Speaker 1: 0:03

your work does not have a mouth, so it can't, so you have to speak for it.

Speaker 2: 0:09

You have to get up there and brag once again, welcome to the digital customer experience podcast with me, alex turkovich. 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.

Speaker 2: 0:49

So glad you're back with us this week and every week as we talk about all things digital in CS. This is episode 76 and I have an awesome conversation lined up for you today with Kat Brigham, and who leads digital at Automox, and we talk about a lot of cool digital stuff, so this is definitely an episode for digital practitioners. Hopefully you get a lot of good nuggets out of here. One of the things that I was excited to talk with Kat about was utilizing LinkedIn advertising as part of a digital motion, which is something she has done, and that is something that excites me, because obviously in digital, we lack persona information all the time.

Speaker 2: 1:40

Knowing who your admins are versus who your champions are versus who your executives are versus who, whatever is, is a really hard thing to do, and LinkedIn basically has all of that data and, utilizing their advertising platform, you can hone in on that data in very granular fashion and actually surface content to your customers. Fashion and actually surface content to your customers, which is just phenomenal and, I think, a really excellent way to spend some dollars in a very targeted, effective way to drive engagement with your customers. So we dig into that and it's super exciting. Please enjoy my conversation with Kat, because I sure did. Kat, just welcome to the show. We've been trying to meet up for a while now and it hasn't worked on my side, and it hasn't worked on your side and hasn't worked on my side. So it's fun to finally talk to you and, yeah, just welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: 2:42

Thank you, I'm very glad to be here and, yes, glad that we finally got this on both of our schedules.

Speaker 2: 2:47

Yeah, made it work, made it work, so you're. I mean, obviously the obligatory question is like, you know what's your background, where are you from? All that kind of stuff. But you're digital CS at Automox, not to be confused with Automax, which I'm sure some people do.

Speaker 1: 3:05

Maybe confused with AutoMax, which I'm sure some people do, maybe I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm used to and it's funny, I used to be at Sales Loft not to be confused with Salesforce, so I guess you know I'm just used to all that. But yes, I am the digital customer experience program manager at AutoMax right now. I just started there, you know, a couple months ago.

Speaker 2: 3:23

Cool, how's it? Going a couple months ago. Cool, how's it going?

Speaker 1: 3:24

It's going good. Yeah, I'm really enjoying the team that I work with. The way that their leadership approaches customer experience as a whole is really refreshing. I mean it's great to see the dynamic approach that they have and this idea of let's try things, let's try to make the experience better. What can we do to improve things for our customers? And it's really refreshing to be a part of that like actually make things better I know right, crazy concept super, crazy, awesome.

Speaker 2: 3:59

And then you know what, what was the journey that kind of led you down this path of well, I guess you know led you into digital. But then specifically, what of your background do you kind of attribute to this path?

Speaker 1: 4:16

Yeah. So I you know, like most people that are in customer success or digital customer success it's not like I majored in it in college it's not an option for people. So I kind of stumbled upon customer success as a whole. I was finishing up my communications degree at university and was looking for I think it was a summer internship at first and my partner at the time was like hey, I know this company in the Atlanta area. They're pretty great and they're looking for an intern on their customer success team. I know that's not something that you are familiar with, but it might be a good fit.

Speaker 1: 4:57

So I went into that, fell into it and just realized I was like hey, this actually has a lot of the overlap I enjoy with what I want to do in my career. I like writing content, I like building out strategy, I like working with people and improving processes and making things more enjoyable for others and having a good message behind things. So I stuck with that, moved into a full-time scaled CSM role and that's, I think, where I got my first taste of what I think scaled CSMs and digital customer success overlaps a lot. So got my toes Right. If you're doing it well, they're working hand in hand. Yeah, started there and then moved into some program management as a part of that. So building out customer campaigns, building out webinars, office hours, things of that nature, and moving into some digital program management roles just kind of evolving.

Speaker 2: 6:00

Yeah, that's awesome. I definitely want to dig into that. First question, though, is what is the Stormy Petrel newspaper?

Speaker 1: 6:09

So yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:10

Stormy Petrel, of which you were editor-in-chief, I was editor-in-chief Doing your homework.

Speaker 1: 6:16

I was editor-in-chief of the Stormy Petrel newspaper, which is the student-led newspaper at Oglethorpe University where I graduated from. At the time I took it over, it was still fully a print newspaper.

Speaker 2: 6:30

Oh, wow, yeah, which is crazy.

Speaker 1: 6:33

And they came out with like this is like in the 2000s. I mean, they were stuck in the 2000s for sure. Yeah, I was like whoa, okay, we got to change this. So came in, made some adjustments. It was also only coming out monthly and so I took it to being digital and weekly and building out like an entire team of just students who were interested in writing things and could publish things weekly, and so I was editing full editions every single week for that.

Speaker 2: 7:03

Oh my gosh, that's insane.

