BLOG

Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI.

Paul Holder:
We’re in business because of our customers. Our easiest source of growth is our customers. I think a lot of companies talk about that because it’s a great soundbite. Like of course everyone does it, but actually doing it, I think is a whole different thing. And I think a lot of companies struggle to do that. And so, you know, early on we said, Hey, let’s, let’s try to do all the best practice things. Let’s make sure we know why people are buying us. Let’s make sure we’re tracking them through that process.

Paul Holder:
Let’s make sure that, you know, the folks that are the key stakeholders are engaged with us both on a product level, but also on a company level. And those relationships putting that time in now is going to pay off handsomely down the road as we continue to grow on scale.

Jon Johnson:
So humans are expensive, right? We don’t necessarily want to replace Every human with tools, but we wanna make sure that humans are doing what humans are good at. Yeah. What do you see as a differentiator for future CSMs? Not tools, not AI. Mickey can talk for hours on that, but, like, what do you want the people to focus on this year in CS?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Josh dances. It makes us all uncomfortable.

Jon Johnson:
That is a saxophone.

Josh Schachter:
My clothes off.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We we hope that that doesn’t happen, Josh.

Jon Johnson:
Hey. As long as it’s below the waist. Interesting.

Josh Schachter:
What a great intro. That’s where we’re gonna start this episode here. OnShearn CS and BS Podcasts. It brought you on.

Kristi Faltorusso:
The pantsless podcast.

Josh Schachter:
The pantsless. Who’s wearing pants? Raise your hand if you’re wearing pants. I’m wearing pants. John, are you John’s not wearing pants.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Paul, I hope Hope

Josh Schachter:
you’re not. Nikki’s not.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. I was told, especially I was told, hopefully not not to wear pants.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Great. Great. Great.

Jon Johnson:
Okay. This is actually the the cornerstone of our go

Josh Schachter:
to market.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Showed up to, like, really record

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, you know, listen, sex sells and we need more viewership, so we’ll, we’ll go with that. Well, welcome everybody to

Kristi Faltorusso:
Interesting. I mean

Paul Holder:
It it

Jon Johnson:
does well, okay. Hey, guys.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m just On this audio podcast, we really need more viewership.

Jon Johnson:
That’s the end of season 1.

Josh Schachter:
We actually get almost half of our Listenership is viewership. Do you guys know that? That, like, we have On YouTube? On YouTube. Yeah. YouTube is becoming a major, platform for, for podcasting. So, Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So we should all look nice and have nice backgrounds like Christie.

Josh Schachter:
She’s always Our guiding star.

Jon Johnson:
Like Christie.

Paul Holder:
I know Christie’s killing the background. Yeah. Yeah. She is.

Jon Johnson:
You just did a whole refresh to her lovely husband.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You can’t even see my signage or anything, but, Yes. My office is killing it.

Josh Schachter:
Well, I’m Josh, founder and CEO of UpdateAI, Least knowledgeable person about customer success on this podcast. I have with me, Christie Valterusso.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Hi, everyone. My name is Christie Valterusso. Okay. You’re alright. Let let me do my own last name. Thanks, Josh. Okay. Christie Valterusso, chief customer officer at Client Success.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Been in customer success for the past 12 years, building, scaling, and transforming customer success teams in b two b hyper growth companies.

Paul Holder:
Mickey.

Jon Johnson:
I’ll tell you this difference every time. Every time.

Mickey Powell:
I know. Every time.

Jon Johnson:
My

Mickey Powell:
name is Mickey Powell. For the next three and a half days

Jon Johnson:
And I’m John Chuck Norris.

Mickey Powell:
And to go to market at UpdateAI, I’ve spent the last 10 years in customer success from leadership operations, individual contributor roles, and, I’m your local CSAI enthusiast and and proponent.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. And I’m John Johnson, principal customer success manager at UserTesting, and author of Random newsletters at measureovermethod.com. I’ve been in customer success for 12 years, Mickey. I like to one up him every time We just keep adding it. But, focused on, enterprise and, you know, growth and all those fancy words. I totally went blank halfway through my Intro. Here we are.

Mickey Powell:
Synergy.

Jon Johnson:
Synergy. We are, synergistic. Just fight my way into that director’s room, tooth and nail, Every day. Just

Josh Schachter:
Dear God, somebody. We have a very special I’m, I’m, I’m keeping the show moving, John. We have a very special guest. Well, they’re always very special guests. But we have a guest I’m very excited to talk to today. We’ll introduce him in a minute, because he’s a fellow startup founder CEO. And we love startup founders. Cool.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Nice guy. Seems like a nice guy. I met him 60 seconds ago.

