Hell yeah brother | Ep. 276

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:21)

the most authentic pulse check you can get. You know, when you're filling out your health score, if you're still using some basic CSM sentiment or account sentiment, that's entirely subjective figures, which you probably should reconsider if you are, but a lot of us are still doing that. How would you get an authentic pulse check with your customer?

[Dillon] (0:30 - 0:43)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh ideas, fresh customer success ideas every single day.

[JP] (0:44 - 0:46)

Yeah, I think we got to work on it.

[Dillon] (0:46 - 1:00)

We can do better. I got my man JP with us. JP, can you say hi? Such a fat Albert. It sounded a little bit like that. And we've got Rob with us.

[JP] (1:00 - 1:02)

Don't let me jump, bro.

[Dillon] (1:06 - 1:23)

Rob, can you say hi, please? And I'm your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Boys, it's just the three of us and Rob, you've got something to talk about. Is that right?

[Rob] (1:24 - 2:37)

Yeah, I do. I do. I do.

Conversation came up early today, this morning when I woke up from my four hours of sleep. And it was around how to get a really quick, valid pulse check from your customers at the end of your calls or during your calls. So this came up, the friend of the show, Christy Falteruso, who brought up that at the end of calls, let me get her exact verbiage.

So Christy said, it only takes five seconds to ask, was today's session a good use of your time? And other folks chimed in on the comments, questions like, let's see, there was another one in here. What would have made this time more valuable?

Or my example was just a simple, okay, how are we feeling? And I also gave the example that you could do when you have a pretty reticent audience or a big group, you can just do a quick show of thumbs. How are we feeling?

If you're seeing this on video, is your thumb up? Is it down? Is it somewhere in the middle?

And you actually get some interesting feedback from that, depending on how sprung someone's thumb is.

[Dillon] (2:39 - 2:54)

I got one. Did anybody say at the end of the call, you say, can I get a hell yeah, brother? And if they all say hell yeah back, then it was a good call.

[Rob] (2:55 - 3:25)

That's a great way. So what questions would you guys ask at the end of a call? Now, I'm curious, what questions would you guys ask toward the end of a call to get the most authentic pulse check you can get?

When you're filling out your health score, if you're still using some basic CSM sentiment or account sentiment, that's entirely subjective figures, which you probably should reconsider if you are, but a lot of us are still doing that. How would you get an authentic pulse check with your customers?

[Dillon] (3:26 - 3:27)

JP, you go first.

[JP] (3:28 - 3:30)

Is that good for you? Would you recommend to a friend?

[Dillon] (3:30 - 3:32)

On a scale of one to 10.

[JP] (3:34 - 5:38)

I think that this is, what I'm thinking about is wanting to get to the real, like when I'm sort of talking with customers, we all sort of go in and maybe this is me, I'm reflecting, maybe this is part of the way that I go into the call, but just this sense of, okay, I have some certain things that I came in that I wanted to accomplish while also trying to be open, even though those things I want to accomplish, I believe are best for the customer. I've tried to be open about what is the best use of this customer's time.

And so I think asking a question like this, first of all, can build a lot of trust, but I also think it takes some trust. So that's the first thing for someone to really give you an honest answer. And I think that maybe it needs to be a little bit specific in terms of like, do you think this was a good job today or something?

Because I feel like that asks the customer to do too much. Maybe if the ask is more like you presented something, you say, Hey, we went over some things today. I really feel like from our perspective, that these things would be really helpful for you.

Do you agree with these? Or did you see any one of the things we discussed today that maybe you had a different take on it? I want to give some time for you to really share about that because I'm doing this from the intention of, I want you to get the most value out of it.

So I'm taking the opportunity to reiterate the reason I was there in the first place and using that as a call back to, that's the way I'm asking how good of a job did I do, is in saying like, Hey, do you feel like the things that we discussed today were relevant or were there other things or things that I talked about that maybe you wanted to focus on more? And you can't ask like when there's two minutes left in the call, you got to give them at least like five, six minutes.

[Rob] (5:38 - 7:14)

That goes well too, with a quick recap. A lot of us don't leave enough time for a recap. I, in the other room, I actually have this little timer that I got.

It's like a little, it's a little sort of toy that you, yeah, well that one works too. It's like this one, it's like you flip it on a different side and it'll automatically set for a certain amount of different time. And it's been really helpful.

So there's different numbers on every side and you just like flip it down on a certain side and it'll vibrate or, or beep at the given interval. So if I'm going into like, you know, 45 minute call, I might set a, you know, 35, 40 minute timer for me to make sure that I get to the section of the call, the sentimental part of the call. But a lot of times we don't.

I also have been working on upfront asking customers when I get to a call, like, I know we booked this time for 45 minutes. Just for my awareness, do you have any hard stops? Right?

That's a good way to open the call to make sure you have that time. And when I ask that question at the end, they're just like, how are we feeling question? It might also sound like, you know, are you getting what you need?

Are you getting the value outcomes you're looking for? Like, well, are you getting the value that you're looking for? Value outcomes is too, too jargony.

Right. Yeah. I don't know.

Sometimes they'll even just say like, quick question, scale of one to five, how are we feeling? You know, that's a good way to, to, to, instead of saying like, if you had to choose a number one through five, like just scale one to five, how are we feeling? That's a nice casual way to get it out there.

[JP] (7:15 - 7:40)

Dillon, just to interject, what about before I lose this, what do you think about this idea of, we always talk about the QBR and everything and how, you know, whatever that is like a simple, would you, do you think another one of these would be good in three months or do you never want to see me again? I'm just, I'm joking about that. But like sort of validating like that use of people's time.

