Under the gun | Chad Horenfeldt

[Chad] (0:00 - 0:14)

How you operate within your organization. If you want to have a career, if you want to actually last in that organization for a period of time, think about how you can actually fix the problems, gather up the information, gather the data and work through that.

[Dillon] (0:23 - 0:39)

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?

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

[Rob] (0:40 - 0:41)

How you doing?

[Dillon] (0:42 - 0:45)

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

[Chad] (0:46 - 0:49)

Sure.

Hello. Good morning. Good afternoon.

And good evening.

[Dillon] (0:49 - 0:56)

Just cover all the bases. And I'm your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Chad, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Chad] (0:57 - 1:28)

Sure. Hey everyone. My name is Chad Horenfeldt.

I'm currently the VP of customer success at a startup called Sienna AI, where this autonomous AI agent that helps and responds to help desk tickets, very advanced technology, and this AI autonomous platform and just changing how help desks and the CX industry operates today. So, and besides that, I've just, I've been in fast customer success for many, many years, probably too many years and really excited to be chatting with you guys today.

[Dillon] (1:28 - 1:29)

Do you want to mention the book?

[Chad] (1:30 - 2:08)

Yes. Yeah. So I've, I've written a book.

It's taken me a fair amount of time, but it is called the strategic customer success manager, and it's literally, I'm in the midst of formatting it right now, got a really big launch team that's eager to read the book. And it's, you know, I think it's been getting very good buzz. Some people have been able to see the full version of it.

And I'm really excited. It's just a matter of like, for me, I've always learned from books and just reading and knowledge and love to hear others in the industry, what they have to say about customer success. I've taken a lot of that and just put it all with my limited knowledge and put it into this book.

[Dillon] (2:09 - 2:18)

Love it. Love it. Well, hopefully we can talk about it some more, but everybody go check it out, depending on when this publishes.

What is your, what is the publish date you're expecting, Chad?

[Chad] (2:18 - 2:35)

Yeah, I originally, it was the end of June. I think there's going to be a limited release, but I think it's going to get moved into July just because I want to make sure I do it right. But you can go to strategic customer success and just sign up and get updates and join the launch team, join the fun.

[Dillon] (2:37 - 2:51)

Strategiccustomersuccess.com looks like, right? Yes. All right, Chad.

Well, 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? Can you tell us what that is for you?

[Chad] (2:52 - 3:57)

Yeah, I'd say like right now, I think it's that customer success managers are really under the gun, they're stressed out, there's a lot on their plate and I don't think they're really given a lot of training tools, knowledge, and a lot of them are stuck, but they don't really know exactly what to do. I think there's a lot of stuff that's out there that's guiding them, but they really need help and what I, what I'm trying to do is really help them either. I was doing it one-on-one, but I found that there's probably a better way of doing that.

Write a book? Yeah. Oh, that's, that's a good idea.

But, but truthfully, truthfully, like, I mean, I could have the, it's called the strategic customer success manager, but it could really be called like how Chad screwed up and how not to do that. And it's a, it's a lot of stories, which I think is profound. A lot of like stupid references, Star Wars, games of thrones, all sorts of other stuff.

But it's, you know, this isn't the funnest thing to do on a daily basis. Although I enjoy it, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's fun. But if there's things that can help us make things better, then I think everyone's all for that.

[Dillon] (3:58 - 4:27)

Yeah. Make it interesting, tie it into things that are exciting to us. I think also, for me, what I found was zooming out, zooming out made it a little more exciting for me and understanding I was, I was an integral part of the operations of a business and many businesses was a lot of fun.

and also privileged. There's a lot of privilege in that. JP, my resident book reader, how many books are you currently reading right now?

Is it over 10? I want to hear what you have to say about this.

[JP] (4:28 - 4:39)

No, no, no. My current readership is down to, I think, five. So no, not 10.

Yeah, that sounds crazy. That's impressive. Yeah, that's a trick question.

You tricked me.

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

It was.

[JP] (4:39 - 4:39)

You tricked me.

[Rob] (4:39 - 4:40)

It was.

[JP] (4:40 - 5:17)

I didn't. That was good. You cut it by half.

I know, I know, okay. So on this, Chad, I totally hear you on, of course, I love to read, and I primarily read nonfiction. So usually, I am reading with the purpose to learn, even if the book is not necessarily academic.

