Pull yourself together | Irwin Hipsman

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:16)

There's a bodybuilder who's like, everybody wants to be a bodybuilder. No one wants to lift no heavy ass weight. It's kind of like your data.

Everyone wants digital customer success, but no one wants to do the data work. So, you know, but it's a challenge that our industry has to suck up and get past.

[Dillon] (0:23 - 0:34)

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 Rob here. Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:34 - 0:35)

What's up people?

[Dillon] (0:36 - 0:40)

And we have Irwin with us. Irwin, can you please say hi?

[Irwin] (0:40 - 0:42)

Yeah, great to be here. Good to be here with both of you.

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:49)

Thank you so much for being here. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Irwin, can you please introduce yourself?

[Irwin] (0:50 - 1:06)

Yeah, Irwin Hipsman, Boston born. And I have started up four customer marketing practices over the years at various companies. When I left Forrester a few months ago, I decided to go out on my own and see what the other side looks like.

[Dillon] (1:07 - 1:27)

The other side looks like. Cool. Well, here we are, Irwin.

You know what we do here. We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind? We typically say in customer success, but if you want to expand that out, I'm happy to have you do that.

So Irwin, why don't you tell us what is on your mind?

[Irwin] (1:27 - 3:25)

Yeah, so the company I started up is called Repetitos, and it's all about the customer contact database. My data says that the typical customer contact database is okay at best. If you were to ask an executive, you know, what's the quality of our customer contact database?

They'd say it's fantastic. Why wouldn't it be? But if you were to ask the practitioners, what's the shape of it?

They'd go, well, it's okay, and nobody really owns it. Everyone owns it. So that's the core of the practice.

What's on my mind right now is the crazy data. So we all know that it's critical to know what the person's title is and where they live location-wise and what company they work for, because they may have left the company that you think that they're working at. But as I start working with clients, I'm running into the crazy data, which is, for example, you'll see in someone's database, it'll be Dr. Irwin will be first name and last name. Somebody needs to go and fix that. Or you'll see somebody's email address will be in their first name. Or you'll see reversed.

Their first and last name are reversed. Jones and Bob. Sometimes a little tricky knowing first and last names culturally, but there's some of them that are so obvious.

So what I'm begging people to do now is just look at your database for the simple stuff, the real basics to clean that up, just so that you can then start working on the next few levels of your database, ending up with how do you find, identify those customers who've left the organization? And how do you nurture them? Because today, everyone waits for that repeat sale, that person who left to call you up.

Yeah, that person left ideal customer profile. When they're ready, they'll give us a call and they'll buy again. Companies spend a lot of time nurturing prospects who will never buy from them.

Why are you waiting? Why are you not nurturing those former customers who will buy from you? But let's accelerate it.

[Dillon] (3:26 - 3:57)

Now, Irwin, I don't know you. We just met. But it sounds like a bit of a regression that we've got to go back and say, you just got to make sure that the first name is the first name and the last name is the last name.

Now, of course, I'm being reductive in terms of what you just said. But do you think we just banged our head against the wall for too long and trying to get folks to do the more advanced stuff? And we've got to go back to, we got to put the training wheels back on and make sure people understand what clean data is?

[Irwin] (3:58 - 4:45)

No, I would disagree with that. I think that it's generally a salesperson who's entering in the data for the first time. And you can train people all day long, but people are going to make data entry mistakes.

So I think it's the responsibility of somebody. And that's always the big question in organizations, who has the responsibility? But let's just say it's someone in customer marketing or customer success operations would be another great place.

So once in a while, just eyeball the database of your advocates. Maybe also move into your full customer contact database. Use Microsoft Copilot with Excel to use AI to do the basic cleanup for everybody.

Then you can start doing the next level of, do we have the right location? The right title, the right employer. But I wouldn't go backwards.

I'd go forwards.

[Rob] (4:47 - 6:26)

Rob, what do you have to say here? Yeah, I like how you brought it home, Irwin. And I think the interesting thing is, we talked about this yesterday.

Cleaning up a database is not something that people look at and say, oh, this is sexy work. But man, does it unlock some sexy work. The example that Irwin and I have talked about before is a great one.

Dillon, I feel like you could probably relate to this too, because Dillon and I both used to work in mortgage tech. And there's a lot of people who jump between companies in mortgage tech. And in the best case scenarios, those people will bring their tech along with them.

And that happens in other industries too, not just mortgage tech, but like tons of other industries as well, where people jump from company to company. Even just in like B2B SaaS, people jump from company to company. And they have this incredible power to bring a new referral to a tech provider.

And that's one of the cool advanced motions that gets unlocked with a clean database, where you're tracking who this user is, what they care about, when they move. And you're not making mistakes like sending an email to a contact that's no longer there. Or I'm sure you've all gotten a high first name in brackets email.

It's like the worst. Here's another example too, that came up yesterday with a client of mine. We wanted to get a hold of the economic buyer.

And I asked the CSM and he's like, oh, I don't know who that is. And I don't know what his phone number is. And I was like, how are we this far down the customer life cycle?

And we don't have the economic buyer. And we're just talking phone number here. We're not even talking about their advanced information about who they are, their history, and what they care about.

So I think what this unlocks is really limitless.

[Dillon] (6:27 - 6:30)

Irwin, do you have a response to that while I try to formulate?

