SaaS Economics & Driving Customer Outcomes Digitally with Jay Nathan | Episode 056

Speaker 1: 0:03

The right answer for any company is not already written. You have to really look at your situation. You can't just take something off the shelf that worked in one company and assume it's going to work in another company. That's a recipe for disaster. I've done that before and I've screwed it up.

Speaker 2: 0:16

Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me, Alex Terkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. My name is Alex Turkovich. So great to have you back this week and every week. Special shout out to those of you who were in attendance at Matic's virtual scale and CS summit. That happened last Thursday. It was an awesome event so many great speakers and I had a blast, and you know, hopefully, those of you who tuned into the session all about the symbiosis of humans and digital emotions got a lot of value out of it of humans and digital emotions got a lot of value out of it.

Speaker 2: 1:32

Today's episode is a cool one because we have none other than Jay Nathan on the show, who is a CS legend he is. I mean, he needs no introduction, right? Jay Nathan has been everywhere and done everything in CS for quite a long time, has been everywhere and done everything in CS for quite a long time. He and Jeff Brunsbach both founded GameGrow Retain back in the day and these days Jay still works with Jeff as part of GrowthCurve and they have a fantastic new learning opportunity that they've made available. That's all about SaaS metrics, which is a really cool course. Highly recommend it.

Speaker 2: 2:13

I'll put a link down below if you want to go through that. In addition to that, jay is also CO at Turnkey, which is a relatively small and nimble organization that he's growing CS there and doing the thing, so to speak. So we talk about that and a bunch of other stuff today on this episode with none other than Jay Nathan. I hope you enjoy it, because I sure did. Hey, just real quick, before we get started, jay just emailed me and he said hey, I want to offer your listeners 20% off the course that we'll be actually talking about in this episode, and so if you listen to it and you decide that's something you want to go through, definitely use the link in the show notes and you'll get 20% off your registration fees. Now let's go. Hey, jay Nathan, how you doing? I'm doing great Good to be here.

Speaker 2: 3:12

Alec Thanks for having me. Dude, I'm so pleased to have you on. I think we've been dancing around this for like well, I've been podcasting for a year, so maybe it's been a year, I don't know and I've had your co-conspirator on, and he was I think he was one of the early. He was maybe episode four or five or something like that, I don't know. So it's nice to complete the package and get the whole growth curve formerly GGR team on the podcast. Hey look, I think you are probably one of the most maybe prolific voices in CS and have been for a while. You've like been there for a while and you've been out there for a while, and so I think a lot of people pay attention to your content and things like that. But maybe, maybe not as many people know your origin story. Perhaps, and specifically because I was doing some LinkedIn stalking like you started life as a software engineer, I believe.

Speaker 1: 4:07

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:08

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:08

What was that?

Speaker 2: 4:09

Tell me about that. And then, what led you into customer stuff?

Speaker 1: 4:14

Well, I would say it was into customer stuff before I was into software development. My parents were. They were entrepreneurs. They had retail stores and malls back in the day when there were, when malls were a thing, yeah, and so I learned from a very young age. I remember being in those stores at seven years old, standing on a crate, bringing people up at the cash register and learning my mom teaching me how to count, change and do that efficiently, and how she taught me. I don't know if I necessarily believe this anymore, but she always used to tell me customer's always right. If there's an issue, you just you make it right with them. You can argue that today, and certainly in our world you could argue that, but I think there's some validity to the way you deal with customers based on that.

Speaker 1: 4:59

So, anyway, I grew up in I'll date myself a little bit, but I grew up in the 90s and late 80s and 90s and by the time I went to college, computers were really just kicking in, something that everybody had. Actually, when I was in high school, I had a friend that had AOL and we all used to go over to his house to get on the internet and check things out and probably do stupid, naughty things. But it was when I got into college I got my first computer and I started teaching myself how to code almost immediately, because I was just something I had never even considered before having a computer to work on every day. And so I taught myself how to code and I ended up going to getting a business degree. My undergrad was a business degree at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. I got a concentration in information systems is what my degree was.