I will say, when I was first getting into Customer Success, of course, the first thing I said was, okay, where are the books? And so I, or I guess they're not in my room, so I can't see them, but they're on my bookshelf. And, you know, I think the Customer Success Professional, I think, I think I might add.

[Chad] (5:18 - 5:18)

Yeah, the handbook.

[JP] (5:18 - 6:07)

Yeah, the handbook. There's a couple of the ones that sort of everyone talks about, and I'm gonna make an admission, I never finished a single one of those books. I certainly read into them.

I probably got, I think the furthest I might've got was the Customer Success Professionals Handbook. I think that's the full title. I think I got about halfway through that.

But there were some really good books from people that I was reading. But I think that those books I think I got, they probably, Customer Success is changing so fast. I guess one of the things I am thinking about is, when you, you know, in writing this book, trying to share your knowledge, sort of what was your thought process behind making what you share sort of like last?

Like, you know, that it's a book that's not gonna get outdated in three or four years.

[Chad] (6:08 - 7:24)

Yeah, definitely not talking about AI. That was the number one. But I do talk about it a little bit.

But you know, to be serious, there's just different methods that people can be using that will help them improve. So just as an example, when I talk about like a CSM versus strategic CSM, I kind of break it down like three things. So the first thing is that you're not just focused on your products, you're focused on your customer's business and really understanding their business, understanding what they do.

I listened to your podcast with Boaz, and Boaz was just talking about that. Like when he gets the first call, he like really understands the business and he like talked to his like peers and learns about the industry. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is not just focusing on product adoption. And so like knowing like just metrics and trends and all these things, but knowing about the business outcomes, like what is your customer trying to do? And then the third thing, and maybe the most controversial, is that it's not just being customer centric, but it's being company and customer centric.

And what I mean by that is not just worrying about your customer, but also thinking about how you're perceived within your organization, like how you treat people. And so a good example of this is if you go on LinkedIn, there's literally like 30 posts about how someone in customer success hates sales and you know, just bashing sales, bashing product, bashing HR even, like whoever.

[Dillon] (7:24 - 7:25)

Never heard that.

[Chad] (7:25 - 8:52)

And let me tell you, that is not good for your career. If you go around bashing teams and you do this like internally, like you feel that it, you know, listen, sales is gonna oversell. Someone, a sales leader told me this very early on.

Sales is gonna oversell and engineers are gonna introduce bugs. Like it's, that's like death and taxes in SaaS and customer success. And you can obviously improve that, but bashing your team members is not gonna help you.

And when I talk about it in the book about being strategic, you have to think about how you operate within your organization. If you wanna have a career, if you wanna actually last in that organization for a period of time, think about how you can actually fix the problems, gather up the information, gather the data, and then work through that. And I think that on top of those like three main things, I'd say that I've put in like actual things to accomplish these things.

So it's not just, you know, like you see a lot of things like, you know, you have to get business outcomes. How do we get business outcomes? Like there's no, it's like saying, how does it, you know, break it down.

Maybe Rob does that if you pay for one of Rob's courses and stuff, but I know you, I know Rob handles this, so I'm not worried about Rob, but the typical person doesn't know how to do those things. And in fact, one of the reasons that I wrote the book is that I didn't even know how best to conduct a conversation with a customer when I get into a sticky situation. And, you know, I'm sure by the podcast so far, you guys would probably agree to that.

[Dillon] (8:52 - 9:00)

Rob doesn't. Rob's got six different frameworks for deescalating and he's got it all figured out. So Rob, why don't you tell us one of them.

-: 10:21

You ready? So my notes, I realize my notes are all alliteration. So strategy.

Chad, I'm the biggest cynic that you've ever converted on the point of strategy. Dillon, one of our first conversations was me just venting about the misuse of, and the vagueness of the term strategy and customer success. Because sometimes strategic means enterprise.

Sometimes strategic means proactive. Sometimes it means consultative. Sometimes it means commercial.

And those are all different things. And I talked to a CEO once. She's like, look, don't ever let my support team believe that what they're doing is not strategic.

Because it is. It's just a different part of the strategy. And so I never really liked this term strategic until I remember, Chad, I sat in a presentation you gave and I was like, damn, this guy's got it figured out.

So you had me with strategy. You had me with struggle. You had me with stories.

You had me with stupid references. You had me with sticky situation. We're all in a sticky situation here, Chad.

But I have nothing but the utmost gratitude for the work you've done in helping define the term and advance the industry on that basis. And especially pulling the voices from the community that have helped make this a reality. So I'm here in your corner, super excited for what you're releasing.