[Irwin] (6:30 - 8:06)

Well, there's the two layers. In the customer marketing world, the company will have 100 advocates, 1,000 advocates, whatever. But the real gold is in the complete customer contact database.

So if you've got 1,000 customers, and let's say there's 10 contacts per customer, all of a sudden you've got 10,000 contacts. That is impossible to keep clean on a manual basis. And you need to start using some technology.

Somebody could go into LinkedIn and look at all 10,000 people, but that would be a horrible job, very expensive. I've done the math. It's probably about $4 a person to go into LinkedIn, find the right person, because that can be a little tricky.

Then do the data entry and enter it properly into a spreadsheet for a bulk upload. With a few technology companies that will, like Repetitos, I work with companies that will scrape LinkedIn and look at other databases. Then at probably about $0.40 a name in a matter of a week, you can update your entire customer contact database. And with a little analysis and segmentation, you begin to find out what are the gaps? What are the holes? Is it that we're not keeping track of who's leaving or we're not keeping track of location?

Also by level within the organization, I would argue that your C-level, your economic buyer, your admins, that data should be like 99% correct, your key people to count. Then you start moving down to the occasional user. That's probably okay that their data is about 90% correct.

Then you have the person who's not a user at all. They're in the database, but they don't use your product. And I wouldn't even worry about that.

So there's a bit of segmentation that needs to go on as well, that not all contacts are equal.

[Dillon] (8:08 - 8:59)

It seems, I guess I made the flip statement earlier, because it just seems so obvious to me that your data has got to be correct in order. We talk so much about AI, but even maybe not even AI, just automation. Your ability to be more efficient in your operations is so dependent upon this data set being robust and being as accurate as possible.

So it just seems, it feels like, duh, to me. And I don't mean that in any sort of negative way towards you, Irwin. But I guess we deal so often, back to what Rob was saying, with CSMs who are running and gunning.

They're moving so fast. How do you, or how have you found success in getting them to stop and worry about something like this? Is it a process thing?

Is it just a reminder that you're hitting them with every single day? What does it look like?

[Irwin] (9:00 - 10:00)

Yeah, I think you've hit the reality point, exactly the problem, which is people are super busy. This is seen as low value drudge work. Maybe they'll keep that person up to date, their primary contact up to date in the database.

That person leaves, they update it. But once you get down to that second and third tier people, they're not going into LinkedIn. One thing I've suggested to CSMs from a customer marketing role is, once a year, show your list of contacts to your primary person at the company and have them just reality check it.

No, these three people are gone. These two people have new titles. Oh, you're missing this person.

Even that would be a huge step. That's probably once a year that you could get the customer to sit down with the database of the list of contacts at their company and go through it with you. And if they have hundreds of people and they don't know them, that gets really hard at a large organization.

I think that's as far as you can get the CSMs to take responsibility is, once or twice a year, go over the database with the customer. And even that, you'll get pushback on.

[Dillon] (10:01 - 10:32)

There's so many CSPs now that allow you to expose a page or a portal to your customers too. I wonder if there's an artful way to just expose your list of contacts at the customer company and prompt your champion or your power user, your main point of contact to look at that every once in a while. And artful being the key word there, right?

Because you don't want it to make it feel like work for them. You don't want any information in there to be private, like the sort of stuff that they wouldn't want to see, like any notes or anything like that.

[Irwin] (10:33 - 10:45)

I just want to add one thing that where that falls apart is with digital customer success. So yes, if you have a CSM, that's one thing. If you have a digital customer success manager, which is no CSM, it gets really challenging.

[Dillon] (10:45 - 11:03)

I bet you could ping somebody every once in a while and just ask the question like, hey, does so-and-so still work there? And you could probably personalize it in such a way that if you're just asking one person one time, it's probably pretty easy for them to say yes or no. Am I thinking about it the right way?

[Rob] (11:03 - 12:09)

Well, short answer is I suppose yes. But I think the long answer is there's a lot that can, even that can be a delicate question. Because like a client could be like, why don't you know this stuff about me?

Or they might be like, why are you asking? So that one-on-one interaction, I think the really interesting problem that the industry has to solve is how do we do this more at the one-to-many scale? And I think that's why the term digital customer success barely showed up in my network until two years ago.

And maybe that's just me. I don't know. We used to call it things like TechTouch and whatever.

But I think that there's, now I think about there's a bodybuilder who's everybody wants to be a bodybuilder. No one wants to lift no heavy ass weight. And I'm like, that's like your data.

Everyone wants digital customer success, but no one wants to do the data work. So it's a paradox or industry, maybe not quite a paradox, but it's a challenge that our industry has to suck up and get past and take on some investments to improve the quality of their database, define ownership of their database too. That's one thing I've learned from you, Irwin, is there has to be clear ownership on it.

[Dillon] (12:10 - 12:29)

But that is our time, Irwin. I love this topic actually. And I love the piece of advice at the end of something as simple as annually reaching back out to your customers and trying to verify or cross-reference that database.

Would love to have you back on. We could do a bit more of a deep dive, but for now, we've got to say goodbye, Irwin.

[Irwin] (12:29 - 12:30)

Thank you, man.

[Voiceover] (12:43 - 13:05)

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 Find us on YouTube at LifetimeValue and find us on the socials at LifetimeValueMedia. Until next time.