Impact & biscuits | Holly Goodliffe

[Holly] (0:00 - 0:23)

I'm impacting user behavior with these emails or in-app guides or digital communities or what have you. I'm impacting users going in and getting value from the product, which ladders up to more daily, weekly active usage at the account level, which most companies accept and have correlated that that is strongly correlated to likelihood to renew.

[Dillon] (0:31 - 0:43)

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

JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:44 - 0:45)

No questions, please.

[Dillon] (0:45 - 0:50)

No questions, please. And we've got Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi, please?

[Rob] (0:50 - 0:51)

I'm not stuck on mute.

[Dillon] (0:52 - 1:01)

You're not stuck on mute. Thank goodness. And we have Holly, Rob's personal cheerleader.

Holly, can you say hi, please?

[Holly] (1:01 - 1:03)

Hello. So glad to be here.

[Dillon] (1:03 - 1:10)

Thank you for bringing the energy. We are glad to have you. And I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Holly, can you please introduce yourself?

[Holly] (1:11 - 1:30)

Yeah, absolutely. Holly Goodliffe. I am a digital customer success expert.

I have built digital CS teams from scratch three times at three different companies. And then now I've moved on to be a consultant where I help all my clients do the same things, getting their digital CS programs and functions up and running.

[Dillon] (1:31 - 1:32)

What's your consultancy called? Is it just your name?

[Holly] (1:33 - 1:34)

It's Holly Goodliffe.

[Dillon] (1:35 - 1:38)

Cool. I just want to make sure folks know how to find you.

[Holly] (1:38 - 1:40)

Yeah. Hollygoodliffe.com. See you there.

[Dillon] (1:40 - 1:52)

Cool. We'll put it in the show notes. All right, Holly, you know what we do here?

We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Holly] (1:52 - 3:16)

Easy for me to answer. It's on my mind every single day because it comes up in every single client meeting is how crucial it is to be able to see and measure impact of digital CS programs on revenue. Why does it come up in every single meeting?

Because like the two questions I get the very most are number one, help me stand up a digital program to make my CSM to account ratio dramatically higher. And the only way to know which programs are succeeding and which are not is to see which are working at moving the needle on increasing likelihood to renew. And the second question, basically the same question, but comes two years later, help me prove impact to my executives so they don't pull my funding.

So basically that question is the same, but it's a version where you didn't set it up at first. And now you're like, shoot, I've only been reporting on how much folks are opening emails, clicking on in-app guides. I haven't actually been measuring or reporting on that impact.

So obviously this impact question is so crucial across the board for all of CS, how much are we impacting revenue, but like it's incredibly, incredibly crucial for digital where we live and die by data. And so if you don't have that data, you're just flying completely blind and yes, you're going to get defunded two years later.

[Dillon] (3:16 - 3:40)

We only have so much time on this show, but I wonder if there's an easy example that you share with your clients about how to execute upon this. Do you have some sort of like framework that you discuss of like, you start here, here's the midpoint and then profit. Like, do you have something like that or what does it look like for you?

[Holly] (3:40 - 6:19)

Yeah, super glad you asked Dillon. So the reason digital CS, the reason, cause I love talking about this. The reason, the only reason it makes sense to stand up a digital CS program and to put in that effort and that funding and those resources are if it's actually going to make it more likely for your accounts to get value with the product and to renew, right?

So I think of it as laddering up. You want to ladder it up all the way to accounts likelihood to renew. Or if you have a fast renewal cycle, like every month, then you don't even need, it doesn't need to be likelihood to renew.

It can just be that they renew. But for most of us, we have like a year or two year SaaS renewal cycle, in which case I need a leading indicator that's telling me their likelihood to renew. And that's what I ladder up to.

So at most companies, this is like either a customer health score or what I like using even more is simple active usage. So whether the cadence should be daily, weekly, or monthly active usage is what digital CS is really good at moving the needle on. I mean, it makes sense that like an in-app guide isn't extremely good at moving the needle on how strong are your relationships with your executive buyers.

But it's very good at getting folks to just get into your tool and use it and do those behaviors that you know are valued, right? So I think of it as I'm impacting user behavior with these emails or in-app guides or digital communities or what have you. I'm impacting users going in and getting value from the product, which ladders up to more daily, weekly, active usage at the account level, which most companies accept and have correlated that that is strongly correlated to likelihood to renew.

So I can take that and I can, and my clients can take that and say, not just we got 30% of users to click on this email. Like it's very hard for an executive to understand how is that impacting our revenue. But if I can say, look, I took these, the set of 300 at-risk accounts, I targeted them with this campaign.

I got at least one person at 100 of those accounts. So a third of those accounts to take this action in the product that we're needing to drive. And I actually recommend for that to be a very generic action of just your active usage behavior.

And that is correlated to their likelihood to renew and expand. And so you're able to really make that very clear delineation between the programs you're running and GRR.

[Dillon] (6:19 - 6:22)

I love the way you broke that down. JP, what does this make you think of?

[JP] (6:23 - 6:37)

First of all, when you mentioned building three companies from scratch, all I could think about was like some biscuits, man. It's so different. It's so different making biscuits like from scratch, like, you know, buying them from the store.

So thank you.

