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Josh Schachter:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to this episode, The 101, 101st episode of Unchurned. I’m Josh.

Jon Johnson:
And I’m John Johnson.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. If you can hear him. He’s having a little bit of mic difficulties today, folks. Don’t, you know, don’t don’t don’t I don’t know. Well, I’ll try not to give you too much grief.

Jon Johnson:
I love it. I love it. What’s up? How’s everybody doing for you’re here this week, Josh. You’ve been, like I am. Out of office. It’s been great. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
But I’m excited about our guest. I don’t know anything about her.

Jon Johnson:
Do we have a guest?

Josh Schachter:
How to pronounce her last name.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, but

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. We’ve been talking here. We’ve been bantering, you know, offline for 5 minutes, and she seems cool. And I know she’s got a great background and has done some really cool traveling lately and figuring out exactly her next path. So Paulina Staszuk.

Paulina Staszuk:
You Staszuk. You got it the first time. Right?

Josh Schachter:
I did? Paulina Staszuk?

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. Staszuk, Staszuk, Staszuk, whatever whatever kind of, like like, it sounds similar, I’ll respond to it if someone says that

Josh Schachter:
was my last name. The last one sounded more authentic. Staszuk?

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Paulina Staszuk:
What’s what’s the background for your last name?

Paulina Staszuk:
My parents are German Polish.

Josh Schachter:
German Polish? Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I’ve got German

Paulina Staszuk:
actually. I’m actually quite impressed. But, yeah, the first one works. It it makes it easier on a lot of folks. So hi. I’m so happy to be here.

Jon Johnson:
Right now. I do. We’re so happy. So for those, the other fun thing that we like to do, Paulina, that Josh is super into is to just talk about how often I spend time with our guests outside of this podcast.

Josh Schachter:
Don’t do it.

Jon Johnson:
If you listen to last last week’s episode. But no really. So Paulina, I met Paulina through Pavilion. She brought me on as a no. Pavilion. Hey. This is CS related, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
This is Oh, okay. Good. Then we share. This is

Jon Johnson:
the problem. Josh doesn’t realize that there’s life outside of customer success, and that’s when most of customer success happens. But Paulina brought me in as a guest speaker for the CSM school at Pavilion. And I had the honor of, you were the proctor and the what’s the tie what was the title? The you’re the boss.

Paulina Staszuk:
Dean. I’m the The dean.

Jon Johnson:
It was such a great title.

Josh Schachter:
I still don’t know what

Paulina Staszuk:
that means, but I love it.

Jon Johnson:
No. It was good. But I I I ran a couple of cohorts with you and, have become I’ve just loved your content, and I really love sitting through the sessions that we did at Pavilion. And I’ve still stayed in contact with a number of the students that, we worked with. Actually, I had drinks with one of them out in Seattle. I don’t know if you remember Anne Rice.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, great. What did you guys have to drink? Oh. Did you were there appetizers?

Paulina Staszuk:
Josh really doesn’t get

Jon Johnson:
the name

Josh Schachter:
of the server? Did you give them a nice tip?

Jon Johnson:
No. Actually, I did. I’ve got the receiver on here somewhere.

Josh Schachter:
No. But don’t you know what? Why don’t you go go get it? We’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll be we’ll stay right here.

Jon Johnson:
Hey, Josh. I’m drawing a line here. Paulina, what have you been up to since Pavilion transitioned from online education into on demand?

Paulina Staszuk:
Well, you’ll be glad to know that your courses are immortalized because you are there on demand forever

Josh Schachter:
as well.

Jon Johnson:
It. And I’m getting paid a penny every time.

Paulina Staszuk:
Every time. Right? And so, yeah, I ended up I’ve been at Pavilion. I was working full time. So background on me, I am a customer success leader. So, Josh, don’t worry. We’re gonna stick to CS things. But, yeah, I I was in CS for a long time. And then in October of last year, I decided to leave all things, including CS.

Paulina Staszuk:
Just all things, basically. I left everything.

Jon Johnson:
Just exit.

Josh Schachter:
I just

Paulina Staszuk:
exited everything. Yeah. And, and we can kinda get into that too, but I’m back in CS, and I’m back in leadership in CS. And so, yeah, it’s the the really high level. I don’t know how deep to go now because I’m looking at Josh’s face wondering if I’ve, like, you know, passed the link No.

Josh Schachter:
No. No. No. No. We wanna go deep on this. We wanna go we want all the all the gory details. Don’t listen. My my hazing of John, please don’t let that get to you because that’s that’s that’s that’s

Jon Johnson:
Did everybody see those balloons?

Paulina Staszuk:
I think Zoom thing. I think if you do this, you get

Josh Schachter:
The balloons. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
But we don’t have Zoom. Why is it

Paulina Staszuk:
what? Maybe it’s run by Zoom.

Jon Johnson:
Okay. So, Josh, the reason that I set it up that way is one of the things that we have talked about in the past is, like, the idea of mental health and the idea of taking a break, and you are just coming out of a break. This was a a a conscious decision for you to refuel, to refill Yeah. So that you can recalibrate where you’re going with your career.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
I think that there’s an interesting moment to talk a little bit about like, you were hustling. You were working. You were doing pavilion. We were talking about podcasts and newsletters and all of these things that are extracurricular. And if you, you know, know Josh and I and Christy, there’s a ton of extracurricular work that we do. I would love to hear your thoughts on how you went from being out there, being a thought leader, being a leader in the space, and then kind of breaking away and feeding yourself, and then what it’s like to kinda move into where you’re going now with a fresh perspective.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. So you’re right. I I think I’d been, like, hustling and building for probably the last 10 years, and I was so happy for where my career was at. But it was taking a toll on me. You know, my relationships, my work as far as I was working for this gem of a company, like, amazing with some of the smartest, kindest humans. And I was just like

Josh Schachter:
What was the company?

