josh Schachter:
are you are you suggesting that that it can are you suggesting that a consulting background is helpful for that onboarding implementation team?

Carie Buchanan:
I do. Yeah. I do. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Because they’re because they’re structured or or what’s the Yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
Because they’re really thinking about, like, you know, like, the you know, what is this customer really trying to achieve? Right? And how am I gonna actually set them up in a way that they’re gonna see the value in that? You know, I’ve seen people you know, and I I will tell you, like, my team right now, this is something that I’m working with with them is that they kind of have come in they come in and it’s like task task task test. I gotta check this up. I gotta do this. I gotta do this. Boom. You’re live. Right? They’re not actually they’re not spending the time to understand why the customers decided to you do this. They choose our platform.

Carie Buchanan:
What value are they trying to get out of it? What’s gonna be the most important for most important thing for them to see that value? Because every customer buys for a different reason. And sometimes if I look at reasons why we’re, I’ve got customers churning is because they never really understood fully what we were gonna help them with. Right? They had this kind of high level, but we didn’t really show them, walk them through that. So so I do think it’s just that kind of, like, you know, that kind of understanding what they’re trying to achieve and then getting them set up to a point where they can measure measure value. That’s kind of like the way, like, a traditional consultant would think about a project.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So, Carrie, if you had to say your your top three skills that you took away from your time in consulting, give me your top 3.

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. Listening, super important. I will tell you it’s a skill I really had to work out when I was younger because I always felt like I had the solution in my head and would be thinking about that, but the customer’s still talking and not even probably missing half of what I should have. So really listening, I think, is super important. The other thing I would say is being very curious. My my own family makes fun of me because I ask so many questions. They’re like, mom, you always ask so many questions, but I’m like, that’s just I ask a lot of questions Because I’m just trying to really seek when someone says something. I’m like, maybe I don’t really understand What it is they’re telling me? So asking lots of questions and I think the other thing is it’s funny because, like, in the customer world, the customer is always right.

Carie Buchanan:
But I think they’re you gotta think about how is it a mutual benefit for both companies? And I think that’s a hard skill, particularly in customer success because people, you know, customer success people are like the most amazing people. Right? They deal with the customer. They’re very empathetic. They want to do everything they can to make that customer successful. But there’s actually a medium point somewhere where you have to balance what’s good for the business that you’re in versus what’s fit good for the customer and how do you have that mutual beneficial agreement together. Because sometimes if you do things for a customer, it’s not really gonna be the right thing. Right? For example, you know, like, you can’t just build a feature for 1 customer, even though they’re gonna be upset about it. So being able to have that kind of balance between the 2.

Carie Buchanan:
And that’s a hard skill, I think, for some people because they just want to make sure that that customer is always happy and they’re seen as the one that’s making them happy. So those would be my top 3.

Josh Schachter:
By the way, it’s a it’s a really hard thing to do to deflect a a customer request to see, like, the forest above the trees. As the CEO of my company, whenever I hear a customer request, my instinct I always say, oh, yeah. Absolutely. We’ll have it next month. We’ll we’ll do it. Like, we’ll adjust the road map. No worries. Then I my end head of engineering gets a Slack message.

Josh Schachter:
He’s like, what? What did you just screw you? But it’s my head of CS that has the actual backbone to be like, no. Actually, you know, we’ll add this to the backlog. We’ll we’ll like, thank you for the information and, but but we’re not guaranteeing something. So I now being in it with with real customers and accounts that are growing, like, I I see and appreciate so much more the strength that it takes to be able to take feedback and request and not immediately cave to it, but understand the broader context of what’s good for the customer and good for the business.

