Share the wealth | Sara Bochino

[Sara] (0:00 - 0:22)

It's like, oh, well, here's what I think the customer is doing. And then your product team comes up and goes, nope, this is actually what the customer is doing. And we made it really hard on ourselves to actually understand what the heck our customers are doing and how they're using our platforms.

And as a result, it's just like this wheel of death. And we've done it to ourselves.

[VO] (0:30 - 0:32)

Are you ready for this? Are you ready?

[Dillon] (0:32 - 0:46)

You guys 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?

[JP] (0:46 - 0:47)

Yo.

[Dillon] (0:50 - 1:03)

And we have, oh God, we have, I don't know what the, I know what it was, but nobody will know what that was. It was terrible. We have Sarah with, Sarah, can you please say hi?

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

Hi, everyone. I can't talk JP's intro.

[Dillon] (1:07 - 1:20)

You didn't want to try to one-up that? And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

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

[Sara] (1:21 - 1:49)

Yeah, sure. So again, I can't talk JP's intro, but yeah, I'm currently, I'm a customer success advocate, executive, you know, Lifer, if you will, at this point, and currently working at Balboa Solutions as a consultant for fractional ownership. Yep.

Rocky Balboa. And Balboa Solutions is Pundo.io's first certified partner. So we are the first partner in the ecosystem, which we're excited to say.

[Dillon] (1:51 - 2:22)

Very cool. Very exciting. And yes, that is who JP was trying to impersonate in his introduction.

There just weren't enough syllables for you to get there. I trust that you could have JP, but you just, you had a small amount of time, small window of opportunity. Anyway, Sarah, thank you so much for suffering through that.

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?

[Sara] (2:23 - 2:34)

Yes, right now I am honing in on software strategy and how we've just kind of done ourselves a disservice. So let me lay some groundwork if that's okay.

[JP] (2:34 - 2:35)

Sure.

[Sara] (2:35 - 4:00)

One of the earliest premises of SaaS was that we could leverage user data to prevent software from becoming shelfware, right? And with visibility into customer usage, we could proactively intervene when customers appear to be off track or getting in trouble, right? This was just like the premise of proactive customer success.

We've all heard this. We built centers of practice and communities of practice around this. And we even like created software around this, right?

You've probably worked in some of them. But the problem is that it's out of reach for many of us. We haven't built products with outcomes in mind.

Our teams are building things that we think customers want or deploying these things or competitors are leading us down this path. Our products don't deliver customer engagement. We're still having to do a lot of that, which is very expensive.

And then as a result, our customer journey is pieced together. And now everybody's like, what is our customer journey? How can we help our teams get proactive?

Well, let's go into the eight different platforms across four different teams that we've purchased and bought, and let's spend hours upon hours doing that. Does that sound like fun? No.

[Dillon] (4:00 - 4:05)

A lot of bite, a lot of bite to this backstory you're giving us, Sarah.

[Sara] (4:05 - 4:05)

I love it.

[Dillon] (4:05 - 4:07)

This is exactly my style.

[Sara] (4:07 - 4:58)

Yeah. I mean, we're seeing it in these customer discovery calls and it's painful. And I'm like, oh man, and I've lived it.

I'm not saying that I haven't fallen into this trap as well, but yeah, I think we can do a better job. And so that's what I wanted to chat about today. How can we really help our teams become more proactive?

Because at this point in time, everybody's talking about digital strategy. AI is pouring gasoline on this space. And we're still in this point where it's like, oh, well, here's what I think the customer is doing.

And then your product team comes up and goes, nope, this is actually what the customer is doing. And we made it really hard on ourselves to actually understand what the heck our customers are doing and how they're using our platforms. And as a result, it's just like this wheel of death.

And we've done it to ourselves.

[Dillon] (5:01 - 5:50)

I have a theory that at least in part, some of this will be solved for with time. Somebody is early in their career and they're hearing this conversation because obviously we're everywhere in the most important piece of content somebody will listen to. But they hear that and they're like, oh, right.

So let me bookmark that. And I'll remember that from when I start my company to put telemetry early on in the roadmap of build it right in. Even better, if you can build in value articulation to the platform itself so that customers can see it front and center all the time.

Do you agree with that or do you think we really need to have a revelatory moment in order to solve this problem?

[Sara] (5:51 - 7:26)

I think it's both. And I think that's a really great perspective. I think, sure.

If you're a new or a younger entrepreneur or even an early stage startup where you're moving quickly, right? You're flying by the seat of your pants. Do your very best to have a connected vision and say, this as a company is exactly what we're trying to drive.