[Chad] (: 10:22

No, I appreciate that. And just to like talk about that. So I look at it from this guy, Rumlet, who's like, he wrote a number of books on strategy.

And like, just to break it down, like we're talking about strategy and strategic. I agree. I think that support is strategic.

It's understanding what the biggest challenge is, focusing on what the priorities, like the goals, and essentially these are the outcomes. And then the last thing that everyone forgets, it's like, it's not just about uncovering the problems and then understanding what the goals are. It's actually the execution, like actually doing the work and making sure it gets done.

And so, if we talk about, let's say a QBR, which I destroy in the book a bit, but where it comes down to it is like, you can have an amazing meeting with a client, right? You go through these slides and everything's perfect. And then you get off the meeting and you have to have these action items and then nothing gets done, nothing happens.

And I think that's the biggest challenge is that, it's a matter of like getting things done, execution, getting your customer to actually do the work. And so on that front, like where I go down and I think where it's extremely helpful, probably the most helpful, is how to conduct these conversations. I have a framework called the AORUS framework.

And so I think everyone knows we should be asking open questions, but how to do things like reflections, how to ask those follow-up questions, the type of questions to ask, how to summarize things. It's really all about influence and how do you influence a customer to take action? And even someone internally, like how do you help them?

How do you manage up to your boss? Those are key things that will make you strategic. And I'd say the last part, and this is based on psychological frameworks that psychologists, therapists use, something called motivational interviewing, where you can ask a question from one to 10, how motivated are you to act on what we've discussed on this particular thing?

And then the second thing is like, how prepared are you to act on it? And by asking some qualification questions there, you kind of qualify them and just to understand like, okay, we've talked about these things, but do you actually care about this? Thinking that we went through these things and you're looking for, well, I'm motivated, but maybe I'm not confident.

And maybe they just need some additional training or you just maybe didn't explain it very well. And so these are some of the techniques that I really wanna help the CSM so we don't just get into a call and we say to the customer, all right, well, what do you wanna talk about? The customer's like, oh, I got this problem.

And then you automatically go into like very tactical crap that's good and you're gonna be a helper. But again, where we are today, you can no longer just be a helper, right? You have to be up at that next level.

You need to be essentially strategic and guide your customer to the right direction. So that's really where I wanna help the CSM and I think where you have to go. And to kind of like make it timeless is like focusing on those core constructs and then mentioning in the book, okay, well, here's where AI can really help you.

So as an example, there's a chapter on productivity because if you're not more productive, you can't be strategic. They go hand in hand. And so even like on LinkedIn, cause things are changing so rapidly, you can actually download your ICS file if you use Google Calendar, and then you can upload it to chat to BT and say to it, go over the last three months and tell me which meetings I should cancel, which meetings are not that effective just based on your analysis, who I'm meeting too often with and maybe who are some people I haven't met with and should meet with. And it'll be shocking like some of the assessments like, oh, I met with this client like every week, I really shouldn't be doing that.

And you could even tie it in with your account data and then have some real magic happen. So that's kind of where using AI, but thinking in the same timeless terms of like business outcomes, driving value, understanding their business, and then thinking about being strategic within your company, those are like, will always be important. And so that's what I'm hoping will come out of all of this.

[Dillon] (: 14:22

I had a revelation during this conversation, Chad, partly from you, Rob, partly from you, sorry, JP, around this whole strategy thing, which is the phrase I am reminded of, it's not what you say, it's what you do. And I think a lot of CSMs walk into a customer meeting for the first time they're being introduced, and they say, I'm gonna be your strategic advisor. And they think that that engenders a level of like trust and equity, but then they never do the work and put all these pieces together that you're talking about, Chad.

And that's, Rob, to what you were saying of like, it's all strategy. The only way it can not be strategic is if the activities don't build upon this larger vision and plan. In which case, that's not, you may not even realize that.

So like the word strategic sort of doesn't even mean anything until you look back and measure what has been accomplished. Strategic means nothing forward thinking. It's all about the activities you do and what they result in.

Chad, that is our time. I know you've got to jump. So I wanna be respectful of that.

I would love for you to come back in a couple of months once this thing has launched and let's talk about what the experience has been like, maybe what you learned from it or where you're heading after that. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Chad] (: 15:51

All right, thank you so much. That was great. It was a lot of fun.

[VO] (: 15:59

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