Notes from an on-site: Leveraging executive sponsorships

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:35)

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

What's up, Lifers? I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

In the flesh, baby. In the flesh. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. And the reason JP's saying that is maybe we sound different. I know we look different.

You're watching on YouTube, and I can smell the difference.

[JP] (0:35 - 0:36)

Oh, yeah.

[Dillon] (0:37 - 0:46)

This is the first time we're all in the same room together recording this show. Yeah. A hundred and something episodes later, and we finally did it, boys.

[JP] (0:47 - 0:48)

Finally know what the rock is cooking.

[Dillon] (0:50 - 2:37)

And it smells like bergamot and... Upsales. Upsales.

That's right. Well, we spent enough time in sacks. Nice.

Plenty. Plenty. Came out small and great.

Anyway, the reason we're here, in case you're wondering, is we just wrapped up attending the Customer Success Collective CS Festival here in Boston, where our good friend, Daddy's Little Meatball... Ro! Again, another visual reference.

Please, you got to get on the video. Five. I think you can say it.

Five. Jim Beato. Five.

MC'd the event. Did a fantastic job. Our little boy is growing up.

And we've got some things to say about this event. Rob, you volunteered. You're going to take it away with the very first learning from our time at the Customer Success Festival, boss.

Yeah. We should talk about it. There was a lot.

It was a lot of good stuff. A lot of good topics. Meaty.

Meaty. Like all the spicy little meatballs. There were some spicy meatballs.

I think the biggest spicy meatball that's on my palate, on my mind right now, is executive sponsorship. We had the privilege of Justice Williams educating us on the power of executive sponsorship. What does it mean to get a seat at the executive table of not just your internal team, which comes up a lot in conversations in our circles, but your customer's executive team?

How do you get a hold of their attention? How do you get on their radar? These people might have 30, 40 vendors who are trying to talk with them.

So how do we make ourselves... Are you reading notes right now?

[JP] (2:37 - 2:39)

Is that what this is? I'm doing a little check on the notes.

[Dillon] (2:40 - 2:57)

I'm not texting. I was just going to say, this is a different animal here. We're all together.

I can see when you're not paying attention in class. Yeah. No, notes for the class.

Typing away. Checking my notes. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not tippity tapping like this cat. Tippity tapping.

Okay. I apologize. Daddy's little meatball.

[JP] (2:57 - 2:58)

Yeah.

[Dillon] (2:59 - 4:36)

So it's a tough topic, right? Because, you know, to your customer's executive sponsor, their veto, as I've referred to them, their very important top officer, who I've said before, is not just my greasy uncle in Staten Island who taught me how to throw a liver punch, but their veto, their very important top officer is hard to get a hold of, right? Because he or she is getting chased down by tons of different vendors.

You're probably the last thing on their mind. The only time you get on their radar is when things are broken, typically. So the truest form of being a CSM is being someone that that person actually actively wants to speak to and even wants the advice from.

But few of us are actually at that level with our life. What tactics did you take away from Jeff's presentation around how to... I will admit, it took me about halfway through his presentation.

It was brilliant. It was good. It had a lot of good statistics.

And JP loves that those statistics were actually cited. Yeah. Let's talk about the stats first.

I feel like that's useful. Before I can ask my question. Yeah.

Okay. It's fun to do it. Because why is it hard, right?

I mean, the stats point out why this is so hard. Well, the one thing I'll say is that it took me a long time to understand that what he was actually talking about was a program internally for your executives to interface with their executive. Right.

Because I think the low-hanging fruit tactic is, well, just get your executive to call him.

[Rob] (4:36 - 4:36)

Right.

[Dillon] (4:36 - 4:53)

Right. But the stat that stood out to me, to your point, was he pulled up one that was every year, on average, 27% of a company's head count a trite. Is that the way you say it?

[Rob] (4:53 - 4:53)

Yeah.

[Dillon] (4:53 - 7:01)

A trite. I don't think it's a trite. A trite?

Okay. Then we're at odds with this, man. It's a trite?

Well, we're saying both, so you know what we're saying. So then in theory, though this is not actually how it works, in less than four years, an entire company turns over, on average. Now, obviously, that's going to change between roles.

But that was really interesting and points to what you were alluding to, which is why it can be so difficult to gain a foothold at that level. I think- Foothold? A foothold, as the gentlemen show off their Patrick Ewing high-top sneakers, one in gold patent leather and one in neon pink leopard print.

And that's the last thing I'm going to say about these shoes. I am working with children. So Rob, knowing that, or are there any other stats that you thought were particularly interesting?

Well, so the stat you shared speaks to why it's challenging, right? And you might just look at that and be like, all right, cool. Well, okay, it's a challenge, but why should I care?

The stat on the other side of the table is the impact that it can make if you can get ahead of these executive changes. And the impact of executive engagement, according to Jeff's research, is that it can improve gross retention by 13%. And that's not small.

The difference between let's say 80% and 93% retention is massive for a startup or any company, not even just a startup. It can be, what, seven figures. And you could still be considered a small company and it can have that level of impact.

Especially you multiply that over the years, that customer remains a customer. And the additional expansion opportunities that present themselves because they're still around. JP, I know you were vibing with Jeff.