Paulina Staszuk:
Jane App.

Josh Schachter:
Jane App.

Paulina Staszuk:
Shout out to Jane App. Lovely people, wonderful company, amazing product. And I was just lacking joy, and it was coming out, like, in in ways that I think my leader probably saw it more than anyone else too. And, you know, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make I I wasn’t sure what to do. And if I wanted to make the next 10 years, great. I realized I really needed to kinda get quiet and get clear on what it was that I valued, what made me happy, and what I was really trying to, like, achieve in this lifetime. Right? So I gave them a couple months notice. I, you know, did a bunch of stuff and did some friendships, relationships, whatever.

Paulina Staszuk:
Started rebuilding a number of good habits. And so quickly, I ended up just, like, diving into courses and reading books. And then I was like, let’s take this up a notch, so I decided to walk across Spain. I did the Camino design.

Jon Johnson:
Hold on.

Josh Schachter:
There was a pivot there that I didn’t expect. I was reading courses and books,

Jon Johnson:
and I decided to walk across Spain.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
I just wanted that to land.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. It was a thing. I don’t know where that came from. I was chatting with a friend, and he’s like, it sounds like you really don’t know what to do. I’m like, I don’t know what make brings me joy. I really just don’t know because I you know, you do school, you go into work, you go from one career to another career, one job to another job, or you stay in the same job, and you’re just doing kind of the same thing. And eventually, I was like, I don’t know what makes me happy. I don’t know what makes me interesting.

Paulina Staszuk:
And I just sort of felt like I thought I was gonna walk away from everything, and suddenly this, like, box of amazing ideas was gonna open up. And I was gonna become, like, the most interesting person on the planet because suddenly I had, like, you know, things that I could do. And most of the time, I was just like, okay. Well, I’m reading and I’m doing some pottery, but I was like, I don’t know that like, I don’t know what this is. And I think I was still sort of kind of really worried about, like, okay. Well, how long of a career break can I take? What is what is a reasonable amount of time? What is that gonna look like? Etcetera, etcetera. And so knowing that about myself, I was like, I have to set some ambitious goal that’s gonna keep me from potentially looking for a job prematurely so that I can just, you know, like, get out there. And I was like, well, if I’m walking across Spain, that’s gonna be perfect because how do I take a job and then be like, I need, like, 6 to 8 weeks off to walk 800 kilometers.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. That’s what I’m doing.

Jon Johnson:
I would love to hear how that conversation goes.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. Well, here’s the irony. The day I landed in Spain, I got headhunted by a lovely, lovely recruiter. And the entire time I was walking across Spain, I was interviewing for this job, which I got the day like, 2 or 3 days before I wrapped up. And I started about a week after I came back. So I feel like it served its purpose in some ways, but I have enough time to, like, think and get clear and just be quiet, which is such a privilege. It’s such a privilege, and I don’t think we get enough time to do that. I mean, think about all the you know, who can really I don’t have children, so that’s, you know, that’s easy.

Paulina Staszuk:
I could just It’s

Jon Johnson:
already quieter.

Paulina Staszuk:
It’s already quieter, I think. Right? But I had the opportunity to just get up and fly across. You know, I’m in Toronto. I got to fly across the, you know, the ocean and basically walk. And every day look the same, and I met fascinating humans that really kind of sparked ideas of, like, well, does this make you happy? Why are you doing this? And I got to think about why am I doing this. And, honestly, I don’t know why I was doing that. Some days, I was just like, everything

Jon Johnson:
And you’re gonna give us the answer. Right?

Paulina Staszuk:
I mean, I’d love to give you the answer. But, yeah, I think that, that that was what I needed to do in order to really get some of that clarity and feel like I had a full break. And even then, it wasn’t a full break because I was interviewing, but it still was. It gave me enough to come back and feel like, okay. I’m on the right path. I know exactly where I wanna be. It wasn’t CS. It wasn’t the company.

Paulina Staszuk:
Maybe it was some stuff I was going through. You know? Like, what what was it that I needed to kinda break free from and reset? Yeah. And I that clarity was huge.

Jon Johnson:
How is that walking into this new role? I mean, you know, you’re coming, washing the Spanish dirt off of you and walking into, an office again. Right? Is it and still in CS, you said?

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. In CS in remote, remote, obviously, so not in an office necessarily. But it’s been I feel like I have a whole different perspective. Like, I’m not I used to be a bit of a worrywart. I mean, I still worry about things, but I’m definitely a little bit more like, okay. You know, there’s always tomorrow. You just you fix it tomorrow. There’s there’s gonna be another day with its new challenges, and every challenge is basically an opportunity for us to go and make it better.

Paulina Staszuk:
And so I have a different perspective. I think I’m far more, like, positive and lighter in general. Lighter, I thought I was gonna lose £20 on this walk. Let me tell you about this. It’s just as a caveat. It’s such a piss off. So here I am walking 800 kilometers across Spain. I was like, well, if I don’t learn anything, at least I’ll drop £20.

