The Impact of SaaS Economics on CS (Plus Much More!) with Christine Raby | Episode 048

Speaker 1: 0:03

That South Park episode where they're talking about how the aliens will take their jobs. Like in my head, I'm thinking AI is here to take our jobs right, but really AI is a tool to help uplevel what we're doing, and we have to remember that our core value in customer success is truly about delivering that experience that results in future growth, right, and so how can we do that in a way that's maximally efficient and that makes our lives better?

Speaker 2: 0:26

And, once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Success Podcast with me, alex Trukovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as I seek out and interview leaders and practitioners who are innovating and building great scaled CS programs. My goal is to share what I've learned and to bring you along with me for the ride so that you get the insights that you need to build and evolve your own digital cs program. If you'd like more info, want to get in touch or sign up for the latest updates, go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Hey, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2: 1:02

It's episode 48, which I can't believe. We're getting closer to that 50 episode mark, which I guess is just another number. But I always kind of, when I started this whole thing, actually just about a year ago I kind of gave myself till episode 50 to see if it was going to be a thing. And it's a thing, so we're going to keep doing them, which is great. Do have a little something planned for episode 50, though Bit of an announcement as well, so stay tuned for that.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Today's episode is a really cool one. I've been a fan of this person for quite some time and it's always very humbling when you meet someone who can just seemingly do anything. So today's conversation with Christine Rabi is fantastic on multiple levels. First off, she has an incredible backstory. By all indications she was going to spend her life in medicine and healthcare but then that kind of took a right hand turn into health tech and she got obsessed with customer success and has been just applying her you know her intelligence and smarts towards this thing we call CS and specifically she's focused in on startup founders and making them as successful as possible in their post-sale journeys.

Speaker 2: 2:30

So it's a lovely conversation with Christine. She brings up a ton of really really helpful things. We talk about kind of the state of startup economics and how that has an impact on CS. We spend a fair amount of time talking about things unrelated to CS, but then also like AI tools and you know where leaders focus should be. You know owning revenue, not owning revenue. You know we get into that a little bit and you know she's also. If you're not following her on TikTok, you should go follow her on TikTok for my fellow TikTok addicts out there, because the advice that she offers and she's really career oriented there, has a ton of great advice and does a lot to empower women in the workplace. I could go on and, on and on, but I'll let her speak for herself in this conversation with Christine Rabi, which I enjoyed and.

Speaker 2: 3:30

I certainly hope you do too. One of the funniest comments that I got from one of my guests not long ago I forget who it was actually they were like you're like the NPR of CS podcasts, and then he elaborated and he was like I meant it in kind of like the sweaty balls SNL NPR way Not necessarily that you're a brilliant journalist. I was like thanks.

Speaker 1: 4:01

Wow, what a non-sector that was. I was not expecting that to go there.

Speaker 2: 4:07

No, I wasn't really. Yeah, yeah, so that was interesting, but I don't know. Welcome to the NPR of CS podcasts, I guess it's. It's really nice to have you and and I've been a big fan of kind of watching all of your amazing content in various places, and I am a self-identified TikTok addict and so it's also lovely seeing you on TikTok and all the value that you provide there, because you provide a lot of really crazy valuable and I'm going to let you talk here in a second, I promise but you provide crazy valuable, career-oriented, just great content that really anyone can benefit from. But especially your work in empowering women in the workplace and those kinds of things is super cool. So I'm just excited to have you.

Speaker 1: 5:07

Thank you, and it was lovely to be here. Also, I will take Flattery all day, every day, so thank you so much. And likewise, I really appreciated your digital approach to client success. I do feel like today, customer success is undergoing a similar evolution that marketing did, let's say, 10, 14 years ago, where it went from being very about the vision and the dream to now effectively. If you're a digital marketer, you're like a physicist chasing AI models, right?

Speaker 1: 5:33

And I do feel like we're experiencing a similar way in our discipline of customer success, so I'm really excited to collaborate with you on this digital effort and thinking about how we're bringing technology to our discipline to help make it better.

Speaker 2: 5:47

Totally. I mean, it's like you know, I feel like a lot of ways we are emerging out of the dark ages where we've we've been to the place where we've just thrown money and people at this thing called customer success and and that is no longer a thing, and so now we're like putting our big people pants on and trying to figure out how you know marketing has done email marketing for decades and how you know product has done in product for a long time, and putting it all into one house. So I think you're right, it is a very exciting time to kind of be in CS and talk about these things, but in some ways it also kind of feels like hey, we're finally growing up a little bit.

Speaker 1: 6:32

I really like it, though, because it's such an apprenticeship discipline that today I can come to a founder and I can say here are the metrics you have to be thinking about, as they relate to the overall health of your customer success org. And if you're going to invest I don't know a million, 5 million a year, depending on the size and scale of the company in your post sale operations, you better darn well be looking at your net retention. If it's 120 or above, that's top of market. If you're not in an industry that has a CAGR of above 10%, should you really be investing in this area?

Speaker 1: 7:02

I don't know and engaging in more of the kind of disciplined, numeric conversations with founders, whereas a few years ago, typically conversations are more along the line of how do you want your customers to feel right, which I appreciate, of course, a little bit of an art and a science, but for me, I'm really liking having clear benchmarks and metrics to be able to say hey, here is what a strong performing team looks like and here's how you can differentiate between the levels of people on your team. And then you can tie that to compensation, because when you align individual contributor compensation to the company's goals, everyone wins typically right, it's just a beautiful kind of synergy.

Speaker 1: 7:39

I'm like restaurants understood this a long time ago in the States, right, you make a lot of money in a restaurant if you're like upselling, and so does the restaurant. It's this beautiful world, and I feel like we're bringing that kind of very practical blue collar benefit to a white collar environment in a good way.

Speaker 2: 7:55

I love that perspective. And there's this raging debate right now whether CS should be in revenue or not in revenue and all this kind of stuff, and I'm like why are we even talking about this? Of course you want to be in the numbers and of course you want to be part of the equation, because that's part of your relevance as an organization, right?

