In a world without Customer Success | Dave Jackson | The Daily Standup Ep. 71

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I'm a bit of a nerd. So when I saw this, I went and looked a bit more and dug into Snowflake. Go look at their job descriptions.

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So go and look at how they describe support people and salespeople and account managers and sales engineers. If you look at that, what you find is, you find the language of CS, about delivering measurable results to customers, written through all of them. What's up, Lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value.

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We're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, JP with us. JP, do you wanna say hi? Hey, people, what's going on? I've got my man, Rob with us.

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Rob, do you wanna say hi? Hello, Heretics. And we've got Dave with us. Dave, do you wanna say hi? Hi from the original CS Heretic.

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Yes, exactly. I can't believe Rob tried to undercut you like that, Dave. And I am your host, not a heretic in any way, my name is Dillon Young.

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Dave, thank you so much for being here. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, Dave Jackson, my, go by the moniker of CS Heretic, and a heretic is not a non-believer, it's just that they've got slightly different beliefs. Background is, started a SaaS company in the year 2000, sold it twice, and now I coach SaaS, B2B SaaS CEOs, typically at scale upstage, and I have a lot of fun doing it.

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And when I'm not doing that, spend time with family, drinking wine and eating good stuff. Hell yeah, this is my kind of guy, keep it simple. Dave, you know what we're doing here? We ask one simple question of every guest we have, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? And I got a feeling you got a good one.

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So can you tell us what that is? I think what's on my mind is, what the hell is customer success and why is it really struggling in the views of so many people? So can I clarify? Sure. Do you also think it's struggling? Or is your question around, do people think it's struggling because they don't know what it is? Tell me a little bit more about that. I think there's two, there's a misalignment between what people think it is and what people do.

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So if you go back to, and by the way, I started a SaaS company in 2000, and I appointed my first CSM in 2004. And if you look at a lot of the, what people talk about in terms of customer success, they talk about it being a company-wide philosophy. And what's the normal reaction for people that think they want to implement CS is they create a CS department.

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Like, company-wide department, there is two opposites, it doesn't fit. There's a guy who is actually another European, a Dutchman, a guy called Frank Slootman, who's the CEO of a company called Snowflake. He wrote a book called Amp It Up, and there's a chapter in that where he said, and I think he said this in a podcast also, anybody who creates a CS department is stupid.

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Was it that blunt? I like that. I mean, we all know Frank Slootman because he is like public enemy, right behind, for me, Jason Lemkin, public enemy number one. And I didn't know, I didn't know he said that as bluntly as that.

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Yeah, in fact, I was reading something on LinkedIn this morning, it was a post from TSIA commenting on, by the way, Slootman said this in his book, I think probably two or three years ago. TSIA, someone put a post up just in the last couple of days saying, is he right, is he wrong? And I've responded to this a few years ago saying, well, actually, he's not wrong. And the reason is, if you look at what's being written, so the so-called Bible on CS, the blue book from Nick and Dan and I can't remember the other guy, rule number one of the 10 laws was customer success is a company-wide philosophy.

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Well, actually, Slootman was taking that and said, yeah, that's right. And in that book, it basically says the reason you don't create a CS department is because if you do, everyone else in the company says it's their responsibility. Yeah, not my job.

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Yeah, exactly that. So he said, you don't do it. And everywhere he's been, he's scrapped CS departments.

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And it's not, I think I'm a bit of a nerd. So when I saw this, I went and looked a bit more and dug into Snowflake. Go look at their job descriptions.

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So go and look at how they describe support people and salespeople and account managers and sales engineers. If you look at that, what you find is you find the language of CS about delivering measurable results to customers written through all of them. So I actually think his approach takes the concept of CS as a company-wide philosophy and actually implements it.

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So I think he's right. And that's what served me this moniker, which a friend of mine gave me, of the CS heretic. I believe deeply that the purpose of a B2B SaaS company is to create measurable results to the customers that you serve.

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That's why you exist. Now, the question then is, do you need a CS department to do that? Well, that's one way to do it, but there are other ways. What's up guys, it's Dillon here.

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Thanks so much, guys. I'll let you get back to the show. One of the problems with CS is, one of the biggest barriers to delivering customer success or customer experience is silos.

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Because silos tend to focus just on what matters to them. And one of the great ways to bust silos is to get rid of it. So I'm not saying no to CS departments, I'm saying no to, that's the only way you can deliver great customer success.

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I've got a feeling Rob knows my feeling about this because this is just a different variation of a conversation he and I have had quite a few times. So I actually, I'm going to skip over Rob for a second here because I think his answer is predictable. Sorry, Rob.