Speaker 1: 7:05

That's an insane amount of work. Oh yeah, Not. Like you know, I had a full-time job and I was full course work too, but it just kind of I don't know organically created that way, and I'm so glad I did it. I think it's one of those things like you never know what's going to be a stepping stone of experience for your next thing. I learned so much time management, project management, people management and so much writing and editing skills from doing that that I definitely have carried with me into all of my future roles.

Speaker 2: 7:40

Mm, hmm. I mean look kudos to you I have. I have a hard time getting out the weekly newsletter companion to the podcast, let alone like editing an entire frickin newspaper. Well, was there a a particular kind of juicy topic or some kind of submission that was kind of like got you in the crosshairs of some trouble?

Speaker 1: 8:04

No, I mean it's funny because Oglethorpe's a very small campus. It's at most, I think, like 1600 students for the entire body Okay, so everybody kind of knows each other.

Speaker 1: 8:14

Yeah, and so there's not always a ton happening though because of that too, but there were definitely times where there would be big stories. I remember someone doing kind of an investigative piece on the cafeteria and the supplier of food for that and because that supplier at the time was going through like some big class action lawsuit. So every once in a while there was like really juicy, interesting stuff, and then other times it was just talking about things happening in Atlanta or you know, just stuff of a less less intense less dramatic.

Speaker 2: 8:52

Yeah, exactly, talking about the thunderstorm that rolled in last weekend.

Speaker 1: 8:57

Right, yeah, well, I was there when a giant snowstorm wiped out power for a week. Oh, so yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:03

That was fun. There you go. Yeah, that was big news.

Speaker 1: 9:07

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:08

And that's no joke. I mean, you know, I live in Austin and we still talk about 2021. Yeah, february 2021, when we had like no power for no water for like a week and it was like the survival instincts kicked in.

Speaker 1: 9:25

Oh yeah, I remember that. I remember reading the news about that. It was pretty bad.

Speaker 2: 9:29

Yeah, it was. It was interesting. It exposed a lot of things we won't get into.

Speaker 1: 9:34

It's a different podcast, right.

Speaker 2: 9:36

That's a different podcast. Yeah for sure, all right. So look, I really want to dig into your role in terms of digital program management, because I think you're the first digital program manager we've had on the show. You know, we've had quite a few leaders and some scaled people. We've had some admins and ops, a lot of ops people, a lot of marketing people.

Speaker 2: 10:06

But you know, one of the recurring questions that I get all the time is like how do I staff my digital and scaled functions? How do I go build this stuff? And you know, what kind of role profiles do I need on my team? And I'm always like it depends on what you need to go do. But, fundamentally speaking, what I'll say invariably is you need a customer facing element, scaled, whatever you want to call it. You need some kind of operations analysts, admin kind of function, and you need at least a program manager, if not 10, to like literally manage the and and implement the programs that you want to. You know that you want to build and you want to implement and manage. You know, manage the iteration of that and the rollout and the dev and the requirements gathering and all that kind of stuff, and I oftentimes I will equate it to really product management in a way. But that's where my first question kind of comes in. It's like what do you do, and am I accurate in kind of those descriptions?

Speaker 1: 11:14

Yeah, I you know, and I think I would agree with you. I think you have to have people who are executing things and talking with customers, whether that's like a scaled CSM team, a pooled CS team, a digital CSM, someone who is connecting with customers and triaging information. And I will also say, yeah, you should have someone in ops because those people are my best friends as a program manager. Those people are my best friends because they're the ones who can bring me the data points that I need. They can set up the really complex, like campaign triaging and segmentation rules that I need. But my role and I think a key thing that people should think about when building out a digital CS team is somebody who does the vision, who says here's what our data says, here's what our customers are saying, here's where we have gaps in our customer journey or in the process of just communicating with customers and here's how we're going to fill those things and here's how we're going to use data to do that and lay out different programs that will fit into those things. And that's what I do.

Speaker 1: 12:24

So I come in and I can talk about this a lot now, especially having started at a new company recently, being able to come in and say what are we doing? Give me the lay of the land. What are we doing through onboarding? What do we do when somebody leaves onboarding and they did really good? What about when they didn't do so good? What about when they're coming up for renewal? What does our health scoring look like? And then, based off of those things saying, here are some areas that we can improve the customer experience through doing a program that targets onboarding, a program that tries to increase adoption of one particular part of our platform, because we know if they use that, they're 10 times stickier. Things like that yeah, are you.

Speaker 2: 13:09

Are you one of one at automox?

Speaker 1: 13:11

I am one of one. Um, you're one of one, yes, and I was one of one in my previous company too, at salesoft. So interesting.

Speaker 2: 13:19

Yeah, yeah, that's cool, but I don't.

Speaker 1: 13:21

I don't work like it's not just me doing everything by myself that would be impossible like I definitely owe a lot of credit to the people I work with, whether that is the scaled csm team, whether it is customer marketing can be or product marketing. Those are usually teams I'm working really closely with to make sure that the content we're putting out works together, that we're not oversaturating our customer base, that we're being helpful at the right time. And working in conjunction with all of those people is really crucial to being able to have good program management or have a good customer experience management or have a good customer experience.