Paulina Staszuk:
Let me tell you how you lose no weight because the there’s, like, there are wine fountain along the way, along the camino. I kid you not. Like, there’s a wine fountain. Every day you’re eating bread and cheese and jamon, and it’s delicious, and then you’re going out for dinner with people that you met along the way. Anyway, you do not come back lighter in that sense. But but I I did come back lighter. It was good. You know? Like, emotionally, mentally lighter in the sense that I had some clarity of, like, what are the things that I value? And, what am I gonna let I when I walked away from this, I you know, the last day, I was like, what am I gonna take away from this? We had someone walking with us, and he’s like, what’s the thing that you’re gonna take back with you? And what I realized was you’re carrying your own stuff on your back the entire time you’re walking.

Jon Johnson:
Literally and figuratively, I would assume.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So you’re kinda there and you’re like, with your 12 k or 8 k backpack. Mine was extra heavy because I have my laptop. You know? So I was just like, why am I doing this? You know? I was trying to break free from the chains of, you know, Internet and society. But whatever. Here, I had my laptop.

Paulina Staszuk:
It’s fine. And I thought about it. I was like, if you had to put a weight on every problem that you obsess over and you put that into your backpack and you had to walk with that, would you carry that day to day, every single day across the country or anywhere else? And it’s just given me a perspective. I’m like, how much weight am I attaching to that problem? Even if it’s an ounce, let me tell you. One extra ounce in your backpack? No. Like, it’s just a hard no. So it’s it’s a different I think it’s shifted my perspective on a few things.

Josh Schachter:
So then let’s relate this to customer success. Okay. So I I love the story. John, you’re giving me that look, but this is what differentiates us. Right? We got the the BS and the CS. Yeah. So, by the way, I love Spain. Studied abroad there abroad there, and I’m jealous of that experience.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
You’re now carrying your backpack into your new job. Mhmm. And you have all these dumbbells. What are the and they have different weights assigned to them. Mhmm. What’s the what’s the order and the weight of the different pieces of CS baggage that you are unloading from your backpack? Of CS The the pains, the the the the pressure, the the weight that you carry on your CS leadership shoulders that you wanna unload.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. So a couple of things come to mind. Right? Like, I think it’s the whole thing of everything needs, not one thing needs to be done in order for everything else to be perfect. And so that, like, idea that there’s gonna be perfection never happens, and accepting that is always gonna change. And that that for me was a bit of a struggle because I was like, oh, I need to have this before I can have that. And then in general, in terms of like

Josh Schachter:
What’s an example of that?

Paulina Staszuk:
Kind of like I don’t know. I need to have organized Notion pages before I can, you know, just little things. Right? Which I think every startup has as as a problem. You know? It’s hard to find stuff. And then, you know, in terms of let me see. It’s such a broad topic. That’s such a broad question. I’m, like, having a hard time answering.

Josh Schachter:
I know. The Spain story is much easier.

Jon Johnson:
No. I guess the the way that I would frame it is how are you gonna carry into this opportunity of of keeping things light, of of, you know, not being a worrywart that you mentioned at the beginning as you’re kinda into this. How are you gonna carry that into what you’re doing with your department? Right? How do you impart that onto your team? How do you impart kind of that that that clarity that you have of saying, like, hey. Tomorrow, there’s gonna be a new set of problems. Obviously, your boss is gonna tell you all the things you need to work on. So how do you keep that piece in that space when customer success is such a reactionary high, you know, volatility, market right now?

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. That’s such a good so I I have to see what that ends up looking like. It’s that I’m I’m 3 days at 4 days in. You know? So I haven’t been challenged with that yet, and I’d like to think that, you know, something’s gonna come up, and I’m gonna be like, that’s baggage that I’m not willing to put in my backpack.

Josh Schachter:
Nope. Nope.

Paulina Staszuk:
And it’s I mean, I I think right now, I’m very much like, okay. It’s gonna be good. Everything is like an opportunity for us to improve. None of these things are complete blockers, and I’m coming in with that mindset. And I think that in and of itself, hopefully, will, rub off on folks on my team so that, you know, as a nonanxious leader, they’re not gonna be like, oh my god. I needed this yesterday either. It’s just like there are priorities that we have, and these are the priorities. And so really being able to bucket what matters and what doesn’t matter versus, you know, everything matters all at once, meaning nothing matters.

Paulina Staszuk:
So I think, we’ll see when that actually happens. But as of right now, I’m pretty calm in terms of, like, okay. Let’s there’s a problem. I’m gonna dissect it. The things that I can do, I’m gonna do. And the things that I can’t do, I’m gonna either, like, assign to somebody else. We’re gonna see if we need this or not, and then we’ll move on from there.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Back to the dumbbells. So you’ve got you’re you’re you’re you’re offloading Yeah. The idea that you don’t have to be a perfectionist, that you don’t need to let, like, perfect setup. And so you I think what you’re saying is, like, oh, I don’t need a $100,000 CSP before I can have a health score. I can do that in Google Sheets. Right? Something, like, of that nature. Right? Okay.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. So that’s what? £10? We have £25. We got £25 in this backpack, like you said. So what’s what else we got? What else are you offloading you’re not bringing to? I don’t we don’t even know where you work. Where is this new job?

