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Josh Schachter:
Everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of unchurned. I’m your host, Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI. I have with I have with me here, Kristi Faltorusso. Should we do should we go

Kristi Faltorusso:
over to this? Again myself, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Like, this is the second time that Josh

Kristi Faltorusso:
has tried to, like,

Josh Schachter:
you know what, Brett?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Name, my title, my introduction. So, Christy, chief customer officer at client success. Thrilled to be here again. Nice to meet

Josh Schachter:
you, Christy.

Brett Queener:
Oh, nice

Kristi Faltorusso:
to meet you, John.

Brett Queener:
And I’m the chief customer officer at Bonfire Ventures. What do you want? Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
And we have with us Brett Queener. Brett, who has nothing to do with CS specifically, but everything to do with CS through all of his his rich history working with giant companies out in, Silicon Valley and more. So Brett is a managing partner at Bonfire Ventures, and Brett is also on is it like 237 boards that you’re on?

Brett Queener:
No. It’s like it’s like it’s like 15. Not 15.

Josh Schachter:
What’s it like being on 15 boards? Like, you know, if a board meeting is every quarter, I mean, like how what is what is the schedule of a 15 board member person?

Brett Queener:
Well, I mean, scheduling is one thing. The question is, what does it entail if you actually wanna be helpful on a board? If you actually wanna

Kristi Faltorusso:
to say exactly.

Brett Queener:
Like, what what is

Josh Schachter:
what is it? How do you

Kristi Faltorusso:
want your assistance with? How involved are you?

Brett Queener:
If you actually wanna be helpful at a board meeting, It entails a lot. But look. As I say to founders, board meetings aren’t sort of these exercises and obfuscation where you put some deck together and some dog and pony to sort of humor your investors. Right? A board meeting is a quarterly check-in that you should be doing with your own team, reflecting on your own priorities. You probably should have met with your team before the board meeting just to hey. How did we do? What worked well? What are we gonna change? And the board meeting should be a reflection of that. Right? And so

Josh Schachter:
It’s a forcing function, right, to get your shit together each quarter?

Brett Queener:
It’s a it’s a quarterly prioritization. You know, I’m on a I’m on a a company. We don’t normally invest at pre seed. We do seed. And when we invest, we write 3 $1,000,000 checks. We lead the round. We’re usually the 1st board member. We help put together a board and help the founder work through cadence and and their own managing cadence.

Brett Queener:
Because the board meeting ends at the end of the quarter, which is a reflection of what your priorities are with your team, how do you review weekly with your team, how do you review monthly with your team, How do you view quarterly? So, like, it is a fun scheduling thing. Like, if somebody sends emails and the rest of them, I introduce them to this application called Doodle. Have you seen Doodle? Where you throw out, etcetera.

Josh Schachter:
Of course.

Brett Queener:
And then I think the bigger issue is how many board meetings are you in person versus not? Because, like, during Zoom, ZURP, you could do 40 board meetings. You know? Just, like, hang out on your Zoom call.

Josh Schachter:
What do you see what do you see in the in your board meetings relate? So this is obviously primarily a customer success podcast, except for those who come purely for the banter. But what what do you see around customer success and from chief customer officers or lack thereof in across your 15 board meetings. And just for for reference for some folks out there, I’m gonna read off of of Brett’s LinkedIn, but this might take about 5 minutes. So

Brett Queener:
No.

Josh Schachter:
He’s the board. I’m not I’m not gonna do all of it, but but we got Pendo and Specket and, what am I missing? What are some Vincoder is a big one.

Brett Queener:
Yeah. There’s there’s a bunch. I mean, look. Yeah. I’m on I’m on the board of a lot of larger companies with, you know, later stage 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of revenue, but I’m primarily a seed stage investor. So I’m on the board of lots of little companies, right, that might have, I don’t know, half $1,000,000 of revenue, might have 10,000,000, might have 50,000,000. As it relates to customer success, look, I think the the big evolution when you’re early stage, which is, you know, it’s when I force the founder to have different sections. Like, oh, hey.

Brett Queener:
Let’s talk as a founder. Hey. What’s on my mind? What’s going well?

Brett Queener:
It’s not. Okay. Let’s go into the function.

Brett Queener:
Let’s Talk about sales. Let’s talk about product. Let’s talk about marketing. Let’s talk about success. For a while there, they just, like, put on a costume and they show up and they have to give the success presentation. And then what that helps me them explain, like, if you are owning all of these priorities and, and then you have to put on a costume and do all of these, you’re not really scaling. And don’t give me the, well, let’s just put success under the CRO. We’ll take somebody sold for 10 years and, you know, suddenly is now gonna be an expert in success.

Brett Queener:
And then all of a sudden, we just everybody’s an account manager because everybody is now upselling. That’s not that’s not what we meant by customer success. But, look, when we get to, you know, 1st success leader is probably a couple $1,000,000 in. Right?

