In this podcasts, we'll be discussing how to align expectations with customers, help them realize value being proactive and educating them.

In this podcasts, we'll be discussing how to align

expectations with customers, help them realize value being

proactive and educating them. And.

All right, all right. I'll read

those energy levels up. Yep. You do your push

ups, jumping jacks. callisthenics. Yeah. Yeah. So

we've been talking about the customer lifecycle, customer

journey, why the the, the mapping of the experience of

customers and the journey they go on, and how visualizing

strategy based on those different phases can be a more

contextual way to align your business and execute strategy.

And so we started with customer awareness, getting people into

the department store to use our analogy, then we went into

engagement, how you treat people, when you are in the

store, then going into customer acquisition, that point of

purchase and what that experience looks like. And now

it's at the stage of customer success. Now, customer success

is of more formalized function within business. There's

dedicated teams as to CS, we've, we know of a lot of people in

CS, I've never had a CS job, neither of you, but you've

worked with a lot of customers. But in my mind, from sort of the

outside looking in, it's making customers happy and successful

using your products. And it's not just, Hey, thanks for the

check. Good luck to you. There is an actual strategy behind

getting customers successful. And OKRs are critical to that

because you can measure sentiment and feedback and

satisfaction and retention and all that fun stuff. And these

are really critical metrics, especially within b2b SaaS, if

you don't have a happy, renewing customer base, you don't have

much of anything. So bringing this to the forefront for CES is

important. So that's a long winded way of saying, when it

comes to customer success, after the point of sale, what are some

of the most important things to look out for? What are some of

the things to avoid? What are the things that you can do?

Right? What are the things that happened internally that caused

problems, I'm just really thrown out of really big catch all

questions, so that you can grab one of these pieces of it and

run with it. But that's kind of my perspective of the this

particular stage of the customer experience. And we'd love to

hear yours. Yeah.

Well, you've summarized that, actually quite well,

there. This stage has become very popular as a discussion

point, because it's the most important stage for value

realization. And that's what people are arguing and b2b SaaS

nowadays is that this is actually more critical than any

other phase, because this is the phase where people realize the

value of your product. And so if they don't realize the value of

your product, you lose them. As simple as that. That's it. So

customers came to you for a reason to buy. You got them

aware of that reason, you engage them, you acquired them by

probably highlighting that they have this discomfort and that

they should buy your solution to solve this discomfort. And now

is the moment when they need to realize that they bought this

product and service so that it would sell the problem. Now is

the point where you solve the problem. And they go, Aha, well,

fantastic. Whatever you're gonna be want to call Eureka. This

this is the moment. This is the stage where it

happens. Big, big missed opportunity there.

It's not say brilliant, brilliant, you're again this

guy.

Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant pints.

Already draw the line. So where do you draw the

line between making customers happy and successful and solving

their problems and in mitigating that discomfort, reducing it and

getting a customer that dumps all of their problems on you, in

expects you to solve them? How do you tell them? Hey, sorry,

Mr. Customer, I'm not here. I'm not your therapist. You need to

go solve that problem with some Buy yachts.

Great question. That's the number one problem in this stage

of the customer lifecycle, misaligned expectations,

unequivocally happens. It's happened to you listener, it has

happened to you, I guarantee you throughout your career it has

happened where the, there has been a moment where things were

misaligned between both parties, you and your, your counterpart.

So, yeah, well, I just like to maybe take a quick step back and

say that there's two teams that drive that are the force that

drives customer success, the first team is onboarding. And

the second team are the actual success team. So, or the support

team, maybe you call them, and maybe those teams aren't divided

out, maybe some companies just have one individual that do

both. But there are two, let's call them two separate

responsibilities, onboarding, and customer support,

onboarding, their primary, their primary responsibility, and

priority is to get the customer to realize value as quickly as

possible. The support person is primary focus is to actually

ensure the long term success of the customer to the point of

renewal. So they're, they're operating the same, you know,

vicinity, but two very distinct responsibilities. And that's why

people get specialized in one area or the other. Because

they're both very important, that onboarding person has to

get some realisation of value for the customer. And that

person is typically coming back to what you said, the person

that deals with the moment the contract is signed, the

customers acquired. It's onboarding. And that's when

expectations need to be aligned, needs to be set. And people

often do this with a project plan or project management

system. They sit down, they have a, quote, kickoff call, and they

say, great, you're a customer, congratulations, we can't wait

to partner with you. Let's set expectations, we're not going to

be therapists, we're not going to do this, we're not going to

do that we're going to do this. This is our responsibility. This

is yours. You have things like RACI tables, you know, describes

who's accountable for what who's contributing tool. So that's

really a critical point of this entire journey of what the

problem is, it gets misaligned. Okay. Why does it get

misaligned? Because people feel as if it's this transitional,

you're running a relay race, and the sales guy hands the baton to

the next guy, and then they run off with us. And sometimes they

drop us. Well, yeah, let's scrap that analogy. It should be it

should not be transitional, but the way you can improve your

business is by mitigating that, that gap of transition. Any

breath.