Speaker 2: 14:07

Yeah, I was chatting with Carrie Carrie Ardala not too long ago. We were talking about what qualities would you look for in somebody that is going to you know, work and do, or be a digital CS program manager or somebody in digital CS, and we we both landed on kind of I don't know if this was number one, but it was like top three is that cross collaborative communication between various departments, because ultimately, you're not the only one that's communicating with the customer.

Speaker 2: 14:40

You know, we've got marketing doing stuff and support doing stuff and sales doing stuff and everybody's doing stuff and invariably that stuff becomes overwhelming to the single point of contact. That's getting all that.

Speaker 1: 14:53

Oh, absolutely. I'm a big believer in cross-collaboration. I'm a big believer in setting guidelines and having some governance in place Because, yeah, you're right, everybody is communicating and a lot of times, too, people want to do even more, or they'll look at just their segments and be like, okay, I'm in customer marketing and I only send out my one monthly customer newsletter, so our customers have all of this room for me to now maybe start promoting webinars, and you're not thinking about the you know 10 other things that they might be getting from support, from their customer success manager, from products. You know, it's very easy, I think, to oversaturate our customers, and it doesn't come from ill intent. I think it comes from us being like we're the coolest, we have so much great stuff to show you, we want you to be being successful in our product, and so we're just, gonna, like word, vomit all of this to our customer base.

Speaker 2: 15:53

So it comes from good intentions one of my favorite terms, by the way, oh yeah, stellar.

Speaker 1: 15:58

Yeah, love my vocabulary, but it comes from good intentions. I think we just can take it a step too far when, when people are falling into these silos and not communicating with each other.

Speaker 2: 16:10

Yeah, and, and it can you know, invariably also it looks different. You know it looks some of these emails or some of these comms look one way and then the other set looks a different way and it's just like it feels gross. So you know, and it's just like ugh, it feels gross. So if you listen to the show, regular listeners will know that this is one of the questions that I ask pretty much all of my guests, because invariably it's different with everyone that I talk to. But what would you say? Your definition of digital CS is?

Speaker 1: 16:43

And it's such a. It's a great question and you're right, there's so many different ways you could answer this. I think my definition comes down to digital customer success should be something that improves the customer experience through the use of good customer data and good customer engagement tools. And I also think, though, something that people maybe don't implement enough, is it something that should go to all of your customers, not just the customers that don't have a dedicated CSM. I think it's something that should, if you're doing it really well. There's some maybe not the same level for everybody, right, Because if you have a dedicated CSM, they're already getting more support, but there should be some level of digital customer success that's being applied to your entire customer base.

Speaker 2: 17:39

Love that, absolutely love that, and you're absolutely right, like, I think, digital CS also to the point of, like, supporting customers that do have an assigned CSM. At that point digital CS becomes a tool that helps a CSM to be more efficient and to do things that would normally take them hours and hours to do. That they can do, you know, very, very quickly or in an automated way. Um, which also I think is quite overlooked, like a lot of people think it's just like customer facing stuff, but actually you're doing a lot of stuff internally too.

Speaker 1: 18:16

Oh yeah, absolutely yeah. If you're, I mean if you think about, okay, if I'm providing, if I'm looking at data points and I'm seeing, hey, this customer is not using this part of the platform, or I'm seeing, hey, there's a lot of support tickets being submitted around this particular feature and it's just the customers are confused about it. If I can then go in as a digital programmer and create some in-app messaging that gives a step-by-step walkthrough or gives additional information on that thing, I've now maybe deflected a lot of support cases from ever being created. Or I've now maybe stopped a CSM from having to have an entire phone call on something that could have been explained in the platform in five minutes.

Speaker 2: 18:58

Yeah, yeah, it's huge.

Speaker 1: 19:00

There's a lot of internal things that are beneficial.

Speaker 2: 19:04

Yeah, absolutely, and there's no shortage of internal things that you have built as a program manager and maybe give us an example of like one or two things, how you approached building them, what kind of research you had to do and what was your general process?

Speaker 1: 19:40

Yeah, so I will start with an example that I think anyone could implement and I call these specific product adoption campaigns not the best naming convention, but it's straightforward were using more. Maybe it's the newest thing that you rolled out, maybe it's your latest AI capability. Whatever that thing is, you want more customers to use it because you know it makes them stickier. It might have even been something that they paid extra for and are not yet utilizing, and that's a churn risk in and of itself.

Speaker 2: 20:18

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 20:19

I have built a lot of different programs and campaigns around that specific use case of hey, we know we want customers to be using this more. How do we do that? So there's a couple of steps that I take. One is figuring out, first off, who is your audience. Are we going to be trying to communicate this to all of our customers? Probably not. I don't recommend doing that for most things.

