Intangible, not immeasurable | Linda Lipovetsky | Ep. 94

[Linda] (0:00 - 0:30)

I feel like customer success managers are naturally able to play connect the dots. We can visualize our way through the labyrinth of all of the tasks that need to happen and all of the people and teams and departments that need to get involved. Where I think the misunderstanding is because we're not responsible for executing a lot of those tasks, it can add to the confusion of the value that we bring.

Oh boy.

[Dillon] (0:32 - 0:42)

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] (0:43 - 0:44)

Hey.

[Dillon] (0:45 - 0:48)

Got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:48 - 0:49)

What's up boys and girls?

[Dillon] (0:50 - 0:53)

And we've got Linda here. Linda, do you want to say hi?

[Linda] (0:54 - 0:54)

Hi.

[Dillon] (0:55 - 1:01)

Hey. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Linda, thank you so much for being here. Will you introduce yourself please?

[Linda] (1:01 - 1:20)

Sure. My name is Linda. I work as a principal customer success manager at Uncork, which contrary to popular belief has nothing to do with wine.

It is codeless architecture. I have transitioned in between a variety of industries, always customer facing. So I'm excited to join you guys here today.

[Dillon] (1:21 - 1:32)

Linda, thank you so much for being here. You know what we do. Every single guest, we ask one single question of them.

What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So can you tell us what that is for you?

[Linda] (1:33 - 4:10)

For me, I would like to talk about the intangible value that customer success managers bring to the table and is often overlooked, mainly because I think it's misunderstood. In every organization, you have specialists, right? You have your product managers, you have dev ops who specialize in certain codes, in certain languages, in a lot of different areas of where they're special.

And customer success managers, we can morph into nearly any industry, any role. And the reason for that is the skill sets that customer success managers need to have innately and naturally in their character are things that oftentimes can't be caught, can't be taught. But we can learn your business and then we can use that in our skills.

So I feel like customer success managers are naturally able to play connect the dots. We can visualize our way through the labyrinth of all of the tasks that need to happen and all of the people and teams and departments that need to get involved. And we have to excel at this because we're responsible for that.

And where I think the misunderstanding is, because we're not responsible for executing a lot of those tasks, it can add to the confusion of the value that we bring, right? But the coordination, the collaboration, the follow through, we have to be the customer advocate in the organization. We have access to people and teams and resources that the customer doesn't.

And so we have to organize all of that together. And it takes a lot of skill to multitask all those things, to prioritize what needs to happen, the urgent before the important, right? All of those things that we have to think about, whereas a product manager or not to disparage anybody, they're thinking about the product, release managers thinking about the release, a support person is thinking about that ticket in a point in time issue.

We have to think in the bigger picture all the time. We have point in time issues and the bigger picture. And so I think that there is a huge invaluable and intangible asset that we bring to organizations.

And a lot of that also comes down to building those trusting relationships. We are arguably with the customer more than anybody else in the organization once that contract is signed. So we have a lot of insight.

We speak with technical teams, business teams, the hierarchy, we're navigating personalities. We often have to bridge the gap between a technical and a business team. And that gives us the insight into the bigger picture.

And so I think a lot of that is often misunderstood.

[Dillon] (4:11 - 5:08)

That actually aligns a lot with the way I think about it, which is I often say, as I've said to these guys as well, is I'm less worried about a person who's been a CSM in the past. And I'm more interested in uncovering whether they are curious, have the ability to have conversations with people up and down the hierarchy, like from an end user all the way up to a C-level executive if they have to have that conversation, the ability to understand new concepts. And what I really mean is new business models, because we so often are going into new businesses and have to understand how we can deliver value to them.

And in order to do that, you've got to understand how they generate value and income. And it is hard to do, though. Would you agree that at the end of the day, those are all just ingredients in the recipe and the end result being NRR of a certain percentage?

Can we agree that's what the CSM is trying to cook up?

[Linda] (5:09 - 6:05)

Yes, we're there to identify new opportunities. A lot of times our conversations can, I escalate those up into our SLT, to our teams and say, hey, I had this conversation. I'm going to hand this baton off to you.

And it oftentimes leads to new opportunities, new case opens, new things that we can have discussions with the customers. I find that the CSM doesn't have the same effect on customers in the sense that while everybody knows we have an agenda to spin up business or expand an account, we're not salespeople. So they will often share different things with us without the fear of being pitched, if you're a good customer success manager, because then you can tailor that to what they really need versus shoving unnecessary features or packages at them that will eventually churn.

