The value equation | Ep. 236

[JP] (0:00 - 0:20)

The way that I want to handle my customers more, instead of just seeing the dissatisfaction as this ugly thing that I need to quash and sort of like, tamp down or be like, ah, they're a forfeit customer. You know, it's like, why don't I get curious about like, what the issue is. We may have something that can actually help them solve this.

[Dillon] (0:27 - 1:09)

Are you ready for this? Are you ready? 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? Bingo.

And we have Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi? Bongo.

What do you say after that? Bingo, bongo. Bingo, bongo.

And I'm your host, Bungo. Yeah. Is that good?

Did I do a good thing?

[JP] (1:09 - 1:10)

Best thing since Snap, Crackle, Pop.

[Dillon] (1:13 - 1:27)

Gentlemen, it's just the three of us. And hey, do you know what's coming up? What?

One year. I'm crying over a joke I had to edit out, so don't mind me.

[Rob] (1:29 - 1:35)

Hey, today's actually also the five-year anniversary since I launched my first consulting gig.

[JP] (1:37 - 1:38)

Hey, hey.

[Rob] (1:38 - 1:50)

And it's my one-quarter birthday. I'm 35 and a quarter years old. All right, so we're going to try something new today.

[Dillon] (1:51 - 2:38)

We need to because this is a meandering episode already. We're going to talk for more than 15 minutes. We're here to celebrate our one-year anniversary.

When this episode comes out, it's either about to happen or it just happened, whatever. I can't plan these things, folks. But whatever.

We're going to try something new. We're going to do some longer episodes. We're going to publish those on Fridays when we usually publish our episodes just between the three of us.

Try something new. Everybody, tell us what you think about this, whether you like it, you love it. And wait until the end of the episode, because I promise it's going to get better.

It has not been good so far, but we'll get there.

[Rob] (2:38 - 2:41)

You gave them two options, like it and love it.

[Dillon] (2:44 - 3:16)

You don't have other choices. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so I've been thinking about something a lot lately.

I told you guys about this in the group chat before we jumped on. I promise it's going to run more smoothly than it sounded. In the group chat, I've been hearing this term a lot and it's not frameworks.

It's somewhat related. Systems thinking. Are you guys hearing that term more than you used to?

Do you feel like?

[JP] (3:18 - 3:22)

Fractional. I hear fractional all the time, but. Fractional, yeah.

[Dillon] (3:22 - 3:33)

JP, you've unsubscribed from the internet, so I understand if you haven't heard this term too much. But Rob, I feel like you're still in the echo chamber with me.

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

Yeah.

[Dillon] (3:34 - 3:37)

Systems thinking. Are you here? I feel like I'm hearing that everywhere.

[Rob] (3:39 - 3:53)

So I'm not hearing it, but if I think about it, it's probably a method of problem solving that involves the interplay between different elements as opposed to sort of seeing each element as its own standalone problem to solve. You're getting there.

[JP] (3:53 - 4:24)

Would you like me to read the Wikipedia right now? Yeah. Systems thinking.

Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, JP. You got it.

Okay. Okay. Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of holes and relationships, rather than by splitting it down into its parts.

It has been used as a way of exploring and developing effective action in complex contexts, enabling systems change. Systems thinking draws on and contributes to systems theory and the system sciences.

[Dillon] (4:25 - 5:24)

Yeah. It's like zooming out to see the machine, not just one broken part. It helps you spot where a process is failing, where a team is misaligned, or something can be fixed once instead of every time it breaks.

An example in customer success or CS adjacent that people might understand is like, instead of handling one support issue that comes up often, how can you solve the one email that everybody is reading improperly? And they're like, trying to use the tool in the wrong way, or they're onboarding, misaligned with your expectation. You just rewrite that email.

Or you fix your KBA or interesting. So it's not hard. It's not a hard concept, right, Rob?

Because you guessed what it was without ever hearing about it before. It's hard to apply it. Why?

[Rob] (5:24 - 5:52)

It feels a little abstract, and it feels like it lends to situations. Like I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago with somebody who was just like overthinking the system of a health score. When the components of the health score or what was important was like, look, we got it.

Clearly we have a login issue. Like we don't need to worry about the health score. Let's just focus on the login issue.

