Customer success funnel for Entertainment

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okay so to kick things off i want to talk a little bit about you know where this all came from and you know so part when i started at winning by design one of my first few projects i listened to a bunch of customer success calls has anyone here raise your hand has anyone here listened to calls that your customer success team has been doing if you haven't i i encourage you to do this and here's why i listened to a whole bunch of calls and i hear i heard a few things one i heard some incredible passion you know thinking in solutions there's always willingness to help this you know unbelievable i mean this is customer success you know at its core you know being positive being supportive how can i help you these are all incredible things but the other thing i heard and one of the types of calls i listen to most often are executive business reviews and part of the executive business review as you know is often this concept of introducing any new functionality or any features that happen throughout you know that you want to share with them and when i listened to these calls all i heard was feature feature feature feature feature all right oh let me tell you about this i'll tell you about this pitching and the other thing i found myself screaming listening to these calls was why why did they say that why did you ask that and of course i'm not on the call so i can't actually you know ask that so i just get to be infuriated while listening to it while the csm on the other end of the call recording didn't talk about this we want to ask why so i always made this rule for any team if you've ever been involved and my biggest rule is you cannot leave a question you cannot leave a call with a customer with the with question with why and why do we want to know that and so often why asking a question why uncovers the impact that we are looking for and this is so much that was missing in those feature feature features talking about product talking about those elements we miss the impact that those features of that new functionality has on your customers and so drawing that parallel drawing that connection to that functionality to impact is so unbelievably critical um i'm going to encourage you if you have a question throw it in the chat beth and sierra are going to be modern in the chat and we are going to um you know we'll definitely do that but i think you were raising your hand which was awesome just to be like yes i listened to calls which i love that was great so one of the reasons we do this and one of how we're going to get what we're going to talk about today is how to get to rapid growth and when i talk about rapid growth there's something really cool here so if anyone know um bamboo is one like the coolest plants because it in three years it can grow it can by definitely double its size but sometimes get to five times its size and one of the other so you this rabbit growth but the other aspect of it is that it's sustainable it's one of the most sustainable product or um you know plants in our ecosystem because it grows so quickly but it doesn't drain all those resources and if you look at there's this new trend happening this is a you know some of our clients and the one of the commonality of these clients is that they're unicorns they've had this rapid growth not all of them have grown sustainably and there's this new trend it's happened it's been happening for at least a year if not a bit longer where this concept of grow it all costs does not exist anymore even vcs are starting to say this we want to see rapid growth but it can't be this spend grow at all costs and needs to be on the under the guise of sustainability and why do i talk about impact and sustainable sustainability when we talk about cs 2.0 is because these are the core elements to how companies can grow at that rapid growth clip uh in a sustainable way so today we're going to talk about um some core principles of cus of cs 2.0 we're going to cover the recurring revenue model the different ways to think about the cs model how to drive profitability and how to improve performance how does that sound to everybody sound good thumbs up awesome seeing some head nods that is great so the first thing i want to kick off with is the concept of first principles who when i say first principles throw in the chat who knows what i mean by first principles i'll give you an example while you're thinking about it but i'd love for you to throw in the chat an example of a so a first principle is something that you know to be true and you use that truth to build upon to build upon it in order to go forward and do other things so for example we know if we're we know the principle of one of the first principles is gravity so if we step off of a cliff we are going to fall off that cliff that drives our decisions in life not to just randomly walk off cliffs it's a very fundamental first first principle um does anyone want to share with us any first principles that they know that they have that they know of or that they use to guide their personal life or their life you know managing in the world of customer success i'll give another example while you all think of one so um you know one of the first principles listen to your customers that's a good one one of the first principle but why right so let's like what's the first principle why are we listening to our customers so just to dig in a little bit there another example of a first principle is i love this example i'm not the biggest sports fan but i do really get into you know sometimes you know the end of the season um for championship games and one you know the golden state warriors if you're a basketball fan you know they change the first principles of basketball first principles of basketball were always hire the tallest players you could find that had the best ability to score on a two-point basket so the basketball game was built on the first principle score as many two-point baskets as you possibly can more than the other team well when the golden state warriors they changed the game by hiring slightly shorter players who had a better accuracy at scoring three-point shots and that changed the mathematics