Only fools rush through onboarding | Amber Monroe | TDSU Ep. 65

(0:00 - 0:22)

Wait a second, why am I not doing that same level of service for my own employees, who I actually care about my relationships with them a lot more than I care about my relationship. I don't want any of my customers to hear this, but I care more about my relationships with my CSN. All right, everybody ready? Let's go.

(0:23 - 0:55)

Cool. 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, except for major holidays, which we decided today. Anyway, I got my man Rob here.

Rob, do you want to say hi? What's going on lifers? We've got JP here. JP, do you want to say hi? What's up people? We've got Amber here. Amber, do you want to say hi? Hello.

(0:55 - 1:24)

Hello. I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Amber, thank you so much for being here. Do you want to introduce yourself? Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it. I am Amber. I am the VP of customer experience at Paradigm Senior Services, worked in customer success for the last eight years, overseeing every part of the customer success journey.

So glad to be here. Fantastic, this should be a pretty easy question for you.

(1:24 - 1:50)

We want to know what is on your mind when it comes to customer success, and you've got a breadth of experience to pull from. So tell us what it is, Amber. I do.

You know what's on my mind this week? It's actually onboarding customer success managers the wrong way. I didn't know there could be a wrong way. Oh no, I've seen the wrong way way too many times.

I want to talk about it. Go ahead. The floor is yours.

(1:51 - 2:18)

Awesome. I would love to talk about this just because I've worked in a lot of different organizations that are growing, looking to scale, and I've seen CSMs thrown into the fire. There's immediate pressure to perform.

There's no objectives or expectations, no goals at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. They're getting accounts within their first two weeks of starting on the job. I've actually seen this in the last four years.

(2:18 - 5:54)

You would think it doesn't happen, but I've seen it a lot. So I want to just talk a little bit about it because I think that a lot of organizations are throwing customer success managers in way too early to manage accounts, especially in smaller organizations, which is predominantly most of my experience has been in organizations, I would say under 75 to 100 million. So a lot of them are scaling and growing really quickly.

And there's a lot of pain for customer success managers. I'm feeling it and I'm seeing it, and I think we should talk about it. Well, let's talk about it.

So I think you put a cap on one side of my question, which was going to be, is this specific to a certain maturity of organization? Because as compared to you, under 75 or 100 million, I've typically worked for companies that are five to 30 million. I certainly don't think you're wrong. I mean, more structure from my perspective is typically better.

But in the experiences that I've had, they'll typically say, yeah, buddy, you can figure that out if you want to. But otherwise, there is no onboarding because we are moving as quickly as possible and we don't have the time to do that. So before I let the guys jump in here, I want to ask if there's any sort of clarification to a maturity level.

Is it like you're really only speaking to companies at a certain revenue? What does that look like for you? Yeah, I think it's early stage. I think it's early stages in their customer success maturity. I think it's building that core foundation.

I think you're growing super quickly. You're stretched in capacity. You're stretched on resources.

You maybe don't have the budget to be able to hire additional headcount. So I think it's something that is definitely earlier on in the maturity of an organization, for sure. JP, I heard you make some sounds there.

Do you want to go first? You want to jump in? I am. Some PTSD, maybe? No, no, no. I am.

I am a recently onboarded CFM, so it's very like timely. Yeah, very fresh. I like that because fresh, it sounds good.

It's like spring. What's up, guys? It's Dillon here. And you know why I'm here.

Hat in hand. I got a favor to ask of you. If you like what we're doing, give us a like on whatever platform that you find us on.

And if you want to know when we're dropping new stuff, give us a follow. Give us a subscribe. And maybe best of all, you want to give us some feedback, drop a comment and let us know what you like, what you don't like, or how we can get better.

We want to make sure we're giving the best content we can to you and others within the community. Thanks so much, guys. I'll you get back to the show.

One thing I want to do is we always talk about in customer success is trying to have empathy. So I'm going to try to have empathy and say that I don't think organizations come on. We're going to just throw these CFMs into the fire.

We just need to get out of there. I'm thinking somebody had to fight, get some budget clearance to hire someone. And this speaks to your point about the maturity of the CS organization, which is I think what's really important, right? The company is one thing, but how mature is the CS function there? I think that sort of can give you a rough outline of maybe how things will be.

And I think for me, I'll just say that I love my company. I thought they did a great job onboarding me. But even they were like, hey, we would love your feedback on what we could do better with our onboarding.

(5:55 - 7:08)

I think what I would say is while I don't have control over if I'm going to get the Ritz-Carlton of onboarding and the CSM, I guess what I do have control over is, here's the other thing, if you're a new CSM, I think that's when this is like crazy, right? You come into a new function, you're just starting a CSM. I think that's something. But me, since it's like my third rodeo, I can come in and say, hey, I can actually start providing value immediately because I can give you feedback and be like, hey, maybe this isn't as good in this process.

Or I found that this was really helpful. I try to think about what I can do as far as a solution. I try to be solution-minded.

