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Through more than 50 captivating conversations, we’ve had the privilege of engaging with distinguished guests, including Customer Success leaders, founders, and a few amazingly talented authors who wrote books not about Customer Success, not about customer-facing teams necessarily, but whose thought leadership can be easily applied.
This week’s episode is a spotlight episode with the key takeaways from three insightful conversations with
– Kindra Hall will discuss how to craft compelling stories and narratives to connect with your customers.
– Geoffrey Moore emphasizes the importance of redirecting budgets during downturns and patching up issues within customer success.
– Kelly Leonard shares practical exercises on how to build better relationships and handle challenging situations using improv techniques.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about these fascinating insights and how they can be applied to your work in customer success and beyond.
Checkout the full episodes with
– Kindra Hall on Spotify | Apple | Youtube
– Geoffrey Moore on Spotify | Apple | Youtube
– Kelly Leonard on Spotify | Apple | Youtube
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[Un]churned is presented by UpdateAI.
Josh Schachter [00:00:04]:
Over the past three months, six months, we’ve spoken to many prestigious people, lots of customer success leaders, lots of founders, and a couple of really amazing authors who wrote books not about customer success, not about customer facing teams, necessarily, but whose whose thought leadership can be easily applied. And there’s so many lessons in what they wrote for customer success. So this week, I want to bring you bits and pieces, the most important bits and pieces of three conversations I had.
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Welcome to [un]churned, a show about the leaders and innovators of companies who have forged incredible customer relationships and stories you can use to advance your own career. Here’s your host, Josh Schachter.
Josh Schachter [00:00:52]:
Hey, everybody, it’s Josh. Founder and CEO of Update AI. Host of unchurned. This week we’re doing something I think is really cool. I’m very excited about over the past three months, six months, we’ve spoken to many prestigious people, lots of customer success leaders, lots of founders, and a couple of really amazing authors who wrote books not about customer success, not about customer facing teams necessarily, but whose thought leadership can be easily applied. And there’s so many lessons in what they wrote for customer success. So this week, I want to bring you bits and pieces, the most important bits and pieces of three conversations I had. One with Kinder Hall, who’s going to tell us all about how to craft stories and narratives that resonate with customers and also internally with our executive stakeholders. The next is Jeffrey Moore. Jeffrey is literally one of my business idols. I first read his book, Crossing the Chasm 15 years ago, and it’s driven my principles in building products to this day. And I sat down with Jeffrey and we just discussed the current state of the economy, the downturn and how to deal with that. And the last one is Kelly Leonard. Kelly runs Second City, which is the infamous, the most famous, the most amazing studio for improvisation in the country. Actors like Steve Krill, Tina Fey, the list goes on and on, have come out of there and have worked directly with Kelly. And he tells us about the book he wrote yes and, which is all about taking principles of improv and applying that to communication. So we’re going to talk to Kelly about how to use yes and when talking to customers. And what do you do when you can’t actually use yes and what’s the substitute? First off, let’s hear from Kendra. All about story arc and narrative of storytelling and how to apply that in.
Kelly Leonard [00:02:45]:
Our day to day.
Josh Schachter [00:02:47]:
Now, as the company founder and constant businessman, I need to talk about my own stuff, right? Yeah. But what was interesting is you said, no, name the character. Right. And my colleague and I recently decided that with our company, we focus on customer success as a core function for a lot of companies, SaaS companies out there. And we realize that what’s happening right now in the world of the economy and in SaaS and this downturn we’re seeing, and everything you’re having are having a tough time. Sales teams and salespeople, unfortunately, in this moment, and customer success managers who own existing customer revenues most of the time are having to step up, but they’ve always kind of been like, in this, like they’ve always been in the shadows of sales. And so we thought it reminded my colleague and I reminded us of Rosie the Riveter, that during wartime, the women are asked to step up and show their strength, and in some ways, that reminded us. So we named our superhero Rosie to go through this journey as a customer successor. I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe that’s good. Maybe you could tell me.
