The many flavors of customer success | Stephen Wise2 | Ep. 148

[Stephen] (0:00 - 0:06)

We left off with talking about what kind of CS do you actually need? And we wanted to dive a little bit deeper into that today.

[Dillon] (0:06 - 0:08)

Here's my problem, Stephen.

[JP] (0:08 - 0:09)

Oh, yeah.

[Dillon] (0:10 - 0:22)

Is this is going to feed way too conveniently into Rob's bullshit five personas. I got to make, Stephen, I don't know if you've heard this. Well, maybe Rob, give him a primer.

[Stephen] (0:22 - 0:25)

Yeah, the Rob's deposit got sent over to me already.

[Rob] (0:25 - 0:29)

So it was an Olive Garden gift card.

[Stephen] (0:29 - 0:30)

Yes, it was.

[Rob] (0:31 - 0:32)

When you're here, your family.

[Stephen] (0:39 - 0:40)

No, ready to dive in.

[Dillon] (0:41 - 0:52)

Cool. 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, JP here.

JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:53 - 0:54)

What's going on, people?

[Dillon] (0:55 - 0:58)

And we've got Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:58 - 1:01)

They pull me back in.

What's up, people?

[Dillon] (1:05 - 1:14)

And we have our first two time guest here on The Daily Standup, Mr. Stephen Wise. Stephen, can you please say hi?

[Stephen] (1:15 - 1:16)

Hello. Thanks for having me back.

[Dillon] (1:17 - 1:31)

Thank you for coming back.

It means we're doing something right, I think. Anyway, I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Stephen, as if they haven't already heard your first episode, can you introduce yourself, please?

[Stephen] (1:32 - 1:47)

Yes. So I am Stephen Wise. I'm based out of the Seattle area.

I'm currently the digital customer outcomes leader for GitHub. I've been at GitHub for about four years and I enjoy helping companies and customers figure out how to just do customer success and post sales a little bit better.

[Dillon] (1:47 - 2:11)

Stephen, you do know exactly what we do here. We ask every single guest, even repeat guests, one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So we last left off.

I cannot remember what exactly you said at the end of that recording, but it gassed me up so hard. I said, you have to come back and talk about this more. So please tell us what that topic is.

[Stephen] (2:12 - 2:22)

Yeah, we left off with talking about what kind of CS do you actually need? That was where we left off. And we wanted to dive a little bit deeper into that today.

Here's my problem, Stephen.

[Voiceover] (2:22 - 2:23)

Oh, yeah.

[Dillon] (2:25 - 2:37)

Is this is going to feed way too conveniently into Rob's bullshit five personas. I got to make one. Stephen, I don't know if you've heard this.

Well, maybe Rob, give him a primer.

[Stephen] (2:37 - 2:46)

Yeah, the Rob's deposit got sent over to me already, so. It was an Olive Garden gift card.

[Dillon] (2:46 - 2:54)

Yes, it was. When you hear your family, future sponsor, Olive Garden. Hey, Olive Garden.

[JP] (2:55 - 2:59)

How loud is? I'll let you know.

[Dillon] (2:59 - 3:12)

OK, OK, Stephen, why don't you give us a bit more of this thesis of how do you think about this? And I know when you're talking with companies like what are maybe what are the questions you ask them to help them determine?

[Stephen] (3:12 - 5:02)

Yeah, so I start in two main camps and start drilling down from there. One thing is, do you already know of a post sales slash CS problem you're trying to solve? Is there you have a churn issue, adoption, engagement, something like that?

Or are you just preparing for the future in scale? So that's one camp that we look at. And then the second one is what product responsibilities do your customers have after the sale is complete?

And what I mean by that is how dependent are you on their technical abilities to install, use and deploy the product? Because that will significantly alter your CS persona. And are you fundamentally changing how they work?

Or is this just a replacement for something similar? So let's say you're switching like expense management tools, so not a huge change in how they're working. But if you're in the deeper tech space, you might be swapping out maybe how they ship software or how they're building applications.

Those might be very, very different. And so when you look at those two different camps, you can start to drill down into, OK, so let's say you have a churn and adoption issue mixed with it's really hard to get your product installed and deployed out. You actually have a product problem and you can you can rub some CS on that.

And they'll get you some good efforts out of that. It's going to be the most expensive CS that you've got. And it's going to have diminishing returns over the long term.

And that's where that whole conversation is meant to challenge the leaders at the company to say, how do we want to do this? Because at the end of the day, your product team's vision should very closely align with a lot of the success team's vision, which is we want our customers to use and deploy and get value out of the product as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And I think that's where a lot of conversations are not happening.

A problem in the industry today.

[Dillon] (5:04 - 5:49)

Hmm. So I want to say one thing before actually here. I recently who was I talking to?

Jay Sanchez reports into a chief product officer and he hated it at first and has come to love it because of the synergies that there are for everything you were just saying, Stephen. So I'm going to say that I'm going to put a period at the end of that sentence. And I am reluctantly, very reluctantly going to cede my time to Rob to talk probably about these five personas.

What five personas is this? No, I'm doing a job for you.

[Voiceover] (5:49 - 5:49)

I hate it.

[Dillon] (5:49 - 6:26)

Everyone's talking about these days. The it's like all over the news. I was watching some DJ Bobby Z set and they had some like little.

Yeah. Yeah. No, this is cool.

This is very intriguing. So I'm trying to just label the two camps in my head, Stephen. And I want you to correct me because I'm going to mislabel them.

But I was like my mind was trying to force the camps into terms that I'm familiar with. And I was loosely saying account management CS versus product intensive CS or maybe product health CS versus product implementation CS. So help me like draw.