Speaker 1: 20:40

I don't think most things should be coming to all customers, but figuring out who is your audience. In the cases that I would do, it would typically be okay we know here's the customers that have this product and here is their percentage of adoption, and let's send a message to people who have, to people who have. We would typically do two messages. Actually, we would have one program that's going to customers who have the product and are using it at less than 80% adoption or less than 60% adoption, whatever the threshold is, and then you would have just zero adoption, like they've never touched this thing ever, because those messages can be very, very different. And then you figure okay, now that I have my audience, what am I communicating to them and how?

Speaker 2: 21:27

do I want?

Speaker 1: 21:27

to communicate that For the things that I have built, a lot of the times it took multiple different avenues of communication in order to get the result that we wanted. So it wouldn't just be okay. I'm building an email campaign that's going to run for three days. It would be okay. We're going to have a six-week program here that's going to include four or five different emails. It's going to also include three in-app messages and it's going to include and in a couple of the ones that were most successful, that I did we also included LinkedIn advertising, which was something new.

Speaker 2: 22:03

You mentioned this and it blew my freaking mind, so I definitely want to talk about that.

Speaker 1: 22:08

Yeah, yeah, we can go into depth on that, but you basically decide okay, who's my audience, how am I going to talk to them? And then what am I saying to them? Here, in the case of something like this, a lot of times taking the approach of this, a lot of times taking the approach of hey, you've bought this thing already, you are able to use this, here are the benefits of it. And a lot of times you take the approach of I'm your CSM, I'm your customer success team. We want you to be using this. I'm just reaching out to see why you haven't and to highlight some of the features here. You go, go ahead and use it. It's a great angle to have, because you're not trying to sell them anything new. They already have access to it and if you get them to use that product, odds are they're probably happier. But then also, too, you're getting your benefit of them being stickier and hopefully having a higher retention rate.

Speaker 2: 22:59

Yeah, and I think a distinction here is, one that you kind of alluded to is this notion of soft churn versus hard churn At least that's how I refer to it where you know your soft churn events is like where your customer renews, but maybe renews minus a couple of modules that they didn't end up using I've done that in the past right Versus a hard churn event, which is where the customer just leaves. But invariably I think that a soft churn is a massive warning sign that maybe a hard churn event is down the road. But, to your point, those tactical campaigns around specific features that either they've purchased or, I think, features that that lead invariably lead to success, are just, I mean, they're, they're massively important yeah, yeah and they yeah it's.

Speaker 1: 23:59

it's a way to ensure you're not going to have a, or not ensure, but probably increase the likelihood that you won't have a downgrade, because the last thing you want is for them to be completely ignoring that product. And then, 90 days out from their renewal, you send them renewal information. They start looking at their contract and they're like what is this thing that we're paying for? We've never used it and they don't know the value of it. It might have been something they asked for when they first went through the process but, they don't know what the value is of it anymore.

Speaker 2: 24:28

Well, the secondary benefit there too is invariably also in accounts. You have people who leave, you have champions who move on, you have users who go do something different, and those campaigns are a great way to re-engage an account that may have had one of those changes, whether you know about it or not. Because I think a lot of times we try to deal with persona changes or account contact changes head on by trying to understand if somebody moved on. But those kind of blanket campaigns are kind of a good way to to to capture some of that stuff too, or you know, without even knowing it.

Speaker 1: 25:08

Yeah, fill in the cracks. And especially if the other thing I'll say here is, like the reason why we took the approach of we want to communicate to them in multiple different avenues kind of goes back to that too. Like, say, you do have new people that are new points of contact at this account. You don't know how they want to be communicated with, you don't know how they work and really just don't know how most people work. Everybody learns differently. Everybody lives in different areas. Some people are still fully engaging with all of your emails. Some people have checked out of those. So having things that live in three different areas just increases your likelihood that they're going to see that message you're trying to send.

Speaker 2: 25:47

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Speaker 2: 26:26

Now back to the show. Do you have a lot of when you go to design something like this? I mean, I think everybody struggles with data to some degree or another right. If you tell me somebody who doesn't struggle with data. Um, if you, if you tell me somebody who doesn't struggle with data, they're lying right. It's like we all struggle with it. Are there times where you've had to like abort building something just because you didn't have the data to build it properly?

Speaker 1: 26:56

I've never had to fully abort building something, but I've definitely had to do some workarounds, fully abort building something, but I've definitely had to do some workarounds. And yeah, I mean, data is always, there's always limitations or there's always something that you think it's going to be this way, and then you go and investigate and it's totally something different and it's not matching or whatever the case may be, or you can't get it to like automatically sync.

Speaker 1: 27:20

That's a big one for especially setting up. Some of the campaigns that I do are evergreen and dynamically update. So think like an onboarding program, which is something I'm building out right now at Automox is building out a new version of an onboarding program that includes in-app messaging and we needed that in-app messaging to be able to dynamically have an audience that dynamically updates so that every time a new customer signed on, they're getting that content in the time period that they need to. That was something that I have struggled to set up before previous times trying to do this. So you find workarounds. You know sometimes you can just manually update content, pull CSV files. There's always, there's always some sort of workaround to do.

