Complexity ≠ value | Jenny Calvert

[Jenny] (0:00 - 0:28)

We are taking humans away and building for automation efficiency and scale day one. My take is that is earned through the unscalable work. The whole kind of purpose of customer success was more of a consulting function.

What are our customers? How am I obsessed with their problems? Learning and then optimizing for scale and efficiency, which includes digital success and things like that.

But we're skipping stages, making things overly complex and then wondering why they don't work.

[Dillon] (0:33 - 0:48)

All right, well, 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] (0:49 - 0:51)

Vita Valorem people, Vita Valorem.

[Dillon] (0:51 - 0:57)

Oh, with the Spock hands and everything. And we've got Jenny with us. Jenny, can you say hi, please?

[Jenny] (0:58 - 0:58)

Hello.

[Dillon] (0:59 - 1:04)

Hello, hello. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Jenny, can you please introduce yourself?

[Jenny] (1:05 - 1:21)

Yeah, I am Jenny Calvert, formerly led early stage customer success teams. So early stage being sometimes zero to one, sometimes growth stage and currently shifting into leadership and executive coaching and NCS consulting like half the world out there.

[Dillon] (1:21 - 1:44)

It feels like there's a lot of them. But I think you all run in the same space. So like you, you end up talking to each other and seeing each other a lot.

There's enough to go around, I think. So Jenny, you know what we do here? We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

Why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Jenny] (1:45 - 2:18)

Yeah, what's on my mind lately is that we have overcomplicated it. And I think it's not just my mind. I think there's a few other minds out there that are in agreement.

But I think as complexity increases, value should increase as well. And I think over the last few years, we've seen the complexity increase, not necessarily the corresponding value. So what do we do?

Right? Like, what does this mean? And how do we course correct and get back to where velocity is actually taking us where we want to go and not just fast in the wrong direction.

[Dillon] (2:18 - 2:22)

And give me an example of overcomplication.

[JP] (2:22 - 2:22)

I'd love to.

[Dillon] (2:23 - 2:29)

Yeah, I mean, I can think of a million. So it's really which one annoys you the most?

[Jenny] (2:29 - 2:30)

Yeah, yeah.

[JP] (2:30 - 2:31)

Name names.

[Jenny] (2:32 - 2:45)

There's two situations. So, yes, us consultants hang out in packs. So I also hear stories through other consultants out there.

And a prime example is working with an early stage startup who said, we want to be a digital touch out the gate.

[JP] (2:46 - 2:47)

Hmm.

[Jenny] (2:47 - 3:08)

Right. And that adds immediate complexity, because what are we digitizing? Do we even know what it is that matters?

What's most important? Who the F is our customer and what do they care about? That's not something that you digitize out the gate when you're very early implementing customer success programming and methodologies.

Stuff like that.

[Dillon] (3:08 - 3:39)

Well, you can blame Jeff Brunsbach for that and his incessant talk of scale for the past three or four. I love Jeff. But I guess it's not.

Can I challenge that? Not because I disagree with you, but it's more it's not. Specifically, you said digital touch, and I thought, OK, emails like we already do that mail merge, you want to do that, that's fine.

I'm talking like fully automated terminology. Right.

[Jenny] (3:40 - 4:13)

So where you're taking humans away and building for automation, efficiency and scale day one. And my take is that is earned through the unscalable work. The whole kind of purpose of the intentionality of customer success was more of a consulting function.

What are our customers? What are their problems? How are we solving their problems?

How am I obsessed with their problems? Learning and then optimizing for scale and efficiency, which includes digital success and things like that. But we're skipping stages, making things overly complex and then wondering why they don't work.

[JP] (4:14 - 4:15)

Hmm.

[Dillon] (4:16 - 4:27)

JP, is that what's interesting is you do this, JP, so talk about. What, like me, yeah, as a scaled CSM, right?

[JP] (4:28 - 4:59)

Oh, yeah, but I don't think what I'm doing necessarily. As complicated, I think I see like what you're saying, what I think. It sounds like another case where someone like doesn't understand CS, and so that's what the fundamental issue is drawn.

Let me not say that name. They're on some sort of social media platform where a lot of people who are professionals usually post usually professional things.

[Dillon] (4:59 - 5:00)

Why not say it?