Speaker 1: 5:49

But through my entire college career I was teaching myself how to code and I built websites for people as on a freelance basis. I remember building a website I've never told anybody this before and I'll think I built a website for a guy that sold oversized basketball shoes. So he like specialized. He was in north new york, of all places, he specialized in carrying like size 13 through 20 basketball shoes. Yeah well, I helped him build a website for that and but I was working building database backed websites from. I built a whole platform for my fraternity, which I should have turned into a product, by the way. Sure, it would have probably been an amazing business, but I built a whole management system for my fraternity. So by the time I got ready to graduate I was super geeky. My wife used to make fun of me because on the weekends I would just read big books on Javaava and aspnet and, yeah, programming languages did you ever use file maker to make a web like?

Speaker 2: 6:49

make like a file maker? I never used on that before never used file maker.

Speaker 1: 6:54

I'm sure there's plenty of tools that I forgot that I use.

Speaker 1: 6:56

It's about the sketchiest way to make an e-commerce site so right but back in the day, actually, the first website I ever built was probably on GeoCities or AngelFire, one of those two. I can't remember which one it would have been, because there were website builders back then, very basic ones at least. So when I got out of college it was 2001. It was pretty much the worst time you could graduate, because the dot-com bubble had just come to a head. It was months before 9 11 happened.

Speaker 1: 7:23

I managed to get a job at a utility in north carolina where I was helping to build and maintain software for nuclear power plants of all things. It wasn't, I wasn't, I didn't have clearance and all that kind of stuff to do all the really niggity gritty. But we did a lot of training systems. We did any platform in and around. We my team managed 700 unique applications that were all custom bespoke. You didn't buy stuff a lot of stuff back then, and so I really got to cut my teeth and learn enterprise there. But I always considered the people in those plants to be my customers and I would go spend time with them. I would build the software and then I'd help go train on it. This is much longer winded answer than you're probably hoping for.

Speaker 2: 8:04

I love it, that's great.

Speaker 1: 8:07

That's really where I got started in tech.

Speaker 2: 8:09

Yeah, interesting. And that eye towards the end customer, which is a big gripe that I think a lot of product customer teams have with each other. It's like, well, you need to pay more attention to the customer and all that kind of stuff, but it sounds like that was ingrained in your DNA, so to speak.

Speaker 1: 8:28

Yeah, and it's easy to blame the product team or the engineering team for not being customer centric enough, but for me, you just couldn't keep me away from the customer or the user, right? That was just the way I was going to operate, not every engineer. That's probably why I'm not an engineer today.

Speaker 1: 8:47

I think I was actually a pretty shitty engineer because I was very focused on the technology, but I also had other interests in getting out from behind the technology and being really close to the user, which I don't always think makes a great engineer. Right Now I think the best engineers can blend some of that, but to me this is a and probably a theme maybe you've heard me talk about before and certainly I try to write about this. A lot is that it's an it's. The problem is not with the individual, is with the how we institutionalize and operationalize customer centricity. Institutionalize and operationalize customer centricity if that makes sense, yep, because it's always gonna be easier for a department full of engineers to stay down and stay focused, hit their metrics right, not get distracted with outside things. But you have to make interfacing with the customer or gathering feedback in some way yourself or watching users use your software that you write. You have to make that part of somebody's metrics if you want them to take that seriously as part of their job.

Speaker 1: 9:51

And I think that if you look at the, if you look at the sort of the modern departmental structure of a software company, it's a disaster for customer experience. It really is, because we've forgotten that. The customer experience. It really is, because we've forgotten that the customer experience is the combination of everything we do for the customer the way the software works, to the way that we market and sell it, to the way that we deliver it. It's not anything that happens in isolation. It's not just the UX, it's not just the onboarding team, it's not just the sales team. So the more we can institutionalize how we blur the lines, the better off we're going to be the better the company is going to be.

Speaker 2: 10:29

I totally agree with you. There's this growing sentiment, I think among CS leaders especially, that CS, yes, it's a team and it's a structure and it's an entity, but it's also like the strategy behind it, and one of the things I've been talking a lot about with people recently is specific to digital CS because I think, more so than any other kind of function or sub-function, you are wholly reliant upon other teams and organizations and departments to deliver on what you need to deliver. There's conjunction with not only product but marketing and sales and all of the different teams that are around the customer journey. You really have to work collaboratively across those teams to make sure that your life cycle is protected and that's so hard and I think, probably one of the number one things that I would look for in a CS leader, in a digital CS leader.

