Speaker 1: 0:31

Have you ever seen an org spiff team members for like data hygiene, like they give them a gift card or something like that?

Speaker 2: 0:40

No, probably the opposite, Like why are you spending so much of your time? You should be talking to customers, not cleaning up the hygiene.

Speaker 1: 0:48

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. Greetings, happy new year and welcome back to the Digital CX podcast. I'm Alex Tergovich and I'm so glad you're back with me this week and every week as we talk about all things digital in CX.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Today is the first interview show of the new year, so welcome to 2025.

Speaker 1: 1:40

I'm pleased today to present a conversation that I had all back in November of last year with Erwin Hipsman, who is a data guy, and you know we talk a lot about data as part of digital, because it is a foundational pillar that we've talked about before and it is one of those things that can make or break a digital program. Well, Erwin has taken it upon himself to build a business all around helping people sort out their customer data, which is super, super cool, and so in this conversation he talks about the company he's founded called Repetitos, and this, you know, not only the services he offers, but then offers some practical advice about what you should do to help clean up your own customer data sets and the kinds of things that you can put in place to keep that data clean. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation today with Erwin Hipsman, because I sure did. And happy new year, Mr Erwin. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day and welcome.

Speaker 2: 2:49

Super excited being here. This is a great topic. I love talking about customer success, digital customer success, customer marketing, customer advocacy, all those things.

Speaker 1: 2:57

Yeah, for sure I actually. Maybe you can remind me. I don't remember how we originally connected, but as soon as we did connect, I was elated, because one of the things that we all talk about in terms of CS, and digital CS specifically, is data and data cleanliness. And that's your bread and butter, that's like what you do, that is your thing, and so I've been excited about this particular episode for a while.

Speaker 2: 3:26

Yeah, it's not the most glamorous work. And the background as to why I started the company is called Repetitos. I'll explain why a little bit later. But the background why I started the company's called Repetitos I'll explain why a little bit later. But the background why I started this is I started. I've been in sales, I've been in customer success and customer marketing, so a little trilingual and at the four customer marketing practice I started at various B2B SaaS companies. The one thing they all had in common was the quality of the customer contact database was okay at best.

Speaker 1: 3:54

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:54

And then when I left Forrester, I decided I'm not going to go back for full-time work. But what was the one thing that? What could I add that nobody else is doing? Because I could hang my shingle out there so I can do everything for you from a customer advocacy perspective run your cab, do your case studies but what's the one thing that nobody does, which is the data health. I said let me start a practice that focuses on the customer contact database, health and everybody I talk to and the data. I see everyone says that the second biggest challenge in customer marketing, when you want to communicate with customers, is the health. First is resources. You've got your maturity index. Challenge in customer marketing, when you want to communicate with customers to health First is resources. You've got your maturity index. Is that in line with what you're seeing?

Speaker 1: 4:39

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'll put it a slightly different way in that I think what a lot of CS orgs that I'm seeing kind of go through this digital CS maturity assessment that I've put up a lot of. What they're after is predictive analytics versus just reactive stuff.

Speaker 1: 4:59

I mean it's relatively easy to, you know, be reactive to certain things that have happened. But I think the real trick is being predictive around things and that's where the clean data comes in. And I think, a health score. You know health scores are a tricky subject because we've all built these rules-based scorecards and we all know the intricacies of building rules-based scorecards and how it takes. A lot of times folks just go set it and forget it. They build the scorecard, it's there. They went through a lot to do it, but then they don't go back and test the score against their churned accounts, for instance, or accounts that have done really well.

Speaker 2: 5:38

The biggest concern I have with health scores is that they're all account-based health. Very few people do the individual health score Right. Yeah, a huge leap to make one, but if you think of accounts as a series of individual people, that one piece of data doesn't really speak to the larger group, particularly your admins, your influencers, your economic buyers. Those people's health score is really important and I'd love to see folks start thinking about the health score of individuals, not just accounts.

Speaker 1: 6:12

For sure, and kudos to those of you out there who are doing separate NPS scores, for instance for your executives versus your users, because a lot of times those aren't aligned. But it goes into that kind of level of maturity, which is to say, are your executives generally aligned and are they prepped for the renewal? Is that going to be a smooth transition? Versus your users, are they actively using the thing? And the two correlate for sure.

