Noise cancellation | Laura Jark

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

How should I approach retention? How should I work with this customer success team? But that noise, like it all bleeds back to CS, right?

All those inefficiencies, they come back to the role. And I think the challenge is how do you continue to just like set all that aside and think about what's really great for my customers? How do I just keep that value as like the guiding light?

Because we hire people who are really passionate about client success.

[Dillon] (0:30 - 0:40)

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, with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:41 - 0:42)

What's up, people?

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:45)

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

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

Hey.

[Dillon] (0:48 - 0:52)

And we have Laura with us. Laura, can you say hi, please?

[Laura] (0:52 - 0:53)

Hello, everybody.

[Dillon] (0:54 - 0:59)

Hello, hello. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Laura, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Laura] (0:59 - 1:09)

Yeah, definitely. Laura Jark. I am currently VP of Customer Success at Disco, based in Denver, Colorado, and happy to be here.

[Dillon] (1:10 - 1:22)

Happy for you to be here, Laura. 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 can you share with us what that is for you?

[Laura] (1:22 - 2:11)

Yeah, I think right now, there's a lot of noise in the industry, right? There's a lot of like, what's AI going to do for CSMs? How is it going to maybe replace them?

Should CSMs own revenue? Do we still need CSMs, or should they be salespeople? There's a lot of those debates going on.

And in all of that, if I'm a CSM, how do I tune out the noise, but also continue to keep client value and driving those great outcomes for clients that keep them coming back, keep them sticky, help them achieve their own personal success or business success? How do I do that as a CSM when there's all this just stuff kind of happening around the role and the job, and what do we do next, right? So that's been on my mind a lot lately.

It's been on my mind for folks that I've talked to in the industry, people on my own team, who we're kind of helping to coach and navigate right now.

[Dillon] (2:11 - 2:30)

I wonder if this is a symptom of us all living too much on LinkedIn, though. And so my question to you, Laura, would be, do you have anybody on your team who's sort of like not really on LinkedIn, and do they share these challenges, or are they like, I don't know what you're talking about, I'm just doing my job?

[Laura] (2:31 - 3:54)

I think they share the challenges, right? Because whether it's a symptom of living on LinkedIn, I think regardless, all of that noise kind of leaks back to you through other parts of the org, right? You've got product inefficiencies and ideas that are happening there that they all kind of bleed towards the post-sales experience.

You have a sales team who's out there fighting for every dollar, and then also kind of thinking about like, how should I approach retention? How should I work with this customer success team? But that noise, like it all bleeds back to CS, right?

All those inefficiencies, they come back to the role. And I think the challenge is, how do you continue to just like set all that aside and think about what's really great for my customers? How do I just keep that value as like the guiding light?

Because we hire people who are really passionate about client success. That's why they come into this role to begin with. So how do you kind of like tap into that intrinsic, yes, I want to go and I want to battle for them because I want to see them successful.

I want to see them celebrating. I want to see them getting awards or promotions or whatever it is. And it's just a noisy industry at the moment.

So some of the things that I thought about doing is like, how do you continue to remind them the value of the product that they've invested in is worth something that you would go spend money on? It's almost like the price is right. Do you show them a BMW at $75,000 and this thing that you're helping your client with is also worth $75,000?

Like try to connect back to that investment mechanism.

[Dillon] (3:55 - 4:10)

I like that. Wow, that was a JP move given that analogy. Price is right analogy.

JP, before I come to you, Rob, why don't you tell me what this makes you think of and are you seeing in the broad conversations you have, are you hearing the same thing?

[Rob] (4:11 - 4:23)

It makes me think of one critical question that I'm gonna put on the table. Is your job as a customer success person, is your first obligation to the customer or to your company?

[Dillon] (4:23 - 4:24)

We know the answer to this.

[Rob] (4:25 - 5:05)

We do. I was just speaking with someone who works at Salesforce and believe it or not, even recently, Salesforce has been going through this twist of answers. So they've spent years, even recent years with the first obligation being to the customer, recent years.

And then now they're collapsing teams, downsizing as most of us have seen. And it's just interesting because I always live in the startup world where these like identity stories happen. But interestingly, it's not that different at Salesforce.

And I wonder, will we ever reach a conclusion on this or will this ever be a like constant vacillation that our industry sees? I don't know. But I do think it helps to define a charter for your customer success.

I'm sorry.

[Laura] (5:07 - 5:08)

Of course. That's fine.

[Dillon] (5:08 - 5:14)

Of course. I know I got any help with that. Any thoughts before JP jumps in?

[Laura] (5:15 - 5:36)

No, I mean, I agree. I think it comes back to what is your charter? What are you asking the team to do?