And I think that there's an opportunity maybe for people who are a little more, who've at least done it a little bit, that when they go in and they get onboarded, they can actually start providing value immediately to their organization by just showing them how to be better onboarding. Maybe they can't show immediate value necessarily in particular clients or in the tech stack or on the product because that will come with time. But we can maybe provide some insight as far as making the onboarding better.

(7:08 - 9:07)

You know, JP, good for your organization for actually asking you about areas of opportunity for improvement during the onboarding experience, because I don't think all organizations do that, but it's a great thing to have your organization prioritize at least hearing that feedback. And then hopefully they take that feedback and make those adjustments too. I think new CSMs too should feel empowered to push back on certain things too.

If they don't feel ready, if they don't feel like they're prepped and ready, that sometimes you have to use the opportunity to manage up directly with your manager to really say, I'm really struggling to understand the product. There's a technical component that I'm still trying to connect the pieces, or I don't feel like I think I need more shadowing calls, or I need to listen to more calls, or I need to participate. I think that good back and forth communication with your manager is super, super important during your onboarding experience because your manager is probably running as fast as they can too, and you might have to slow them down and really set those expectations of what you need to.

Cooking with grace, cooking with grace. Rob, you want to jump in? Yeah, you guys would have hated prior versions of me. I know Rob, so.

I'll say this, look, I've onboarded in my career like hundreds of people, over a hundred for sure. That's not to credential myself. That's to say that I have made some mistakes along the way, but I started out being like such a startup person, such an early stage company person.

I've actually, interestingly, I have never been through an onboarding process. I have never been through an employee onboarding process because every company I've joined, the task that I had was to build my own onboarding process. And so, I sort of had this like spiritual old love for zero onboarding models, where it's pick yourself up by your bootstraps, figure it out, throw yourself into the fire, you're going to learn how to swim.

(9:07 - 9:42)

Then I realized, I was like, man, just because that works for me, doesn't mean it's for everybody, and it shouldn't be for everybody. So, I sort of realized this irony, and here I was, I was like taking so much pride in this perfect customer onboarding process that I built at companies I was at. And I was like, wait a second, why am I not doing that same level of service for my own employees, who I actually care about my relationships with them a lot more than I care about I don't want any of my customers to hear this, but I cared more about my relationships with my CSMs, and you guys have heard me say before, it's my job as a manager to be a CSM to my CSMs.

(9:43 - 9:49)

Eventually, I built two different types of programs. One is a more syllabus program, which like goes through a proper syllabus. It's like week one, we learn the industry.

(9:50 - 10:48)

Week two, we learn the product. Week three, we learn the job. I've also built other models, onboarding models, which I think are kind of cool, where I give new employees, I spell out their first week for them.

But after that, I give them a checklist of here are all the things you need to do to be onboarded. You can go at this at your own pace, in whatever order you find best fit. Essentially, what they could do, it's like getting a bowl of Legos, they could just kind of piece them together in any creative way they wanted.

That ended up being the model that got the highest feedback to your points before about like, getting feedback from people, because they still had enough creative liberty to structure things in the way they wanted. But they weren't completely without a paddle. You know? Yeah.

So I love that. I love that, Rob, too, because there's a lot of autonomy in how they choose to onboard themselves to and they can really take that pathway. I also think we do this so intentionally, we try to do it and execute really well for our customers.

(10:49 - 11:00)

Why the heck are we prioritizing with our employees, like we take good care of our employees, they're going to take good care of our customers. So we should create those great experiences for our employees, too. So I'm on the same page with you.

(11:01 - 13:02)

Have any of you guys used a learning management system or an enablement team to manage onboarding? Kind of curious. That's a good question. I have not.

We have a learning management system that we utilize for our customers. And we've talked about how do we do that better for internal training. It's a great concept.

It's a great idea. I haven't seen that in a couple organizations that I've worked in. It's been a lot of shadowing.

A lot of shadowing. Also, a lot of the organizations I've worked with have that startup vibe. So it's really like, it's very similar to your sentiments before pick up the bootstraps, figure it out.

And we got to build this together as a team. And so employees are hiring onboard recognize that's the stage you're at right now. And they can choose to join at that stage.

Some choose not to join because they're like, oh, hold on. This is not what I want to sign up for. So yeah, I've been in and I've made a lot of mistakes, you guys, as a manager myself, too.

So I've made a lot of mistakes and haven't done it right all the time. Everybody does, it sounds like. That's our time, Amber.

I want to thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. I think it's a topic that honestly, I don't think we talk about enough in terms of we dance around this a lot around, like we don't give enough resources to the CS group and blah, blah, blah. But why don't we talk about the actual tactics and how are we setting them up for success from the beginning? I love those moves, JP.

But anyways, as I was saying, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing this topic. We would love to have you back in the future.

But for now, we've got to say goodbye. Goodbye. Thank you.

It was a pleasure. 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.

(13:03 - 13:18)

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.