Speaker 2: 6:41

And I think of the predictive as sort of level three customer database. Health Level one would be no offense, just the freaking basics. Do we have the right title for the person? Because when we first found them three years ago they were director, now they're VP. And then how do you do segmentation if you have the wrong title? Second is their location. Over the past few years people moved everywhere. You've got field marketing who would love to know where people are located. You've got legal who wants to make sure you're being compliant. And the third is do they still even work for the company that you think they work for? And that's the name Repetitos. It's all about, once you get it clean, all this, people leave all the time, and how do you nurture those leads as they move away from one company and move to another company?

Speaker 2: 7:29

So that's the foundation is the basics to another company. So that's the foundation, is the basics. The second level is what data like, and this never happens. If, let's say, the demand gen or the CRM team came to you and said, hey, what fields could we put in there to make your life easier? Never had that question. I've never had a question from an executive saying what's the health of our database either. But we can talk about that in a second. But if and but. If they did, I would say I come up with a list of five or six, but the two I would work on would be I need a feel for people's LinkedIn profile so I can more easily track them as they move, change their titles. Second is I want to know when we did the last update of their title. Yeah, because that would say here are some people we haven't updated their title in three years. Maybe it's time to look. And everyone says that, oh, it's the CSMs who keep the data up to date.

Speaker 2: 8:19

And they can't at that scale. Maybe that top contact they can keep up to date, but all the users they don't have the time to keep them up to date. So people think the CSMs, that's their job and it's not. It's not.

Speaker 1: 8:34

And people work in digital CSM, because there's often not a CSM yeah exactly.

Speaker 1: 8:36

I mean, look, there's a time and a place for humans to do a gut check on things, For your CSMs to maybe do a gut check on a report that comes out every once in a while that says, hey, we have these people listed as champion. Does that ring true with what you think? Totally Like a validation exercise? Absolutely. But like keeping contact lists up to date is nasty and to your point, especially in digital, where you may have thousands of accounts that you've got to track and it's so interesting because LinkedIn is where all that data lives and I think the vast majority of organizations aren't really leveraging that as well as they could be.

Speaker 2: 9:16

There's two ways to do it. I've done this a lot over the years. Okay, I'll pick the main point of contact. It all comes in our 2,000 accounts and every quarter I do 500 of them. Just spend the day on LinkedIn double checking making sure we're right. You'd be amazed what you find out Now. That doesn't scale well, and there's technology out there that helps a little bit, but the technology isn't perfect. Finish two engagements with clients one with 900 advocates, one with 30,000 contacts and you can't do it all with technology. They'll get you 80% of the way there, but there's 20% that you've got to do. That it's still the hard work of trying to find them and, obviously, update the data.

Speaker 1: 9:54

The old Pareto principle at work. Hey look, we jumped right in, which is awesome. I definitely want to dig in on a lot of this stuff, but I do want to go back to you for just a second and I want to understand a little bit about who you are, what got you to where you are today, what your journey was. But really primarily my interest is what was it like working in community television in the nineties?

Speaker 2: 10:20

All right, Actually my career started in radio.

Speaker 2: 10:22

So that's. This is why I love podcasting. I, frankly, go to bed at night and listen to podcasts because they tend to put me to sleep, but that's a separate issue. But I started my career in radio and public radio in a small town in Yellow Springs, ohio for those people who know it, I don't know what I'm talking about and then did work in video documentary and then got involved in video conferencing. So the early days of video conferencing, where you needed pretty heavy equipment to do multi-point video conferencing, satellite conferencing I got my master's through online learning. I was one of the first people in the country to get a master's degree through online through George Washington University. And then at that point I pivoted and started working for B2B SaaS companies and that's where I had roles in sales early on. Customer success has that evolved? Customer marketing has that evolved? Yeah, and in the middle of that I ran two public access cable TV stations in Boston. So I started up Somerville Massachusetts and Cambridge Massachusetts public access TV station. So basically, the cable company gave us a boatload of money as part of the franchise fee 3% of revenues and we built TV studios and to this day, both of those organizations exist and there are many public access cable TV stations around the country.

Speaker 2: 11:39

We trained folks on how to create video, whatever it might be. I have a studio for live production and we also had channels that we had to fill up. So the ones I worked at were nonprofits. So I was also the executive director of a non-profit organization, with all of its pros and cons and challenges, but the great thing was watching these people who have something to say. Here are the tools, here's the training. First amendment to the extreme I can tell stories. I mean we had police protection a few times. We did live shows because there are people not happy with what we're doing, particularly elected officials.