Paulina Staszuk:
Ah, yeah. I haven’t even updated because it’s so recent. It’s a company called DigiTail. It’s very similar to Jana, actually, but for the vet space.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, nice. Very cool.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. Did you

Jon Johnson:
tail get it?

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. The dog tail? Yeah. Exactly.

Jon Johnson:
Love a good pun.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. Let me think. Yeah. I Josh, it’s such a difficult question for me to answer because I’ve been offline for so long that, like, basically, all of it has been offloaded. How about what we’re putting in?

Josh Schachter:
Right. There we go.

Jon Johnson:
Like, okay. What are you bringing in your backpack?

Paulina Staszuk:
I I basically, I dropped all of it and was like, what do I actually care about? Right? So the things that I really care about that I’m willing to carry, you know, weight on is, like, how are the people feeling? Making sure that employee success is key. Right? So focusing in on, what are the things that I can do to ensure that they are able to service our customers. Because at the end of the day, like, if my employees are happy, my customers are gonna be happy. There is a correlation there. Right? So, looking at what are the ways that we can improve onboarding potentially, how can we improve onboarding for customers as well? But then just, you know, more broadly, you know, what are the systems that they’re currently using and really kind of focusing efforts there versus the noise of the background. So everything else that is not related to people, efficient process, or quality products that we can bring in or improve is sort of noise. Those would be, like, the 3 big dumbbells, and everything else

Jon Johnson:
is just,

Paulina Staszuk:
like, little ounce packs.

Josh Schachter:
Pick 1. Pick a dumbbell. Pick 1 of the 3. Which one’s worth £20? And let’s dive into it.

Paulina Staszuk:
Oh my gosh. I would say right now, at least, because I’m just starting, I’m really, really focused in on just, like, employee onboarding and the impact that that then has on customers and the ability for customers to have really good experience. So if you have highly trained, you know, really happy employees, if you’re gonna have a better customer experience, they’ll be able to do certain things. So even if there isn’t necessarily, like, amazing process or amazing products, you have employees that care and they have enough knowledge of the tool base, They’ll be able to, like, make things work to a degree. So that’s the thing I’m mostly focused in on right now. And I think that, employee onboard, we focus so much on, like, customer onboarding.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm. I

Paulina Staszuk:
think employee onboarding, most HR people are gonna be like, oh, why’d you say that?

Jon Johnson:
Sorry. They don’t listen to our podcast. It’s fine.

Paulina Staszuk:
Perfect. Employee onboarding is broken in CS.

Jon Johnson:
It’s so broken. Yeah.

Paulina Staszuk:
So broken. And, and I think oftentimes, you know, there’s just this idea that, like, you’re you’re gonna just figure it out somehow. Right? Like, we put you up we’ll pair you up with a buddy, etcetera. And we don’t really look at the long term effect of having people come on board, and we’re just, like, letting them figure it out. Because when we say let them figure it out, they’re either wasting a ton of time, so they’re not gonna be up and running for months, potentially, where they’re comfortable and, like, actually producing, or they’re gonna be, like, messaging other people in the company. So now you’re wasting 2 people’s time potentially, right, for just not having a really thought out onboarding process. And that’s and that applies for both, you know, at the executive level and also at the, you know, IC level. And that’s really you know, I’m curious.

Paulina Staszuk:
Like, do you have any thoughts right now, Josh? And, like, where are you at with onboarding? Would you say it’s a good, like, employee onboarding?

Josh Schachter:
Well, that’s a loaded question.

Paulina Staszuk:
CEO as CEO of company.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I don’t I don’t get into that minutiae as the CEO of the company. I I hand handle higher level more strategic valuable things.

Jon Johnson:
Red flag.

Josh Schachter:
Red flag. Oh, there’s so many, John. There are so many.

Jon Johnson:
I know. I’m on this podcast. So many, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. But I actually do wanna can we can we can we put a bookmark into I wanna understand what, like, the before and after looks like for you because you’re also going through onboarding yourself. Yeah. So part of me is I’m thinking, well, wait. Does she just want a better experience for herself? No. I’m just joking. But I wanna know but I do wanna talk to you about what before and after should look like in your mind and and what what strides you’re taking for that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. We do something that I’m actually really proud of at Update. So there is I have this amazing executive coach. She coached me when I was at Boston Consulting Group, and she stayed with me as an adviser through the start up, and she’s so generous with her time and everything. And so we do something called a Clifton’s strengths finder assessment. You’ve heard of it?

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. I’ve met.

Josh Schachter:
Great. So it’s, you know, it’s it’s focused on your strengths, not weaknesses. It’s positive. Right? But it can still be telling of where your energies lie, basically. And for me, it’s I don’t know. It’s kind of more about, like, influence and control, which could tell you something too. Right? But everybody’s got different areas of a spike. And so every time we have and we’re a small company, but every time we have somebody new come into the company, we have them fill out a strengths finder.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm. We have them speak with Katarina as the coach, and then we bring together a town hall for the company to go through. And we look at how our aggregate strengths finder profile as a team, as a company has changed and what that person is gonna be bringing as a new dimension and now where maybe we have to shift our focus based on the strengths in the areas of energy for across the team. That’s generic. That’s not CS related. Yeah. On the CS side, I just I hired somebody who really knew their stuff and said, okay. Go and figure out how to run a CS motion, and luckily, she’s been amazing at that.

