K.I.S.S. | Marc Ray

[JP] (0:00 - 0:11)

That's what complicates it. Instead of, Hey, you do this job. It's not, man.

I love that you came here to lay some bricks, but I need you to lay some pipe too. You know what I mean? It's like, Whoa, you know what I mean?

[Dillon] (0:14 - 0:17)

Is that, is that where you're leaving it?

[JP] (0:17 - 0:21)

Yeah, that's where I'm leaving it. Pick it up, pick it up, baby.

[Marc] (0:22 - 0:24)

Awkward pause, awkward pause.

[Rob] (0:24 - 0:25)

What's up pipe layers?

[Dillon] (0:33 - 0:44)

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 with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:45 - 0:46)

Viva Valor baby.

[Dillon] (0:47 - 1:07)

Oh yeah, there it is. It's never going to stop now. And we've got Rob with us.

Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up people? And we've got Marc with us.

Marc, do you want to say hi? Absolutely. Hello everybody.

Good to have you Marc. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Marc, can you please introduce yourself?

[Marc] (1:08 - 1:22)

Yeah. Marc Ray. Yep.

Been in customer success for over 10 years now, various roles from building customer success at startups to running a VPCS at companies. Today, I am delighted to be coming from Ethicode where I run their US services.

[Dillon] (1:23 - 1:38)

You are in a dark and moody room. Do you got the memo? These guys didn't.

So I appreciate it. Marc, you know what we do here? We ask every single guest one single question and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

Why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Marc] (1:39 - 2:41)

Yeah, for me, it's like, why are we over-complicating things? There's so many conversations. Like you can see it on LinkedIn.

I speak with peers or people that reach out to me. When a lot of these conversations have to do, many of them, I would say actually the majority recently has a lot to do with just like team alignment, right? Account management, customer success, sales, and onboarding, if your organization even has a separate one.

And it feels like we're in this world of theory when let's take a step back out from the theory, get in front of a whiteboard, maybe a spreadsheet and start putting down exactly what it is we're trying to accomplish. Who do we have? How do we get there?

And I feel like we're over-complicating it with the theoreticals of, oh, if we move this lever, we're going to increase our NRR here. I don't think people are getting down close enough to the metal to understand, you know, who you have on your team. And also a lot of it has to come into organizational scale and size.

Are you ready for some of these more theoretical or more scaled practices or do you kind of just need to get in, get some done?

[Dillon] (2:42 - 3:07)

Yeah. I think we talk theory a ton, but with this idea of they don't apply to everybody. You've got to always take into account what your customer looks like, what your org looks like you said, and then look at your, the tools that you have available to you and understand which ones are applicable.

It's not always, it doesn't have to be a 10 step process. Sometimes it's three steps. JP, why don't you jump in?

[JP] (3:08 - 4:29)

I love this topic, Marc. Thanks for bringing it. I definitely am a fan of simplifying the conversation.

And I think at one level we have to be mindful of, sometimes this is the way people are doing things on LinkedIn. You want to complicate it so that you can maybe give it a, the Wizard of Oz effect, right? There's all this stuff and oh, you don't want to come over here because it's real complicated in customer success.

But when you get down to it, I think that what we do, the difficulty is not in it's that it's complicated, right? That's not necessarily where the difficulty is. I think that for me, and I know this is probably going to be what I'm going to be on for a while.

But for me, I think what it's about is how can we stay in this driving value as CS, as opposed to, I need you to be also a sales, a support of this, right? I think that's what overcomplicates it is because it's like, Oh, there are expectations from leadership about how you're going to show your value. And that's what complicates it.

Instead of, Hey, you do this job. It's not, man. I love that you came here to lay some bricks, but I need you to lay some pipe too.

You know what I mean? It's like, Whoa, you know what I mean?

[Dillon] (4:33 - 4:35)

Is that, is that where you're leaving it?

[JP] (4:35 - 4:40)

Yeah, that's where I'm leaving it. Pick it up, man. Pick it up, baby.

[Dillon] (4:40 - 4:41)

Awkward pause.

[JP] (4:42 - 4:43)

What's up, pipe players?