Speaker 1: 12:17

We're not happy.

Speaker 2: 12:18

And the First Amendment. It's a beautiful thing when used properly.

Speaker 1: 12:23

That's fascinating to me, especially in that market in the Northeast, because it's just an amazing melting pot of different cultures and different people and all that kind of stuff. So you've had all these experiences in marketing and sales and post-sale or customer success and whatnot. I guess because of that there aren't a lot of people who have that kind of trifecta and I call it a trifecta because those things ideally should be working in tandem or in alignment with the customer journey but we get it wrong, like so many different, so many times. There a common thread that you often pull on when you're maybe advising some of your clients or when you're just observing organizations and how they function. Is there a common thread that you recommend they pull on?

Speaker 2: 13:22

Yeah, I mean I think it's language in some ways, that people don't understand the language of each other. I mean, we all speak English, but you've got different, very heavy accents and things get lost in translation. I mean, sales talks one language and Customer success talks another and customer marketing talks another, and you have to know when to have these conversations. So the last week of the quarter is probably not a good time to talk to sales people about your great idea, and so it's understanding the ebbs and flows of their year.

Speaker 2: 13:58

Csms classic CSMs really focus around the QBR. Salespeople focus around closing. Customer marketing doesn't have those sort of guideposts like they do, and so in customer marketing, you sort of need to understand what their guideposts are, what an individual salesperson, csm, is able to do on their own without having to ask a lot of permission and what are you asking? That you know what. They're not going to do this because their boss has to tell them, and you've got to convince their boss that we need everyone's LinkedIn profile and here's why we need it. If you just ask them, they're never going to do it for you.

Speaker 1: 14:35

Yeah, yeah, so spot on that language and communication style is so different between those orgs. One of the things that I preach quite a bit for folks that I'm working with is this notion of in order to really work cross-functionally effectively, you need to know what other organizations are driving towards, and it can be as simple as spending a little bit of time with an executive on a regular basis in that other org to really understand what their goals are, what their KPIs are, what are they driving towards, and then putting in the effort to really examine how the things that you're doing within your own function potentially impact those KPIs that those other leaders are working towards, because, ultimately, everybody has their thing and it can be very easy to just wrap your arms around your thing and forget about everybody else, but if you're really truly trying to build something cross-functional which, let's be honest, in digital, we have to operate cross-functionally you got to know what the drivers are on the other sides so that you can then demonstrate how this is what you're going to see out of it.

Speaker 2: 15:48

Yeah, and even sitting like strongly. It's just people sitting on QBRs, people sitting on a sales call. I mean not with tools like Gong, you don't have to sit on it, you can just listen to the sales call and understand what's it like being in the shoes of a salesperson with a customer in early stage and late stage. If you're doing user groups, I mean to me that's when I think of digital customer success, my tendency is like, well, now there's no human involved anymore with those customers that get the digital customer success that are assigned to that. But what are those human things you can start doing? You can start doing user groups in your key cities. So the interaction is not purely digital, there's that human interaction. But what are those human things you can start doing? You can start?

Speaker 1: 16:24

doing user groups in your key cities.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Yeah, so the interaction is not purely digital. There's that human interaction. You get to see each other and not just send things all day to people and hope the open rate exceeds 30%.

Speaker 1: 16:35

Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, ultimately digital is a digital CS as a whole. A lot of people like to put it into this box. That's like, okay, yeah, this is just a tech touch customer and this is like we're just going to send emails to these folks and be done with it. But ultimately, if you're of that mindset, you're missing the primary point, which is that your digital CS function should enable your humans to be effective.

Speaker 2: 17:01

But enable your humans to be effective and you know whether it's yeah, good question for you as core organizations start pivoting to digital customer success. I think that there's one of two reasons why. One is well, it's cheaper and we can reduce headcount. Second is oh, we've got these tools. Now they're these digital tools. Yes, we're going to reapportion people. We're not going to lower headcount, but we're going to put two of those CSMs into customer marketing. We're going to put three of them into digital customer success. So we're not lowering our costs, we're just moving things around. What's your take as to why organizations pivot to digital success? Is it, oh, we can save money and just use all these tools? Or is it we could just be with the same money? We can be that much more impactful.