Josh Schachter:
When’s 1st success hire? Same thing? Or is

Brett Queener:
it either the 1st hire? Look, I I published some long and crazy blog about how do you build out your success order. Right? The key issue in any of these functions, marketing, sales, etcetera, is you don’t wanna operationalize too early. Because until you kinda know what you have, I don’t want people coming in and building playbooks where we got, like, false market fit. Right? Like, you you know? Right. So look. When do you have success? Within the first 5 to 10 employees, you better have somebody who’s the customer person. You know? Like, you know, you need first hand you know? Because when we build work with our partners, build companies, we believe in building companies that are balanced and won’t souffle cake on themselves. I think I mentioned that comment, Josh, where you get, like, a1000000.

Brett Queener:
Founders sold 5 deals, then you raise an a, we’re ready to go. And then it kind of right? Because you have no process, no baton, you know. They souffle on themselves, and then everybody’s sad, and then we gotta get everybody excited again. Nobody works in one place, so we gotta do all this virtually. Right? So, look, within the first

Brett Queener:
time I

Josh Schachter:
I just have to say, Brett, I I by the way, can I call you queener? I feel like we’re we’re going with the yeah. We’re going with queener for this episode.

Brett Queener:
Whatever. Whatever.

Josh Schachter:
Because I because because Matt Binetti was calling you Queener before, and I know he you guys are chums. And so I just feel like for the sake of this episode, we’re we’re gonna go there. So, Quiner, I love the souffle cake analogy. I just have to pause right there and tell you that. That’s that’s that’s a wonderful visualization.

Brett Queener:
Well, and the challenge is you have these companies that raise a bunch of money, and they souffle cake. And then we’re done making them. It’s okay. It’s hard. But now there’s new startups that are just going hard. Right? And you, you know, you you gotta go hard. So look. Within the first and whenever I look at a p and l, like, you know, we’re weird.

Brett Queener:
Like, at seed, we’re putting an operating plan together often with the part. Like, what about founders? We need an operating plan. Like, we need to have an operating plan at a high level. It could be 50% wrong, but what are your assumptions? You’ll be like, oh, so you’re gonna close, like, these 20 customers. Okay. Who’s gonna make them successful? Well, what do you mean? Well, I don’t know. Who’s gonna implement them? Who’s gonna onboard them? Oh, what does that entail? You know? And depending on where your product is, because I can look at a product, see stage, and be like, that’s not self-service. You know, somebody’s gonna have to help with that.

Brett Queener:
So, generally, you know, within the first ten employees, you better have somebody who’s thinking about onboarding. And then, you know, I was just at a on a board of a company that’s rolling out product fast, but it’s product to, you know, if you think SMB rooftops. And you’re like, what the hell is this CAR, ARR gap? What is this CRR stuff? Oh, is that because we sold stuff we didn’t have? And in some cases, founders do that. Like, they’ll do that. Like, that’s that’s not good. You know? Like, oh, these features are gonna come. We’re gonna book it. I’m like, that is not setting the right customer relationship.

Brett Queener:
But the other one is like, oh, well, we don’t bill until we go live. I’m like, well, let’s let’s try to change that. That’s not good. Because if you don’t bill till you go live, there’s no skin in the game for the customer to, like, go live. And then they’re like, well, we don’t have enough onboarders. Oh. Oh, you don’t have enough onboarders. So what often we’ll say in an organization, especially if it’s on the low end of a market, like, the the 2 people you don’t want too few of is SDRs to qualify inbound and onboard and support.

Brett Queener:
Right? Right. So, like because if

Josh Schachter:
you botch that, you’re you’re done.

Brett Queener:
Hey. Look. The product is a vision. It’s not beautiful out of the gate. And at the end of the day, we need people at the end to kinda make the customer happy. Because what I say in the early days is they often will renew because they love the company, and they love their customer success people. And then over time, that’s not scalable. Right? That’s not a scalable approach.

Brett Queener:
So but look. Very early on, customer success is really important, because what are we trying to figure out? Like, what was missed in the last 3 to 5 years, especially in the go to market text phase? Are we selling enduring revenue? Is this durable revenue? Because all the economics of SaaS, magic number, cash burn number, can’t return, assumes your people don’t churn. Now, yes, there’s higher churn elements in SMB and mid market, but everybody’s getting all excited about NRR. But you have companies that are public that went from 175% NRR to 60% GDR in a year.

Josh Schachter:
So Brett Brett, what what are the, like, why the CS not have the influence of the other functions. I thought it was the VCs. I thought that you guys are the Darth Vader in this equation that are pushing for growth, growth, growth in the boardroom. And then, you know, it’s souffles because of you. But you’re defending CS, which I love to see here. Why why is CS not It’s fearful what

Brett Queener:
it’s like that’s a gross generalization.

Josh Schachter:
I know. But this is my podcast.

