Managing the noise and easing the mental load | Matt Bennett | TDSU Ep. 30

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I think everyone listening to this should challenge themselves to find one Slack channel that they can exit today, and one channel they can mute today, and they should maybe even consider bringing it up to their company that they want to advocate for getting rid of Slack entirely, because I'm burned out. I hope Slack doesn't hear this, they're going to be on there, they're black, they don't care about you, they will squash you like a bug. What's up, Lifers, and welcome to the Daily Stand-Up. 

We're giving you fresh ideas every day in customer success and the customer success adjacent spaces. I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi? What's up? And we got Rob here. 

Rob, do you want to say hi? What's going on, Lifers? And Matt is here. Matt, do you want to say hi? Hey, everybody. And I am your host. 

I am the rubber chicken of customer success podcasts. My name is Dillon Young. You like that one, JP? Matt, thank you so much for being here. 

Do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, my pleasure. Hey, everyone. My name's Matt. 

I'm the director of customer success at Ritten. You can look us up at Ritten.io. We are an EMR for behavioral health, so think therapy, substance use disorder, mental health disorder, pretty broad array of use cases for our product, but it is fundamentally an EMR. I have a background in engineering and consulting.

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And now in customer success, I've made my way in a very zigzaggy type of path into customer success. And I've been fortunate enough to be able to help the CS team here at Ritten. And we're now at an early mid-stage growth. 

So we're getting to that point where CS is especially painful, and it's a poignant time to have this conversation. So really grateful to be here and looking forward to chatting. All right, Matt. 

So a couple of things. You hit on my bingo card with mental health. I'm really happy you're here. 

And maybe off the record, I'd love to hear more about Ritten overall. Secondly, for anybody who's not watching the video version of this, Matt has an absolutely top-notch hat branded with his company. So if you're not watching the YouTube, maybe you should go over there and see what sort of swag this guy's working with.

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But Matt, you know why we're here. We want to hear what's on your mind when it comes to customer success. So why don't you hit us with that? Yeah. 

So I listed out three topics. I don't think we have time to go through everything, but I will kind of touch on all three because they are things that I think about often. Because we are an EMR, a big part of our work is onboarding. 

The reason I say that is because EMRs are systems of record that generally don't switch very often. It's a ton of work because of HIPAA, because of just the way that healthcare works to switch systems. So once customers are on, the product and platforms are pretty sticky, we found, unless they fail onboarding. 

And the real pain point is onboarding. So we're trying to get out of the superhero phase, as my CEO calls it. I've definitely worn the cape a couple times, and it's very exhausting. 

So we're trying to figure out how to scale the org. And so I would be interested to hear if you guys have any recommendations on tooling or approaches, really onboarding centric stuff. That's definitely an area where we're investigating and trying to evolve and mature. 

Another topic that I think, and it's just, again, to touch on something I think about a lot, it's just some of the friction that we experience with sales and product. I think this is probably the monkey on a lot of people's back in CS. Coming from a background of engineering and of consulting and product work and being passionate about design and having a polished product, I definitely have opinions that sometimes can be harsh or outspoken about how the product should be delivered and how it should be presented to customers in the sales process. 

I think you guys can certainly empathize with this. And this is definitely something that I have found to be, we'll call it a friction point, but we're working on it. And I think especially, and this is a good segue into the topic I think we should probably dig into, which is mental health, because it's such a nice segue from the industry.

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We're a fully remote company. I live in San Diego. Our technical headquarters is in Philly.

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I travel here and there for launches, but I try to stick around. Way nicer weather. America's finest little city as much as possible, yeah.

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So we operate on Slack, as probably most remote companies do. When messages are flying and people are stressed and customers are angry, it's so easy to say the wrong thing or say something that you think is well-intentioned or just is honest or blunt, or just trying to get the information into the headspace, the collective consciousness of the team. It's just not being crafted in the right way. 

And so that's actually been an improvement area that I've been working on personally. I've been fortunate to have a CEO and counterparts in other orgs who are patient with me, but sometimes unabashed feedback and opinions can lead to more chaos than good. I think that, like I said, it segues well into mental health because it's about managing the stimulus that you deal with and narrowing the channels. 

And also, just in that day-to-day, figuring out how to block time. What does the optimal CSM schedule look like? How much time should be dedicated to sorting through all the problems that you hear about and all the gaps? There's so much, right? I'll hand it off to you, but I think that's where we should dig in. How do you manage all the stimuli? What do you do? And all these different channels we use, how do you use them right? Guys, I think this is an opportunity for me to pull out my UV method again, because at the end of the day, isn't that what it's all about? Urgency versus value. 

And that's how I manage probably everything within my life, is what is the most urgent thing I'm dealing with? And then it's almost like a two-by-two matrix, most urgent thing I'm dealing with versus the most valuable thing that I'm dealing with. And value can be customer satisfaction, but more often, as the boys and I have talked about, it's dollars. And that can be direct, like sales needs you on a call so you can help close a deal.