[JP] (5:00 - 5:09)

Why not say it, JP, at this point? I'm not going to say it. We all know.

I'm not going to say it, all right? It's, you know, yeah.

[Dillon] (5:09 - 5:12)

Logo's a blue square, but hey.

[JP] (5:12 - 6:09)

Blue square, blue square, yeah, leave it alone. Two white letters. Yeah, but people are.

So this is whenever I hear like we're overcomplicating, my first thought was like, who's overcomplicating? Who's overcomplicating it? That sounds like, one, there's discourse that can be complicated, and I feel like that is what I'm going to term wizard of Ozism, wizard of Ozism, and this is like when people try to conjecture things to basically, I think, create almost more barrier to entry to be like, oh, you don't know how much value I'm providing because you can't even understand the complexity of what I'm putting here.

It's like smoke and mirrors so that maybe someone can keep this divider between themselves and maybe capitalize or monetize that gap for themselves, right? Which is what we're totally against here at Lifetime Value Daily Standup.

[Jenny] (6:09 - 6:59)

Thank you for the wizard of Oz. I'm originally from Kansas, so that just warmed my heart today, but I think you're right. There's the echo chambers, the thought leadership, and look, I love it.

I think some of those people are brilliant and incredible. At the same time, when you're building and implementing and getting everybody on board, it's not a copy and paste. That's not a unique thought of mine.

I'm sure you've heard it, but it is always, it depends. And my point is, let's not start in a really complicated manner. Let's actually simplify it down, get back to the root fundamentals.

What are our customers' problems? Why are they buying our product and solution to solve them? How have they tried to solve them?

And what do we do moving forward? It's really simple. Then we learn, we get the data, we figure out, what can we automate?

[JP] (7:00 - 7:22)

Yeah, you look in the toolbox. But we know this, right? That's what I'm saying.

On one side, but the other side is the people who are actually going to do this. It's one thing for people to be posting on LinkedIn and saying stuff. You're talking about somebody who's about to implement a motion and they're like, yeah, we're going to go to digital touch first.

Where do they hear that? Where do they get this idea? The blue box, white letters.

[Dillon] (7:23 - 8:01)

Oh my gosh, the blue box. So let's make this productive. I hope I'm asking the right question and that you didn't go full burn bridges on them, Jenny.

When the person said to you, I want to do digital touch out of the gate. What was your response and or how did you walk that back? What did you say?

This is going to be very valuable for even folks who are sitting in seat W2 employees when if they're a founding member or they're coming in and their leadership has wild ideas, what did you say to reign this in?

[Jenny] (8:02 - 8:25)

Why? I'm sorry, but it's really simple. It's why?

What is the actual driver behind this kind of we're prioritizing going with a tech automated, digital, whatever word you want to insert their touch, right? Why? And it's usually an inside out reason.

And we are a function that was designed to be outside in.

[Dillon] (8:26 - 8:27)

Oh, tell me why.

[Jenny] (8:29 - 8:53)

So efficiency reduced expenses. Maybe they're burning through cash too fast, still trying to build and develop a product. The real reason is this is usually what is deemed to be a cheaper, faster, easier, whatever someone has told them.

It may be approach to standing up some kind of function to feel like. So customers feel like they're taken care of, right?

[Dillon] (8:53 - 8:56)

It's like, but cheaply, yeah, it cheaply it's back.

[Jenny] (8:56 - 9:06)

What JP just said. It's right. You're like manipulating behind the curtain, look behind the curtain, like you don't have substance.

You don't have data and information that early. You have to get it. It's earned.

[Dillon] (9:07 - 9:18)

What if I was that individual and instead of saying, I want digital touch out of the gate, because digital touch, I think is like, it's, that's the problem.

[Jenny] (9:18 - 9:21)

What is not digital touch though? Like we live in an era where everything is digital.

[Dillon] (9:21 - 9:33)

What if I said, Jenny, I want your help building this motion. And I'd like for you to have an eye towards automation as often as possible.

[Jenny] (9:34 - 10:14)

That makes sense, Dillon. That makes sense. But if day one expectation is I'm going to build things in an automated digitized fashion.

That's an unrealistic expectation, especially when you can ask some of the, those questions. What do you customers care about? What are they trying to accomplish?