Speaker 1: 11:30

Yeah, let me ask you this Whose job is it to create a great culture for employees inside of the company?

Speaker 2: 11:37

Yeah, it's an amazing question. We were talking about this a little bit before we pre-rolled, right, because I gave you an example of like a CFO who was the cultural champion, but in some cases, this head of HR, in some cases it's like whoever and it's left to a committee or something like that. But so it's like I think I don't know if you're asking me a baited question, but I think it's like all over the freaking map and just like we have these struggles with the customer journey, we have these struggles with employee culture as well.

Speaker 1: 12:09

Well, yeah, it was a loaded question, to be fair, and the answer to me is it is the executive team, the CEO, everybody who has a manager director.

Speaker 1: 12:20

VP title so everybody who has a manager, director, vp title. Ultimately it's the individuals in the company who want to be leaders and who do lead from individual contributor ranks. It's everybody in the company. And so and look, I'm not saying that customer success can be distributed to like there still has to be a champion, there still has to be a leader who believes in it. But in most smaller companies that should actually be the CEO. They have to endorse it right.

Speaker 1: 12:50

As the company grows, maybe the CEO is very focused on fundraising or very focused on sales and marketing, as you have to be in SaaS and then you might have a CCO, or if you've given that responsibility to the CRO. They should be the person who champions the customer experience and the fact that we've got to deliver outcomes for customers across every touchpoint of the journey. For the customer to keep coming back. We champion with the product that we build the right things that customers need to have them continue to be a fit for us. A lot of companies are losing product market fit right now because there are way too many solutions and the dollars just aren't there. So somebody's got to champion it, but it really does. I love the way that Dave Jackson, dave Jackson. I love the way that he talks about customer success. It's an organizational capability. It's not necessarily a department, doesn't have to be a department for us to deliver it.

Speaker 2: 13:43

I loved what you said about the incentive aspect earlier when we were talking about engineering, because I think to put those two points together, like those things should and do have to come from the top, whether it's your CEO or your CCO, or I think we can just generally say the C-suite and if they're incentivizing their respective teams to drive towards things like a product adoption and those kinds of things, the other financial metrics, so to speak, will fall in place, naturally, because you're protecting your customers and you're protecting from leaving to go to a competitor and all that.

Speaker 1: 14:21

Yeah, one of the most customer centric executives that I ever worked for was a chief product officer, and what she brought to the company that I was with at the time was an outside in methodology we actually brought. I don't know if you've heard of a guy named Marty Kagan. He wrote a book called inspired, the Silicon Valley product group his name of his company. He gets free advertising here from me but it's awesome but she brought him and his team in to train our entire. I was in product management at the time, so that's part of my Goat Path career is I spent some time in product not in engineering, but in product management and we learned this methodology of how design, product management and engineering should really be working together to deliver the right solutions for our customers, and how to go engage with customers to go get the information, because it doesn't exist inside the building. You've got to go outside the building and we were in buildings back in those days, so we learned a whole methodology around how to go outside in and get the information.

Speaker 1: 15:25

We needed Not hundreds of interviews, but at least six. Go talk to six to 10 customers and validate what are you building, who are you building it for? What's the value? How usable? What does it need? What does usability look like and how feasible is it? And that's what the engineers covered. But those were institutionalized processes that became the way we work. And the way we work is our culture. It's not perks, it's not the benefits, it's the way we work together as a team, which defines culture. And so, anyway, so to your point, it can be any executive who can be the cross bearer for the customer experience, and in that case it was our chief product officer.

Speaker 2: 16:01

Yeah, I currently have a chief product officer. She makes it a point to meet with customers on a weekly basis, like she's got to meet with customers on a weekly basis, and I just absolutely love that because it sets the tone for the rest of the team. We're going to take a quick left turn because I do have. I'm obliged to ask you this question obligated, not obliged. I'm obligated to ask you this question because it is the Digital CX podcast now.