[Dillon] (5:54 - 7:17)

So you're playing directly into my hand, because what I really would like to explore today is the difference between systems thinking and psychology, specifically in customer success. And so this is not meant to agitate you, though it might. I think psychology is abstract.

You do a good job of explaining the frameworks or the studies that have been done before and applying them to CS. But without you holding my hand and walking me down that path, I wouldn't understand how all of those studies apply in customer success. I think that is very abstract.

Hmm. So this is what I think is interesting. I think very much in systems.

And I want to understand how these two, let's say, strategies or ways of thinking are different and how they're similar. Where can they combine and be used to even greater effect than each one individually? What do you guys think about that thought process first?

Rob, I know it's your first time hearing systems thinking, but what does it make you think of initially? A couple of things.

[Rob] (7:17 - 8:00)

I'm thinking about, so I've been using the term a lot, first principles thinking, which I think is related. And I think I've talked to you guys before about this idea of like the pyramid principle. That's like this idea of you have like one main idea and it breaks down into like smaller ideas.

All of this sounds probably very abstract, but like a really concrete example that came up recently was a client was trying to figure out their churn problem. And when we really unpacked it, they didn't have a churn problem. They had an ICP problem.

They didn't have the right ideal customer persona defined. And they had a product market fit problem, or at least they perceived they did because they were selling to the wrong audience. Something like that was a matter of seeing the whole system instead of just seeing churn as like the thing we need to solve.

[Dillon] (8:01 - 8:11)

So this is interesting. JP, do you have anything to add to that? Or maybe like initial thoughts about my question or what Rob just said?

[JP] (8:11 - 9:19)

I think as I kind of make sense of this, it's not something that I'm unfamiliar with, but maybe just unfamiliar more with the term. And so to sort of clarify the way that I'm thinking about this is it's about not getting so caught in the weeds that you miss things contextually. And so we think about like, why do we design a playbook?

We do it because we are, in essence, trying to zoom out because we're saying, hey, there is a sort of recurring thing that happens here. So why should we expend so much energy on this particular thing when we know that we can sort of put our heads together and think about this in a way to address it? And the system's thinking we free our mind to sort of say at what level the problem lies.

In other words, you could sort of solve the problem at one level, which is just like nailing the whack-a-mole that comes out. Or you could take the top off and sort of look inside and be like, why is this mother popping out? You know what I mean?

-: 10:42

What a journey. So what's interesting is, the first question I had here is a way of perhaps setting the stage for our listeners, each of us asking this question. And JP, I think you just answered it a little bit about what our natural problem-solving styles are.

And JP, I am a lot like you. What I typically will do is I'll whack the mole and then I take the top off and say, why the **** do these moles keep coming out? What's up with this?

Or you could even look at the hammer and say, is this the most effective tool we have? What if I just rig up eight of these hammers and I just stuff them in the hole so that the mole can't come up? There's a bunch of different ways you can solve for the problem.

And Rob, I'd like to hear more about the way you solve problems because what I've heard through our interactions is it's usually in some way related to behavioral psychology. Was that the original place you wanted to go with your example of solving churn? Were you immediately going to run down the path of why is the product not compelling enough, blah, blah, blah, before you took a step back and realized that it was an ICP problem?

[Rob] (: 10:43

I mean, in that case, yes. And I think that's kind of the beauty of like, this is not a shameless self-plug, but the beauty of working with a consultant or just someone on the outside. I mean, sometimes even just having a partner at home who you can talk to about this stuff helps you just sort of see things from the outside and kind of get the big picture of what's going on in a given problem-solving situation.

And I'm asking myself, like, I actually don't know an answer to how I typically approach these things. I don't know if that example is typical. I'm trying to relate to like other experiences I've had.

Speaking of partners at home, one of the things Lana talks about a lot, my wife for the new listeners, who's a psychologist, is like when she's evaluating a person's like psychological experience, she looks at the whole system. What is their demographic background? What's their family background?

What's the overarching history? What's their place in society? Even though she's quite like pragmatic with her approach, she takes all these systematic factors into consideration.

Like you could look at like a family dynamic, for example, and say like, what are the coalitions and boundaries that happen in this family that inform and guide how this person behaves?

