Get educated | Ep. 186

[Mickey] (0:01 - 0:08)

I'll start for anybody that's not familiar with Central California coastline. There's a wonderful city called Morro Bay.

[Dillon] (0:12 - 0:18)

And I'll start. Is this like show and tell? You're like raising your hand.

Nobody else wanted to follow.

[Mickey] (0:18 - 0:21)

Yeah, exactly. I was like, I might as well jump in.

[Dillon] (0:22 - 0:42)

I'll start. 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 with us.

Rob, can you say hi?

[Rob] (0:43 - 0:44)

Ciao lifers.

[Dillon] (0:46 - 0:50)

And we have Mickey with us.

Mickey, can you say hi?

[Mickey] (0:51 - 0:52)

Hello, everybody.

[Dillon] (0:53 - 1:16)

And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Mickey is not here in the capacity of a guest, but rather as a co-host. We're trying something new.

We kicked J.P. the out with Mickey. No, we love you, J.P. J.P. is on a business trip. God forbid.

Who let that happen? Business and Mickey with us.

[Mickey] (1:17 - 1:18)

I wore my business socks.

[Dillon] (1:19 - 1:22)

Yeah, you've got your business socks on. Do you want to lift your leg up and show us?

[Mickey] (1:22 - 1:23)

No, I'm standing.

[Dillon] (1:24 - 2:57)

I'm not flexible. OK, it's just the three of us. No guests.

Just three co-hosts doing what co-hosts do. And as everybody knows, when we have a lack of topic to cover, Dillon goes to Reddit. Now, what I'm doing here is I'm reading Reddit posts while I try to introduce the show.

So if anybody's unsatisfied with the cadence of this introduction, you're absolutely right. But I do have one for you guys. You ready?

I'm going to read this. Read this to you. And we'll just go.

We'll just do it live. Spendsome792 wrote this. What would you do if you were starting in CS from scratch?

Hey, everyone. I very recently started a client success role. He's already off on the wrong foot.

And I've been looking to make sure I'm positioning myself for a bright and stable future. He picked the wrong career. I have a background in sales in the online high ticket space.

I don't even know what that means. I believe cybersecurity and AI will be the leading industries in tech. There you go, Mickey.

I was thinking of doing some introductory courses so I can try to break into these industries. But then I realized I don't know anything. And some of you in here probably have way better plans slash ideas.

For all you experienced guys in here, what would you do different in terms of trajectory to maximize skill set, avoid getting taken advantage of, and earn as much income if you were literally starting from scratch? That last part kind of irks me. But does anybody?

Mickey, you wanted so badly to speak when we first started recording. So why don't you go first?

[Mickey] (2:57 - 3:08)

It's because I'm over caffeinated and I'm just trying to survive. I went to the Lakers Warriors game last night. So I got home late, but it was fun.

Sorry, you lost.

[Dillon] (3:08 - 3:09)

It's OK.

[Mickey] (3:09 - 3:13)

I got to see Steph Curry play and LeBron. They both played wonderful. It was great.

[Dillon] (3:13 - 3:13)

Yeah.

[Mickey] (3:14 - 3:23)

I actually have very simple feedback for this person. Do we, by the way, did this person make it clear if they are man, woman or other? Or are we just going to use they?

[Dillon] (3:23 - 3:30)

They did not. But do you want to default to whatever your, you know, sales world view is?

[Mickey] (3:31 - 4:32)

Statistically speaking. But I will say this. I've known plenty of just best female sales reps.

Anyway, that's not important. What is important is my my one piece of advice for this person actually is very simple. They're already doing what I would suggest, which is go learn and read and listen and watch and talk as widely as you can.

It is fire hose time. The good news is you have the skill you need to be effective in that, which is if you're from sales, you have no problem going and knocking on a bunch of doors, asking to pick people's brains, getting rejected and just grinding through it hour after hour, day after day. So that's my one piece of advice is go learn as much as you humanly can.

I agree with their premise of like cybersecurity, AI, all that you need to learn and you need to be adaptable because that's going to be the skill of the future.

[Dillon] (4:33 - 4:47)

So the phrase it's fire hose time couldn't have wildly different meanings depending on the context you're in. Yes, yeah, yeah. So directionally correct, like just learn as much as possible.

[Mickey] (4:48 - 4:48)

Yes.

[Dillon] (4:48 - 5:09)

But you don't want to provide anything or don't think you need to provide any further like you should really actually be learning about this one thing versus this one thing. You don't. I'm too dumb to make that suggestion.

All right. The comments here are fantastic. But before I get to those, Rob, I want to give you an opportunity to get in here.

[Rob] (5:09 - 7:38)

I'm going to say a couple of things. Mickey, I'm going to modify a little bit of what you said while you're on your learning journey. Please stay off LinkedIn and please be careful with what chat GPT tells you and be careful with courses, too, because not every course out there.