Speaker 1: 8:17

You know, what's funny is I grew up in sales and I did fun fact once tell a chief revenue officer that sales is not a real job, because he tried to hire me, my title was director of business development. Right, I'm at a startup. It's called Noom, so today it's quite a large business. But I joined them just post-series. A right the hire and revenue leader, and he identifies the fact that I have brought on the first four enterprise accounts for this startup. But I got my start in hospitals right, so I knew very little about business. What I learned I learned on the ground and he said wonderful, here's your new title, You're going to be director of sales, You're going to be helping us grow the business. And I look at him square in the eyes I'm not lying to you, Alex. And I was like that's not a real job. Okay, Salespeople only get paid on commission and I do real work and I expect a real salary. God bless this man. He did not fire me on the spot.

Speaker 1: 9:10

He educated me about what growth meant and how to drive value in an enterprise context. And luckily for me very luckily he and the rest of that team really brought me under their wing and taught me that really it's about solving problems and that that's how we grow a business. But what I found was that, although I like the hunter sales aspect, I really love getting to know the customer and then doing that kind of mental math of realizing all right, especially in healthcare, it's such a regulated, complex industry. You have these 10 systems that we have to integrate with and you have these three other vendor partners and these 10 budget line items. How can I make this work so that you love us and we keep growing over time? And also we're happy because we don't have to be a custom dev shop and I love that interplay of that complexity. So that's how I ended up in client success. But having grown up in sales, to your point, when someone says, oh, should CS live in sales or not? That's exactly my same reaction. Like that's the wrong question, right?

Speaker 1: 10:07

Like we're all on the same team. We're all driving value for our customers, so I don't think it really matters if it lives in ops or in sales. At the end of the day, it's about delivering a great client experience and using that experience as leverage to grow the account.

Speaker 2: 10:20

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely, and not only grow the account, but grow the accounts you know, yeah, grow the business. Because I mean, there's so much of those, those customer experiences that you kind of collect along the route that are just crazy relevant in other customers and so many of us kind of fail to collect those and fail to utilize those in a pre-sales motion or in renewals motions and all that kind of stuff, which is just crazy to me because it's like nuggets of gold sitting on the ground that we're not picking up.

Speaker 1: 10:55

For sure. The other day, I was reading an article on HBS that was talking about how the hyper-personalization of sales is now de rigueur in enterprise. So, if you think about a direct-to-consumer brand, they get very niche about their market and they think, all right, we're going to sell to 52-year-old women who own poodles and who live in condos in Florida named Susan, and they tailor the whole campaign just for Susan, right, and this has been the motion now for several years. But today we're seeing an increase of that on the enterprise side. And, to your point, what I see, at least in my industry, which is healthcare technology, is that it may seem like this massive industry, right, you'll hear people say, oh, the US healthcare industry is worth $3 trillion annually, which is, I mean, something like 50% of the global healthcare market cap is just the US, which is why every international company wants to play in the States, of course, which is like a story of misaligned incentives and a bit of a mess. It's a huge opportunity, but it's such a small industry, right, yeah, and so if you don't really deliver for your one customer, you're not going to expand.

Speaker 1: 12:00

And every time that I've seen a healthcare technology startup succeed, and truly 3 to 10x year over year. It's because they did exactly what you said. They found those nuggets of gold right, and they went to this one customer in this one orthopedic shop in the southeast and they said hey, who are your friends? You know? Turns out they've already been talking to their friends about the startup. They go to a regional conference. They don't get a booth, they just roam the, the halls, have meetings with these people. That one account turns to five, the five turned to ten, the ten turned to fifteen, etc. And it's all because you did a really good job with one customer, particularly in these highly regulated industries where the barrier to entry is so intense, because once you're in, you're in, but if you muck it up, yeah everybody's going to know it's that, yeah, right, it's, it's so interesting, it's going to know.

Speaker 2: 13:00

you know that way and you're right.

Speaker 2: 13:02

I mean, you know word of mouth is a big, is a big aspect of of I would say, you know, not just in healthcare, but in general, like, if you know whatever, whatever SaaS solution you provide to whatever cottage industry.

Speaker 2: 13:16

I talked to somebody, not recently, you know recently, that is building a SaaS platform for the pool service industry and I'm like, yes, of course you're doing that because there's lots of pools out there and there's lots of people servicing pools, and but you know, to your point, like it's like these, uh, and I know we're going like way down the rabbit hole already, which is cool. That's why I love this, this uh, talking to folks like you. But, um, you know, like, like you, you, you, you, you, the way that you work with one customer or one group or one you know cohort of people, um, you know, just just spreads like wildfire. If you do a really great job, you know it's going to be like, oh, yeah, you're going to become the recommended kind of solution for that that thing that you, you do. But if you, if you mess it up, then equally it's going to be hard, to hard, to catch up on that one.

Speaker 1: 14:11

Well, if you look at any kind of market distribution, I always think about ice cream. I'm sure you've seen this chart where vanilla ice cream has 60% of the market, chocolate has 20% strawberry, and then it's a long leading tail, and so no matter what you do, I don't care if you're in the pool industry. Naturally that makes sense. You have SaaS for pool Sure.

Speaker 2: 14:29

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Or if you're in something like FinTech. Ultimately, whatever your space is, people are going to want to look at the top one to three and they're going to invite you to the request for proposal process or the request for information. They're going to look to you as a market leader. So how do you get to those top three? Personally, in my opinion, the way that I've done it is by delivering an amazing experience and doing things that aren't scalable at first, and then kind of building out the system as you go.

Speaker 1: 14:59

So for example, at Arterra which is formerly known as WellHealth, we get a customer named Memorial Care and they're in the Orange County area. It's a pretty large health system. They've got about four hospitals there. Early customer of ours that we got through an investor relationship at Cedars-Sinai right Came out of a Cedars-Sinai accelerator, so Memorial Care we sent a whole team on site. This company was based just north of Los Angeles so I think there were six people there for GoLive. I mean, we just kept hammering them with a very strong on-site presence.