Speaker 1: 16:35

But what would your definition of digital CS be, if you wanted to, if you were passing somebody on the street and you wanted to explain it in elevator pitch terms. So my definition of digital customer success is really how do you drive automation and scale into generating outcomes? Right, we are all in a much different era today than we were even two years ago. I repeat this all the time, and I'm sure people are tired of hearing it, not just from me but from everybody, but this is post zero interest rate period world. We are in a different world, right, and so people are watching their spend. They're only going to buy solutions and renew solutions that are really providing value.

Speaker 1: 17:10

Now, if, for a long time, we have covered the value gap in our products with people and that has largely been in customer success, support, onboarding a lot of these roles, even in sales right, like when a product is hard to sell, we just throw more good salespeople at it. And right, like when the product is hard to sell, we just throw more good sales people at it and guess what? It goes off the shelf, yep. So to me, digital customer success, it actually starts with the product.

Speaker 2: 17:37

I actually have a little acronym for this. You want to hear. I love it. I love a good acronym abc2, ai.

Speaker 1: 17:40

It just happens to end with ai, abc, ai. So what that stands for is analyze, benchmark, communicate, consult, assist and iterate. And basically, if you look at that process of analyzing data, benchmarking it, communicating it to the customer how they're performing, this is a management consulting methodology, right Like? We're looking at data, we're creating insights and then we're reading the situation back out to the customer. I'm sure you've you follow Greg Danes. Greg is a good friend of mine and he has done some fantastic work on analyzing.

Speaker 1: 18:17

I think by now, millions and millions of renewal makes a customer renew. It's not high NPS, it's not CSAT, it's not all these other things that we often spend a lot of time thinking about. It's actually whether or not we're having results. Conversations with our customers, good or bad, is one of the largest determinants of whether that customer is going to renew thus or not. So if you look at this process ABC2,AI, whatever it's really all about gathering results, analyzing results, benchmarking them, showing them to the customer and then helping them get better, consulting with them on how to get better results with our product. That process can be automated. And if your customers pay you below a certain amount call it, I don't know, below $5,000, $6,000 a year. You actually have to automate that.

Speaker 1: 19:09

You can't afford to go do hands-on management consulting with all those customers, right?

Speaker 1: 19:16

So to me, digital CS is how do we take pieces of that framework and automate them through the product, through some third-party tools? Sure, you could use a CSP maybe for some of this, but I think the more you can do in the product the better, because that's where you get the kernel of data that you need to say okay, here's what's actually happening, here's how your usage of the product is going and here's how that translates into value, whatever your value prop is. Now, that's hard work. I'm not saying this is easy, it work. I'm not saying this is easy, it's very hard work. But in the absence of that, you are forced to make the connection between how you use the product and the value that the customer is getting for it with just your words, and it's not enough, it's not in this environment to keep customers. It's not enough. You actually have to make a hard. You have to draw a hard line between all that product usage and engagement there and the actual value that's being created from it, and the more you can automate that, the better.

Speaker 2: 20:15

Yeah, for sure. Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about this show. Did you know that roughly 60% of listeners aren't actually subscribed to the show, on whatever platform they're listening to it on? As you know, algorithms love likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. So if you get value out of the content, you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well, please go ahead and follow the show, leave a comment, leave a review. Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show. And while you're at it, go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 2: 20:56

Now back to the show. I love the concept of just driving outcomes with digital, because I think a lot of people are very focused on driving sure enablement, and focused on product tours and welcome emails and those kinds of things. Probably why people aren't focused specifically on outcomes is because that's hard. Depending on what your product is, or set of products are, that can become a very amoebic thing, and so at some point ideally digitally we would have our customers like self-identify, like, hey, these are the outcomes that you're driving towards and this is the path to get there. Whether they do that or not, like that's the question too, but I think having those vehicles available. And then it's also fascinating to look at what's happening with generative AI in this realm, because you have these machine learning models that can. They're starting to analyze your behavior in comparison with your most successful customers and trying to drive things that way. I think it's actually making those really difficult things to build in a rules-based environment somewhat tangible in this new world, which is exciting, fun to be a part of.