I mean, that was an impressive, impressive run,

he just seems like he just ran your relay race, and you just

transition the baton to me, and now it's my turn to run. So I'll

do my best. It sounds like and I would agree with you. It's often

once customers have seen this so much in my career, that the it's

almost like when the customer is acquired, the job is done.

That's kind of the sense. And and then once from there, it's

what's the bare minimum that we can do to keep these people

around and not pissed off. And to create an environment where

that's not the case, it's got to be a holistic environment where

the customer is at the center, and the there's all these

different parts that are supporting the customer. So I

think customers support I think the help desk like hey, my

things broke, and who would I call, right? And that's a

function of it. Onboarding is a function. But the long term

success is driven from the holistic experience from that.

And if you have somebody that's really dedicated towards your

success, then you can get a lot more value out of the product. I

mean, we have a lot of SaaS products that we use internally.

And I've purchased a lot of SaaS products. And there's, it's

happened a few times where I don't hear anything from anybody

until about a month out from renewal. And that's a great

disservice as a customer because there's probably a lot of things

that I'm not aware of that I can be doing with your products that

I'm not taking advantage of, there's relationships that can

be built that I'm not building, I was a customer of one product,

and I won't mention who it is, but I had like six different

account managers within a year. Like, like that was the

communication was, hey, just got a new account manager. And it

was a, it was a really bizarre experience. What you're

describing, though, is it's not a linear journey. It is a it is

it needs to be focused on the customer, it needs to be focused

on value creation, sustainable value creation, and oftentimes,

and SaaS that is secondary to just acquiring the customer.

When in fact, the reason why SAS business models are so popular,

it's all on the premise of the recurring subscription. Yeah, if

you don't have the recurring subscription, you just have a

cash generator, right? You have a service,

basically. So Well, that's exactly it, the people

prioritize, well, we need to grow. Therefore, we need to make

more sales, therefore focus on just getting the sale. But no

deal is better than a bad deal. And you're going to you, you

ignore that at your peril. Because you'll sign up customers

huge rate, and lose them at a huge rate. For that exact what

you just said, You're not not thinking about providing them

value. And that's why it's become so popular for other

podcasters and people in SAS to talk about customer renew, and

customer onboarding and customer experience, all this sort of

stuff, because that's what the renewals you know, have a

business model that you can, you can sustain. But you've hit on a

really good point with the renewals, because that was the

second biggest problem I thought about at this stage of the

customer lifecycle is what an ignorant signal to send from

your, from your company to another to say, we haven't

spoken to you and since you bought this thing, but hey, we

need you to upsell, we need you, we need you to pay us more

money. How ignorant is that? We wouldn't do that to a friend or

you know your partner. I mean, it's it's ridiculous. So yeah, I

mean, what people need to realize is that without the

customer realizing their return on investment, only then may you

discuss a upsell or renewal. I haven't realized any value from

your product yet. How dare you? How dare you go and ask them for

more?

Right? You haven't paid the relationship

rent, relational rent, right? You haven't made it a boss?