[Rob] (4:52 - 6:31)

Um, anyway, no, I, so Marc, actually, this is really good. This has been on my mind lately in part, because I feel like I have an ability. I have a natural ability to get distracted by so much noise that is in customer success.

And that to me is a manifestation of overcomplicating things where I'm getting distracted by things like unread emails, things like networking events that maybe I don't actually have to go to or like stuff like that, I think this is really relatable for anybody in customer success because there's so much noise in customer success. And so what I've been teaching myself to keep myself focused on a big picture is, have you guys ever heard of something called first principles thinking? Or, yeah, so first principles is really like boiling your initiative down to what is the core principle of what I'm trying to do.

And so I've seen situations where like a CSM I'm working with, for example, he's like, Oh, I have to prioritize this onsite for this customer. Meanwhile, there's another customer that's churning. So I was like, okay, let's step back.

What is the first principle of your role? Your first principle of your role is to retain customers. It stands to reason that all your effort should actually be focused on the churn risk customer, not this delightful onsite that you want to do as like icing on the cake.

We actually turned this into a whole training around pyramid principle, which is another cool way that I've gone about this as well, which is, okay, you start with your main point, you break it down into key arguments, then you find the supporting evidence. And it reminds me of like in grade school, learning how to write an essay, but it's a really good topic, Marc, and I appreciate you bringing it up.

[Dillon] (6:32 - 6:48)

Leave it to Rob, the framework Zambito to start off lamenting over-complicating things and then provides two different frameworks for things. Yeah, that's not ironic.

[Marc] (6:50 - 8:34)

Yeah, I think Rob brings up a good point though, right? It's about focus and like distilling it down to what is the one thing you're trying to, like the biggest thing your team is trying to accomplish, right? Call it a rock, call it a level 10, infuse some EOS and some other acronyms in there, but it doesn't matter.

What is your team focused on for the next three months? What is the biggest mover you have? I have actually talked to other companies and peers who are like, yeah, we're churning and I'm like, all right, then maybe you should focus on that.

Like maybe everybody should focus on that. Maybe you should focus on just lightweight segmentation of like people we think that are going to churn that we are probably not going to be able to help, right? They're low utilization, they're bad product alignment.

It all depends on like product maturity. People that are going to churn that we don't want them to churn and rightly so many times it has to deal with revenue and deal size and opportunity. I think a lot of people lose focus on some of those things and then working leadership, supporting them by working backwards from that and saying block and tackling anything that gets in the way of it.

Like maybe it's training, maybe it's going to an onsite, maybe it's taking on, Hey, we want you to now handle renewals or other commercial upsell aspects, but we need you to go to like Sandler training now or something like that. And it's like, hold on, we're focused on renewals or excuse me, fixing churn. Let's start there.

And then let's not overanalyze it. The best customer success tool out there that I've ever used or seen is still Google sheets and like get a quick spreadsheet, get the data in front of you. Cause that's another aspect that I think people get distracted on is if you get the right data set, that data won't lie to you and that'll help drive that focus.

[Dillon] (8:35 - 9:46)

This may come as a surprise to nobody, but I was a big Dungeons and Dragons guy as a kid, I used to get stuck so often on creating the character. So if you're familiar with this idea of you build your character, like you choose your race and then your class and your starting skills and all this stuff. That was always my favorite part.

I very rarely ever got to the point where I was like deep into a story with my friends cause every two sessions I'd be like, nah, I'm going to, I want to be a barbarian now. And I think that's a little bit of the same problem that we have is like we love the setup. We love making the Rube Goldberg machine and we don't love enough achieving the outcomes that we're looking for.

We lose the plot a lot of times. This is a great topic, Marc. We're out of time, but we ought to come back and talk about this some more.

Maybe talk about some tactics that you've used in the past. Maybe some stories you have around where you've seen this and how you've realigned the team. But for now, we've got to say goodbye, Marc.

[Marc] (9:47 - 9:50)

Well, goodbye. Appreciate you having me on. Yeah.

We'll look forward to the next one.

[Voiceover] (9:55 - 10:25)

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.

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