Ghost stories and VAT | Erdem Gelal

[Erdem] (0:00 - 0:22)

The science behind it is like, if you were very smart, you would just have a pen and then you would note these down as you spoke with the prospect, right? Thanks to the technology these days, we don't have to do this anymore. We just drop a cold transcript and then ask a custom GP to, to just point out what those points of shared emotions, shared informations were, and then once you use that to follow up, we get people's attention.

[Dillon] (0:31 - 0:53)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value. We're working with new, fresh, new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, JP with us.

JP, do you want to say hi? And we have Erdem with us. Erdem, can you say hi, please?

Hey, thanks for having me. Thank you for being here. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Erdem, thank you so much for being here.

[Erdem] (0:54 - 1:07)

Can you please introduce yourself? Yeah, Erdem here, co-founder and CEO at Flowla. We're building digital sales rooms and onboarding portals, basically helping sales and CS teams run complex processes with their customers and prospects.

Wow. That was tight.

[Dillon] (1:08 - 1:19)

I like how tight that was. All right, Erdem, you know what we're doing here. We ask every single guest, one single question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success.

Can you please tell us what that is for you?

[Erdem] (1:19 - 1:24)

So what's on my mind is something called VAT. Have you heard about that?

[Dillon] (1:24 - 1:26)

No, no.

[Erdem] (1:26 - 2:37)

I'm sure everyone has a definition of VAT in their minds. This is something else. It stands for value added touch points.

So this was an experiment that we made. So basically what we do, we sit in front of our pipeline during sales and post sales during onboarding and talk with the team. Hey, what can we do today to move these deals forward?

How should we follow up with these people? And we ended up just writing, Hey, just checking in. Did you have a chance to complete that spreadsheet I sent over?

And no one responds to that. So we said, okay, like our touch points, they suck. We should do better than that.

Yeah. Like they're not value adding. We're not being ghosted.

We're not just offering any value. So we came up with the idea of value added touch points. And we found a funny abbreviation, VAT, which doesn't have any positive meaning in anyone's mind, but in this case, it's rather positive.

And we turned it into a LinkedIn post. So before we actually did that, we build a custom GPT that generates value at the touch points. And then we turn it into a LinkedIn post.

Apparently it went viral,: 2000

[Dillon] (2:39 - 3:03)

Three days is pretty sweet. I guess you had already sort of like built out the idea and the theory behind it. So what's the, you would not be able to tell us what the secret sauce is.

I wouldn't understand it necessarily. But maybe like, what's the theory behind it? Of what are the prompts you're trying to ask the GPT to like reframe these touch points as how is that?

Tell me more about that.

[Erdem] (3:03 - 4:43)

Like, to be honest, like I'm fully okay with sharing whatever's behind it. It's not secret sauce. It's actually like, if you're good with writing prompts, I don't think it's rocket science.

Anyone could just do it as long as they had the right sense of doing it. So basically what makes people respond? Like, let's go back and think about it.

It's usually shared points, like the emotions that you shared, the information that you agreed on, things, they were like ideas and events that were giving them emotions. Like if someone tells you, Hey, we have the launch next week and I'm sleepless. Like I'm really sleep deprived these days because we're prepping for that launch.

And if you ask them, Hey, how did the launch go? You were, you seem quite anxious about that. They feel heard.

So the science behind it is like, if you were very smart, you would just have a pen and then you would note these down as you spoke with the prospect, right? Thanks to the technology these days, we don't have to do this anymore. We just drop a cold transcript and then ask a custom GP to, to just point out what those points of shared emotions, shared informations were, and then once you use that to follow up, you get people's attention, things like, Hey Dillon, like you told me this, you know what?

I kept thinking about that and I didn't like where this was going. So I sat with the team and we came up with the solution. How does that sound to you?

Like if you receive a follow up like that, there's a great chance that you'll just engage back in conversation. And if it's a new onboarding and implementation process, like if you're new to that company, if you just committed to a contract and you're not getting the value yet, you really need these value added touch points because you as the CS person, the onboarding manager, you need to pull those people back in the game.

[Dillon] (4:44 - 4:53)

JP, I know this is probably tough for you because you never get ghosted, but if you did, how would you, tell me what this tool sounds like to you?

[JP] (4:53 - 7:34)

It sounds like it helps us to be more human at scale. I think there's, this is sounds like a really great example of using the technology to facilitate, you know, warmer connections, which I'm very much in favor of, I mean, it's why I'm not in sales. Sometimes I feel like sales can be a fairly cold interaction with people, but necessarily so a lot of times, because you do need to sort of deal with numbers, which is, you know, it's business, not personal.

Right. But I think value added touch points to me sounds very much like what I think a lot of people may advocate for, but it's a tactical use of, which is trying to build a customer success or sales model, like inside out from really from the customer. All too often, I've had competing objectives.