Speaker 2: 28:06

Some way to get to the. Yeah, absolutely. A lot of what I've been kind of chatting with people about recently is like building health score cards without telemetry data, because, you know, in my day-to-day I support a product and a customer base that's primarily on-premise and so we don't have the luxury of like adoption data, usage data, you know time on page, any of that kind of stuff, and so we've had to get like really crafty about you know what other signs do we have that a customer is either engaged or not engaged? Or like you know what what other signs do we have that a customer is either engaged or not engaged? Or like you know working with a brand or not working with a brand, and it gets. I think we have to we in digital we have to be a scrappy lot Like we gotta, we gotta kind of find workarounds.

Speaker 1: 28:57

Yes, and it's you know. There's definitely, I think, any good like if, if your program or project that you're managing doesn't have something pop up as risk, then either you're just the luckiest person ever or it's not. You know an advanced enough program like take it a step further, go find the risk. It's data points, if it's you know, know something there. But there's, yeah, there's always something that you have to be scrappy and mitigate and move around.

Speaker 2: 29:29

Indeed. Yeah Well, I know one of the things that you mentioned to me last time we spoke is that you're a big advocate for quote unquote showing your work, and we've had other guests on that have done similar things, like gosh. I'm blanking on a couple of them now Jeff Beaumont, for instance, when he was at GitHub, he would post in detail online how they built certain health scores and how they built certain emotions. What does that look like for you in terms of showing work? I mean, I know you're very prolific on LinkedIn and your content, by the way, on LinkedIn is phenomenal and that's how I first knew about you is like this cat person keeps coming on my feed and just saying like really cool shit.

Speaker 1: 30:12

So thank you, appreciate that.

Speaker 2: 30:14

So, but what does that look like for you in terms of showing your work?

Speaker 1: 30:17

Yeah, I mean. So LinkedIn, I think, is showing your work in a more public, external way than maybe most people are comfortable with, but I think it's a really important thing to show your work internally too. I think that's the thing that I'm a really big proponent of, really big advocate for, and for me, I think that manifests in a couple of ways. You need to be communicating what you're doing all of the time to people. Yeah, and I know for some folks that's really an uncomfortable thought, like they might say, oh, I feel like I'm bragging or I want my work to speak for itself, but your work does not have a mouth, so it can't, so you have to speak for it. You have to get up there and brag.

Speaker 2: 31:02

That just became the promo for the show.

Speaker 1: 31:07

But it's true, you know, like and I and I say that as like I am naturally an introverted person. I don't think of myself as like bragging in real life, like I could never live, you know, as an influencer or anything like that. I would not survive. But there's an importance that comes to it. When it comes to, like, your career and your place in your job, you should be communicating here's what I'm doing, here's how it's impacting the business, and you should be communicating that to as many leaders as you can. For me, a couple of things that have been that I've like, consistently done over the years I've taken with me to this new role. I'm having skip levels with whoever the senior leader is of your customer success or experience department, at least monthly, if you can. If not, if you can't do monthly, at least quarterly. At least monthly, if you can. If not, if you can't do monthly, at least quarterly, yep.

Speaker 1: 32:03

I also think it's really important to have a newsletter about what you do, whether that's your customer education newsletter. Here's everything the customer education team has done in the past month. Share that out to a wider group of leaders, not just your direct department, but everybody else. It makes it easier for people to know what you're doing, which is good, evangelizes you. But it also makes going back to our earlier conversation like the collaboration between different departments. It also makes that easier because now you've went ahead and told people what you're doing, so if they're going to do something that's going to overlap with that, they can come to you.

Speaker 2: 32:38

Yeah, yeah, so huge. I mean they can come to you. Yeah, yeah, so huge. I mean there's a lot of gold in what you just said. Because, first off, you know, I I fall into one of the that, that same category of like I'm. I'm naturally an introvert you wouldn't know it because I have a fricking podcast but I'm naturally not one who defaults to like, oh need to tell everybody about this stuff. You know, because it does feel vain, sometimes I mean it can come.

Speaker 2: 33:09

You know it can feel like you know I don't like talking about myself and all that kind of stuff but in the context of work, if other people are struggling with this, it's like the angle to put or the spin to put on it mentally is like you're enabling the rest of the organization to just use your shit Like you know, like enable them so that they can engage with your team appropriately and engage with your resources appropriately and do all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 33:36

And then the other bit that you said that I think is key is around that executive engagement, not just with, like, the CS leader, but those executives around a lot of the career advice that I give to, you know, younger folks and it's related to what you just said is like go figure out what KPIs your sales leader, your operations leader, your product leader, like all those people, are driving towards. And then how can you like impact those metrics by what it is you do? I think that's, you know, killer, because then that's what feeds your communication, because you know exactly what your audience wants to hear, you know, or kind of needs out of your communication.

