Isosceles triangles and technological tsunamis | Ep. 226

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:09)

Your money, your company's money, your customer's money. If you can get all of those things moving in tandem up and to the right, you're probably going to, that's going to show in your wallet.

[Dillon] (0:18 - 0:30)

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 JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:30 - 0:31)

Hey, what's going on?

[Dillon] (0:31 - 0:34)

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

[Rob] (0:34 - 0:35)

I'm losing my hair over here.

[JP] (0:36 - 0:38)

Oh man, come on.

[Dillon] (0:39 - 0:42)

I am your host with the horrible hairline.

[JP] (0:46 - 0:48)

You got the same hairline today.

[Dillon] (0:51 - 1:05)

JP, it's just the three of us and we're going to do something different. Let's do some rapid fire. But we're just going to ask the same question we ask everybody else.

JP, what's on your mind when it comes to customer success?

[JP] (1:05 - 2:55)

That's a good question. I think what's on my mind is the money, the money. What do I mean by the money?

Just following the money, where the money going. I think I posted something recently on LinkedIn, a non meme post, one of those rare moments for me, but just in terms of framing a lot of the sort of customer success mindset around things, getting away from maybe the, the fluffies, you know, sort of like, you know, empathy and curiosity, which are, you know, we agree those are not bad things at all. It's just like toward what end.

And I think after working in customer success now for a few years, you know, really that ability to be money minded, where's the money, where's the money going internally in terms of like, what are my organization's priorities? And also like when I deal with customers, it's sort of like thinking about, maybe thinking about revenue as a certain amount of trust. So like maybe a yearly contract is a sign that a customer has X level of trust because he has a multi-year contract, right?

Then that's maybe evidence of a higher level of trust. And so looking at things more in terms of like, you know, where are people actually spending money and then getting curious about, okay, where that money comes from? Because if you have customers and you know that, for example, you have a customer that's in academia.

Okay. So if you find out about funding getting cut to some sort of thing, that's could be a churn, potential sign of churn, right? So that's what I mean by like following the money is having that, that awareness.

That's what I'm talking about.

[Dillon] (2:56 - 3:46)

We don't have enough time to do rebuttals, so we're just going to let that marinate. And Rob, why don't you say what's on your mind? It's a very similar topic.

It's funny. That's funny. You mentioned that.

So I started, I drew a triangle, as you said, this, it's a triangle between Phil Jackson over here. Yeah, really? Like, how do you do this?

It's, it's like the conjoined, it's the conjoined triangles of success. You guys know that reference? No, Silicon Valley.

Nevermind. The listeners know, the listeners know. Anyway, no, I was thinking, I was like, there's a correlation between your money, your company's money, your customer's money.

If you can get all of those things moving in tandem up into the right, you're probably gonna, that's going to show in your wallet. Don't you think?

[JP] (3:46 - 3:48)

Okay. Isosceles. I still have more isosceles.

[Dillon] (3:52 - 4:45)

Interesting. Do you have more? But I think tension arises.

Yeah. I think tension arises when, when they pull apart. Right.

So I think, you know, obviously money is vague because there's different ways to look at that. There's, you know, there's top line growth. There's, there's margins.

There's a lot of elements to that. Actually one of the capacities that I'm thinking about it is mostly in terms of when you say follow the money, JP, I'm also thinking about forecasting the money. So not just following it, but getting ahead of it.

And that that's been coming up with, I've been talking a lot with friend of the show, Mickey Powell recently about how to build better forecasting. Most of us are really bad at forecasting financial outcomes for ourselves, for our customers and for our companies. But the technology is actually there in a greater capacity than it's being adopted.

Ooh. Yeah. I, yeah.

Yeah. I'm not going to, cause I didn't respond to JP's and I can respond to Rob's. What's on your mind?

[JP] (4:45 - 4:46)

Yeah, buddy.

[Dillon] (4:51 - 5:43)

Buddy, what's on your mind? It's got nothing to do with money, but everything to do with money probably. And I am still stuck on and trying to predict the future of customer success amidst this just tsunami of technology and where that leaves customer success.

