Speaking your leadership's language | Moussa Gherbi | TDSU Ep. 35

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What's up, Lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value. Thank you so much for being here. We're here to give you another fresh idea in the customer success and customer success adjacent spaces.

I got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? Bonjour, Lifers. I got JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi? Hello, cool world. And we've got Moussa here. Moussa, do you want to say hi? Hi, everyone.

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I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Moussa, thank you so much for being here.

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Do you want to introduce yourself briefly? Sure. Thanks, Dillon. So I'm Moussa Gherbi.

I am now running the customer success group at Planisware in North America based out of San Francisco. It's a software company providing enterprise solutions for projects and portfolio management. As a trainee, I was a graduate from engineering school back in France and immigrated to America in 2013, fell in love with San Francisco, and also fell in love with this company, Planisware, where I've been at for 11 years building this customer success program.

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11 years, that's unheard of. Okay, so Rob, now it makes sense why you broke out your French for that. It sounded bad.

It sounded like it wasn't even the right word. Did you add extra letters in there? Dude, I don't know. I'm just making it up as I go.

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I can do French. Okay, okay, buddy. Frank, it's easier for all of us.

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All of us, one language. You're used to having your bakery, Rob. Anyway, Moussa, you know why we're here.

We want to hear what is on your mind when it comes to customer success. For sure. Right now, that's probably a three to five year plan, which is very ambitious, is to really take my organization to a self-service mindset.

I mean that for customer success, and I would hope that this would then cross-pollinate into other functions and other areas. But the goal here is to say our customers want to be able to consult and access important information about their partnership with us at any time, and they don't want to have to go through someone to access this information. This is something that I hear all the time when I talk to customers.

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Same thing the other way around. Internally, my team needs to be able to access insights, the right level of information at the right time, whenever they need, without having to go through hoops, asking the SaaS team, a technical team, anything of that nature. And so this is what everyone is asking for.

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And this is where I need to take our customer success program and hopefully help shift the mindset of the company entirely to self-service. This really helps with a few things that we're going through right now. We're scaling.

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We just had our IPO two weeks ago on Euronext Paris. So congrats to our founders and top leadership team in France. Yeah, it's a great, great milestone.

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But that comes with more pressure. We have to deliver on guidance, obviously. And we're scaling.

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So we need to find systems to gain operational efficiency. So that's a topic not just for customer success, but across the board. And there's only eight hours in the day for everybody to meet and get information.

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So we really need to go there to do more with the same team and to truly scale. That's what's on my mind for the last six to eight months. And it's probably getting on my mind for quite some time.

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Now, you're saying all this, and to me, it sounds a lot like what we hear called just scaled customer success, where digital customer success is usually a better term because it's not, I think scale now has a stigma attached to it of like, it's only for your long tail customers. The small guys that can't have an assigned CSM or team, anything like that. But I think we're hearing it increasingly from the likes of Alex Turkovich and the folks that he talks to on a regular basis.

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It's more of a foundation. It's a piece that anybody can use. It should make everybody's life easier, both internally and externally.

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Is that the same way you're thinking about it? Or is there maybe a dimension to this that I'm missing? No, that's exactly that. As you said, it should be foundational. I think the organization that I'm at today, we've done quite well for ourselves, able to grow sustainably, get an IPO.

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It took us 28 years to get an IPO, but we did it in a way that makes sense for us. We have never done any layoffs, which I think is something to be proud of. In 28 years, no layoffs.

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We're still founder-led, even though we're public. Our founders still own 70% of the company and can take it in the direction that they want to. But at the same time, without these injections of cash that you can get throughout your journey, you may not make the same investments for your foundations.

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That goes back to your comment. We need to revisit some of our foundations to go to that skilled and digitalization of the customer experience. That's what I'm calling self-service mindset to be able to grow further, if that makes sense.

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Absolutely does. Gents, who wants to jump in? What's up, guys? It's Dillon here, and you know why I'm here. Hat in hand.