Speaker 1: 15:29

Well fast forward a year and their executive over innovation gave me a ring and said hey, the UC systems, which I think there were eight now at the time there were seven All of the major UC schools UCSF, ucsd, ucsb all have a big hospital.

Speaker 1: 15:46

They're looking for an RFP for the thing that you do in patient communications and we recommended that they choose you because Memorial care is affiliated of course with three of the UC health systems and all the doctors work there too, and so we got kind of first dibs to come to the table and of course we had to compete but, we won in part because the sales team was strong and the product was wonderful, but in part because we really went above and beyond in a way that was completely unscalable for that one customer who we knew could be the linchpin in that area.

Speaker 1: 16:17

And this is a story I've seen play out so many times, which is why one easy way to make my blood boil is for a technical leader to say, yes, but our current customers aren't the ones who are going to get us our future customers. And so should we really wait our current customers needs equally with our prospective customers. And look, if you're pivoting industries, you know, if you're going from health systems to payers, or you're saying we're going to completely change who we are as a company, that makes perfect sense, but in this instance that was not the case and it was a really fast way for steam to start coming out of my ears right to think of course, they are the key to our new customers.

Speaker 2: 16:56

That's what this whole thing is about yeah, it's like you know, know it's it's ignoring the expand part of land and expand Like you know. Then you just go have some tea or something. Wow, Well, you know it's a whole, not really. I just you know coming off of uh, I have been a this. This has nothing to do with our topic. Um, I have been a severe coffee addict for probably the better part of my life, like we're talking 30 years of severe coffee drinking habit.

Speaker 1: 17:47

So far, is it just black coffee? Yes, is it like the cappuccino situation? Just all of the above, like what are you doing?

Speaker 2: 17:55

It's all of the above. Like you know, I'm a fan of black coffee. I'm a fan of espresso, Maybe a little bit of milk in there. I'm not a big sweet coffee person. But, sorry, my printer is all of a sudden printing.

Speaker 1: 18:12

I thought you were getting a fax for a moment. Yeah, totally. My fax machine is going off. It wants its fax machine back.

Speaker 2: 18:22

I have a new Gainsight integration into my fax machine that tells me whenever a customer goes into a red health score. Just kidding good way to keep yourself up at night, right, that thing's going while you're sleeping, it's cranking them out cranking them out, but my point is like I've been a very recent convert to tea and it's I, my eyes have been opened um to the world of tea and, uh, just the massive amount of variety there is and how horrible coffee actually tastes. So I've been lied to the last 30 years anyway.

Speaker 1: 19:03

I don't know podcast you got to give me your top tea recommendations, because I feel like there's a certain stage in everyone's human evolution where they realize that tea is in fact delicious and I realize this is a thing I should know. But every time I think about getting into that world I just feel a little intimidated, right like, what is an oolong relative to a blue tea or a white tea? How do I know I'm choosing the right one? Which one's right versus organic.

Speaker 1: 19:27

That just feel like there's a lot of info out there. Yeah, and I've worked for starbucks in college, you know I feel like I already know a lot about coffee and like I can navigate that landscape quite effectively. So let me give me your top tea hacks after this. I'm into.

Speaker 2: 19:39

I don't think I have them yet, but I am looking forward to going. So my dad lives in Vienna and right around the corner from his place there's this tea shop and you walk into this place and it's like walking into something off of a Harry Potter set you know where. It's like wood paneling everywhere. You've got jars like all over the place. Like wood paneling everywhere. You've got jars like all over the place and they're like blending tea for you right there with loose leaf, that's like that. So I'm I'm looking forward to nerding out on that, cause that's always a place that I ignored. I was like, ah, tea, whatever. I should start a tea podcast. Okay, so while we're kind of off off the topic a little bit, I do want to get just a quick like who are you, the person you know? Kind of CS origin story, like where did you come from? Like what got you into? Like health tech specifically and healthcare, and what is it about you that, uh, really identifies with, with you know that industry.

Speaker 1: 20:50

I got my start in healthcare by virtue of first being a professional equestrian. My first job in high school was buying and selling race horses. I grew up riding horses and after years of blunt force trauma, of being thrown from every horse imaginable into everything from a saguaro cactus to a metal fence, my body kind of gave out yeah and I couldn't pursue that avenue anymore.

Speaker 1: 21:14

And, luckily for me, the women at the very fancy stables that I worked at in scottsdale, arizona, sat me down and they said, hey, um, what are your grades like? And I was like they're excellent. And they're like, oh okay, what are your test like? And I was like they're excellent. And they're like, oh okay, what are your test scores like? And I said, well, I think they're good. And they looked at the numbers and they said we're going to get you a scholarship.

Speaker 1: 21:31

And so they helped me understand that the kind of undergraduate work that I had done in the equestrian arena could be translated to a state university. So I ended up getting a full ride at Arizona State. But because I studied equine science, I already had all of these biology classes, physics classes, etc. Which naturally translated well into a health sciences degree. So that's what I studied and I thought I'm gonna go to med. School. Seems like a good option for me. You know that's what people do when they want to build a career they go to law school or med school. Those are the two options, right, because I grew up very blue collar and, through the way of applying to medical school, I ended up working at Mount Sinai at a hospital in New York city, and I piloted this program called the national diabetes prevention program, which, at the time was only being delivered in person.

Speaker 1: 22:16

We're talking at a YMCA and it's basically a program that reduces your chances of developing type two diabetes by 60% for 10 years, which is way more effective than metformin, which is great.