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That's obviously a value. But also, spending a lot more time thinking strategically about onboarding is a value. If you have the data that shows that onboarding is an outsized piece of the weighting of a renewal decision, right, Matt? So I'll leave it there, and I want to give the guys, whoever wants to jump in, an opportunity to also talk. 

But if I'm talking high level, that's how I make decisions, is based on those two things, and not only professionally, but also personally. Yeah, I think that's good. Urgency and value, two good things.

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I was trying to think of UVLA. How can I extend that? Because it makes you more screened. But sometimes, CSN can make things too complicated. 

Yeah, I totally agree. I think currently at my company, the Slack noise can be very just overwhelming. You have so many channels.

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You have different things going off. I'm reading Deep Work by Cal Newport right now. And just like these pings that happen, they can all distract you. 

And I'm honestly trying to find my way through it right now. But I'm glad that my company at least encourages that. I think that's one place where I'll leave it. 

It's good if the CEO sets that as part of the culture, the expectations around how you pay attention to things. Otherwise, it's chaotic. Well, let's use an analogy here. 

How often do you audit the emails you're getting in your personal inbox? And Gmail is really good now of saying, hey, it looks like you don't give a crap about that Lululemon email that you get every single day for the past six months. You never open it. Would you like to unsubscribe? Doing that audit of the stimulus that you're receiving is great. 

And you can do that even with Slack. I remember I wanted to be in every Slack. I'd be in the engineering scrum Slack. 

I thought that I needed to understand what was going on in there. And at a certain point, you got to be real with yourself of like, bro, I can only download so much. And I can only think about so much. 

And I can only be responsible for so much. So Matt, from your perspective, like the superhero tape thing, I talk a lot about we're a basketball team. You can't do it yourself. 

You've got to be ready to pass the ball and let your guy shoot the ball. Trust in them. And it's the same in a company. 

Okay. I'm getting worked up. Rob, why don't you share some thoughts? I'm glad you're getting worked up because I was about to myself.

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Look, to take a glimpse into my life, this is just me complaining. I'm not asking for sympathy. Personally, I signed up for this, but I'm in like 10 different Slack environments.

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And so the thing is, every notification looks like it's of equal value. You can't tell the difference if something is a little one notification from one person versus a little one notification from another person. Maybe your VP of sales and your VP of product are both contacting you. 

You can't use your UV method, as you shared Dillon, to differentiate which to attack first or which to address first. I'm trying to stay away from this unnecessarily. Let me say, actually, Slack does have the ability to configure down at that level of like, who do you care about? Who do you care about? It's just a notification, but who's also a sound? Are there channels you want to be in but not get any notifications from? What goes to your phone? Slack's actually pretty good at it.

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It is good, but it's a volume game, and it's just not ideal for an inbox zero approach. I think everyone listening to this should challenge themselves to find one Slack channel that they can exit today, and one channel they can mute today. And they should maybe even consider bringing it up to their company that they want to advocate for getting rid of Slack entirely, because I'm burned out.

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Matt, I want to give you an opportunity. Any last words before we get out of here? Yeah, I think it's interesting because each person's problem set is going to be unique, but narrowing the aperture as a theme, I think, is a really prudent thing to try and do. Really thinking about it, what problems don't I need to solve right now? Using that to help you, because I found that it's really easy to allow your aperture to get too wide and use like, oh, this is an easy problem solve. 

But it goes back to that BCG matrix you're alluding to, because for those who aren't familiar with UV, I mean, when I heard it, it's the importance and urgency matrix, right? It's the four quadrant thing, very similar. And I do try to use that sometimes, but sometimes there's too many problems to assess. Picking a couple key themes and really figuring out what to put the laser focus on. 

If there's a theme, it's like narrowing the aperture and using that to prioritize the things that will make you feel good and be successful, and not really allowing the other things to weigh you down. And that could be true for someone in all dimensions of their life, right? If we're going to think about what a well-rounded life looks like for some aspiring CSM who's listening to this podcast, time for fitness, time for mindfulness, time for work, prioritized work, time for literature, reading things, creating that balanced structure that allows you to be a high-performing person who's hitting their stride and delivering their optimal quality, both in life generally, and then also at the workplace. Because I do believe that there's a lot of cross-pollination.

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How about some grace, right? Give yourself some grace, man. You're a work in progress. And grace.

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You don't need to solve this tomorrow. A little bit of default to action, put something into place, think about it, but do not beat yourself up over it. So, Matt, I love this topic. 

I could talk mental health all day, so I really appreciate it. But that is our time. So until next time, thank you so much for being here.

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Thank you. You've been listening to The Daily Stand-Up 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. Hey folks, it's Dillon here. Thank you for tuning in as always. 

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