Jon Johnson:
He’s staring at us right now

Josh Schachter:
So it kind of applies to say nice things, but that’s okay. So before we introduce our guest, I do want to give Mickey the mic. This is going to be Mickey’s last episode with the CS MBS podcast. And, Mickey, well, you kind of announced it a 2nd ago, and then John just, like, trampled over it. Like, you know, like, why don’t you share

Paul Holder:
Mickey McDaniel? Yeah. I’m the team

Mickey Powell:
of the show.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. So right. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Example over Mickey.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Nick, Nick, what’s going on?

Paul Holder:
I was thinking yeah. I was thinking maybe

Mickey Powell:
I just don’t say anything, and then I just don’t talk as usual. And then Nobody will be those.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Just fade off into the abyss.

Jon Johnson:
We’ll just keep introducing you

Mickey Powell:
now. Yeah. I think I think that that like, it it should be a murder mystery. We anyway

Jon Johnson:
Well, he’s he’s gonna Gong Girl us.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. So

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay, Mickey. What’s happening? Let’s go.

Mickey Powell:
I’m gonna be take I’m gonna I’m gonna be taking a career break. I’m I’m departing UpdateAI. And as a part of that, I’m gonna be taking, And then definitely from the podcast because, really, I think it’s in fantastic hands with Christy and Josh and John. And, so, yeah, today’s gonna be my last episode. So I don’t wanna make it all about me. Paul’s here. I wanna hear what he has to say. I’ll, I’ll add some snarky comments along the way, and then I’ll fade off into the ether as you guys all said.

Jon Johnson:
Well, I’ve I’ve already got a bunch of 1 shot, so we’ll just hit we’ve got little, like, your little, You know, the things that you say, like, the one liners, we’ll just prerecord them, and we’ll just hit them

Mickey Powell:
Oh, yeah. That’s right.

Jon Johnson:
Throughout the episodes.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That’s good.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I like that.

Jon Johnson:
Like, AI is the future.

Mickey Powell:
No. I was gonna say no. I was

Jon Johnson:
gonna say even shorter. Can it just be can it just

Mickey Powell:
be, like, me just yelling AI just at the top of Just Yeah. No context. Just

Josh Schachter:
AI. Well, I’m gonna miss I’m doing this for Nikki.

Jon Johnson:
As somebody who So you just gonna say that? Please. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But Josh needs to make sure that anytime John’s saying anything that Josh cuts John off. So, John, why don’t you take the floor?

Jon Johnson:
I have loved doing this with you, Mickey. Like, I mean it. Like, the guests have been great. Paul, hold on. We’ll get to you. But, no, really, Mickey, like, this has been like, this last year has probably been one of the most filling, like, outside work activities that I’ve had, and you’ve been a major part of that. So From the webinars that we’ve done with AI and CS, from, you know, hanging out in San Francisco at Pulse and and in DC and all the other places that we’ve hung out. Like, I I’m truly grateful for what you put into this and to know you in the way that I do now.

Jon Johnson:
So we’re gonna miss you and I’m so grateful that you’re taking this break and that you’re gonna build into, wherever you’re going next. So

Mickey Powell:
Appreciate it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Whatever John said. And then my last question is is, like, does Mickey out of the group chat?

Jon Johnson:
Like, so it’s just shutting down.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Might change like, I just need to know, like, is Mickey out of the group chat?

Mickey Powell:
You know, that’s gonna be like

Jon Johnson:
when we kick Brandon.

Josh Schachter:
He’s in the group. He just started a new one.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Alright. Alright. Okay. Alright.

Josh Schachter:
No. I’m gonna I’m gonna miss Mickey. Which is

Mickey Powell:
not I don’t know.

Josh Schachter:
You know, Mickey Mickey is surprisingly quiet on this podcast. Mickey actually has a lot to say and is not afraid to air what he wants to say. And Mickey has very intentionally Taking a backseat on this podcast because, you know, talent, respect talent. He, he, he, he sees you, Christy see and John. And he know he doesn’t wanna get in the way of of, you

Kristi Faltorusso:
know He’s like Santa, like he sees me when I’m sleeping?

Josh Schachter:
So he doesn’t say much on the podcast, but it’s But when he speaks, it’s it’s it’s the whole, like, you know, most interesting man in the world thing or whatever that is, right, that that, that does that case. You know, when he speaks

Mickey Powell:
I like Silent Bob.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. He’s Silent Bob. Yeah. When he speaks, we cut him off. It’s profound. That’s the word. Profound.

Jon Johnson:
It is.