Paulina Staszuk:
Mhmm. Mhmm. That’s so let me I’m gonna come back to that for a second, but I’m also curious because, John, you you agreed with me, like, wholeheartedly.

Jon Johnson:
Absolutely.

Paulina Staszuk:
And so I’m curious, like, what has your experience been?

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I think CS gets the lowest, focus for onboarding. I think we just kinda get thrown in. We get added to sales training or we get added to marketing training, and we’re just like I mean, you’ll figure it out when you go along. And I I do think that the core competency of driving successful customers is a truly successful employee.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Jon Johnson:
And I think that it’s fundamentally broken how we onboard our CSMs. And I know Josh is spending a lot of time. He’s got a a head of CS, which is is kinda running the show right now. I’m actually really excited when you guys start hiring Josh CSMs just to kinda see how, like, that diverges a little bit because there is a very good focus on it. What I’ve noticed is we, you know, expect as individuals, we want a career path. I want a promotion every year, and I want movement, and I want growth. But, like, the problem that that brings into, and this is where I think I have a question for both of you as leaders is, I mean, like, the the happy customer needs stability. They need to know who to go to.

Jon Johnson:
And if we’re just shifting accounts every 12 months, how are we ever gonna, like, actually, like, get successful customers? Right? We have salespeople that sell into the same accounts for 5, 10 years. Right? And they build these relationships. But CSMs get onboarded very, very quickly and they get thrown in front of a customer very, very quickly. And then every 6 to 8 months, they have new customers from churn or whatever. So how do you build out and how are you thinking through stability? That’s those are the things that I ask in onboarding. It’s like, yeah. You you just train me, but you’re gonna move me in 6 months. So what’s the point here? Right? And it’s just this rinse and repeat.

Jon Johnson:
Right? And we wonder why our customers are confused as to where to go for support or where to go for help or, you know, who to talk to on the account.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. So I I appreciate the CliftonStrengths finder call out because I do think that that’s such a great resource, especially if you’re, like, growing teams and you’re trying to figure out where the the the strengths are basically and how you can recalibrate. You know, with smaller companies, I find that oftentimes those types of resources just aren’t there. Right? You don’t have an in house career coach. You don’t have access to a lot of those stuff those things. But I do think that regardless of, like, the strengths in that instance, I’m going, like, baseline. Like, what does it actually look like to onboard someone? You know, what does that first week look like? Do we throw everything at them and expect them to kind of figure it out? And they’re drinking from a higher fire hose for the first, you know, 2 weeks, and then maybe they’ll catch on to something. Or What do

Josh Schachter:
you think it should be? What do you think it should be?

Paulina Staszuk:
I actually think it should be far more structured. Right? So that 1st week, 1st 4 days, you’re spending basically with, you know, the HR team. You’re getting all of your systems onboarded. You’re meeting the heads of of different departments to understand the purpose of those departments. You get, you know, a sense of who the folks are. You are reading about potentially the industry. So I’m in vet sciences or vet clinics, you know, veterinary care, basically. And, you know, that first few days, I don’t come from that background.

Paulina Staszuk:
I would like to have all the resources to understand clinic life and who the customers are, really, as humans. What do they what do they care about? And so I’m looking for that information, that data, but just having that sort in front of you is, like, this is what we learned about our customers. Here’s what you should know.

Jon Johnson:
And just

Paulina Staszuk:
some baseline things that you can kinda get your get your system sorted so that you’re not, like, 2 weeks in being like, oh, I don’t have access to HubSpot. How do I, you know, like, it’s awkward. And it it’s just like it slows you down because now you’re going back trying to figure it out, etcetera. So just dedicate that time. Don’t throw people into a 1000000 different meetings. Just the all hands, maybe a 1 on 1 with their manager, and then get them going. And then work them through, like, a proper system. So I manage onboarding, customer success, and customer support teams at Digitail.

Paulina Staszuk:
And, really, you can actually put all 3 groups, including sales, I would argue, through the exact same onboarding when it comes to post that first, you know, call it 3, 4 days with your HR org. And that is literally like a step by step of the product. Right? So an overview of the company values and just sort of if you think about it from a perspective of you can build this out in Notion, but it’s sort of like, alright, who are we as a company? What do we value? And then you think about people’s different learning styles. You have a couple of videos. You have support tickets that are included there where they can respond to them. Someone actually checks their responses to see if they’re accurate, to see if they’re able to find the information in different places. Right? Like you can test these skills as you’re onboarding them by just being a little bit more thoughtful about what onboarding actually looks like for your employees. We give it so much thought for our customers.

Paulina Staszuk:
We don’t give it enough thought for our employees. And then we’re like, okay. We want you to now go give these customers the most amazing onboarding experience. And they’re thinking back to their onboarding because if you think about it, employee experience and customer experience are quite similar. Right? Like, whatever. Get hired to get onboarded, etcetera. And then, you know, you kinda have this, like, customer success, which is your people ops person that’s just continuously there for you. And so there should be, I think, like, different ways to train people.

