Workplace whack-a-mole | Russell Bourne

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:17)

Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound. And this came up this morning for me because somebody was like, my goal today is to improve customer satisfaction. And I was like, seriously.

And I was like, how do we make this smart?

[Dillon] (0:25 - 0:49)

Rob's about to say something. He's going to interrupt me. All right.

Maybe he's learned his lesson. 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, Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi? What's up, Lifers?

And we've got JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:50 - 0:52)

We're halfway there, baby. Come on.

[Dillon] (0:53 - 0:56)

And we've got Russell with us. Russell, can you say hi, please?

[Russell] (0:57 - 0:58)

I'd love to. Hi.

[Dillon] (0:59 - 1:05)

Hello. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

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

[Russell] (1:05 - 1:13)

Sure. I'm Russell Bourne. I am a customer success consultant with the Success League.

Been in customer success for a very long time.

[Dillon] (1:15 - 1:28)

Very cool. Well, hopefully you can bring some of that experience to bear because you know what we're doing here. We ask one single question of every single guest, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

So Russell, can you tell us what that is for you?

[Russell] (1:28 - 1:45)

Yeah, I'd like to talk about the lack of goal setting, or maybe I should spin it positively, the importance of goal setting, because without it, you're just not going to be successful by accident. The other thing I want to highlight is that by setting goals, you're doing yourself a huge favor for your mental health.

[Dillon] (1:48 - 2:15)

Well, don't I know it. So you hit on the center of my bingo card. I think you could strip out any mention of customer success here, and we could just talk about goal setting as a general principle, maybe not even professionally, like in life too.

But tell me why that's what you want to talk about today. Is it something that you're dealing with personally? Is it in your work at the Success League, you just are constantly confronted with people who say, what are goals?

What do you mean? What is it for you?

[Russell] (2:15 - 2:51)

Yeah, and myself included. So this is something that people, for the most part, do not get formally taught. I was embarrassingly well into my career by the time I heard it first, and I thought, how could I have gotten this long?

So what I want to do is try to amplify that to everybody else. Look, if you don't set goals, then in customer success, or probably in any field, we really talk about how reactive work just kills your day, and you're just dangling at the mercy of whatever's on fire. I call it workplace whack-a-mole.

Although I don't know how many people have gone to arcades at this point. So maybe the whack-a-mole reference has to go away. No, keep it, keep it.

[JP] (2:51 - 2:52)

All right.

[Russell] (2:52 - 4:10)

All right, good. If you don't have a goal, then you don't have a plan. And this is something that applies to every level of a company, right?

If you're a founder or an executive leader, how many of us have been in companies where there's two departments, and it turns out that they have goals that conflict with each other, and the productivity just grinds to a halt, and now you've got your silos, and you're infighting. You also have to make sure that you give your projects and your resources enough time to actually work, right? Like, how many times has there been the most important initiative in the company's history, and you're doing all this work, and the pipeline is building, and right before it's about to come to fruition, someone says, this is not working, let's try somebody else.

You can't cut your own projects short like that. In the middle management level, you've got to have good goals because you need to track indicators of what's working and what's not. You have to be a good forecaster.

And as an individual contributor, even if your leadership team doesn't give you a great, clear goal, you have to be able to figure it out for yourself, right? You ask yourself, why does my position at this company exist, and how would that be measured? And what should I do every day to build toward that?

And anything else that hits my plate, all that whack-a-mole stuff, I'm just not going to do it, or I'm going to delegate it appropriately because it takes me off my path.

[Dillon] (4:13 - 4:46)

I have one quick question for you. So I'm not 1,000% familiar with the Success League's work, but if you're consulting companies on how to do customer success, I imagine you often confront what I'm about to ask, which is, what is the influence of the investor group or the board on the way some of these goals are set and often shifted prematurely, like you were talking about? What is your experience in how the upper echelon at the company is influencing that?

[Russell] (4:47 - 6:19)

That's a great question because it's something that often gets lost in the cascade even by the time you get into VP or director-level leadership. Obviously, investors are in it for a return. I think most of the time when investors have a portfolio company, their goal is to eventually sell it off within a few years and make a profit.

And in order to do that, the company's valuation has to be high, right? So there are all kinds of metrics that you can use to track what evaluation should be. It's the rule of 40, which says that a healthy business, if you add its profit margin and its annual growth rate, those two numbers need to add up to 40 or else it's not a healthy business.

There's obviously revenue versus costs or profit or EBITDA that you might be tracking. The other thing that a lot of investment companies look for is, what's the churn rate? So you may have a healthy rule of 40, you may have healthy EBITDA, but if there's a high churn rate within, that means that you're doing great at new customer acquisition, but that's finite.

Finally, the other thing that they may look at is, how involved are the founders? If the founders were to exit, would the whole thing crumble? Maybe that's not going to get a great valuation.

From those things, you can create all kinds of sub-goals that would address, we have a churn problem, we better get that under control. We don't satisfy the rule of 40, maybe we should get our costs under control. Or maybe the founders have to figure out, how do I enable the people below me to take over?

So that when this investor group sells, I can go ahead and exit and the investor group can feel good about the price they got.

[Dillon] (6:22 - 6:35)

Rob, obviously as a fellow consultant, I want to give you an opportunity to jump in here. I mean, you are largely those very early guys, like seed to, I think, series B, maybe, as far as you go.