that changed the first principle of the game and they were able to win but let me think about what are some first principles that you that you have so i'm going to share with you a few first principles that we're going to talk about that may be changing the game of customer success so the first principle is recurring revenue is the result of recurring impact now let's get into that that's a bit of a heavy one so recurring revenue but what is recurring revenue recurring revenue we often think that it has to do with our sales funnel does this look familiar we have the top of the funnel we have leads come in they turn into opportunities and they close and they create opportunity we think that this is a recurring revenue model that's what we think it is but it's not why is this not a recurring revenue model let's look at that bottom we've got revenue but we don't have recurring so we are all work for recurring revenue businesses yet none of us are actually driving recurring revenue if it is all the if you're just working on this funnel if you're just focused on filling that funnel with new leads so we are going to flip this funnel on the side we are going to turn it over and we are going to create a bow tie because on the right hand side on the customer success side that's where you get the recurring piece and that's where you get recurring impact and we think about what we do in customer success we get our customers to first value we help them achieve the impact they were looking to to get when they first purchase and they continue to purchase so this recurring impact happens and that and then customers buy again and they upsell and they cross-sell and they advocate and they refer you new business and that's where the recurring piece comes so recurring revenue is a result of current impact i'm going to share with you a different way of looking at it so we think about how we are often trying to get to this goal of a certain amount every year we're trying to achieve a certain amount of revenue every year we're trying to hit certain targets so what we do is we have this fun maniacal focus on winning new deals let's avoid churn let's make our customers love you right we're constantly filling this funnel in order to create that curve that exponential curve of getting to new to getting hitting that goal but is this the only path to get there so if you think about this concept of achieving recurring impact let's focus on successful customers at the at the up at the outset now if we focus on those customers and we focus on those key moments in the customer journey and we think about achieving impact early on creating those amazing customer moments and then growing together we are now creating recurring impact amongst those customers that's going to continue to create recurring revenue so it's not about filling that funnel but it's about circling it back so it's about upselling your existing customers it's about getting them to renew and continue to renew but it's also about filling them if you think about some of your best customers if you've created recurring if you create impact with them they go ahead and leave and they go to another company they're going to buy you again they're going to buy you faster they might even spend more because they understand how valuable you are to their organization they also will refer you to new customers and we know the referral lead so it's about fill you know using those customers and so it's even okay to lose customers who aren't working achieving that recurring impact because they're going to increase your cost to serve they're going to increase you know they're even more challenging to think about those really difficult customers they just aren't achieving that recurring impact how difficult they are how much of a drain they are to your organization if you focus on the ones that are achieving that impact and achieving that recurring impact you get that recurring revenue that first principle is a big one i want to just stop for a minute and see if anyone has any questions about it give you a chance to think about it and let us think in if you got it give me a thumbs up just so i know that you're all paying attention and and we got okay cool all right sounds like we're good okay good love to see the thumbs up awesome okay so if we're gonna go to the second concept so now i want to build on that so now that we know that first principle is true right so recurring revenue is an outcome of recurring impact we're going to build on that truth so the principle number two we think that the model we use to drive you know to think about revenue and customer success is additive but in fact it's multiplicative and if i get through today say multiplicative the right way the entire time that's a huge win for me uh okay so uh i want you all to close your eyes and i promise i won't go to any more slides while you do this and i want you to write in the chat and i i really want participation today you know there's one thing if you just want to see me talk i'll upload this to youtube you know you can always see me talk there the whole point of you coming today is to interact with us so you can get more out of it so i want to see you participate i want you to close your eyes i want you to really think about what is the impact of your cs so this impact of cs is going to be fundamentally similar everywhere but sometimes in unique situations with your own clients you can even get more specific what is the impact of your cs and i really want to see some things here beth and sarah feel free to share as well i'm super curious or some things that you've seen driving change that's a big one driving change so that we've got some coming in here creating advocates by showcasing success these are some great ones let me give everyone another uncovering new needs a lot of corporate objectives creating value yeah keep this is great keep thinking about it so when we think about customer success these are all some really great things of what customer success means to your organization it means to you when we think about it it's just like uh so often either to you or often to other people on your executive team it tends to be this box of customer success and you know customers come in then you have whatever