Sharing space | Somer Jefferiss

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:32)

And it felt very Ari Gold of you're not going to stop me. I'm just going to enter any conference room I want to and I am going to start confronting people. All right, everybody 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 Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:33 - 0:34)

What's up, people?

[Dillon] (0:35 - 0:38)

And we've got JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:38 - 0:40)

Hey, how's it going, y'all?

[Dillon] (0:40 - 0:43)

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

[Somer] (0:44 - 0:45)

Hi, everyone.

[Dillon] (0:45 - 0:51)

Hello, hello. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Somer, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Somer] (0:52 - 1:07)

Hey, thanks for having me. My name is Somer Jefferiss. I am a customer enthusiast.

I do a lot of different things in the SaaS world for a lot of years. And these very rules have led me to one important thing that we'll talk about today in my mind.

[Dillon] (1:09 - 1:25)

Oh, I love that you left a teaser. So you know what we do here, and you caught me while I was drinking my seltzer water. Somer, you know what we do here.

We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Finish your statement. I am intrigued.

[Somer] (1:26 - 1:48)

I am a big believer in face-to-face relationships and why they're so important and why I think that getting in front of a customer, getting in front of your colleagues, whether it's the product team, it's your VP, whoever it is, if you can make that face-to-face, if it's possible, you should do it because it drives a lot of value. That's what's on my mind.

[Dillon] (1:48 - 2:07)

Andy Jassy, is that you on the other side of this screen? RTO, five days a week. You're breaking my heart.

So tell me why. Like, why do you think that's so important? What is missing in the world today?

Let's say in this conversation where we're all remote from one another, what is the secret ingredient that we don't have right now?

[Somer] (2:08 - 2:55)

It's really quick on the RTO thing. I'm not saying that everybody should be in the office five days a week. I promise.

I've actually been a remote employee for 16, 17 years of my career. But I do see the value of getting together because I think that you can understand the person so much better. You break down those barriers.

You get to know them. You see their body language. You see them in their atmosphere.

If you can get on site with a customer, that's the best. You can find out answers to questions you didn't have to ask. You can see everything, energy, eye contact, just breaking down those barriers.

And I really think it takes away the nerves. My experience is pretty much every time I've ever met a customer or somebody I might not have been really jiving with, after that face-to-face, things are better.

[Dillon] (2:56 - 4:01)

So I have a very good friend of the show, Steno Smet, who had a very similar sort of argument. And the way he said it to me was, if I'm in your office, it's so easy for me to just walk down the halls and meet people. And it felt very Ari Gold of, you're not going to stop me.

I'm just going to enter any conference room I want to, and I am going to start confronting people. So I will give a counter from that perspective of, I'm not that sort of person. I want there to be a consensus on where our relationship is going.

And so I feel a little bit uncomfortable with that idea of, nothing's going to stop me. I'm going to get what I need when I'm there. While I do understand this idea of, there's so much more room for relationship building when there's not a, Hey, I'll give you some time back.

We can go our separate ways because we ended the meeting early. That doesn't happen in real life. You'll sit in the conference room and talk about your kids for another 15, 20 minutes, something like that.

And so from that perspective, I do understand it. Anyway, I want to give JP a chance to jump in here.

[JP] (4:03 - 6:21)

Really great topic, Somer. I really appreciate you bringing this up. I have worked fully remote now, all in customer success since the pandemic pretty much.

Although there is an office, I live close to the headquarters of my job. And I still haven't gone to the office. Now that's not to say that I'm averse.

It's not to say that I'm averse to going in the office. It's that I've been trying to plan it when other teams are coming in from out of town so that maybe I can meet more people when I come into the office. But this is something that I definitely thought about because I didn't think that I would actually enjoy the remote work because I saw so much value.

I'd only known about working in person, but I do think that what you're doing, this is a valuable call out. I think, of course, depending on the roles, like I have a customer that's in Japan. I would love to go to Japan, please.

Company, if you hear me, wait for me to fly to Japan for an onsite. I would love to be probably won't come back. But I would love to do something like that because that's the type of person I am.

And so to Dillon's point, I think, yeah, we can have people in customer success who do have this maybe a little bit more not personal. Dillon's personable as well. But just being able to enjoy that sort of not confrontation, but just coming in and meeting people.

And like you said, even with something like, and I hate to keep bringing up the talk that I had to start up Boston. But one of the things that I did talk about is if you're having this contentious exchange with a customer over email, which can sometimes start to resemble tennis because you're literally going back and forth in these emails. You're pretty much like always escalating.

My boss told me she was like, you should hop on a call with them. And I was thinking in my head, hop on a call. I don't want to hop on a call.

And she's like, that's exactly what you need to do. Because if you do that, people act different on the call than they do on the email because of that. So I definitely, I think there's a lot of credence to what you're saying about, especially if you want to repair a relationship, it's going to do it.