Speaker 1: 22:10

Yeah, the interesting thing about how AI plays a role here and Daphne Lopez put an interesting post out about this earlier this week or over the weekend I think people misconstrue what AI is actually capable of doing in the customer success world. What ai is actually capable of doing in the customer success world. My friend, bob london I was at an event with him last week. He did a great presentation on basically how to have deep, engaging conversation with a customer and and the cool thing he did in this presentation was he plugged that conversation into chat gpt to have chat say, hey, what's the sentiment of this customer Like, what's the risk? And it got it exactly right. But here's the thing Without the conversation that Bob had with the customer, the high quality conversation that Bob had with the customer, there's no way chat GPT would have had the data to know everything it needed to know to make that precise forecast of what that customer's health was.

Speaker 1: 23:14

So my point is like, yes, digital, yes, scale, but when your customers are large enough and you can afford to still have these high quality conversations with them, you still have to do that. You have to find ways to do that, whether it's at scale or one by one to be able to do it and, by the way, like customer success involves a lot of different things. You have to you probably heard me talk about this before you have to have a great support motion. You have to have a great training and labeling motion, because most of our products still do require some hands-on usage of the product. You have to provide services a lot of structures with different technologies, with AI so the right answer for any company is not already written.

Speaker 1: 23:59

You have to really look at your situation. It's just like a go-to-market motion. You can't just take something off the shelf that worked in one company and assume it's working in another company. That's a recipe for disaster. I've done that before and I've screwed it up. So you really have to think critically about where the choke points are for your customers and how to overcome them, and then how to make them as efficient as possible. Once you figure out what's effective.

Speaker 2: 24:21

Yeah, the variability is real in the digital. Yeah, absolutely, it's the value problem.

Speaker 1: 24:28

The value problem is different for everybody the product, the competitors, your own cost structure, the dynamic of the market that you serve. So yeah, highly variable. Your data quality.

Speaker 2: 24:41

We won't go there. Let's not get into data, please. We're on our own lives now. As someone who's facing a gainsight migration right now, I'm like, oh God.

Speaker 2: 24:52

One thing that I wanted to highlight and that we've danced around a little bit is, yes, driving results, but also having a good eye towards the business of SaaS in general.

Speaker 2: 25:05

And we were talking I should have just recorded us when we hopped on the thing, but we were talking before about this amazing new course that you and Jeff have put out, called Cover your SaaS, which, going through it, it reminded me of some earlier experiences and some mentors where somebody has really sat down and talked to me about what it is we're driving in the SaaS business and what the big impacts are to the board and to the executive suite and then on down, like how various levers have a huge impact on the economics of SaaS in combination with the customer experience.

Speaker 2: 25:41

And so I just want to shout you guys out for this course that you've put out, because it does go in depth about what the core metrics of a SaaS business are, which I think is table stakes for anyone working in SaaS, whether you're in the executive level or the individual contributor level. It's like if you understand this stuff then you start to understand some of the other decisions that are made and some of the strategy that's out there, and it allows you to also question stuff. So I'm curious to get your insight into, I guess, the current economic situation in SaaS, which has changed dramatically over the last couple of years, and how we've seen that play out in terms of a proliferation in digital. We danced around it a little bit.

Speaker 1: 26:26

Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great point, Thank you. Thank you for the comments on the course Flavor of love and hopefully some people are getting value out of it. But yeah, the economics have changed dramatically. One thing that hasn't changed in SaaS is that the cost of sale is higher than ever. If you go look at the median tech payback period in publicly traded SaaS companies right now it's about 38 months Crazy For people that aren't familiar with that terminology.

Speaker 1: 26:52

That means on a gross margin adjusted basis, how long does it take to pay ourselves back for selling a customer? Right now it's three years and four months median Insane Before you even make the first dollar of gross margin adjusted profit on that customer. So that means, as Jeff puts it, everybody's job just got harder. You have to go sell, market to and sell the right customers. You have to keep them not just for three renewal cycles. If you're doing annual renewals, you have to keep them for four or five, six and, by the way, that number, that retention number, the lifetime value of the customer, should be three or four times or more what it took to acquire them in the first place. So really you need to be thinking about keeping customers nine to 12 years if it takes you three years to pay yourself back for winning them.