Josh Schachter:
No, it is. He always, like, he always, like, he always he always greats at great ideas. And And, he takes it to another, like, perspective. So anyways, Mickey, thank you for joining us on all these episodes. And as far as UpdateAI goes, you know that you’re part of the family. You’ll forever be a part of the family. And you and I were talking, you know, a couple hours ago about this, where you’ve helped us level up over the past year has just been so profound. Again, that word profound because it’s true and I’m deeply grateful For it.

Josh Schachter:
I’m choking up here because my relationship with Nikki means a lot. And, Nikki means a lot to me. And and I really do appreciate everything that you’ve Done for the podcast for the company for me over the past year since I really got to know you.

Mickey Powell:
Appreciate it. With that,

Kristi Faltorusso:
Paul I vote to Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Paul, how do you feel about making progress?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Because it’s got real sad and awkward. So I think we leave Mickey in the chat because I don’t want otherwise, it feels like Big breakup, and I think it’s completely unnecessary. Anyway, Paul, how are you?

Paul Holder:
Yeah. I’m good. How do I follow that? That was so kind. That was so nice.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I know. It’s So awkward and uncomfortable, Paul. So I just jump in. Just what what would you like to talk about today, Paul?

Josh Schachter:
We I need to you guys have not learned you still have not learned. Neither you nor Christy nor nor John have learned. You need to do last names. People don’t know who Paul is. Can we do a

Kristi Faltorusso:
proper role? We were joking around, Josh, because you have to get so serious. We didn’t even

Josh Schachter:
intro a campaign. That wasn’t

Kristi Faltorusso:
even a formal transition.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Well, let’s see what you’re

Kristi Faltorusso:
gonna do. Joke segue.

Jon Johnson:
This is a serious going in so well, guys.

Paul Holder:
Kristin Josh,

Kristi Faltorusso:
would you like to introduce our guest?

Josh Schachter:
No. No. No. No. I want you to.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Paul Holder, I’d love to welcome you to the show, CS and BS. We are thrilled to have you. Just mostly BS. So, Paul, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Josh Schachter:
And she just wants to work for a time frame. Time out. Paul, Paul, don’t tell us his story.

Jon Johnson:
You can’t tell her to do it and then correct her.

Josh Schachter:
Because she doesn’t know who he is. Paul Or Chris do

Kristi Faltorusso:
know he who he is.

Josh Schachter:
He’s the

Kristi Faltorusso:
CEO of OnRamp. He’s been actually that. Which is one of my favorite products before salesforce. Right? Like, so I’m sorry. I wanted him to tell because I think him saying it is better and more profound than me rambling off some letters and titles and Whatever.

Paul Holder:
In this

Jon Johnson:
podcast, the hosts fight with each other. Can

Paul Holder:
you see what

Josh Schachter:
you’re gonna be missing? It’s violent. It’s violent. Okay. Paul, over to you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Paul. Paul, Tell tell tell us a little bit

Paul Holder:
about it.

Jon Johnson:
This is this is this is the worst one so far, guys.

Paul Holder:
Or is

Jon Johnson:
this the best one?

Kristi Faltorusso:
The thing is that Paul, it’s the best one.

Paul Holder:
Oh, man.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s the best one.

Jon Johnson:
I’m obligated. You guys so much.

Paul Holder:
But yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Alright, Paul. Tell us tell us about yourself.

Paul Holder:
I am Paul Holder. Yes. CEO of a company called OnRamp. I’ve had 50 years in CS. No. Just kidding.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yes. Yes.

Paul Holder:
There has

Kristi Faltorusso:
to be a number bigger than 12 anymore. Yeah.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. I was 12.

Jon Johnson:
CSM over here.

Paul Holder:
But I went with 50. About about a decade in customer success, including before starting OnRamp, leading customer success at Troops, which it sounds like some of you here No fans. Know well. So I don’t live in New I don’t live in New York anymore. I’m in Boston. But, remember my troops experience very fondly. And, yeah, I’m excited to be on the on the show today with you.

Jon Johnson:
Well, we’ll see how excited you are

Josh Schachter:
at the

Jon Johnson:
end of this.

Josh Schachter:
We’ll be the judge of that.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. We’ll be the judge of that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
He’s wondering why his EA doesn’t really vet these things

Paul Holder:
for sure.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Someone’s getting fired later. Yeah. It’s not me.

Josh Schachter:
Paul, why’d you start on ramp? Paul, tell us about what is on what is on ramp? What is on ramp?