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Thanks so much, guys. I'll let you get back to the show. I'll just go quickly.

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I love what you said about your owners still having 70% of the company and never having to do layoffs. The company where I currently work, it's a B Corp, so it's a little bit different. I love that structure because of what it allows the business to do.

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We are, of course, trying to be profitable and everything as well. It's not like we're out looking for a charity or something. We still need to make money.

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But I think an important point is really what is the CEO's vision for a company and the founder and who has control of that? Because I think it really does shape a lot of the way that things actually get done versus sometimes people want to do things, but there are constraints because of shareholders. And I don't want to get in that direction too far. But that's what stuck out to me.

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I agree with that. I was going to give some additional information about what I went through in my journey as a leader now in this organization. I understand the vision from our founders, from our CEO, from our investors.

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So the way I have to frame any initiative where I want investment, where I want change, I have to speak financials. There's no other option. And so here, when I talk about the digitization of customer experience, the self-service mindset, I speak about operational efficiency.

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I speak about margin. I speak about a BIDA. I show it with simple surveys around my team and beyond my team to show what we could gain in operational efficiency.

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And all of a sudden, it's much easier to present the topic of digitalizing customer experience. I think you said the perfect thing that segues into my thoughts here. And by the way, credit for knowing your numbers.

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A lot of us in CS have a hard time even getting those numbers, let alone owning those numbers. But the way you took the words out of my mouth is that where I see these things fall short sometimes is that companies will say we want to improve our self-serve options and our self-serve strategies, but they don't align on why. And when you really unpack it, there's a huge difference between self-serve for the sake of efficiency and margins as one category, one bucket.

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Growth is another bucket. Adoption is another bucket. Client satisfaction and maybe client retention by extension is another bucket.

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And so what happens with a lot of these strategies, if folks don't align on what they're trying to ladder up to for the company's big picture and the financials too, when you get down to brass tacks, that's where a lot of times these strategies can be meandering and sometimes even wasteful and kind of hurt the initial vision. So I really appreciate that you specified how you're thinking about measuring the success of your own initiatives, Moussa. Yeah, for sure.

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It comes down to making a business case. For me, I started working after my degree. I worked at PwC as a business and technology consultant.

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So that gave me that sort of foundation and that approach to transformation initiatives. And then I was in professional services at Planetsware, my current company, for quite some time. So with all of that, today I'm really in a good position to explain why I want certain changes to happen.

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Maybe I can give an example that's a bit more tangible. What I'm envisioning today, and we're looking to build that internally, it's going to take some time, but we have to have a vision, right? Otherwise, we're not in that leadership position for a good reason. But the goal for me is to have, as a first step, a simple dashboard where customer success managers can connect and quickly see the health of their account.

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And I'm talking about support items, support tickets, renewals, usage, adoption, things of that nature. That needs to be able to roll up to me, but also roll up to top leadership, C-level, when they want to see overall health of portfolio and potentially do cohort analysis, looking at something they've rolled out this year, last year, previous years. What has helped with stickiness and user adoption, and what are the financial risks with where we stand with our portfolio of customers? So that dashboard is the first step in the journey.

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I want to build that first dashboard for the customer success managers, and then build upon that. Maybe I missed this, and we're going to wrap it up here, but is that dashboard meant to be inside of a CSP, or are you building that in just a BI platform? So today, I would say if it was outside of Plano Square, it definitely would be in a CSP with aggregation of multiple sources of data. Today at Plano Square, we're probably looking to build something internally.

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We do a lot of tooling ourselves internally. It could be a bit surprising, but that's also what has helped keep our margins very attractive to go to this IPO two weeks ago. In general, I would say building that either in your CRM or your CSP probably is the right place.

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Right on. Well, that's our time, Moussa. Thank you so much.

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This is good stuff. Always like to talk financials on a sleepy afternoon, but no, I think it's good. So thanks again, and until next time, Moussa.

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Thank you very much. Thanks, Moussa. Thank you all.

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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 LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at LifetimeValueMedia. Until next time.