Speaker 1: 34:25

Yes, absolutely. I think it's very important to take a what's-in-it-for-you approach. When you're communicating these things In a monthly newsletter, that's not as easy to do because you can't exactly tailor to an audience Right. I would also encourage people who are trying to get better about showing their work to go to the scrums for other teams. Go to whatever their monthly meeting is. See if you can get a 10-minute slot and put together some slides. Talk about what you do, but do it for the angle of whoever you're talking about. If you're going to the sales team, talk about how you are helping to reduce churn or increase upgrade potential. If you're going to the support team, talk about how the things that you're doing have helped with ticket deflection. See if you can come in there with some hard numbers too yeah, right, which is another battle entirely, but it's hard.

Speaker 1: 35:18

it's hard to get that stuff, but but if you can show that for your work too, Okay, we've skirted around this topic enough.

Speaker 2: 35:26

You dropped a big kind of like thing a little bit earlier about like yeah, we use LinkedIn advertising in our digital flows. So talk to me about this, because I've never heard anyone else kind of talk about, you know, using let's put the LinkedIn thing aside but using an ad campaign as part of their post-sale flows.

Speaker 1: 35:52

Yeah, and I think that when it was brought to me, I think it was the first time it was done at that organization too. So the way that this started was through a similar one of those campaigns I was talking about earlier. Like we, this product adoption campaign, we're trying to increase adoption of this product for this group of customers. How do we do that? And as we were going through the process of figuring out what do we want to communicate, how do we want to do it, I became aware.

Speaker 1: 36:20

I don't exactly remember how this came into the conversation, but the demand generation team was like, hey, we have budget this year to use specifically on customer-facing campaigns, but we don't actually know what to do with that budget because we're demand generation Right, not exactly their area forte.

Speaker 1: 36:39

Totally fine, get it. But they were like we have this money, do we want to maybe add it into this existing campaign you guys are building? And I was like I mean, we might as well, right, like there's, this was, you know, back in the time when money was a little bit easier to come by in sass organizations. But it was like the budget's been approved, like let's see how we, how we can do this, and so we pulled the list of customers who were going to be targeting through the emails and the messaging, put those into LinkedIn, said here are the accounts that we want to target. Here are the specific roles we want to target. Here's this custom branded ad that we're going to run and it's going to link out to this landing page that we've created specifically for this campaign. And it did really well. Now, part of that might be because this was at Sales Loft, who famously sells to sellers right, most of the customers are in sales, so a lot of those folks are in LinkedIn, like just as part of their job.

Speaker 2: 37:37

On the hourly basis.

Speaker 1: 37:39

Yeah, yeah. So I think part of it is that you have to know your audience.

Speaker 2: 37:42

Know your audience, if your audience is not in LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: 37:45

This might not work out so well for you, but our audience was, so we got fantastic numbers from it ran the campaign for six weeks. I think it ended up using maybe like a quarter of the budget that they had for the year. So then we went and did it you know, three or four times for other campaigns, and at the end of the campaign, though, we were able to see, okay, not only did we do what we wanted to do, which was this subset of customers has now increased their adoption of this part of the product Is that what we wanted? But we were also able to see how much traffic is happening in each places. Our email open rates were really good. You're talking 40, 50% open rates. Engagement with it up was good, but the engagement with the LinkedIn ads was, I mean, hundreds of thousands of impressions, a couple thousand clicks on on that. So it was able to. We were able to basically say, like, a lot of the success of this campaign probably came from those LinkedIn ads.

Speaker 2: 38:44

That's amazing, that's so cool. And you're right, you had a captive audience in LinkedIn, right, but that's not to say that you couldn't do this other places. So I guess, a couple of follow-up questions. What did the campaign look like? Was this a video? Were these images? What did the campaign look like? Was this a video? Were these images? Because if you're not familiar with LinkedIn ads, literally they're sponsored posts, right, they're like posts. They go into the regular feed that everybody looks at and you, by virtue of being the advertiser, can target in your case, you targeted specific companies and specific roles. So what did the campaign actually look like?

Speaker 1: 39:29

So we had custom graphics built for it that was branded for us and then actually in one of the later examples, we took a more abm account-based approach and we targeted I think it was three it's like our largest customers. So those ones were branded literally of like this you plus sales loft. Like here's how to do it like every you know cool yeah, but it was designed to be just like something quick and easy to read, and it was.

Speaker 1: 40:00

I don't remember the exact language of it, but it was something along the lines of you know, you're missing out on this product you already have.

Speaker 2: 40:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:09

Here's the sales off branding of, again, product you're already familiar with because you have it. So it's like I don't know something about. That, I hope, is a reason why it caught attention. If it's not an ad for something you've never heard of before before is an ad for a tool you're already using and from are familiar with. And you've got this catchy language that is saying like, hey, you're missing out on this key piece of information.