Speaker 1: 27:40

So I do think that this is a I don't know that it's going to be a forever normal, but if you look at interest rates over the past 50 years, this is not abnormal. What has been abnormal is everything since 2009,. The financial crisis of 2009,. Having near zero interest rates for 10 or 15 years that is abnormal. Got very used to operating in that environment, basically having unlimited capital to build teams, to subsidize pricing for our customers over the past 15 years, and we've all gotten very spoiled by that.

Speaker 1: 28:19

And now you can't be in a software company because they're funded externally. You have to be in a situation where and we're fortunate software businesses are very high gross margin, meaning that every incremental sale we make a good gross profit on, but it's all the other costs that sit below the line, like sales and marketing and operating costs related to HR, IT finance. All that stuff eats away at that high gross margin and ends up. We end up burning cash in a lot of software companies, meaning we spend more than we make. But the bottom line is that the SaaS business model is an expensive model to scale and, unless we can survive. There's a balance between profitability and growth. As long as you're growing, you can go raise more cash to grow faster, because it does cost money. You do burn cash, meaning you spend more than you make when you're growing a software company in the early days. But if that growth flows down, then all of a sudden investors expect profitability.

Speaker 1: 29:16

Just look at, go look at what happened to meta two quarters ago. I actually referenced in the course itself. They stopped all their superfluous spending on the metaverse. Right, they cut 25, cut 25, 27,000 jobs. They kept their growth, their top line growth, going and the result was a massive profit and they gained $200 billion in market share in one day. Right, so that tells you that investors value growth until they don't. Right, and if it's not there, then you have have to be profitable. And so that's the balance we try to strike in software companies, right? Most software companies right now are trying to work on that pathway to profitability or maximizing whatever profitability they already have yeah, for sure ebita reigns supreme these days.

Speaker 2: 30:03

Yeah, and yeah sure, the unfortunate side effect of it is that we are seeing lots of reductions happen these days, and CS is no stranger to that, for sure.

Speaker 2: 30:13

What I do find interesting is I think there are a lot of people who still maintain this notion that digital and AI and whatnot are solely here to replace the human.

Speaker 2: 30:29

And the element of truth there is that digital and AI can help weather some of these storms that we're going through by building efficiency and things like that. But the one thing I've maintained for a while now is that these tools are actually here to build efficiency, but also to make you more effective and focus on you having valuable human to human connection with your customer. And you pointed to it earlier in the example that the Bob London example where you still have to have that human connection. Like you can't expect that robots are going to come in and take over all of this stuff at the end of the day. Yeah, sure, you can have a robot kind of answer some rudimentary questions and be in the product with you and be that handholding element of it, but you're, you know there's I think there's always going to be a need for rapport building and a human to human relationship when it comes to that customer company togetherness.

Speaker 1: 31:31

Yeah, certainly these tools are going to make us more effective, even just in little ways. Right, the ability to use call recording, just like everybody else does these days, and I tell you, my notes in the CRM have never been better. Right, and like these things, like the sales to customer success transition that we always talk about as being difficult and rocky, like those things should be easier now.

Speaker 1: 31:59

But anything you try to delegate completely to a system is especially when it involves relationships, is probably going to be dangerous anyway. So again I come back to effectiveness first, efficiency second. So figure out what's effective, especially in the early days when you're trying to win market share, like right now. I'm in a very early stage company. We're trying to win market share. We're absolutely putting our best foot forward for every customer. We will do this forever, but over time we'll get more efficient at doing it In the early days. We're not trying to automate things that we're trying to figure out how to do in the first place.

Speaker 2: 32:37

Yeah, I would argue that a lot of times you can't really automate something effectively unless you've done it manually first. You can, but it's a waste of time.

Speaker 1: 32:45

Exactly. It's a waste of time. It probably is a poor experience for a person on the other end who deserves a high quality experience.

Speaker 2: 32:53

That's right, talk about that a little bit. You know you're at Turnkey now. You have been for, I think, officially in a few months but about a year, including the advisory kind of period with them. You guys are very PLG focused, obviously from a product standpoint, but what are you doing internally right now to really manage the customer lifecycle?