[Dillon] (: 11:56

And you could say the same for a company. Yeah, yeah. Sales and product really well aligned.

CS is left out in the cold. Okay. How about a tough customer situation?

Do you have any examples, either one of you, raise your hand, where you can explain what happened and how you resolved it? And we can break that down into what parts of that were people-oriented, more psychological, and what parts were more task-oriented or systems-oriented?

[JP] (: 12:37

I have one in mind. So let's say in the past, I had a customer, and around the time when I sort of first started at this particular job, your typical sort of freakout situation sort of started where we got messages at the end of the day. This is the customer globally.

So we got messages at the end of the day, me and their sales rep responded at the same time. So there's one sort of point. So this customer might've gotten a certain idea when they get two emails within a certain time, but it's also probably because it's the end of the day.

So we're both probably trying to be like, oh, let me respond to this before I'm out.

[Dillon] (: 13:21

I log off, yeah.

[JP] (: 13:22

Yeah. And so what happened was when I came back to work in the morning, there was a bunch of more email exchanges. This problem had escalated because apparently it was some sort of critical thing.

And let's say that this customer did not have a certain level of service where somebody can just hop on a call or they would need to pay extra for that sort of solution. But let's say that them paying extra for that solution is actually more than what they're paying yearly for said service. And so we eventually decided to hop on a call after a pow-wowing.

This customer was pretty upset. There was also a language barrier and they were on top of that, uncooperative. So we'd get on a call.

So we get on a call to actually try to do everything. And what we're trying to communicate with them is that the problem is actually on their end, but they don't have the expertise or the right personas on said call. So what ends up happening is things do eventually get fixed.

But what we realized is we were talking to the wrong persona. The business persona is responsible for getting it done, resolving the issue. But the issue is technical in nature and they are not in the best communication or their technical team doesn't have the expertise to recognize this issue stemming from their side, not ours.

Let's just say that same customer a year later had the same exact issue. A little bit of everything in there. I told you I had one.

The juiciest steak I got, fellas.

[Dillon] (: 15:16

Let's say, can you point to any like people first pieces of that that you executed on? It sounds like the first one is using enough empathy to understand while they may not have paid for the service, but they're pissed off. We are going to just have to get on a call with them.

We're not going to resolve this through email.

[JP] (: 15:40

Yes, I actually had that discussion. Exactly. I had a discussion with my manager and what I didn't say was my initial reticence due to their tone and their email and everything made me reluctant to jump on a call.

And the difference in philosophy was that maybe because of how much they were paying, it wasn't necessarily worth it to sales either. But this is where CS and sales may diverge in that if I had actually hopped on the call, it might have actually stopped some of this escalation from happening. Even if it's technically not the right thing or I couldn't have solved it, I could have been a listener, listened to the issue, built the relationship.

[Dillon] (: 16:27

Well, what I'll say is a benefit to you is if that broke down, I guarantee you there's no system to track your hours and whether you're even allowed to get on the phone with that person or not. It's not like anybody was going to come laying the hammer on you later because you know that they can't. They're not tracking your activity like that.

Rob, why don't you jump in?

[Rob] (: 16:52

I'm thinking about a parallel situation. One of the trainings I'll do with teams is I'll role play as a customer or as somebody responds and they can role play as a customer and I can act as like the person responsible for retaining them. But when I'm the customer, I'll say things like, you know, it's just not worth it for me to stay a customer.

If you're a CSM, what do you do with that? Right?

[Dillon] (: 17:13

I know exactly what you do with it. What do you do with it? I'm curious.

I say, what does worth it mean to you?

[Rob] (: 17:21

Right. Right. Exactly.

[Dillon] (: 17:23

Let's break that down.

[Rob] (: 17:24

That's such a hard thing for a lot of CSMs to wrap their heads around, especially because we're all under the gun. We're trying to move quickly. And our gut reaction is just to say, yes, it is worth it.

But like, that's such an ineffective approach, right?

[Dillon] (: 17:39

Well, so you know what's interesting and I want you to get back in here. But the reason I say it that way is because I crave breaking it into Lego blocks so that I can plug it into a process or a system that I know can re-communicate value to them. Yeah.