Josh Schachter:
But but but why why does CS get shit on if if it really is, like like because what you just said right there, it is the entire foundation of SaaS is predicated on CS, on renewals, and then that the economies grow from there. And so why like, why has it not like,

Brett Queener:
okay, a couple of things? It’s kind of the same reason CMOs last 2 years of startups. Founders don’t understand how to speak marketing or how to speak CS. At the end of the day, CS would be fine if the customer if the if the CEO leadership team was very clear about who our product is for, where it has fit, where it doesn’t have fit, who we sold it to that was a bad fit. So, like, I don’t care how many bodies we throw at. That puppy’s gonna churn. And Dan is very clear about this is what it takes to make a customer successful. And just be honest with it. If you’re selling a highly custom thing that requires a bunch of one off integrations and a bunch of rollout of the rest of it, we gotta throw a lot of CS at that.

Brett Queener:
Right? But, similarly, don’t tell me you’ve got a 25 k SMB product that’s easy, people love to serve, and then you realize that the product’s kinda donkey. And then you get upset at the CS org. And then, oh, god, you don’t wanna churn. So then you throw in a bunch of expensive CS resources. It’s not the CS org’s fault. Economically, it’s not sustainable. If you’re selling to a 25 ks ASP, you know, I was at board meeting recently where someone told me about, oh, we have TAMs. You have a 25 kSP.

Brett Queener:
You got a TAM? Well, that’s a product problem. So I think it’s not CS gets shit. That’s a little bit of Frank Slootman or the rest of it. Right? I think at the end of the day, the it means that the CEO and the leadership team is not very clear in communicating. Hey. Who’s your product a good fit for? For what segment? Is it a sophisticated or unsophisticated buyer? And what does it entail to make them successful? And here’s what it entails. And then our org that we’re building in CS maps to those motions and that expense. Right? Absent that, you’re like, what’s going on? Now I will say CS, and they’re not alone, just like sales and marketing.

Brett Queener:
For the last 7 years, we’ve become masters of our tools. Right? Used to be we hired CS people, like, 20 years ago. I had some of the first c s CSMs, created some of the first ones at Salesforce in 2003. Was your job is to love the customer. And once we’re through deployment, they know you, you talk to them, you have a relationship. You make them love us. Your job isn’t to go install Gainsight or Catalyst and run plays all day. And then when I talk to you and say how many hours a week are you talking to customer? Like, I don’t know.

Brett Queener:
3. I’m like, what? No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Brett Queener:
We’re not this we’re not a whole bunch of robots here. Like, you’re a human, and your job is for the customers. Do whatever it takes for the customer to love you. Now I get that’s hard to do system to systematize and do attribution and measure the ROI. But like, we all became a bunch of robots. It’s the same reason like, in the US, like, you know, we rolled out Outreach and SalesLoft. I’m seed investor in, Outreach. Great tools.

Brett Queener:
Not much different than email on your behalf out of the email marketing tools that existed before. But you were able to but email marketing, you couldn’t email to people who hadn’t opted in or you’d be blacklisted. And so you’re able to, in sequences, send it less than groups of 50 where you can send emails to people who haven’t opted in. It doesn’t destroy your email alias. But just because you do that doesn’t mean as an enterprise or mid market AE you stop prospecting. Right? So

Brett Queener:
I I look.

Brett Queener:
At the end of the day, it’s very simple. The magic number says what’s a magic number of 1? The magic number 1, it says, I get to spend this amount in sales and marketing to generate a dollar of revenue. That includes keeping the revenue you have. And so as an org or as a leadership, it’s your job to understand for your motion, here’s what I’m willing to spend in marketing, when I’m spending the sales, when I’m gonna spend in success. What are you spending today, and where is it vis a vis where it needs to be? And what I’ll say most of the time in success, what happens is the biggest gap is that teams are not honest that the product is not as self serve or ex self usable or as clean-cut as it should be to use and deploy. And the ASP that you’re selling at kind of makes it need to be. And what you’ll often do it’s fine. I would do it too if I was a founder.

Brett Queener:
You probably throw more expense from a CS perspective than you should, which is fine as long as you say this is what we’re doing, but we need to systematize this as we go forward. So that’s my sense. But, like, that’s just silly. At the end of the day, I got a dollar to spend. And depending on my product and who I’m serving, what would I spend? Right? I mean, the funny thing is what is success? Look at Palantir. Look at their business model. Right? They go in. Here’s a product, and then they go do a ton of discovery once they land.

Brett Queener:
Is that success? Is that sales? It’s kind of a blend. You know? So, I also think in success, leaders do a very poor job of what I’ll call at some point figuring out proper specialization in baton passing. What happens in orgs, especially when they’re early, is a lot of success people do, like, 4 jobs. I do implementation, including, I don’t know, god forbid, data migration technical. I do user onboarding, etcetera. And then once they’re live, I’m supposed to, like, check-in and make sure the company is happy and executives aligned. You know, they’re getting the outcome that they want. But if the sales team the last 6 years just sold a product because people were buying and didn’t tie it to some business outcome for a champion who then leads, What? The CSM using user gems is gonna magically come in and do this? And then, of course, there’s renewal.