Speaker 1: 22:26

I won a grant for about $3 million to scale it over several years, and so I went looking for a company to build a mobile app for this thing, cause I thought every patient I talked to says they don't have time for this, but everyone also has a smartphone, so how can we get this thing into a smartphone? Right, that was my goal, and I ended up meeting the SVP of strategy at Noom, which at the time was doing consumer weight loss and still is primarily known for that, and he was actually looking to get into the pre-chronic chronic condition management space and to enter into the enterprise healthcare arena. So I ended up getting into medical school, didn't go joined Noom full time instead and first started off more in that business development side of things, but then quickly landed in the client success arena and realized that was really the area that I love to thrive in, because I love getting to know someone very well and getting to that level of depth where there's a lot of complexity with the account and then using that to naturally grow over time.

Speaker 1: 23:19

So, that's how I ended up in client success in a roundabout way, started studying health, found my way into startups and then figured out that I love working with people to solve their problems, and customer success is truly, I think, the discipline that allows me to do that the best.

Speaker 2: 23:34

Fascinating. What a cool story. Okay, you probably get the award for most unique story on the podcast so far.

Speaker 1: 23:44

I still write horses for fun, but not professionally anymore, Not into cactuses. Time I fell off and landed on a cactus. I mean, I was a kid so you can imagine like a cartoon you're going across the desert, you just go and then you land. And I landed straight on my bum on this little kind of barrel cactus and I hollered and my trainer just like pulled over laughing. She just fell over like the horse ran off. No one had time for the horse. I learned very quickly not to fall off when they're cactus around.

Speaker 1: 24:18

You don't want to do that.

Speaker 2: 24:20

No, that was a good for. I mean, if you're going to fall, you know, fall into a cactus. Teach you not to do that anymore. Yeah, it's not a good idea. Yeah, yeah, exactly podcast. And I ask all my guests, including you, the same general question, which is to say I'd love your elevator pitch if you had to describe digital CS to somebody who wasn't really in the know. What is this whole thing we're calling digital CS these days?

Speaker 1: 24:50

I love this question because it does have that digital bent to it which is really unique, and for me, digital customer success is the discipline that helps customers derive maximum value from your company's products and services using advanced technologies. So for me, it's about technologically empowered client experience, and that means having a matrices by which you identify high touch and low touch modalities of interacting with your customers and you blend those things such that you're not constantly grinding out the high volume, low value things all day, every day. Right, you can outsource those things to robots. Instead, you're really focusing on that customer experience element and the human element that right now, at least for now, can't be outsourced to a chat, gpt, an open AI, a Gemini, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 25:37

I love that you hit on that, because there is this. You know, one of the things that I get asked about quite often is this whole thing about is AI and, you know, digital going to replace me? Like is it here to take my job? And I'm like, no, it's a tool. Like it's it you, so you don't have to spend five hours making a PowerPoint and sending the same email over and over again and doing all that kind of stuff. Let's not do that and let's spend some time with your customers. How about that?

Speaker 1: 26:12

Well, and let me ask you this have you ever spoken to a single customer success representative and said the question do you feel like you're more proactive or reactive, and have them say anything other than so reactive? But I wish I could be proactive right All the time. So for me, exactly that's exactly the point. Although there are lots of kind of fear inducing stories like Klarna laying off, what was it 600 employees saying? In my opinion, that's bad business management. If you have a business and AI can take away some of that workload and you aren't already leveraging that, then your leadership did a bad job there. This, for me, is about helping those CS reps get out of that grindy support ticket. Let me hunt down another interface issue.

Speaker 1: 26:55

Right, let me hunt down another interface issue right and getting into the how can I leverage this account's connections in this particular part of the industry to create white pages, white papers, one pages, all the things that you need, all those assets that are repeatable both in implementation and the sales process and also help grow that area of the business, whether it's regional or industry specific?

Speaker 2: 27:20

Yeah, absolutely, and I think that this kind of gets into my next question, which is really just around your take on the state of CS and CX. So, for those that don't know, the big thing that you missed in your intro is that you're founder of Deliver Delight, which you know helps people do this stuff, and so you, by virtue of you kind of, you know, being in the space and talking with lots of different leaders and different people and whatnot, you probably have a pretty good kind of insight into, like, what's the current state of CX? What are you seeing in terms of trends, how people are treating their organizations, maybe a little bit differently these days? Lay it on me.

Speaker 1: 28:11

Yes, thank you for that. I'm the founder of Delivered to Light and I today, with my team, partner with mostly founders of early stage, stage growth startups, and the key things that I'm seeing in the startup landscape, with a special lens through healthcare technology, are that number one there's a strong emphasis on the growth aspect of customer success, more than I've ever seen. As we all know, anytime that you're in a kind of startup environment, you want to maximize the valuation. You maximize your valuation by maximizing how much money. You're in a kind of startup environment you want to maximize the valuation.

Speaker 1: 28:39

You maximize your valuation by maximizing how much money you're earning per year on a contract basis, and the way that you do that, as well as by boosting your margin like that's the other way that you can boost your valuation right. And anytime that you've already sold a customer, when you go to upsell them, that cost of customer acquisition immediately comes out of that budget line item, which means that your margin on upsell, resale, cross-sale whatever is typically 20% higher than your margin on net new sales. And so if you're thinking about proactively looking at your book of business and thinking, all right, I have these three use cases already deployed. But here are the top 20% of my customers by their gross revenue, not by how much they're paying you today, I don't care about that but by their gross revenue. Where can I add enough value such that I can take that $10,000 account to $100,000, that $100,000 account to a million dollars and that I can leverage that relationship with that account to tap into the accounts in that same region or in that same specialty area?

Speaker 1: 29:38

And so I do feel like today more than ever, founders are seeing their current customers as the key to future revenue, which excites me, because this is something I've been very bullish about for many years and I'm loving to see that more and more founders are thinking that way.

Speaker 1: 29:52

And then on the startup side, I will say there's some positives and negatives here, particularly for those smaller startups.