I was vibing. He thought he put together a great presentation. He is easily the voice of God.

[JP] (7:02 - 7:17)

He does have a great voice. If we lost James Earl Jones, somebody's going to frown, right? Might as well be Jeff Justice Williams, babe.

With a name like that. Yeah, exactly. Earl Jones, Jeff Justice Williams.

[Dillon] (7:18 - 7:20)

What was your take on it?

[JP] (7:21 - 9:49)

So what I love, first of all, is that in the beginning, he really made the call out like, I'd lead both our enterprise and our scaled teams. So what I'm going to be talking about is more of an enterprise strategy. If you want to talk more about scaled, see me later.

I love this because it shows a nuanced approach to customer success. And that's really not even that fine of a nuance, right? He's just really saying like, hey, talk about executive sponsorship.

If you're working with scaled accounts that are under a certain amount of money, well, then executive sponsorship to me, the way it's going to maybe relevant for me is with accounts that are big named, but only spending so much money, right? So if one of my, I'm just going to say Johnson and Johnson, let's say that they're one of my, they happen to be one of my clients. And if me, if I'm on scaled, and let's say that means they're only spending like 10 K with me or something like that.

But we know that Johnson and Johnson can spend a lot more money. Now, maybe I have a lot more clients that are small. They don't have that potential, but I should probably be thinking about that executive sponsorship potentially with Johnson and Johnson, right?

Even though that accounts lived in with me on scaled, I should be thinking about what's the executive sponsorship for this because there's clearly some potential there. And I think that like, that's the important thing. Like we don't want to get executive sponsorship just because we're doing it because there's, there's a real opportunity there.

So for me, I see the opportunity as, Hey, I may be in scaled by virtue of the size of the ARR ACV, but there's a real potential here. If I can get these people on the phone to talk about, what's going on? Because as we can see, sometimes these places are siloed and there may be people using different solutions.

And so it may not just be that team. Maybe I need to use them to get to another department, right? Where we can get this sort of larger buy-in.

But the only way we can really do that sometimes is to talk to someone who's at the top, someone who can maybe mandate that change more. Because as we know, when people don't, sometimes when they don't spend as much money, they're more likely to let you go. Right?

Because if they're spending more money, they clearly see more value in you. Right? So.

[Dillon] (9:50 - 10:24)

I look at it a different way and I'm going to present this really quickly. And then I want to get Rob's take on both because I'm sure you've had more exposure to this and both in than either of us, just by virtue of the work you do. I actually think of it as...

Oh, I'm sorry. Am I boring you? JP got his flu shot yesterday.

So he's working through it. He is here and he's a trooper. Thank you so much.

Get your flu shots, baby. Yes. Get your flu shots.

Get your COVID shots. Stay safe, everybody. Except Aaron Rodgers.

You stay doing what you're doing, baby.

[JP] (10:24 - 10:25)

Stay immunized.

[Dillon] (10:26 - 11:07)

Get those rock crystals. However you do it. Ayahuasca and crystals.

No. So the way I thought of it, I'm not taking anything away from the way you just described that. I think that's valid.

I thought of it as you could do the same motion and not use the word executive. When it's a smaller value, the hierarchy that works on it is going to be low. Right?

But you can still use a lot of the same things. Like you can do a skip level right on their side. And you can also bring in a skip level from your side.

So your boss's boss show a little bit of muscle, but it's not necessarily a CXO, right? Not necessarily a senior VP.

[JP] (11:08 - 11:08)

Right.

[Dillon] (11:08 - 13:02)

And it still shows we have multiple levels of the organization that are interested in this account. And we'd like to see the same from your side. Not just not necessarily the heavy artillery.

So Rob, I'd love to hear what you have to say as we close this out. Yeah, it makes me think of when I was in food, we sold to a very... Exactly.

Did you do? I did a lot of things. I did all the things.

All the things. The dirtiest things. But it was just dirty.

It was sticky occasionally. Anyway, it's hard to stay clean. It's hard to stay clean.

Anyway, we sold to at one point a very small subdivision of Netflix. And it was enough to put the logo on our website, actually. But the thing is, the whole nature of the game was to figure out how to leverage our local buyer basically of this one department to then expand to the broader logo of Netflix.

And that took a lot of ingenuity, a lot of persistence to basically leverage the person who somehow by some sheer coincidence was somebody I knew from college, which helped to get him to work our way up to his boss and then sell cross departmentally to other departments, which I could see happening if you're selling... You don't have to be selling food. You could be selling workflow software or marketing software, whatever.

If you can find applications in other facets of the business, and you can identify the local economic buyers of each of those departments, there's a ton of expansion opportunity there that really helps the value of the work we do in CS. It sounds like just more creative methods for expanding. Right.

Which is hard because usually we're so worried about like, oh, I've got so much going on with my current accounts, I can barely think about taking on more.

[Rob] (13:02 - 13:02)

Yeah.

[Dillon] (13:02 - 13:18)

The only way I'll take on more is if sales sells it, I receive it because I have to. But that's our time, guys. Fantastic.

We had a ton of fun at the Customer Success Festival here in Boston. We're going to have some more topics on this, but for now, we've got to say goodbye.