Brett Queener:
So it’s just kind of important to understand, like, what the roles are of the different people within your broader success org are, where it needs to be specialized and not. That’s my sense.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So Brett, let let me ask a quick question here. So I I agree that at a certain stage, you have to introduce specialization. I think most companies will start off with a full stack CSM who is managing some of those core elements. For some of those organizations that will be inclusive of support, others, maybe not so. But what are your thoughts on the customer success organization? It doesn’t need to be the success manager, but owning all of the post initial sales commercial responsibilities, so upsell, cross sell, expansion, renewals. What are your thoughts and philosophies around that living in that organization?

Brett Queener:
I have a very strong point of view on this. So I may not share different things. I hate Hunter Farmer with a passion. Hate it with a passion. Except if you’re on the very low end of a market where the relationship that a rep builds with the customer is immaterial. Right? It’s just purely transactional. I don’t care that it’s just so transactional. That rep should be responsible for selling more to that customer.

Brett Queener:
That’s the job. And it’s the role of the company to make sure we give them enough to sell. What often you’ll see happen is like, oh, we’re trying to get to enter. Like, I’m 10,000,000. I gotta get NRR. What are you talking about? You’re a baby. Just sell one product. Oh, no.

Brett Queener:
I need to sell product 2 and product 3 to get my NRR stack up. And I was like, hey. Do you have enough product that if a rep went to go sell to the customer, everything you have, he could at least make 50 he or she 50% was sold upfront. No. Do you don’t have an add on product? And what they’ll do is, oh, then we need these add on people in success to go do it. No. You just don’t have a meaningful upsell strategy. So, like, just because the rep won’t give a shit, because reps look at their comp plan and, like, go, where am I gonna make my money? You don’t go, like, now I’m gonna have this farmer.

Brett Queener:
So I don’t like farmers whatsoever. I don’t think CSMs or success team are reps. They’re not. They’re not. Just like SCs do all the work in sales, but don’t get paid because they don’t want quota. But give me any mid market up deal that ever gets closed without an SE. Whatever. Like, no.

Brett Queener:
CSMs want a higher portion of their comp tied to base. There’s a variable tied to, their number, and we could give them based on GDR. We can give them credit for enter I would give them credit for enter our. But their job is to understand opportunities, etcetera, etcetera, and then bring the salesperson back in. But I’ll tell you a very funny story. I’m at a company. We got a good rep, but he’s kind of a pain in the ass. Right? He’s very good at what what does a rep do.

Brett Queener:
Try to marshal all the resources of the company to work on his behalf. Right? That’s what a rep should do. And so, like, you get the CSMs, like, oh my god. This person’s abusive. And I got involved with this. I drove this, and he got all the credit for it. Oh, this is not fair. I’m not getting paid.

Brett Queener:
So I called the rep

Brett Queener:
up and I’m like, what the hell? Like, don’t do that. Like, it’s like, be nice. He’s like, dude, I sent each of them 10,000 in cash in an envelope.

Brett Queener:
I was like, what? Did they take it? Yeah. They took it, and then they complained to me. I’m like, no, dude. You cannot do that. You cannot go send them cash. So, no, I think the success org does not own upsell. The sales org owns upsell. That’s it.

Brett Queener:
And you can we can say upsell is growth. Like, here’s the other one. Well, what if I sell a product to a company and the rep sold 10 seats, and then they buy 11 more seats because they grow? Who gets credit? Who cares? I just don’t think success people are reps. I don’t want them to be reps. I actually want them to be trusted by customers who are trying to figure out what’s working on their behalf and serving as a good and a good feedback to the product org around prioritizing with 10 issues, making sure the support org is set up correctly, etcetera. So I don’t like upsell, cross sell being the success org.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Let me ask you a question. Brett, so

Brett Queener:
let me You

Brett Queener:
know what happens is here’s here’s what happens. This is what naturally has happened. Oh, and then I just have the CRO who owns sales and success, and it reports to the CEO. So now if you work in the success org success org, if you’re a CEO, you’re already one level removed from what’s going on with your customers. In my view to a c f CEO is like, look, each of your direct should answer for you these key questions. And your success person should be able to tell you, hey, how happy are my customers? How likely are they to renew? How likely are they to refer me? Right? And then how prime are they for upsell, etcetera, etcetera? The second you blend that with, hey. How are we doing in the SDR is creating pipeline, and how are we doing at win rate, close rate. Usually, it just gets lost in the mix.

Brett Queener:
I don’t like it. That’s just me.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay, Brett. So let let me ask you a question. In a in a universe where, let’s just say, it’s Wait.

Josh Schachter:
Actually, Christy, what’s what’s your sorry to interrupt you, but what’s your view on this? Do you agree with Brett, or do you have a different view?

Kristi Faltorusso:
I say it depends. I’ve run successful businesses where we didn’t own any revenue. I’ve owned it where we’ve owned renewals, but not any of the growth. I’ve done it where we’ve owned expansion, but not cross sell, where we’ve owned all of it. So I I’m always gonna say it depends because I’ve seen a successful model vary from business to business. It it depends on the complexity of the product, the complexity of what you’re selling, who your buyers are, the maturity of the organization. So I I’m gonna I’m gonna politely say I get Brett’s point of view. I think at some stage in my career, I probably very much agreed with you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And I’m gonna say having led this in a few companies myself, I I’ve seen different successful models.