Speaker 1: 17:48

I mean you hope the latter but I wonder what's the real take? You do hope the latter. 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 1: 18:33

Now back to the show. Yeah, I mean, look, it's no secret right that the state of, let's just say, the SaaS industry has changed dramatically over the years and where, in the past, we've thrown headcount at CS and those kinds of things. That isn't the reality that we live in anymore. I'm not a hundred percent convinced that it's entirely budget, that the reason for switching to digital is entirely budget driven, although, although that is undeniably a massive part of it, I do think there's a healthy element of look, we want to leverage AI, we want to leverage these tools. It's become incredibly easy for practically anyone to go and integrate tools and to get two tools talking to each other and to build some basic automations, and to get two tools talking to each other and to build some basic automations. I mean, the accessibility of this stuff, I think, has also been a massive driver to adopting digital, just because it's way easier these days than it has been in the past.

Speaker 1: 19:36

The really mature organizations, I think, are coming at it from a different lens. They're looking at it from a customer experience lens and they're also looking at it from a customer experience lens and they're also looking at it from an employee experience lens, because your customer experience. I mean it goes without saying, right, and in fact there's a lot of, there's a lot of surveys out there I think Gartner and Forrester, maybe one of the two where they've said that most, the majority of customers actually prefer a digital engagement when they go and when they need help with something, and I get it. I'm right there. I'm about as antisocial as it gets sometimes.

Speaker 2: 20:12

And so.

Speaker 1: 20:13

I would prefer an AI chatbot over talking to a human not any day, so I think that goes without saying. But the employee experience of it is often kind of overlooked a little bit because, hey look, you've got these CSMs that are being asked to do quote, unquote more with less. What the hell does that really mean? But, fundamentally speaking, these folks are doing things that, honestly, are mind-numbing, overly repetitious and are things that could either be automated or worked on in some other way, and specifically around AI assistance and those kinds of things, I think that's all coming together to to help a CSM specifically be as efficient as possible without having to, like rip their hair out, spending four hours making a QBR deck and all that kind of stuff. I think that's where the gold in digital really lies is making your team as efficient as possible.

Speaker 1: 21:22

That was a stupid long answer to an easy question. But yeah, I mean what's pivoting a little bit to the data element of things, because that's your bread and butter and that's what you do. To do any of this stuff, you're going to need the data to support that stuff, and data can mean any number of things. But I'm curious, as part of what you do with your clients. You're going in and you're doing essentially data hygiene exercises and you're doing some of the work for them on behalf of the customer, but then you're also likely advising your customers on how to keep up the hygiene and those kinds of things. Like if you go in and it's just data chaos and you need to start advising them on where to start, where to look first. What are you advising your clients on?

Speaker 2: 22:14

Yeah, so the first thing I'll do with a customer, I mean I'll do a health assessment. This is what you do. Well, this is what you don't do. Well, this is what you can fix on your own. This is what I can fix for you. Well, this is what you don't do. Well, this is what you can fix on your own, this is what I can fix for you. And then, pretty quickly, we get into okay, how are you going to clean up our database? So I've got 10,000 customers. We need that cleaned up. So I need to see the database.

Speaker 2: 22:37

Some clients that I can't work with, like government, for example, or even cybersecurity, they're not going to give their account list to me. I say, well, here's how you can do it yourself, but it's going to be. You're gonna have to hire somebody to, or get some summer intern or the kid of the CEO to come in here and spend a lot of time. And I would do some quick segmentation. You probably have five different levels of contacts your sort of main point of contact. Your admin heavy user, advocate main point of contact. Your admin heavy user advocate. Your regular user. Your irregular user. Your non-users. Take the top two to really really focus on. So you may have 10,000 names, but there's only like two or 3,000 you really care about and go in there and clean up yourself If you can't give me the list.

Speaker 2: 25:23

But if you can give me the list, then the first thing I do is just eyeball and say, here's what you're doing poorly. I mean, look at how many people have their first name and last name reversed. This is something to clean up that you can do without me. But you know the math. I use costs about $4 a contact to clean, to go into LinkedIn. You know, cut and paste, update, put into a spreadsheet, have that someone update it. If you use technology, it's about 40 cents a person to do that.

Speaker 2: 25:51

And so generally what I found is I can generally find between 80 to 90% of the people that they'll give me that with the data processes I work with and they're all SOC 2 compliant. And then there's a small percentage that part of my job is to go in there and find those people. I could do it. I'm a little expensive, know that, but I could do it really fast.