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think that’s interesting point though because I don’t think a lot of customers still today even truly understands what buying a SaaS product really means. Right? Like, they come in wanting to have everything exactly the way they want it, and they don’t realize the benefits of having something like that. You know, back when I was at Salesforce, I had the actually was at a dinner with, the he was a vice president of of, IT at FedEx. Right? Really big customer of Salesforce. And he was complaining because he said that a lot of the partners that they have been using that actually do the work, you know, implementation partners, were pushing back on him because they didn’t wanna customize the solution.

Carie Buchanan:
Right? And he was actually giving me this feedback, so I would go talk to the partners and tell them, you know, stop. Like, you should do everything that the customers ask. But, you know, and you guys know in the SaaS world is that once you get off of that once you go on to that customization track, you start to lose all the innovation that you could be getting. And so one of the things I always tell customers when they’re upset is, like, you know, have you ever thought about changing your process to actually map to the software so that you could actually get more benefit out of it versus trying to customize the software to actually do it the way you’ve always done it. Right? Because in a lot of senses, the platforms are created because they take the best of all things that they hear, and that then potentially could be very beneficial to customers, but they’re so used to doing things the way that they’ve always done things. It’s hard for them to see that. So it doesn’t always work, but sometimes, you know, customers I had one just a couple weeks ago, and he was like, oh, yeah. That’s a good point.

Carie Buchanan:
I never really thought of that that way. So

Kristi Faltorusso:
Carrie, can we go to your time at Salesforce? Because I’m also I’m very interested in this. So you started your career there. You were director and then you kinda moved up to senior leadership there. From a leadership standpoint, how did the role evolve, and what were some of the changes that you really liked as you kind of shifted those roles? And what were some of the things that you kinda lost touch of? Right? I talk to leaders all the time who are like, yeah, when you’re at a certain level, you’re very connected to the customer, you’re connected to your team. And as you you start to move up, right, you lose some of that connectivity and you’re focused on strategy and it’s, you know, the whole it’s lonely at the top. So what were some of the the changes that you experienced through that progression at Salesforce?

Josh Schachter:
And you were there from 2012 to 2018. Right? Just for context?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess maybe my style is a little bit different, so I I guess I didn’t see a a big impact there. And when I left Accenture, you know, I was actually leading teams, so I almost kinda took a step back. My first role there I was actually I was a customer success executive. So I was supporting is a paid for resource. So I actually had coca cola as my customer, the global, entity.

Carie Buchanan:
So it didn’t feel it felt like, you know, I had a lot underneath me. But one of the things, you know, I guess the harder thing is just making sure that you’re it’s I think for some leader, it’s hard and I would say this is probably something hard for me as well as I wanna come in and, like, do everything for everyone. Right? And help them all be very successful. So, kind of taking a step back from that and feeling comfortable that people can be accountable for their own work and being there more for a sounding board. So part of me moving into the role, you know from specifically at Salesforce into a leadership role was kind of letting go on some of the small stuff. But being there for the big stuff. And when I say being there for the big stuff is making sure that I didn’t lose the connection with the customer themselves. I think it’s very easy to get into a leadership role where you actually don’t meet with customers.

Carie Buchanan:
You’re too focused on your team. And so I always had to have the balance of building relationships. So for some of the, our more strategic customers, making sure that I would have a relationship, meet with the customer, especially those in Atlanta. Like I said, the customer events, I used to actually do customer events where I’d bring the customers together in town. So I think that I the other thing that’s I think it’s important is to make sure that you’re still As a leader, it’s easy to kind of like step out of having like a call like a superpower, right? You know when you’re an individual, you’re really good at something. I always wanted to keep involved in some of the things that I really enjoyed. So, for example, when I was a director, I did a lot of stuff, with my customer around governance models and helping set up governance models. So that was something when I came a leader, I would go around with my my CSMs and do workshops on government.

Josh Schachter:
Sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You you enjoyed this setting up governance models.

Carie Buchanan:
I did. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, okay. Just I just had to clarify.

Carie Buchanan:
I know. I know. It seems kind of like a silly thing, but, but that’s the consultant in me. So

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s

Kristi Faltorusso:
absolutely why consulting is so critical.

