Breaking down barriers | Jeremy Silver | TDSU Ep. 48

(0:00 - 0:32)

The real reason customer success exists, just to reiterate, is to maximize the customer's value to your company. But the way in which you do that most successfully is by maximizing your company's value to the customer. 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 and adjacent spaces every day.

(0:32 - 1:25)

I got my man, JP here. JP, do you want to say hi? How's it going, y'all? And we've got Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, Lifers? And we've got Jeremy here.

Jeremy, do you want to say hi? Hey, everyone. Happy to be here. And I am your host.

I am the Jack Sparrow of customer success podcasts. I got exactly what I wanted, which is a disappointed face from JP. I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Jeremy, thank you so much for being here. Can you introduce yourself, please? Yeah, sure thing.

Happy to be here. So my background is, I'll kind of go back to when I got into customer success. It was about 16 years ago.

I was an early CSM at Salesforce, and I've been in it ever since. I spent 10 years at Salesforce. I went on to lead customer success post-sale teams at two startups, and then also at a group of McKinsey, which was a unique experience.

(1:26 - 1:48)

So yeah, I've been working in it for a long time. I'm obviously super passionate about it, and I'm excited to talk with you guys about it today. Awesome.

Really happy to have you here. Thank you for making the time. So you know what we're doing here.

We ask you one question. What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Why don't you tell us what that is? Yeah. So one of the things I've been thinking about a lot lately is getting out of our silos.

(1:49 - 2:05)

And I think the way I would think about it is we're entering a new era, I think, in the go-to-market space. For a long time now, we've been in kind of this zero interest rate, growth at all costs mode. And now we're more in what people call profitable, efficient growth, where companies have to be a lot smarter.

(2:06 - 2:18)

What does that mean for customer success? What does that mean for employees? I think it means we all have to get out of our silo. You have to drive efficiency across the entire lifecycle. You can't sell the customers you're going to lose money on.

(2:19 - 2:33)

But you also need to be, as a CSM, you need to be much more focused on retention and customer-led growth and being cost-effective. Because having a leaky bucket is not going to work. Maybe there were companies in the past that could just sell themselves out of a problem.

(2:34 - 2:52)

Everyone's going to have to get on the same page, I think, to drive profitable, efficient growth. I think it does. It absolutely does.

Rob, I think you're probably best positioned to speak on this one. There's a lot of big words in there. I was like, all excited.

(2:52 - 2:58)

Not that I'm making fun of you, Jeremy. I want to make sure we're clear on that. Your McKinsey is showing, but I think it was all good stuff.

(3:01 - 8:34)

I think you bring up a lot of really good points, Jeremy. I think reducing silos, I think not selling through your problems, but being smarter about how to sell is an extremely important point and one that resonates with me in particular, where a lot of companies I work with, they're anywhere pre-seed through series B. A lot of the ones are on the earlier side of that, where they're still trying to find their product market fit and define their ideal customer profile. A lot of times, even I as a leader, I've been in a situation where my CEO and sales leader decided, let's take a gamble.

Let's go try to sell these customers, see if it works out, run this experiment, but they don't tell me. I'm like, wait, this customer has nothing to do with our product and they bought for some reason that we've never heard of. They're like, oh yeah, we thought we'd try it out.

I was like, it would have been nice to have had a conversation about that beforehand. That's one example that comes to mind, but I'm curious, Jeremy, are there other examples that come to mind when you mentioned silos, as opposed to help make that less abstract for me? First of all, I think that's a situation that's happened to all of us many times. I think in the past, let's be honest, when push came to shove pretty much everywhere, you're going to sell whatever.

I don't want to say whatever you can sell, but if you have an opportunity to sell, more likely than not, you're going to sell it. But the reality is that those customers are more likely to do a trip. They're often more expensive to support.

And in the long run, they're probably also less likely to grow. In the long run, they might be costing you. And I think if you talk to most CEOs, if you talk to boards today, if you talk to investors, they're talking about this concept of profitable, efficient growth.

