Hoodwinked | Jon Johnson | TDSU Ep. 61

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Guys, seriously, I don't think- Come on with it. How the hell is Kong as tall as Godzilla? Oh, is that the problem? It's not the fact that they exist? Jeez. What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value.

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I'm gonna get through this damn introduction, where we give you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, JP, here, nodding vigorously. Do you want to say hi, JP? What kind of pudding do you like? Got my man, Rob, here.

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What's up? Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, everybody? And I got my man, Jon, here. Jon, do you want to say hi? What kind of pudding do you like? I like your rendition. It's pensive.

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And I'm your host, barely holding it together. My name is Dillon Young. What's up, lifers? Jon, thank you so much for being here.

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Really? Would you like to introduce yourself? Hey, guys, I'm Jon Johnson, principal customer- Hi, guys, I'm Jon. I think I just peed a little. Everybody cries in tears.

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It's so good to see you guys. I'm so happy to be here. What the f*** is happening? Jon, so it says here that you know what we're doing here, obviously.

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We're asking, what's on your mind? And it says here on your submission form, we'd like to talk about Kong versus Godzilla. No, I don't think enough people are talking about this. Guys, seriously, I don't think- How the hell is Kong as tall as Godzilla? Oh, is that the problem? It's not the fact that they exist? Oh, hold on.

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We've already leaned into this world. There's a universe. But in every movie, Kong is a different size.

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And I think that it's incredibly poor experience as a- Just like our customers. Just like our customers. Our customers are always a different size, you know what I mean? Okay, do you want to get your real topic out here or would you rather debate the size of Kong? I'm not debating it.

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It's real. You can watch the movie yourself. It doesn't make any sense to me.

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A second thing that doesn't make any sense to me, four years ago, they told us that we weren't in revenue and that we're not in charge of money and sales. And now they're saying, hey, guys, maybe you should pay attention to revenue. And I have whiplash and quite a bit of anxiety.

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I'm excited and scared. This is how I'm feeling. And if you're looking for a job right now and you've never touched revenue because they told you you never needed to.

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You never needed to. CS isn't sales. Fuck that.

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You're screwed now. You're screwed. You're screwed.

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All these guys that came into our industry and gals, all these folks, these people, these others have come into our industry in the last four years. And they have been told by every single thought leader, including the biggest thought leaders in the world, that we should not talk about revenue, that we should not touch revenue, that it degrades our relationships, that it degrades the trust that we have with our customers. And now everybody, I mean, most groups are getting moved back under CROs because they have been unable to provide the value that their salaries require.

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And all of these folks that came into our industry are getting whiplash saying, what do you mean? I have to talk about money now? Oh, my God, I'm terrified. And most of these folks came in expecting to just have a nice, happy time, run a few QBRs, sip their cappuccinos, never go to sales club. The whiplash is real.

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And I can empathize with that. But did we really think we weren't going to have to justify our roles in some quantifiable? No, no, no. Like lines of code, engineers can tell you how many lines of code they write in a week, a month, a quarter.

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Marketing can tell you how many inbound leads they've generated and how they're filling the funnel. If we ever thought that we were allowed to just be like, yeah, I had a lot of chuckles with my customers. I locked my calls.

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We're good. Did we really think that was going to be sustainable? No, I'm actually an ad. I've been saying this for the whole time that we... You're just pissed.

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We absolutely have been. The sheer number of people that gaslit me on LinkedIn over the last four years. Oh, no, we can't touch any revenue.

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We're not sales. Thank you for saying that. I am waiting.

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I am waiting for the day that your boss is like, oh, I would like you to move under the CRO. For them to be like, oh, this is a great idea. It's very natural to do this.

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It's like, no, we've been here the whole time. And those of us that have been in the CS industry have been shouting the moment they took revenue and renewals and growth away from us. Then like, what's the point of what we do? Our job is to protect revenue and grow it, period.

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That has always been the case. And I feel like we lost so much momentum in the last four years. And I think not that it's just CS, but I think there's a lot of opportunity that is going to be coming for those of us in CS that understand revenue and understand how to have complex revenue-driven conversations with trust and with relationships.

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What's up, guys? It's Dillon here. And you know why I'm here. Hat in hand.

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I got a favor to ask of you. If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on. And if you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow.

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Give us a subscribe. And maybe best of all, if you want to give us some feedback, drop a comment and let us know what you like, what you don't like, or how we can get better. We want to make sure we're giving the best content we can to you and others within the community.

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Thanks so much, guys. I'll let you get back to the show. JP, what do you want to say? Yeah, I think what's interesting, I'll speak to something because I was talking about the term customers obsessed and how I never liked it and how I prefer the term impact-motivated.

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And I think this speaks to, as someone who's more of a boots-on-the-ground person, really understanding the impact that you're having on the company. And I go a little bit further back. I used to hate the resume.

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Why was I hating the resume? Because it was an exercise in having to think about the impact that I had at these companies, and I couldn't think about it. So that led me to say, OK, while I'm there, it's like, why am I thinking about this dumb document piece of paper when I'm trying to get another job? No, no, no, no. I should be thinking about what's the impact that I'm having right now? What are the wins that I'm getting? And how can I quantify this? And I think that that's what we have to do in CS, whether that's tying it to revenue, whether it's tying it to maybe somehow we're aligned with support and we're getting tickets resolved faster.