Josh Schachter:
Well, Christy, would you wanna set up governance models?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I don’t know how. No. I could I could figure it out. I’d be fine.

Carie Buchanan:
But, you know, there’s a way. Like, the the reason why I loved it was because there was something that I found found so many customers struggled with. Right? And when I when I say a governance model, it’s, you know, like, if you’ve got, you know, whatever. Let’s say it’s Salesforce. How are you gonna actually get input from your different teams around what’s needed? How you know, especially if you have multiple I always thought about it growing up is, you know, like, you have you went to school. Right? And that was, like, kinda your day your day to day job. And then you would have extracurricular activities, and that would be like setting up governance models or, you know, playing sports or something like that. So I think having that balance because it’s really easy as a leader to kinda lose contact with what’s going down, you know, kind of at the individual contributor level.

Carie Buchanan:
And so that’s something I’ve always done, you know, ever since then is I’ve I I love doing skip level meetings with my team because I know my leader sometimes hide things from what’s really going on. And so, in fact, I’ve just been doing them now with a lot of people who

Josh Schachter:
What kind of what kind of information do you get out of those skip little meetings that that you think are being

Kristi Faltorusso:
I wonder if it’s like that they’re hiding it, or is it just people aren’t sharing with their direct manager and maybe they’re more inclined to share with you?

Carie Buchanan:
I I think it’s sentiment. Right? Like, one of the things I just had one last week, and, like, the feedback from my team was there’s so much change going on. And people, we gotta be careful. There’s so much change and, been through so much change. You know, I’ve only been here for 5 months and so there’s been change change change. And I’m like, you know, change is actually a good thing. Right? So I was talking to one of the folks on my team last week, and she brought she brought it up. And she said, you know, there’s a lot of change.

Carie Buchanan:
And last year, we went through this and, like, you know, it wasn’t wasn’t good change. But this year, I feel like even though we have the same amount of change, I’m okay with it because I know why. Like, I know why we’re doing it, and I know that there’s a purpose behind that. Right? So all my all I’m hearing from my team is that there’s a lot of change, and we gotta be careful that we don’t change things too much. Then I go talk to someone who’s, you know, maybe talking about it and they’re saying, it’s great and we love it. As long as we know why we’re changing, then we’re good with it. So those are, like, like, the kind of little nuggets that you get, or something is a really big serious issue, and then you talk to the people and I’m like, no, that’s okay. It’s not bad.

Carie Buchanan:
We’re okay with that.

Josh Schachter:
Interesting. What what what information do you get about your customers in your book of business that you might not get?

Carie Buchanan:
That’s an interesting one. And I what I what I always think about this is you got our version of this customer. You You know, I hear things like that customer is so difficult. They’ve never been easy to work with. They’re always upset about everything. Right? And then did you get you guys still got me? I’m I might have some issues there. Okay. I’m back.

Carie Buchanan:
And so it’s it’s always

Josh Schachter:
You’re good.

Carie Buchanan:
This negativity. And then you go talk then you go talk to the customer, and, they they give you a different perspective. Right? Well, this is what you guys told me. This is why this was so difficult. You’ve lied to me. You didn’t do this. You didn’t do that. Right? And what I always what I always tell people, I know it’s somewhere in the middle.

Carie Buchanan:
Right? We’re not perfect. They’re not perfect, but it’s somewhere in the middle. And I usually get a lot of it’s always the customer’s fault. We’ve never done anything wrong. Right? And you get on the customer side, they’ve never done anything wrong. It’s always our fault. So I always like to balance those 2 and then it becomes a little bit of a, you know, a guessing game as to what the actual truth is. But I think that’s, that’s why I love talking to customers because you never get the full explanation until you actually talk to them directly.

Carie Buchanan:
And some of them, you know, I I think are a little over exaggerated, but you’ll always have that.