we think customer success is and then you have lifetime value and what happens inside this box let's get into this for a minute so this is something that we see all the time we get into customer success organizations we'll start talking to them and what we find is the path by which we have we fill this box of customer success can be a little bit unknown can be a little bit you know on this journey of and if you you one question i often ask cs leaders is when your customer success team comes into work every single day do they know exactly what they're going to do do they have a proactive prescriptive process they're going to follow in order to help your customers achieve impact or is it kind of like every single day what should i do today how should i manage my customers what what things have they emailed me with overnight that they need to respond to so we have this myriad of journey of what happens inside this box but ultimately we do have a sense of what's supposed to happen right we do know that you know and how we measure customer success is we are new revenue from new customers they come to us then we add in expansion revenue from existing customers then we subtract turned revenue from those customers who decide to leave us and there we have our model of net new revenue so we are constantly adding and how much and how many and then we're measuring you know ever measuring the love aspect what your mps score at the end of it we actually factor in what it's all costing us so we have this additive model that we think is is how we actually calculate customer success but what if we're using the wrong model i want to go back to that bow tie funnel that we saw for a moment and that recurring impact model and i want to open that up a little bit here and talk about what that is in customer success and so customer success we have three main functions we have onboarding of our customers impact and use renew and grow and each of those moments can represent a conversion rate when we talk about conversion rates we often think about those in the world of cup in sales right so if you've ever you know looked at if you've ever been part of a sales metrics meeting we often think about okay we're going to convert mqls to you know marketing qualified leads what's our conversion rate from those to sales qualified leads to you know opportunities to close well on the customer success side we actually have the ability to track those metrics and to consider that on the right-hand side of the funnel as well how many of our customers successfully onboard how many of our customers get to first value within a certain time period how many of our customers achieve recurring impact so that they renew and that they grow and so what we do is we have each of those moments represent a metric that we can now multiply so we multiply our net new customers times the number of who successfully onboard in that right bound of time multiply by the ones who renew multiply by the number of periods they renew multiply by the expansion revenue so we keep multiplying so the actual conversion rate or metrics go from adding and subtracting to multiplying and when you multiply multiple times you create exponential impact and this is the fundamentals of how we're going to break down thinking about that exponential growth curve and flipping it from always just adding new leads adding new leads and subtracting the ones you turn to creating impact sooner we think about the how and what this means to the exponential growth curve is if you multiply so you have your lifetime value a number of customers or length of time if you multiply one time you create a linear graph you create sort of a straight trajectory but if you multiply by the num again and again that is how you create that hockey stick that so many of us are looking for and what creates that hockey stick is the number of periods the number of times that they renew and it gets even bigger when they have upsells and i'll get into that a little bit later but it gets even bigger when they have upsells on top of that and here's the really cool thing this is what you know this is really where we start to really change the game from this maniacal focus on sales and investing so much into driving new leads to investing with our existing customers so if we know that the hockey stick of revenue gets steeper the number of times your clients stay with you and renew the number of periods let's look at that lifetime value model you have new revenue times retention plus upsell to the power of the number of periods they stay with you and guess who's responsible for that who's responsible for that anyone anyone on the chat anyone want to go off mute and shout it out kim i know you have it in it yeah there we go cs we're always taught like for so long i've been in customer success for way too long cs is always tad that we are you know considered a cost center right we're here to support our customers and therefore how we're measured we never get budget because how we're measured is based on you know the cost to serve but we drive so much of that revenue this is going to flip so that's principle number two the way that we model cs is multiplicative all right now for the third principle are you ready for this anyone have any questions about that does anyone want to jump in here or it's a very quiet chat this morning i don't it's wednesday come on we should be energized we're halfway through the week all right we're gonna all right i see some good conversations happening overall in the chat right now so that's good um i love that sarah and beth you're lucky you have sarah and beth who are just like the ocs geniuses um participating here and answering some great questions in cs uh on the chat all right principle uh number three this is a topic i am unbelievably passionate about the right way to measure customer success is with impact and not csat all right i'm prepared to get a little bit of controversy here but here's what i want to know in the chat how do you oh yeah it's a good one how do you measure we'll talk about that in a minute how do you measure your cs team how are you measuring right now what are you using i'm just guessing we're going to see a lot of nps but how are we measuring right now what