Right. Right. Because I'm a systems thinker.

[Rob] (: 18:01

So I've worked with some really gifted systems thinkers. And one of the times this came up, geez, I don't know, probably eight years ago, we were having this big account churn. And my friend who I worked with, he like took a deep breath, went into a room to go take this cancellation call with this big customer.

He comes out of the room a half hour later and I'm like, how did it go? And he's like, oh, good. I upsold them.

I'm like, you upsold our angriest customer? And he was like, yeah, it was kind of simple, actually. Explain this to me.

And he said, he was like, so really what I did was I just unpacked what their goals are, what their needs were. I realized that the thing they were upset about is not having the client portal. And the client portal is actually an upsell.

So I introduced them to that package. They upgraded and now they're happy. That was like a really good example of like systems thinking where the customer was saying something like, you know, it's just not worth it.

This thing is like way limited in functionality. But looking at the whole system was really effective.

[Dillon] (: 19:03

Yeah. This is where I came into this entire conversation thinking, JP, no shots. But I was like, me and Rob are going to butt heads.

Like this is two different ways of moving through the world and operating. And as hard as I tried, I could not get Chachipiti to agree with me. I was like, do you think this is a good topic?

And Chachipiti, he's a very charming British man in my model. And he was like, no, they work perfectly together if you know how to do it. And I was like, no, tell me that I can win this argument against Rob.

And he was like, no, I really think you guys are. What the argument that you perceive? Well, I'm like systems thinking is so like rigid, black and white, like it's this modularized, like everything's broken.

It's almost like pixels, right? Instead of a beautiful artist painting from the Renaissance, right? It's pixels and the ability to just move them around and they all fit together.

You just got to make sure that they're in the right order. So I came into this understanding like, OK, it's not they're not actually chocolate and vanilla. One, I know, JP, I don't know why that charms you so much.

You can tell me in a second. I think what's interesting is that colleague that you were just talking about invariably had to use some psychological pieces or behavioral psychology pieces. And he had to empathize and he had to mirror the customer in certain ways during that conversation, all of which are those standard activities within psychology to then zoom out, see the larger system and help them with their issue.

But then he had to get back in there and persuade them, which is not a systems thinking. That's a psychological thing. Was he good with that stuff, too?

Was he just a preternatural CSM altogether? He's very good with that.

[Rob] (: 21:02

I mean, he was always very good at even doing that with coworkers. Like if a coworker had experienced burnout, for example, he was really good at unpacking what was going on in their overall picture of who they are and then addressing that root cause, which is beneficial to me, too, because like I work side by side with this guy for like four years. A similar example came out.

[Dillon] (: 21:26

You were burning out weekly.

[Rob] (: 21:28

Oh, yeah. I told you about Meltdown Rob.

[JP] (: 21:32

Meltdown Rob. Put that on a shirt.

[Rob] (: 21:37

You know who's another good person at this? Friend of the show. Mickey Powell sees everything in terms of the foundational principles and the overarching systems.

Mickey and I kind of, I wouldn't say buttheads, but we see things differently. We just sort of see things like I often involve myself more with the tactics. So we looked at like we were talking about a negotiation with a customer around a price increase.

I approach this like here are the talk tracks and the strategies you can use to present the logic as to why the price is going up and whatever. Mickey is like, we're going about this all wrong. The core thing here is there's this thing and there's this notion of value and like one of us perceives value at X and then one of us perceives value at Y.

And it's the same core thing, but we perceive value differently. So it's a matter of coming to alignment on this like overarching negotiation chart of where can our values align. I tried both strategies.

I found that the latter was harder for me.

[JP] (: 22:46

Sure. Yeah. I think that what the CSM did with that call is a really great example of how being attached to a certain way of thinking can limit your approach.

I'm thinking about the through line here. Like when I had that upset customer, what is the natural reaction? I want to either withdraw, pacify, hopefully not escalate.

I'm definitely not CSMing. That's something else. If we're going to escalate with an angry customer.

But it's like my framework may be either to withdraw or to try to pacify, right? Like in some or maybe some combination of the two. So this person went in, there's an upset customer.

When I go in that situation, I'm not necessarily thinking about, oh, this is an opportunity to upsell, right? So how would that drive my conversation differently, right? Versus your person who went in to talk to them.