[Stephen] (6:26 - 7:24)

It might be a difference of actually saying a relationship based CS versus a project management based CS. Because it's if it's not as deep as a tech and you just need to see a sense to help with enablement, webinars, educational stuff, slowly getting some people unstuck. That's a different persona than, hey, this is going to be a nine month rollout and we're going to have to like heavily track the milestones, the metrics, the time to value that.

That's a different skill set. And they both need to maintain those relationships. But you're two different personas.

I'm just curious, too, from your which do you bucket yourself under? So right now, what I'm doing with GitHub is we're giving a post sales customer success experience from a digital first approach. So how can we help a lot of the customers in the masses of getting value out of the product, guide them toward product adoption and things like that without with some of whom will never have a human engagement with GitHub?

So that's where how we approach things.

[Dillon] (7:25 - 7:52)

Hmm. Interesting. I don't have a new epic idea to drop, but it's a new this is a really cool framework and lens.

Slice it. Yeah. To view our different roles.

And I bet the people listening to this are probably thinking, wow, I'm totally this one or I'm totally the other one. And they're intrigued about the other side of the house. I want to ask JP which one he is.

[JP] (7:55 - 7:59)

This is being more aligned with product and more aligned with like sales.

[Dillon] (8:00 - 8:07)

Or I like the way Stephen said it of relationship based or project management based.

[JP] (8:09 - 10:08)

So I'm seeing a push more towards project management based, but I still the language is getting murky. And I think that's why I framed it as sales and product. I've heard us talk about taking more of the project manager approach in terms of being the one who's driving everything.

Someone who can. OK, whatever disparate communications are happening internally, whatever. Just taking responsibility for that instead of being like, I don't know.

Hands off. So that's a little bit different because that does involve a lot of the relationship. I would say what perked up my ears is hearing this again.

I think I'm seeing something else in CS that I have not really visualized. I think that I've seen CS and sales so closely tied. And then like marketing product is very like ancillary.

Yes, we can connect to them, but us and sales are like in a three legged sack race together or something. But now I'm like, wait a minute. How could you align product?

What would that look like if you actually had CS aligning with product? Because I begin to think about things like we have as a KPI, I think, or drawing up more of a KPI of how soon we can get someone to install their software and get value. These are like technical elements that if the customer does not do them, they cannot get the value.

And so I begin to say, oh, so then that is actually extremely valuable. So I think for me, this approach is now it's a little bit more novel, but I really like it. And now I almost want to talk more to Jay.

I think I missed the episode with Jay, actually.

[Dillon] (10:08 - 11:16)

But no, that wasn't in the episode. But, oh, you know what I think is interesting here is what I start to think is relationship versus project management. And I think in the project management bucket are those much more technical products.

Yeah. You were talking about Stephen. And that's because I think there's another piece to this that maybe we're saying, but not saying is.

The technical product, once it's installed, is actually really sticky because it's hard to get back out to. And so there's probably a little you still have to articulate value, but you probably aren't having to hold on as strongly to that ARR because it's stuck in there versus the example of an expense software. You can unplug one and plug the other one in.

And yeah, there's a little bit of implementation that needs to take place. And it's more commoditized. And so that's where the relationship becomes a lot more valuable because you need to be able to drive value through that relationship, constantly be communicating with them, because otherwise it's very easy for them to just unplug yours and put another one in.

[Stephen] (11:17 - 12:14)

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, and I was going to say to that point as well as if you find like once your customers fully adopt on the more technical side of the house, that things are pretty good, it converts to that relationship based. Maybe you have two different CS personas you need.

Maybe you need the relationship one to take care of that customer post adoption. You need this more CS engineering up front to get them over that hump. So instead of having that CSM trying to do both through that entire arc, that might be how you can differentiate that.

Or if you're a small startup, you can look at saying, hey, sales rep, run that relationship after our onboarding is complete because we only have enough dollars to spend here. So let's invest in on that to get them to the value point. So that helps identify when you're, again, going back to what post sales problem are you trying to solve?

And then what are the actual responsibilities that the customer has for your product once the sale is complete can help you start slotting those things into the right buckets as you go along.

[JP] (12:15 - 12:24)

I'm about to look smart at work. I'm about to look smart at work. I'm about to go rub some CS engineering on it, baby.

They're not going to know what hit them.

[Dillon] (12:24 - 13:30)

Until this episode comes out and they're like, hey, wait a minute. Delay, delay. Rob, it sounded like you were going to say something earlier.

I don't know if you got your point across, but do you want to close us out here? What I was going to say is, I wonder if this is one of the most fundamental identity crises we have as an industry and that maybe what you're doing, Stephen, as you're getting to the real soul of the industry and figuring out this dichotomy and maybe, Dillon, I know you have a lot of good forecasts for where you think our industry is going. Maybe this will be one of the main bifurcations that our industry has in the next several years.

I'm not sure. Bifurcations. You had to get a four syllable word in there, Stephen.

Awesome. As always. And as you have more prognostications, I think you've got to see, I can do syllables, too.

You ought to come back, Stephen. You're always welcome. Why don't you go for three before anybody else gets to two?

I think that's the challenge I'm going to give you.

[Stephen] (13:31 - 13:35)

I'll be happy to come back. We got to have you co-author the book.

[Dillon] (13:35 - 13:49)

We got to have one of the authors. It's going to become clear that this should just be a longer show. We should just be recording for 45 minutes instead of 15.

Anyway, Stephen, thank you so much. A pleasure, as always. Come back soon.

But for now, we've got to say goodbye.

[Stephen] (13:49 - 13:51)

All right. Thanks, y'all. Have a good one.

[Rob] (13:55 - 14:25)

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