Kindra Hall [00:04:06]:
Well, there’s good, and then there’s things to think about as far as that goes. But you’re right to have a person that they can think about. And I would also just add this. As sales are struggling customer success experts, this is not only is it your time to shine by necessity, but you actually know the characters that you’re working with if you’re trying to tell customer success stories and equip your salespeople because they need those stories now more than ever, you’re the bridge. You’re the one who knows them by name. You’re the one who knows what they’ve been through.
Josh Schachter [00:04:49]:
Yeah. When I read your book, and the reason I wanted to have you on the show is the relevance of what you talk about. It’s so relevant to the world of customer success. And I was thinking about different use cases where there could be huge value. How do you sell your company vision to your customers? How do you elicit stories from your customers? I know customer marketing is increasing. How do you share your own story? You always have to be advocating for yourself, and I see that now on LinkedIn and all over the place. How do you share the story of your customers once you’ve elicited those stories? How does customer success share the story of their own impact? Basically, there were all types of different kind of applications is what I saw in my current role at Update AI. The concept of having a market narrative fit came up right. Like, there’s your product.
Josh Schachter [00:05:43]:
Sure.
Josh Schachter [00:05:44]:
Does that work? Does it solve a need? But then it’s just like, does your narrative fit into the arena of what you’re doing? I want to try to blend a couple of those story types together in telling you my story and get your feedback and really critique, if that’s okay with you, Kendra.
Kindra Hall [00:06:02]:
You got it. Let’s see what we can do.
Josh Schachter [00:06:05]:
So this is unedited raw, and you’re going to blast it back at me here. I want your candid feedback.
Kindra Hall [00:06:11]:
Okay, you asked for it. Here we go.
Josh Schachter [00:06:13]:
All right. So I haven’t rehearsed this either, to my own detriment here so I’ve been running Update AI for a little over two years now, about two and a half years. And prior to that I was working as a consultant, a Boston consulting group. And in consulting, it’s just there’s lots of communication, there’s lots of presentations, lots of communication, lots of notes, all kinds of things like that, that’s in many ways how consulting in that type of world can make their revenues. And we were moving really quickly and information was getting lost from these fast moving, high performing teams. And so I said, how can I make sure that everybody stays on the same page each week in all the work that our team is doing and all that we’re accomplishing? And so the very first kind of inception for Update AI was just that. It was like, how do we take all of the key information for the team? Whether it’s here’s all that we’ve accomplished, here’s, all that we have to do here’s, all the action items, here’s, the blockers, the open questions, and distill that down into a quick update, into a quick narrative that everybody gets on the same page for. Then we jumped into this and we started interviewing and kind of understanding different functions and verticals. We realized that meetings were really kind of the central point of communication for lots of teams, especially during COVID going to this remote working world. And then we said, okay, great, let’s solve meetings. We don’t want to just be a generic meeting notetaker, so to speak. So we started talking to different functions about understanding what they would need. We came across customer success managers, realized that these folks were in meetings with customers every day, underappreciated and underserved in our opinion. And they had a lot to follow up on after calls with customers because accountability to the customer matters. So we said, okay, how can we help them the most? And that’s where we developed our algorithm for detecting action items so that we are in calls with customer success managers with their customers, detecting all the action items automatically for them so that nothing slips through the cracks and we can relieve some of their stress in back to back meetings so that they can stay focused on the customer conversation. And that’s the start of our company. And there’s a whole story about the vision, which to me is actually more interesting. But I’m not going to go there. I feel right now, Kendra, like I just had a really long and uninteresting monologue pick that apart.
