Adjacent learning | Chris Tazewell

[JP] (0:00 - 0:11)

One of the light bulb moments for me was learning to pull my Samuel L. Jackson. Does he look like a customer success professional?

[Dillon] (0:15 - 0:17)

I was all for it until you started to yell.

[JP] (0:17 - 0:22)

Samuel L. Jackson, they know, he's a rich tapestry of American acting royalty.

[Dillon] (0:22 - 0:23)

Rich tapestry.

[JP] (0:23 - 0:24)

But all I'm saying is...

[Dillon] (0:33 - 0:44)

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] (0:45 - 0:46)

I need to bring the pain.

[Dillon] (0:49 - 0:52)

The intellectual pain, I hope and nothing else.

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

Yes, the intellectual pain.

[Dillon] (0:53 - 0:56)

And we have Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:57 - 0:58)

What's up, people?

[Dillon] (0:59 - 1:03)

And we have Chris with us. Chris, will you say hi, please?

[Chris] (1:04 - 1:04)

Hey, what's going on?

[Dillon] (1:06 - 1:19)

Not much. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

JP's hating because I'm out of my element right now. Chris, thank you so much for being here. Can you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

[Chris] (1:20 - 1:36)

Yeah, Chris Tazewell. I'm an enterprise customer success manager at a data science company called POSIT. Been in customer success for about four years now.

I originally started my career in sales and pivoted over to the, I would say the light side. Now they say the dark side.

[Dillon] (1:39 - 1:48)

You're not going to find any dissenders in that, dissenters in that category. But Chris, so you're a fellow POSIT guy. I am.

All right.

[Chris] (1:48 - 1:49)

I was a month ago.

[Dillon] (1:51 - 1:52)

Gotcha, gotcha.

[JP] (1:52 - 1:54)

You're doing big things, kids.

[Dillon] (1:57 - 2:09)

Thank you for being here. You know what we do here. Hopefully we ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

So why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Chris] (2:10 - 2:51)

Yeah, for me, I was thinking about a lot of the time I've been talking with different people trying to break into customer success and trying to move up in their careers, figure out how they do it. For me, I stumbled across customer success super late. I never even heard of customer success up until 2019 when I was about to start my first role.

And so really what I was thinking about was adjacent learning and how transferable skills are impactful in customer success. A lot of people have been figuring out, how do I break in? What's the major that I need to take in college?

And I don't think there really is one. Every experience that you have, you can probably find a way to be in customer success. It just depends on the industry and what type of role you want to be in.

[Dillon] (2:53 - 3:11)

Adjacent learning, I don't think that's a term I'd heard before. But I missed an opportunity to ask you about this relationship between sales and customer success that you alluded to by saying you were a former salesperson, alluded to again by saying they suck and you hate them. I'm just kidding.

[JP] (3:11 - 3:12)

You didn't say that.

[Dillon] (3:13 - 3:38)

You did. There was nuance. There was nuance, but that's how I read it.

So I look, hey, guys, I'm just calling it like I see it. But I wanted to know, it sounded like you did actively make the move from sales over to customer success. But what was that experience like for you having been in sales, which we talk about a lot as being an increasingly critical skill for CS professionals?

[Chris] (3:38 - 5:07)

Honestly, we're all salespeople at the end of the day, whether you're selling ideas, selling yourself, interviewing, it's all selling in one way, shape or another. I always joke around about the dark side. It was actually the last thing I wanted to do when I came out of college was sell.

And I stumbled across being a salesperson. I think it was the best thing that happened to me. Making the transition, I had been an individual contributor.

I had also been a sales leader for about three or four years. So I had seen a lot of different levels of it. I was primarily in the B2C space.

And for me making the transition, it wasn't a big shift. I was already managing the full sales cycle. Being in B2C, it's a little bit of a shorter sales cycle.

You wear a lot of hats. Really what made me want to make the transition, honestly, was more of a focus on long-term relationship building, actually being able to see what happens after I sell the product, and really being able to actually dig in, solve more problems, not necessarily just sell a bunch of widgets and things that people will need. But I feel like it fits more with who I am as a person, being in customer success, just being able to wear a lot of different hats, being able to focus more on the people, the relationship aspect.

And that's really what made me make the jump. And I think, honestly, it goes hand in hand. A lot of people don't want to say that they're salespeople or focus on the sales aspect when we're on the customer success side.

But when I think about it, we're selling value, if anything. Chris, of course.

[Dillon] (5:08 - 5:42)

Yeah, I think we all agree that everybody's salespeople, but that can be interpreted in a lot of different ways. I want to let the guys loose here, but I have one more question for you. So you said something about you wanted to see what it looked like on the other side.

I'm paraphrasing heavily. But you didn't just want to sell it and throw it over the fence. You wanted to see what that life cycle looked like after the fact.

What were those first few months like for you? Were you like, oh, was it eye-opening? Or were you like, yeah, I knew that this is how rough and windy it was, basically?

[Chris] (5:43 - 6:31)

Yeah, I had an idea. I knew a little bit of gray area. We're not support, but we have to play a support role.

It's really whatever is best for the customer to make sure the path is cleared for renewals, opportunities, and just make sure the customer is in a good place and successful. I wasn't completely blindsided. I think as I've been talking to more people in customer success, it opened my eyes to how many different ways there are to do customer success.

I primarily get on the high-touch side, working with large contracts, more one-to-one relationships, somewhere between 10 and 20, 25 customers, versus there's a whole flip side where you have 100, 150 customers, and figuring out how do you create a personalized experience for a mass audience like that.

[Dillon] (6:32 - 6:36)

Who wants to jump in here? JP, I feel like you can't yet because you're a homer.