Speaker 2: 26:10

Yeah, and there are a lot of subtleties that you just can't hire, like somebody on on fiverr and say they're going to linkedin to do this for me, because they're going to find half the people that I find, but there's gonna be half the group to miss. And then I do an analysis. I go, now that I've looked at your database, now that I see you know what, to me, the three most important pieces of data we talked about data, but in order, are the employment status of the person, so if they're no longer at the company, that is really important, particularly if they're a main point of contact, because when I was in sales, the number one reason why the accounts renewed is we lost our champion.

Speaker 2: 26:45

You want to find that out six months in advance, not six weeks in advance. Second is the second most important is location, because I'm sorry, is the title, because if you think about cross-sell, if somebody was a manager now they're a VP you probably don't cross-sell to managers, but you probably do cross-sell to VPs. And the third is location, which is important, but in the scheme of things, the least of the three. And the third is location, which is important, but in the scheme of things, at least to the three. And so then I would be able to say, okay, for your top tier of accounts, those main point of contacts and admins, you've got 20% of your people who are no longer at the company. We've got to figure out a way to keep better track of folks. Or your admins. You're really good on their title, but you don't know where the hell they live. So, as you want to do user groups, you don't even know where to invite them. So that's the analysis that you do. So it's more than just give me your list, I'll give it back to you. I mean, there are companies that will do that for you. But let's dig into it deeper and say, okay, moving forward, here are the things that you need to focus on. And now you can go to the CSMs and say we've done the analysis. This is what's hurting us.

Speaker 2: 27:48

My math says that around 3% to 5% of ACV is at risk due to bad data, based upon the companies I've worked with and scenarios I've worked out. Well, you're never going to get down to zero. But if you could clean up the main point of contacts and the admins and maybe their title and where they're working, you're going to reduce that projected economic impact to 1% and you're never going to get down to zero. I mean, think about retail stores. They never get theft down to zero, but they do things to get it down to an acceptable level. And that's what it's all about is how much risk is a company willing to take with their data?

Speaker 2: 28:22

And if I were a CEO of a company and I were to ask the head of CES or my head of customer marketing or demand gen, hey, how's the health of our database? I would not be able to get an answer. They'd say, oh, it's pretty good. If I was CEO, I'd go what do you mean it's pretty good? Yeah, well, we don't really have any numbers, but we think it's sort of okay. It's like wait a second. These are our customers. That an acceptable answer. So one of the things I want to do with any of my customers at the end of this is so they can have a number and they can say our data is 92% correct and that's an risk we're willing to take, but that's not too bad.

Speaker 2: 28:58

And then, as we move forward, maybe we can get up to 95%. Certainly, for the main point of contact you want that at 99%, your admin's 95%, your active user's 88% on. So where do we want to really zero in on in order to keep that database so it doesn't continue to decay 2% every month? It only decays 0.2% every month, yeah, right.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Yeah, it's so critical and, to your point, this isn't a one and done thing right, it's an amoebic thing. It changes all the time. One of the things that I'm keen to dig in, maybe a little bit deeper on, is an example that you pointed out, which is the classic one of hey, you're champion left. I think by any measure, that should send alarm bells ringing throughout your organization your health scores should tank, your CSM should be alerted, your account team should be alerted. The renewal, like everybody should know. Okay, champion left.

Speaker 1: 29:56

What's the playbook that we follow, all of that kind of stuff, but you got to know first that your champion left, and that's probably the number one thing that we just miss until we actually talk to the customer or until we actually have the next conversation with the customer and let's hope it's not at renewal time that you find this stuff out right. So I think, to your point, there's any number of tools out there that can help you to try to identify that. But, in your experience, what kind of what's the mix of action that you would want to take on a regular basis to get ahead of that information? Is it digital, something like Champify? Is it looking at it on a regular basis via your CSMs. Is it a little bit of both? What's your take on those?

Speaker 2: 30:46

Yeah, I think there's a combination of manual and technology. So manual are things like bounce backs, things like an account manager or CSM, knowing that the person has left and checking it off and no longer at company. The other really tricky part is those champions who are still at the company. They haven't left the company but they no longer are involved in your product. So and that could take a long time to figure that out They'll tell you eventually, but that could take a while to do that. The playbook is one we need to find a replacement for that person that's on the account team, this customer success team, on the customer marketing team, that person, if they've left and have landed at a new company, the people who left and haven't landed I would argue that those people should be nurtured in a very different way. But if they've left and landed a new company, that becomes a marketing qualified lead at that point.

