The dream team | Kathryn Vaughn

[Kathryn] (0:00 - 0:10)

That's what I want with the CS team. You might not look like a CSM, but you better be able to come off the bench. You better be able to get the ball down the court, get some rebounds and get some points on the board.

[Dillon] (0:18 - 0:35)

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've got my man, Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

What's up lifers. And we've got JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:36 - 0:37)

Good afternoon people.

[Dillon] (0:38 - 0:41)

And we have Kathryn with us. Kathryn, will you say hi, please?

[Kathryn] (0:42 - 0:43)

How you doing?

[Dillon] (0:44 - 0:57)

You out Italian Rob. Yes, I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Kathryn, can you please introduce yourself?

[Kathryn] (0:58 - 1:05)

Absolutely. My name is Kathryn Vaughn. I am the director of customer success at Vivi, which is an ed tech company.

[Dillon] (1:07 - 1:19)

Very cool. Very cool. Well, Kathryn, you know what we're doing here because you told us you listened to the show.

We ask every single guest one single question and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Kathryn] (1:20 - 1:29)

What's on my mind is the 1992 US men's Olympic basketball team, also known as the dream team.

[Dillon] (1:30 - 1:33)

I love, I thought you were going to leave it there.

[Kathryn] (1:33 - 4:28)

No, I have to tell the story and then ultimately I'll rope it into customer success. But prior to 1992 professional players were not allowed to be on us Olympic basketball teams. And after some tough losses in the Olympics in 1992, they allowed professionals to play.

The 1990s were perhaps the best time in history to be a basketball fan. Those were the days of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and my all-time favorite Sir Charles Barkley. I'm a Barkley through and through.

Yeah, absolutely. They were able to build this team from some of the most amazing players in the history of basketball. And they went on to win the gold medal and got the US back to where they should be in Olympic basketball history.

So that always has me thinking, how do you build a dream team in customer success? I was the first customer success manager here at Vivi. As a company, we've only been around for about eight years.

I just celebrated my sixth anniversary here and it's been an absolute blast. But as the only customer success manager, it's like clean slate. Where do we start?

What do you do? And as y'all know, you have to wear a lot of hats. You have to be able to do a little bit of everything.

And we've been able to grow the team. And now we have a global customer success team. It's been a lot of fun being part of a startup, an early stage company and building that team.

And I do believe that you can build a dream team as an early stage organization. I think we've done it here. I have an amazing team.

And so I think one thing that's really important when building your team is finding folks that are generalist to some extent, they need to be able to wear multiple hats. And as you grow, you can specialize. There you go.

Nice JP. Nice. I really appreciate that.

CSM should always have hats on hand. So I was talking to Rob recently. It was actually right after the U.S. Olympics, the men's team won gold this year. Rob and I were talking about specializing at perhaps adding an onboarding specialist to the team. And when you're still small, you start small. You don't go big.

And so Rob's like, Kathryn, what happens if they're out of the office? What happens if they go on vacation? I'm like, no problem.

Somebody can come off the bench and step right in. They can dribble that ball down the court. They can shoot, they can rebound.

I like to think of customer success as a basketball team. Nobody's on a basketball team that can't dribble, that can't rebound, that can't shoot, and so you build a team with folks who can do it all and step in when they need to, and then you can specialize as you grow.

[Dillon] (4:30 - 4:47)

Really quick question. Do you think that changes as the organization gets larger? Do you think that you need to niche down more or is your goal, your dream, pun intended, to always have generalists or multi-tool players?

[Kathryn] (4:48 - 5:21)

No, I think as you grow, you do have to specialize and that's where we are. We're at a point where we're growing. We're contemplating how to do this, but even when you specialize, if you're only so big, people should be able to take vacation.

People are sick and they should be out, but the show must go on, right? Customers are still there. I like the ability for somebody to come in off the bench and step in and still help the team win.

I do think that as you grow, you do have to specialize, but when you're an early stage organization, I think having generalists is really important.

[Dillon] (5:23 - 5:38)

All right. Despite my better judgment for the man who has zero hats on hand, I want to give Rob an opportunity to jump in here. I'm mad that I don't have any hats on hand.

I'm not in my house right now. Take that lampshade off the lamp behind you.

[JP] (5:38 - 5:41)

You only want to get the lampshade.

[Rob] (5:41 - 7:48)

My Jets hat. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know a whole lot of things about successful teams. Cause I am a New York sports fan. But classic, but, and I don't claim to necessarily know the answer to this topic about how you build a dream team.

I love this topic. I can only speak to my experience, which I remember my experience with this started with somebody taking a bet on me saying Rob could be a decent generalist. He's got a failed startup, so he can avoid some of the mistakes that he made in the past.

