The Revenue Revolt | TDSU Ep. 57

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I found a great amount of freedom and liberation in saying, yes, I own revenue. Hell yes, I own revenue. I'm so glad that I own revenue.

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Oh my gosh. All right. Recording is actually happening right now.

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Yeah. What's up, lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where I'm saying this for the second time, and we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man Rob here.

He might be a little bit peeved with me. Rob, do you want to say hi? But not with the audience. What's up, people? And I am your host, Dillon Young.

It is just the two of us, and we just spent the past six minutes screaming into the void. Yeah. Rob, let's start over.

I want to talk about this topic. I brought it to you. We talked about it for a little bit, but maybe we'll sound even better the second time around.

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It feels like in the past two weeks, and in multiple different venues, it's not just professional networks like LinkedIn. I'm also seeing it on Reddit and elsewhere, where folks are saying it almost feels like they're thrashing against this onslaught or this chorus of voices saying that customer success needs to own a number. These folks are saying, that's not why most of us got into this profession.

If we wanted to be salespeople, then we would go be salespeople, and we would have very strict commission structures, so on and so forth. Am I crazy? Are you seeing the same thing? I am seeing the same thing. But I think the thing that really upsets me about this conversation is, to your point, a lot of people are just desperately avoiding revenue responsibility.

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And I think that's a really dangerous path to go down. And you see it when people are like, oh, churn is not a customer success problem. And I'm like, then whose problem is it? You're just going to go blame your CEO? It's the equivalent of imagining a salesperson not hitting their quota.

They're like, this product, man, just like, this product just doesn't sell. That's okay. Maybe the product's part of it.

But at the end of the day, selling the product does fall on you. So we kind of have to have this reckoning with our identity that yes, we touch revenue, we own revenue. I don't know how you feel about that.

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I thought the same thing. It's kind of this race to the bottom of, if nobody wants to take accountability, then we all just, like you said, we all just start pointing to the CEO and we say, well, it's your company. Why can't you do it? Why don't you sell every deal? Why don't you retain every customer? And obviously that's being hyperbolic, but it feels as though folks are trying to, it feels like a last ditch effort to say this isn't what customer success used to be in the same way.

Don't start with the make customer success great again. That is what it feels like though. It is what it feels like.

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Yeah. Because if you ask people who are like, oh yeah, you know, customer success ain't what it used to be. And I was like, tell me a time when it was great.

Cause it's always been hard as far as I see it now. Sure. There were times where the standards were a bit more lax on the revenue front, but I actually had more difficulty at that time in my career because I had this bloated amorphous idea of what success looked like in my role.

And I didn't have any God metric to just point up to and just say, okay, NRR, that's it. That's my focus. That's it.

And so I found a great amount of like freedom and liberation in saying, yes, I own revenue. Hell yes, I own revenue. I'm so glad that I own revenue.

This is my connection to the lifeblood of the company. I can see my fingerprints on dollars that come in. Why would you not want that responsibility? I mean, maybe that's not for everybody.

That's why. Because then you don't have anything to hide behind. Well, they're really happy.

The MPS went up. What if your retention numbers keep going down? Then did that really matter? If a customer is worth 90% a year later versus what they were worth at the beginning of that year, then does it matter if they're happy? Because they got one over on you and your business is failing. It reminds me of some friends I have in sales, right? They're like, we're not closing deals, but we are generating pipeline.

And there is something to that, right? I mean, ideally, obviously, within a matter of a couple deal cycles at most, that pipeline should manifest in new revenue. It should. Otherwise, tough conversations are to be had.

So I think we can still do that. I wouldn't even call it sugar coating. I think it's just adding color and adding context to the story around revenue.

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But at the end of the day, if that's all we're hanging our hats on, the warm and fuzzies, I don't know. That just doesn't sit well with me in terms of my responsibilities within the organization. What's up, guys? It's Dillon here.

And you know why I'm here. Hat in hand. I got a favor to ask of you.

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I'll let you get back to the show. Do you agree that folks are pushing back so aggressively because they are afraid of the implications that they can no longer hide behind? Oh, I just keep my customers happy. Yeah, I think there's different camps, right? I think there are people who are afraid.

And that's totally fair, because most of them look at their history of working at a company. And they're like, when have I ever been trained for this? I haven't been trained for this. Right? That's common.

And I wouldn't blame somebody if they're afraid to suddenly take on their first selling responsibility. And there's another camp of people that are just plain overwhelmed. And this is my story for myself.

There are plenty of times where I didn't hit goal, you know, the notion of me starting my day with doing outbound outreach to customers, especially for expansion or anything like that. Or just having conversations around renewals. It just feels impossible.

Because I can see from 9am, like when I start my day, I can see myself working at 8pm already. So there's just no way I'm gonna get through this. So I might as well just plug the leaky bucket and hope and pray that I'm not on the hook for some of these revenue numbers that I'm not getting to.