Speaker 1: 31:41

That was the project.

Speaker 2: 31:42

The last project I did at Forrester before I left was setting up a repeat sales by former customer contact. We found that we were able to find about 200, about half of the people manually bounce backs whatever. About half of the people have left their company in the past, let's say, 90 days through technology. So it was a combination and what happens? About half of those leads got accepted by sales. The person went to work for government we don't sell to government, so wasn't accepted lead and then we were able to get of the ones that were accepted within the first 90 days of the project. There was a 10 close rate. So typically in in regular marketing qualified leads you see about a two percent. A close one rate here was 10.

Speaker 2: 32:25

So yeah what most companies do today is they go, well, that person will. Just when they're ready to buy, they'll call us. You spend all this time prospecting to people who are never going to buy. And there's a warm prospect who've gone to an ideal customer profile and you say we're going to wait. Well, because that salesperson says that person's not in my patch anymore. I sell, I support high tech, and they went to insurance, so I don't sell to insurance, so I'm not going to follow up with the person and that lead just goes away. Why are companies not nurturing those warm leads, incentivizing them? There are a lot of things you can do and not just put them in the prospect queue because they know you, and it's a different sort of nurture flow that you would have with those warm leads that landed at an ideal customer profile.

Speaker 1: 33:12

Yeah, I mean to your point. If you have a champion that left to another company that's within your ICP and you know about it, send them some congratulatory cookies.

Speaker 2: 33:24

Yeah, depending on what your product is like. At Forrester our product was content we could give people yeah, hey, here's your first 90 days on your new job. Yeah, documentation. If you're a sales force, you can give. Hey, here's a ticket to Dreamforce. There are things that you have and not just like a 10% discount on your next sale. Things you have that are core to your organization. Well, we have a community. We normally kick people off when they leave, but you know you can stay the community, a lot of things you can do to keep those people. So when they are ready to buy they think of you first, they don't start looking at all the other competitors.

Speaker 1: 33:54

Yeah, exactly that's so cool.

Speaker 2: 33:56

And the advantage of what I do is that you mentioned there are a bunch of companies out there that will clean up databases, track them, but they all want the success. So they all want one-year, two-year, multi-year contracts. Yes, what I do is the data process I work with. Is I can do a one-off, so for I use their 40 cents, a name whatever it is a name we can clean it up once without the company having to purchase a license, go through procurement, legal I mean. I can get things done in weeks where it'll take six months to bring software into the company and then you can try and then, if you like it, now you've already have your building case, your business case, and then you can say now we want to purchase this product, whether it's from the company I work with or another one to help us on throughout the year.

Speaker 2: 34:40

But in a sense, I'm your pilot.

Speaker 1: 34:42

Yeah, exactly. Well, and that brings me to kind of my next question, which is look, you've gone through an initial round of data cleanup, you've gotten yourself to a pretty decent point, but, as we talked about earlier, the clock starts ticking, that data starts changing in drips and drabs here and there. What kind of hygiene practices do you recommend your customers engage in? I mean, there's the obvious stuff of hey, look, you mentioned it earlier when a CSM notices their champions leaving, like mark that contact as left. But what are some maybe not so obvious things that you might recommend a customer do?

Speaker 2: 35:16

Some of it's eyeballing. The one thing and this is all a little silly, but the one thing that drives me crazy is you'll look at a customer contact list let's say it's 2,000 names and you'll find that 10% of them, the first initial, their first name, is not capitalized. It's like, guys, come on, we should be able to fix that on our own and just do that right.

Speaker 2: 35:37

So I think there's some ongoing basic once a quarter CSM. Go through your list, just eyeball it, clean it up, because we've done the hard work and we'll continue to do the hard work. And then one thing that surprised me. I thought my clients would want okay, erwin, thanks, we're done, we're going to keep it clean from here. They basically want me to go back once a quarter, go back through their database and just it'll be a lot easier the second time and obviously a lot cheaper. But once a quarter I prefer to use somebody, a service, to keep an eye on it, because not everyone's going to keep it all updated and there's some hard stuff of that, like location or title, that you can't ask anyone to keep track of. That. And that's where technology comes in.

Speaker 1: 36:17

Yeah, that's huge. That's huge. How do you?

Speaker 2: 36:22

deal with dupes.

Speaker 1: 36:23

Delete them, I guess.

Speaker 2: 36:29

Tricky part is which one to delete.