Speaker 1: 33:13

Well, we have implemented HubSpot, so that is our CRM and we run everything out of HubSpot End-to-end customer we have. Hubspot has a concept called pipelines, which is very natural for a sales team. We also use pipelines for our onboarding process, and so there are key milestones as soon as a deal is closed, one in the sales pipeline, a record is automatically created in the implementation and onboarding pipeline and our teams get together and talk about that customer and we hold a joint kickoff call with the customer and our onboarding manager who sees the customer through that process and then works with them beyond that. So from a technology standpoint, we're still super early innings ourselves in the way that we're building this and we use Intercom for support today. So, very simple, we don't have too many tools in play yet. We're a 15 person company. We can't have 20 tools out there to keep track of. As it is, we have a lot of tools, I think. So we're managing everything in HubSpot today.

Speaker 1: 34:15

Our product team has developed dashboards that sit right in the product to show performance and results. Like, honestly, this is a customer success person's dream, because you can log into the product and you can see it on behalf of your customer. That's cool. You can literally see on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis the results that they're getting in the product A means to communicate with the customer on that. So I've been in so many different software companies and consulted with so many more that just didn't have that real close tie to revenue or cost for that matter. I probably worked with two companies now maybe three in my career and in my consulting career where I've seen this type of a connection to the ROI and the value that the product provides, and so it's a really exciting place to be that's really cool, that, yeah, yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 2: 35:05

And it's cool to be at a place, too, where you can like just go do stuff. Yeah, probably you know I could do. You haven't reached the, the red tape phase yet and just now they're done.

Speaker 1: 35:16

That's the interesting part about every startup you you look at and you're like we'll never do all the things that I used to do, and I was that blah, blah, blah. Right, eventually you will. You think you'll have to because it's part of scaling, but I think I always tell people that work for me, how we do things, is really important to me. Yeah, right, we're gonna do things that we have to do to scale, because I believe in a great employee experience. I believe in a great customer experience. I also believe in running a really solid business and you have to do some of those things. Are we going to have departments at some point? Yeah, probably.

Speaker 1: 35:48

But the question is how you do that right. How you operate the culture again, like the environment that you create for how teams work together, for how the executive team works together, for how individuals work together, is really important, and I believe you can balance both. You can balance the need for scale and structure and you can also maintain an eye for effectiveness and what it feels like on the other end of those processes, to the customer. I think HubSpot's a great example. They really have done a nice job of building their company, making it feel cohesive, scaling. They know who they are. They serve a very specific type of customer, of which we are one. They've been able to make that feel good to me on the other end of the process.

Speaker 2: 36:32

And Google thinks so too.

Speaker 1: 36:33

So they, they do. What do you mean by that?

Speaker 2: 36:37

uh, I think there's like acquisition talks happening oh, yeah, that's right, that's big news.

Speaker 1: 36:42

Huh, it's huge. Yeah, that would be a game changer right there for sure.

Speaker 2: 36:46

yeah, well, it makes sense because google's been behind the game when it comes to that kind of stuff, I think. But, um, yeah, um, one thing I always like to get from uh guests is like have you seen anything out there in the wild? That's really cool digitally, because I constantly like run into things, especially in B2C, where it's like, oh, that's cool, I wonder how they're doing that, and those kinds of cool digital experiences. Have you run into anything interesting?

Speaker 1: 37:11

lately.

Speaker 2: 37:12

I need to think about that a little bit.

Speaker 1: 37:14

Put me on the spot.

Speaker 1: 37:15

I literally, right before this call, got off of a call with a company that they're basically automating the BDR role Cool. And the one question I asked them because they did the outreach to me. And the outreach is like it, especially we just announced a small fundraising round. It just comes in these massive waves, right, when your name's anywhere associated with a company that does a fundraising round or when you're an executive of any sort. But this one outreach got me and I was like, okay, this is pretty interesting because I run our sales and BDR team and I help oversee marketing and the customer experience side that things at Shrinky were very early stage. But they got me on a call and then we were having this call about doing ai driven automated business development. And I was like, wait a minute, did you didn't send me that email? Then you couldn't have sent me that email or your pitch wouldn't hold up very well. He's like, no, I'm not doing outbounding at all. Wow, okay, well, that's good, and I don't ever respond to those things. So, right, think about that. Right, yeah, now that is an interesting use case too for customer success, especially at the long tail, because think about how many customers you don't ever hear from Right.