If I'm not mistaken, at least I was reading about systems thinking, it really can help to get us maybe outside of our blind spots. If we're too caught in the weeds, that implies that maybe there's some blind spots, things that we don't see, possibilities that we just don't see. Going in and being able to talk to someone and recognize, hey, we're going to solve a problem.

You are upset. I am not going to take you at your word. When you said, Dillon, when someone says, we just don't value this, what did you say?

You said your tendency is to do what? Ask like, okay, well, let's break it down. Let's talk about it.

I think if you're willing to have those conversations, then we can get behind what we are initially presented with. This is the connection to the fluffy curiosity thing we talk about in customer success. If you take everything at face value and you work with things the way that you've always worked with them, you kind of limit the way you can approach things.

If you go into things more like, there's an issue, let me see what we can solve. You may not just save churn, you may actually end up getting an upsell. Something that I took in terms of the way that I want to handle my customers more.

Instead of just seeing the dissatisfaction as this ugly thing that I need to quash and tamp down or be like, oh, they're a forfeit customer. Why don't I get curious about what the issue is? We may have something that can actually help them solve this.

[Dillon] (: 25:24

During that explanation, JP, I had this thought or this gut reaction. I mean, look, I think systems thinking is the truth, right? But I know that's not fair.

That's just my reality in the way I perceive things. In the situation that Rob posed, I'm trying to think of an alternative to breaking down the customer's sentiment. Either ticked off about something, that guy went in there and really tried to understand it.

I'm trying to think of an alternative because what if you go in there and the customer's like, yo, dude, I do not want to talk to you. I hate your product. I think it sucks.

And like the surface level answer is like, OK, well, you got to empathize with them and blah, blah, blah. But like I'm trying to think if there's like a third alternative that doesn't turn you into the fight or flight that you were talking about, JP, I just got to like I got to solve the problem I have here today, which is the customer is screaming in my face. Is there or do we agree that you've got to reach a point with a customer where they're willing to explain themselves to you?

[Rob] (: 26:39

I'm not sure you have to. I was using a system recently. We were building like a churn flow that would try to win customers back at the point of churn.

And you've probably seen similar things with like canceling Amazon. They throw everything and the kitchen sink at you to try to retain you. What if we give you this?

What if we give you that? What if we give you a lot of systems do that? They're not attuned to your needs.

They're just like scattershot approach. They're like, let's just try everything and see if one of these things sticks. And, you know, oftentimes they do, you know, maybe it is, for example.

Oh, okay. If I get one free month on Amazon Prime, then I'll stay fine. I'll reconsider, but it's not connecting to why.

So there is an alternative approach, just like a solution forward approach. I don't, I just don't think it's typically as effective in like B2B SaaS environments.

[Dillon] (: 27:39

That just happened to me. I was trying to build a chatbot for something and it turned out it wasn't what I needed. And it was very expensive.

And so I tried to cancel and they were like, do you want 50% off? Like it was the next screen after I clicked the cancellation button. And I was like, what?

Like, I don't, you don't even know why I'm. And so I think they try to nuance this slightly by asking, like, well, why are you canceling? And if the reason is it's too expensive, then they'll offer a discount.

Or if you don't understand it, then they'll offer a call with somebody. Like if the system is too hard for you to get stood up. I think this is a place where AI can provide a lot of value in the near future.

If you've got enough, like conversational or usage or any other contextual data to dump in. So AI probably has some menu of options that tie back to certain context and sentiment that it can help guide you through the different options. I thought that's the direction you were going to go, Rob.

[Rob] (: 28:48

No, no, but it's a good one. It's a good one. I think where I'm getting stuck is like even saying offering a discount presupposes that your issue is price.

And your issue being price presupposes that exactly, exactly. There's like layers to this onion, right? Price is just like the outer layer of the onion.

But if you really get to the core, there's something so much deeper, which is your perceived value.

[Dillon] (: 29:18

I actually think of it more like an algebraic equation, which is values on one side and it should equal price on the other side. It should be greater than or equal to price on the other side. They are not the same thing.

And I think Ed Powers brought this up on our show. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he did. JP, you look like you had a revelation in the middle of this.

