Specific and rigid | Stephen Wise

[Stephen] (0:00 - 0:20)

Well, it turns into your most expensive way to do customer success, because then you're really expanding out to, all right, let's go offer them free services. Then you probably are going to have to attach some engineering with it. And sellers are getting back involved.

All of a sudden you're dozens and dozens of hours into the customer for maybe a coin flip at that point.

[Dillon] (0:26 - 0:40)

Well, 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 with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

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

Buenos dias lifers.

[Dillon] (0:42 - 0:46)

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

[JP] (0:48 - 0:52)

Konichiwa MFers, Monday through Friday. Monday through Friday.

[Dillon] (0:52 - 1:09)

And we've got Stephen with us. Stephen, will you say hi, please? Hello.

Thank you. Thank you for not being insensitive, Stephen, unlike my co-hosts. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Stephen, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Stephen] (1:10 - 1:30)

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to meet y'all.

My name is Stephen Wise. I am currently the director of digital customer outcomes at GitHub. I've been both the CSM and CS leader for a little over a decade now.

And then I also have a consulting business on the side, Snowise Technologies, that I have with my co-founder, Jon Snow. And yes, that's his real name.

[Dillon] (1:32 - 1:48)

Spicy, spicy. So we're just going to skip right over that, because that's another conversation entirely. Stephen, 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? So why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Stephen] (1:49 - 3:00)

Yeah, I think what's been on my mind lately, and I think I've seen it a couple of times on this podcast as well, and some other CS leaders talking about is, what does onboarding actually mean for your product at your company? And what I mean by that is actually getting into the specific metrics and milestones of the actual onboarding and implementation. So diving deeper beyond the, oh, they've used 10% of the licenses, they're onboarded.

Specifically though, when did they see value? What were the specific features or aspects of the features where they started to see, okay, yeah, now I can start to see value with this. And so getting down and drilling to the specific metrics of those aspects, and then understanding what milestones have to happen in order for those to be successful.

You need to create this type of account. You need to do this type of training. You need to enable some type of feature aspect to do that.

So being able to track that, and then finally rounding that out with, how long is that going to take? What are the specific timelines that we need to be able to do? So I think all three of those things are what, I haven't really seen that programmatically done well throughout CS of getting into the hyper-specific granular elements of that, and then tracking from there.

[Dillon] (3:01 - 3:31)

Stephen, really quick before I let the guys loose here. Tell me a little bit about how you think about what success means in an onboarding. Is it defined by the customer?

And is it a case-by-case basis? Is it defined by your product team? And maybe they split it out by cohorts or personas.

When you say success, tell me who success is for in your definition.

[Stephen] (3:32 - 4:53)

Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is, both things can be true. And in this case, it is both things can be true. They have to feed off of each other.

So if my product team is saying, we go back and say, let's say you don't have this today in your company. And you say, okay, I'm going to go to my product team in engineering and say, what feature or aspect of the product would you say that the customers get to first value when we're initially onboarding? And they say, feature B would be our number one thing.

And you start rolling that out, customer after customer is like, actually, feature C is way more valuable for us. That's the give and take that you have to be able to have between your product. You got to go back and say, hey, our first 10 customers told us B is no dice for them, but they really like C.

So we need to go from that aspect. But I think the important part about that is, and what the key underlining aspect is, if you're defining those metrics, milestones and timelines, what you've done is you actually have now created your first success plan with the customer. You've created the roots of your first business review with them.

When you're actually finished with those, you've actually now completed your first renewal statement with them. Should those things continue to track with there? And then subscribers to the MedPig sales philosophy will see that's just a natural evolution of the sales process of being able to identify those specific things and then follow through of your post-sales motion, which should be part of your entire sales go-to-market strategy anyway.

[Dillon] (4:54 - 5:05)

Isn't it nice when the flywheel works as intended? Where all those pieces build upon one another, give energy to one another. Rob, why don't you jump in here?

Tell us your thoughts.

[Rob] (5:05 - 6:39)

Yeah, I love this because my career in customer success, the centerpiece has always been onboarding. From the time when I first had a job that was labeled customer success, the CEO, he was like, you should figure out onboarding. And I was like, what's onboarding?

And he was like, I don't know. You should figure it out. And I was like, okay.

This was like almost a decade ago at this point. But I think Dillon brings up a really good point that like the word onboarded, the past tense means like past participle. Anyway, whatever it is.

Dictionary Rob. Okay. It's going to mean different things to different people.

And I like what you brought up, Stephen. That's okay that there's a middle of this Venn diagram. As far as you mentioned, CS teams not operationalizing onboarding in a very scalable, repeatable way consistently that they can use across all different customer segments.

I've been working on that a lot. Actually, today I worked on a, I called it my onboarding readiness plan, which is basically an extension of this like customer success maturity assessment that I try to do with new clients. And I worked with this client for the last month.

And I was like, let's take a look back and say, do you actually check off all the boxes that are emblematic of a scalable, repeatable onboarding motion? Do you have the right customer facing collateral? Do you have the right rev ops?