Speaker 1: 29:59

I am seeing more of a dissolution of what I would consider to be a traditional customer success team, and what I mean by that is, instead of coming and hiring a VP of customer success and then staffing a huge support team, I'm seeing more and more startups say well, we only have 30 or 50 people, so how can we think about the support function as a holistic discipline and everyone wears the client success hat instead of hiring specifically for customer success? So the pros there actually are. That means that your customer is truly at the heart of everything you do, because if you have an engineer doing solutions engineering, then when they're writing code, they're thinking about your customer right. If you have a seller who also is responsible for the renewal, they care about the experience, which is great. And on the flip side you may be seeing for these earlier stage companies we're talking C to Series A we may be seeing a slightly stronger dip in terms of hiring for CS-specific roles.

Speaker 1: 30:49

But I do think that there's still more opportunity for them on the solutions engineering side or the implementation side or the solutions architect arena, which would be customer success by different names. So there's still a lot of growth there, but kind of a dissolution of what would be considered a traditional customer success org, which is kind of nice because sometimes if you have that organization right, it can be a dumping ground for any perceived customer issue.

Speaker 2: 31:15

For sure.

Speaker 1: 31:16

And it's much better, I think, for everyone to kind of just say no, the customer's at the heart of what we do and we're all here for our customer because that's how we're growing our business.

Speaker 2: 31:26

Yeah, I've, I've sensed this growing um notion as well, where you know traditional, traditional CS orgs, you know, are like the post-sale owner of the account and the customer journey and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 31:39

And I think in certain size businesses, especially as you grow and you scale, that makes absolute sense. Like you're going to want account management, you're going to want kind of that oversight or whatnot. But I think what you're hitting on is super important, especially with early growth stage companies, where if you start and you really instill the sense that everybody is part of the customer journey and everybody has inputs into it and everybody should be documenting certain areas of it and you know and all of that kind of stuff, that's immensely powerful. I mean even I'm even thinking about you know, immensely powerful. I mean even I'm even thinking about you know finance teams and IT teams and all those kinds of things, like if there is a CS lens that everybody within the company kind of shares, and that's insanely powerful. Just yes, tactically and in what you do every day, but more so as just a mindset.

Speaker 1: 32:36

Yeah, actually putting your customer first, and within that, the only other trend that I'd identify, that I wanted to highlight for this conversation, is specific to technology.

Speaker 2: 32:46

And.

Speaker 1: 32:46

I have seen a strong advent of AI driven chat tools and a layering in AI to the current toolkit that already exists.

Speaker 1: 32:56

So, whether you're using Zendesk or HubSpot or Help Scout or Help Juice, being able to tie in something like a drift or a Bing chat or the embedded kind of AI chat function and then really leveling up those pre-built templates. For me, that kind of goes back to the question that always springs to mind when I think of this as that South Park episode where they're talking about how the aliens will take their jobs. Like in my head I'm thinking AI is here to take our jobs, right, but really AI is a tool to help uplevel what we're doing, and we have to remember that our core value in customer success is truly about delivering that experience that results in future growth, right. And so how can we do that in a way that's maximally efficient and that makes our lives better? And that's what I'm seeing on the chat side, which I'm personally excited about, because I don't know about you, but I don't like being up at two in the morning answering no road support tickets like we've all been there yeah, and I think there's tremendous lessons.

Speaker 2: 33:53

I think we kind of alluded to it a little bit earlier, but there's tremendous lessons that we can take from b2c in this whole thing as well, because b2c has kind of mastered a lot of this stuff. Um, story time, uh, my, the storm door on our front front door, um, the, the, the closer mechanism or whatever busted didn't work, made the door slam close, right. So um, and I, you know, went online, did the whole Googling thing, did the Amazon thing and nobody stocks this thing. And so I reached out to the company that makes the storm door on chat, because I'm antisocial sometimes, and the chat bot was like yeah, you know, go take, uh, go take a picture of this little label. And uh, I did, and it scanned it and it told me exactly what part I needed and it put it on order and it was like you're, you're, we see that you purchased your storm door within the last X number of years, so this is free, we're going to ship it out to you.

Speaker 2: 34:53

No humans involved, no humans involved, and I was like how? First off, holy shit, this is amazing. Second of all, though, the next day I get a call from the company. It's a human being calling me saying hey, how was your experience? What could we have done better? How's your door? Like. So my point is like they're using this AI chat bot in this really great, innovative way that made me go, wow, this company has their stuff together, and then, instead of having a human being like okay, this is the part number you need and all this kind of stuff, the human is calling me and providing value and really like hammering home that this company actually kind of cares about its customers. I was like, yes, Awesome, that's amazing.

Speaker 1: 35:48

I've never had that experience with a chat bot. I recently did, though, need an arborist to come, because I live in an area with a lot of very large trees, and this hundred year old Oak tree in my front yard had a couple of limbs that were looking a little bit suspect, so we thought let's just take those down before they take down the house.

Speaker 1: 36:06

I told you I don't even know how many times I had to contact different companies to try to get anyone to come out to give me a quote. It's very clear to me this is going to be a very long and drawn out process until I found a company who clearly has been purchased by a PE firm so just saying that for now and I sent them and they had a little form, I filled it out and then in an hour they had a preloaded Salesforce page that had a quote already laid out in it and then they had taken some Google Earth shots of my front yard and said if it's this tree so smart, here's what we're thinking. We're going to have someone come out and look at it today. And then they did. They came out to they use Calendly to schedule. They're like pick your Calendly time for our team to come out.

Speaker 1: 36:50

They came out two weeks later, did a great job. Crew came on site, talked to us, went through the whole checklist and then they called me back two weeks later and said how was everything? And do you want to refer us? And I was like five stars, 100% referring you. Also, why doesn't every other vendor? I mean, how much time and money would you save even if you were to misquote consistently right, but you?

Speaker 1: 37:13

would still win so many bids just by leveraging this effectively seamless workflow, whether it's via chat love that, or through some sort of Salesforce or HubSpot, enabled landing page Right, and I mean you think about that's an arborist, but that model is anything any services type model out there, absolutely Especially ones that are hard to get at.