Paul Holder:
OnRamp OnRamp’s a, it’s a it’s a customer success based tool, but it is a, platform for drastically helping the customer onboarding and activation experience. That was both at Troops and previously at a company called VTS, where I was where I met my co founder Ross actually. We realized that the onboarding process is an integral part and critical part of customer success and adoption. And yet the tools we were using were quite primitive to try to manage that. So We went and we built something to, to make our customers lives happy and most critically their customers lives happier and better. F for you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Paul, what were some of the things that you saw shortcomings? Right? That what what was happening that you said, I gotta fix this. This is a mess. I don’t have the proper tech stack. I can’t do what I need to do. What was that? What did that look like? What was happening?

Paul Holder:
Yeah. When you think about, like, top down b to b onboarding. Right? Like, a lot of the tools Tools that you try to use to manage that today are all internal facing. There are the Asanas, the monday.coms, the Notions. And these are phenomenal. These are great tools. Like, I’m sure you guys use them. I don’t yeah.

Paul Holder:
They’re great. But they’re really built for internal teams and internal management. If you try to like Throw that to your customer and you say, hey, go learn this new platform, a new tool that you’ve never used before. And these things are getting really complex. They fall down. So what do you end up doing? You end up like using emails, and use spreadsheets, and the tools that they know. And so we said, that sucks. Now you’re managing like emails, spreadsheets, An internal tool, you’re trying to manage the customer and their expectations, and you’re trying to manage your internal team, and you have your CRM, and you’re a different tech stack.

Paul Holder:
And you have all these things floating around, all getting in the way of like getting the customer on and live and adopted. And so we said, Hey, there’s, you know, we did the classic, There’s gotta be a better way. And so, our experience that kind of troop, my experience at troops and VTS turns out that’s experience of many both software companies, but even more interestingly non software or companies. Companies like Anheuser Busch, CVS, Cardinal Health, they’re customers of OnRamps, which is really cool. And so, so we built this kind of 2 sided platform where on one hand, The internal teams get, they get the templates, they get the workflows, they get all the reporting, all that great stuff. But we create this white labeled beautiful kind of customer experience that’s bes spoke to what that customer needs to do and how they need to do it in a way that they’ve never had before. That’s super easy, keeps everyone aligned, keeps the process moving. It’s all sunshine and roses.

Paul Holder:
You know,

Josh Schachter:
what’s your favorite part about that customer portal experience? Like, what’s the part that you’re like, oh, I love this little piece, this way that it works or this feature.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Yeah. Great Great question. You guys have used TurboTax, I’m sure. Right? Like, you get taken step we we all don’t love TurboTax. Maybe it’s a bad example because, you know

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. It’s like the premier example of when you’re trying to explain that, like, you don’t have to have an accounting background and even you could do taxes. Like, it’s done. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Nobody likes it. But does I thought you

Josh Schachter:
were gonna say you have you pay lobbyists in DC 1,000,000,000 of dollars.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
We don’t The only reason that this economy exists is

Paul Holder:
the reason I bring that up is because we have a similar kind of step by step guided workflow tool where a customer can go in, they can sign a document, they can upload data and information. They can get approvals, they can get communication, all this like we call it a turbo tax like experience. Cause it’s a very simple step by step. Here’s how I tie my shoes 1 through 4. And, and that’s really cool to see like the end customers go through that and be like, Oh my gosh, You made it really easy for me. And so this idea of this kind of workflow, this automation is something that, you know, is kind of unique to us and why we get excited to do what we do every day.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. So you, you started an onboarding platform for Customer success. It makes a ton of sense because onboarding is if you don’t do proper onboarding, you’re not going to have a proper Right? The rest is just going to follow-up from there. So, I understand that. There’s a bunch of onboarding platforms in the space. Christy, what’s the one that you guys just acquired?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Status.

Josh Schachter:
Status. And so, how do you feel about that, Paul? Like, you know, founder to founder, like and and all its listeners. What, what do you feel like, you know, is like the differentiation for you?

Mickey Powell:
All 7.

Josh Schachter:
All 7 listeners, like, and how do you feel about like, you know, a little bit of, it feels to me like a little, I mean, there’s some good competition out there, right, within onboarding within CS for, For a market size that maybe is not a, you know, $100,000,000,000 market size. So how do you feel about that?

Paul Holder:
Well, I would disagree with that, actually.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Good.

Paul Holder:
Respectfully respectfully disagree with that. So so I think there’s 2 I think there’s 2 things. We there has been some, like, This has become a category. And on one hand, right? Like we could say, oh, that sucks. Like there’s competitive entrance. On the other hand, I think when you start to look at a category, you look at, okay, if somebody’s searching for my piece of software or my thing and what I’m doing, if I’m the only one out there, like, is it really a thing? And so, you know, in some ways, you know, we frankly, as a, as you know, maybe a slightly less well funded than some of the other guys, we’ve appreciated some of the lift that they’ve given us from a category perspective. But I think why I would disagree with you is because actually I think The word every business does customer onboarding in the world, right? And like, you know, I think a lot of these other tools really strictly focused on software and other venture backed startups. And I think what Onramp is kind of approaching this as is like, No, this is onboarding for, for all.