Brett Queener:
It depends on, one, the relationship that a rep has with a customer. There’s some segments where it might vary, Whether you have meaningful upsell, etcetera. Yeah. I mean, but, like, for example, you own growth. Of course, you own growth, not upsell. Because if the customer deployed it and they’re successful, as they grow, will they add more? So you get growth. But I don’t know if you’re hiring, like, killer reps necessarily for the most part, but so be it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. No. I mean, listen. We we see tons of different things work and and not work for a multitude of reasons, and I think what’s what I’d be curious to understand is we see a lot of organizations starting to put the ownership of revenue in customer success. But to your point, right, you’ve probably hired people that were initially brought into the business to be customer success professionals, right, help their customers with onboarding and enablement and and change management and strategy, and now you’re tasking them with the commercial responsibilities. And they’re not successful because, 1, they don’t have those skills, and, 2, we’re not making the investments to enable them or give them the resources to do this. Are you seeing those things, or what are your thoughts there?

Brett Queener:
They they don’t wanna they don’t wanna be a rep. Like and the other reality, like, in the success role, especially for a company that’s complicated in the product, it’s a hard job.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Brett Queener:
You sound like people you don’t get you don’t get like it’s like I told my mom when she got obsessed with Fox News. I was like, you know, mom, it’s the business model. If they if you got on and they said everything’s good today, you would turn that shit off and they make no ad revenue. It’s not like people are calling success people. Hey. I love you. Oh, your product’s awesome. That’s like like, it’s a it’s a hard job.

Brett Queener:
And then you’re like, oh, I want you to go sell too. Like, okay. Well, I understand the problem you have, but did you know we just changed the thing that you’re gonna have to renew at the same price you had even though you you know, 20% lower and you don’t like our product? Like, click. And so the funny thing is you owe revenue. You do owe revenue. The magic number is revenue. We need to generate a dollar in revenue. And what are we willing to spend in marketing sales and success to get that dollar of revenue? I’m sorry.

Brett Queener:
That wasn’t a question you asked. So what were you gonna ask?

Kristi Faltorusso:
What are your thoughts on organizations who are putting this on the CSMs, but they’re not enabling them? We don’t have the right skill. We don’t have the will. Right? To your point, it’s it’s not only can they do the job. Do they want to do the job? Most of them can’t do the job, and they don’t wanna do the job. And then it’s not successful. And then we’re seeing companies say, you know what? We’re gonna disband success altogether because it’s not able to do what we needed or expected it to do. So I feel like a lot of these organizations are being set up to fail by design, and now we’re seeing this entire part of the business just go away.

Brett Queener:
I don’t know what the hell happened in SaaS. I think here’s what happened. I’m old. Every 78 years, we’d have a boom and then a bust. And by the bust, it towards the high of the boom, you get a bunch of frauds. Right? They run around. They’re like, I’m the chapter pavilion for Sioux City Pavilion, and I’m a sales expert. You look at the resume, you’re like, not sure you ever sold anything at a company that matter, but whatever.

Brett Queener:
We went like 16 years. So just be complicated the hell out of everything. Yeah. It’s like it used to be like, I had Salesforce or Marketo. Marketo created an MQL, and then you’re like, does it qualified or not? And then we threw 15 tools in there. Oh, I got Chili Piper using Clearbit, and now it goes directly to the rep. We don’t need the SDR because the customer just wants to talk to the rep. Hey.

Brett Queener:
Why aren’t the reps prospecting? Oh, because we just let Randos at 2 person accounts book meetings. Like, what the hell is everybody doing? I feel like people are just making shit up just because they can’t like, it feels like I feel I feel like I’m Tom Cruise and or Jack Nicholson, a few good men. You can’t handle the truth. So what do I think about that? I think it’s dumb. Like, stupid is a stupid does. And I think I think people aren’t sitting down and aren’t able to take a breath, look outside their business and go, hey, what’s going on with their business? Hey, like, what product do we have? Who is it really good for? In which segments? And then economically, what’s the mix here? Right? Like, if you’re on the low end, you kinda need a product that’s pretty discoverable, and you better have an inbound lead. You shouldn’t have can’t have 5 SDRs calling for an AE and an SE for a 25 k deal. Right? Oh, and then the product should be pretty easy to use self serve because on the success side, there shouldn’t be much success.

Brett Queener:
It might be some onboarding. There’s some they can do digital skill, one to many, but there’s not a lot of dying catches. You wanna make sure support set up correctly that if their bug fixes the rest of it, you better figure out what the SLA with dev or what we’re doing, Sev 1, Sev 2’s. Right? Like okay. And then how do we handle renews? We have auto renew. Is it clear its credit card? And large ones, we talk to them. That I feel like people just aren’t honest. And so they start like, they buy their self time at the board meeting with who aren’t smart enough.

Brett Queener:
Like, oh, I’m gonna go do this thing over here. Okay. We’re gonna go do this. You’re like, well, that’s just dumb.