[Rob] (6:37 - 8:24)

All right. I guess that leaves it to me, then. Chris, I love this term, adjacent learning.

I've never heard that before, and it's really good. Yeah, yeah, it's good. It's very relatable, right?

Because zero people who listened to this show grew up as a kid saying, I want to be a customer success manager when I grow up. Nobody said that. Yeah, I want to drive outcomes.

If my trainings with my three-year-old nephew go well, then that's what he's going to be saying soon. But same as you, I think I look at the umbrella term of adjacent learning. I look at my background, too.

I had the same experience where the last thing coming out of college I wanted to do was sell. When Dillon and I met, I was actually giving a presentation. I was borderline going to title it Confessions of a Reluctant Salesperson.

Because similar to what you're saying, I feel like I only retroactively reached a conclusion that all I ever did was sell. And I asked myself, I was like, let me unpack this. Why was I so hesitant?

And there's various reasons. And there was various stigmas that I had embedded in my head around what it meant to sell. There were hesitations that I had, too, with being told no.

And it wasn't until I connected the dots and I found this marriage between initially my academic background to then working in the restaurant world to then working in SaaS that I had these moments where it just clicked, that there was this lovely marriage between all the different fields that I didn't really see before. And so now I just embrace it. And so much that for the past three days, four days, I've been meeting every day with my friend who is a career salesperson.

And I'm like, I just want to learn from you. And today's lesson was about using a takeaway. You guys ever heard this before?

[JP] (8:24 - 8:25)

No, but tell us.

[Rob] (8:26 - 9:09)

It's like when you have a non-responsive customer or prospect to send them a message that's like, it seems like it's a bad time. I'm going to stop pursuing this deal. And to do so politely.

You don't have to be mean about it. Some people do it a little passive aggressively, but you don't have to be mean about it. And it was just interesting because I just, this is another like brain blast moment where I saw this connection between my background in like psychology, behavioral economics, and why do we value things that get taken away from us even more?

And it's super interesting. So I'll report back on my findings, but it's crazy when you think about customer success, because how many of us would actually take away a renewal to say, you know what? You haven't been responding to me.

I'm just going to not renew you.

[Chris] (9:09 - 9:11)

I'm just going to terminate your contract.

[Rob] (9:11 - 9:12)

Could you imagine that?

[Chris] (9:13 - 9:18)

It works really well, Rob. I learned that with Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.

[JP] (9:18 - 9:20)

It's a negotiable technique.

[Chris] (9:20 - 9:37)

And it really, it forces the customer to have to say yes or no that they're bought. They're going to have to make a decision. And it's, I think, I don't know if it's called anchoring.

I can't remember what the actual term was for the technique, but it actually works pretty well. I used it a couple of times with some other customers.

[Rob] (9:38 - 9:38)

Bold move.

[Chris] (9:39 - 9:41)

It is. Yeah. Use sparingly.

[Dillon] (9:42 - 9:48)

I use sparingly. I have thoughts, but we can make this a two-parter. JP, why don't you go ahead?

[JP] (9:49 - 12:00)

I'm listening to this, and all I can see is a purple lightsaber, Samuel L. Jackson. He's on the light side, but why does he have a purple lightsaber?

This is some lore for you, because he uses a style called the pod, which means he's able to actually tap into the power of the dark side without being taken over by it. And this is one of the lessons that I have learned, because I am fairly new to customer success. I've been in maybe for about three years.

And I think that I polarized the CS and sales relationship a lot more when I initially came in, so much so that I believe I actually turned some interviewers off way back when. But what I began to understand is, as you really put it, Chris, we're always selling. And you put it greatly in that we're selling value.

Because value is not just apparent or obvious because it exists, but also, who is that apparent to? And that's what I've begun to learn is so important. How do I thread the value that my product has through an organization so that we grow?

Because what I learned was my older CS brain was so much about, oh, I love it over here. It's not. It's all.

It's cool. It's chill. I don't have to worry about it.

All I got to do is make sure I get this renewal. Nope. Like a lot of things, you're either growing or you're regressing.

It's really not. It may seem like there's a flat zone, but it's not really true. A lot of times it's like, how is that relationship growing?

And there's many dimensions to that. And so one of the light bulb moments for me was learning to pull my Samuel L. Jackson, tap into that Vapod, right?

Does he look like a customer success professional?

[Dillon] (12:03 - 12:07)

I was all for it until you started to confuse and yell.

[JP] (12:07 - 12:45)

Samuel L. Jackson. They know there's a rich tapestry of American.

Rich tapestry. But all I'm saying is for people that are looking to break into customer success, please don't think, especially nowadays, that you're going to come into customer success and just chill out and try to just, I'm going to not say that word, just gingerly move your way towards a renewal. You better be threading that value so that not only the users, but all the relevant stakeholders can see the value or else that's where the churn comes from.

And it's unidentified. Blah, blah, blah.

[Dillon] (12:45 - 13:27)

I think this is a cool topic. I want to come back to this, Chris. You ought to come back and talk to us about some other ways that you've learned from other professions.

I don't think that it's, I don't mean this in any sort of rude way. I don't think you've cornered this market, but I think it's an interesting way that you phrase it. We're all in this Venn diagram, right?

And sometimes we do a little bit of marketing. Sometimes we do a little bit of sales. Sometimes we do a little bit of product.

And so understanding them better and learning from them and maybe taking some work off their plate is probably actually good for the relationship. It's also good for you and your career. Anyway, that's all the time we have, Chris.

I love this topic. Thank you so much for bringing it to our attention. We do have to say goodbye for now, but love to have you back in the future.

[Chris] (13:27 - 13:29)

Yeah. Appreciate the invite. Anytime.

[Voiceover] (13:33 - 14:04)

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