But how, again, like how do you keep that fresh in their day-to-day? How do you eliminate just all the distractions and the things that people can get into cross-functionally? Like how do you continue to drive that as your core focus?

[Dillon] (5:37 - 5:37)

JP, go ahead.

[JP] (5:38 - 8:35)

So reducing, we're sort of getting on reducing noise, right? This is sort of like the crux, right? Okay.

So I have found that the first part of reducing noise, this is gonna sound super obvious, but it's making the choice. I think that it's very easy to see a lot of work that you have to do. As CSMs, we all have a lot of work to do.

And to sort of feel like, I feel like my day as a CSM is sort of like on call. I feel like I'm on call. And like I have to make a literal choice to flip a switch to say like this work that I'm doing is important because I think sometimes the bias towards action, like serviceable action can lead me to be like, oh, someone's say slacking me this or that.

And so like I instantly sort of like cut away and go to do something else. I've been seeing things like with coworkers where we sort of briefly brush past like AI, where people are using things like AI to be able to help them to reduce noise. I would say some names, but I don't know, we already got one out there.

I don't wanna, I don't know how many sponsorships we're gonna give in one episode. But there's a really, I find that really interesting part is the first is that decision to make a choice. I am going to set aside focus time for which I'm going to get this done.

And after it's over, we can deal with what's next. So I would say it's as simple as beginning from there. And then everything else really falls under, okay, once you make that decision, noticing what things impede that decision.

And there's actually something I don't wanna give, I don't want, I'm trying to like avoid talking about things directly at my job. But I'll say that sometimes people are doing exercises where they may look at your workflow and ask, where are you spending your time? And I know that that can, for some people, that can be a bit of a scary question.

They're like, what do you mean? Like, it feels sort of like invasive maybe in a way. But I think that we have people who maybe say on a workflow team who wanna meet with people to discuss like, hey, where is it that you're spending your time?

How can we sort of maximize that? Where are you getting noise from? So you could find that you have something like, I mentioned Slacks, but maybe you're getting a bunch of emails from a source you don't need, or you're getting a bunch of notifications on support tickets that you really shouldn't be on.

I think that there's all these little sort of like tactical things that can be done. But I think making the choice in the beginning that, hey, I really wanna protect my time from this noise can really be like the great point to start from. Otherwise you're just getting tossed, sort of just tossed about, and then you can't speak to anything.

People ask you, where are you spending your time?

[Dillon] (8:35 - 9:36)

I avoided asking this question because I wanted the guys to jump in here. And I'm glad I did because JP, I think you added an additional dimension to what I was thinking. I thought that was really interesting around without maybe we connect it all together and we say without a really well-defined charter about where you should be spending your time, it's easy for you to make bad choices because you think it's a quick win or it's a serviceable fix, like I think you said.

I wanted to say, or what it makes me think of, I should say, and Laura, tell me if this is kind of like where you were thinking about it or how you theorize about the solution is this sort of like combination of vision and values. And then it's sort of your job as the leader to constantly be reiterating those and maybe having to rejigger them slightly to keep it fresh for your folks. You mentioned freshness before.

How do we keep it top of mind, fresh in their mind? Tell me what you think about that with your parting words.

-: 10:42

Yeah, I think that's spot on because every organization has the charter to make customers successful. And you can, I'm sure frame it in a variety of ways, right? That are special to your org at the end of the day, like that's the charter, but it's easy to get lost in the shuffle.

And as a leader, I think it's our job to help keep it fresh, to help keep it interesting, to help keep it very connected to the individual and how they are helping their customers do it. Like we wanna celebrate customer wins across the board for sure, but we also wanna celebrate the effort and the impact that that CSM or the cross-functional team had on helping a customer get there. And you need to, you kinda need to switch it up because if you always do it at like in all hands or you're kind of constantly throwing out Slack messages, the volume of those celebrations tend to start to become undermining because people stop paying attention to them.

So yeah, it's about keeping it fresh, keeping it different. And then again, like connecting it back to that individual CSM so that they feel like they're really contributing to their clients' overall goals and needs.

[Dillon] (: 10:43

Really cool. And I think it also kind of like calls to mind or reminds me of the, how squishy the challenges become for leadership, for people leaders of, you're now several degrees removed from what is like the ultimate company goal or vision. And you've gotta find ways to continuously motivate people to drive towards it.

Laura, that is our time. I love this topic. Fantastic.

Would love for you to come back in the future and maybe talk about some other like really tactical ways that you execute on this and what you've seen work and maybe not work. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Laura] (: 11:18

All right. Sounds good. Thanks for having me.

[VO] (: 11:26

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