Brett Queener:
And so what I call

Brett Queener:
it I’m at some board meetings lately when they go, you didn’t give a lot of feedback today. I’m like, will you guys stop doing dumb shit? My feedback for the last 4 quarters, like, you guys are really doing dumb shit. I don’t know why we’re doing dumb shit. You’re not doing dumb shit anymore. So, like, I could give you feedback, but I feel like it’s a major win. So, no, we should not give revenue to CSMs that aren’t reps. We haven’t enabled them. And I’m sure in those orgs, I’m sure we did an amazing job when the salesperson sold it to doing the handover and explaining not what was sold, but actually the value they were trying to achieve so that the CSM would know really quickly and easily what goal were you trying to achieve, and are we on track or not on track.

Brett Queener:
No. None of that happens. So don’t do that is what I would say.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Now, Brett, you you you kinda rattle off a whole bunch of technology when you’re talking about people who waste their time doing a whole bunch of stuff. Now, Josh, very, very thoughtfully sent me some of your articles before we spoke today. And in one of them, you talked about kind of this this change that we’re gonna see in the landscape. Right? We’ve got too much SaaS applications out there. Everyone’s using a 1,000,000,000 things. And you’ve made some some pretty aggressive I don’t know. I don’t wanna call them I’m not gonna say they’re guessing.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I guess you’re like, I don’t know. Well, you tell me what that but you said 55 per predictions. Thank thank you. Thank you, Josh. It’s late my time. It’s 6:40. I’m hungry. I’m tired.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. 75% 5% less employee facing software, and you said 50% less employee facing application categories. Yeah. Let’s talk about let’s talk about this prediction because, I mean, like, you basically just put a whole bunch of companies out of business. So talk to me.

Brett Queener:
No. But I but no. I but I look. The weird thing in

Brett Queener:
software with SaaS is we can all work at different companies, but they’re zombies. If they’re not doing well, they’re recurring revenue, they don’t die fast enough. We work there as a career. And look, at the end of the day, there’s only like 2 or 5% of these software companies that if we got the chance to work at, we’d be like, oh, I worked there. I did something. The rest of it’s just like, oh my god. It’s like, you know, it’s like the slog through the swamp while someone throwing grenades at you. I’m like, oh, sass.

Brett Queener:
Right? So and the really cool thing where I’ll get to is what it means for customer success. So I’ve been in software for 30 years. Most of the software uses deduction. It’s just not great. Why? It doesn’t help me do my job. Right? You know this. Why do we have a success org? Think about it. We have a success org because in theory, somebody was trying to accomplish something, some goal or do something, and they we need to teach them and make sure they understand how to translate what they were trying to do with it.

Brett Queener:
However, you navigate across our complicated app. That’s why we have Successworks. What is implementation? What is onboarding? Oh, you’re not using these features. Oh, I rolled out pendo. Oh, I’ve got this thing. Oh, look. You’re not using this feature.

Brett Queener:
What what the hell is going on? That’s been for 30 years. And then what I just said was, like, we thought

Brett Queener:
it got better in SaaS. It got worse. We created REST APIs.

Brett Queener:
So now you don’t use one app, you use 9 apps. What?

Brett Queener:
I used to hunt and

Brett Queener:
pack through one app to translate like what I wanted to do. Now I get hunt

Brett Queener:
and peck across 15 apps and everybody goes, now we solve it all because it all feeps into Slack. Oh, great. Short attention span theater. Just a

Brett Queener:
bunch of channels. Oh, no. I have list and tasks now in AI. Please. It’s madness.

Brett Queener:
So what’s really cool about AI, and I love seeing all the haters. Oh, the AI boom, and the AI this, and the AI is a fad. And I’m like, keep saying it because you’re dead wrong. Because for the first time, as long as I’ve used software, software helps you do your job. Not a poor CSM who’s also assigned an upsell quota gets on and helps you do your job by translating it. And often, they’re going to help you use the app. Right? Or write meaningful emails deciding what your data says and then sending it to the customer because they can’t figure it out. That’s something that works.

Brett Queener:
Right? No. Software helps them use the app. You know? If I say, like, think about using software. You wanna do something. Oh my god. What the hell? What if it’s like multiple CRUD actions? You know, create, read, update. I gotta go here, and then I gotta go here, and then I gotta go here, and I gotta go here. What if we just say, hey.

Brett Queener:
Jim’s sick today. Can you resend all those meetings to Jen? Yeah. Done. Oh, that’s cool. Or, hey, an example I use, hey, is there a hurricane in Tennessee? Is that fully property managers?

Brett Queener:
Like something that would take 10 minutes. Takes like a minute, and then it says, hey, do you want me to do that for you anytime? Yeah. So then it takes 0 minutes. I just think that is so transformational. And when you start and what I’m basically saying is the new default for an application is if you could hire, like, the smartest assistant in the world that worked 24 by 7 and knew your company intently, it was just there to help you do your job, What would it do? And I think that’s what these AI interfaces are going to do. Now why do I say there are gonna be less companies is the second a functional user, I don’t care if it’s a SaaS person or a salesperson, etcetera, starts to get an application. It’s like, oh my god.

