Just pick one! | Ep. 171

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:51)

There's a dissonance here with how CS sees their own role, let alone how other people see their role. If I'm holding the purse strings and you're telling me 85% of the time you believe you're doing a great job for customers, well then you do have the resources. You're getting it done.

I have a bone to pick with the way CS views itself. I am so special and nobody thinks I'm as special as I do. 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, Tiara Rob with us. Can you say hi?

[Rob] (0:52 - 0:56)

Have it your way at BK and happy birthday to me to all who celebrate.

[Dillon] (1:00 - 1:09)

Which is nobody. As you get older, nobody's celebrating. And we have JP with us.

JP, can you say hi, please?

[JP] (1:10 - 1:12)

Hey, I'm going through something, but are we all?

[Dillon] (1:17 - 2:11)

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Boys, it's just the three of us and I have something to bring to the table that is not a post on Reddit.

at my other screen here, the: 2025

Okay. So 68 members of the customer success community. And I think did one of you say what the actual breakdown was of those 68 members?

Well, Rob's on here. I just saw his picture.

[JP] (2:13 - 2:17)

Oh my gosh. That's crazy.

[Rob] (2:18 - 2:22)

It's just a bunch of talking heads who use words like framework and paradigm.

[JP] (2:22 - 2:34)

I'm looking at it now. It looks like there's about 10 or so consultants and the rest of people where there's a range of people from individual contributors. It looks like a lot of heads or C-level type folks.

[Dillon] (2:34 - 2:45)

Okay. So about 15% are consultants. Others are professionals in some degree or another.

I didn't answer this survey, so I'm not included.

[JP] (2:45 - 2:45)

I didn't either.

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

But Rob is.

[JP] (2:47 - 3:23)

We're missing out on a good chunk. I think to me, what's interesting is there was a lot of questions that were answers consistently among people. I was definitely attracted to the questions.

Maybe they had a little more variance in them for answers from the respondents. One of them that I thought was interesting was more around resources and budget. I think that this is one of those uphill battles that we often face in CS where we are along for the ride a lot of times.

We're not the ones pushing things.

[Rob] (3:23 - 3:59)

No, that's it. That's a good one. And honestly, JP, my eyes keyed on the same one for two reasons.

One is, as you said, there's a big spread of whether people feel their team has the resources and budget they need to do their jobs well. And it starts getting me asking secondary questions. What are those resources, beyond just money?

Is it headcount? Is it time? What is it?

Is it tooling or something like that? And then what does doing your job well mean? Presumably for most CS teams, it's going to be NRR related typically, but not necessarily.

And I think that's part of the reason for this discrepancy, I say as my tiara falls off.

[JP] (3:59 - 4:00)

And just that tiara, Garrett.

[Rob] (4:02 - 4:39)

Yeah. This is part of the reason why so many people have reported somewhat disagree or strongly disagree with having enough resources. In fact, out of the whole survey, this had the highest percentage of strongly disagree.

There's 16% of people surveyed said they strongly disagree that they have the resources and budget to do their jobs well. So that's a little scary. And that tells me that we have to do a better job of making the case of we're in the business of outcomes, guys.

But evidently, we're not showing the outcomes of these resources that we're asking for investment in. Not well enough, at least.

[Dillon] (4:40 - 6:29)

This is part of what I want to key in on, personally, is what strikes me about this survey is, so you mentioned, Rob, that not many of the disagree somewhat or strongly even register. In a lot of cases, it was my customers experience measurable value from our customer success efforts. Over 85% strongly agree and somewhat agree.

Okay. Over 85%. And it's obviously not the exact same respondents.

But if you compare that against my customer success team has the resources and budget, it needs to do its job well, which some might define as my customers experiencing measurable value from my customer success efforts are strongly disagreeing. So there's a dissonance here with how CS sees their own role, let alone how other people see their role. Because if I'm holding the purse strings and you're telling me that, let's say, 85% of the time you believe you're doing a great job for customers, then you have the resources you need.

Unless on the back end, I'm seeing people burn out, get sick all the time, have to take a bunch of mental health days. Unless I'm seeing that, then you do have the resources. You're getting it done.

I sort of seeded this conversation because I wanted to get that in there. I have a bone to pick with the way CS views itself. And in many ways, it is, I am so special and nobody thinks I'm as special as I do.

[Rob] (6:32 - 7:03)

That is interesting. What you're calling out, Dillon, is the same thing that sparked the whole personas conversation. A CSM might think their own persona is driving customer value.

Meanwhile, their finance team thinks their persona is driving net revenue retention. Those are just not the same thing. It constantly leads us to feel frustrated, to maybe come off, like you said, as almost a little entitled, a little privileged at times.

Every department has an element of that. Feeling misunderstood.

[JP] (7:05 - 7:16)

Internal discrepancy around the personas, you think X, company thinks, your CS team thinks Y, and then the company thinks Z.

[Rob] (7:17 - 7:19)

And the customer thinks something else.

[JP] (7:19 - 7:26)

And the customer thinks something else. And so now you have these four points of, I don't know what's going on, and that's what creates this mess.

[Dillon] (7:26 - 8:00)

And the way to get around that is to create a common vernacular. The idea of how things get measured. And my argument is, those two examples I gave, you're very clearly defining success, which is my customer derives value from my company or my role in it.

But when I turn that lens internally, I don't think I have the tools I need to be successful. Okay, well then why do you think your customers are receiving value?

[JP] (8:01 - 8:22)

Is there a correlation between, like, I wish my job was easier? If we just say it flat out, like, I wish my job was easier. I feel like I'm getting success, but it feels like there's an unsustainable rate at which I'm working, at which we're getting these results.

