What's in a name? | Cinthia Silva | Ep. 98

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:12)

When you were on the pre-sale side and you were really invested in making sure that the ICP was rock solid, why did you care? Was there a piece of your incentive plan that was tied to that?

[Cinthia] (0:13 - 0:23)

Yeah, that's such a good question. No, there really wasn't. Let's do it.

[Dillon] (0:24 - 0:37)

All right. 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] (0:38 - 0:38)

Giddy up.

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

And I got my man Rob here.

Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:44 - 0:47)

They're welcoming lifers. I guess that's welcoming.

[Dillon] (0:47 - 0:52)

Oh my goodness. He's reading off of Google. He's learning touch, man.

[Cinthia] (0:52 - 0:52)

I like it.

[Dillon] (0:52 - 0:53)

I'm trying.

[Cinthia] (0:54 - 0:54)

I'm trying.

[Dillon] (0:54 - 1:00)

Good start. I thought that was him being spacey. And we have Cinthia here.

Cinthia, will you say hi, please?

[Cinthia] (1:01 - 1:02)

Hey, everybody. Greetings from New York City.

[Dillon] (1:03 - 1:09)

New York City. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Cinthia, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Cinthia] (1:10 - 1:37)

Yeah, of course. Cinthia Silva, a little about me. I've spent my career in client facing roles in finance, the event space and tech.

In my pivot to tech, I've worked at companies like IHS Market, Refinitiv, and I made my official pivot to customer success in my most recent role for Nasdaq Trade Surveillance. I'm a big believer in communities, which is why I'm active in such as Exchange, CS Middle East, and Latinos at Success.

[Dillon] (1:38 - 2:01)

Oh, my gosh. All the big ones. All three of which the founders are friends of the show.

So, Jan. I'm not surprised. And Priscilla.

So, I'm glad to add you to the mix. So, Cinthia, fantastic to have you here. You know what we do here?

We ask every single guest one question and one question only, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So, can you tell us what that is?

[Cinthia] (2:02 - 2:41)

Yeah. Something I'm thinking about a lot lately, and I don't think I'm alone. I think there's a topic that's been being debated a lot right now.

But I'm convinced that customer success managers and account management are going to eventually morph and become one going down the line. And I think it's happening now. And essentially, the reason I feel this way is because there's an overlap in both roles.

We know that there's this taking care of the customers and there may or may not be commercials involved. But I think it's a huge disconnect in terms of how the customer experiences once they sign on the dotted line on the contract and how those handoffs happen and then what their experience is like post sale. I think it's going to be a way to easily streamline that experience for them.

[Dillon] (2:42 - 3:01)

I always struggle with this because I have always sort of used them interchangeably, account management and customer success. So for anybody else who has the same feeble mind as I do, how do you define the difference between them historically, traditionally, and how do you think that's going to change?

[Cinthia] (3:02 - 4:12)

I think that customer success has been around for a long time, but I think it's been called different things over the past years. So historically, I think customer success would be about implementation and adoption. And again, that depends on how complex the solution is.

If you're selling widgets, implementation is going to be non-existent. People will self-serve, but it's about adoption and any iteration on that. I think account management has always historically been tied to commercials.

So it's been about making sure that those renewals happen and identifying upsells, cross-sells, and then probably executing them yourself. I've held both roles, so that's why I feel strongly about it. And my feeling is any good salesperson that I know, the way that I like to operate when I was on the pre-sale side, was it's so difficult to get a new customer in.

You better make sure that you really find the right ICP and make sure that they succeed. And that means that they don't fail to launch. So to me, you have to have that kind of long-term vision in terms of how you deal with your customers.

And ultimately, I think that's why there's overlap. Both are trying to look after the customer, but it's been split up. And I think oftentimes it's very different from one company to the next, what a CSM is.

And there's confusion within the own company about who does what, really, in a lot of instances.

[Dillon] (4:13 - 4:34)

I have one last question before I let either Rob or JP jump in. So whoever, get ready. But when you were on the pre-sale side and you were really invested in making sure that the ICP was rock solid, I don't mean to be flip, but my question truly is, why did you care?

Was there a piece of your incentive plan that was tied to that?

[Cinthia] (4:35 - 5:40)

Yeah, that's such a good question. No, there really wasn't. But I've always taken a long-term view because I actually really do enjoy working with customers.

And while some of them can eventually be your friends, it's a business relationship, right? So what I'm trying to understand and why I was always trying to really hone in on the ICP was because I wanted to figure out if I got the right customer, then as our company grew, if there were other solutions within that space, it will be much easier for me to identify ways to basically upsell, cross-sell them and in a much more strategic, consultative way. Everybody loves to throw those words around strategic consultative.

There's no like magic or mystery around it. It's about really understanding what your customers want, having the hard conversations with them, making sure you're aligned throughout the process. That's like ongoing discovery that I think sometimes in the post-sale that you don't get that benefit of that you do when you're doing your own cold calling and when you're working with clients and really trying to convince them to sign.

When you really understand what it is, how they see success and how they win and help them get there. That's how you can be much more strategic. And I think the best post-sale players know that and are able to leverage that.

