Value value value | Keishla Ceaser-Jones

[Keishla] (0:00 - 0:19)

We hold conversations with partners and we talk about the data that we have. And most of the time, the data that we have for our products is engagement data. We know how they're using our product, but that's not value.

That's engagement data. How are we then translating engagement data into KPIs that are about the customer and what data matters to them?

[Dillon] (0:28 - 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 Rob with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

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

Bienvenidos, Lifers.

[Dillon] (0:42 - 0:46)

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

[JP] (0:47 - 0:48)

Hola, como estas?

[Dillon] (0:49 - 0:55)

I'm not sure I'm following. And we have Keishla with us. Keishla, can you say hi, please?

[Keishla] (0:55 - 0:58)

Hello. I didn't know we were being bilingual today.

[Dillon] (0:58 - 1:10)

I didn't either. I'm not. Sometimes I don't get the memo and I think it's on purpose.

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

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Keishla] (1:10 - 1:42)

Thanks for having me. My name is Keishla Ceaser-Jones. My pronouns are she, her.

I'm a managing director for partner success at EAB. We're a organization focused on helping students K through 20 find their best life path both in college and career. I work and lead a partner success team who is focused on supporting partners who leverage digital immersive experiences to support their marketing and enrollment efforts in the higher education space.

Been with EAB. Today is my three-year anniversary. I just woke up, I was like, oh, today's the day I started.

[JP] (1:43 - 1:45)

Wow, okay, yay.

[Keishla] (1:45 - 2:05)

Prior to that, I've been working in ed tech. I'm a former educator as well with a background in sales and sales management. So I've just evolved on this continuum of loving learning and life and educating and building that in a way that sort of reveals itself in a different capacity as a customer success leader.

So great to meet you all.

[Dillon] (2:06 - 2:19)

Keishla, no shots whatsoever, actually the exact opposite, but it sounds like you've said all that before because it was so clear and so informative. And you're gonna tell me you've never done it before, don't you?

[Keishla] (2:19 - 2:25)

In that exact way, no. I think that I don't have that memorized script or anything like that, but I understand who I am.

[JP] (2:26 - 2:38)

Ooh. Unlike me, if that's what it is. Woof.

Tap that boy, bro, just tap that dildo back right there. Keishla, dildo, dildo, dildo, dildo.

[Keishla] (2:38 - 2:55)

I'm always working to figure it out, right? And continue to adjust and change. I think if you look at my LinkedIn profile, my tagline, which has been my tagline on my LinkedIn profile for 20 plus years is human, thinker, learner, and educator.

That's how I show up first each and every day.

[Dillon] (2:57 - 3:14)

Okay, with that in mind, Keishla, we do one thing here and one thing only, and that is we ask every single guest one simple question. What is on your mind when it comes to customer success or partner success? So can you please tell us what that is for you?

[Keishla] (3:15 - 3:43)

Wow, what's been cooking for me for several months and manifesting itself in a couple of different ways is value, value, value. Value realization is my topic of the day, both not just for my customers, my partners, but for my team. How am I delivering value as a leader to them with my strategies and the tools and resources that I provide with them?

And how are we able to communicate the value and return on investment to our partners for the tools that we provide them?

[Dillon] (3:43 - 4:30)

So that's been the hot topic. I don't know when it was, whether it was my short and doomed stint in sales and the WFM model, or more recently with customer success and this idea of value in every interaction. That's how you get the most out of people.

That's how you get the most out of interactions is by bringing value. But I can't not think about it now when I'm trying to get something accomplished. It's like, well, did I bring enough value in order for that to happen?

So Keisha, the reason I say that is because I wanna know, you could take it in any direction about how you think about it. So what is it specifically, or maybe a few ways in which you're thinking about value? And is it, how do I provide more?

Is it, am I always providing value? Or what is it for you?

[Keishla] (4:31 - 7:02)

So I think there's a couple of different things. One, obviously most present for our partners, they purchase a tool that is meant to deliver on some particular value props, right? And it's making sure that we are really aligned in where our tool does its best work in response to our partner's greatest needs.

I have two products that I support. One of them, we did a lot of work a year or so ago of just moving away from a lot of open-ended goal, what are your goals? And we say, our product supports these core areas of these core areas, what's important to you?

And so like really shortening the conversation and get to what matters most and then provide playbooks and actions then in engagements that are gonna support you moving to those goals. So we've been doing some of that work. In another instance, we've been having customers who say, I know this tool that I'm using, I get it.

It's important, I need it. But I don't really know if it's valuable, if it's returning my investment. And so we've been doing some work recently to make a shift.

I think for a while, we hold conversations with partners and we talk about the data that we have. And most of the time, the data that we have for our products is engagement data. We know how they're using our product, but that's not value, that's engagement data.

How are we then translating engagement data into KPIs that are about the customer and what data matters to them? And oftentimes there's a gap between the data you have and the data they have and how do you get them to either give it to you, share it with you or talk about it in a way that is oriented to your product. And then the final stage, I think, of value realization conversations is around return on investment.

So how are we shifting from that product usage focus? Like I can tell you how well you're using it, how many buttons you're clicking, how many resources you're using, that's not value. How is it solving your problems?

We talked about this at a recent conference. How is it improving your sales? Not me, the vendor, but the customer, how is it improving your sales, improving your efficiency, reducing your cost, improving your customer CSAT scores, whatever that might be that they're measuring based on how they're using the product.

And then how do they quantify value? So in our instance, our partners quantify value from a student that's interested in going to college, starts to look at their campus and goes from looking to applying to being admitted to showing up in school.

[Dillon] (7:03 - 7:03)

Lead conversion.

