Selling success | Kristina Klakegg

[Kristina] (0:00 - 0:17)

How we ideally would like to do customer success in our company, which has to do with providing strategic advice for our customers. And in the onboarding that we have spent a long time developing, we have been giving out, for example, strategic advice in the onboarding for free.

[Dillon] (0:26 - 0:37)

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 here.

Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:37 - 0:38)

What's up people?

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

And we have Kristina with us.

Kristina, can you say hi please?

[Kristina] (0:43 - 0:44)

Hey everyone.

[Dillon] (0:44 - 0:50)

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

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

[Kristina] (0:51 - 1:11)

Sure. Yeah. My name is Kristina.

I'm based in Oslo, Norway. And yeah, my role is, well, I'm a customer success manager for a Norwegian sauce and we work with email marketing. And now we also are building like developing our company to also work with SMS marketing.

[Dillon] (1:13 - 1:35)

Interesting because we literally just talked to somebody else who's doing the same thing. It seems like the hot thing, SMS, maybe getting hotter by the day. True.

Well, Kristina, thank you so much for being here. You know what we do? 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 share with us what that is for you?

[Kristina] (1:36 - 3:01)

Yeah. Well, since I was talking a little bit about SMS, this is a lot of my mind. So what exactly what is happening is that we have been working with email marketing for the past 15 years that we've existed as a company.

And now we're kind of changing that and adding on SMS. So it's email and SMS. So there are two things in that regard that I currently I'm kind of like working on and thinking about. And one thing that I have to do now is not only change, like I'm firstly changing a little bit my background, my domain. I've been an expert in email marketing.

Now I have to learn another field, which is SMS marketing. So that is something that is on my mind. And the second thing is what is the role of customer success when we are working with developing this new feature?

And what we're doing now is that we are for the first time trying to figure out how to kind of like we're developing CS feature on a specific CS service. On a specific feature. And we're trying to do that in order to make more money from customer success to put it that way.

And also of course, at a value for our customers. So yeah, that's a short introduction.

[Dillon] (3:02 - 3:09)

What's the feature like, tell me more about the way you're thinking about creating a CS specific feature.

[Kristina] (3:10 - 3:32)

Yeah. So this will be a CS specific, let's say service actually. So the feature is an SMS and the service is providing strategic advice for how to succeed with SMS marketing together with email marketing and it will, we're making it as a paid service.

That's what we're developing now.

[Dillon] (3:32 - 3:34)

That CS will deliver.

[Kristina] (3:34 - 3:34)

Correct.

[Dillon] (3:35 - 3:38)

Got it. Got it. Rob, do you want to jump in?

What questions do you have?

[Rob] (3:39 - 4:57)

I love this. This is so cool because Kristina you're at like the bleeding edge of this topic that's so important in customer success right now, which is customer success getting ahead of revenue and doing so in a way that drives more value for your clients, meets clients where they're at. And it makes me, you asked the right question when you said, what is the role of customer success?

Because I think it would just be so disappointing if customer success were only there to just support the launch. I've been a part of customer success teams that have been the primary driving force behind a launch of new features. And that starts with getting the voice of the customer that's asking for this in the first place.

And then it carries through into how do you price it? How do you package it? How do you model it in your CRM?

So you have the right deal stages. How do you script talking about it? How do you build objections and rebuttal document documentation around it?

So if a customer says, you know, the timing's not right, the price is too high. Like what do we do with that situation when not everything goes as planned? And then all of this kind of makes me ask a bigger question, which is where do we find the time to do all of this?

Because I mean, we're all busy, right? The opportunity is huge, but I am curious if that resonates with you finding the time to. Oh, yeah.

[Kristina] (4:58 - 5:13)

Oh, my gosh. That has been a huge thing. And like every Friday meeting we have, like, what is your feeling?

And it's always been like, I am so annoyed because I am not getting as far as I would like on this, you know?

[Rob] (5:13 - 5:22)

Is that a company thing? What is your feeling? Yeah.

That's so cool. We also just talked about mental health on a different on a previous recording. So really cool.

[Kristina] (5:23 - 5:33)

Definitely. Yeah, I know it was really like in the beginning, that's kind of a deviation. It was a little bit strange for me to answer and difficult, but it's very nice to have that.

[Dillon] (5:33 - 6:08)

Cool. So what is the biggest challenge, Kristina, in developing this new paid offering that Customer Success has to deliver? I know from my experience, there are quite a few CS professionals that are not, let's say, service providers.

They find themselves often pulling, not necessarily pushing. That's sort of how I think about this is, OK, I'm getting paid now. I've got to deliver on this service.

Is that a part of your biggest challenge or maybe take it in a different direction? Is there something else that keeps you up at night as you try to build this this new offering?

[Kristina] (6:08 - 6:12)

I'm just wondering exactly what you mean by pulling versus pushing.

[Dillon] (6:12 - 6:57)

Yeah. So in Customer Success, I think a lot of what we do is is trying to extract information from our customers. And then we'll go and orchestrate how best we can deliver upon that success for them.