And that maybe there'll be more consistent, sustainable results if we had better tooling.

[Rob] (8:22 - 8:53)

There's an underlying question here too, which is like, because of this discrepancy, these internal discrepancies, these results that we're each looking for, each department is looking for are so vastly different. So I just don't even know if I can look at doing your job well as a monolithic concept. It's not like one thing.

If I look at a customer success report card, there's not just a uniform score that we can land on at many companies. There is, it's possible, but I think a lot of companies haven't done the work to align on that.

[JP] (8:53 - 9:36)

Let's say you have two customers and you have one customer that, and they're going to renew for the same amount and they both end up renewing, but let's say for one customer, you never talked to them ever. Like you tried to reach out, they were non-responsive, but when it was time to renew, they just renewed. And then you have another customer where it took you QBRs and readings and maybe last second, and you got the renewal.

There's two instances of where we've gotten renewals for the exact same amount, but the work was different. In one way, we say, oh, see, it means that we should be doing QBRs for everyone, but that's not necessarily true because you've just seen evidence to the contrary. I think that, you don't think that's a, that's tough?

-: 10:28

No, not necessarily. Not necessarily. I think a renewal decision encompasses so many things.

Of course. Of which a CSM has in some ways influence over and can use certain tools to help move that needle of influence. But there's another scenario in which you do all of the things in both of those scenarios.

Either you don't talk to your customer at all, or you do the most and your customer goes out of business. Okay. Well, they're going to churn.

How do you measure that churn? If you never talk to them and they go out of business, does that churn still count against you? And vice versa.

The measurement cannot be churn or not. It has to be much more granular along the customer journey.

[JP] (: 10:30

I see what you're saying.

[Dillon] (: 10:32

Ultimately, all of those come together into an amalgamation of churn or not, but it cannot be, I did all these activities and they ended up churning or not. That formula doesn't work. There's way too many additional variables.

[JP] (: 10:48

So my question to you then is, when we're saying what best practices are, we can at least agree that known churn is better than unknown churn, right? If they go out of business, we know that's a churn reason. But I think that what you brought up, look, you said these activities, if I didn't talk to the customer and they churn, and then there's this other customer where I made all these efforts, couldn't you say that in that other instance, okay, I see that this person's made some effort despite their efforts.

There's the value, right? You made these efforts. You can't control the outcome, but you made the efforts.

[Dillon] (: 11:26

It depends on the lens through which I'm viewing it. If I care about efficiency, then I'm pissed that you spent 100 hours in a quarter on a customer that churned versus zero, because you never had a Google alert set up that told you they got bought six months ago. And in it, they mentioned they're going to inherit all of the buying company systems of which yours fall squarely within.

But if I care about long-term reputational value, maybe I'm concerned that JP never reached out to them because he could have supported them off-boarding, and his main point of contact ended up leaving the company, going somewhere else, and may have had a favorable interaction with JP and wanted to buy the system again. So it all depends on the way I view it.

[JP] (: 12:14

So you had a consistent model, but you had a consistent model. You can't have both. You can't say that you were concerned about efficiency.

That's what I'm getting at. You can't say you were concerned about efficiency and that you were concerned about this other thing at the same place. You got to pick one.

You just got to pick one. That's what I'm saying. Just pick one.

[Rob] (: 12:31

You guys are reminding me of a conversation I had with a CEO. I learned a good lesson from the CEO. I went to him.

I was like, we kind of have a churn problem. I think I'm doing my duty and bringing it to the table with him. And here's a report of all the churn reasons.

And he looks at it, and I'm like, we're trying so hard and everyone loves our service, but they're still churning. And he's like, interesting. And so I start to see the gears turn around efficiency in his mind.

He's like, so how many customers have churned because we lacked service? And I was like, zero. I proudly said zero.

And he was like, that's a problem. What do you mean? He's like, we're doing too much for these customers that are not churning over service.

Maybe we should just do less service and just churn customers more quickly if they're not a good fit. And it was so refreshing to hear that. It was kind of disappointing because I felt like I was doing the wrong thing by pouring all of this time and effort into QBRs and meetings and even like dial blocks on our calendars.

We're going to call this whole cohort of non-responsive customers. And a lot of the times we were just spinning our wheels. It eventually came to a conversation around the difference between controllable and uncontrollable churn, which maybe you guys have had that conversation internally.

And it's something you have to be very disciplined about because it's so easy to be like our main decision maker left. So we'll call that uncontrollable churn. But actually maybe there is a controllable element to it.

So you have to put it in the controllable category. But either way, to your point, JP, you bring up a really good point that we have to be internally consistent about in a given situation, even on a monthly quarterly basis, are we optimizing for efficiency or are we optimizing for pour all the resources in we can to save everyone we can? Because those are different outcomes and different- Yeah, basically.

[JP] (: 14:15

Yeah. I think we're all in agreement. What Dillon said was spot on.

And that's what I'm saying, but you can't go every direction all at once. You got to pick one. That's the name of this episode.

You got to pick one.

[Dillon] (: 14:31

It is increasingly a theme of most of our conversations. Most of the struggles come from not everybody singing from the same hymn book departmentally or company-wide. I don't care about the CS industry overall.

I think there's always going to be different flavors. We've talked about that in other professions, whatever. But internally, everybody has to be crystal clear on what customer success should be doing in the same way they are about marketing, going and finding leads, sales, closing those leads, engineering, developing lines of code, so on and so forth.

Let's just get crystal clear on what customer success does in that sort of succinct fashion. Anyways, we're over time, guys, but this was a good one and we will continue to talk about this, I'm sure. But until then, we got to say goodbye.

Peace.

[VO] (: 15:26

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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