Speaker 2: 37:42

If you make it easy, the money's there. Business has just got to pick it up.

Speaker 1: 37:48

Yeah, I often got the pushback on the sales side and I say this lovingly, I do love my sales colleagues, I work very closely with them. Sure, a customer would come to us and they would say we want a blue widget, right? And I would say, great, let's just scope it out for you and price it and then package it and ship it. But then generally the response that I would get on both the sales and the engineering side was whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to be thoughtful about this, I don't know, right. And so I eventually came to the CEO of this last company I was working with most recently and I said look, you are.

Speaker 1: 38:18

This is how much money I'm estimating that you're losing on a quarterly basis by not doing basic scoping for professional services and then packaging it in a way that helps your customer see, you're not nickeling and diming them, right, yeah, but rather you're solving their problem in the way that they want you to, which, by the way, this is very standard in healthcare technology. Everyone has an electronic medical record. You're actually required to have one for the government. And if I want to I don't know stand up a new interface. I'm going to pay for the interface, but I'm also going to pay a professional services fee and a 20% annual maintenance fee to the company and they're not starting to work until those things are paid upfront, because it's a services, business and so we found that by just adjusting that model, the professional services team, which admittedly was small, went from being a cost center to a revenue driver, because we could go

Speaker 1: 39:05

to customers and say hey, for a customer like you, we normally see a package of X number of hours that's to do projects with ABC. You can talk to these guys over here. They can tell you what that. It's great. We got this gal over here. She recently did this work, you know. And then the customer was like oh, absolutely, you're speaking my language and you're proactively thinking about the kinds of work that I'm going to need you to do, which is so much better than waiting for them to come to you in this reactive capacity and saying I want a blue widget and then having everyone you know throw their hands up like no, no, we're not a custom dev shop. I'm like, no, but you know, we are in an enterprise field, right? So there's going to be some tailoring going on, yeah we should price for that and charge for it.

Speaker 2: 39:46

Totally. I love this model. I'm seeing more and more of this model in terms of like service subscriptions as well.

Speaker 2: 39:53

Absolutely which I think is freaking brilliant because you know, obviously you want your customers to achieve maximum value and you'd like that value to hit as soon as possible. And yes, you can have an onboarding team that specializes in getting somebody stood up and all those kinds of things. But then you know, nine times out of 10 after onboarding it's like crickets and it's like there's your support team. You know, go to town. It's like crickets and it's like there's your support team. You know, go to town. Versus if you say to the customer look, here's a couple of service subscription options. Option one is mandatory. It's 20, 20 K a year. We're going to check in with you every single month. We're going to work in sprints to get X, y, z done. Customers like, okay, you know, and it's not like this uphill battle. And then, to your point, you become this part of the ARR renewal cycle because ideally you will have provided a lot of value throughout the course of that services subscription and the renewal will be a foregone conclusion.

Speaker 1: 41:00

The most beautiful example of this I have is from Twilio At the time I was working for a company called Arterra. It's in the patient communication space and we were sending millions upon millions of patient messages a month. It was easily 10 million plus a month. So we were actually one of Twilio's larger customers at the time. We were negotiating this contract and I'm working with this guy. I think his name's Randy. I really liked him, based out of New Jersey.

Speaker 2: 41:22

I mean his name's Randy. What's not to like you can?

Speaker 1: 41:25

imagine this human right. He's like, based out of Hoboken. This is the situation. So I'm talking to Randy and I'm like hey man, your support. I don't even have swear words strong enough to describe what a cesspit it is All right. What an awful fire swamp of a support team you have. And he said, oh, hang on, let me just look at the level of support you have today. And he said, oh well, well, that's why you have a free support tier. Why would you have a free support tier? You're one of our larger customers. I actually recommend this enterprise grade thing, which is 8%, and customers like you use this and you get a dedicated or designated technical account manager with a designated Slack thread and you get committed to our return time, where we have an SLA that we have to hit and if we don't hit, it you'll get a discount, and I called the CEO because we're in the middle of negotiating this really large, multi-year, multi-million dollar contract with them whereby there's a referral element for us.

Speaker 1: 42:20

It's a complex deal and I told the CEO I was like we need this thing.

Speaker 1: 42:27

I don't care, I know this is going to be north of $100,000 a year, but I've got to show you what it means for us and for our ability to deliver a good experience for our customers, because this is the pass-through entity and if something goes wrong for us, we can't just say it's a black box of Twilio.

Speaker 1: 42:42

We have to get to a greater level of granularity and we have to have a higher level of fidelity, because that's what differentiates us from our competitors in the marketplace. I need this and we got it and everything changed. Everything was so much better, but Twilio had this beautiful, simply laid out packaging right that very clearly described what the levels were, how much each one cost, and that, for me, was absolutely worth it. Now they could have lost that on money because we might not have renewed, we might've tried to build it ourselves right, but instead it gave us a better experience and they just charged for it so that we were not experiencing a situation where they were trying to foot the bill for something right they were smart, they knew they needed to fund that section of the business and then, effectively, this is a services arm of their company.

Speaker 1: 43:25

So what I often see founders do is they'll say, oh well, I want to maximize my car on the SaaS side because I'm only getting a 3x multiple on anything professional services or it's a one-time fee. I don't care about one-time fees. So I'm going to waive the one-time fees and I'm going to maximize SaaS. And if you want to do that, my number one contract hack for you raise your prices 10%.

Speaker 2: 43:48

Yeah, absolutely Just, full stop Just raise them 10%.

Speaker 1: 43:51

I don't care if you're 10% more than your competitor. If they really think that you're that much better, they're going to pay the 10% more. Like think about the last time you went to a really nice restaurant you liked you know that one versus the one on the street that you don't like as much. Are you willing to pay 10% more? Yes, you are.

