Give the Newbies a Chance | TDSU Ep. 5

00:00:43    what's up lifers and welcome to the Daily standup with lifetime value where we're serving up fresh customer success ideas for you every single day I've got my man JP with us JP do you want to say hi what's up bleepers I've got Rob here Rob do you want to say hi what's going on value drivers I don't like that and we've got Kevin here Kevin you want to say hi what's going on and I am your host the Battle of Lexington and Concord of customer success podcasts Dylan young Kevin do you want to

00:01:16    introduce yourself absolutely well hello everybody my name is Kevin Leonor I've been in customer success now for five years um I've also uh trained uh 42 different uh SAS professionals to their first SAS role JP is actually one of the people that I've coached to their first SAS role so pretty proud about that there JP has done an amazing job there I've also been a uh strategic adviser for the path to CS program over in Toronto Canada uh that helped displaced uh workers from covid get their first

00:01:53    rle into SAS so definitely um you'll find a lot of people that I've coached over the years uh scattered among the uh the Cs uh world so uh pretty thrilled to uh join the podcast today that's sweet man so maybe JP we got to kick you off and put Kevin on here yeah nothing to say nothing to say all right Kevin uh you know the deal do you want to tell us what your topic is for customer success today absolutely so topic today is training to the vertical and and what I mean by that is uh when it comes to

00:02:23    bringing in a CSM what some of the things that we're seeing in the market right now is that more and more companies are trying to hire people that are already in the vertical for uh for the product set that they're uh that they're offering now the trouble with that is that when it comes to a lot of csms that are looking to change into verticals or are suddenly uh in in a position where they're open to work uh they are limited to just the verticals that they are uh that they previously served how is it that they're able to go

00:03:01    into those areas and there there's two things that we could talk about today one is from an internal perspective how are companies gear uh gearing their csms to work with these uh particular customer sets other thing that we could take a look into is also how individual job Seekers can also uh train up and get the knowledge they need in order for them to succeed in these other verticals really quick do you think that this is the market that we've heard a lot of news commentary that this is not the

00:03:37    market to be trying to change your vertical or what you know would you agree with that or are you kind of saying that you think folks can still make a change right now if if that's their desire it just takes a little bit more work I think it that that mindset that this is the market not to change is kind of forced in my opinion uh the reason why is because the amount of applications that are coming in for each of these roles are are well within uh 500 to even upwards of thousands of applications so the only reason

00:04:15    why they they want you to have experience in this vertical is because it's a whole lot easier to weed out everybody else that doesn't have this uh the skill set uh and makes it a whole lot easier for them to get through a lot of those applications quicker does that mean that today you can't learn this vertical absolutely not there's nothing that changed in the overall environment that says a new CSM can't learn this vertical today all that change is that you're up against so much more competition so you just got to be

00:04:49    more on your game exactly it uh so if you're not able to position yourself as a uh subject matter expert uh with the customer base you actually have to be able to show that the skill set that you bring from a CS perspective is far and way harder for a new CSM uh that's never worked the job before but has domain experience to pick up in a timely manner these are some things that uh a lot of employers are not considering as well is whether or not the uh the learning curve is going to get in the way uh of working

00:05:28    with the these customers because yet you could chop it up with uh with your normal stakeholder but can you build an actual plan to help them succeed that's that's going to be the question and can uh new csms go in there just knowing what they know about the industry and build some things absolutely they can it's going to be on a company by company basis uh whether or not that ramp up is going to uh be a lot of work can I I and I want to give uh the gentleman a chance to jump in here but can I take an a a a

00:06:00    guess that we're mostly talking about like Enterprise customer success where you've got a smaller book of business I mean your monday.com folks can't necessarily focus on a single vertical I mean maybe because Monday's got such a a a large set of customers at this point but that that b Toc segment is a lot harder to implement this strategy until you've reached a certain size is that fair to say I would say it's mostly that there are still a lot of industries that still want you to be well skilled in the