[Rob] (6:35 - 6:35)

Typically.

[Dillon] (6:35 - 6:37)

What does this look like to you?

[Rob] (6:41 - 7:36)

You're calling out something, Russell, that comes up for me all the time. And I think just how fitting is it that we realize we have to teach customer success people how to set goals, right? It makes perfect sense, right?

Because really, when you think about it, the first principle of a customer interaction is really understanding what is their pain and what are their goals. If you don't have that figured out, odds are you're not going to be very good at customer journey mapping. You're not going to be very good at handling difficult renewal calls.

You're not going to be very good at onboarding. And something you said that I really liked, the three words, three magic words, figure it out. I thought were really good.

That comes up a ton with early stage companies that I work with, right? Where it's like people have to just realize, geez, no one's going to do this for me. I got to pick myself up by my bootstraps and figure it out.

So this comes up a lot in my line of work. It's come up recently in a couple of ways. One, like bigger application is...

Have you heard of the pyramid principle? You ever heard of that?

[Russell] (7:37 - 7:38)

No.

[Rob] (7:38 - 8:58)

It's basically like you identify the top level goal. Maybe it's like improve NRR. And then you can see how that trickles down into lower level goals, like improve GRR and improve upsell revenue.

And then that trickles down into other lower level goals, improve customer satisfaction and improve usage and adoption. And then from there, the second thing I was going to bring up is there's the simple framework. I think a lot of people here is the smart goals framework.

If you haven't heard that before, make sure your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound. And this came up this morning for me because somebody was like, my goal today is to improve customer satisfaction. And I was like, seriously.

And I was like, how do we make this smart? And I don't mean to sound pejorative with that, but that's so different than if you say, my goal is to increase CSAT from 78% to 85% for our tier one customers by the end of Q4 by using proactive surveying strategies, personalized support or whatever, that kind of thing. So it's a huge, it's like night and day.

And I think when people start to crack that code and develop that muscle memory of establishing their goals as smart goals, that's the thing that elevates them in their organizations and as leaders. Even before they have a leadership title, they might be a leadership in the organization.

[Dillon] (8:59 - 9:22)

JP, I want to hear this from your perspective as somebody relatively new to even the corporate world, right? Like you spent a lot of time in retail and then in a higher education situation where it was probably a lot more reactive. It was like, hey, this is your process, man, every single time.

But when you get into the corporate world and particularly in CS, things change. What was that like for you and how have you adapted to it?

[JP] (9:24 - 11:31)

Yeah. Well, in the context of the goals thing, I would say the execution of said goals is where I think I've seen a lot of difference in my short time. I think I've worked at, I haven't worked at any like huge name places, not like I did in retail.

But I think something that I've seen is that you can have something that's a great goal, but how aligned are the teams? I'm going to try to do and control what I can, but I think I can see now more when leadership is not quite aligned on something or if there still is like a bit of a gap that's there because if they're not super tight there, then it's almost like something falls through the cracks. So then when I'm trying to think about this pyramid, if those levels aren't solid and it's like things fall through and they become this like vague sort of place where you need to, as has been pointed out, figure it out, right?

Like now it's like I have to figure it out along with my fellow co-workers and I have an opportunity to do that with say like sales. But what happens if sales has a directive that they want to push, but the reality is that there are things that cannot be so easily executed on my side? Well, now we're starting to execute things at a more individual level and so we're not necessarily making a very like consistent measurable process, though there may be success that is found.

And so when I was more working like the retail or things like that, as you said, Dillon, it was definitely more, this is the product, this is the process, I'm sorry. And if you're out of line, it's very like they just point to that and it's a little bit wilder. It's a little bit wilder.

[Dillon] (11:32 - 12:02)

Yeah, it's interesting to hear your level of awareness of being able to see how the game of telephone is happening. It's pretty clear that this message is no longer a coherent sentence once it reaches individual contributors or even like Russell, you were saying middle management type folks. So Russell, with the time we have left, I'd love to hear what is the number one thing folks could do to create better goals or to start their goal building process in the first place and take us out of here with that piece of advice.

[Russell] (12:03 - 12:31)

Yeah, I'll go back to something I said earlier, which is just think about why does my department exist at my company or why does my role exist at my company? Why does my company exist? If you're an executive or a founder, Rob, I told you, I didn't know the pyramid scheme, but I do know that as boulders, rocks and sand, right?

So all of these goal setting analogies line up, right? So you start with your North Star and then you work down from there and you boil it down to what are the projects I should have and what should I be doing every day?

[Dillon] (12:33 - 12:34)

Very cool. I love it, Russell.

[Russell] (12:34 - 12:35)

Awesome topic.

[Dillon] (12:35 - 12:39)

Pyramid scheme is a little different. You're right. Sorry about that.

Rob's running one of those.

[JP] (12:39 - 12:44)

No, don't be sorry. Don't be sorry. It's okay.

I like you, Russell.

[Rob] (12:44 - 12:51)

If you want to sign up for the program, if I sign up three people, yeah, you can have your own business.

[Dillon] (12:52 - 12:58)

Russell, thank you so much. Awesome topic.

We are out of time, but we'd love to have you back in the future. For now, we've got to say goodbye.

[Russell] (12:59 - 12:59)

Thanks, guys.

[Voiceover] (13:03 - 13:34)

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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