A fabulous alignment | De'Edra Williams | TDSU Ep. 26

And that's part of the reason why I love speaking with people who have been in this field with such tenure.

I love how diplomatically Rob told me that I'm mature.

I like that.

 All right. One, two, three. What's up, Lifers? And welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh, new ideas in the customer success space every single day.

I've got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

How you doing?

I've got my man Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

How ya doin'?

And we've got De'Edra with us. De'Edra, do you want to say hi? 

Hello.

I half expected you to try to go even deeper than Rob there. Understood. Understood. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. De'Edra, thank you so much for being here. Would you please introduce yourself? 

Thank you. And I am so honored. I've watched a couple of these previously.

So I am De'Edra Williams. I am a customer success leader with over 15 years of what I consider rather strategic revenue led customer expertise. Most recently I was SVP of customer success for an ed tech (education technology) and right now I'm doing some advising for women in customer success. So thank you for having me today.

Thank you so much for being here. De'Edra, you know what we're asking since you've watched a couple of these episodes. We ask one simple question and that question is, "What is on your mind when it comes to customer success?"

So can you hit us with it? 

Yeah, for me, it's what I'm calling customer success 4.0.

And it's really all about what I'm leading into is my Fab 4 for '24. Can I call out the fours? 

You can. 

Okay. Fab One is really all about making sure we lead with customer led revenue growth. And I'll dial into that in a little bit. Fab 2 is really all about making sure that we have customer time to value.

Fab 3, and the one I think is the most important topic for today, is really about customer success as a profit center. 

And then Fab 4 is employee experience, making sure that our employees are taken care of. So I'll stop there and we can dive into any one of those topics, but that's what I want to talk about today.

Well, I think we got to start with number three, right? Customer success as a profit center. You said it's the most important. So tell us why you think that and how you think we need to reframe... what we've thought about customer success to date. 

No, I love that. Thank you for that Dillon. Because when I look at customer success, I look at it in four phases.

The first phase was what I call customer success 1.0. 

And keep in mind, I've been doing this for quite some time. And it was really all about adoption, particularly for SaaS companies, focusing on renewals, focusing on utilization for customers. But it was really all about those metrics that are important to the customer.

Because our customers want to adopt, but I saw a moniker the other day on LinkedIn, actually this morning, that said 

adoption is dead. 

I'm not going to say that yet, but, I do... 

Everything's dead. 

Oh, well, I don't want to be that macabre about it. It's not the metric that we need to be focusing on now. So I call that customer success 1.0.

That's in the past. 

But then we moved from that to what I call customer success 2.0.

And that was really all about the customer experience, but it was more around what I call sentiment, 

NPS, CSAT. We've also heard-- I love that face. I feel the same way, Dillon, about it. It's kind of cringe worthy. Therefore I no longer think it's an area where we need to put our emphasis.

Okay?

The second one really is around customer success 3.0.

That was all about value realization. It's when we figured out that our customers could leave us. And if we didn't drive value for them, then they were going to attrite and churn and we just started focusing on that. 

But what I think is most important and why customer as a profit-- customer success as a profit center is the one I consider most important, is customer success 4.0. 

And that's really about customer led revenue growth. And if we are driving revenue, if we're moving 

from being COGS (cost of goods sold), 

which is what a lot of customer success organizations are right now, even in our largest companies and

moving to having a P&L (profit & loss), 

making sure we all own a revenue target, that to me is customer success as a profit center.

And that's why I think it's one of the most important of my Fab Four.

Boys, I want to give you a chance to get in here. I have some opinions, but I also think it's just like a-- you've obviously thought about this, De'Edra, and so the timeline is very clear, and I agree with everything you've said, but I want to give the guys a chance to jump in here and give their opinion. 

I welcome all forms of discussion.

 Can I just start out by saying, that is a fantastically well thought out concept and it speaks to so much... so many of the phases that I think we all relate to in different parts of our job and being able to take like a historical look at it and a conceptual look at the why behind each of those transitions, that was really cool.

And that's part of the reason why I love speaking with people who have been in this field with such tenure, like you shared. It was like drinking a bowl of hollandaise. Feels like a JP-ism right there. 