It's not confrontational Hulk Hogan getting in the ring confrontation. It's more like confronting with kindness.

[Dillon] (6:22 - 6:54)

JP, I hate that you went in this direction and here's why. I know you personally as someone who is introverted. And by that definition, what I mean is somebody who needs to recharge by being alone, being quiet, not liking to be distracted.

And I was hoping we were going to team up. JP and Dillon versus Rob and Somer, because I know Rob's going to say, I love people. All I want to do is talk to shake hands all day long.

[JP] (6:54 - 6:59)

Oh no. Oh Rob, go ahead. I want to go.

[Somer] (7:00 - 7:48)

Introvert versus extrovert. That's not, I get, I think an introverted CSM is great and totally be fine. Let me give you a quick one that I always jumps out at me.

I had a pretty good relationship with a customer. I went down and they were down there to Georgia, boat manufacturer already had a good relationship. So it's not just the fact that I was building the relationship, but I was able to see things and I actually was able to see things that they were not doing that I never would have seen regarding the software.

So it's not just about, yes, I'm talking about breaking down barriers and forming a human connection because I do think that's so important, but there's also value in really understanding what their problems are that they're not telling you about or what their situation is that you never would have seen. So that's just elaborating that it's not just about a personality thing.

[Dillon] (7:50 - 7:52)

I need to make this an adversarial conversation.

[Rob] (7:59 - 10:03)

I'll try it. I'll keep it quick. I'll keep it quick because I am notorious within this group of going way out of my way to meet people for coffee, to go to networking events, borderline burn myself out just to, yeah, I went to an onsite yesterday and with, to be fair, I have a loose agenda onsite with a client and I squeezed it in a networking event at like 3000 miles from my house.

And I'm like, Oh, why not? I just love this stuff. I love it.

I love it. It is what energizes me. The ironic thing though, is that I actually started my career in SAS door to door, which sounds very ironic.

As I started to build a team, it was funny. We went back and forth. We were like, we got to go fully digital.

And we were like, no, we have to like reintroduce in person, in person, work in person, client onsites. And it was ironic because when I started repreaching the gospel of like client onsites and face to face, I remember there was a catering company, easy cater that like was trying to sell to us. Like it was the first day that we ordered lunch from them in office.

My coworker is like, Rob, our rep is here. He came on site. He wants to talk to you.

And I was like, what the hell is he doing here? Tell him to go home. Like, why is he here?

I don't want to see this guy. I was so mean. So I was so busy.

I had such a tunnel vision for my work and I had like my headphones on and he shows up and I'm like, Hey, nice to meet you. Cool. See you.

Like I'm going to eat my lunch in peace now. And so it was so ironic that I could see even just within myself, the two sides of this debate. But no, I have.

Reluctantly come back to the conclusion at times exactly what you said Somer that in most of my onboarding playbooks and most of my cancellation handling playbooks, like for clients when they're trying to cancel, we have a concession built in or a strategy built in either proactive, proactive or reactive to do an onsite. And we're like, all right, this is a $5,000 value, but we're going to waive it just because we love you so much. Never really enforced that fee.

Now it's good to tag a dollar value on something. And so I've got two minds about this one, but yeah, I don't know. I'm such a grump in the office.

You would never necessarily expect it. I'm so mean.

[Dillon] (10:05 - 10:11)

Geez. All right. I'm glad we're working remotely then Somer.

Any last words before we get out of here?

[Somer] (10:12 - 10:26)

No, thank you guys for having me. I like that. This is a quote unquote, debatable topic for me.

It's not, but you guys don't want to be in front of people. You all like working from home. Hey, I'm working from home, but I just got back.

[Dillon] (10:27 - 10:50)

So understood. No, I like meeting people. I also like going back to a very quiet room or being able to work.

And like the office for me was always tough because specifically the office, like I think meeting customers is a different thing, but working in an office and the ability for anybody at any point to come up to me and say, Hey, I need your attention was always very hard for me.

[Somer] (10:50 - 10:52)

And I think that's what I agree with you there. That's not.

[Dillon] (10:52 - 10:54)

Yeah. So maybe it's me and Rob against JP.

[Rob] (10:55 - 11:01)

And no, I feel like I just, this is why I don't even use Calendly. I hate Calendly for this.

[Dillon] (11:01 - 11:07)

Somer. We love you. Calendly.

That is our time. Thank you. So yes, Calendly, please be a sponsor.

[Rob] (11:07 - 11:07)

Somer.

[Dillon] (11:07 - 11:14)

That is our time. Awesome topic. Thank you so much.

You were a lot of fun. We'd love to have you back in the future, but for now we've got to say goodbye.

[Somer] (11:15 - 11:16)

Good. Yeah. Thank you.

[Voiceover] (11:20 - 11:51)

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 lifetime value media dot com. Find us on YouTube at lifetime value and find us on the socials at lifetime value media. Until next time.