00:06:30    particular technologies that they're uh given and I I come from a uh UniFi Communications background so Zoom is a one of those places where they want you to have some experience in Video Communications as well as PBX uh cloud-based systems so even in that case what where we're working with so many different verticals and I I had four different verticals that I was working with over at Zoom they still want you to have that prerequisite knowledge in that space and at the end of the day the use cases are still going

00:07:04    to be the same um across all of the different customers um and the use cases can be learned do I need to know about web RTC no never in my conversations with customers have I ever had to talk about web RTC which is the backbone of a lot of uh video uh Communications these days yeah JP why don't you jump in here I'm I'm hearing discourse around the ver artical and but my mind keeps going really to um this the phrase all things held equal right if we simplify the pool and let's say that you have two

00:07:41    candidates who are both equally skilled and let's say that one of them has um a little bit more training in you know this hypothetical vertical and the other one doesn't you know where is a a company making these decisions if if there's one bit of advice that I would be giving to both the prospective candidate and the employer it would be probably around the cultural fit actually probably a little bit more than the vertical because if I've heard time and time again you could have somebody who's really skilled really talented in

00:08:16    a certain area and even if you had two people who were both equally talented in that same vertical right which one ultimately is probably going to fit better in the long term because I know that the hiring process just like a lot lot of things is really about it's about mitigating risk right you don't want to have to hire someone again so yes if you can train someone you willing to train someone who's probably a better cultural fit right um and I think that that can definitely count for for something if

00:08:46    you zero in on okay we're going to be a cultural fit because there's a lot of variants and cultural fits even in companies that deal in the same vertical I agree with a lot of that to to even double down on it um cultural fit also talks about how each of the different pieces fit together it and I have seen when it came to especially some of these announcements that are coming in hey I just got a new job working for this and I I will see the same post back to back for the same company and I'm seeing okay

00:09:17    well looks like they hired three csms uh let's see what the what the versatility is between these three csms and they are an exact replica of each other um so is there an opportunity where now instead of hiring to the vertical that maybe one of those hires can be a CS professional that is new to the industry that can act actually give a learning osmosis between the vertical champion and the Cs champion and and now they can learn together because you're going to put them in the same uh the same training

00:09:52    classes uh they're going to be onboarding at the same time been through so many different on boardings I know that a lot of like dead time uh time where you're kind of learning on your own these are opportunities where uh you can sync together those two different skill sets by having them meet together and sharing what they've learned and you have a much faster time to value and and much faster onboarding time if you were to combine those two different skills uh there it especially if you have the

00:10:25    opportunity to hire multiple people why hire three of the same when you can mix and match and uh have those skill sets join together as they're learning through the product and through the culture Rob do you want to offer any closing thoughts think a closing thought is for anyone listening to this to ask themselves if they're on the hiring side is the reason we're looking for a vertical fit because we lack internal enablement and maybe we lack a rigorous hiring process my personal experience was when I sort of came to reconcile

00:11:03    myself with exactly your advice was in the process of hiring honestly it was over over a 100 people over several years and I consistently found that I was tempted to hire for vertical expertise and ended up hiring for people who are hungry to learn the industry from scratch people who are hungry to even learn the skill set but may have had some raw skills so the interview process was all about about figuring out what is this person's unique aptitudes to learn this industry learn this skill set um not off of what they had coming

00:11:38    in the door so that may have been my unique experience at certain companies but taking that bet was one of the most refreshing things that I was able to do for myself and for the candidates too so I really appreciate what you shared Kevin thank you I'll add one more thing to as well there are certain certain industries right now that really do need to start looking into uh bringing in more outside uh candidates because the amount of roles that are available in these two particular segments are so high but the amount of

00:12:14    talent is so low uh and in the fintech and healthtech areas those are places where they really value fintech experience and healthtech experience but the amount of available candidates there is few and far between but they are eliminating a lot more candidates on at an early stage level um a lot faster than they should be Point good point that's our time Kevin thank you so much for being here really appreciate you uh pulling back the curtain a little bit on this and Rob your point you know kind of

00:12:47    flipped it on its ear I I thought that was interesting too so uh Kevin we hope to have you back very soon but thanks again for being here thank you for having thanks Kevin