Service delivery is different, right? It feels a lot like professional services to me. They're buying a training program or advanced customer success.

And and when that happens, you've got to the way in which you deliver your service is different and in some ways more valuable to the customer. So and that's that's pushing. Right.

That's more of delivering upon and and giving value. It's not a fantastic analogy. So feel free to tell me that.

[Kristina] (6:58 - 7:45)

No, I completely that completely makes sense. And in this in this sense, I feel like what I and we are doing together with my team in this specific regard is that we are also inspired by the conference where I met Rob at the Customer Success Conference in in London, really, is that we are doing we're being entrepreneurial, you know, we're developing customer success. And it's not necessarily I don't think very much based on like, oh, we because we haven't really like properly released the feature yet.

But it's something that is we are predicting that will add so much value to our customers and that it makes so much sense to do. And the way that we're doing this is actually that we are involving our pilot customers.

[Dillon] (7:46 - 8:12)

Yep. OK, because that was part of that was going to be part of my question is you're predicting through what process do you predict it? Was it through did you originally identify a need just through conversation and then you started to pull your customers and then you built like a minimum viable product that you're now delivering to your pilot customers?

Does that sound roughly like what the process has been or tell me how it may have been different for you guys?

[Kristina] (8:12 - 8:58)

I mean, we're building upon how we ideally would like to do customer success in our company, which has to do with providing strategic advice for our customers. And in the onboarding that we have spent a long time developing, we have been giving out, for example, strategic advice in the onboarding for free. Right.

We've done so much for free. And now we're trying to understand and trying to draw the line much before that and making stuff more paid that makes sense to be paid for both parties. You know, it makes sense for us to ask to get paid for that and for the customer to pay because they will properly improve the results drastically and get a lot more out of their investment if they're doing this.

[Rob] (8:58 - 9:04)

Does that answer? Have you gotten pushback on that? I'm curious.

Sorry? Have customers pushed back on that?

[Kristina] (9:04 - 9:21)

So yeah, we don't know. We don't know. Like we haven't and that's what we are going to now explore together with our pilot customers is to ask, are you willing to to pay for a service like this?

Right. Get that feedback from them.

[Rob] (9:21 - 9:22)

That's a smart approach.

-: 10:01

Yeah. Rob, I want to hear more about how you view this, both because you work with so many different companies. This is sort of the basis of our relationship is seeing you do a presentation on how to make customer success more aligned with revenue.

But I don't know that you and I have ever talked about selling customer success. It is often we go and identify white space opportunities by being a strategic advisor or more consultative, so on and so forth. But rarely is it, no, you need to pay for my services even to begin with.

So tell me a little bit or help me clarify that.

[Rob] (: 10:02

Yeah, it's a good question. And you're right to call out that gap. It is something I've worked on quite a bit, selling professional services.

And I think the hard part is a lot of our organizations, our whole go to market strategy has been around like giving our services away for free. And then so when you go to price it, you've implicitly accidentally anchored yourself at zero. And then you kind of are faced with this question, what's my time worth?

And you're like, well, how do I price this? Do I price this based on the cost of my time or the value I provide? Or is it based on competitive pricing?

Are our competitors charging a certain amount for this? But I do think if you go through those three ways of looking at things, you can sort of triangulate some number that makes sense as you're going through pricing and packaging and then starting to market it to your client base. But as Kristina is doing, like pilot customers are key, right?

If you have a customer advisory board, it can often help to say like, you know, what do you think our time is worth if we were going to provide this service for you? Not just our time, but the output.

[Kristina] (: 11:05

Yeah. One thing I was thinking now is that like, we haven't provided this from before. So another thing that we could do is provide it to like the pilot customers, for example, or the first customers that are wanting to buy this service is that we provide it to them at a discounted price so that they then like kind of like what we're getting back from that is testimonials and results that we can use in order to show, Hey, we did this to someone with somebody and these were the actual results. And that would help us perhaps to increase the perceived value and help us make it easier to sell.

I don't know.

[Dillon] (: 11:44

No, I think that's perfectly correct. Right? Like everybody, you got to start somewhere.

You're very rarely going to get the first number you think of in terms of pricing from your very first customer, because you don't really have, like you said, the proof to show that the offering is valuable. I mean, you could do a lot of research, but at the end of the day, you got to go and get a customer and start to build that, that case. Kristina, I love this topic, but we are out of time.

So why don't you come back in the future and talk more about this, particularly once you've got it up and running, or you got a couple of pilot customers, how that's looking, what you've learned, what worked, what didn't work. I want to hear all of it. But for now, you do have to say goodbye.

[Kristina] (: 12:24

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It was so much fun.

[VO] (: 12:34

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 general inquiries, please reach out via email to hello at lifetime value media.com.

To learn more about advertising on The Daily Standup and the Lifetime Value Media Network, please reach out via email to advertising at lifetime value media.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.