Yeah. So it's like we were talking about before you get to

the two columns you have? Did they? Did they add value to the

point of the price of purchase? If if the value exceeds the

price point, you'll you'll get a customer? If the same thing when

you go to renew that customer and we'll get into loyalty and

how to do you know, retention and all that we'll do that

tomorrow on the next step. So but the same thing here, it's

like if you have a if you have a one month, not every company,

every SAS company does annual recurring, sometimes it's

monthly recurring. Sometimes it's self service, right. But

you will you do an equation in your head very quickly. Did the

value I get within the timeframe in which I signed up for exceed

the price that I'm paying? And if the answer is yes, you stay

on board as a customer? If the answer is no, you readjust your

subscription, you downsize or you just you just churn. And if

you're doing a long term annual recurring revenue, obviously,

there's a lot more money paid up front, there, there needs to be

a sustainable consistent exchange of value, not even

really in exchange for you have to provide value, not only with

your product, but also with your services. So that when you have

the you know, the renewal comes around, somebody is doing the

math and saying, well, either like this is really working out

well for us. And let's remove it's a no brainer. Just give me

the contract or a yes, we sign up for a bag of shit here. And

we need to restructure this. I've seen it happen a lot. I

think the main thing to take away though, is it's always that

that equation happens very quickly. And yes, it's based on

a feeling it's based on. That's not it can't be ROI. But that's

I mean, who really knows the ROI of anything these days, right

Really, it's more, it's more based on the relationship and

just that the feeling of value. And because I mean, we have a,

as an example, we pay a monthly subscription to deliver

contracts, and we pay a little bit of money right now. It's not

a lot of money. But even though it's not a lot of money, we

still, after one cycle said, Hey, we can cut this in half and

save a few bucks. Because it just the value is not there.

We're using it like, you know, a handful of times a month. But

anyway, that's, that's the value equation when it comes to this.

Yeah, totally. But you've done it nicely, where you've

shared the value equation and how it relates to the

relationship and the relationship, we could talk

about that as well. We talked about this throughout the

entire, so one of those ubiquitous topics that flow

through the customer lifecycle, well, the customer life cycles,

the hint is in the title, it's about the customer, which is

about people and people are about building relationships,

and in a relationship. You know, this is the moment where people

are excited to finally tie the knot, use a wedding analogy,

they've decided to marry you, you know, they've decided to

partner with you, at least for a year. You know, and they, they

want to realize value, and you need to, you know, start this,

this is the first step in building a relationship with

someone. And in the first step, you need to keep your promises,

you need to get aligned on what, how it's the relationship is

going to operate. Like the valves, like the virus, very

much like the virus,

unfortunately. Well, I would say fortunately,

SAS companies have a better chance of renewal than weddings.

Because you know, 5050, everyone, or every marriage 5050

is going to

rise. Yeah, terrible statistic in the States. Yeah.

But, but yeah, I mean, it's probably the ideal analogy, but

it works, you know, its relationship. And so this needs

to be a primary focus, I'm OKR is can help but because OKR is

give the shared language, that Anna gives this, the structure

that you need with a partner, like a new customer, you need to

have a clear objective with the partner, well, okay, ours, first

thing you do is set an objective, and make it

inspirational, you know, make it something that you jointly would

like to get, you know, you know, you'd like, you would like to

have a customer that pays you lots of money in an incredible

incremental amount of money every year. And the customer

wants to have a partner provider that cares about them, and that

provides them value. So maybe that's a great objective to

start with. And then go into your key results, you know, it

gives that framework for this phase. And it's very important.

Yeah, and I think that I was going to

transition into some OKR talk, but you did it nicely, and beat

me to it. And I think the value here though, with OKRs, as it

relates to customer success is, as a marketer, I can tell you

that the vast majority of my time is spent on customer

acquisition, just broadcasting a big message, getting word out

there, build new channels, bringing in qualified leads,

building pipeline, working with sales, to get all these

customers across the finish line. And it's happened a lot in

my career to where it's an effort once they've gotten

across the finish line, it's on to the next one, right. And it's

almost counterintuitive to say you should split your time

because you might be missing out on things on the top of the

funnel, but you can get a lot more value, talking to

customers, getting quotes, getting case studies, having a

consistent production of those materials out to the market, you

can get a lot of value out of that. And it's often de

prioritized. And I think it's a big missed opportunity. So when

you're creating OKRs and you can Your Head of Customer Success is

saying, Hey, I got this problem with churn for example. Well,

that's more of a product question or product statement

like well, okay, we've got a problem. We have a problem

problem with churn. Why? Well, the technology is lacking. Okay,

well, instead of, let's shift a roadmap, right, to solve that

problem, or we have, we have all these unbelievably happy

customers. And marketing's not even doing anything about it.

Why can't we create a coalition or advisory group that's all

about happy customers to build our long term value? Like, these

are often like, secondary? Not even thoughts

really are. Totally, yeah, maybe you've hit on the third

problem, which is a lack of proactive engagement. You know,

from all departments, all teams throughout the company, you

know, there should be a, they're all reactive to Oh, shit, we're

gonna pull out a fire at this customer, because they didn't,

you know, they didn't get their feature on time or something,

whether what you're saying is, take a proactive approach,

let's, let's proactively talk about the customer in this

particular vertical. And let's incorporate a cross departmental

collaboration with people from marketing people from

engineering people who can have other ideas and how to solve it,

and, and use OKRs to them formulate something a plan of

action.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's the siloed nature in