Josh Schachter:
I wanna go back to Salesforce for one moment. You were there in some during some formative years of the building out of the customer success space as a SaaS space, 2020 2012 to 2018. I think at the time, they probably around that time, they probably have made an investment in Gainsight, I believe. Could be wrong. But, and there were some other start ups that were coming up. I think client success, Christy, was was coming up. Right? About the beginning of that time. Do you have having been an insider there at that time, why, Carrie is there not a more or was there not a more pronounced and intended product for CS at Salesforce?

Carie Buchanan:
I’m sorry, Josh. I just lost you here.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, well, I threw you a little bit of a tough ball. So a hard ball spin. That’s why.

Carie Buchanan:
No. That’s okay. I apologize. We we’re we believe it or not, I’m in the office, and we’re having Internet issues today.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So That’s why it’s better to work from home.

Josh Schachter:
Exactly. And you

Kristi Faltorusso:
have to

Carie Buchanan:
work there. I know. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
That’s true. So you were you were you were you were at Salesforce during, like, some formative years for the CS industry. And I guess I’m wondering why did Salesforce not take it upon themselves to become a big player in CS? Do you have any sense of that having been there?

Carie Buchanan:
You mean, like, doing some sort of software, building something some software around it?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Being a CSP of their own. Right?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. It was definitely something we had talked about, you know, in all transparency because we actually built, For example, if you look at what Gainsight does today, we actually built a custom solution like that that we use because the early warning system which was really kind of like the premise of of Gainsight and, you know, being able to track, you know, adoption and and and utilization, all that good stuff. And I think, you know, Marc Benioff, like, because there was a lot of different areas, you know, we could have gone into ERP. Could we go into, you know, some of the, like, the fringe areas. And I think the the the feeling was to just do what they did really, really well. Right? And even though we had, you know, customer success managers, you know, some will argue that’s where the CSM started. Doing the software itself just wasn’t something that was that we felt that, with all the other stuff that we did would be another thing to take on. Right? So if you look at the investments, I think when I started, we had just acquired, ExactTarget from a marketing perspective.

Carie Buchanan:
And they’ve taken some other, you know, fringe, obviously, like things like Slack, they acquired. Just doing too many things, I think, was a decision. And and if you look at if you look at, Salesforce today, they’re kinda changing how they even look at customer success. Right? Like the customer success manager role has really, really changed since I left there. I keep in touch with a lot of people there. You know, they’re moving more toward, they’re moving towards, more technical. So, like, technical account manager type roles for customers, and they’ll they’ll still have CSMs, but they’re at the really, kinda high level. They, are looking at these, like, architect type roles that are a little bit more than, customer success managers where they’re actually helping, like, architect the solution with some of the bigger customers.

Carie Buchanan:
Of course, they moved away from kind of the traditional signing CSMs to more of a, like, a hub hub model. I’ve been following that a lot because I I do agree with that approach, right, where you can’t continue to to put CSMs on accounts. You need to, you know, have more, like, programs around it. So and I think, you know, when we looked at kind of some of the stuff we wanted to do, what we had already built, we thought, how how do we actually do this? Right? Because it’s so customized. It was it took, you know, probably took, like, 15 years for us to really build out the, the kind of early warning system model, which is probably why we ended up in Gainsight because we did see value in

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh, it’s because it was a really tough question.

Josh Schachter:
I know. I know.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, what’s interesting is how many companies run customer success from Salesforce today, and they don’t have a formal way of orchestrating that. Right? So people kinda haphazardly piece things together to make Salesforce work for them. So I think it’s interesting because I do think that Salesforce actually probably has the most customer success organizations using their platform than any CSP in the space. So to me, it’s, like, wild why you wouldn’t double down on that.

