Winning Together in SaaS | TDSU Ep. 14

00:00    holy that's a great partnership thanks so much for being so open about that like now we can move [Music] forward you're listening to the Daily standup by lifetime value consider this your daily dose of new ideas fresh perspectives and or hot takes as they relate to the worlds of customer success post sales or whatever the hell we're call it these days and where we ask each guest one simple question what's on your mind okay let's go you ready yep what's up lifers and welcome to the Daily standup with lifetime value where

00:48    we give you daily ideas from the customer success space for you to Noodle on JP do you want to say hi up y'all we noodle her Rob do you want to say hi lifers welcome Hello Alex would you like to say hi hello my uh my Fred Rogers mug and I say hi Alex would you like to introduce yourself Alex turkovic uh I lead digital programs currently at flexera formerly snow software and I'm host of the Digital customer success podcast all right Alex you know what the deal is you know what we're doing here can you tell

01:26    us what's on your mind right now on my mind is probably like one of the undersung skills of people in CS and specifically digital CS because that's my kind of topic which is cross collaboration internally for customer success it's like an undersung kind of skill set that CS just has to have you think it's undersung I think that's literally all we do is is maybe not under but under underrated underrated is what I should say yeah internal external what you yes absolutely it internal because you think

02:05    about it this may be maybe Vain and kind of biased towards CS but it's kind of like the Hub into which all customer information and stuff kind of flows um you've got Partners also that you might need to collaborate with but literally as a CS leader but also as a CSM you got to know how to talk to product you got to know how to talk to you know your pre-sales folks you got to know how to talk to Services you got to know how to talk to Partners and who to talk to your partners like that's the that's the gig

02:34    you know it's being the connector and the collaborator you know what I think is interesting and I'm I'm only now thinking about this now is that there's an element of politics to the Cs role that I don't think we ever talk about and is is as important as you're talking about I mean you could call it cross collaboration but I think a piece of that is knowing um hey this product guy doesn't like that pre-sales guy because he's always complaining about this one feature blah blah blah and like how do

03:02    you work around all that like that's politics and could we just add one more thing to the list of stuff let's go that CS has to deal with now we also have to be politicians we got to even do you think product teams for example do you think they talk about this probably it's like you we could stack stack rank the departments in How likely they are to talk about this with sales being like the bottom one right I don't I don't know that product does because product is the end point right like at

03:33    the end of the day the product is why people come to your company right so they kind of they're the end all Beall the Alpha and Omega sales doesn't give a  because they so often get to Wag the Dog so to speak I don't know that they are and if they are I think they're just laughing yeah you know I think I think the relationship between product and CS is insanely unique and also it it's ironic how often it falls apart because CS is sitting on this Treasure Trove of like customer information we're

04:10    talking to customers all the time and a lot of times we try to push like feedback into the product organization and product feedback but it becomes this ego thing and invariably it's asked for at least in my experience it's asked for in like this last minute kind of hurried kind of way when they're trying to get a feature in or whatever and it's not not really productive it's like this weird kind it's super I don't know why the relationship between Cs and product is so weird because the connection is

04:38    obvious between customer feedback you know feature enhancement all that kind of stuff I think my guess my experience I suppose has been that we and CS are expected to be the mouthpiece of the product organization and that carries an inherent risk of Divergence so for me it's like everything in the workplace boils down to incentives in some way and a lot of times those incentives are misaligned right A lot of times products incentive is to not give timelines or give loose timelines or give timelines that are way out right except in certain

05:15    organizations where product had variable comp based on the same kpis that CS it like retention for example but yeah a lot of times it's funny you know if you ever put a product manager on a call with a customer they up saying a lot of things that csms do because their incentive shifts in that moment in that setting you know yeah exactly yeah for sure JP I want to give you a chance to yeah I was gonna ask what does JP have to say about the whole thing surely yeah I think cross collaboration is a nice way it's almost like saying

05:50    Environmental Services instead of janitor you know what I mean because like we end up having really clean a lot of this up like yes we we cross collaborate with everyone and have all this noise all this sort of data coming in and I think the personas is such an interesting exercise because it's a way for us to sort of aggregate our customers in a way that maybe can add more weight to it so that that's what I feel like has always been the rub terms of with product is they always want to they're looking for the data

06:26    they're looking for how you know is this one customer who said this or is it 10 or is it 100 and so I think part of it is sort of siphoning through what customers say to sort of boil things down and really figure things out I feel like a lot of what product does if we're sticking with product is prioritization there's so many things they want to do with the product but which things are they going to do first and I think that customer success managers we can be really good if we can figure out how to

06:53    filter through the noise and figure out which problems most likely lead to churn those are the ones that need to be fix first I think yeah I I want to add in here uh in a previous life I I finally broke through to a product guy or he just happened to understand a lot of what you just said JP around how you know I've always said I I don't really give a what your decisions are product those are yours to make I'm trying to give you the data to make informed decisions and then like I got to trust that you can take that shot like we're

07:29    all role players on the basketball team right I can't do everything so I've got to trust that my teammates are are doing their job so to speak not even so to speak literally in speaking to that product guy super intelligent super empathetic towards our role he was like here's what I want you to understand I want all the information you can give me but it has to be structured in a certain way then what I want you to understand is I am going to prioritize to your point JP because typically you guys are

08:01    talking to existing customers or almost exclusively you're talking to existing customers understand that unless there is also overlap with the research I'm finding elsewhere both in like market research but also data from sales and uh closed loss deals and why those fell out of the funnel understand that you are often going to be of a lower priority because we already are getting the money from the people you're getting feedback from MH we want to try to expand our target market most of the time and depending on

08:34    the maturity of the product we want to expand our target market by prioritizing the feedback that sales is getting and those closed loss deals I think and then I was like holy  that's a great partnership thanks so much for being so open about that like now we can move forward I think there's another couple couple of elements too that come into play which is the first is this whole Telemetry thing because I feel like for those that have the luxury of having product Telemetry they tend to lean real heavily on that data which is to say

09:08    okay they're using this they're not using that but that obviously is missing a whole bunch of context where the magic is if you can combine the context and the feed the actual mouth Words which is one of my favorite terms with the data um that's like super gold and then there's the whole aspect of in-product stuff and who owns that and for for for me anyway that's always that's been a bit of contention here and there is like okay the in product and the walkthroughs and all that kind of stuff well okay who

09:40    contributes to that is that CS is that Services is that product is that you know it could be any number of those things but ideally It's a combination of those things that's our time Alex but I just want to ask one last question if it's not mouth wordss what kind of words are they stupid words ass words all right right that's our time Alex thank you so much for joining us on the daily standup we hope to see you around thank you for having me bye thanks Alex you've been listening to the Daily

10:13    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 email to Dillon [at] lifetime Value media.

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