Right? Is that a matter of prioritization? Do you think looking back, you could have done better at prioritizing the tasks that were going to satisfy upper management C-suite, like outbound retention activities, and less about maybe the long term stuff like advocacy? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, is it a matter of prioritization? Yes.

And I can't tell you how many times I've used what do you call your UV matrix? The equivalent? Apparently is. Yeah, it's a much more famous name. Hey, it's great.

Put your own spin on it. But I can't tell you how many times I've drawn one of those up. And you know, the thing with it always is, it's almost always the case that churn will be equally important, and more urgent.

And that's why it always takes precedence. And so you mean, then selling? Yeah, yes, exactly. Then expansion selling, in this case, is what I'm referring to.

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Yep. But I think the strategy that's worked for me is to do some like, team wide time blocking. I think that's a really effective strategy to say, all right, everyone's gonna buckle down for this block of one hour, two hours, and we're going to do all of our outbound.

And usually, because we're working with a small book of business each smaller than what sales is often working with, you can actually knock out way more than you think, with a concentrated period of time, like where you're on do not disturb. And you're just disturbing others. Can I, I want to clarify something, because the way I've always run it, is I want the expansion motions to be weaved in tightly with the overall interactions with the customer.

And it should not be siloed to this block of time. It should instead be, you should be trained to number one, asking the right questions of your meeting with them regularly, asking the right questions of them, networking within your customer organizations, working on that multi-threading process. And then obviously continuing to meet with those folks, asking good questions of them.

And the point being, you're trying to discover these white space opportunities that you can serve. So that you're not, in your example, going on do not disturb for two hours and just calling people. Hey, I got this product.

Do you need this thing? Do you need this thing? That, I could see how that could be way less efficient. And I understand that may have been the way it was before, particularly when you're dealing with CSMs who didn't have this muscle strengthened. I imagine your answer to this will be yes, but do you agree that's a better process than locking down two hours and just calling people and saying, hey, do you want this thing? Hey, do you want this thing? I think it's an ideal process, but I mean, you may not have been in as many situations as I have where you're like under the gun to hit a number and you've just got, you're like, my only way of going about this is I've got to start outbounding.

So, I mean, to me, it's like if you go hunting and you point your gun in one direction and you just wait for something to go past your scope. Sure. That's one way to hunt, but if instead you're like looking around and trying to find your targets, that's probably a much more strategy, right? So, if I expand upon your analogy, I would actually say that the difference between the way we hunt is it sounds like you are just spinning in a circle and shooting your gun and hoping that it hits something.

And mine is more about setting bait, tracking what I'm looking for, understanding the movements of whatever animal I'm trying to find and thinking much more strategically about how I can find them. That's what I would. So, here I'm going to challenge this again, challenge you back here.

And I can't extend the analogy any further because I've lost my mind. Basically, if you go to your customers with diagnostic questions that are hyper-focused on a certain problem that you might be able to solve with some product they haven't yet adopted, that's actually net more effective at times than going into a QBR where you're talking about all this other stuff, right? You're talking about their usage data and you're talking about their advocacy opportunities. And you've got this customer advisory board and next thing you know, the customer is way too distracted to think very specifically about this one core problem that you're trying to solve for them.

So, I've found more effectiveness by having a very focused outbound approach with that methodology. Yeah, I think I would agree with everything you just said. I think there is a way to do what I described while not being what you described as under the gun.

There's a way to weave it all together. And as soon as a new product gets launched, you learn everything you can about that product. What is the USP? And you start to build that into the same conversational framework you already are running with your customers.

And this is now a new piece added to it. And of course, that framework will at some point get too large for you to manage in a single conversation, in a single QBR. And then so then you've got to prioritize.

And that's where I think coaching your team comes into play. But at the end of the day, I still think that obviously, and we can agree to disagree, I believe that the much more measured approach is more effective than the outbound. Show me a C-level team that has that kind of patience and I'll agree with you a bit more.

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The ones that have fired me because I argued in that favor and they were like, the problem I have with it, and we've talked about this, is it's so quickly, this is where I agree with these people that are out here plugging their ears and stamping their feet and saying, I don't want to do sales. I don't want to do sales blitzes because I don't believe they work in a CS function. And what you're describing to me sounds so dangerously close to a sales blitz.

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And I think it's inefficient. I think it's demoralizing. And I think you end up in the same place, which is you're still not going to hit your goals because they're giving you 90 days to do it instead of the, what should be 365 or more, because you've got to think of budgetary cycles.

You've got to think of warming them up to the idea that you're even capable of doing that. There's a lot of things. You might hit one every once in a while, but it is not going to be systematic in the way that I described.

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But it is systematic. It's systematic in a way, just a different fashion. And in fact, I have found that it's so liberating to have that heads down time to focus on that one activity where you're like, this is just my time to sell, period.

I embrace my selling identity, right? My Sasha Fierce comes out and I'm just powering through, right? Rob, that is our time. I appreciate the debate. I think there's value to both sides.

I hope you do too. Until next time, let's say goodbye. Take it easy, lifers.

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And find us on the socials at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Until next time.