[Holly] (6:37 - 6:46)

That's right, JP. I didn't buy any mixes. I built these programs from scratch.

Not the companies, just the digital CS programs.

[JP] (6:46 - 7:18)

Yeah. And that is my question to you, which is, so you built these three programs, what have you, what is it? Just keep it 100 with JP.

What's the main reason you decided that you were like, I don't want to make no more biscuits and I want to go and have my own bakery? What is it that spurred that change for you? Maybe a main reason or the two main reasons?

Because we have a lot on the show and I think our audience would like to hear more about that.

[Holly] (7:19 - 8:56)

Yeah. Different for everybody, JP. I talked to people who are like, no, I just can't give up being the operator and being in that mix and being the one who's building it personally from scratch with my, you know, rolling up my sleeves.

And I do a lot of rolling up my sleeves with my clients, but for me, it really came down to the moment of opportunity in the market that I feel is just an incredibly exciting time to be working on digital CS. When I started in this, in, at Adobe, we didn't even call it digital CS. There was no such thing.

We called it retention marketing, right? And it brought together my interests of marketing and CX so beautifully, but like now we're at a point where we're done convincing companies that they need digital CS. They're not like, Oh, do I need this or not?

They're like, how do I do this? How do I stand it up as fast as possible? Please increase my CSM to account ratios right now or yesterday.

Right? So that's a really exciting time to be doing what I'm doing and to get to like, for me, what's exciting is getting to be part of like the next big wave of our beautiful CS industry. Like this is, I mean, digital CS and AI and how they fit together and how they're going to morph is what's happening.

So to be able to be involved in that in lots of different companies across my clients and even beyond my clients to just get to have like one-off meetings and advising with so many different folks trying to get started with this is what's incredibly rewarding for me personally, instead of just doing it at one company at a time for a few years.

-: 10:48

Rob, how about you? What do you think about all this? I think about a recent experience that I've talked with most of you about where someone said to me, can't you just spin up an online university?

And I'm like, what? You lost me at just what I, but that experience was really valuable. It made me think about what are the prerequisites to a digital program.

So I know like Holly and I know Dillon, I know I've spoken to you both more recently about this, JP you're up next, but it's questions like, do you have a defined customer journey? How clean is your data? Do you have defined customer segments?

Do you have playbooks and any data on whether they're working or not? And ideally you've A, B tested different playbooks and different strategies. I worked with this one product manager.

He was absolutely brilliant. He put together five different email sequences and ran this massive statistical analysis against them that measured which of them was most effective at driving engagement. And I was like, this is out of this world brilliant relative to anything I've done.

Now you don't have to do it that fancy, but that's number four, I would say. And the number five, have you defined your goals of the program? And I don't know about probably in your experience, Holly, you've seen this too.

You meet with these like very eager execs who are, they're like, well, we want revenue growth and we want to save on costs. And you might have to be in the bad position and say, well, we might have to choose one of those. Because if you're looking at metrics like CSM to account ratio, that might be a margin metric or profitability metric.

There might be other times where you're like, forget the margins. Let's invest in more programming, more tooling, more people behind the scenes to drive up our top line growth. So I think having that alignment, not only between you and your leadership, but also cross departmentally is so important.

Otherwise you end up just trying to wing biscuits out into the world. Yeah.

[Holly] (: 10:49

You can't wing biscuits. Yeah. I could not agree more, Rob.

I mean, I say pretty often to people, digital CS is not magic. It's not like you just say the words digital CS and suddenly your business is saved. And it's interesting because most people don't think they can stand up the human side of a CS function just overnight with no goals, no metrics, no clarity on the roles and how we fit together with other departments.

But I guess just because digital CS is such a hot topic right now, there's a lot of just thinking, yeah, I'll just do what I saw that other company do. They stood up a digital university. Let's do that.

What is the goal? What is the journey? How do you want this to fit together with the human components?

Like what is increasing usage your most important goal here? Or is it exactly? Is it something else?

I mean, I always vote for increasing usage, as I said before, but yeah, there's a lot of just trying to jump into it without thinking about any of that groundwork. And that is where I spent a lot of my time with very eager accounts of like, I know you want to just jump into this right now, but like, I don't want you coming to me in two years saying I'm about to get defunded because I've proven no impact. And actually we've just put out a bunch of programs that aren't actually contributing to the top line or the bottom line.

So yeah, we got to actually be, have a plan here, how we do this.

[Dillon] (: 12:20

I love where we're at in this journey, where two years ago, scale and digital customer success were this sort of like amorphous, magical idea. And we're now getting to the point where we have to like re-educate the masses of like, no, it's like, it's like a scientific process and it takes a while and it's not magic. And you can only choose one of these two things.

And it's awesome. Holly, that is our time, but I loved everything you had to say. Would love for you to come back in a few months and talk to us about how this new venture is going and all of the dumb founders you meet.

No, I'm kidding. Yeah.

[Holly] (: 12:55

The ones who think it's still magic.

[Dillon] (: 12:56

Each and every one of them. Name them by name, please. Keep a list and then we'll invite you back.

Until next time, Holly, we have to say goodbye.

[Holly] (: 13:05

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on.

[VO] (: 13:12

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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