Paul Holder:
And certainly there’s use cases where software doesn’t solve a particular onboarding problem. But I think what’s been really great for us to see why we get so excited and we don’t get dismayed by, by competitors for example, is because we think the opportunity is so massive and that’s what Our customers and prospects are kind of telling us.

Josh Schachter:
So who who are your ICPs, your ideal customer profiles in that sense? I mean, you mentioned CBS, they’re not necessarily, they’ve got a huge Digital group.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But Anheuser Busch. Like, I mean, they you dropped a bunch of names that we wouldn’t traditionally hear in Yeah. SaaS. So I think I’m really interested in those use cases.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So so yeah, just to give a couple examples. Right? Like, Anheuser Busch, they, you And as a Bush has a unique position where they have the power to say to these retailers and distributors, Hey, like you, in order to order through our system, Like we’re gonna dictate how you do that. And we’re gonna dictate the means in which you do that. And to facilitate that transaction, they’re using OnRamp to do that as an example. Right? At CVS, yeah, another, another great example.

Paul Holder:
They work with these specialty pharma manufacturers, you know, specialty drugs, you think about like really rare diseases. Manufacturers need to work with CVS to get in the pipeline of a CVS and ultimately distributed to all the pharmacies, right? They’re working with, They’re using OnRamp to facilitate all the steps needed and required to do that. And so, yeah, this there’s software touches everything, Right? So a lot, you know, almost all customers we have have software or some digital component to it. But, but yeah, onboarding, like onboarding could mean a customer. It could mean a Customer, it could mean a vendor, it could mean a partner, it could mean a reseller. Right? There’s like multiple ways in which this onboarding concept can take flight. And, and so, you know, what we found that’s been so great is what we’re doing, really kind of spans a lot of those use cases.

Mickey Powell:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I would love to learn a little bit about what it was like at Troops, personally.

Jon Johnson:
Yes.

Josh Schachter:
You were there during a time of hyper growth And you were leading CS. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that experience and maybe for people that aren’t as familiar with what Troops is all about.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Troops now a, now a Salesforce company,

Jon Johnson:
Salesforce company. Yeah.

Paul Holder:
Like everybody else. Yeah. Do you guys know Scott and Dan directly?

Josh Schachter:
I met Scott at a lunch in Miami.

Paul Holder:
At a lunch in, that’s, that sounds spot on. That sounds

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. They, they actually, so they let me in, in total. It was a breakfast, but they let me into the breakfast. I was the only active founder that was in the breakfast. One of my investors invited me, but it was for post exit in, founders that had basically all moved to Miami where there’s no, you know, Exit a startup and you get to move to Miami and have breakfast at a country club with other founders every month. That’s it. So that’s where I met Scott.

Josh Schachter:
He’s a

Paul Holder:
pretty good deal. Oh, yeah. Really, yeah, really great guy for sure. Yeah. It was it was a crazy time. So Troops, for those unfamiliar, is kind of a connector between Salesforce and Slack. So the idea was, hey, wouldn’t it be great if our CRM could be conversational? Like nobody likes going in and make your update sales teams. We hate going in and making updates to our CRM.

Paul Holder:
It’s not particularly insightful. It’s not particularly proactive. What if we change that? No, by the way, where that’s happening more and more is in Slack. And we all could debate the pros and cons of Slack, but it’s obviously

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yes, we could.

Paul Holder:
It’s here to stay and, you know, Teams or Slack or whatever. They, they ended up integrating with Teams as sure you can imagine. But, yeah, I was there in a period where, you know, not only Onramp in some ways, like we were seeing a really steady growth of these kind of smaller, You know, cutting edge companies mixed with what ended up becoming larger kind of enterprises. And from a customer success perspective, That became a challenge because it’s like, we’re a small team. I had a team of like 2 or 3 at the time or whatever it was. It’s like, how do you bifurcate the resources to accommodate, Hey, this, this backbone of the business compared to these deep relationships that you want to be forming with these bigger companies and recognizing those new opportunities. So that was a re that was kind of for me jumping into the deep end. Prior to that, I had just been doing kind of the onboarding thing.

Paul Holder:
So that was, that was a huge learning experience. And Dan and Scott were incredible mentors. You know, as we, as we navigated that and yeah, obviously they, they had the exit to Salesforce.

Josh Schachter:
What did you take out of it?