Paulina Staszuk:
And this is something I’ve seen done before very successfully where you have videos, you have quizzes, you have actual assignments that are based on support tickets, from previous customers that folks can read and, like, solve a problem. And they’re actually that forces them into the the software. And as they’re doing that, you know, you’re not throwing the entire software, but let’s say your software is modular. You know, you get them into that first, you know, overall, you know, main dashboard. And then you’re like, okay. Now we’re gonna add on this thing. So here’s some questions about whatever, you know, product we’ve that’s an add on that some of our customers might have. And here’s, you know, here’s the information, and here’s the learning, and here are the help center docs, etcetera, etcetera.

Paulina Staszuk:
So people are starting to, like, understand how to navigate the information, and then you can start to layer on the different processes as well. But just understanding the product, I think, oftentimes is just like the first step. Right? And really spending enough time. And I really I genuinely believe that salespeople should be doing that too. And heck it. If I could get every sales exec to agree that salespeople, upon graduating this onboarding program, which hopefully lasts like a month or whatever, will go on support tickets for a solid 2 weeks before they actually hop into sales. I think we just have, like, a better SaaS ecosystem in general.

Jon Johnson:
Well, there’s there’s this idea of, like, patience. Like, we I think what we are lacking is patience. I think sometimes, like, we do have to get things up and running very quickly because we’ve got a board or we’ve got numbers that we gotta hit, and that’s very real. And we have to work against that for sure. Absolutely. But at the same time, like, to to that detriment, like, we’re actually not we’re actually not even giving people the building blocks that they need to be successful. Yeah. That’s interesting.

Jon Johnson:
I wonder I I always kinda, like, pivot into, like, you know, the like, how AI is, like, helping, understand problems. But also then I I I tend to think about, like, the way that we live now because everything’s remote.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Jon Johnson:
These problems didn’t necessarily exist when we’re all in the office. Right? There were different problems. Yep. But now it’s like we’ve got employees sitting at home, and then they’re a new employee. And it’s like they don’t have anything to do. They’re just sitting at their desk. Right? So what I’m curious about is how you’re thinking about leverage leveraging technology that is either being built or or currently available, to to kinda, like, elevate what we know about our employees that without, like, Mike getting super micromanaging because that’s where this tends to go. Is that if we do put an extra emphasis on enablement and, employee onboarding, you know, everybody gets teams, and they’re like, oh, they’re tracking my clicks and they’re tracking this.

Jon Johnson:
And then it becomes micromanaging, which is the exact opposite of what we want. Mhmm. How are you thinking about leveraging tools and processes to keep that human element in this remote world.

Paulina Staszuk:
So let me just what I’m understanding from the question is sort of tools that we would use for onboarding employees.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Paulina Staszuk:
I honestly, I don’t think we necessarily need all these fancy tools for onboarding. You can do this Cough, cough, cough, cough. You can do this in a motion doc. Where I think you’re gonna get the most value from tools are are ones that are actually gonna benefit your customers as well. So the things that your employees are most likely stuck on is where do I find this information? How do I know it’s accurate? And so on and so forth. Right? You solve for that, you’re also inevitably solving that for your customers. So let’s assume you’re gonna use AI for all your support docs. Right? That’s great.

Paulina Staszuk:
Maybe you can create something. Maybe you’re using a I don’t know. I don’t wanna name a company because I don’t know if they’re any good. So but, like, an AI tool that aggregates all of your internal and external sort of support information so that you can basically type as a human and say, like, where do I find this, or what is the answer to that? And, you know, if that if you are gonna if you if there’s anything that you can build into making the employee experience and the employee onboarding experience easier, I think those tools, the ones that you’re actually using, are the ones that are also going to somehow help your customers in the end. So this AI bot thing is a perfect example. Because now when your customers go to your support pages, your help pages, or, you know, reach out to someone, they can type the exact same question. They’ll likely get a very similar answer. Right? So those are the types of tools that I would have, you know, on my mind, especially being in the startup space.

Paulina Staszuk:
You know, you’re looking at different budgets. You’re not gonna you don’t have, you know, 1,000,000,000 of dollars where you’re gonna go and spend just because you want every fancy tool. And for in terms of onboarding, yes, you could have, you know, an ever after and all the other fun stuff for employee onboarding. But, really, you just need a highly organized Notion page.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Paulina Staszuk:
Couple videos and some good, you know, like, hyperlinks and maybe a Google, a Google form that acts as a quiz and a good Slack integration with people that are actively checking it and a group internally that is dedicated towards actually supporting the new hires. Right? So a new hire channel where they can ask or a triage channel where they can ask all of their, like, you know, questions that are like, where do I go for this? And people are actively there and supporting them through that process. And then, you know, that’s also searchable. It’s not the best search, but we know it’s searchable. Right? So, new hires come in. It’s like, where and that also then builds like, we can look back to that to be like, is this is this something that is valuable for us to improve? Right? So we’re looking at not only product improvements for our customer, but process improvements internally to get our people up and running faster so they can find the information they need so that they can be better, you know, advocates for our customers.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. We we just we implemented that, user testing. We have, like, a it’s called newbie shoobies, and it’s our internal channel. And no leaders are allowed. It’s actually one of those things. Like, the the one of the things that we learned is that when we put all these new people in a Slack channel with their boss, they don’t wanna ask the what they would consider a stupid question.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Because they’re just like, my boss, I should probably know this. Right? So we, like, kick them all out. And there’s a gal on my team, Lena, who runs this channel with all of our new employees, and they’re in it for the 1st year. And even now, after I’ve been there for a couple of years, I will go back into there and, like, scroll through and be like, oh, that’s right. That’s how you do it. Right? And it is super helpful to have that active intentionality behind it without it being, okay, now you have to log in to this platform and download this CSV and then follow this like, it’s just we get into tools and solutioning, which is like, no. I just need an answer.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. Yeah. And oftentimes, I find that we get so hung up on I need this tool to do this thing, and then you get all these tools. And just the same way, like, I’m sure anyone’s company, you’ve sold to tool. CSM tools are probably the like, CS CS tools are probably the best example or Salesforce or whatever. Right? They’re like, we need a CS tool, and then they get the CS tool. And they’re like, okay. Import your health scores.