Josh Schachter:
Well, there’s there’s one answer to that. It’s pretty obvious. Total total total available market. Right? Like, the TAM, the the opportunity size. It’s just not the same. You buy Slack, you get all businesses, all SaaS businesses in the world.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. But you don’t have to make a lot of changes to Salesforce to make it work slightly better than it does today. We’re not talking about a redesign. There doesn’t need to be a product acquisition. It’s literally modifying in some feature functionality and maybe connecting some dots a bit better.

Josh Schachter:
It’s a landing page. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Are we gonna get Carrie back here? That Wi Fi in Atlanta.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s because all those 2 companies that are in Atlanta.

Josh Schachter:
You know what? Let’s just take a commercial break. So, Christy, tell us how’s how’s She So Sweet going? That’s your new podcast that just launched 2 weeks ago.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yes. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
We’re I’m I was super excited. I’ve listened to a couple episodes myself. How’s it going from your perspective?

Kristi Faltorusso:
So so great, actually. I just recorded last week, which the episode that will drop this Wednesday with the CRO at Calendly. And she was just super, super impressive. I got off my call my recording with her, and I, like, called my husband, Anthony, and I was like, I think I have a crush. Like, just a a complete dynamo powerhouse, super smart. Just, her story is so fantastic. You’re gonna see because you’re gonna watch my episode on Wednesday.

Josh Schachter:
She forgot her name, folks.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I did not. Jessica Gilmartin.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Carie Buchanan:
Okay. She forgot

Josh Schachter:
the name.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And she’s fantastic. She actually was the CMO at Calendly and just recently stepped into the CRO role, but she’s taking over marketing and sales, so bringing the 2 teams together. So we were talking a bit about that as well. Just really, really fantastic. So I think the the coolest thing for me is the response that I’m getting from people who are willing to participate. Just the the caliber of the companies and these leaders have been super impressive, so I feel, like, honored and humbled every day I get response. I’m like, wait. Really? You wanna be on my little show? So that’s been really cool.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And I’m actually preparing to launch a kinda special series that I’m gonna weave in there called she’s so sweet, the he edition Oh. Where I’m going to interview CEOs who have had hired and worked with female leaders and how they believe the diversity in their leadership organizations has changed the trajectory of their organization.

Josh Schachter:
Is that an invitation for me to come on your show, Kristin?

Carie Buchanan:
It might be. It might be.

Josh Schachter:
It’s not. But that’s okay. I’m gonna make it one.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But I but I really like I think that that’s an interesting perspective on this. Right? Like, the whole She So Sweet podcast is about women and their career trajectories and breaking into the c suite that I wanna get the he perspective of how our male counterparts really believe that we are bringing intrinsic value to the organization.

Josh Schachter:
I have a really good recommendation. Can I can I recommend a guest for you?

Kristi Faltorusso:
You can recommend anything you’d like, Josh. It’s gonna be like a product request, which means it’s just a recommendation, and

Carie Buchanan:
it may

Kristi Faltorusso:
go in the backlog.

Josh Schachter:
Well, but I’m gonna text you incessantly until it happens. Okay. I recommend there’s this guy out in Utah. His name is Dave Blake, and he’s the founder of this amazing software called client Success, but he needed some real oomph to come in there for leadership. So he hired this pit bull

Kristi Faltorusso:
from Long Island. He did hire he did hire somebody who’s a little I brought I brought some diversity to the to our leadership team.

Josh Schachter:
You you did. You did. And so, yeah, I think you should bring Dave on and talk with your

Kristi Faltorusso:
boss. Like, bring Dave to talk about me. That feels weird.

Josh Schachter:
I why? I I would happily be in the room as the intermediary, and I can just ask them. I can lob the questions and just sit and enjoy the show.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see. Anyway, our friend Carrie’s back. Back. So

Josh Schachter:
Carrie, welcome back. We had a little, we had a little promotional time out while we’re waiting for you. You know

Carie Buchanan:
that Christy

Josh Schachter:
has a

Carie Buchanan:
new podcast out? You’re at. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. We we bantered. We did the banter thing. That’s why that’s why the CS and BS is there. The BS is for, technical difficulties.

