Reverse psychology | Gurp Singh

[Gurp] (0:00 - 0:31)

When I'm speaking to COOs or CTOs, anything it may be, I ask one question. I say, awesome, you seem happy. But tell me, 18 months from now, what would make the board happy?

What would you consider success 18 months from now? How can we reverse engineer that to help, number one, provide that feedback to clients or provide that to our product teams or provide that maybe to my leadership team, my CEO? And let's use OKRs.

Let's use command of the message to promote that, to help grow that and become your champion.

[Dillon] (0:41 - 0:56)

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, you're on mute. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:58 - 1:00)

I am happy to be here.

[Dillon] (1:01 - 1:04)

Oh, Rob, you want a second chance? Is it a bad day?

[Rob] (1:04 - 1:07)

I'm like, I'm still in pain from my boxing class.

[Dillon] (1:08 - 1:14)

He's got the ice pack on his neck. It looks dainty green ice pack. And we have Gurp.

[Rob] (1:14 - 1:14)

I broke my back.

[Dillon] (1:16 - 1:19)

Gurp with us. Gurp, why don't you say hi, please?

[Gurp] (1:19 - 1:21)

How's everyone? Gurp Singh here.

[Dillon] (1:21 - 1:27)

What's up, Gurp?

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Gurp, thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Gurp] (1:27 - 1:48)

Yeah, of course. Gurp Singh, everyone. Speaking from Englewood, New Jersey, originally from upstate New York and Buffalo.

I am a CS leader by profession, but a man of many different passions and love. I come from a background of equity and finance at Bloomberg and pivoted into customer success over a decade ago. So really happy to be here.

Very cool. Very cool.

[Dillon] (1:48 - 1:59)

Bloomberg. I like Bloomberg. Gurp, 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 please tell us what that is for you?

[Gurp] (2:00 - 5:07)

Yeah, I appreciate that. It's it is April 4th, Friday. You know, a lot in the news.

People are rightfully panicking. But I think in the world of CS, go-to-market sales, there's a lot of pain. And pain to me means opportunity.

I actually want to talk about: 2016

My dad's his two brothers. They were world famous before, you know, .com, before the internet, before social media. Indian classical is a small genre, but something that, you know, they were at the height of.

And funny enough, they never took advantage of, like I said, social media, harnessing their, you know, their followers. And slowly but surely, over the course of two decades, they fell off the face of the earth, as in they didn't go anywhere. They weren't reaching anyone.

S. I was working at Bloomberg: 2016

I was on the C train going back to Brooklyn. I was living in Bed-Stuy at the time. I see an ad for Squarespace, and it hit me.

All that pain I was feeling in my personal life, wanting to do something for my family. I started taking action. And that's the one thing I think the best leaders in this world, they do, even without having a final version of a vision, they start taking action.

They start harnessing that pain. Long story short, because I know when I have about, what, 10 minutes? I took hard drives full of music.

This is: 2016

Everything is, everyone's starting to focus on building their brand, their equity, using these free tools, essentially, to gain a following. And this was my passion. After work, I would spend five hours.

I remember this. It was the best time of my life. Keep in mind, there was a lot of pain.

And I got them up on social media. We started doing Facebook Lives. Hundreds of views turned into thousands of views and millions of impressions.

I got them up on a website. I used Squarespace. I started building their brand, their equity.

s,: 2000

I wanted to find pain. And coming to present day, they just finished a world tour in India. Rolling Stone wrote a couple articles on the family.

We're working on a documentary, a book as well. I started this by saying, I'll bring it back to CS. What I do in my personal life bleeds into my professional life as well.

To me, there is a world of opportunity every single moment. Anytime you speak to a customer, anytime you meet great individuals like yourselves, we're all looking for what? We're trying to mix our pain with pleasure.

And the world is looking for people to stand up. So would love to answer any of your questions and elaborate on that.

[Dillon] (5:07 - 5:47)

Gurp, I just got to say, first of all, what a wild ride you just took us on. The mixing pain with pleasure at the end. There's some jokes in there to be had.

I'm going to demur from doing so. The one thing I want to say is the home from which or the location from which you're calling us does not look palatial enough for having revived the careers of world famous musicians. So I need you to go and get yours, Gurp.

This can't just be a charitable endeavor for you. You've got to win too. With the rest of my time, I want to give it to JP because I think he's probably got some great questions for you in regards to this.

[JP] (5:47 - 6:24)

Yeah, I mean, yeah, there was a lot. There was a lot in there. I guess since we are like a CS podcast, I'm going to resist the urge to want to get in because I love music and like, oh, that's great.

So what would you say this experience for you is something like at the end, you sort of mentioned teaching, if you can teach these 60 year olds, this thing is, are you sort of leaning into this like educational aspect? Like you bring this to your, maybe to your customers in CS? Like I'm interested in like, you said your personal life leans over, I'm interested in that.

[Gurp] (6:24 - 9:34)

The practical application. I think the best thing I've learned from everything I mentioned with my family is you have to be able to do three things to be successful. Articulate ROI, speak your champion's language.