Speaker 1: 44:04

So that's the only way to pay and then make a professional services fee line item for 10% and then waive it. Just that, there you go. You know what I mean. Like you're done.

Speaker 2: 44:16

It's good.

Speaker 1: 44:17

And that way you can say look, it's a SaaS revenue, because it is. But at the end of the day, you have to recognize that in order for you to compete in the B2B SaaS space, you need people. At least today, you do. Maybe in 20 years, chatgpt can just do all this for us. I don't know. But today you do need people to actually make this work for you in the enterprise environment, and the best thing for you to do is to create a system for those people to be able to earn their own keep.

Speaker 1: 44:42

Right and to have proactive packaging that allows for your customers to get the experience you want them to have at a price point that makes sense for them.

Speaker 2: 44:50

Right, exactly, and I mean you know, and to that point I mean, if you do it right, the ROI is like a no brainer, it's killer. It's a no brainer, right? Yeah, it's kind of like you know you buy a really expensive car but then you never change the oil in the car. It's like, okay, stupid, don't do that.

Speaker 1: 45:15

No, and the reality is you know. You need to know also what the level of effort that your customer should experience on their side. So when I'm selling to a large health system. I will tell them you need to hire someone to manage this software, because I knew, at least most of the time, I know I'm selling against an incumbent, which means that there's already someone there who's already managing that element of the work, and oftentimes they'll think, oh, this is a startup, so we can just peel this person out.

Speaker 1: 45:42

But you can't. You need someone there to make sure that the software is truly meeting the business's needs on a tactical, practical level, and that person needs to be responsible for the success of the technology within that organization, because if you have someone doing that work and you just pull them out, there's going to be a vacuum and nothing's going to fill it.

Speaker 2: 46:01

Totally. Yeah, exactly, we're going to take a hard left here for a second, Because I know that a lot of the content that you put out there, um, is really focused on um, you know, career advice and those kinds of things. But you also, you know, focus a lot on um, you know, equity in, in, in equality in the workplace and especially with regards to, you know, to women and all that kind of stuff. But I wanted to um, you know, give you a little bit of time just to just to talk through through some of those things, because I think, anytime that we can speak about these things, no matter what the form. This is the digital CS podcast, so we're talking about this, but I think, I think it's important to, like, really highlight some of those things sometimes. So I'd love from you, kind of your take on where we are today, but then also, like, you know, what are the things that everyone should essentially be doing in order to help you know the solution towards the equity and inequality problems that we still have.

Speaker 1: 47:05

No, I really appreciate that and I do think it blends nicely into digital customer success, because customer success for me is this landscape of varied humans.

Speaker 2: 47:14

right, we're like this model band of bits you know, and that's beautiful.

Speaker 1: 47:18

And one thing I will say is, if you want to encourage people who maybe have a non-traditional business background or who didn't study specific computer science but who want to work in technology, customer success is a beautiful entry point into the world of technology because really all you have to do is be likable, right? Everyone wants like a golden retriever customer success person. So if you've got the good attitude to start with.

Speaker 1: 47:41

that's 80% of the battle, right. And then you also have to be a good problem solver. So you have to like working with people and you have to like solving problems and you have to be willing to learn on the job. And I've hired hundreds of people into this function from all walks of life and oftentimes they'll be referred to me by someone, and so often I'll talk to someone and they'll say, oh, but I'm not really technical, particularly women. Or oh, but I'm not really business oriented, Right.

Speaker 1: 48:06

And so for me, as I'm thinking about practical, tactical ways that we can encourage diversity in the workplace full stop. Number one encourage people from non-traditional business backgrounds to think of themselves as having the capacity to be very successful in this kind of startup technical environment. Right To say look, this is just skill acquisition, you made it through university or you made it through community college or you made it to where you are today Right, so you can learn this skill. To just being encouraging, I would also say having an open mind to hiring folks from different walks of life. Like, I've gotten a lot of flack for hiring people who went to community college. I went to community college.

Speaker 1: 48:44

I don't put that on my resume, naturally, but I did and I personally find that oftentimes these folks are wonderful did, and I personally find that oftentimes these folks are wonderful at what they do. They just didn't have the same starting place that someone who maybe went to a four-year school did, or they weren't willing to take on a lot of debt to fund their own education.

Speaker 1: 49:04

Right, which is also smart, especially when you're talking entry-level customer success role right, it's a good job, it's a great career trajectory, but it's a good entry point for you. So if you've got someone who maybe has a couple of years of experience, right, but they also have that drive, they can be phenomenally talented there and just encouraging them to say, yeah, you can be technical here, and also, when you have them in the door, prioritizing, doling out those high visibility projects and speaking about them in a positive way, you know. One example that springs to mind for me is a woman who's a director today. She's got a team of 15 people. She's crushing it.

Speaker 1: 49:39

But when I first started working with her, the positioning for me was we have this woman let's call her Brianna, that's not her name and in Bree she has an attitude problem. I think we're going to fire her. And I was like whoa, whoa, whoa, what, why? What is the attitude problem? You know Well, it turns out Brianna was a classically beautiful woman, if you imagine, like a Barbie just walking up to you, one of the most beautiful women you've ever met, face to face. This is this woman and she also is an extreme questioner. Okay, and she also is an extreme questioner.

Speaker 1: 50:10

So when you meet her, you expect her to present in this kind of stereotypical way of this, being this blonde sea bunny, that she is right, but she hits you hard. She's like what do you mean, fire HL7. What's this in her face? Why do you want to do this? And she has this really intense personality which I love about her.

Speaker 2: 50:26

Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 1: 50:28

And I was like I don't think she has an attitude problem at all. I just think that she's staffed in the wrong area of our business, right, like let me take her, you know. Like let me let me work with her.