-: 12:03

I think there's this all sort of bleeds together for me. So I'm going to try to answer that question. And, and Rob, your initial question by giving you guys, not that I'm the arbiter of anything here, but a look into my mind.

So the one thing I want to point out is Rob, your question about the hard stop is interesting because the way my mind works, this is just the way my mind works. I think that's probably polite. And that's a, that's an easy, like equity win early in a call to show that form of respect.

It's not a thing I even think about because I assume if the meeting is set for X amount of time, that's the time I have. And we've got to be judicious with it because I just assume that that person has a hard stop. That's just a thought in my head of like, I would never ask that question probably, unless we had a history of running over and then maybe I'd, I'd do it.

And I think that then feeds into sort of my thought process overall. And it aligns very closely with yours JP, which is it's all about context, right? Like it depends on what the call is about, whether I I'm going to say this in a, in a clickbaity way, if I even care how they feel, if the message of the call is I'm going to give you value, which in customer success, it almost always should.

Then yeah, you probably want to close that loop at the end. Did you give value? Is it the value you expected?

Was there anything we didn't talk about that you were expecting? And what I think that allows you to do is then iterate upon that cycle you've created. Okay.

I scheduled this call with the messaging that we were going to execute on this thing, or we were going to deliver this value. At the end of the call, did I meet your expectations? Were your expectations met about what I said we were going to do?

So more than when you first started this and you were reading what Christie's post was about, Rob, I went back to the difference between let's say NPS and CSAT and customer effort score. And what people typically will say is they're used for very different things. NPS is very broad.

It's meant to be about the relationship as a whole, whereas CSAT and CES are more closely related, but one is emotional about how they felt about an interaction and that CSAT, whereas customer effort score is more about do you feel as though it was easy to do this thing? Was the effort low to accomplish this task? So they all sort of like, to a layman, they might be the same thing, but they're actually measuring different things.

And I think that that's really important when you have these conversations about what you actually care to measure. Because something like, again, this is just the way I think, but something like how are we feeling is way too squishy. I don't actually care how you're feeling.

I care about whether the thing I wanted to accomplish was accomplished. And as we talk about a lot, feelings don't actually matter. It's about business outcomes.

It's about achieving a goal. I don't know though. I go back and forth.

It's probably just a colloquialism for you where you're actually asking, do you feel good about accomplishing the thing we set out to accomplish? But for me and the way I communicate, I would just have to be way more specific about that, way more purposeful and intentional in the way I measure each one of these milestones. So I guess my advice to folks is like, just be very intentional and understand what it is you're trying to measure.

Do not install this in your playbook and just say, hey, give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down guys. And you don't even actually know what to do with that feedback when you get it because you don't know what your goal was. Yeah, exactly.

So I didn't mean that to poo-poo anybody. It's more like the different ways people view this stuff. And you've got to be really careful about the way you design these questions.

[Rob] (: 12:04

You know, it's interesting, by the way, my timer just went off five minutes. What's interesting, it depends in part on what you're trying to measure. And all of this is just, we're all kind of shooting from the hip here because none of us have really statistically measured a correlation.

It's true. Channeling my inner friend of the show, Ed Powers here, who would be rolling his eyes at us.

[Dillon] (: 12:27

Ed, we miss you.

[Rob] (: 12:28

I love how Ed thinks of these things. So there's a study that I read. It was like, and I'm going to bastardize the exact numbers here, but work with me.

They were like, if you ask people, how happy are you? A group of single people ask them, how happy are you? And then, hold on, I'll get there.

How happy are you? How's your dating life? Versus the other group, you ask, how's your dating life?

How happy are you? When you change the order of questions, the results change substantially for how happy are you? People who were asked, how's your dating life?

First are actually substantially lower on how happy are you versus the people. Yeah. Right.

[JP] (: 13:11

Rob, you know where else I heard this?

[Rob] (: 13:14

What?

[JP] (: 13:14

Algebra.

[Rob] (: 13:16

Really?

[JP] (: 13:16

It's called order of operations, baby.

[Rob] (: 13:18

Yeah. Drop a little PEMDAS on it.

[Dillon] (: 13:24

Is that salt bae you were doing there?

[Rob] (: 13:27

No, it was more just a casual blessing. We doing addition? We doing subtraction?

Parenthesis? Yeah. No, I mean, look, it's kind of interesting because what actually- We multiply?

I think the other thing that's implicit in what we're talking about here, Dillon, is your point is based on the assumption that value outcomes drive the company outcomes you're trying to achieve, like renewals, let's say. I have a counter hypothesis. I'm not saying that this is true, but it's a hypothesis that a lot of times people make those decisions off of vibes more than outcomes.

[Dillon] (: 14:10

I mean, that goes against a lot of what we talk about, but actually that was not my point. My point was if you're asking it at the end of a meeting, then the only real thing you can measure is what was experienced during that meeting, and it can't just be a vibe. That's worthless, right?

It's got to be, for me, the systematic endeavor of we set out to do this thing. Did we do that in this meeting? Did I show you the strategic value of this new feature?

Are you now going to incorporate that into your workflow? Or we did a QBR. Do you feel as though you're more informed and you can move forward with more clarity after this, which are things that should be spelled out in your agenda ahead of time because they are goals that you set out to achieve?

[JP] (: 15:00

So you said, do you feel- Anyways, that's our time, y'all. We got to go. Let me tell you, please be careful out there because hypotheses are not just an African statement.

A lot of hypotheses out there.

[VO] (: 15:24

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