And number one, or number three, rather, but I think is actually the most important thing is challenge the status quo. I think we'll all agree if your customers are happy, they're using whatever product you may be selling, whatever the industry is. Great.

That's amazing. But to me, that doesn't push the bar. That will never push the bar because you can have customers who are happy.

You can have, you know, anyone who's happy with you and, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're challenging them. So I think what I learned from this opportunity to not only help my family and improve myself in my own personal career, but was to be inquisitive, articulate ROI and speak your champion's language. I prefer clients who are edge cases, who are asking me, okay, but what does the roadmap look like?

How are we actually improving the product overall? I don't want to understand just your short and long-term goals, but I want to understand what would make you successful a year from now. When I'm speaking to COOs or CTOs, anything it may be, I ask one question.

I say, amazing, awesome. You seem happy. But tell me 18 months from now, what would make the board happy?

What would you consider success 18 months from now? How can we reverse engineer that to help number one, provide that feedback to clients or provide that to our product teams or provide that maybe to my leadership team, my CEO. And let's use OKRs.

Let's use command of the message to promote that, to help grow that and become your champion. And I think when you align yourself to not just where we are now, of course, everyone's talking about AI. Of course, everyone's talking about how we acquisitions and how we harness this new world of information and whatever it may be.

But what's the practical application of that? How are we actually going to design a plan forward to actually achieve those goals? And if you can measure yourself against that, I think that's actually real success.

And I think out of everything I've mentioned so far, articulating ROI, I have to tie it back into the family. For me, it was, hey, family, dad, uncles, you want to be on top of the world again. I'm speaking your language.

I'm trying to articulate ROI. Suddenly, you don't have to worry about ticket sales. Suddenly, you don't have to worry about reaching 200 people in an auditorium.

You're reaching millions of people. You're doing millions of impressions. You apply that same sentiment to customers.

Okay, you're thinking in a silo at the moment. You want to reduce tickets by 30%. But let's actually think of a long-term plan that not only reduces tickets, but helps you extract actionable insights from the people who are actually using your product and making it even stronger.

It's a partnership. So that's how I kind of applied it in real life.

-: 12:23

Rob, why don't you go? Totally, totally. Gurp, this is a great mapping.

And by the way, it's coming at a good time because I was just talking about how much pain I'm in from a boxing class that I wasn't supposed to be in. That's why I use that Mike Tyson impersonation. JP picked it up.

My back is broken. What is it? A vertebrae?

Spinal. Anyway, spinal. Anyway, I'm going to eat your babies.

Enough Mike Tyson. But anyway, no, no. This has actually been on my mind a ton the last couple of days.

Because obviously, in my work in consulting, I have to do a lot of sales. What I've learned is that our counterparts in sales are so much more well trained on some of the fundamentals that you mentioned. Connecting with the pain, establishing a vision, and drawing that distance, the delta between those two, between the pain and between where the customer wants to be.

The difference is in customer success, we often want to shrink that delta. We want to tell customers, you're doing great. You're meeting your goals.

You're doing well, well enough to renew. Keep it going. But that doesn't always apply.

And that's why we fumble when it comes to expansion selling, stuff like that. Because we have to kind of flip our strategy. So I've been working a lot on my discovery methodology.

And I've been working with a friend of mine who, he's a career salesperson. And setting up a model where we ask those types of questions, like the ones you mentioned. If you could ask your customer, what initiatives are you working on?

What would make you look like an all-star to your boss? What if we doubled your goals this year? What would happen?

Or doubled your capacity this year? What would happen? There's so much value that we can start to suss out when we ask those right discovery questions.

And we don't have a ton of time, but I'll just give a quick mention of a friend of mine who's a sales consultant. His name is Scott Lease. He talks about this addiction model of selling, which I think is very compelling.

So credit to Scott for this. And he taught me this a long time ago. He basically talks about how, you know, in his story, in his journey, he learned that to get someone to commit to something, they have to go through the same steps that people go through when they overcome addictions.

First, they have to admit they have a problem, which a lot of us don't do. Then they have to acknowledge the problem is important enough to address, which a lot of us don't do. We all have problems, but most of them we don't do anything about.

So oftentimes people kind of have to hit rock bottom in that discovery process. Yes. And then they have to acknowledge that this is a problem we're dealing with right now.

And then and only then do you actually even discuss your product you're offering well after you've deeply, deeply discovered the journey that your customer is on. So I'm trying to take a page out of that playbook. It's helping with my product relations as well, because the product team often says, look, we don't want to hear the solution the customer is asking for.

We want to hear the pain they're experiencing. Exactly. So we have a lot to learn from our other departments.

[Dillon] (: 12:23

Gentlemen, that is our time. Gurp, I love this. I love the roller coaster, the story you told.

It was fantastic. Would love for you to come back and give us some more practical tips, because I think you've got a really unique way of looking at it. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Gurp] (: 12:37

Appreciate you guys. Thank you. Enjoy.

[VO] (: 12:45

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