are you doing share with me never have any retention yes and our nps that's very very common and that's good those are you know we want to think about nr it's okay if you throw an mps everyone you know everyone's doing it no one wants to talk about it okay i'm gonna throw something i'm gonna i'm gonna give you something here to think about this is something i did with uh we had uh one of the clients that i was you know actually when i was running account management we had something called turn week which our churn was so bad we called it churn mcgenitt like that's how that we'd call we named it that and one initiative we launched was six months to the renewal date my account management team called every single one of our decision makers and asked this question if your renewal was tomorrow would you renew now when we think about actually measuring impact think about how impactful it is to get a stat saying fifty percent of our customers or eighty percent of our customers who were surveyed who were asked if your renewal was six months out from the renewal date if your renewal was tomorrow would you renew and x percent said yes and next percent said no how much more impactful would that be for your organization as opposed to some you know satisfaction survey right now we actually know now we actually have a quantify quantifiable metric to share with us to show here's what here's what actually our pipeline of renewable customers looks like and here's the really fun thing can i get anyone to volunteer to do a role play i might ask i might ask best to do this just because you know it's the first one and you know so here's what we're going to do best i'd like for you to be the client okay and i am going to call on you and i'm going to ask you this question and you can answer however you want this is how much fun this is going to be we have by the way we didn't we didn't prep at all so i have no idea what she's about to do yeah beth just agreed to moderate okay this session you know late last night or something earlier i will say by the way just really quick there's a bunch of really good questions interspersed in the chat so if you do that we're tracking them so we can do like we can bring them back to julie um at different breaks or like points appropriate so just know we see those okay beth okay thank you for being such a great customer hey um you know you've been with us for about you know half a year so far you've been with us for um i just want to know if your renewal was tomorrow would you renew you know i honestly i'm not sure right now i'd have to think through it a little bit more to understand and justify to my cro and to my uh to my cfo because we're you know we're just being really careful about budget this year and so i'm definitely going to need to get a better handle on like what it's doing and why we should keep it thank you so much for sharing that with me may i ask what impact would you need to see in order to be able to make that justification to your cro yeah well pause here okay because that's a really important like right there right what i want is an answer and i love that beth you were great you got into more detail and i loved how much thought you put into a fictitious situation you really took the longer like well you really thought about that in this imaginary situation but i really i that was great so so you know i got a great answer i gotta know i don't care i just wanted an answer right because what i was able to do and i didn't say oh that's too bad you know why not i don't care why not what i want to know is what impact are you looking to achieve in order to renew now that is something we can talk about that is an answer that she can go back and think about and it's very actionable okay this is what i want to be able to show to my cro this is what we're going to work towards and if just on the flip side if you get a yes the follow-up question to that is you know i like to say it like this but you know to be more formal you would say what would make it even more impactful how can we make this you know more impactful for your organization but i always like to say like what would make this a slam dunk like what would make us like you screaming off the rooftops or even maybe sharing with the other divisions now that aren't using us and to go deeper i'll tell you i did this with the team and 100 of customers that we were able to speak to whether they said yes or no 100 of them renewed that is how powerful asking that question with enough lead time provides you as opposed to hey how likely are you to refer us to a friend um so i'm seeing a few questions about this um how about that work for digital how would you i how often i would not ask that too often right you want to ask that so the timing is really critical you want to ask that at a time when you have enough time to actually make a difference so in a one year contract i really like doing it at the six month mark because you have half a year to fix anything that's not going well but it also provides them enough time to have achieved some level of impact on a three-year contract what i would probably do is give them at least 18 months to start to achieve that impact and then potentially ask it then and then ask it again you know sort of eight eight to six months out from their contract renewal um and then also from a digital standpoint you can totally digitize that right you can actually just ask that question if your renewal was tomorrow would you renew yes or no and then just make sure that you have some things that you can do to follow up on right so even just you know collecting that information but i have to say we are too lazy in the way that we survey our customers we are so you know we don't want to work hard to get this information yet so we're happy with this like mps score that we don't do much about yet if we actually put a little bit more effort in it what we get is the opportunity to be more proactive and more on top of things to it to help us out with those other metrics and when we think about this you know so there's this one point of time to ask this around the renewal date but there's other times and so if you go back to that model around customer success and those key moments you know on board right