Do you have the right trainings? Do you have all the right roles filled? The right role definitions, the right KPIs, the right dashboards.

And it was like super cool just to look back and say, wow, I actually think this is what's going to take this company to their series B series C. So yeah, I like the topic a lot.

[JP] (6:40 - 8:01)

Yeah. I think you, you hit the hell on the head. What?

The nail on the head. Sorry. What?

Yeah, that didn't sound right at all. Edit that out, baby. I think the scalable, the repeatable part is what's crucial here.

Like you don't want to have a few good onboardings, but like you don't quite know why they were good onboardings. I think that if you're going to get things at any point, it's going to be great to capture it doing onboarding because what I've seen is like the worst time is later on trying to go back and get that stuff. It just doesn't.

I don't know. I haven't seen it work. If people have done that, please let me know.

I would love to know how anyone goes back after an onboarding. They miss things that they captured and figure that out. Because I just think like in CS, we are trying to, it's this relationship, but we have to keep it on a track, like on a railroad track.

It can't go off the rails. That rail is the scalability. It needs to be there or else we don't know where we're able to steer things.

And so, and I feel like from the jump, I'm still relatively new to customer success. I have realized that you mess up in that onboarding, man. It is just difficult.

[Stephen] (8:01 - 8:23)

Well, it turns into your most expensive way to do customer success when you mess up the onboarding because then you're really expanding out to, all right, let's go offer them free services. Then you probably are going to have to attach some engineering with it and sellers and SEs are getting back involved. All of a sudden you're dozens and dozens of hours into the customer for maybe a coin flip at that point.

[Dillon] (8:24 - 9:42)

What I think is interesting is I think a lot of people, the conversation is like junior CSM to senior CSM. It's like this idea of, I don't know that much about the product. Maybe I'm new to CSMing.

And the next step, and I think it's where the evolution stops for a lot of people in their heads is like, okay, I've been doing CSMing for a while. When in fact, senior CSM to me is like a subject matter expert. They get how to do it and they oftentimes get the industry.

They've been in the industry for a while. I think there's a level beyond that, which is your ability to systematize that expertise. And that's what you're talking about, Stephen, I think in terms of like your ability to create these processes, to understand all of the different pieces that feed into it and then pivot at any moment, if you need to specific to if one of those variables changes.

And I don't think that's even something that a senior CSM can do a lot of times. I think that's the more strategic role of understanding how all of these streams of information fit together. And so it's an important call out and one that I think is super interesting.

Stephen, I want to give you an opportunity here to tell people where they can learn more about SnowEyes Technologies, because I believe it's my understanding that you're working on something that you want to start delivering to people one day. Is that right? Or are you already?

[Stephen] (9:43 - 11:45)

Yeah, so actually we're already delivering fractional customer success leadership to startups to adjust this very thing is there's a lot of out of the box operational things that you can save yourself time and effort and money in doing when you're just looking at where do we go for tangible advice? I remember when I was looking at some success plans forever ago with templates with another company, one of them, one of the first steps on the success plan tip, it was call your customer. I was like, wow, thank you so much for that deep, insightful instruction of what to do.

So I think there's sadly, there is a lot of that out there in the market where it's not it's not specific enough to where you're at as a company. And it doesn't address some of the generic things because oftentimes with CS is it can be a very generic tool. And if you don't have the expertise or familiarity with it, you can apply it in the wrong way where you need someone to come in and be like, actually, you're going to want to use this specific aspect of the multi tool for now.

And then when you get to the other stages, this is how you'd want to apply it. And so that's where the fractional CS leadership that we're providing some startups provides that is giving them some generic templates as being able to be like, hey, this is what we'd recommend you start doing based off of your needs and then identifying what type of customer success you actually need. That was one of the things of part of the root causes and looking at that onboarding aspect is if your customer is nearly 100 percent responsible for the onboarding aspect of your product, and you're really dependent on their technical abilities to use and deploy your product, you're going to have a different type of persona that you need in a post sales role to be able to fulfill that, because that is a heavy emphasis on really project managing those implementations to work out correctly. Whereas if it's that's not the case and you need more relationship based and things like that, that's a different type of CS and that you're going to need to be able to walk them through some of the kind of different things or if you're the one that has to train them on that.

So all these aspects are different. They're not all built the same.

[Dillon] (11:46 - 12:02)

That's got to be a sequel. Man, I can't believe you just dropped that at the very end. That's such a that's a really like salient point that I cannot spend any more time on because that is our time.

Really quickly, I want to call out the Rohan poster.

[JP] (12:02 - 12:03)

Yeah, I was going to.

[Dillon] (12:03 - 12:16)

I love and it's so cool looking and the vibe of your room is fantastic. But Stephen, thank you so much for being here. You absolutely have to come back and talk more about that second piece.

But for now, we've got to say goodbye. So thank you so much. Yes, thank you.

[Stephen] (12:16 - 12:17)

Happy to come back again.

[Voiceover] (12:22 - 12:52)

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 LifetimeValueMedia.com.

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