Brett Queener:
This is super helpful. But for some other part of their job, they gotta hunt and peck through stuff, they’re gonna be like, oh. I mean, think about this like you I assume most of you record your meetings now with Gong or Fathom or whatever it is. Right? It sends you a summary. Are you ever Right now, I don’t

Josh Schachter:
know what

Kristi Faltorusso:
I Update ads.

Brett Queener:
Update ads. Update ads. Yeah. Whatever it might be. Yeah. Are you gonna go back to like not doing that and writing down notes on a piece of paper where you don’t pay attention to the person because you’re not fully engaged and you’re writing stuff down and then you look at scribble scratch and then try to update and do You’re never not going to do that again. You’re never gonna do that. And so I think you’re gonna look at other things like I don’t wanna do that.

Brett Queener:
And then you’re gonna go to your company who’s giving you this great AI to do this one piece of something like, hey. Can you do that? And the answer is it’s a 100 times faster. Because there is the person isn’t like, oh, it’s gonna take me a year because I gotta go build and design all these screens, and then usability testing. There is no screen. It’s just the data model and some answers and some workflow. Just train the engine on it, so now you can solve this problem. So I think

Josh Schachter:
it’ll take before we get to a place where you can trust the precision and accuracy of that AI so that it really can do your job for you.

Brett Queener:
Portions of your job. It’s already there, portions of it. Like, I mean, do you think Gong does a good summary of what happened in a call? And what were the descriptions of that?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Does agree. I I personally do use UpdateAI, so I use it.

Brett Queener:
I’m sorry. And IT does

Kristi Faltorusso:
a great job of summarizing for us.

Brett Queener:
Right. Does it do a good job summarizing?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Not

Brett Queener:
perfect. Okay. But do you relatively trust it? And maybe you gotta look at it and say okay and tweak it a little. But, like, do you trust it?

Josh Schachter:
Good enough. Yeah.

Brett Queener:
Good enough. Right? So, look, I think if you have the right data model, right, and you have the right repository in your metadata that has the content there, and you’ve trained it on what that then means, if you just want me to help do task for me immediately, if we start to get to higher level value math questions, and, you know, that, maybe a little longer, but pretty soon. Like, I’m a keep So what’s

Josh Schachter:
the implication for CS?

Brett Queener:
I think I think CS job gets so much better.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, it can’t get much worse.

Brett Queener:
Because well, here’s why it gets better. What is onboarding for a product that works the way someone would want it to work? What’s onboarding? Nothing. It’s very little. So I think similar to what I think happens to SDRs, like, you you know, you get on these calls where people are like, okay. The SDR and the AE went through some random list, and they picked the accounts to go after. I’m like, what are you talking about? No. We can do that with AI. Like, here’s our ICP.

Brett Queener:
Here’s the accounts. Go after these people. Let’s just have them focus on, like, writing a compelling message. You’re supposed to just, oh, I guess you don’t like me. It’s the 5th try. That works well. But so you said it gets better. All I’ve

Josh Schachter:
heard is it gets eliminated.

Brett Queener:
No. I don’t think it gets I don’t think it gets eliminated. I think the part of the job that you have to do, which is keep up to speed on all the different parts of the product, and then somehow be the product expert, and then get people to use the product goes away. And I think what it allows you to do is understand the value of why you fucking bought this product in the first place, and understand how they’re getting value from it. And where are they not? And what more do they need to go do? I think you move much more into a business conversation as opposed to just like just taking body blows left and right and trying to like play coordinator and try to get somebody at dev to pay attention to a bug, etcetera. Like think about this, it was so funny the other day. I was like, okay, I’ve got this agentic interface in my product that helps them use the product. I’m like, okay.

Brett Queener:
If they have an issue where they don’t know how to use something and there’s a bug, oh, they go over to this other tab over here. They log it. What are you talking about? We got this bot over here. I’m like, guys, the user’s right here. It’s 1 bot. Like, if they got a product issue or they got a bug issue or they can’t it’s all there. Let’s just consolidate this. So I think in success, I was talking to Nick Mette about this, that I think there’s an opportunity that, hey.

Brett Queener:
The same reason Blackstone’s hiring liberal arts kids this year, not STEM kids. Right? They’re hiring them to be like, let’s be first principle problem solvers and people who are actually in there kinda like, okay. Here’s what you’re doing. Successful. Great. You’ve gotten this. All these other people in York haven’t adopted this yet. Why? It’s not because the product, you know, like, it’s higher level order stuff.

Brett Queener:
Now there may be some of these things where, I think they become amazing customer discovery engines. So today, in theory, it’s pretty easy. Customer success will tell you, here’s the 10 things I need in the road map. But it’s not the 10 things product builds. They’re like, product customers always complain. But don’t hate your customers. And, yes, we do need to prioritize the 10 things our customers want versus the 10 customers we can’t sell to if we had yes. And if Salesforce was running product, we used to call it the clappies and the slappies.