The company wants me to do X. They really are pushing for X. They're pushing for X because they're looking at things in a bigger picture.

They're looking towards this goal, but value added touch points are very much about this particular customer and the company does not, cannot really see that individual customer. And so that creates, I think sometimes a tension. And so this is why, you know, you go in and you tell someone you want to, Oh, we want to do a quarterly check-in.

And it's like, Hey, we're one tool in somebody's tech stack, right? Like they have 10 people all trying to do quarterly meetings. They just want to be able to do their work.

They're not trying to give you 30 minutes every quarter. Like, it's just, that seems more like where I'm asking you to do something for me. Whereas value added touch points are more thinking about how do we drive things forward using value?

And I think I'm just always going to be a bigger fan of that rather than staying in touch or just doing a check-in, you know, because it's like, I just think that we should be past that. I don't know why we're still like, Oh, QBR or not. It's like, this is what you do, do a value added touch points.

What value are you adding in this interaction to drive towards some mutually beneficial goals? And that may require a warm touch. To me, I'll just say, Erdem, this is very much like, it sounds like it respects what we really look for customer success to do, which is something that maybe we don't expect other people to do, which is, again, to have this type of relationship where we can maybe be a little bit more, give that warmer touch.

[Erdem] (7:35 - 8:03)

I love how you coined it as being human at scale. That's definitely it. And maybe Dillon, to answer your first question, one of the things that exists in that prompt is to highlight what's in it for them.

Because as JP said, it's like, it's not about your product, it's not about your process, it's about what they've given you. So you have to make that communication about them. And this tool was just a simple solution to make that two sentence email, two sentence message more about them than you.

[Dillon] (8:04 - 9:28)

With the time we have left, I'm interested in understanding maybe from both of you, being human at scale, to me, feels incredibly paradoxical. A lot of the narrative these days, particularly, I guess on LinkedIn, we talk a lot about getting pitch slapped, right? I'm sure most people know that phrase.

And many folks couch that in the AI experience. They feel like, they complain mostly about the logistics of the automation, right? Of like, I connect with you and you immediately send me this very long pitch, which is really just an inelegant usage of automation and perhaps AI as well.

If there's, if there's any sort of like learning happening. But doesn't the scale idea sort of negate the humanity of it all? I'm no longer personally connected.

I'm no longer personally learning or thinking critically about the way in which I interface with another individual. I am gaming the system to make them feel like I am. Now, I do totally get that at the end of the day, you've got to put your money where your mouth is, and you will eventually get into a situation where you have to talk to them one-on-one, real, live, whatever, and connect with them that way.

But do we at all feel icky about humanity at scale?

-: 10:25

JP? I'll just say that it's really about, this is going to sound, it's about the numbers. Like I can't, I may not be able to keep track of all that in my head.

So why, why not use technology to put that in front of me? You know, I'm, it's still, it's still me. I'm still the one sending the messages.

It's not like you're just getting handed off to a program. I mean, I guess, and you can speak to this more Edvin, the way I'm thinking about value-added touch points is I am getting data that I, maybe I don't want to have to go back and review through the file to get it. Does that make it more human?

Because I spend more time on it. I think that the scale part is really about giving me, being able to leverage this with less time. So I can say, okay, let me write this or let me write that.

And it's just, it's just making it easy because I can't remember all that. And I don't think the customer would expect me to remember all of them in detail, just off my head.

[Erdem] (: 10:25

Like I'm more team Dillon on this. I think this is a short window of opportunity where like, like in the first days of those email merge fields, like, Hey, first name stuff, like remember yourself like 15 years ago when you received an email, like, Hey JP, you felt like special, right? And now it's, it's everywhere.

It's normal, not personalizing. We can't even think of them. I think now we're in this little window of opportunity.

Like there are little wins and gains that you can have leveraging AI that still make you look human at scale. They still make the impression as if you're one-on-one communicating that as if you noted that down, but you can do it at scale. Probably people will get used to it.

[Dillon] (: 11:05

I love that. I've got a small win at the end here by you siding with me. I think at the end of the day, it is, it is about the numbers.

I agree with JP on that, but I do agree with what you're saying that we'll get to a point where we become desensitized to it. And I think at the end of the day, you're still going to have to have that one-on-one conversation. So it's really just about getting your foot in the door.

Erdem, that is our time. Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. I will put in the show notes, a link to that post and how they might learn more or get access to that tool.

I'd love for you to come back in a couple of months and talk about sort of like where this has gone, because I know you guys made some pretty significant shifts in your roadmap in order to bring that thing to market. And I just want to hear more about that, maybe from the business standpoint, what that all looked like, but for now we do have to say goodbye. It was great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

[VO] (: 12:03

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