Speaker 1: 36:31

Yeah, exactly Like cause I can. So in my current organization we just went through a pretty massive Gainsight migration where we basically migrated one instance into another existing instance and just the amount of duplication that's inherent in whenever you do that kind of stuff is just massive, just massive. And it can be like a super tricky thing to figure out which one to merge into which other one or which one to delete and all that kind of stuff and and I'm sure that's something that you face all the time and ultimately it's probably not even your call, it's your call to like highlight that's more the the demand gen.

Speaker 2: 37:12

When you think about you know well, when you talk to companies they'll say that's everyone's responsibility is to clean up the database. Well, whenever you hear everybody means nobody. But the part of the responsibility that, like the demand gen team owns is the duplicates.

Speaker 2: 37:26

I would say the accuracy of the data itself, like their title location. I don't think that's a demand gen responsibility because they're not close enough to the client to do that. That's what falls upon customer success, cs, ops, customer marketing, if there's that group in the organization. So everyone should know their lane, what they're responsible for cleaning up the database. But the CRM team, I think, is responsible for the database.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Have you ever seen an org, spf, team members for data hygiene If they see one person doing a huge amount of it, like they give them a gift card or something like that?

Speaker 2: 38:03

no, probably the opposite. Like where are you spending so much of your time? You should be talking to customers, not cleaning up the hygiene. I would argue against against that okay I think there's now with technology.

Speaker 2: 38:15

I think, like I said at the beginning, if you could do the hard work, like customer marketing or CS ops whoever's best positioned to do this we've just done the hard work. We've hired this guy, erwin, we spent the money, we've got it clean. It's at 92%. Now we need you to do this little part, like, okay, they stepped up as opposed to our data is no good Guys, you've got to clean up. So if you do, 90% of people they'll say, oh, we'll take care of the 10%. We get it.

Speaker 1: 38:42

Yeah, yeah, for sure, that's cool. I love it. One of the things that I like to ask quite frequently is just around any huge blunders or missteps that you've seen, either in action with your customers, or ones that you've been part of yourself, where you've learned something.

Speaker 2: 39:04

You know, I want to say, yeah, it's like it's a tricky one. So we all believe in collaboration and I collaborated hugely with the digital customer success team and it's like, okay, we don't need you anymore Because you basically told us everything you do, and so that was a case where I probably should not have collaborated so much, because I probably still would have had my job.

Speaker 2: 39:27

On the other hand, it gave me this opportunity to both babysit my granddaughter, nine to five, for the next three months, and it also gave me the opportunity to start my own company. So maybe it was a blessing in disguise, I think from a blunder perspective. It seems like everyone thinks everyone else is doing that part of it.

Speaker 1: 39:48

Oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 39:48

Getting back to that, if everyone does it, nobody does it, and then you start getting embarrassing because you start sending the wrong type of email to the wrong type of person. Right, it gets into like segmentation. You can't do that unless things are really up to date and people understand the types and the personas. Yeah, so I think it's the mistakes that get made. It's really the plunder.

Speaker 1: 40:10

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 40:12

And by sending the CEO of a big company your product update. They don't really care about that. Yeah, so it's poor segmentation.

Speaker 1: 40:19

I think, yeah, it makes sense. One of the things I'm seeing more and more of are and what you just said reminded me of this are SaaS platforms that are asking their users in-app to self-identify what role they play within an organization, because it's one thing to go grab titles from LinkedIn or whatever, but they may or may not have a direct correlation with what an actual person does within the platform.

Speaker 1: 40:49

So I love it when I go into a platform and they ask me who I am and what I do, because I know what they're after is trying to target me with very specific information that I may need in a timely manner based on my role. And the thing is like there are certain platforms that do that really well and they ask me and then, oh lo and behold, I start getting emails that are kind of crafted towards me and then there are others who are asking it, but then don't do anything with that. Well, that's a separate issue. That's a separate issue. That's a separate issue. But have you seen like other cool things where there's like digital motions supported by some of the data? In that way?

Speaker 2: 41:27

But it's just confluence of sort of a title and role. Because somebody, for example, from a health score perspective, you might think, oh well, they're doing poorly because they don't log in as much as somebody else does, whereas no, they're super happy, but they only need to log in once a month because that's the way they use your product. Or a C-level person, you might think they're the main point of contact, but they're really not. Who's truly that main point of contact?

