The early stage blues | Ep. 82

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:09)

This guy was hired as the title of a lead CSM, lead to a team that doesn't exist, to customers that don't exist.

[Rob] (0:09 - 0:13)

This is a masterclass on poor expectation setting by the leadership team.

[Dillon] (0:21 - 0:32)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:33 - 0:33)

What's up, y'all?

[Dillon] (0:34 - 0:37)

And I got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:37 - 0:38)

What's up, everybody?

[Dillon] (0:39 - 0:50)

Rob's wearing his referee shirt today for anybody who's not on video. Yep, he just tried to whistle.

That's great. I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Do they whistle when you get a field goal?

[JP] (0:52 - 0:53)

Flag on the play.

[Dillon] (0:53 - 0:55)

All right, guys, just the three of us.

[JP] (0:59 - 1:02)

You gotta keep that. You gotta keep that.

[Rob] (1:03 - 1:08)

I have workout equipment at my feet. Should have been in attention to that.

[JP] (1:10 - 1:11)

That boy tripping.

[Dillon] (1:12 - 2:50)

Literally, this is a shame. This is a real shame. Guys, it's just the three of us, and we are going to dive into one of my favorite channels of information, and that is Reddit.

That's because people on Reddit do not care, and I love it. And that goes every level, the people who are originally posting, the commenters. So here I am on the customer success subreddit.

Let me just read you a little bit of this person's post. It is so fantastic. About 10 months ago, I left a successful career in finance.

Why? Well, I'm still young. I fancy doing something different.

I wanted to do something that played to my strengths and experience. So I'm a lead CSM at a tech startup. I accepted the job, assuming that the product would be ready by the time I started.

10 months into the job, don't even have enough product built to really start onboarding beta testers. Blah, blah, blah. The beta is finally in a decent place.

The CEO is pressuring me hard to find beta users via cold outreach. My problem is this is not my job. I'm here to do a CSM role, not spend my life spamming people on LinkedIn for meetings.

A-I-T-A, if you know, you know. Am I the problem for not wanting to compromise anymore? P.S. We don't have a sales or marketing team yet. And I understood that when I joined.

[JP] (2:51 - 2:52)

No.

[Dillon] (2:54 - 2:59)

Who wants to take a crack at this one? A-I-T-A.

[JP] (2:59 - 3:05)

Real quick, you ain't doing no damn CS work without a sales and marketing team. Sorry.

[Dillon] (3:05 - 3:14)

Yep. The Luo says, what you're doing isn't customer success. Can't have a customer success program unless you have customers.

[Rob] (3:18 - 3:28)

That was mean in the past. I had to wear all those. It was brutal.

I was the worst salesman ever. Door-to-door. So bad.

[JP] (3:29 - 3:31)

Actual door-to-door. Startup?

[Rob] (3:31 - 3:36)

Literally door-to-door. Yeah, no, this was when I was at Qualia. We, it was so early days.

[Dillon] (3:38 - 4:28)

But were you called a CSM? I mean, I was called operations. I recall you saying you didn't even know what customer success was at that point.

You were doing whatever. No, this guy was hired as the title of a lead CSM. Lead to a team that doesn't exist.

To customers that don't exist. This is a masterclass on poor expectation setting by the leadership team. I like this person.

Valuable, visible s*** is their user. I don't even understand why someone would go for one of these early stage startups if there isn't a big, big pile of money in the making. I think customer facing roles suffer the most in these phases.

Why? Because you're doing everything. Sales, partnerships, customer success, renewals, expansions, retention, support.

LMAO. It's hell enough to be just a CSM. Imagine all of that too.

[Rob] (4:31 - 5:23)

The referee is throwing the flag on this one. If I were in this person's shoes, I would be having a strong conflict of conscience. Do I really want to go search for another job?

Probably not. I'm sort of stuck in this situation where I feel screwed over by the leadership team that I have to report to and smile to every single day. Do I actually change my career direction because of this job?

Your job actually is a go-to-market function. So maybe there's a way to embrace that and enjoy that and be like, you know what? I'm head of go-to-market for this company.