Speaker 2: 40:32

Very minimal text, really, just relying on those graphics to grab the attention cool and, and so I mean I I think a lot of people would have what my initial reaction was, which is to say, oh God, you know, I'm spending money on this. You know, post-sale, I'm like just increasing the overall post-sale budget, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2: 40:58

But then immediately I took a U-turn I was like, okay, what's the ROI on this thing? But then, immediately I took a U-turn I was like okay, what's the ROI on this thing? Like you know, obviously there's some direct attribution because you're going after customers who exhibit a specific problem or specific lack, and so there's probably some pre and post kind of attribution that you can make to like having run this thing pre and post right.

Speaker 1: 41:19

Yeah, yeah, and that's one of the things that we did in our executive review.

Speaker 1: 41:23

We were able to say and I don't remember exact numbers, so I will just ballpark it- it was like okay, we spent $15,000 on the six week LinkedIn ad campaign and we were able to influence 3.5 million in ARR to use this product. To me that's worth it. And then I think you could take it what we what I don't remember if we tracked fully, but I wish we had, and if I did this again I would is like keep watching that same customer base, see how they renew.

Speaker 2: 41:55

Then in the cohort, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 41:57

Track the cohort in the long tail, yeah, exactly and then you can really say okay, and and this amount of arr in that bucket renewed yeah, this is so cool, uh, so, um, I really like gary vaynerchuk.

Speaker 2: 42:12

I follow him quite yeah not religiously, but I follow him and his whole thing on linkedin is a very similar approach. Granted, he is talking marketing. He's not talking like post-sale customer engagement, but his approach is narrow in on your three target customers. What are the three customers that you want to work with? Create crazy targeted campaigns towards specific roles at those companies and then literally create like individual ads. That it's creepy, but that's the power of LinkedIn and cause. You can be that targeted and if your messaging is personalized down to the person or down to the department or down to whatever, that can be an amazingly effective tool to use, especially if your industry is using LinkedIn or another platform like it.

Speaker 1: 43:10

Well and especially you've got. The other thing to say with that is it actually might be a more cost-effective way to do it. With that, too, if you're limiting your audience, then that's really going to lower the amount of spend that you'll have doing this. So it could be a win-win situation of that You're getting the attention of people you really, really want because you're really targeted, and you're also not having to spend nearly as much.

Speaker 2: 43:33

Yeah, and I think this is especially relevant for people who really struggle with customer data and specifically persona data, like if you don't know who your champions are, or if you don't know who your end users are, or if you don't know you know who in your customer contact list. You need to engage actively, even if you don't have that granularity of data you know. Go to where your customers are and spend a little ad budget.

Speaker 1: 44:02

That's yeah, it was definitely the case when we did this, because it was, I think, and I think this is just like a continual challenge. I've talked with other people in digital success about this. Like trying to keep your personas up to date is just like you know, trying to push that rock up the hill just forever and ever, and it just you, just can't win with that.

Speaker 2: 44:21

It's impossible.

Speaker 1: 44:22

So LinkedIn, though people update that fairly regularly it's a good data set you can use from, and if it's where your customers happen to be, then it can be a really good solve to that problem?

Speaker 2: 44:33

Do you know about Champify?

Speaker 1: 44:35

I don't what is it, tell me more.

Speaker 2: 44:38

Champify one of their. One of the problems that they solve for is identifying when key personas move from company to company. So I think a big angle for them is like cross-sell, like selling into new customers where a champion has moved to and whatnot.

Speaker 2: 44:59

But, yeah, a really great way to kind of track certain people. I've seen a couple of demos, certain people I don't. I've seen a couple of demos of it. I've talked to a couple of folks at Champify. Haven't like gotten into the weeds on it too much yet, but it's like another potential solution to that problem.

Speaker 1: 45:16

Okay, I'll just write it down, so I'll take it there you go.

Speaker 2: 45:22

They did not pay me to say that, so, look, I feel like we could talk about this stuff forever. Alas, our time is somewhat limited. I do want to ask you a couple, maybe rapid-ish fire questions. One might be like are there digital motions that you've seen in the wild that you're like crazy excited about?

Speaker 1: 45:44

like you saw it, somebody did something cool b2b, b2c, whatever and you're like oh man, I need to remember that oh man, I think the thing that it's not like one particular example I have, but I think the thing that I'm enjoying seeing people talk about, is this idea of how do we make this as discreet as possible. I love to see this change away from like in your face, I'm going to tell you everything. It's so important and urgent and awesome. So, this idea of like, I'm only going to show this to you if you actually really need to know it, based off of all of these data points, and I'm going to serve it up to you in a way that's not a pop-up in the middle of your screen. You know, yes, I think that's the trend I guess I'm seeing that I'm really enjoying and trying to mirror.

Speaker 2: 46:34

Yeah, I've heard other people talk about this too, and I think the importance of that is understanding that we as a society, with our mobile yes, I'm a two phone person- oh, my goodness.