You're not profitable. How are you getting more efficient? How are you having a path towards that? And to me, what that means is companies have to be a little bit smarter about what is our ideal customer profile? Do we have product market fit? Are we selling to the right customers? And so that to me is about, okay, CSM is getting more involved in the sales cycle, making sure that the right expectations are set, making sure that we are, even before the sales cycle, is it the right message? Are we going after the right types of customers that we can drive the most value at? And to some extent, I think it's on CS to raise up if that's not the case. Now, it may be that your company makes a decision to go a different direction anyways, and that's the prerogative of the leadership team.

But at the very least, raising up and saying, hey, these are the impacts downstream. And then at the same time, I think, what does it mean once CSM start working on customers? I've always said that the reason customer success exists is to drive value for customers. And everything else is a leading or lagging indicator of that.

But the reality of it is that the reason that you're driving value for customers, there's actually like another more important goal that you're doing that, which is because you're trying to drive retention, and you're trying to prime customers to actually grow in the future. So I think if you kind of like uplevel your thinking as a CSM and say, why did this customer buy? What are the things that they were talking with the sales team about future growth opportunities, right? And kind of take the big picture approach and say, how can I be thinking about what I'm doing to make sure that this customer is going to have a long and profitable and growing relationship, right? And that means getting a little closer to commercials, whether it's your job or not, that means being really curious. But it also means understanding from the sales team, not just what do they expect next month or next year to get to renewal.

But what are some of the big picture conversations that you had in the sales cycle? Because ultimately, sometimes those get lost, right? Because the CSM is focused on the year and now, unless the sales team re-engages. And I think we all need to be thinking about what is it going to take to drive this customer to be the most profitable, efficient and growing customer that we can have. I want to call out what you said earlier, Jeremy, which is why does customer success exist? I'm really actually just repeating what you said, but I think we've always said it's about customer value.

But I think we get wrong the direction that value is going. The real reason customer success exists, just to reiterate, is to maximize the customer's value to your company. But the way in which you do that most successfully is by maximizing your company's value to the customer.

I want you to jump in. Yeah, I was actually thinking the other day about this, what really makes a great CSM. And I think I was talking to somebody and I came up with this artfully or skillfully driving a successful customer outcomes within the company's boundaries slash resources.

I think that last part within the company's boundaries and resources is a very important part of the whole equation. When I first got into CSM, some of the early messaging was a bit fluffy, right? It's about you got to have empathy for your customer and you got to be like, oh, this stuff. And it's like, I mean, in a perfect world, yes.

When you're trying to deal with the scale and you have so many customers, your time is finite. You're getting paid a certain amount. We can begin to do some math, right? Customer's paying this amount of money.

How much time are we spending versus what the customer's value is getting for our product versus what we're getting out of you as a CSM. These business equations become a little bit more apparent once you start trying to do, what's the word I'm looking for? Numeralize them, put a value on them. Quantify? Yes.

There we go. Quantify them. That's the word I'm looking for.

(8:34 - 9:55)

Numeralize is like way cooler. That's a McKinsey word. I'm a numeralizer.

You know what I mean? You've never seen my movies? Anyways. Yeah. That's our time, but I do want to thank you, Jeremy, for bringing this up.

It's always a good one. I think the silo thing, I don't think we could talk about it enough because of how important it is to break those down because of the central role. I will not say we are the center of the wheel necessarily.

We are not the hub every time. Sometimes we are, but we do play a central role in all of these other pieces of the business, both internally and externally. I think it's an even more important role right now, to be honest, because if you live in a world where all you care about is growing the top line and driving revenue, a lot of us have been there, and sometimes customer success takes a backseat.

But if now the number one goal for most companies is to drive profitable, efficient growth, then you can't do that without keeping your customers. You can't do that without really focusing on driving customer led growth. I think you've got to work together.

I think if what you do and everything you do is around skating towards that goal, then I think you're going to be successful. Well, we appreciate it, Jeremy. We are going to have to say goodbye for now, but this has been awesome.

Thank you so much for sharing it. We hope to have you back soon. All right.

(9:55 - 9:57)

Yeah, we'd love to. Thanks so much for having me, guys.