Paulina Staszuk:
They’re like, we don’t have a health score. Now it’s delaying it forever. Right? So forget all of that noise. You just need to have a very clear process. Like, what are we trying to achieve with this person? By the end of the time that, you know, they’re in onboarding, they can respond to x number of questions that are related to, you know, that are that are actually from customers. They came in from customers. We answered them before. We have, you know, like, how do they this is how you learn by some people learn by doing, and so you do kind of like you wanna cover off all of that.

Paulina Staszuk:
Right? You learn by doing. You learn by listening. You learn by reading. You learn by watching. Have it all there. Do it once so that they’re not bombarding, you know, Jane over in, Jane because I worked for Jane.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I was gonna say,

Jon Johnson:
I’ll call back.

Paulina Staszuk:
Right. You know, they’re not they’re not bugging Jane over, you know, in the other department in product to ask about something because it’s there. You already put the time in. And I know it’s it’s sort of like one of the things is that you have to get buy in from, like, even senior leadership because these things take time to build out. These things take but, ultimately, when you look at the downstream impact, you’re gonna save time. Right? You can then just have a small team that’s there that’s responsible for updating it. And you put that onus on your new hires as well where it’s just like if something in these records or in this, you know, onboarding manual or onboarding process, step university, whatever you wanna call it, seems inaccurate based on information you found, like, pop it into this channel, like,

Jon Johnson:
update it.

Paulina Staszuk:
And then you just have, like, a team that’s just find it, fix it. Let’s go. Josh, you

Josh Schachter:
You’ve been you well, no. You you mentioned you mentioned Slack. You mentioned Notion.

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
John and I have been sitting here doing, Notion bingo with you. And no. But Notion’s great. We use Notion too. It took me a while to catch on to it. 1st, I actually really didn’t like it. But then once you kinda learn how to use it, you’re like, wow. This is very helpful.

Josh Schachter:
What else is in your stack? What else what else are you are you bringing to the team here or not?

Paulina Staszuk:
In terms of tools.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. It could be as it relates to the onboarding experience.

Jon Johnson:
Heavy backpack. That’s for sure. She’s

Josh Schachter:
yeah. So it’s a light backpack. Right? So she’s just gonna bring a couple of, like, 1 pound dumbbells. So what are you bringing?

Paulina Staszuk:
Yeah. So I think, like, those are the the baselines. I think you can get a lot done with just those 2. I think Loom is also another one that Mhmm. Important. I also really like, like, gift creators. So there used to be a creator called Record It.

Jon Johnson:
Yes.

Paulina Staszuk:
It doesn’t work anymore. Now No. And so I found an alternative, which is actually really good. And you’re gonna hate me because I can’t remember

Josh Schachter:
the name.

Jon Johnson:
Fine. We’ll put it in the show notes.

Josh Schachter:
Put it

Paulina Staszuk:
in the show notes. I have it on my other laptop. Laptop. I downloaded it. I was looking for it recently. And that’s just like one of those where you record and, you know, it kinda plays this little feedback or playback loop on a regular basis so that you don’t have to have a whole Loom video.

Jon Johnson:
And a lot of companies block videos embedded in emails. So this is like there’s like a little pro tip in there, like, as CSMs, like, because I work with a lot of enterprise. And if you embed a video, their their firewalls will block that video and they will no matter how many looms you send, it will not get through, but a GIF will make it through.

Paulina Staszuk:
A GIF will make it through. Exactly. I will send that over so you can add it to the show notes. This thing worked perfectly. I tried it the other day. So that just like tools that they can use to make themselves, like, more productive, etcetera. Internally, so we’re still talking, like, employee onboarding to make sure that they’re set up with all the tools that they need so that they can go and be successful. Even some of the smallest things, like, you know, a clockwise app.

Paulina Staszuk:
So that notoriously bad at updating your Slack status so people know how long potentially to wait for a response from you, especially if it’s another department, another team, etcetera. Like, having something like that installed, such a game changer because it’s off your plate. It’ll just run off of your calendar. Right? You don’t have to explain to people that, hey. I’m taking a 15 minute break.

Josh Schachter:
Really? So the Clockwise app integrates with Slack Yep. And then it’ll automatically change your status based on your calendar? I’m not being facetious.

Paulina Staszuk:
I yeah. I was like, are you saying

Josh Schachter:
No. I’m not being facetious. I I I need to go get the Clockwise app. That’s Yeah. Good to know.

Paulina Staszuk:
It integrates with your Google Cal and then also with Slack. Right? And Slack has a Google Cal integration, so you can totally do that, which is great. I like the clockwise app. I think it’s a lot better.