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And I'd like to hear what JP has to say in response to this. Cause JP, I don't know if you and I have had this conversation, nor do I know if you knew all that stuff about Frank Slootman. And I thought that was pretty interesting.

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So tell us what you think. Oh, Sloot, good old Sloot, man. Slooty boy.

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Decided to jump across the pond to old JP, huh? So my thoughts are, what would the word be? Agnostic to the CS language, to stick within the religious theme. They're agnostic in terms of, if someone hires me, I think I have a very mercenary mindset. You hired me, as long as I'm not cleaning the toilets and I'm providing value, whatever you need me to do.

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I guess that would mean I'm not too fussy. You're gonna- JP, let me challenge that though. Just not cleaning toilets.

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That's my barrier. But let me, I think where the rubber hits the road here is when you have trained for years as a CSM and that is what you do. That's how you describe yourself on your resume or at the proverbial family dinner.

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And they say, what do you do for work? You say, I'm a customer success manager. They say, what the fuck is that? But what I mean is, then what happens when the profession evolves and is no longer a single job description? Now you've gotta be a product manager that has CS capabilities or you've gotta be a support guy who can go a degree or two further and provide additional value. That leaves JP, in this hypothetical situation, in the lurch because he doesn't have the other half of that skillset.

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Perhaps the primary skillset and all he does is customer success, so to speak. What do you say then? My primary skillset is evolution. So I don't think I worry about that.

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That's the thing. Everywhere I've gone to different jobs that have different products or different sort of ways that they have to do things. And I learned them.

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And I think the specialization, if you wanna get more into that, whether maybe I'm leading a team or we're doing something a bit different, but in terms of you get in and you do this thing called, hey, we need retention. We need you to be a function of retention, a part of it. People are gonna, like organizations are gonna change, they're gonna do whatever.

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And I'm at peace with that. Like the world is a very, it's gonna continue to be volatile and evolving. So I greatly believe in continuing to evolve myself.

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So I'm always trying to learn new skills and I would never just stop. I'm always like, what can I learn next? Where are things going? That's why I work in data science right now, baby. I see it, man.

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I see it, man. Come on, go to Rob, man. Give Rob a video.

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Let's see what you got to say. Tell us what you got. No, I love this.

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Dave, it's a good topic. I've seen this progression too. I've seen the companies that say, customer success is a philosophy.

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And I'm like, no, no, no. Customer success is a strategy because the philosophy is not specific enough. And then it's like, no, no, no.

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Strategy is not good enough. Customer success is an outcome. Okay, no, maybe that's not good enough, right? So customer success has to be a department that owns all these things, the philosophy, the strategy, the outcome, right? So I've seen this evolution over time.

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And it's kind of interesting, especially because I often work with really early stage startups that they bring on a customer success team because they're like, well, I guess we're supposed to check this box, right? But they don't actually take the time to decide about the nature of that department. And everything that underpins it, like those different topics we discussed. And I think you're right, Rob.

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They have to check the box. And I think too often, people just check the box without understanding what is in the box they're checking. Exactly.

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And yes, so to me, do I believe this thing? And I think we're moving from customer success to something which I call customer-led growth, which is something which is right across the whole... I was a CEO. I've never been a sales leader apart from just in interim roles. And to me, it is about everything the organization does to deliver results to customers profitably.

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So it's about how you win them, how you deliver those results, how the product delivers those results, how you communicate those results. And that's the red thread that runs right through it. So therefore, by definition, it can't be the responsibility of a single department.

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The whole thing is only the responsibility of one person, that's the CEO. And his or her job is to actually inculcate that into the organization. And you do that through, not through structure, not through creating a department, but by actually creating vision, values, frameworks that run right across, metrics that join the organization rather than fragment the organization.

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And you've got to put your effort into building that understanding, that culture, and those capabilities rather than an organization. There's an American, I think his name was Arthur Jones, who said, every organization is perfectly designed to achieve the results it does. It's a truism.

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And the answer is, if you want different results, if you want to change your churn numbers, if you want to change your CAC, if you want to change your win rate, you've got to change the way the organization is designed. And people understand organization design properly know it's got all to do with structure. It's not about departments and roles.

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It's about frameworks and processes and values and culture and vision. So that's my stance. It's about capability, not structure.

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You lived up to the billing, the headline as the heretic, but I love it. And I think the way you let it off with a heretic isn't somebody who doesn't believe, they just believe in different things. I love it.

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And I think that this is a fantastic topic. Unfortunately, we are at time and we do have to say goodbye, but I hope that this is something that folks can use to expand the way they think a bit and the way that they're spending their time and their efforts. So Dave, I would love to have you back, but for now we've got to say goodbye.

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Look to be back, thanks. 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.