that's cr5 getting customers to onboard get to first value in the right time think about measuring the onboarding moments that matter some you know in a similar way you know getting to impact getting them to renew getting that expansion all of those are key metrics that we should be that we should be uh tracking and measuring okay now we're going to get to the crux of this was just profitability this is such a different way to think about things because we are now trying to build sustainable businesses and sustainable businesses are built on profitability so here is our fourth principle customer success is the greatest way to drive profitability right we've just you know we're all building on each other this should be very obvious that here's why all right who knows throw in the chat who before sorry before i move on to profitability beth sarah are there any other questions that i didn't catch that are relevant to any of these things that that i should call that i should answer before moving on um i've been responding to some things but i think um there's a couple that i think we should get to a little bit later okay thank you um does anyone have any questions pertaining to any of this that they didn't there is actually i will i will call out a little bit there's a little bit of a theme of with um asking the probing questions like how to go about that but you might get to that later or want to spend a little bit more time because that could be a big one okay we could yeah let's do a little bit later let's make sure we get through the content and chat a bit about the probing questions um okay so throw in the chat who knows how much on average it costs to acquire a new customer do it in months so is it like a 10 month payback period is it a year what is it what do we all think it is 10 to 12 months 12 months these are good guesses so that's actually what i built my model on as well i built it on a very generous 10 months recent research has come out to say that it's actually 12 to 18 months you know ej you just said 16 months which is super which is a little bit scary when we think about customers churning after a year like you just spent you know an extra six months of your revenue to you know achieve nothing uh but we have we're looking at a round around that i built my model in 10 months um to make it a little bit more more generous there so if we think about a contract that's a hundred thousand dollars a year and we subtract about ten months of that contract for the cost the customer acquisition and then cost to serve tends to be around 20 to 40 percent we're going to do it at 20 all right so cost to serve huh 20 percent oh we got to mute whoever that is oh maybe you can find that person and just uh get on them i'm happy for you to mute to jump into question but if you're talking your family let's uh keep that uh or your dog's barking uh so it costs to serve so that first year we're losing and again we've been pretty generous with our numbers and we're still losing money right we are paying to keep them now let's look at year two all right so you have that same contract value you have your 20 cost to serve and now we have an upsell so we can think about upsells so if you are a platform it is very reasonable to have a 68 upsell uh or increasing cost every single year you're a platform you're investing your product every single year if you are you other ways to think about upsell are adding new seats adding new users adding new features okay so we should always be thinking that every single one of our customers should be increasing their their spend with us year over year and there's a variety of different ways to think about that so at a six percent upsell again pretty conservative estimates we all of a sudden have and year two a substantial amount of profitability now if you think about what that could be your three or four as we increase our upsell so next year we're looking at a contract value of 106 000 your cost of service stays the same you upsell another six percent your profitability more than doubles and you keep building on that i'm going to break it down and it's just another way to look at it so this is like just fun modeling that i frankly someone who really does not enjoy math so much really enjoyed actually doing this modeling because it created these like crazy aha moments for me when thinking about the true impact of customer success and so very often we tie upsells with the end of the contract right okay your renewals coming up okay we're going to think about a you know an increase of six percent or we're going to talk to you about this new functionality but let's look at what happens so you know if we're gonna do that so scenario one is we don't upsell pretty flat growth scenario two is we have an annual upsell about four percent and we have some annual churn if we think about and this is with a book of business of about 20 customers at an acv of a hundred thousand now what happens if we have what i call micro upsells so what happens if we take a portion of those 20 customers and we actually upsell them throughout the year quarterly so 25 of those customers so the base of customers we upsell and then we're continuously building the base look how much more revenue you're earning from those customers at the end of year three your upsell rate stays the same your churn rate stays the same but you're because you're upselling them earlier you're getting more revenue in to build on so this is really important when you think about all the different ways that you can upsell and the fact that and how you and how you plan out how your customer success team engages with your customers having them talk about new opportunities for growth sooner at different moments is going to drive a substantial impact to the revenue of your organization workshop time who is excited you've been great lots of really fantastic interaction on the chat we're gonna do um a quick workshop a quick interactive and then we'll probably get to some questions okay so uh here's my question for you how many accounts for a hundred thousand dollar customers can one csm manage per year so if your acv is roughly so there's going to be relatively enterprise customers 100k um how many can they under 25 25 to 50 50 to 100 or