You got anything to add there?

[JP] (: 29:49

Not that I can quite put it into words.

[Dillon] (: 29:53

Oh, wow. JP, speechless.

[JP] (: 29:57

Yeah, I mean, yeah, some things take a little, gotta digest that a little bit.

[Dillon] (: 30:04

I want to go back to a point, Rob, that you made just really quickly. And then this idea of all the playbooks and the scripts you wanted to create for a negotiation, pricing, maybe it was also related to churn. I have always been fascinated with the PLG motion.

Can I just send them to a page, to a webpage, and they'll do this? I don't want to negotiate. Can't we turn this into some formula, some step-by-step thing where they say exactly what they need and I can build them a system that gives them exactly what they need for the price that makes sense and still meets my margins?

That's just how my brain works. Even if I had to negotiate, if the PLG wasn't available, that's what I would want to do is I'd want to create a playbook that did that.

[JP] (: 30:54

One of the things I'm thinking about as you say that, Dillon, is throwing out the it depends thing that we say all the time. It doesn't resist us. How much are they paying?

I find that the conversations people are willing to have usually have to deal with in some form or fashion how much they're paying. It's not always the case, but depending on the product, if someone's paying a lot for your product relative maybe to their budget, like you're one of their business critical things, maybe the PLG motion maybe isn't as good. They're going to require more of that in their approach, but I also think that it can come down to persona.

I work with a lot of people in the data science field, and so the data scientists themselves tend to have a certain persona. They just want things to work and to go in. They're not necessarily interested in getting deeper into their work, improving their workflow.

Their whole way of thinking may be just to maintain. So when you say the PLG motion, I agree. I think that is definitely work in some areas where for some folks, I don't want to hop on a call with Netflix.

I may really value my Netflix, but I would probably get more value if there was a simple way to address my stuff, but maybe not just a bot. Maybe I need a service level higher than just pure automation. Not that I'm calling anything out that we don't know, but just that sense of people tend to have the conversations.

We're willing to have them based upon the money they're paying and the value that they attribute to whatever the service or product is.

[Dillon] (: 32:42

It's funny though. You think about when I played video games and they started getting pricier and I would, or even like the console itself. So think about like you buy a console, it's 400 bucks, 500 bucks, something like that.

And you buy two games with it. They're like 60 bucks a pop. I know they're more now.

They're like 70, 75 now. Let's even say that. So it's total is $650 for a console and two games.

But I could play a video game for a hundred hours. So that ends up being 75 cents an hour of like enriching entertainment. Maybe I also have a internet connection and I pay for the online version of the game.

And so maybe like you even add in like an extra hundred bucks a month, but the amount of entertainment you get out of it and social connection is such that it's one of, I have found one of the most economical uses of entertainment. Netflix is the same thing. Like how there are thousands of hours of content and now games as well on Netflix that you can get for what?

12 bucks a month. Well, like 16 or 17, but still, still, still, it's right for the, like that level of value is so insane that like, you would think you would want somebody to get on the phone with you. But what they've done is they've made it so easy for you to manage it.

And it is such a seamless experience that you don't need it. It's funny how you consider the value of your time. You don't want to, you don't want to pay over $20 for Netflix.

That's absurd, right? But the actual economies of the value you're getting are insane. You know, it's interesting.

[Rob] (: 34:48

You're mentioning, implicitly, you're mentioning things that disturb the equation that you shared before a little bit.

[Dillon] (: 34:54

Yeah.

[Rob] (: 34:55

I think, for example, you just mentioned like a price increase, basically. Like what if they were to increase prices to 25 bucks? We would feel pretty irritated.

Only because we've got this anchor around the value already. And then another thing that influences your perception of that value is like what your alternatives are. Your alternatives could be Hulu.

They could be Pajango. They could be you doing nothing too. They could be you reading a book, right?

[JP] (: 35:29

Horrible. No, not poo-pooing books.

[Rob] (: 35:34

But it's very interesting if you, if you, if you kind of, if you as the consumer categorize, sure, you could look at the streaming space, but you could also look at the overall entertainment space.

[Dillon] (: 35:45

Yeah.

[Rob] (: 35:48

And that f***ed up the whole equation. Pardon my French. Oui, oui.