Kindra Hall [00:08:45]:
Okay, so I’m just going to give you kind of a few things because I was taking notes. But here’s what was great, is that it was clear why you came to this. There was a moment in there when you said that information was getting lost. But here’s where things kind of fell apart. So the good news is that’s all I can say nicely, here’s where I want to go back to the four components. We need characters. And in this situation, you’re one of the characters and we can explore whether or not we need to have another one because usually the narrator, the teller of the story, is an inherent character and it’s valuable to have another character in there. We were missing the emotion, which we can talk about. But you said the information was getting lost. And here’s where the misconception about emotion in a story in business is that it needs to be dramatic and it’s information getting lost probably isn’t super dramatic, except that it’s emotional. Like why we’re doing all of this work where it’s frustrating for the people who are putting in the effort and they know that they’re not maximizing the work that they’ve done because the information is getting lost. I would imagine that there’s a lot of time loss. I would imagine that there’s a lot of efficiency. And these are people these are people who are like, I’m good at my there’s so much good stuff here and I can’t do anything with it because I’m just trying to keep track of the stuff. So even having not knowing anything about what except for the little that I know, I would imagine that that is the emotion. And anyone that you’re telling this story to, because we tell stories to audiences for reasons, and the reason you would be telling this is because they know how that feels. Right. They’ve felt that before. You know what I mean?
Josh Schachter [00:10:46]:
Bring the emotion. Bring the emotion.
Kindra Hall [00:10:47]:
Exactly.
Josh Schachter [00:10:49]:
Now let’s turn to Jeff Moore.
Josh Schachter [00:10:51]:
What’s the first thing to do in an economic downturn?
Josh Schachter [00:10:54]:
Let’s find out. Now is the time where we should all be investing in our existing customers and expanding them and not losing them. Right. But is there some psychology that just keeps drawing people to sales and to the new shiny toy and how do I objection handle that and help have that conversation as a platform that is right now approaching decision makers and customer success?
Geoffrey Moore [00:11:19]:
Yeah, so let’s be clear. With tailwinds, it’s smart to be worried about the top of the funnel. I mean, basically, processing the top of the funnel will lead to stuff at the bottom of the funnel. We’re not worried about budget being redirected or whatever. We’re just going to try to make it make it work. First rule in a downturn is don’t take your customers budget for granted. Whereas an upturn and in good times, you do. In good times, you qualify a customer. If they don’t have budget, you don’t call on them. But in a downturn, even if they do have budget, they may not have permission to spend it. And so then the question is, well, what do you do instead? And this gets to the provoke your customer point in the article, which is, in a downturn, you have to either create budget or more likely, what you have to do is redirect budget. And the way you redirect budget is you say, look, there is a place that you’re not investing that you should be investing. And you make a very compelling case for saying now is the time for you to move the budget from A to B. And by the way, once it’s at B, I can compete for it because that’s the reason I’m telling you this story, is I want to sell you what I do, but I can’t sell it to you if you don’t have budget for it and don’t have priority to spend that budget. And so the provoked sales call was all about you need to reframe your understanding of your business. You need to reframe the understanding of the risks you’re exposed to and the opportunity. It’s mostly, by the way, about risk, not opportunity. In a downturn, people are much more worried about plugging the leaks in the boat than they are about sailing to Tahiti. So basically it’s like, okay, how do I fix the so it’s got to be very immediate and very pressing and it’s usually a problem or a risk because they’ve had good times. They’ve kind of taken the kind of shoved it on like tech debt. Tech debt. Well, a little more tech debt to be okay, it’s going to be okay. And all of a sudden it’s like, no, it’s not going to be okay in a downturn. A couple of things will happen. First of all, how do you lose money in a downturn? Well, one is you spend the money at the top of the funnel. By the way, people are interested, they care, you work them through the sales cycle. But when you get to the bottom, a whole bunch just defect either because they couldn’t get the budget or it wasn’t going to get prioritized. So think about not only the absolute cost but the opportunity cost of processing all those deals to no outcome. That’s number one. Number two is this notion of you look at customer success and you say, okay, customer success is really key to retention. Obviously it’s an important thing. But the customer success Manager doesn’t control their budget. It’s not their budget. It’s the chief revenue officer or whoever you want to put that highest level who says, and I’m going to take my budget, I’m going to put some in marketing, I’m going to put some in sales and I’m going to put some in customer success in a tailwind. She say, I’m going to put more in marketing and more in sales