Josh Schachter:
But

Paulina Staszuk:
Right. So these are some, like I’m I’m also you gotta realize I’m coming in from a I’m coming into a very small start up right now. And so I’m thinking of, like, what are the tools where we can, like, optimize, that employee experience without necessarily spending a fortune? Because what’s first of all, what’s the point if we don’t really, really need it? The other things that I think are really important that, you know, maybe not necessarily as part of onboarding, but something to help the the company. You know, how are we keeping documentation and processes up to date? Right? So something like a guru, and and having those systems, you know, have a score of how what their quality is over time. Sorry, Josh. I’m like

Josh Schachter:
No. No. You got it. I did love it.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Like There’s

Paulina Staszuk:
just a handful that I’m like, start off. Right? And then

Josh Schachter:
It was good because this is this is coming from the profile. Like, you’re not you’re not an enterprise investing in in Gainsight or whatever right off the bat. Right? So this is from a different profile of somebody who wants to be a little bit leaner and scrappier and and get the right, as you would say, processes set up.

Jon Johnson:
She’s Canadian. Everybody, let’s

Josh Schachter:
just be clear. I get it. I love it. I love it. I go Oilers. They’re playing tonight. Like, I’m all ready for it.

Jon Johnson:
Is that the one Canadian team that you know?

Josh Schachter:
The one left. Canada is bringing back the cup. 20 to 30 No. 29 years, 30 years. 31 years, they’re bringing back the cup tonight.

Jon Johnson:
My favorite part of this entire podcast is Josh refuses to let me talk about anything in my life, but will always talk about the sports teams that he’s following. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
So Yeah. Pretty much.

Paulina Staszuk:
Pretty much. Me for a minute and just tell me what the Oilers are.

Josh Schachter:
Oh god. Alright.

Jon Johnson:
You’re you’re so much older.

Josh Schachter:
Trudeau Trudeau just called, and and you’ve been exiled from Canada.

Jon Johnson:
Your poutine has been, has been removed. No. Okay. So one of the things that we like to do as we kinda wind down, like, where what do you see as the future? Like, what or what do you wanna see? Maybe we can stick on tools, but, like, like, what do you wanna see in customer success? Like, what is something that you’re looking to for in the future in our industry as a leader, as somebody who’s been at for a very long time? It was very, very correct opinions on many things, I would like to say. Yeah. How are you looking forward to the next 10 years? You talk about the last 10 is a little bit difficult. How do we get lighter in the future?

Paulina Staszuk:
I genuinely believe there needs to be a shift. And and I mean, this this is gonna sound like a broken record, so I’m just hopping on the same bandwagon. But I do think there needs to be a shift more broadly in SaaS and just tech around what is the value of customer success and, you know, sales versus customer success. I wonder I think we might still be in that’s that mindset of, like, sales can do no wrong, and so sales is what we need. And customer success is sort of like the little brother no one’s really paid attention to yet. But that little brother’s grown up and doing some big things. And, you know, we really need to give our CS teams, our CX teams, I wanna say more holistically. Right? So not necessarily just customer success, but also customer support.

Paulina Staszuk:
You know, if you are working at a bigger company and you have an onboarding professional services, whatever. So just call it CX as an experience in general, far more far more credit. And, also, like, I would love to see this just on a personal pain point in general. It’s just like NPS scores to go away from customer success. I think that that metric exists, it should be with product, and that’s about it.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. Paulina, thank you so much for spending your afternoon with us. This was great. It was great to get to know you. You can see the lightness. You You can see the dumbbells have been cleared from your backpack. You you have that effervescence right now, which is nice. Effervescence.

Josh Schachter:
Is that the right word? Aura

Jon Johnson:
effervescent? Effervescent. No. That’s good. It reminds me of seltzer.

Paulina Staszuk:
From the window.

Jon Johnson:
It’s just I just didn’t put any foundation on today.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. But, don’t let that startup get to you and lose that effervescence.

Paulina Staszuk:
Oh. Stick

Josh Schachter:
it all the way through.

Paulina Staszuk:
I have all of the faith in this startup.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. Amazing. Okay.

Jon Johnson:
But let I’m gonna get it on on the record. Are you coming to CS 100 this year?

Paulina Staszuk:
I don’t know yet.

Jon Johnson:
Okay.

Paulina Staszuk:
So yeah. Cool.

Jon Johnson:
Well, let’s

Paulina Staszuk:
let’s back into the country and just step back onto the CS train. It was much not

Jon Johnson:
fair. I’ll ask you again in a couple weeks.

Josh Schachter:
More more things that John thinks our audience cares about, folks. Anyways, it was a wonderful episode. Thank you. You did great, John. You too, Pauline.

Jon Johnson:
So much, Josh. I appreciate your

Josh Schachter:
your words. I was especially snarky this episode. I I do feel bad after this, by the way. No.

Jon Johnson:
This is I know this about about him because I I’ll he’ll always send a text message. Oh, dude. I’m so sorry. Yeah. I still love you. Yeah. I love you, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
I love you too.

Paulina Staszuk:
Well, you guys were a pleasure to chat with anyway, and thank you for some of the harder questions too. I was like, I don’t know what I would take out. I took everything out. What am I putting back in? So

Jon Johnson:
I love that.

Paulina Staszuk:
Really stumped

Josh Schachter:
with my

Jon Johnson:
personal Thank you so much.

Paulina Staszuk:
Thank you, guys.