How do they measure success? Guess what your customers don't know. We've got to do the work to find out together and co-create it.

And then we have the kind of benchmark data, the ideals that we can build towards. I would say, great. We can work towards that being the future state where things are a little more hands-off.

We're not putting heads in and expenses to do this, but it's going to take time.

[JP] (10:15 - 10:27)

This feels like, inside out versus the outside in. I really, this is, I said this in my talk. It's like when I said that people, if they cared more about the investors than the customers, then this is what you would get.

[Dillon] (10:27 - 11:20)

But I think if you say with an eye towards automation, that is inherently an investor's concern, right? Because you want to be as efficient as possible. I don't know why, but for whatever reason, this conversation makes me think of a guy walking onto a plane.

Like he's going from Florida to New York city, whatever. It doesn't matter. A regular standard trip.

And he walks onto the plane and he walks right into the cockpit and he says, all right, where's the pitch? Where's the yaw? I can do this.

Like he just knows a couple of terms and he's like, I can fly this bitch all the way up to New York. Not a problem. It just feels like that jackass that's like, I know a couple of terms, so I feel like I can do the work or I know a couple of terms, I know as much as you do, Jenny, you do this for a living.

I don't care. I'm digital. Do digital.

[JP] (11:21 - 11:22)

I saw a post on LinkedIn.

[Dillon] (11:23 - 11:24)

I figured it out, guys.

[JP] (11:24 - 11:32)

Oh no, she said it. She said it. Oh no, we're going to get, we're going to get delisted.

[Jenny] (11:33 - 11:45)

I love LinkedIn. It's such a great platform. The networking, LinkedIn, LinkedIn premium, go buy it.

It's so valuable. So we redeem ourselves. Are we good?

I don't think so. I don't think so.

[JP] (11:45 - 11:50)

We dug the hole deeper. It's not LinkedIn's fault, right? Like it's not LinkedIn's fault.

[Jenny] (11:50 - 12:08)

Yeah, I think I want to get back to the point. Like that was a single example, but you can do that for almost kind of everything that we have figured out over the years in CS, right? Segmentation models.

How often do you go and somebody is like, we need to figure out segmentation. How many customers do you have? 25.

What are you segmenting for?

[Dillon] (12:08 - 12:22)

But I think that's an okay idea to have. You'd like to think about that to future proof so that as you grow, your segmentations have already been designed. I wouldn't spend a ton of time on it though.

No, you don't need like a business to figure out segmentation at that point.

[Jenny] (12:22 - 13:19)

Is if you are that early and you're in your first 25 customers, your activity should be around those four things. I already talked about understanding your customer, what drives them, where they get stuck, how your products performing, how it's not performing in a lot of cases, like early stage, I know it. If you've worked it, you know it too.

And instead it's like this obsession with moving towards the maturity scale in terms of operationalizing, systemizing, automating all of those things and forgetting that there is an evolutionary period to get there. Even once you're there, you don't need all of it all of the time. That's back to, it depends on the business, the customer, where we are, what our growth expectations are, what our VCs want us to do, following blindly what someone just posted on LinkedIn without understanding and synthesizing the data information at hand that's unique to your business and your customers is adding complexity without increasing value correspondingly.

[Dillon] (13:20 - 13:41)

You can have an honorary seat on the board of the Daily Standup because I just edited an episode where we talked about this. We talk about it all the time, but I like the way you said it actually. And let's wrap up there.

I would love for you to repeat this statement about increasing complexity without increasing value. How did you say that? Just that?

[Jenny] (13:41 - 14:17)

Being extremely cognizant that you're not increasing complexity while not conversely and parallel, like those should go up into the right together. If complexity is on one axis and values on the other, we should see the up to the right that every VC wants to see, by the way, so I gotcha. But a lot of times increase in complexity, adding roles, things, processes, and standards.

Does the value that you're bringing both to your organization and to your customers increase at the same rate? Now we're talking velocity more often than not. The answer is no.

People burn out. They get frustrated because we're not making progress and movement. And we repeat the vicious cycle.

[Dillon] (14:19 - 14:23)

Jenny come back soon, but we are out of time for now. We've got to say goodbye.

[Voiceover] (14:28 - 14:59)

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