and I’ll do customer success, God bless. But even if I have a bunch of churn, I’m growing so damn fast at the front end, I can live with certain amount of leaking in the boat in a downturn. Just turn the priority absolutely around. Your chances of getting a new logo in a downturn are dramatically worse. Not just sort of worse, they’re God awful worse because in a downturn the last thing you want to do is onboard a new vendor. So on the other hand, your installed base becomes your practical point of growth. First of all, by the way, let’s just not have shrinkage. How do I maintain my base? But the good news is the money they have, they’re going to spend it with their existing vendors. And the bigger the vendor you are, the more likely it is that you’re able to consolidate around you. So if you’re GAINSITE competing against salesforce in a tailwind world, GAINSITE has a lot of advantage. It’s got one product to sell, it knows how to sell it really well. There’s people got budget for it, but in a downturn, salesforce has the advantage because they say, well, yeah, gameside is great, by the way, but we add our little module here and really, frankly, you got pretty much what you need. And by the way, I can give it to you for seven cents and blah, blah, blah. But why would someone in a downturn spend money in customer success that you could compete for? And if the answer is, well, your customers will be happier. Happiness is not exactly the currency of a downturn. So well, in a downturn, if you lose customers, first of all, we said customers is your best opportunity. But if you lose customers, the impact, because you can’t replace them, the impact on your business model is devastating. And so most people say, well, we’ve been tracking our NRR, we’ve been tracking our Attrition and our retention rate, we have statistics, it’s blah, blah, blah. And part of the provocation, I think, at this point would be, yeah, but that’s not you cannot expect that to continue in the future. You’re going to be under enormous pressure. What are you doing to improve your take the leaks in your boat and patch them now because you’re going to head into a stormy weather and if you have leaks in the boat and so I would make it all about leaks in the boat. And then your software has very interesting capabilities to patch a whole bunch of leaks in the customer success boat.
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Josh Schachter [00:16:32]:
And lastly, kelly.
Josh Schachter [00:16:33]:
Leonard.
Josh Schachter [00:16:33]:
This was such a fun conversation I.
Josh Schachter [00:16:35]:
Had with Kelly, and I know you’re all going to benefit from hearing again the techniques of improvisation and how they apply to business day to day communication. But one thing that came to mind is you’re constantly getting requests from customers, whether you’re in sales or whether you’re in customer success post sales. And oftentimes maybe that request like you can’t fulfill immediately or there’s reasons behind the scenes that like, no, I could never get that done. We have a backlog or my manager would say this or whatever. And so how do you I don’t know. How do people naturally yes. And when the situation when you can’t. Yeah, when you can.
Kelly Leonard [00:17:12]:
Okay. Yeah. I actually have an answer for that. When we first started this project at University of Chicago, a small group of our top sort of performer teachers, directors were meeting with a handful of professors, and these are sort of major figures in the field. And we took them through that yes. And exercise. And they were like, this is great. We already have the evidence that can prove why this works. And they asked the question, what do you do when you can’t? Yes. And the person but you need to stay inside the conversation. And we didn’t know. They didn’t know. But they went and looked at research that existed and looked around. We went back and practiced some stuff out on stage. And when we came together, we had an idea, and we took this idea, turned it into this exercise. And there’s a paper coming out next year, and basically the idea is thank you because so when you are in a disagreement or a situation where you can’t agree with the person but you need this thing to keep going, you first thank them, which sets off the gratitude part of the brain. Everyone loves that there’s no threat. And the because is crucial. You find something, anything, no matter how small, that you can agree with, with what they said. Thank you, because you just brought something to my attention that I don’t know how to solve, and I’d like to figure out how to solve it. And it can be used in a variety of different ways. And I think this will resonate for anyone who lives in America right now that we are all about the canceling. We are all about not listening and not talking. And guess what? That doesn’t get us anywhere. We have to all do this together. That’s what the human experience is about. And I’m not saying you have to put up with unjust systems. I’m saying in many cases, we let low stake, low level dumb stuff get in the way of a potentially flourishing relationship. People want to be in delight, and they can get that feeling with a human relationship. So one of the things that’s always bugged me, especially in recent years, is I’ve worked with the business schools and with businesses is in businesses how much they don’t pay attention to what we know about human behavior. Why would you not use the science of human behavior? Because you probably have human beings selling to other human beings.