We don't drink hollandaise over here. I don't know what you're talking about. 

I love how diplomatically Rob told me that I'm mature.

I like that.

"Tenure."

You called it tenure. 

That is a form of maturity. It is a form of maturity. So thank you for that, Rob. I like that. I like that. Look, he's like discombobulated. He's like, "I don't know what to do with this."

I was just trying to set myself .... And now, and now, now I'm getting, yeah, yeah. Give me some milk.

Anyway...

Can I go back to the hollandaise, let's back to the hollandaise? 

That's actually a quote from this guy who is a very gifted life coach with some interesting analogies that I met years ago. But anyway, so the question... are there ever times where you've seen value realization and revenue growth, pull at-- like, pull in different directions?

I've seen that tension arise at some companies. 

No, absolutely. I won't get into some of the companies I've worked for, but there's some pretty big names in the industry. And it's been a constant tension throughout my career in customer success. Because you've got sales competing for that revenue, that's their target.

But then our customers really want value. And sometimes, unfortunately, one side makes decisions that don't necessarily drive value for the other. So yes, I've seen a tremendous amount of friction throughout my career. I have horror stories to talk about, but I've also seen where it can work. Yeah.

JP, why don't you tell us what you think? 

Yeah, I'm currently in a role where I'm working very, very close with sales. We might as well be in a, what's that sack race with two people get in the sack and 

Potato sack race?

...potato sack race. Yeah. 

We got potatoes. We got hollandaise. 

We ain't making nothing.

Okay. Stop it right there. But we in the sack together and it's very, very cozy. And it's really interesting because I haven't worked with sales this closely and figuring things out really comes down to me and the AE talking about things. Sometimes it's a logic thing where someone will talk about, "Well, if it's a growth opportunity, revenue opportunity, then it should be led by this person.

And if it's more of a... retentive thing or like make sure they're getting value, then it should be with you."

But like, again, a company can have a perfect strategy, things that they want to implement, but of course, how does it actually play out? I think that owning revenue is a really great thing.

I embrace it.

I want customer success to be more smooth, less fuzzy. Maybe that'll be my mantra for 2024. Who knows? 

But, I think that there also has to be that, if we're going to be smooth, we got to have more proper demarcation with who's owning what so that we can be better aligned, more consistently.

And I think that that's how we can sort of execute on things. Otherwise, we can expend a lot of energy in the alignment process itself, which can take away from some of the forward momentum we want to be giving to our book of business. 

Can I jump in or Dillon were you going to say something?

JP, what you're really talking about is a symbiosis between customer success and sales. And I envy the fact that you have that because it is very rare. I myself have had it in my previous career back when I was a individual contributor. And what I noticed was

not only were we aligned, particularly around what I consider cross functional roles to some degree, who owns that revenue target, who owns that retention for that customer.

But at the end of the day, we still need to focus on that value realization for that customer. And you can't really have that if you don't have that form of symbiosis. Or that connection in the sack that you talked about. So I agree with you on that. But to me, the best thing that you can do in any organization, and it really comes from your leadership is once your leadership understands what kind of experience they want to create for their customers, then that needs to disseminate down to the respective cross functional teams whether it's product, whether it's support or whether it's sales And then once you're all aligned. on what your go-to-market strategy is to give that customer experience to those customers. Then that symbiosis can happen. It's where that misalignment or misdefinition or lack of clarity or that opacity that you were-- that fuzziness that you were mentioning, where that comes into bear is when you don't have that strategic leadership that defines those roles for you and more importantly, what your goals and objectives are.

Okay. And all that's strategic, and the customer sees that, that friction happens between sales and customer success. And it's very difficult to be aligned, and more importantly, it's very difficult to be successful. Pun intended. 

I love that De'Edra. That is our time. Thank you so much for, for bringing this to us.

I feel like that was a little bit of an education, the way we took it all the way from the beginning to where we need to get to. So thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. Your energy was fantastic too. We would love to have you back in the future, but we've got to say goodbye for now.

So thanks again. 

Bye guys. So nice to meet you all. Take care. Have some hollandaise for me.