Carie Buchanan:
Well, well, we can we can now say that we can now say that, going back to the office maybe isn’t the best thing if the Internet doesn’t work well. Right?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I said it’s all those tech companies in Atlanta soaking up all the Wi Fi. See? So

Carie Buchanan:
How about And you have to go very busy.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. Alright. Well, where do we go? I, you know, I actually you you started talking about it a little bit in the last question, about your pods. I think I don’t know. That might not be a word you use, but, how you were gonna create the formation of your CS team to manage your customer base. And I’d love to hear more about that in your theory, because it sounded like a theory that, you know, it can’t just be a one to one of of CS to account for it to really scale. So what are you doing right now, at Popmenu?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. We just created a a team. We’re we’re calling it the Success Hub. Nothing, like, really exciting name, but, but it’s just

Josh Schachter:
It’s it’s not exciting if you say it like that. People. It’s, you know, Carrie, it’s success hub.

Carie Buchanan:
I want something

Josh Schachter:
We’re launching this new

Kristi Faltorusso:
Throw in Chachapetea. You’ll get something. You got a ton of things you won’t like first, but if you keep at it

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. I Came I was trying to come up with some cute like restaurant names that I went out that was silly. So that’s okay. We’re we’re good now. But, but basically, there’s so much stuff that that if you think about like just the kind of day to day tasks that could really be done either through automation programs, we’re actually doing a lot through, kind of journeys, like onboarding journeys, you know, for new customers. We’ve got, we’re rolling out some stuff around, like, with some of our products, like how to use marketing, and then really leveraging some of the one to many, webinars like adoption type seminars. Not not so much on the selling of the product, but how to use the product and because we’re not a huge company, obviously, I have to kind of think about My costs and I can’t keep hiring people. So really using those customer success managers for the very complex you know, the way the way it works in the restaurant industry is that you could have a owner who could actually have multiple concepts.

Carie Buchanan:
Right? So different types of restaurants, and each of those restaurants could have different types of locations. So you could have, like, 70 80 different types of entities with 1 customer and so really saving the customer success manager people, dedicated to those bigger customers and then using the success hub. So you still want to make it feel like there’s someone there for you, but you do it more through a teaming perspective. Right? So you have a team of people that can support you, and then we do a lot more proactive reach out to help with customers. Like having a health score is great. Even we’ve, just rolled out a health score, last year that helps us target customers that we know aren’t adopting well. So those are ones that we’re reaching out to. So I think it’s a combination.

Carie Buchanan:
And then the other thing that’s really interesting and Christy, you might have seen this, in your role is is the notion of account managers versus customer success managers. Right? So account managers who are renewing the business, and I’ve had renewal team. I’ve had CSMs do renewals. I have had them not do renewals. It’s an interesting kind of debate right now. But, you know, how do you actually leverage those account managers that can also help as well? And that’s what we’re doing right now where

Josh Schachter:
Do does account management report to you as well, Carrie?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. As a renewal as a yeah. But they’re kinda more focused on the renewal. Yep. Right? So they they’re they’ve got a more of a commission based type of targets. And so that’s that’s kind of some of the debate that’s going on as well. Right? Is, do you have CSMs that are more pure cost? We don’t actually charge customers for CSMs here, but Salesforce did. Right? Salesforce, you had to pay a premium to actually get a CSM.

Carie Buchanan:
And if you didn’t, you you didn’t get a CSM. So, you know, just trying to figure out, like, how do you actually leverage the resources that you have. And I know there’s a lot of conversation Wait.

Josh Schachter:
Wait. I wanna let’s it sounds like there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s go into this debate. What’s what what are the two sides of the debate that your team is having on this?

Carie Buchanan:
I think it’s probably what is what should a CSM do? What is their role?