Because I think we've all gotten into the trap of, hey, we have a problem. We have a job that needs to be done or a problem that needs to be solved. And of course, there's a thousand softwares out there that can solve that one problem.

So you go down the path of acquiring that software and then it becomes disjointed from the rest of your experience or the rest of your ecosystem. So I do think it's good to have a center or somebody in charge of software acquisition other than procurement. Let's just be clear.

They don't necessarily understand the technologies and how they connect to your strategy. I think that what we're trying to help customers do is say, can you take a step back? Because once you leave implementation of a software, you don't ever get that time back.

And so before you go out and purchase your software or whatever you're looking to achieve to get to your vision, look at what you already have, right? And meet with the teams that have it, because at the end of the day, teams don't own software. The company owns the software and you have every right to use that.

And that's a really great place to start to try and create more connected experiences.

[Dillon] (7:26 - 7:35)

JP, I know you probably don't have too much experience with this in your role. You're also at an interesting sort of company where it's largely on-prem.

[JP] (7:35 - 7:36)

I got you. I got you.

[Dillon] (7:36 - 7:36)

I got you.

[JP] (7:36 - 9:49)

I got you. Here I go. Sarah, this reminds me of, I was a former guest who was talking, I asked him about what does he see in CEOs that really help customer success to really thrive?

And he was like, they're really involved. They really care about the customer. And as you were talking, I thought about an article I read sort of a couple of years ago.

I think it was about NRR. I'll have to find it. Maybe we can put it in the show notes.

But it was talking about this new metric. It's a familiar metric. It's not like you just get pulled out of the genie or what have you.

But it did again, drive home that there was a culture of caring for the customer. And so when we talk about unified vision, I'm going to say heavy is the head that wears the crown. This sounds like the CEO's job.

If you're the CEO, your job, I don't think it's just to tell people what to do. I think that you should be the unified vision. And the longer I've worked, the more, because I've primarily worked in startups, I've seen how that plays out, how that comes about.

The CEO is instrumental in keeping that vision unified. Now the hows and everything, I'm sure there's like a bunch of ways this can be done. But I think when we have these conversations, the reason they always seem so typical is because, yes, because the CEO, it sounds like that's supposed to be your job.

And this is where you could really bring your value. If he or she or they does not really care about the customer, I don't care what the hell we're trying to do. It's going to become disjointed because they're looking at things through a certain lens and beholden to the board.

I'm beholden to this. They see it in a certain way. If they don't care about the customer, then it's already fighting and losing battle.

I hate the sound. Please make me sound better, Dillon.

[Dillon] (9:53 - 9:55)

Sarah, would you like to rebut that?

-: 11:14

Yeah, I do think it's, I think CEOs do genuinely care about their customers. And I think more and more we're seeing that they care about the customer experience. And they don't necessarily need to care about tool acquisition.

I think it's a layer deeper at the C-suite, even more so the V-suite area that needs to work together to say, hey, we have these technologies. Are we building the customer experience in the right way? Or are we, again, teams having ownership over a software is ridiculous.

If you have a marketing automation platform, everybody should be able to use it, right? Not just marketing. And so that's the thing here is let's make sure that we're connecting these softwares to create a very fluid customer experience and not like chopping our nose up to spite our face because, hey, I'm the one that purchased Pendo or I'm the one that purchased Twilio.

All of those things need to come together and we just need to do a better job of combining it. So then we can actually show the CEO, this is our customer experience and this is how we're connecting with the customer throughout their partnership with us. And I think we've just lost sight of that.

We've just gone too fast.

[Dillon] (: 11:15

I wonder, I mean, look, as procurement does their thing and whether it's titled procurement or it's just the process of procurement, they consider a number of different things. And the easiest example I have, particularly I've typically worked with enterprise customers, one that always comes up is security, right? And so often you're putting together your SOC 2 and handing that off to them, so on and so forth.

But security is this sort of line of questioning that always is there and is considered no matter the piece of technology. And I wonder if it's high time we start thinking of customer experience the same way. How can this better serve our customer experience, no matter what the piece of technology is, and making sure that customer success or customer experience, if that's the title of the group at your organization, has the opportunity to be a part of that conversation, no matter the piece of technology.

Sarah, I love this conversation. I think it's fantastic. So Balboa is relatively new.

I think it's less than a month at the time of this recording, or at least publicly. But I'd love for you to come back and talk more about that next time. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Sara] (: 12:29

All right. Well, this was fun. Lots of bite.

[JP] (: 12:33

Thanks, Sarah.

[VO] (: 12:41

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