Speaker 1: 46:47

It's a whole story I'm learning so much about you.

Speaker 2: 46:51

I hate it. It's the worst thing in the world, but we are constantly subjected to dopamine and input and you know, pay attention here, pay attention there. You're right If you remove yourself from that a little bit and you're relevant and timely and kind of like just there, I think that's super important and can be effective.

Speaker 1: 47:17

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 47:17

That's awesome. What content are you paying attention to? What's in your content diet?

Speaker 1: 47:24

what? What content are you paying attention to? What's in your content diet? Well, so I am notoriously terrible at like reading professional self-help books or totally staying on top of, you know, any of that content. So I try to do things that are more bite-sized. Love, obviously, this podcast and the accompanying newsletter. That's something that I try to tune in for I'm on a regular basis, if not every week. I try to keep up it's hard there's, you know weekly, weekly.

Speaker 2: 47:50

Making a podcast weekly is hard I can, imagine.

Speaker 1: 47:53

I think almost harder. Listening to a weekly podcast every week is, I think, even harder well, my issue is I just have, like I'm a big podcast person so I listen to a lot of other things too, so it's like okay, there's like six things I have to listen to every week. I also there is a customer education newsletter that I subscribe to that I really love that is run by. Let me just pull up the I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah, by by Joe Ryan.

Speaker 2: 48:22

Joe Ryan, that's right, he puts out great content.

Speaker 1: 48:25

He does that every week Comes out on Monday at like 8 am and it's a great way to start my week and just see what content are people putting out, what can I read and digest and he shares not just the blog posts or the whatever, but he also just shares. Here's what someone wrote on LinkedIn, which I think is really great, that he's kind of opening up the doors for a lot of people who are trying to post content on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 48:51

Yeah, You're not the first to call out Joe Ryan. You probably won't be the last, because what? What I really love about him is that he uses his platform to amplify other people, which is so so yeah yeah, so yeah, dig that and then I will say one other thing is my.

Speaker 1: 49:07

I'm terrible about reading books, but I did just read a book called now discover your strengths which is it's centered around. I mean, first off, there's, like you fill out, you know, one of those tests that tells you what your strengths are. But it's actually a very good representation. I've never read something that I felt was more accurate to my strengths and the entire book is this idea of you shouldn't be focusing on oh, I have these weaknesses, I need to improve them.

Speaker 1: 49:33

You should be focusing on these are my strengths, and here's how I'm going to improve those in order to take my career to the next level.

Speaker 2: 49:43

Ah, that's interesting, yeah, because so many of those things like Myers-Briggs is, like they point out, kind of like your weak areas and give you like suggestions on how you can improve those. But I always took not offense, but I always kind of looked at that with like kind of a side eye because I'm like, well, some people, yes, have weaknesses, but that's kind of what makes them who they are. Like. It's not, it's not realistic to expect like a fully round circle on that diagram that they give you.

Speaker 1: 50:14

Exactly, and some and some of your weaknesses don't matter if they're not something you that applies in your role, you know so.

Speaker 2: 50:22

Yeah, right, yeah, exactly yeah. That's super cool. Do you want to give any shout outs?

Speaker 1: 50:29

Oh, I gosh. I know that's hard I know I have so many people I could shout out Like I would shout out.

Speaker 2: 50:36

Invariably what happens is people shout out a couple of people and then, like a day later, they're like man, I didn't shout out so and I didn't this is like my oscars speech that I like was not prepared for.

Speaker 1: 50:46

I need to like pull out my little like note card if I'm supposed to think I would shout out a couple people from from sales off that were like really great and are doing great things and and pushing me forward natasha evans, suzanne graham they've really like helped build out a lot of the things that I was able to do and kind of clear a path from a leadership perspective. So that was really great and I love the way they're championing that. And then, in my current role, katie and Charles. Yeah, eric and Brandon. They are just great people to be working with. I'm so glad to be able to get to build the things alongside them that I that I am.

Speaker 2: 51:19

Yeah, that's awesome Cool. I appreciate that very much. Where can people find you and engage with you? I mean, LinkedIn is the obvious place, but where can people engage with you?

Speaker 1: 51:32

Yeah, linkedin is the best place. I don't have my own podcast or newsletter or anything else to plug, but just wait, follow me on LinkedIn. I try to post there once a week about truly relevant digital customer success things. I'm trying to share examples of what I've done, insights that I've had, things that didn't work, and I also throw in some, you know, just building like your personal brand and being just a good career person. I've got some of that content in there as well. So if you like any of that, follow me on LinkedIn.

Speaker 2: 52:07

Yeah, I'll. I mean, like I said at the beginning, like you know your, your content is spot on and and, uh, yeah, I think a lot of people can take a page out of your book of personal branding and whatnot. So kudos on that. Well, look, it's been a pleasure chatting with you over the last hour or so and thank you so much for joining and taking the time.

Speaker 1: 52:28

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2: 52:32

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 you. I'm alex trichovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.