Speaker 2: 41:52

when you've got some sort of issue. So to me it's pulling together a few different pieces of data title, role, utilization of the platform, other sorts of activity, email open rates, webinar registration rates. So you begin to get that full picture of the customer.

Speaker 1: 42:08

Yeah, it's super smart.

Speaker 2: 42:09

It's hard.

Speaker 1: 42:10

It's super hard, yeah, and it's different for every industry, right, which adds a layer of complexity because you can't necessarily take one one theory and apply it to the other.

Speaker 2: 42:21

so yeah, yeah, banking finance is very different than technology. Oh, yeah, yeah absolutely.

Speaker 1: 42:27

As we kind of start to round down this combo, which I've super enjoyed and it I think it's going to bring a lot of value to the audience, I'm curious what are what? What do you consume from a content perspective to keep yourself up to date?

Speaker 2: 42:39

Yeah, at the beginning I talked about how I'm a radio guy, so I'm a big podcast listener. I love Derek Thomas. Derek Thompson does plain English. He writes for the Atlantic. Very eclectic but super well produced. Big fan of Scott Galloway's and what he talks about vis-a-vis even though I have all granddaughters and daughters and granddaughters just what's happening to men out there, I mean as a guy, it's like really, really bothersome and he talks about that a lot and I really appreciate him raising this issue. Oh, and one thing I strongly suggest to my customer marketing friends because that's my world and I would suggest our CS friends as well as I listen to RevOps and MarketingOps podcasts.

Speaker 2: 43:20

Podcasts yeah, Because I want to understand their language. I'm not a demand gen guy, I'm not a MarketingOps guy. I've worked with them but I want to know like and they have the same issues that we have when should MarketingOps live? Should live in sales? Should live in with CS? How do we automate it? Ai, all these little sub-niches with the organization have the exact same conversations and it's really it's interesting to hear what's on the mind of marketing ops versus RedVal ops versus CS ops.

Speaker 1: 43:46

So those are the things.

Speaker 2: 43:47

I tend to listen to.

Speaker 1: 43:48

Yeah, that's great. I love that. Yeah, I've started to like not listen to as many CS podcasts, just because like like I'm here, I get it. Let's start to diversify a little bit. That's super smart. Are there any kudos that you want to give to anyone while you're here? Either people that are doing great stuff in digital or otherwise data related or really anything.

Speaker 2: 44:12

No, I heard that when I was listening to the cat webinar with the podcast I don't say webinar with cat and so I heard that question. Oh, I got to be prepared. So I thought about two things. One is there are people that we've worked for that we will never work for again. They can call us up and say Erwin, come work for me. What did we pay you before? 50% more. Sorry, I'm going to pass. There are also people who I've worked for in my life who, if they called me tomorrow and said, erwin, I can't tell you what the job is, you've got to start Monday. I can't tell you the salary, I'd say I'm in.

Speaker 1: 44:43

Let's go.

Speaker 2: 44:44

And those are the people I love, and unfortunately they're more of the former people you'll never work for again. Yes, the people that you would you drop everything because you trust them. They trust you and you go work for them. But the kudos I want to give are really to my two daughters. I never tell them enough how proud I am of them, but my parents are war refugees and I'm the first American born in my family. One of my daughters is the Assistant Attorney General for the state of Wisconsin. The other one is a VP of Customer Experience sort of the family business at a large international bank. Wow, those are people I give my kudos to. I'm so freaking proud of them.

Speaker 1: 45:24

That's amazing.

Speaker 2: 45:25

Because they won't listen to the rest of it.

Speaker 1: 45:27

Yeah, that's awesome. Kudos to you. You've raised some incredible human beings, so there you go. Lastly, where can people find you, engage with you, ask you about their data problems and all that kind of fun stuff?

Speaker 2: 45:42

yeah, I'm a solopreneur, so I'm not the strongest on marketing because that's that's a full-time job. Yes, uh, so I do everything on linkedin. So the company's name is repetitos, repeat sales by former customer contacts. On my profile, er Erwin Hipsman is where you find me. A lot of my content is there. The website repetitoscom has a lot of content. It really explains what the company does.

Speaker 1: 46:05

Amazing, amazing. Well, I am so thankful that you joined us today, shared your insights. I think it'll be really useful for the audience and, yeah, looking forward to getting this one live. But Erwin really appreciate the time. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, matt, appreciate it. 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 word map and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 1: 46:46

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 Trikovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.