No weak handshakes | Monica Stewart | TDSU Ep. 53

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All right, you guys ready? 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 wanna say hi? Hey, how's everybody doing? I got my man, Rob here.

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Rob, do you wanna say hi? What's up, Lifers? And we have Monica with us today. Monica, do you wanna say hi? Hey, guys. And I am your host, the Grape-Nuts of Customer Success Podcasts.

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My name is Dillon Young. Everybody's favorite cereal, Grape-Nuts. Monica, thank you so much for being here.

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Can you please introduce yourself? Yeah, it's great to be here. Listen, I think that Grape-Nuts are like the unsung hero of breakfast cereals. I was raised by a very hippie mom.

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We didn't get to have the fun cereal. I love Grape-Nuts. You can microwave them, you can eat them hot, you can eat them cold.

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You can put some- I think they're great, yeah. You microwave Grape-Nuts? Yeah. You can make it like a hot cereal, you can make it like an oatmeal type of thing.

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Oh, okay, okay. I thought that they were just dry, like on a plate. I didn't understand.

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They're like upside down cookies, like it's not right, you can't eat two types of cereal. Yeah, now look, before we started recording, Monica, I said, you can't say anything wrong, but microwaving Grape-Nuts might be the threshold. We might have to say goodbye after that.

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I'm never excited enough to show it. Well, I'm just making it pretty difficult. No, no, okay.

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Grape-Nuts aside, Monica, why don't you introduce yourself? Yeah, great to be here with you guys. So my name's Monica. I'm the founder of MSD Consulting.

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I help founders of SaaS companies that sell an enterprise product get to their next stage of growth. So usually I work with people when they're around two to 10 million in revenue and they wanna like raise a series fee or maybe they're going towards acquisition and they kind of hit this point where they're like, if we keep doing this like this, like we're not gonna be able to get to where we wanna go. And so I work with actually sales teams and CS teams.

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I kind of do full customer journey with my clients and I love talking about customer success because I think it is the Grape-Nuts that is the unsung hero of revenue teams. I've never seen a company that's really maximizing what they can do in that area with their customers. So you guys are my key goal.

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Thanks for having me on. Grape-Nuts is gonna be the gift that keeps on giving here. I wasn't prepared for that.

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Monica, you know what we're doing here. We are asking one simple question. What is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So why don't you hit us with it? Yeah, so the thing that keeps coming up in the past couple of weeks and I'd say like my biggest key right now when what people are doing with their customers is there's this ball that is being dropped across the board in the customer journey and that is implementation.

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And it's really sad because this is the moment where people are probably the most excited about your product. They just signed the contract. They got everybody on the invite.

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They're like, okay guys, we're doing it. And then it just is falling flat with so many teams. It's like you get on the call and they're like, okay so you guys bought this product.

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We're gonna go through our implementation checklist. We're gonna give everybody a training. And then your executive sponsor is like, yeah, I'm never going to any of these meetings ever again.

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And you just lose them right there. And then you come back in three months, six months and you're like, great, let's have a QBR and have a strategic conversation about your business and let's try to do some upsells. But it's like, you missed the window.

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You lost them right there. And so that's kind of like the biggest theme that I'm seeing right now. So it sounds like there's a couple of things here, right? So it sounds like there's a piece of it that is someone's just not doing their job as it relates to dropping the ball but there's also another piece of it that is a total lack of excitement, which to me screams like you've got some, you've got like a back office project manager running your implementations which is not always the best way to do it.

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But tell me which one of those is it? Or is it all of them? Like where do you see the failure most commonly occurring? Is it a crappy handoff between sales and CS? Is it that sales isn't setting the proper expectations or is it all those things and we can just complain generically? I think it could be a combination of those things, right? I will say that among the enterprise teams that I'm working with, I have to give a shout out to them because I'm currently seeing a lot more awareness than I was even like a year or two ago about what a best-in-class like late stage sales process slash handoff looks like. People are kind of on board. Okay, we need to be doing mutual action plans.

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We need to be getting some good information over in the CS team. We need to create an account plan with them. We need to do all of those things just so that everybody on the call doesn't get mad at me.

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I'm not gonna say those sales teams are doing everything perfectly because they are 100% not. But I think that there is at least some awareness that you should be transferring that information over. I think there is a misalignment about what the job of that stage in the customer journey really is.

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And if you ask different people in the organization, you're gonna get different answers. I think it might be like, using the wrong tool for the wrong job in the way that I see it. Yes, there is the component where this is the time when you have to actually get people to really use your products and implement it and you need to do a rollout.