I'm figuring out product market fit. I'm figuring out the basics of sales and marketing. And customer success when it comes along.

I'm sure there's even product responsibilities this person is owning. And maybe there's even a way to celebrate that and even get a raise for that. Can I ask you guys a question real quick?

Oh, go ahead, JP.

[JP] (5:23 - 5:37)

Well, so what do we think this company, what they were trying to do when they offered this person a lead CSM role? What do you think their intention was?

[Rob] (5:38 - 5:40)

I bet they had completely delusional timelines.

[Dillon] (5:42 - 6:00)

Yes, maybe about timelines. But I think I'm going to answer your question with a question, JP, of like, we've all been here, right? Rob, you just explained your experience with this.

But looking back, who do you think was delusional? You or leadership?

[Rob] (6:01 - 6:22)

Leadership had the totally wrong timelines for... Even at Qualia? I mean, I don't want you to...

Oh, no, no, no. Yeah, that's what I did. My expectations were set incorrectly.

I was basically told, you're going to wear all the hats. We'll start with figuring out the onboarding problem. And then I did sales and I did marketing and I did recruiting.

And then I came back to customer success and whatever.

[Dillon] (6:22 - 7:52)

I guess my point is, I didn't answer your question very well, JP. But when you work at a startup that's that early, like less than 10 employees, I'm speaking to the audience now. If you think it does not matter what your title is, you better look at the money they're willing to pay you and consider whether it's worth doing something different every day, learning something new every day.

A lot of it's going to be stuff that you didn't think you were going to do, wasn't in the job description. It's you are helping build the company. And I will say that as soon as I say that, for me, what I think is like, oh, well, then you better give me ownership.

If I'm helping you figure this out, that's not realistic though. If I put on my CEO hat, my founder hat, what I'm really probably actually looking for is somebody who's relatively young, who just wants to get after it, who might want to found their own thing in the future. And so to everybody who's listening, there's probably a ton of people who have been through this who are nodding.

There's probably some people who are shaking their head. I guess the way I would look at it is like, it's going to be hard, man. Building a company is hard.

It doesn't matter what kind it is. It doesn't matter what you're selling. And you don't get to pick and choose early on.

[JP] (7:53 - 9:51)

Yeah. I'm going to say, I do have experience working for a very early stage startup, which I'm just going to add, I'm forever grateful to them because this was where I first started. They gave me my first start in customer success.

I was one of the first CSMs they hired, me and another person. So I got to see really how things changed. And I was asked to do some things that were relatively salesy, things that might not fall under customer success.

I can remember being only about three months into the role, something like that. And I was like, I got to get out of here. This was my first remote job for a CS job.

And I'm like, oh man, success hacker didn't tell me this. All the books I read, the customer success professional didn't talk about this. What's going on here?

And so I remember interviewing at some other places. I got to this company and I got to really the final round. And I was like, I am about to get up out of this job, baby.

JP, I'm here. This is the right thing. Okay, I'm about to enter in this other job.

And I remember I was in one of those rounds and I saw all this rhetoric on LinkedIn about how CS is CS and it's not support and it's not sales and it's not this. And so I was like, I'm going to tell them I know what I'm talking about, right? Three months into my job.

And I'm just like, yeah. They asked me a question about the roles. I don't want to do anything that's too salesy.

I was like, that's not. And I remember I saw their demeanor change visibly. I saw a shift.

And I went about my spiel, but I remember thinking that I see something wrong. That was wrong. It was very wrong.

I know because I did not advance past that round.

[Dillon] (9:51 - 10:05)

Wrong is the wrong word. It was what you wanted to say. It is not what they wanted to hear.

This is with any job interview. You've got to figure out what it is they're looking for and whether it's what you're willing to offer them, period.

[JP] (10:06 - 10:10)

That's our time. I just say, oh, that's insane. Okay.

Well, you have to wait for part two.

[Dillon] (10:12 - 10:14)

The sequel coming up.

[JP] (10:14 - 10:15)

All right, boys.

[Dillon] (10:17 - 10:21)

We're out of time. Okay. Bye.

Bye.

[Voiceover] (10:28 - 10:59)

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