If you have that trusting relationship, you can build an expansion that will stick.

[Dillon] (6:08 - 6:10)

JP, you want to jump in? You've been gesticulating.

[JP] (6:10 - 8:34)

Yeah, I do a lot of gesticulations over in my area. Yeah, I'm going to say, I think you got in something that was very important, right? Because it can go a lot of different ways when we're talking about the value that we bring and things that are intangible or unmeasurable, especially when we're talking about, we want to do a lot of things that are measurable in terms of showing success and things, right?

That's what we're all about. But I think you really hit upon something important in the last thing you said, which is about trust. That is a vital component.

That's actually one of the things that I've been learning the importance of in my role, as I've had different roles that have had some sort of sales components, if we're considering upsells or expansions, things that can be thrown under the umbrella. But when I think about CSMs, I'm thinking about two things, like protecting the revenue and building that trust with the customer. And so it's pretty easy to measure the revenue being protected, but how much does the customer trust you?

We can do an NPS, we can do different things. I've heard people say, a good way to know if you've built a trusted relationship is if they are willing to refer a new business, which you can say will reduce the customer acquisition costs. Some people call that NRR 3.0, the ability for customers to actually become your advocates. And that function is coming from CS. But still, what do we have for tying that back or really measuring it? And I think that's what's difficult.

People are trying to figure out a way to do that, or maybe not even trying to figure out a way to do it because there's so many other things that are in priority. But I agree with you. Even though we have KPIs and OKRs, ways to measure how well we're doing in our role, there is an element of our role, I think that specifically in customer success, which has to do with trust.

And let me tell you, when you violate that trust, if you get too close to sales, you can mess up a customer. I know because I recently did this and I was like, why are they not responding to me? And my CS people after hearing the situation were like, I think you ruined the trust.

Yeah, you didn't, you messed up a little bit and you should have drew the line.

[Rob] (8:34 - 10:02)

I like this. You know what it's making me think about is what I consider some of the best advice I ever got in customer success, where I went to a conference at one point when I was still trying to figure out what customer success was. And the advice I got from someone was, think about the value, think about your role through the lens of what value do I bring to the table, even in a world where my product or service doesn't even exist, which I thought was very compelling.

Imagine your product disappears, right? Imagine Uncork or whatever disappears. Not that it should.

What are the things that are still on the table that you bring, that only you bring, right? And the X factors. And I thought that was really interesting because at that time I was building a team and I started having this conversation.

People actually got nervous because they were like, geez, I don't know. This is a big identity question. And I don't know how to measure that in the role.

So what I ended up having to share with the team was that just because it's intangible doesn't mean it's immeasurable. And we started putting together skills rubrics. These are the skills that are emblematic of being really good in the role.

Here's how you're stacking up against, or how we as a team are stacking up against these different skills. And it became like a really cool exercise to take these, I would call them seemingly intangible qualities, and to learn to define them and celebrate them and embrace them and grow them too, right? Within the organization.

So really good topic. I like it a lot.

[Linda] (10:04 - 11:04)

I like that. I like that idea. And it's interesting.

What do you bring if the product or the company went away? When I started at Uncork and I was meeting all of my new customers, I met with one customer and I said, what is it that you need from me? What can I do for you that is different?

And she said to me, if you tell me you're going to get back to me, I don't want to have to ask you twice. And I said, I'm really good at follow-ups. I'm really good at reminders.

And she said, there's nothing that frustrates me more when I have to follow up on something you were supposed to action. And it was great. And we've developed a great relationship.

We're friends outside of work now. And so that trust, she told me exactly what she needed. And she said, I've been promised this before.

It always fails. This is the one thing that I need. And it's been great.

[Dillon] (11:06 - 11:31)

Well, Linda, that is our time. I love that story you share at the end, but this is a great call out. It's a great, another one of these blind spot issues that we need to make sure that we're paying attention to.

And I love that tactical advice that you gave Rob around creating a rubric about how to better measure things that we otherwise find intangible. So again, that's our time. Linda would love to have you back in the future to talk about it more, but for now we've got to say goodbye.

[Linda] (11:32 - 11:33)

Thanks for having me.

[Dillon] (11:34 - 11:35)

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

[Voiceover] (12:07 - 12:09)

Bye-bye.