Speaker 1: 38:27

Going back to Greg's research, it's not the customer that gives you a zero on an NPS. You should worry about it's the customer doesn't respond to the NPS. You should worry about it's the customer that doesn't respond to the NPS you should worry about, and so think about, the customers that you just don't have any contact with. What could you do to engage them using some of these tools? Literally treat them, of course, tailor it, because they're not a prospect or a customer, but treat them as if somebody that needs to be outreach to and because you're working for their attention, just like you were before you sold them something that's right the world is such a busy, crowded place, so what kind of value could we be automating, sending, getting in front of them, engaging with them?

Speaker 2: 39:05

yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's an interesting point because uh also a lot of stuff that we do digitally is based on marketing best practices that marketing teams have been doing forever, and so I think uh one one piece of advice that I've been giving a lot of digital leaders is like go pay attention to marketing tech, because there's a lot of cool stuff happening there that is a great point.

Speaker 1: 39:27

It is. It is marketing. Yeah, it 100 is marketing. You are vying for attention every day. You are if you're a csm, you know that right, because you might be getting all the kinds of attention you don't want, which is like all these inbound support requests that should be going to a stronger support team, but you don't have that for whatever reason. But then it's like okay, how do I get the story in front of the executive sponsor? How do I get to more people to help them understand the value that we provide or expand what we're doing? Like it's marketing, that's right.

Speaker 1: 40:00

You strip away me to be. If you look at BNC and you think, okay, like, what is success using a consumer product? It's being educated on it, it's knowing the new capabilities. If there are new capabilities like all those, that's customer success. And in that case it has to be delivered in a marketing style execution it does.

Speaker 2: 40:19

It's marketing and you have the extra added benefit of kind of maybe some telemetry data and maybe knowing a little bit about what the activities are that are happening. It's like a perfect world. Look, we are out of time and I'm super sad about that because I've really enjoyed this conversation. A couple of things when can people find you, engage with you and all that kind of stuff, and do you want?

Speaker 1: 40:43

to give any like shout outs to anyone. Shout outs, Well, yeah. So first of all, people can find me on LinkedIn. It's pretty easy. You pretty much can get rid of me if you're on LinkedIn, but shoot me an email, jchernkeyco that's chernkey, not turnkey C-H-U-R-N-K-E-Y, and happy to chat with anybody about that. Growthcurveio is the website where we provide the financial literacy course and also we have a weekly newsletter. Jeff and I do twice weekly that comes out there. We put a lot of thought and effort into that each week. Probably spend about 10 hours writing every week.

Speaker 2: 41:17

Yeah, it's really good. I'll link it down below, for sure.

Speaker 1: 41:20

Thank you, I appreciate that, and these are a lot of these topics are just topics that are interesting to us, but we're not trying to set the world ablaze with customer success or sales or SaaS or anything else. It's just how it all fits together.

Speaker 2: 41:33

So your title isn't like customer success is dead. Yeah, everything's dead.

Speaker 1: 41:38

by the way, have you noticed that lately Everything is?

Speaker 2: 41:41

dead Customer success. Then the next line is just kidding.

Speaker 1: 41:45

Then let's see shout outs. Goodness, I want to do something here. That's not your typical shout out, because I think we can be very self-referencing in the customer success world. Yep, but I didn't give this one enough thought. Alex, that's cool. To be honest with you, it's all good, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2: 42:05

You ain't got to give any shout outs, it's on the fly very quickly. The tagline for this episode is going to be Jay Nathan hates everyone. Everyone is dead to me, everyone is dead to me. Everyone is dead, everyone is dead. Uh, jay, I've uh really appreciated your time because I know you're a busy dude running like everything at growth curve and uh, or at churn key. I should say and yeah, you do good stuff, let's talk again soon yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1: 42:33

Thanks a lot for having me.

Speaker 2: 42:38

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, Dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content, video, audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent to you. I'm Alex Strickovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.