And the interesting thing is as we started to grow the team, one person at a time, we kept asking this question. Do we optimize for people with industry expertise? That's a topic that has come up before on this podcast.

Do we optimize for people who have experience at in customer success? And the interesting thing is we kept choosing neither option. We would go with people who had no industry expertise and no CS expertise.

And we're like, we will build your career in customer success. And so we would do things like hire former teachers, right? We made a joke once that we depleted the Austin school district of all of their teaching resources.

But the interesting thing is that we would find hungry, intelligent generalists in different lines of work. We would teach them the industry and teach them customer success. By the end of this, we had 70 people that we hired to our support team over the course of about four years, 40 of them got promoted to different roles.

Some to be within customer success, some products, some sales, another sales engineer to QA people, which was interesting or more technical folks, a bunch of subject matter experts. And the other 30 that didn't get promoted were on track to get promoted within six to 12 months, a lot of them. So it was super cool.

Honestly, it was an amazing thing to be part of. But again, it's my experience. I'm not sure it's generalizable to all companies need a lot of pieces in place to support that growth, of course.

Fellow hat wearer JP, what do you think?

[JP] (7:49 - 10:24)

Yeah, I love, I love that analogy of the dream team. I think what's cool about what you said also is, you know, they're all playing for the same goal and they're all playing like the same sport. And it's not like Bo Jackson's great.

I don't know if he played, he probably could play basketball, but I think what's also cool is that, yeah, we can make sure we say Jordan is the best, but like everyone has also their own way of doing things. So even if you're all going to be like generalists, as you say, you can still have your specialty. So I don't want that to get lost in the sauce.

I don't think it will. Some people, there's Patrick Ewing and yeah, there's Barkley. Like you said, there's all these other people on the team.

I think like one of the core things that I think makes this work is of course trust, right? Like you have to be able to trust everybody. Maybe you don't want Isaiah Thomas on your team because he was a bad boy.

Just couldn't stop with all the fouls and so forth. But I would say, I think that one of those key things that I'm really thinking about when I heard you say about the dribbling and the rebound, it's like the instincts, like they say, one of the things that made Michael Jordan really great was that he said he was playing the game at a different level in terms of like, he was figuring out like how to win the game. So it wasn't like, oh, I need to score 40 points or I need to get the most deals and it's like literally figuring out how to win the game.

And I think like those CS instincts are so important. I do think that a lot of it is teachable, you know, to Rob's point. But I also think that those teachers probably also had some of that DNA in them, if you will, to make great CS folks.

I'll just say, I feel like one of the things we're always doing in CS is coming in at a point where we're trying to get more context, right? We can be reactive and the customer presents us with something and we simply try to answer that, or we can try to understand the context with which they're talking so that we can turn the conversation more proactive because we are focused on bringing them success as opposed to answering their questions simply within the context of what they know, because we often know more. I'm thinking about that ability, so you can pass it to anybody on the team because they can understand that this is what we're trying to do.

Like you can come in, you don't have to just, yeah, I want to leave you great notes, but you need to be able to come in also and be like, Oh, I see something and add value in your own way.

[Dillon] (10:25 - 10:32)

This is our time, but Kathryn, I have a very important question to end this. Who's the greatest basketball player of all time?

[Kathryn] (10:33 - 10:38)

Oh, I'm going to go with Charles Barkley every time. What? Never even won a championship.

[JP] (10:41 - 10:42)

He's a churro for that.

[Kathryn] (10:44 - 10:49)

He was a small guy in the grand scheme of power forwards, small in height. He's a big dude.

[Dillon] (10:50 - 10:51)

I was going to say, what are you at? 280? 300?

[Kathryn] (10:52 - 11:11)

He was one of the best rebounders in basketball history. I've seen some interviews of some of his teammates and they're like, but he could still dribble the ball down the court and that's what I want with a CST. You might not look like a CSM, but you better be able to come off the bench. You better be able to get the ball down the court, get some rebounds and get some points on the board.

[Dillon] (11:12 - 11:15)

If you were here, I'd throw every one of these hats at you.

[JP] (11:16 - 11:17)

San Antonio, baby.

[Dillon] (11:18 - 11:32)

Kathryn, thank you so much. That is our time. Fantastic topic.

I love the way you think about this. Come back again. Give us a new sports analogy.

Can you go draw another one up and let's talk sports some more. We're all sports fanatics for now. We've got to say goodbye though.

[Kathryn] (11:33 - 11:33)

Thanks guys.

[Voiceover] (11:37 - 12:08)

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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