over a hundred [Music] so we're getting a lot of a's getting some b's okay this is awesome okay we're getting a mix of a and b's which is great anyone said over 100 i'd be very very scared uh so one way to i want before we get into the answer it depends on the support model let's get into what that support model should look like so one of the things that we do when we think about capacity planning is we don't just do you know how much does it cost to manage those customers and how many customers do we need because as we've proven when you turn if you keep your customers for longer you increase the profitability so cost to serve becomes a very like such a um such a minuscule amount compared to the opportunity what we need to think about is what do we actually need to do to help support these customers so the first thing that we need to think about is how many meetings do we need to have and i hate thinking about meetings no one likes meetings but the reality is we manage our customers through a variety set of meetings especially on the enterprise side i know there's some people here who have lower touch and i'll i'll get to that in a minute um but we're going to talk about this at the enterprise level so monthly meetings what do we have monthly meetings for we think about we have early adoption we have change management oh this happened uh we have ongoing use and impact those are the types of meetings we might have on a more frequent cadence right let's you know and ah and then we have quarterly meetings those things are often like different themed executive business reviews let's talk about impact let's talk about opportunities let's talk about renewals um we've actually listed all these out we have renewals let's talk about expansion so those are the types of quarterly meetings we're gonna have then we also have bi-annual meetings and if you're not doing these with your larger customers i strongly encourage you to start considering doing some of these these can be um what how i love to do biannual meetings are workshop style so interactive these are a great opportunity for your champions to bring in other peers who might not be doing things so it's a great way for them to start collaborating and crying you know gives you opportunity for cross-sell and collaboration to really drive that internal so you then come to this you become a facilitator essentially whatever topic your product or your service does and you help that organization think about how they can more strategically think about that topic so we used to do these a lot at inflative with advocacy and i would host these workshops or my team would host these workshops let's talk about advocacy at your company um you know i remember very clearly doing this one day at salesforce we brought in uh eight different divisions of salesforce some of them were using our products some of them weren't and the topic was let's talk about advocacy and let's be agnostic and i was the expert and advocate and advocacy and that's the cool thing like you're the experts in your space not necessarily your product but your space and so as a service you're going to host this workshop you know there was this unbelievable moment where i remember you know i remember erica cool you know shouted you know let's just stop talking about what if we didn't use inflative right so i'm in the room i'm just like sorry julie and i'm like that's okay we're here to talk about advocacy whether you use our platform or not the purpose is to talk about advocacy and spreading that across the organization now of course the result of that where three more divisions ended up using influitive but that's because we talked about advocacy and we were strategic partner in it so these workshops are really really critical and then we have ad hoc meetings these are the hardest ones to measure because you can't plan them out right they happen when triggers such as a new decision maker comes or there's low usage and you notice that your health score you know you is is pinging away saying ah this is red uh or there's an advocacy opportunity so all those could be our ad hoc and some of them take longer to deal with than others but we've done our best to model them out on a general average so if we think about all of those meetings that happen so we you know all the monthly quarterly biannual and ad hoc meetings how long it takes so we have to prep for those meetings we have to you know we have to prep to you know either before and after then we actually have to have those meetings how many do we need to have per year that all comes up to a total of about 70 hours per account per year all right we have 2 000 work hours a year and we utilize about 70 of that for client work 30 on you know admin zoom coffee chats because we no longer have water cooler we no longer have ping pong maybe ping pong with your kids walking dog whatever it is now but we use about 70 of that which means we have 1400 hours to spend with our clients which means we have 20 accounts and that's it and if you actually model it what that could look like you know it can really encourage you to do that for your organization what type of meetings do you need to be having in order to effectively support your customers now now a good way to do this for for your lower acv clients is to take these even just take you're probably not going to be doing workshops so you can take the biannual meetings out ad hoc is the thing that's going to drown you um i would take quarterly meetings and maybe you want to do them biannually maybe you want to do them in group settings and you're obviously not gonna you're not gonna necessarily have the monthly meetings but those monthly meetings should have themes around them and you can scale those through different email communications video communications uh webinars those types of things so the last we're now we're going to get to how do we achieve this how are we going to improve performance and that gets to our principle number five small improvements over over time have a large impact so how are we going to improve this in performance three three tips time process and structure and continuous improvement let's talk about time all right when clients first come to us the decision making process is as f