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Like, whatever it is, finding a way to show that you're having an impact on the company beyond chuckles. Yeah, I prefer money. Actually, that's the impact that I want.

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I want to tie the shit that I do to millions of dollars. Rob, go ahead. Jon, I feel seen.

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I feel heard. I feel seen. Heard.

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I feel good. The thing is, I have not heard anybody articulate their experience in the way that you did, which speaks exactly to my experience of when I've logged onto LinkedIn for the last four years and it's driven me nuts. It's driven me absolutely crazy because I feel like I'm the crazy one for saying basically exactly what you're saying.

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I'm talking about the commercial responsibilities within CS. And similar to you, I was like, is this bubble going to burst at some point? And I think we're at the point where it has. I have told many CSMs over my years and teams that I've grown that I'll teach you how to talk business as your godfather, your CS godfather.

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And honestly, it's worked for the teams that I've been on. When I was at one company, CS ended up making up two-thirds of net new company revenues, which was awesome. What I think was the most successful execution of a land and expand model of any company that I've ever been a part of.

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One of the interesting things that we had to do, and I was actually just talking with some folks about this just prior to this, is we did have to split two different functions, like the traditional CSM role and a commercial CSM role. And then we had other functions like support and onboarding too. But I thought that was one way that we were able to specialize and balance our responsibilities.

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Now, granted, the thing is that the hard thing was that I had to convince leadership to make that bet. I was like, okay, you allow me the specialization and this investment, and I am making the bet and the forecast that this is going to pay off in the long run. And it did, in that case.

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It has not always been successful. But I do think that there's still room for companies that are growing fast enough to make that bet. I actually, I was meeting, I met with one of the CS leaders from Planhat and we had a really great conversation specifically about this too.

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We had done a podcast with Nick Mehta on my podcast, and we really hit the ground running on this guy that's telling us that sales wasn't important, or I guess CS wasn't a part of revenue, is now saying CS is a part of revenue. That's where a lot of these kind of thoughts came up. But you look at the teams that took revenue, do you know him? Have you heard of him? Do you follow him? You're referring to him as the person who turned on a dime? Okay.

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Yeah. I don't know about turned on a dime. It's been a progression.

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I don't know his business. I don't know him. It's not like he gas, it just, it changed.

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The conversations changed. But you see these teams that took revenue away have deprioritized success and have really moved into more support motions and account managers. Where the relationship now relies on the salesperson.

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And some of them are successful, some of them are not. A lot of the product-led growth guys are doing this account management plus support. And there's this big gap of just, we just don't know our customers.

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And we're hearing this time and time again in all of these webinars. I'm just like, we just don't know what our customers are doing. And it's like they're having these new thoughts of like, man, it'd be great if we had a role that was focused on understanding the use case and the value that our customers are finding in our product, right? And it's like, we're just going in this big circle over and over and over.

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I would say that those companies have more than one issue though, because if you don't even know what the use case is for your customer, that's a product issue. Well, right. Product isn't doing the thing that they're supposed to do.

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But I mean, is it one of the great things about CS is the fact that our customers mature over time. And if we don't have somebody that is walking alongside them as they mature to understand how their use case matures, sales comes in from day one and they fill out their medic and they give you, oh, it's going to be this persona. But then three years later in the enterprise or global space, these are long-term customers.

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These are people that we're not getting new logos. We're getting expansion. And I think that sales doesn't have the same motion of or temperance of the ability to mature with the customer to say they started from here and three years later they're here.

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And then I'm going to tell you the story of change. But the reason that is, is because there's a very clear goal with sales. Take a net new opportunity or what you think could be an opportunity, AKA a lead of some variety and get it to the point where they sign a contract.

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That is customer acquisition. There's a very clear start and stop for sales that I think a lot of companies just struggle with where does customer success start and stop and what do they do in the middle? But I think we also, we live in a bubble for sure. There's a lot of companies that are struggling with all types of stuff.

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It's not just customer success. And so I call out product, but it's probably also sales. I've been at a ton of companies where all of a sudden customer success has this fire under their ass because sales isn't getting it done for one reason or another.

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Maybe they stink, but also I've seen other companies just cut the legs off of sales. Yeah. And they fire all but two salespeople and expect their funnel to get worked the same way.

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And that's a company that is making the wrong decisions. Period. Agreed.

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If you're in that company, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. They're called... No, I'm not going to do that.

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No, no, no, no. Please don't do that. And I've worked for too many companies for anybody to figure out which one I want.

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Jon, that's our time. Well, my anxiety has left. This solved it.

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I came in really hot. Good, great. Well, when we sign off, it's going to come right back, my friend.

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It's going to come multiple, three times. What did I say? It just went by so fast. It just went so fast.

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Thank you, guys. Happy days. Have a good stand-up.

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It's over. It's it. It's it.

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How do you end these things? Do you just... We say, come back soon. But for now, we've got to say goodbye. Okay, nobody else say goodbye.

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Oh, goodbye. 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.

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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 lifetimevaluemedia.com. Until next time.