[Dillon] (: 35:57

Guys, let's close it out. I want to bring it back to systems thinking and psychology. And I want to see if you guys have any suggestions for ways in which folks can make a small shift towards bringing psychology and systems thinking together.

You guys have any suggestions for ways people can make a change maybe this week, this month to incorporate the two of those harmoniously?

[JP] (: 36:30

Maybe. I think the first step, I now just say, I think this is a great small thing as a first step that I think would really benefit me is taking off the negative context of problem or difficulty.

[Dillon] (: 36:47

So it's not something to run away from.

[JP] (: 36:50

Yes. Because I think that if I have an issue with something, let's say something a little bit more mechanical, I feel like weirdly, I tend to have more empathy around it, oddly, because I'm like, oh, there's an issue here. This thing isn't charged.

Or maybe something's disconnected. Or I start asking all these questions, whereas a lot of times in customer success, we're dealing with people. When there's a problem that comes up, the hesitation could be because it's like, okay, here we go.

Here's one of the difficult parts of the job. And instead, just learn to look at these things, especially the more difficult they are to really just be like, yes, this is a problem. And that does not mean that we cannot come to a positive solution.

I'll just say that I think I'm guilty of a lot running into situations where I am just like, I do not see how this could work. I don't quite know what we could do. And that really limits my ability to contribute to whatever I'm doing with someone.

And then I'll see someone else come in, maybe a more senior CSM or somebody. And all of a sudden, they were able to find a problem. How were they able to do that?

I think some of it has to do with the way that we learn to approach problems and difficult things.

[Rob] (: 38:21

Rob, how about you? I think similar related to what JP was saying. I feel like at least once a day, try to practice the five whys.

You guys heard of this before? Of course. Right.

Yeah. Basically, try going layers deep into the problems that you're solving or that your customers are trying to solve, where everything from the interaction where a customer is canceling saying, I just don't see the value. Well, why?

Well, it's just not really worth it. Why? It's a lot of effort.

Why? Because our people are really resistant and they're burned out. If you keep going layers deeper, you can become such a better problem solver.

It's not only that. It's even just like to how you wake up and take yourself to work in the morning. It's like, I mean, the interaction, I think I may have told you guys about was like my nephew, he's at that stage where he's like asking why, why, why?

And he's like, you know, he wants to play. And I'm like, I can't. He's like, why?

So you got to work. Why? Because I got to make money.

Why? Because if I don't, I'm not going to feel like I have any self-worth. It's actually an interesting thing to do deliberately before you start your day.

Why am I taking myself to work today? What am I going for here? Is it just a paycheck?

Okay.

[Dillon] (: 39:42

Right. What is that chief? To me, it's brushing your teeth and just screaming why into the mirror.

Why? Exactly. But I think, Rob, to your point, the five whys is super crucial to dig deeper and to not take things at face value.

Because my suggestion was going to be in asking yourself, is this a system or a people issue? So you can do that as a individual contributor. Let's say you're going into a one-on-one with your leader and you have an issue or an update you want to offer up.

Or maybe you're building a playbook as an individual contributor. You're working on a special project. You might want to create steps in a playbook that can have prompts for considering both the people side of it and the systems side of it.

And if you're a leader, if in your stand-up meetings with your team, if they're bringing escalations to you or you're reviewing escalations that have occurred, help them understand the difference between what was a people issue and what was a system issue. And start to ingrain it in your culture, understanding the difference between the two things.

[JP] (: 40:57

Yeah. Let's not have a system of a dare. Let's have a system of a nut.

[Dillon] (: 41:01

And if that's not a great way to end this, I don't know what is. Boys, there was our very first long-form episode in celebration of one year.

[JP] (: 41:19

No chop suey, baby.

[Dillon] (: 41:20

Of The Daily Standup. No chop suey. That's a deep cut reference.

Thanks. All right. Hey, if you like this, guys, tell us what you think.

Shoot us a DM on LinkedIn. You know where to find us. Leave us comments anywhere you can.

We'll find them. Shoot us an email at hello at LifetimeValueMedia.com. We love you.

We'll talk to you soon. Peace. JP with the power fist.

[VO] (: 42:01

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