follows you have an initiator you have the decision maker who makes that you makes the call and you have an end user all right now after the initial you know after that initial introduction the decision maker and the end user are usually most involved but at some point usually after the sales to cs handoff or maybe after you know during the kickoff the decision maker is no longer part of the process why is that often it's time right the decision maker doesn't have time to spend all of their time with you as a vendor they they just assume that things are going to be happening but how do we keep that decision maker engaged because they are critical to the success and the problem is that so often we just we're just like uh we'll get them engaged you know we lose touch of this and then when there's a problem we all of a sudden have to engage the decision maker again but that's the wrong time to engage them so how do we keep the decision maker engaged ongoing without using up their time well this is one of my hottest tips of the season which is asynchronous video if you uh how many of you i'd love to know how many of you using asynchronous video in your communications with your clients anyone i don't see any hands up right now all right this is going to be mind blowing all right so i'm using here yay tori you're using it awesome okay so this is actually i shared this this is actually me and yesterday's video that i shared with a client um so the best way to use this with customers is so you have a meeting with the end user record the meeting but also record and me another video that actually speaks to the decision maker hello decision maker we just had a meeting we talked about this here's a recording of the meeting if you want to watch this here is i want we just confirmed that this is what you're looking to achieve this year here are the metrics we're trying to achieve this quarter is that accurate call it out call it a video you can call it an email engage them two minutes they are going to watch that because it's two minutes long and you've specifically asked them a question now all of a sudden the decision maker is forced to stay engaged throughout the process and now when you need them they can be they're there and they know and also they have the opportunity to say no that's not what we're trying to do here right or you can use it to build on and say um hey this is what we agreed to does this align with some of the strategies that you're doing at your level you know do you want to have a conversation about that right again you're not abusing their time but if something's off or that it prompts them to think of something it gives them that ability all right so that's the first thing time process and structure so we talked about the core moments that matter in cs on board impact use renew and grow the you should be pro creating a proactive process for that customer journey and all of those key moments and all those meetings that need to happen and the end goal of what needs to happen in all those meetings mapping those out and then you have those different triggers what are those triggers when can they happen what should you do about them so in the playbooks that we designed we designed that customer journey and then we design a whole trigger playbook to help get people back on track and then you have the customer health that helps wrap it all up and makes it a little bit more automative so we save time we become more efficient we engage the decision maker and we create process and playbooks now we're going to talk about continuous improvement we have those playbooks what are those playbooks built on they should be built on blueprints how do you have an ebr how should you have customer center conversations with clients to drive impact how do you assure that everything's set with an end goal you learn you build out those blueprints uh that make up the playbooks and then you break it down to what skills do your csms need to have in order to have that conversation how do i start a meeting how do i ask questions to a decision maker to uncover impact so you break down those skills then you practice you role play you listen to calls then you do it right go out there have customer calls listen to them practice and then you use those calls and you use those call recordings to to to coach and then you continue to iterate on it so hey we've noticed after listening to 40 calls that the way we've structured these types of you know the way we structure the way that we're talking about these features or the stories that we're using to help create that point is not in line with what we're trying to achieve and then you adjust the blueprints you adjust the playbooks are any of you using call recordings i know it's become a trend that's taken off in sales over the last five years and it's starting to gain traction in the world of cs um we often use you know our clients are using chorus or gong we've actually started implementing some of our blueprints uh into dom recording because it provides some of that ai uh technology to be able to you know to help with that coaching and scaling it i see a lot of people are using gog as well um so we're just gonna recap really quickly and we're gonna open it up for any questions at the end so our core principles that we've talked about today are building recurring revenue as a result of recurring impact that was the foundation that we built it all on so if you disagree with that you know we got it we will rehash that later that's essentially number one the cs model is no longer additive it's multiplicative and that's the best way the best way to measure cs is with impact and by doing that we are going to achieve profitability and small improvements can have a major impact you are all so so great love all of the interaction love the videos thank you so much um we share all of our content on linkedin we are a oh my gosh what was the model beth sarah ella what was the model we are we are an open something model as a as a firm do you remember what it is i was going to say open source but then i got it's not open source as soon as you asked me that question it flew out of my head uh we are open yeah we share all of our content we have books on amazon we share our research papers