Jon Johnson:
What see, every time, Josh, we just always I’m I’m gonna restart

Mickey Powell:
raising my hand.

Paul Holder:
I’m

Jon Johnson:
just gonna start raising my hand. You said you have to help us see issues.

Josh Schachter:
Wait, how am I getting, how am I getting shamed? How am I getting, how am I getting shamed for this interaction? Because I was probably a good, like, 3rd of a second before you.

Jon Johnson:
Well, but not to me. To me, I was a 3rd of a second before you. Oh. So there’s a delay here.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, there is? Yeah. Everybody is. So that’s why. Got it. Because I keep on wondering why Christie is like getting upset with me. I’m like, Christie, I’m beating you to the punch. But no, it’s because we each think that we’re ahead, that we have the pole position. Okay.

Josh Schachter:
Now I understand. Okay. Mhmm.

Jon Johnson:
I’m glad we had that talk, Josh. So Paul, who

Mickey Powell:
can you explain?

Jon Johnson:
I would love to understand what, like, how did you how did you run your CS team? You were the You were the director. Right? You got a promotion there, I see. Walk me through a little bit of, like, what this type of tool Looks like from a retention and a growth standpoint on the CSM

Paul Holder:
side. Troop. I mean, took my time at Troops. Yeah. Yeah. So, kind of how we structured the team was we said, hey, you know, for our smaller customers that are paying us a few $100 a month or, you know, a few $1,000 a year. You know, how do we scale adoption programs? Like, the great thing about Troops the unique thing about Troops was, it’s one of these tools that like, cool, I could connect these 2 things together. What the heck do I do with that? And what are the best ways to do it? That, that was kinda unique to Troop.

Paul Holder:
So we, we did a lot of work to really focus on Use cases, bringing it to life, making people feel specific pains and saying, Hey, even if this exact workflow or this exact thing doesn’t apply to you, it at least resonates with you to Spark an idea. Because that was the biggest thing like, and if you know anything about the true story, the closed one gong was like the the shining light use case. Who doesn’t like you you win a deal in Salesforce, it celebrates in Slack, everyone rallies around it. That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. You obviously can’t build a big business just around that. But, you know, it went 10 layers deeper. And we said, hey, both for sales and CS teams that are using Salesforce every day.

Paul Holder:
What are the triggers that you need to know? Like, what is it you’re not getting today? What are you manually updating today that could just be circulated another way? And how can we make it easy to do those, you know, review and pipeline and updates. I say all this because we really structure the team in a way to focus on bringing those use cases to life, and try to share that library across all our teams. Could try to go hand to hand combat with every single customer, would have been a big, would have been a big challenge. Now, working with, you know, Slack was one of our customers actually at the time. We, we could pay a little bit more attention and really dive deeper into their specific use cases. So we, you know, put our resources in that direction, when the dollars made sense to, to do so. But, but yeah, we really just focus on, obviously onboarding and adoption, getting those use cases live and making sure folks were getting value out of those, and updating them appropriately as their business and their rev ops stack change.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. And just to bring it current to where you’re at right now. Yeah. Obviously, that’s a transition. Right? Director of CS into CEO and and and cofounder. Right?

Paul Holder:
Well,

Kristi Faltorusso:
that was the path I thought I was on.

Jon Johnson:
We all thought we’re on that path,

Paul Holder:
now you’re not the CEO

Jon Johnson:
of

Kristi Faltorusso:
this podcast. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
No. No. No. But of the default to Russo Enterprises, I think you’re the CEO.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I am the CEO of myself. Yes.

Paul Holder:
Yes. You have

Josh Schachter:
an enterprise.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’m sure My husband

Jon Johnson:
would disagree. Ignore them for a second. No. But, you know, curious how what you did and what you built from a CS standpoint at Troops, transitioned into how you view the organization that you’re building right now. You know, kinda give me some of the threads. Right? That that’s as broad as I’m gonna make it.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, I think like, you know, it’s the classic, maybe it’s cliche in the CS world. I get it. But like really putting the customer at the center, you know, of everything that you do.

Paul Holder:
I think If you have a, someone who’s just a CEO, that’s just an engineer or somebody who’s just done sales or something like that, you know, oftentimes Their strength lies in different areas. I, you know, I’d like to think, you know, what, what was my background, what we try to structure OnRamp was by saying, Hey, the customer, we’re in business because of our customers. Our easiest source of growth is our customers. And, you know, We should really do everything in service of our, of our customers. And I think a lot of companies talk about that because it’s a great soundbite. Like of course everyone does But actually doing it, I think is a whole different thing. And I think a lot of companies struggle to do that. And so, and so what we’ve tried to do is really say, Hey, let’s really key in on why our customers purchase our, you know, early on we said, hey, let’s, let’s try to do all the best practice things.