[Keishla] (7:04 - 8:11)

Right, so that's the value. How do I move along that continuum? And so we started to do some work around trying to quantify that of the number of leads our tool generates and how many of those that they can attribute to moving throughout the funnel.

And it does require some assumptions to be made, but we then framed that, not in a metric that's about how many I generate for you, how many the tool generates for you, but how much that student in seat generates for you in tuition dollars in a metric that matters to the customer. And so I think that has been an aha moment for us this past year. We're starting to use the tools to some pretty great effect.

We've used it first in some risk situations to try to re-establish value. I mean, it was really developed first as a risk response tool. And now we're moving to put it as a part of our, like where's the right place in the customer journey that we should be integrating this?

Just yesterday, I was talking with another team and it's like, how do we then start to layer in that at the kickoff? It felt like a little bit of a backward thing, but we're building in that way.

[Dillon] (8:12 - 8:41)

All of that is possible with the very first thing you talked about, which is segmenting or stratifying the ways in which they can find value from your system. Don't leave it open-ended, make it literally a pick list in Salesforce or whatever, because that can then impact all of those downstream activities you just talked about. It's like, well, if lead conversion is the most important thing, or ROI is the most important thing, then this should be their talk track.

This should be their journey versus all of those other.

[Keishla] (8:41 - 9:03)

Exactly. A lot of times we start like really wide up here and then we're hearing about goals that maybe our product has nothing to do with, or maybe it's tangential or side and then you end up working really hard to try to solve some problem that was never part of the original value prop. So how do you get really focused?

Like you said, that pick list, really refined. This is what we do and this is where we're gonna spend our work.

[Dillon] (9:03 - 9:04)

Perfect. JP, why don't you jump in?

-: 10:53

Ooh, this is quite the double-dutch to jump in. There's a lot being laid down, Keesh. There's a lot you laid down there.

I don't know. I do really like what you said in the beginning about knowing where the areas that you provide, because we can't provide value every which way, right? There are gonna be some core areas where you provide value and I think that's also part of knowing your product.

It's part of knowing your product. If you don't, you're not understanding your product, then I think this is where we start to get maybe a bit vague. So I think that's a really good call out.

So I wanna express that. I think that the other things that I thought about, I think we've definitely had this conversation a few times, which is when we can't get, you said it perfectly, like engagement data, that's not necessarily where you're getting value. So how do we get people to give us that correct data?

I think this is where CSMs can bring a lot of value because we're able to have that conversation. And I think one of the hurdles that I've encountered in the past sometimes is I don't wanna say political, but maybe it's bureaucratic hesitations that some people may have where they don't wanna tell you about all the value they're getting from their product because they're thinking about negotiating in the future. And so there's this conflict of like, how much do I tell you?

It's like, do I trust that you're gonna help me or that you're gonna be like, wow, you're getting millions of revenue versus from this product. We should be charging you a lot more money. Like I can see this, maybe conflict that happens, but I don't know, Rob, what do you think?

You got some- No, you bring up a good point.

[Rob] (: 10:53

Value is elusive. Value is difficult because it varies on the customer segment. It varies on the persona within each given customer, right?

Like I'm thinking about a time, we talk a lot about multi-threading within client organizations. And I'm thinking about a time I remember this guy bought our software and he was like, literally said, I could lick the screen. And I was like, that's weird, but okay.

And then I thought that would trickle down through his whole organization. And it turns out his people just said, look, we don't like this thing. We just wanna keep the boss happy.

We just wanna keep, you know, we just frankly- Cause he's out here licking screens. We can't predict what he's gonna do next. So someone said to me, look, value to me is I just keep my boss happy.

Maybe I get a raise at the end of the day or something like that. But like, I just wanna keep my job. And I was like, wow, that's a really interesting value narrative that I am actually not central to.

The other thing that's elusive is like value changes over time too. Like I remember one company I was at, customers would buy our software saying, we wanna grow and we wanna make millions of dollars next year and we wanna be an industry leader and we wanna be cloud-based and secure and whatever. And the next thing they're like, value for us is this document needs to look the way that I expect it to look.

This software needs to function the way I expect it to function. All those big lofty goals we talked about before, yeah, sure, they're value, but they don't matter right now. Right now I have angry clients.

I need to get this document out the door. I need the software to work. And they're like, stop talking to me about these big picture lofty goals.

I don't want your QBR. I just need these documents to work.

[Keishla] (: 12:29

So it's kind of challenging to document that over time, but it is- Yeah, but to Jean-Pierre's point, number one, you have to know what your product does. And if your product doesn't support those big lofty goals, then you're really wasting your time having those conversations. I think to the question of how do you get the data?

I think you have to build in the narrative from the very start that this is necessary. This is a part of us understanding how you're experiencing the journey. I think it's a whole different thing to try to get it after you've been in play.

You're gonna have to find ways to rebuild into these conversations. And one of the things that we try to lean into is that whole notion of a partnership. I mean, how do you move from a vendor to a partner status?

And that does require trust and accountability with one another. And maybe it means they don't give you the data. Maybe it just means I ask you to come to the meeting equipped with the data so that we can have an informed conversation.

It doesn't always have to be a transfer. It's just that I'm not gonna have you come to these strategic meetings that we're having with one another in these strategic engagements and just sit and get. This is us working together and being collaborative.

And so I think it starts with knowing what data you need and why you need it, and then asking.

[Dillon] (: 13:39

I love it, Keishla. That is our time. It shouldn't have been a surprise to me that you so eloquently weaved this storyline of value.

I love it. Would love for you to come back in the future and expound even further, but for now we do have to say goodbye.

[Keishla] (: 13:56

No worries. Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Thanks for letting me chop it up with you.

[VO] (: 14:04

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 inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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