Brett Queener:
You go to Dreamforce and you’d be like, we built Chatter. It was like the PR light. It was slappy. But all the admins are like, dude, forecast you know, like, whatever. I didn’t ask for that. They’re like, hey. We fixed forecasting for the 4th time. Oh, thank you for fixing forecasting.

Brett Queener:
Right?

Brett Queener:
So you gotta balance you gotta balance that stuff. Right? Right?

Brett Queener:
Like, no. I’m gonna use Clari because I can’t figure out how to use my forecast categories. Whatever. So I think what is interesting is real discovery. Because what’s really interesting about AI and in my AI centric companies that I funded, it’s not like we sit down and have a road map for a year and are like, okay. Here’s what we’re building. Because in SaaS, we’re like, okay. It’s just features and code.

Brett Queener:
There’s no, like, technical breakthrough. Okay. How do we prioritize? Some of this AI stuff, if you can go talk to customers and figure out some pains, you go back in a lab. Some crazy kids, like, work, like, 48 hours straight with, like, a Red Bull and Zims, And they come back and they’re like, we can do this. And it’s it blows your mind. I call them minor miracles. And so I think in my mind, what I want 6 and so which companies are gonna win? Are those companies who are working with customers, understanding the pain, what is other pain they have, and figuring out with the r and d org. Hey, can we go solve this? And then, like, then go hard.

Brett Queener:
And I think it changes the relationship between success and product. They’re kinda weird, like, they need each other, but they get along as well as, like, marketing and sales. This is like a weird thing. I don’t really understand it. It. Right? Oh, they’re always complaining and like, you know? So I think that’s the path. I don’t think we need as many CSMs. Just like I don’t think we need as many SDRs.

Brett Queener:
I don’t think we need you know, the interesting thing though is we may AI should allow us to have some more money to spend on appropriate success. If I can have an AI for inbound SDR, I don’t need 50 that 15 of them to tell me what an MQL is. If I can use AI for RFP automation, or I can use AI to spin up demo orgs with synthetic data, I don’t need as many SCs. Right? And so I for the same amount of new ARR, I don’t need as much on the sales side. So I don’t think we’re compressed on the success side, but I think we need to evolve what the success function is. What’s so funny is why I get excited about this AI stuff is that my entire career, I’m an expert in how to build orgs, and these orgs, what I know is all tied to this friction, that this product is a set of tabs that somebody has to translate. Back in the early days, don’t show them the product. Let’s qualify.

Brett Queener:
Let’s do real pain and discovery. Let’s get them on the hook. And then the AE and the SDR, and then there’s the SCU who does magic. Right? And then we bring in the success. Like, think about all of the pain and friction of running SaaS today is tied to the issue that this product, when I wanna do something, I have to translate it in my head to understand how that product work to try to accomplish what I want to do. And then I actually still have to go do it. It’s pretty cool.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

Brett Queener:
And so I think I think the success function becomes more strategic.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Amen.

Josh Schachter:
I just actually was polishing our mission statement today as a product. And I wrote, you know, our mission is to help the next generation of businesses use shared customer insights to guide human led decisions while AI takes care of the routine tasks. Give humans the key decisions, give AI the routine tasks.

Brett Queener:
You know, like, I publish all the time. Right? And then I was like, okay, I moved from LinkedIn to Substack. Hope LinkedIn doesn’t know. I’m gonna shut off my newsletter. And then somebody was like, well, you still gotta write a long post. That’s sort of a summary of your thing on LinkedIn. Put the substack on my God, I gotta rewrite this thing.

Brett Queener:
It’ll be 30 minutes.

Brett Queener:
I have Claude. I’ve got a project. It knows my tone. I’m like, dude, here’s the 3 articles. Write a LinkedIn post. It’s a little said, okay. Make it less cheesy, a little bit longer. Copy paste it.

Josh Schachter:
Hey, Brett. We never even got to talk about the fact that you’re, like, one of the the originators of customer success, that you were at Salesforce back when it was how many people were at Salesforce when you first joined?

Brett Queener:
I don’t know. About a100.

Josh Schachter:
About a100. And you were part of the entire evolution of CS. Will you come back sometime and join us and we can talk about that story?

Brett Queener:
Always. As long as you’ll have me.

Josh Schachter:
Great.

Brett Queener:
We’ll see

Josh Schachter:
you next week. Yeah. Alright. Everybody, this is Brett Queener. Brett,

Brett Queener:
awesome. This is this is me filtered.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, next time we’ll do it unfiltered.

Josh Schachter:
Filtered. Okay.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I prefer unfiltered. Unfiltered.

Josh Schachter:
Tales from the Bonfire. Tales from the Bonfire. That’s where you can read Brett’s articles and his blogs. Word of warning, they are long but thoroughly enjoyable and very educational. And I love your perspective and prognostication for the future of SaaS, Brett.

Brett Queener:
They’re meant Thank

Josh Schachter:
you very

Brett Queener:
much. To be helpful they’re meant to be helpful guides, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. They’re they’re amazing, long, helpful guides. Thank you, Brett.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Thanks, Brett.

Brett Queener:
Alright. Is that what you guys wanted?