Everyone's a winner | Colin McHale | TDSU Ep. 46

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What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value where we're giving you fresh new ideas every single day in the customer success and adjacent spaces. I got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up ballers? Got my man JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? Mm-hmm. Okay, go. Say it.

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Hi. Thank you. And we've got Colin here.

Colin, do you want to say hi? Hey, y'all. Perfect. And I'm your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Colin, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself? Absolutely.

I'm currently the mid-market team manager for the customer success team over at Qualia. Started out at Qualia about five years ago now, which is kind of crazy to think about. Started in support and then just worked my way through the CS worlds.

I've hit just about every stop you can take there. I started on support, went to onboarding, went over to the CSM side, and now I lead the CSM team within that org. Right on.

Low-key humblebrag, I've used Qualia quite a few times. Really? Love it. You never told me that, Dillon.

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What's that? How have you never told me that? Buyer side. Yeah. There you go.

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The true users will know. Colin, thank you so much for being here. I think you probably already know what it is we ask on this show, so I'm just going to hit you with it.

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What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? I almost forgot the question, by the way. Yeah, absolutely. When I was asked this question when you guys first approached me with this, it was interesting because it's been what's on my mind quite a bit lately.

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It's a very interesting concept that we're working through, but the thing I'm thinking about is how can I expand the early adopter-customers and founder relationship? How can I essentially bottle that and send it and sell it to the rest of the customer base? What's interesting about it is I was trying to solve just thinking about retention, especially in a market correction like this. I started looking around. I'm like, none of these early adopter customers are escalating.

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None of these customers are having difficult renewals. I started just trying to think, what is that answer? Why does that happen? I go to the immediate default things first. It's like, oh, well, they know our CEO.

They know the VPs. Oh, they have grandfathered pricing. I thought that it would be interesting to explore a little bit beyond that because that's such an easy answer.

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What I think it really comes down to that gets lost as customer bases grow is they lose the proximity to product development. I think that if you lean into that, that's much stronger than, oh, we need to build every feature this customer is asking for. Oh, we need to fix every little bug because they say that we're buggy or they don't like support.

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Or we just give them discounts to say, see, we do care about you. Much more beyond that. What I've come up with and what we've put in place starting in Q1 of this year, I think it's going to be very interesting for any customer success leader to think about.

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We've created a structure to where we incorporate product development conversations within our executive business review or quarterly business review, however you guys refer to it. It's already bearing fruit, which is very nice to see. Essentially, the way that I'm closing the gap in that proximity from product to customer, I'm certainly not putting product on the calls with customer.

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We want to own that in the customer success side. It's just not feasible for the product team to do that. They do need to get on with customers from time to time at certain stages.

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But for what we're doing, we're putting ownership in the customer success world towards product ideation and product scope at the exact time that the PMs on the product side need that scope. What we're doing is essentially there's three parties involved, right? You have the product side, you have the customer success side, and you have the customer side. What I had to do was think about how can I create massive value in all three parties? I think we've done it because the pitch was easy to product.

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I go to our VPs. I'm like, hey, you guys are having to do this all the time in a very manual way. Outsource it to us.

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You're going to get a higher volume of insights, and you're going to have lower labor costs to do so. We should have been doing this from the beginning. That's pretty easy.

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And then I sold it to the CSMs, and that actually turned out to be very easy as well. I'm like, hey, guys, the customers are always asking for this. We don't have a very detailed process towards this.

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We do have ways to get information over to them, but we don't know if they're working on the things that customers are telling us. We don't know how detailed they're looking into it. So I told the CSMs that we're creating a structured process to where the product team is going to give us some key projects they're thinking about for the next quarter.

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And we're going to go out, and in our EBRs, we are going to talk to customers about through three to five high-impact questions of what they would want this project to look like when we roll it out. And that gives a very meaningful reason for customers to get on a call with us beyond the executive business review type stuff that we just have been doing for years now. And it's also a great way to break into certain customers.

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If a certain customer has been waiting for this high-impact reporting function we're rolling out or high-impact workflow function that we're rolling out, they're going to finally jump on if they think that their voice is going to shape how this actually gets built out. Colin, so that was meaty. That was a meaty thought process.

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Not bad. Just meaty, man. So, gents, I want one of you to raise your hands to respond to that, and we only have time for one.

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I'll do it. Can I speak to that? I'll do it. Oh, go ahead.

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Fight it out. I'll keep mine really quick. All I'm going to say, Colin, is anybody watching this has probably just seen me cheesing this whole time because I'm so pleased to know that this is the next evolution of the Quality at Customer Success team.

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For anybody who doesn't know, this team was a baby of mine at one point in my career. So I spent four years, and hiring Colin was one of the best things I did when I was there. I remember the times when we would be deathly afraid of having these types of conversations with customers because we were just going to get our butt kicked by all the angry customers.

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So we wouldn't solicit their feedback. We would hardly loop them into the product decision-making process. We set up a system that made it so that wheels would get squeaky, and then those squeaky wheels would get fixed.

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Not the ideal state, so I'm just so happy to hear that's where things are evolving today. JP, I don't know if you have time for a quick opinion. I was going to say, Colin, I really like the way that you think.

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It's really refreshing to hear how can we take this early adoption sort of spirit and how can we bring people closer to product. I was just thinking about when you mentioned the grandfathered pricing, I kind of chuckled because I feel like when it comes down to pricing, that's when everything gets real. That's when everything gets real.

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When a company has to keep up because everything's rising, all the costs are rising. So the community is great. It's great to have all this.

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I'm with you because I feel like this is part of what I see as well, something that my company is, I think, going through as well. It's like, how do you maintain this great relationship with the community and sort of them being close to the product and all this stuff? But at the same time, the value that they're getting is so great, but the price that they're paying is so low, comparatively speaking. And so when you try to reconcile that, how does that affect the relationship? But I think it would be great to have you on again.

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Really appreciate your insights. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's my line.

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Oh, yeah. You go ahead and say it. Anyway, that is our time, Colin.

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We'd love to have you back to hear more about this. No, seriously. Appreciate it.

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This is awesome. I think it's a noodler in terms of understanding how early customers versus the critical mass you receive later, how they're different, what qualities of one do you like and what qualities of the other do you like? How do you get them to behave similarly? So really cool. Really cool.

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The only knock against you is that you are associated with Rob. So besides that, you're super cool, dude. That's actually the source of most customer escalations.

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Rob. Rob from years ago. I'm still waiting on Rob to get back to me on this issue.

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I still get the occasional call. Colin, that is our time. Thank you so much.

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We'd love to have you back in the future. But until then, thank you. Thanks, y'all.

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You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media.

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Until next time. Hey, folks, it's Dillon here. Thank you for tuning in, as always.

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