Josh Schachter:
Okay. That sounds pretty existential.

Carie Buchanan:
I think CSM’s original intent was to really focus on adoption and cost have been making sure customers are getting a return on their value. It’s turned into probably the catchall in a lot of companies where they’re doing support and they’re doing billing. Like, my my CSMs are doing billing. And I was like, why are you guys doing billing? I went to our CFO and I said, why are they doing billing? And he said, oh, because I don’t have enough people on my team to do it. And I’m like, so now the CSM is doing billing, and you’re yelling at me because we’re not retaining customers. And that’s because they can’t do their job because they’re doing support. They’re doing billing. They’re doing yeah.

Carie Buchanan:
And everyone, like, well, the CSM has a relationship. Have them do it. Right? So Oh,

Josh Schachter:
and by the way, you’re not giving me

Josh Schachter:
any more budget. You’re not giving more budget, but you’re taking

Carie Buchanan:
care of it right away.

Kristi Faltorusso:
With the accounts receivable team.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Right.

Carie Buchanan:
I know.

Josh Schachter:
So so is your CS team still doing billing?

Carie Buchanan:
The the cost no. No. I I told them to stop.

Josh Schachter:
Nice.

Carie Buchanan:
And it’s it’s a, interesting little interesting switch that’s happening right now. So we’ve had

Josh Schachter:
So, yeah, so what’s the interplay between between CS and and the account management team? Like, how how do you think about that, the relationship then and their interactions?

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. So I will tell you. So it’s I’ve I’ve I’ve I’ve came from a world where I think it was a lot clearer. Right now, we’re just in early stages of of rolling it out. There’s a the the the differences between the adoption piece. Right? Because account managers are supposed to be upselling and renewing, but they can’t actually do that if a customer’s not adopting. So then when they go to talk to the customer, they might not be using something, which really should be the CSM’s job. So it’s kinda like where’s that fine line between Right.

Carie Buchanan:
I missed the mark as a CSM, and they’re not adopting. Now the account manager can’t actually upsell or renew. So what the what we’re working through right now is our account managers right now are focused on the smaller, ARR customers that don’t have CSMs because we don’t have that dedicated person. So really focusing on, you know, like, we basically define that, you know, certain threshold for value focusing on that and then partnering more. So we wanna make sure, like, if if account managers are reaching out to CSMs, we have a plan around that because the CSMs really should so you have to have kind of clear, swim lanes. I’m I’m a geeky consultant, so I’ve made us put together a very, intense RACI model of who does what across all the different functions. So, we actually just rolled that out at the beginning of the year, so it’s kinda clear. Because the biggest thing is you don’t want customers to be like, who do I talk to? I’ve got 5 people reaching out to me.

Carie Buchanan:
That always becomes a problem as well. So yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Well, it sounds like they you’re getting they’re getting exactly what they hired you for. Sounds like that you love organizational behavior and really making all the different groups work together, like, pistons firing. And so sounds like you’ve got a lot going on there, but good things ahead, Carrie. And, I’ve got nothing else. I I wanna thank you for your time on this episode. I wanna make sure we lock in coffee talk when I’m next in Atlanta. And, Christy, I wanna promote one more time. I’m just gonna keep promoting it all the time.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You’re you’re the best.

Josh Schachter:
She’s so sweet.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I know. It’s a very clever name.

Josh Schachter:
It’s a very nice name.

Carie Buchanan:
Yeah. Congratulations. I did see that. That sounded fun.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It is. It’s very fun. Interesting. Thank you. We played around with names for quite a bit until we nailed something that was just cheesy enough, and so that was where we landed. And I got a lot of positive feedback on the name and the content so far. So I’m excited to keep it going, and we’ve got a lot of great content teed up for the next couple weeks.

Josh Schachter:
Well, thank you guys. Thank you, Carrie. Have a great rest of your week, everybody.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Great. Thanks. Bye, Carrie.