[JP] (5:41 - 5:42)

Strategic consultant, you go first.

[Rob] (5:45 - 6:52)

Yeah. Yeah. I, I, uh, I've seen many uses of that word strategic and sometimes to refer to the commercial ownership, similar to you, Cinthia, like I've actually always been a part of customer success organizations that we try to build actually as account management functions.

It's just always been like on first print from like a first principles perspective, the goal of customer success is to retain and expand revenue. And to do that without owning the commercials to me just doesn't really make sense. And it never has now for me as a consultant working with a lot of, uh, different companies that have grown their CSRs differently, particularly in the last couple of years, uh, without CS owning the commercials.

What I'm finding is that there's a whole lot of folks in the customer success worlds. I want your thoughts on this. There's a whole lot of folks in the customer success world who lack the interest, lack the skills or lack the time to hone their commercial skillset.

And those are all really different barriers, but our industry is full of people who just don't want to have that responsibility. And many have even said, I got into this field because I didn't think I'd have to own any commercials.

[Dillon] (6:52 - 7:00)

I don't feel good. I didn't want to, I didn't want it to just hang out and well, I don't know if anyone's doing that.

[Cinthia] (7:00 - 7:01)

Yeah.

[Rob] (7:02 - 7:09)

A lot of people are like, maybe they actually want to be a product, but they felt like CS was their safety school.

[Dillon] (7:10 - 7:28)

I think they wanted to be in tech. I think so many of them came from outside of tech and thought this was the easiest way to break in because there's no real like skillset barrier. It's just, can you talk?

Can you take notes? Can you sort of like light project management? JP, jump in.

[JP] (7:29 - 9:39)

Yeah. I'm glad I was just, that's perfect. Yeah.

Income JP, because that's exactly when I was like trying to get into customer success. Like I was looking, I knew I had this passion for tech and I had this customer facing background, a lot of skills there. And so I found customer success by accident.

I said, Oh, I can work in tech and I can work in this function. And I saw that there was some definition to customers later on. I would really learn what was going on, but I would see, okay, I've, I saw it as a passport function.

I still see customer success as a passport function, where if I really love it, I can stay here. If not, I get to work with so many different teams, really get to see how things are done. And so for me, I think that I haven't had huge barriers around what I've been asked to do at this point in my career.

I think as long as they're not asking me to sweep the floor or something, right? Then I'm like, okay, what is it that I'm doing? So whenever they're talking about expansions or upsells or whatever, even if I'm not in sales, a lot of times I'm thinking like, all right, great.

How can I go and learn this skillset and apply it? And if I fail, if it doesn't really work out for me, then I can know why, and I can continue to refine myself and really figure out where I best function. And so I think that line between like account managers, customer success, I'm just like, Hey, you hired me.

Is the pay still good? Am I still able to do the job? Okay, great.

Now I'm just learning. And it's like an iterative process where yeah, I'm just trying to acquire different skills, really up my business acumen, I think overall. And that's actually one of the biggest values I see about working in customer success.

Some of that vagueness to me is actually an asset, right? It sort of allows me again, to move around a bit. Just no one can say, why are you talking to marketing?

It's like, why wouldn't I talk to marketing? Why wouldn't I talk to product? Why wouldn't I talk to accounts receivable?

So I think that I see some value and I'm not afraid of the smush.

[Cinthia] (9:39 - 10:55)

Actually, I'd like to jump in on this because I think when you talk about the vagueness, that's tricky. Because the problem is the C suite often doesn't understand what customer success is. That's a big problem, right?

Because a lot of times I saw this when I was at NASDAQ, we were launching the CSM team. And I kept saying, let's manage the C suites expectations on this that I hope they don't think in six months time, everyone's going to turn from red to green. And it's exactly what happened.

They really thought that was going to happen no matter how much we warned them. And so they wound up being many times customer success winds up being customer service 2.0. Because everyone's coming from different areas, maybe they're so empathetic, I want to help my customer want to help my customer. But really, you should be that central spoke that's directing them internally and making sure that whatever problems are related, that aren't strategic, are being handled by the correct areas, including service desk, including sales, including these other areas.

But I think the vagueness creates big problems, because how do you measure the ROI of customer success? And that's why you see like, all these mass, like support teams get dismantled into customer success sometimes, because it's seen as a cost center, because it's not directly tied to revenue. But there are ways that you can tie your actions to ROI from the customer's perspective, or the company perspective, but you have to have that strategic mindset, even internal.

But I love everybody else to take on that.

[JP] (10:56 - 10:59)

And that's why we need good CS leadership. Because I can't control it.

[Dillon] (11:00 - 11:25)

Beat that drum until it don't even make a noise anymore. Cinthia, that is our time. But thank you so much for joining us.

I love this topic. And I love your take on it coming from pre sales over to the post sales side. You've seen both sides, you've got a little bit of experience in those falsely inflated expectations, something for everybody to look out for.

Would love to have you back in the future. But for now, we do have to say goodbye, Cinthia.

[Cinthia] (11:25 - 11:28)

Thanks, everybody. Great conversation. Have a great day, everybody.

[Voiceover] (11:56 - 12:03)

and find us on the socials at lifetime value media. Until next time.