Paul Holder:
Let’s make sure we know why people are buying us. Let’s make sure we’re tracking them through that process. Let’s make sure that, you know, the folks that are the key stakeholders are engaged with us both on a product level, but also on a company level. And those relationships, putting that time in now is going to pay off handsomely down the road as we continue to grow scale. So I think it’s just that lens is like different than maybe what some other folks get. And so anyway, that’s, that’s kinda how we approach, that’s kinda how we approach things here.

Josh Schachter:
Why are people buying you? So when you go to customers, you know, it’s a serious question. Outbound or inbound?

Jon Johnson:
No, no, I love it.

Josh Schachter:
When you, when you identify Yeah. I don’t have a way with words, John, when you identify, like, what’s that, what’s that killer hook? It’s actually not that one I wanna say, Cause that’s a solution. What’s the pain, the killer pain that you’re solving for them?

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and especially over the past year, I think this is, This was always true, but especially over the past year. People are saying, oh my gosh, this onboarding process is really complex and we’re throwing people at the problem. And I love people, but people are really, really expensive. And what’s happening is our customers are getting a really shitty experience. They’re, they’re getting, You know, they’re not just working with 1 person from my customer. They’re getting bombarded by 3 or 4 by SEs, by CSMs, by account managers in, in, in SAS and non SAS.

Paul Holder:
It’s operations teams. It’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a billing and credit team. It’s a review team. Like it’s incredible how the complexity of the org gets shunted on the brunt of the customer. And so when they come to us, they say, Wait, we need to simplify and streamline this in a couple ways. 1 is we need to make it dead simple for our customer, as I kind of alluded to before. But 2, we can’t just keep throwing people at the problem. And so if OnRamp can help automate, streamline, make us more efficient, and give us visibility across what’s happening across our various product segments, That’s going to be a huge win for us.

Paul Holder:
And oh, by the way, for many of our, many of our customers, if you could take our onboarding down from 3 months to 2 months, that is a direct, That’s the easiest 5% bump to our bottom line that we’re going to have as a business. So like, let’s go. Right? So, so that, that’s the kind, that’s kind of what people come to us and they say, it need process needs to be better, but also, like, I can’t just keep throwing people at the problem. So help me not do that.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. No. I love that. And and just as a comment, Josh doesn’t like it when we swear Podcast. Okay. Sorry.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It’s a joke,

Paul Holder:
Paul. Please don’t have a link in the

Jon Johnson:
Keep it fucking PG.

Josh Schachter:
We talked to you, John.

Paul Holder:
You know. Yeah. I know.

Jon Johnson:
There no. That’s what I hope that’s what I wanted. I wanted. Yeah.

Paul Holder:
That was the vibe.

Kristi Faltorusso:
We can have no pants, but the cursing, it really Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Okay. A little bit back on track. One of my favorite things that we did last year is we kinda talked a little bit about, like, what we see as the future of customer success. Right. And and you are in a unique position where you’re you’re literally building a tool that is either run by CS teams or supporting CS teams in the law office. Right? So, you also said something in the last line, you know, humans are expensive, right? We don’t necessarily want to replace every human with tools, but we want to make sure that humans are doing what humans are good Yeah. What do you see as a differentiator for future CSMs? Not tools, not AI. Miki can talk for hours on that.

Jon Johnson:
But, like, What do you want the people to focus on this year in CS, and stop fighting for to let the the AI overlords take over?

Paul Holder:
Yeah. But I, I think it is, it’s an interesting point you brought up. But, you know, that I think is right. Is that the goal is not eliminate people. I think that’s, that’s the bet. That that doesn’t necessarily Well, this is not our goal. But Sure. Sure.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. But, you know, even our goal, you know, is not to do that. It’s to elevate people. Right? Because what people shouldn’t be doing This cat herding and wrangling and communicating all this, project management with all the like PMP’s and all that. It’s wonderful, wonderful and great. But, but I’d like to think, how can we get CS people elevated in the conversation and closer to revenue? Is like that’s that’s our, That that’s my biggest thing is like, I think CS is still viewed very much as kind of a cost center and a, oh, how many people do we need to support this number of customers. And I think like really, you know, what teams are starting to wake up to and what we’re going to continue to see is, Where’s your growth coming from in 2024? It by the way, it’s slowing on the new logo side. Times are hard.

Paul Holder:
So CF now is going to be the star of the show when it comes to like customer growth. And those relationships are more important than ever. I’m really excited about like where these people are gonna take their relationships and be more front and center in the orgs that they’re a part of. I think it’s it’s been happening, but I think you’re gonna see that accelerate in in 2024.