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We need to do all of that. So there is a project management component for sure. But if you just go right into that and you don't keep the strategic plan going and also make it feel fun and keep it exciting.

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Oh my God, congratulations guys. Let us send you some fricking swag. Let's call it like, instead of calling it a training or like an implementation, which sounds really boring.

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What if we call this like your ignite period? This is when you're gonna jump off with your product. Like we're gonna work with you really closely and get you guys to launch. Yeah.

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Boys, what do you have to say? Can I jump in? Sales sucks, right? Should we just say it? Sales sucks. Can I twist that on its head? Yeah. I think it's that we, on the implementation side, need to embrace our selling bones, if that makes sense.

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We need to embrace our sales. So I think Monica, you bring up a great point about the ball being dropped in implementation and the lack of excitement. I went through an implementation recently and it was a snooze fest.

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I was losing my mind. I went off camera, I went and I made lunch and I came back, didn't miss a beat. And it was just like listening to like Bueller, Bueller.

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Like it was driving me absolutely crazy. So I think there's components to that, right? Your plan has to get your customer excited. Your product obviously has to get your customer excited.

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That's the most central piece of this. But you yourself also are responsible for getting your customer excited. And so one of the examples of this that came up recently, I have a kickoff script template that I use with almost all of my clients.

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And in the beginning of the kickoff script, Dillon, you're gonna have to bleep this. It says, fucking smile. Because there's so many times people get on a kickoff call and they're just like, hi, so we're gonna be getting started today.

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And it's so bad. But you know, I got advice from someone like, it's all theater, right? We're performing. And so I do a lot of like call control training myself and I've needed it from some sources myself too, people to remind me that I'm not being exciting enough, but love the topic.

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So like question for you, Rob, how do you do that with teams that feel like that's not their job? Like we're not sales people. Fire them. Wow.

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Cut them loose. So I think to answer your question, Monica, you have to approach that sort of with a lot of line of questioning. Socratically, right? Well, why do you think it's not your job? And I'll say, well, because my job is to get the customer alive.

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Okay, so if your job is to get the customer alive, it stands to reason that you wanna do everything in your power to get the customer alive, right? And I'm like, yeah. Okay, well, statistically or ideally, even anecdotally, we've found that like customers are more likely to show up to meetings, more likely to move quickly, more likely to renew, more likely to expand if they're given a positive experience. And part of that is by the face that they're speaking to, the voice that they're speaking to, the person they're speaking to.

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Can I have your commitment to trying to put some extra effort into the customer experience and making it a more positive one by bringing more excitement to the table? Here's some actual strategies you can use to make that a reality. JP, talk to us about how you bring the energy in your client calls. How do you embody this? So, I mean- Were you the opposite of the way you are here? Hey guys.

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I think that like, I'm a participant of the meeting too. That's the first like most obvious thing is that I'm a participant of the meeting. So if you go into a meeting and if you just wanna get the meeting over with, and if you're like just not present, then how can you hope to have anything go well or generate any excitement? So I think that, yeah, by nature I'm fairly extroverted.

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I tend to do my research on customers beforehand. And I think that research is not just about finding out some of the more tactical information, it's about finding ways to connect with the customer, finding ways to connect with them either personally, finding ways to connect with them about where they are in their journey, because that's sort of like more dynamic information so I can meet them where they're at. Because I think that there's two parts.

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Of course, I wanna be engaging, but there also has to be value there or else it's just theater, right? Like it can't be just theater. I think that is a good part of it, but there needs to be that value there as well. And so that's why I think doing the research helps to build the confidence to be able to get on and have that.

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Because if I haven't done my research, even me as confident as I am, I'm probably gonna be a little bit shaky. Monica, do you agree with all that? What do you wanna add as we wrap it up here? Yeah, I would say that I love that call out of generating genuine excitement from your team signs. They've done the research, they know who they're talking to and they know why the customers should be excited about it, for sure.

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And I think, yeah, it sounds like a lot of it that is just reframing really what sales is. I think that people forget that just because a company bought something and their boss told them that this is what they're doing now, it doesn't mean that they're on board. And so we need a little bit more of those like sales tactics into selling the use case to the people that are gonna need to actually take this forward.

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Right on. He's listening. I think that's a good point.

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Yeah, change management 101, honestly, with a little bit of sales, sprinkled on top. That's our time, Monica. Thank you so much.

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I think this is a great call out and one we would all do well to keep in the front of our minds. I love it. I love it.

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And you came prepared. So we've got to say goodbye for now, but we'd love to have you come back in the future, Monica. Yeah, this has been super fun.

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We'd love to come back anytime. 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 Lifetime Value Media. Until next time. Hey folks, it's Dillon here.

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