which companies operate, it's, it becomes a big finger pointing

game, where it's like, well, that's not my problem, it's your

problem. Whereas if everybody's kind of looking at everything

through the lens of the customer, and making sure that

they're happy. And yeah, there's a lot of interesting ways. I

mean, if I could fast forward a few years, and we've got tons

and tons of customers, we do lead scoring and marketing,

where we look at all your activities and how you've

engaged with content. And we can give you a score based on your

segmentation. And we can see which leads are the top of the

list. And based on all these sorts of scoring algorithms, I'm

sure it exists with customers as well, I haven't really seen it

that much. But I would love to know, based on some sort of

rubric, how we can score and understand whether a customer is

happy way in advance of the subscription renewal. I mean,

that's the most important part. It's like, you're the point of

signature is the the epitome and the highest the highest point

you'll ever be. Most likely, it's usually downhill from

there. But you know, a lot of cases it's not, it can be a

better relationship that has long term value. But anyway,

it's about visibility and bringing that to the forefront

being proactive and not waiting till they say we're not going to

assign to try to solve problems, it's no different with

employees. Yeah, you got to be able to retain you have to

consistently engage your employees and correct by them

value. And so they because they the job market, now you can go

work pretty much wherever you want. And you don't want to try

to rectify a pissed off employee at the last second, the damage

is already done. So

you're right, you're right. And that's probably the last

thing you know, it's we talked big one is misaligned

expectations, now keeping promises, then asking for money

when you don't deserve it, and being reactive to these

customers. But maybe the last one is exactly that, you know,

the point of this site, or this stage in the cycle is to realize

value. And the only way you're gonna get there is through

education, you know, you got to train an employee, you got to

train your customers, you got to really prioritize that.

Prioritize being proactive, and prioritize that in a proactive

way, educate the customer. You know, whatever they need to

learn about your products, whenever they need to learn

about the methodology behind your product, be proactive in

that it's the first thing we do, we say, Hey, you're not getting

into this product and clicking every single button without

knowing the OKR framework, knowing the pitfalls, no one,

you know how to operate them correctly, how to communicate

them correctly, you know, can't get in the car without, you

know, learning doing the written test. So yeah, training, lack of

training is another one in this phase of the cycle that gets

overlooked.

Oh, yeah, I mean, there's the training parts

huge. And I know like the next podcast we'll be talking about

customer loyalty and getting into all the different touch

points in how you can deliver value that all the different

touchpoints whether it's through your product or training or

services, but it's the car analogy is great because you can

do the written test. I don't know how you learned how to

drive but like my my old man took me out into the high school

parking lot. Like every weekend for like a year. for like a

year. I was I would drive all throughout the parking lot. I

thought I was gonna be like Dale Earnhardt when I got behind the

wheel. I don't know if you know who that is, but I don't

Yeah, as like a good driver

for this he passed away like 20 years ago,

but he was. He was a NASCAR driver. He was he was awesome.

But anyway, I but my dad took me every weekend and I learned how

to drive. I learned how to parallel park, I learned how to

your head on swivel, and I learned a lesson and knock on

wood. I've never been an indirect that was my fault. I've

been driving for 22 years, I've only been in two wrecks, or

somebody smashed me but I was very, very well trained. So when

it came time for me to get out on the road, I knew what the

hell I was doing. Yeah, exactly. And living down here in Florida.

I wish everybody had taken that driving training the way I did

shitty drivers down here.

Send them an excellent, it's an investment and it's worth it.

You know, it's worth it. So yeah, definitely. I did learn

the same way my mom would take me in car parks and stuff. She

was the typical mom like hanging on to the side of the car like,

so it was going like 20 kilometers. Yeah. Yeah.

I was good. It's good stuff. I think to kind of

summarize it. Yeah, we see the value in there's obviously an

immense amount of value in customer success. We talked more

theory than OKRs and like ways to measure customer success,

like, you know, there's customer engagement or satisfaction,

there's different touchpoints there's onboarding

implementations at

the time, time to onboard trying to achieve the milestones

in the project. There's always time to value you know, number

customer interactions, you know, there's there's a ton of them

support tickets time to resolve sort of support

ticket always measurements, let's Yeah, and there's the

combination of volume, quality and in health in the health one,

it's more important. It's the most important when it comes to

this stuff. It's like, you got to have a healthy happy

customer. And yeah, and there's a lot of ways to do that. And

there's a lot of key results and objectives that can be created

to really deliver an exceptional customer experience. So it's

been a good topic. For the next podcast, we'll be talking a lot

about the customer loyalty phase and how to create the advocate

for your brand and for your products and, and what that can