Jon Johnson:
Gosh. I love that. That’s great.

Paul Holder:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Christy, what do you got?

Kristi Faltorusso:
Well, I wanna know more about your experience transitioning from a director of customer success to a cofounder. Yeah. Like as that that professional transition, I’m most interested in that. So talk to me a little bit about what that experience looks like. You went from running teams, That acquisition with Salesforce into them starting your own company, what were some of the experiences, challenges, things that you’re navigating, learning curves? Because unless you went to cofounder school, which Josh clearly did not, I’m just curious how you prepared yourself for that.

Paul Holder:
Is Is there any way to prepare yourself? It’s I

Kristi Faltorusso:
mean, I have no idea. I’m not a co founder.

Paul Holder:
I’m asking you a call. No. No. Yeah. That’s that’s the question to the void. I’m screaming into the void.

Josh Schachter:
Somebody prepare me.

Paul Holder:
It’s like somebody Yeah. I was hoping Hey, I. I was hoping you guys would have an answer for me. Yeah. Exactly. No. It’s a great it’s a great question. It is vastly different, right? Like sitting in a functional role is very different than being the person that now is responsible for the functions, but also managing a board and like managing investors.

Paul Holder:
And you know this, going into the co founder journey, you know this, like I, of course, like hypothetically or, you know, Yeah. You know, you know, when I talked to Dan and Scott and they talked about all, to take the troops example, and they talk about all these things. I’m like, cool, cool. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, That doesn’t seem that hard. Like cool, that that’d be easy. Like I can totally do it.

Paul Holder:
And then you actually get into it and you’re like, holy crap, there’s so many moving spinning plates at any given time. I think to prepare myself, I mean, like most people, I think getting a really good mentor is really important, right? Like surrounding yourself with other founders, people who’ve gone through The same thing, kind of commiserating and like, you know, staring successes and saying, hey, this thing that’s on fire, is it actually a fire that needs to be solved? Or is it just A soup du jour that like will will blow over. Being like, figuring out like where to raise that flag and not raise that flag has been something that like, I have, you know, that’s been a learning for me, certainly. But, but yeah, I mean, You know, it definitely is a difference, you know, between, you know, leading a functional area versus leading entire company. And, I’m still learning every day on how to best do that. Right. But Hey, jumping to the deep end. My favorite way to go.

Josh Schachter:
I really like the shade of purple blue on your website, onramp. Us.

Paul Holder:
Thank you. I was supposed to have the background. I have a lame background, so I apologize. This is like my deep crappy home office. It was supposed to be the cool purple and blue. Most people liked it, but Thank you, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
It’s a very, I don’t know. It’s just a sharp shade of purple blue.

Paul Holder:
Thanks. I had absolutely nothing to do with that, but yeah, I’ll pass, I’ll pass the kudos along.

Josh Schachter:
Cool. Well, Paul, it was awesome learning about your journey with OnRamp and Troops and

Paul Holder:
the

Josh Schachter:
bridges in between and the lessons and whatnot. Thank you so, so much for being on the episode. I hope we didn’t we probably did, but I hope we didn’t scare you away from being vaccinated.

Paul Holder:
Oh, you did. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. You definitely did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
He’ll never be on this podcast again. Yeah.

Mickey Powell:
Yeah. We’ll be hearing from his lawyers.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Dope. But I

Jon Johnson:
I will say I will say Before we just Josh just ends the episodes too, so he’s probably gonna cut me off right in the middle of this. But, like, your vibe plays really well into, like, our, Like Vybe as well. So I feel like it’s a good match. You’re a great guest. You have great energy. I love everything that I’ve read about your products, and It is absolutely solving a problem in the market. So

Paul Holder:
Thank you, John.

Jon Johnson:
Thank you for what you do, and and I really, really wish you the best in success. And a happy exit. Can go back down to that cafe or whatever in Miami, and hang out with Josh some more.

Kristi Faltorusso:
That was Josh is invited there.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Josh got kicked out.

Paul Holder:
Yeah. Yeah. No. No. You guys, I appreciate it. Really?

Josh Schachter:
You said

Paul Holder:
yeah. You guys are a lot of fun for sure. So I’m happy to help out in anyway. And, you know, wish UpdateAI the best, of course. So founder to founders.

Josh Schachter:
Thank you. That’s awesome.

Mickey Powell:
Alright.

Josh Schachter:
Mickey. Happy Monday everyone. Right. Nicky, you What’s

Jon Johnson:
the last word for Nicky?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Take us out.