Look, customer success courses are people are starting to hand out customer success courses like Halloween candy. And, you know, I can't speak. I've never taken one of these courses yet, but I do know that the content is substantially different.

And if you throw yourself into a Ph.D. level course by accident when you're trying to build the fundamentals of your team around the tactical stuff, then you might be in for a wild ride and a lot of wasted money at your new job. So I can walk you through the method that I've typically used. This is the same method that we use with every consulting engagement, like with our core six month program that we use at my company.

So we do we do six months. And in a case like this, we usually prescribe not necessarily in this order, but the order I like to go is start with first two months on on tactical items. So month one, start with the unsexy stuff, start with support, find the pain that you're solving for and dive into it, like go as far as to go on site with customers and month to focus on the customer onboarding process.

Right. So that whole first set of two months is going to be all the tactical stuff that, frankly, LinkedIn will tell you. You've got to stay away from the reactive mode stuff.

I'm like, no, embrace it. Enjoy it. It's good.

You'll get yourself out of it eventually. But please make sure that you set some deadlines around it. That's where I think months three and four, you're looking at month three.

You're focusing on renewals and churn. So now you've you've figured out the onboarding process. You've figured out now you've got to figure out the other end of the customer life cycle around renewals and churn, which is the end of the customer life cycle or hopefully not the end.

But that sets you up for month four, which is all around the stuff that happens in between. You've bookended your customer life cycle, right, with onboarding and renewal slash churn. Now you look in the middle, which is all around customer health.

So that's when you start thinking about stuff like NPS and customer outcomes. And and well, OK, you should be thinking about customer outcomes earlier. But you think about things like, you know, customer satisfaction, usage metrics.

You start developing visibility and what it means to be a customer who opens your solution or your tool every day. And then the last two months put these on the back burner is customer expansion, customer advocacy. You're not going to get to any of that if you don't master the first four months, first four chapters.

So that was not meant to be a plug or anything like that. But I have an example I can share with anybody listening to this that goes through all of that. Dillon, I want your thoughts.

[Mickey] (7:39 - 7:41)

So you basically just said what I said.

[Dillon] (7:41 - 8:03)

Yeah, I was going to say, well, thematically the same, Rob, maybe you made it actionable and said, like, here's learn about how SAS businesses run. Yeah. And then like, whereas Mickey, yours, your Google search was a little bit broader, like which is how I success.

[Mickey] (8:04 - 8:52)

And yeah, yeah. Well, that's how I use Chachapiti's. I usually start very broad.

Like if I'm learning something or exploring something, I start very broad before I go tactical. Also, there's been a long period of my life after I got I felt like I had a very good fundamental of everything Rob described, where I stopped reading customer success things. And I started reading more foundational things like game theory, game theory, microeconomics, philosophy, psychology.

And this isn't to be like arrogant Mickey. It's more like I didn't go to college. I barely graduated high school.

I should probably educate myself. Yeah. So that's why I was like, learn broadly.

But Rob is right that like, then you do have to learn the context specific stuff. And I kind of skipped over that because I have already gone through that journey.

[Dillon] (8:53 - 8:55)

All right. You guys ready for the comments?

[Rob] (8:56 - 8:56)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-: 11:11

Please. So you'll notice I was reading this and and it goes something like this. I've been looking to make sure I'm positioning myself for a bright and stable future.

And I made some crummy comments. Turns out I wasn't the only one because the top rated comment from Escriz is run away. That's it.

That's all it says. Second most highest rated comment from what about is I would do something else. Don't come here.

Is this the Lion King where Mufasa is like, don't go over. Don't go over there. Number three, keeping it Brockmire said I would have found another career path.

There's some there's some good stuff in here. There's like a really long one around, you know, understand what the role is more largely before you decide what it is you're going to learn. And I think being within cybersecurity or AI probably helps with that because they're much more technical.

And so you're probably going to go down a much more technical path than some other CSMs. The last comment, this one didn't get nearly as many votes, but that's because it's brand new. This is from Spurlot. Leave immediately.

Four of the five top comments are all don't come here. The conciseness with which these people comment is so fantastic. Anyways, that is our time.

I think you both had fantastic ideas around just like just start firehose time is the right way to go about it and then start to niche down as you learn certain pieces or you pull on different strings. The last thing I would say is you never stop learning. So you always start somewhere and you follow a path.

But as you follow that path, maybe take notes about other things that seemed interesting to you. I do this all the time with like books and articles where I read something and they reference other stuff. And I'm like, oh, I want to read that next.

My Amazon cart is so damn long. I'm never going to finish it in my lifetime. But it's my way of continuing the learning experience.

Anyways, that is our time. Awesome, awesome stuff. I'll see you guys later.

[VO] (: 11:42

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