Speaker 1: 50:36

She's going to work for my team I want to hire her and they were like, okay, and it took me a year of intentionally positioning her in specific projects and showing the work that she was doing for my executive team to see her capacity and to really see her as someone who was doing good work and she's done incredibly well at that business. But I think it's for you as a leader, identifying talent and then looking at how you can maximize that talent and intentionally saying I want more people of color in leadership, I want more women in leadership, and so for me, if I'm just taking all the inbounds, look, 80% of inbound resumes are most likely going to be from people from traditional schools, traditional backgrounds, a lot of people who do not give you that kind of diverse bag. And so you have to be intentional about opening the door and people can say, oh, you're lowering the standard or you're kind of using an unfair bias here or discriminating.

Speaker 1: 51:28

But I would advocate to say that you are trying to create the world you want to live in, which means intentionally giving opportunity to people who may not have found it otherwise, and then letting them succeed or fail right Because their success, ultimately, is their own.

Speaker 1: 51:42

They have to put in the work and it's going to be harder for them than for anyone else. But you, as a leader, have the capacity and the potential to say I'm going to be really intentional here and I'm going to hire a recruiter and I'm going to tell this recruiter I only have four director positions. Three of them are held by white men. This fourth one is not going to be held by someone that looks like everyone else. I need you to show me profiles of different types of candidates, right and just work like that.

Speaker 2: 52:05

Absolutely. Yeah, I learned kind of a very similar lesson several several years ago when I took a leadership role on an implementation team for software that serviced primarily the hospitality, like restaurant, industry. Yeah, and you know by nature of what it is we did. We hired probably 70, 75 percent out of hospitality, out of restaurants, a lot of these folks. It was their first gig in tech period and so you know, you got, we got a lot of folks who didn't finish college, did community college, did whatever.

Speaker 2: 52:52

I never had to do a single session of customer service training, customer skills, like these people. Of course they did. I mean, that's your restaurant analogy earlier was like in full display and it was one of the most wonderfully diverse, you know teams with all kinds of different people on it that all you know got along, they had this kinship and it was just like a beautiful thing. And so you know, similarly to you, the lesson I learned was hey, look, you know, I really don't. I don't care where you went to school, I don't super care what your experience has been, I care who you are as a person, I care who, who I'm sitting across from, you know what motivates you, what drives you. I want to. I want people from diverse backgrounds that maybe have had challenges, that can thrive because of those challenges and those kinds of things. It's just it's fascinating to me how you know, tech hasn't really caught on to that. It's starting to, but it's like still kind of in the dark ages that way. I don't know.

Speaker 1: 54:05

Yeah, Attitude and aptitude, man all day, every day, and you know, I thought you and those people were probably really grateful too for the gig that they had.

Speaker 2: 54:12

You know having been used as bumping around the restaurant.

Speaker 1: 54:14

It's exhausting work. You know when you're doing it like that. It's exhausting work, it's moving to something else until they were, like, so jazzed right To move their career in a different direction. So yeah, weren't you know, putting in 30 000 steps a day anymore? You might underestimate the amount of bread rolls and french fries you eat.

Speaker 2: 54:36

Tell me about it. Tell me about it. Tell me about it. I. I am extremely sad because we are out of time. Um, and the reason I'm sad is because I've really enjoyed this conversation and I know we have more to talk about, so we might do a part two if you're game for it, or we might, you know, continue the conversation on another platform of choice somewhere some at some point. But I've really really enjoyed having you on the show. Your, your unique, your perspectives are unique and healthy and full of massive experience, and so I'm I'm excited to share this with the audience and would love to give you a little bit of a time to A let us know where people can find you. But also, are there people you want to shout out? Is there cool content that you want to turn people on to? This is your time to promote what you want to promote or share what you want to share.

Speaker 1: 55:31

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for having me. Alex Love this conversation. I felt like it was wide ranging and overall very positive, so I really appreciated being invited to be on the podcast and, in terms of shout outs and CS, I would say, individual humans. Sarah Roberts, who you introduced me to, has success unscripted as a podcast, which is a very different kind of bent to this particular podcast that we're on now on the digital side, but really have appreciated getting to know her work a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 55:58

And then Jess Osborne, on the LinkedIn side, as a content creator at GoCardless, does a lot of really great work in customer success and I really appreciate just the tactical approach that she's taking on LinkedIn. And then on the TikTok front, I would say Diana in Customer Success, or Diana DeJesus. So Woman of Color talks a lot about how women of color can get their start in tech under Customer Success as a banner, which I love. And then finally, if folks are listening to this and they think I want to really get into this arena but I don't know where to start, there is a company called how to Break Into Tech and it's by Charlotte Sage. She also has a lot of free content on TikTok and she created a digital training program that you can do on your own for how to do data analytics, and she has had literally thousands of people graduate from her course and go from earning 40 grand a year to 90 grand a year using data analytics.

Speaker 1: 56:49

So folks, who are? Police officers, teachers who didn't have a traditional background. Um, she has a lot of really wonderful free content and I think the course itself is like 200 bucks, so it's really accessible and affordable to a lot of things out there.

Speaker 1: 57:02

Um, and if folks want to find me, I'm at deliver delightxyz, or hello at deliver delightxyz, and I work with mostly VC companies on their portfolio management side, founders and CEOs of growth stage companies who are looking to use their current customer base as a primary lever to drive further growth. So if you have questions about that, you can reach me at Deliver Delight.

Speaker 2: 57:24

Amazing. I love it. I love the name too. It's so good, puts a smile on your face.

Speaker 1: 57:30

I still think about Dungeons Dragons a little bit with a double D, but yeah. I like a good alliteration.

Speaker 2: 57:37

You know, you got a little bit of whimsy in your day. Absolutely, absolutely. I dig it Cool. Thanks again for the time and, you know, thanks for everything you do for the community. It's so great.

Speaker 1: 57:49

Thanks so much, alex. Have a great rest of your day, sir.

Speaker 2: 57:51

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital Customer Success Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. It really helps us to grow and to provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more details about the show at digitalcustomersuccesscom. My name is Alex Terkovich. Thanks again for joining and we'll see you next time.