Josh Schachter [00:19:23]:
Any tips around dealing with somebody who’s a big fetcher? They like to complain. There’s escalation, right? We all know that folks that talk to customers have to deal with complaints and escalations. Is there anything to disarm or does that just go back to the thank.
Kelly Leonard [00:19:39]:
You, because I don’t know. I mean, comedy is a superpower, which also means it could be used for evil. That’s true, too, and I don’t want to suggest that people who don’t have the ability use comedy don’t. I use it to diffuse things all the time, and it’s very useful, and sometimes that’s finding a common enemy. So I think if you can, like, what’s the cavetching? And how do I get the spotlight off of me or our company or something like that? That can be very effective as well. I do not enjoy toxic people, and I would suggest that if someone is toxic, you need to stay away from them. And then if you’re in the business of like, well, that’s my job. Find another job. This is not healthy.
Josh Schachter [00:20:22]:
Well, that’s a good point, too, as well.
Kelly Leonard [00:20:23]:
Yeah, no, look, I do lots of public speaking, and I’m on lots of panels, and often somebody like, I agree with everything you’re saying, but I got this boss, and they won’t do this, they won’t do that. And I’m like, quit. I don’t know what to tell you. You’re not changing this human. What we know is that people don’t leave companies. They leave bosses that they don’t like. And what we also know is that you can have a business that has a bunch of bad bosses, but if you’re in the one team that has a good boss, you’re fine. You’re fine because your day to day. So I have a great boss right now. I have the best boss I’ve ever had in my career at Second City. And this person listens to me, values what I say, challenges me, makes me understand what I am actually responsible for. And there’s a high degree of trust that goes both ways, and we check in on that, which is like, are we still in this good place? And it’s like, I work harder, I work smarter because of that relationship. And I’ve had mediocre bosses, and it’s been okay, and that can be fine, too. But if there’s a note I would give young Kelly, it would have been, hey, when that real bad boss came along, you should have left. Now I like that I’m still here. I’m glad I’m still here. But there were years in terms of my working life here where I was like, no, that was fairly miserable for a couple of years and suffer. Yeah. And then understand that I have value outside of the brand that I’m associated with. And I think we all are. I think we all have a fear that we’re not going to find the thing or the grass is always greener. I get all that. But no, sometimes you just got to get out and look younger generations understand that we are no longer working in the place where my dad worked WGN radio and TV for 33 years. I’ve been here for 34. My wife’s been here for 36. That is a rare thing now. And that’s it.
Josh Schachter [00:22:12]:
If you enjoy this medley, let me.
Josh Schachter [00:22:14]:
Know and we’ll do more. Thanks again and see you next time on unchurned.
Josh Schachter [00:22:21]:
Hey, guys, it’s Josh. Don’t hang up. If you enjoyed this episode, you know what? Even if you didn’t, I’d love for you to give us a rating in itunes or Spotify. And after you do, email me, Josh, at Update AI with the name of your favorite charity and my company. Update AI will make a donation on your behalf. I’d love to connect with each of our listeners. Send me a LinkedIn request and I’ll accept it immediately. Just go to www.blog.update.ai/LinkedIn and it’ll redirect to my profile. Thanks.