um and we share a lot on linkedin so here if you want to throw your camera up you can grab my linkedin you can connect with me or follow me so that way you can see all of the content that we continue to produce um and our next web we're going to host another workshop if you have any peers or colleagues or um friends you think would enjoy this feel free to send them to our next workshop which is going to be on june 2nd and i will also share that on linkedin um but let's open this up to any questions or um there is no link to the workshop i know i should share we will share it out um uh maybe ella you could actually probably put in the chat because i'm sure you actually have the link to that workshop so this is why the workshop's a week later because i didn't want ella to be on vacation without her i don't know anything um who has any questions uh for us or best you wanna uh yeah i'm gonna throw up a question to get us started but throw some in the chat if you think of things i'm going to combine a couple of them here there were some questions about how to do this and get alignment from different stakeholders who might perceive impact differently and even more specifically somebody was asking about a product led company like how do you use this information to convince people to align around something okay so let's go back to the concept of recurring impact so there's two main things that i see are often missed in the world of customer success number one is understanding what impact is i'm gonna give you an example of impact okay so when you you know we all need to get places sometimes public transportation isn't the way we want to get there we want it so we buy a car right so you know the analogy we often we used to use was getting to the office but none of those are doing that anymore so maybe it's going to a cottage right so we are going to the store um on our fun outing of the day uh for those of us who are still on lockdown so you buy a car which you think is impact but really that's the promise of achieving value you buy a car but once you get that car you have to buy insurance you have to you know you have to fill it with gas there's all these other things that you need to do in order to achieve the impact you're looking for which is getting to that final destination whereas when you call an uber or a taxi or um you know a lyft you get immediate impact you call it they arrive you get in you get your destination pretty much immediately and you can get that recurring impact over and over and over again so when we think about impact for our organization think about it in terms of you know peeling back those layers of the onion because so often and i saw it here in the in the chat you all threw up some really great start of examples driving value in terms of what impact means to your organization or uscs but how do you go further what is the actual impact that gets the customer to what they're trying to achieve and so often that is i was talking to a client yesterday it's like okay you know the first thing they gave me was impact was making sure that they're be helping their manufacturers be more efficient okay well at the end of the day what does efficiency get them so efficiency gets them the ability to make less mistakes if they make less mistakes they save more time and they save costs on materials now we're starting to get to impact what does it mean if you're saving time so i encourage you whether you have you know hundred thousand dollar customers million dollar customers or you know ten dollar a month customers really honing into the impact that your customers are achieving and and the impact for every single persona so you know persona is such a term that we use for marketing very often so marketing personas or who should we target how do we target them how do we get them to pay attention to us the missing element of personas is who are the people we're connect who are our real clients who are the decision makers who are our champions who are our end users and what do they care about about on an emotional level and on a rational level emotionally i care about using this product because it's going to help me make less mistakes so that way i don't get fired it's going to help me do my job better so i can get a promotion it's going to help me save time so i can end my day an hour early and make dinner for my family or go for a run those are types of emotional impact that change based on on the different personas that you're interacting with so if you don't have personas in your organization again it doesn't matter what size really understanding what that means because that's going to help fine-tune your communication and then on product led growth that's all about scalability so the way your customers interact with your product is that helping them achieve impact are you showcasing new features and pro and functionality consistently to help get them to upsell you like boxing it in are you gating those features and functionality to help create upsell opportunities and are those gated features based on impact and are they compelling enough i hope that answered your question are there other ones this chat's gone gone wild so i can't actually keep track of it all um are there any other questions that anyone has or does anyone have anything that they want to shout out at the end of this what is one i have a question for you all uh what is 3.0 look like let's just get companies to uh you know adopt this 2.0 this is a you know enough of a challenge for now um and then we'll go we'll go further um can everyone quickly throw in the chat before you leave what is one main takeaway that you got from today's session what is one main takeaway it can be something that you're going to think about it can be something even better that you're going to implement you know by next week or you know this month tell me what uh a good takeaway is i want to please throw it in the chat and i want to thank you all for today's session thank you so much for joining i look forward to seeing you all and continuing the conversation on linkedin or other social channels i love this don't lose the rbr but without asking why leona is a great one measure more yes measure measure measure thank you so much everyone for joining