And I just keep going back to this theory that I have about the way in which a customer success manager works is just changing. It's shifting under our feet. And particularly for me, for somebody who hasn't sat in seat for like a year and a half, if and when I go back into an operator's seat, it will be, I believe materially different, almost unrecognizable to the last time I did the work.

[JP] (5:43 - 5:48)

And is this because of the tsunami? I'm sorry. Is this because of the tsunami of tsunami?

Okay.

[Dillon] (5:48 - 7:12)

Yeah. Because I will go back. Maybe it's because of the conversations we have that I have.

But if I go back into a seat and they don't have a call recorder and a call summarizer that automatically imports to my CRM and all of those little things that help me save my time. So I'm not typing notes manually and I'm not typing follow-up tasks manually, which I all did a year and a half ago, but there is no reason, certainly not a budgetary constraint for me to do that. When I plop my ass back in a seat someday, there is a psychological reason.

You retain information better when you write it down. But to your point, you know, I don't know. Yeah.

I'm a weird one like that. Yeah. Yeah.

I think it depends on the person, but there are other ways to accomplish that. I think you may be overestimating the extent to which the fundamentals have shifted. I think certainly the fundamentals, but this is the, this is the crap that gets, that keeps you from doing it.

Anyway, we don't have to make this about my topic. I think it's interesting where everybody's thinking right now. And ultimately what I'm thinking, I think comes back to money.

The same as you guys about how to be more efficient and trying to maximize margins and maximize coverage for a citizen.

[JP] (7:13 - 8:17)

Right. Like when you said that, obviously, like the first thing I thought of was Gong because Gong integrates, I know it integrates with Salesforce. It probably can integrate with other CRMs as well, but I've seen that feature up close.

Like I know how good that is and it's really easy to see the value. I'll just like say, lastly, one of the interesting things I saw was a workflow. So there's these departments, there can be workflow offices.

Y'all I didn't know this existed. And you know, when the whiny CSM, I'm just joking here, but when we're like, ah, we want to get this or we want to get that, you know, the company has to spend money on that and to spend the money. They usually have a process through which a technology needs to be vetted before they're going to spend money and bring it over.

So just, just a little something to add to my whole like follow the money thing. Like you usually people have to actually go justify that expense. You can't just wave a wand and be like, Oh yeah, we'll get to that because you keep whining about it.

[Dillon] (8:17 - 8:21)

Yeah. ROI calculators and ROI. Yeah, exactly.

[VO] (8:22 - 8:22)

Yeah.

[Dillon] (8:22 - 9:06)

That's what it comes down to. So actually let's end here, JP, I'm interested to understand gong is its own thing that's been around forever. And I think it originally spawned out of this idea of a sales manager can't be in all these places at once.

He can't listen into all these calls, nor do they necessarily need to. So if they could pull them up on demand after the fact, use them to quality control or even to use as training opportunities, so on and so forth. And then I think they started to layer AI on top of it to get summaries and things like that.

But do you still have to manually create like your followups and things like that, JP, or does, does gong do a piece of that? Or do you have something that's ingesting the gong information and doing that for you? Like, what's that look like?

[JP] (9:07 - 9:41)

Yeah, it'll, it'll list. If you just go into the call, it has a very nice setup. It's not perfect, you know, cause it can't, it can't fully like parse out things, but it is, it is pretty damn close.

And you can, you can go in and you can see, yeah, it'll have next steps summarized at the bottom, which again, is usually pretty accurate as well. So yeah, I think part of the difficulty is breaking the habit of the old, well, not the, not the note taking by hand, but like some of those previous habits that we've had that now technology replaces and like actually relying on them more.

[Dillon] (9:41 - 9:47)

Yeah. The have I geeked out about Spikey, the tool that I use? Oh my.

[JP] (9:47 - 9:47)

Yeah.

-: 10:00

But we're at a, we're at a time. We're at a time, but man, there's some cool visuals that they can generate around all the dynamics of calls around sentiment, around ratios, future sponsors, Spikey, future sponsors, Spikey.

[JP] (: 10:00

What's up, Spikey?

[Dillon] (: 10:02

What's up. What's up. All right, boys.

That's our time. That's what's on our mind in this snapshot in time. It'll be different next time we ask this question.

And until that time, we're going to say goodbye boys.

[Rob] (: 10:22

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