“The entire sales process simply seeks to understand and define clearly the problem the prospect is having at this moment, the impact that it's having on their business, and then how we can be the solution and solve that gap.”

Grant Freeman is the guest on this episode of Be Customer Led with Bill Staikos. Being the Chief Customer Officer at Thryv, growing the SaaS division's income is one of Grant's primary concerns. Grant oversees the software sales and client experience teams and the retention and monetization of Thryv's software customers. Throughout our conversation today, he shares how he supports more than 40,000 local businesses across the U.S. through a fully integrated, end-to-end customer experience platform, Thryv software. 

[01:03] Background –Grant discusses the aspects that have set him apart professionally and how he has applied those learnings to assist small businesses in improving their operations. 

[03:41] Thryv - How Thryv helps organizations improve their daily operations so they can focus on what they should be doing.

[06:55] Onboarding - What Grant does at Thryv and his thoughts on why the onboarding process is so crucial

[15:50] Customer-Focused Culture- Grant outlines how they help organizations improve operationally and culturally.

[17:41] Measure the Success - What metrics are used to gauge a company's success in relation to the customer's experience?

[22:19] CX - Grant expresses his views on customer experience as a board-level topic.

[24:23] The Future - Grant describes how he envisions the CCO's obligations will evolve over time.

[27:44] Never-again Error - The one mistake Grant will never repeat. 

[31:51] Inspiration – Sources where Grant draws his motivation and inspiration.

Recourses:

Connect with Grant:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/grantfreeman/

Website: thryv.com/

Grant Freeman on the B2B Experience

[00:00:33] Bill Staikos: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another week of B Customer led. This is your host, Bill Stakehouse. I have an amazing guest for you all. Grant Freeman is the chief customer officer of a company called Thrive, which is doing some really, really special stuff in for smaller businesses. We're gonna get into what Thrive does and Grant's role, as well as sort of the evolution of customer experience and B2B Grant, welcome to be customer led.

Great to have you on.

[00:01:01] Bill Staikos: absolutely. We're gonna have fun today. So the first question we ask every guest grant on this show, as you may know, is tell us about your professional journey and what were some of the differentiating factors in your career.

A lot of folks that are listeners of this show are either chief customer officers or chief experience officers themselves, or certainly aspiring to be. So I think they're gonna be really interested in your sort of navigation and your journey, cuz it's a little bit different, maybe even. Maybe your traditional experiential kind of journey too.

Generating leads. The al, before there was Google, there were That's awesome. Phone books. And those books, you would open 'em up and it was the original search engine bill. That's what we say now, so that we're kind of hip still . That was the original search engine. But early on I gained a really deep respect.

For the entrepreneurs that make up small business America. I mean these, these people are incredible. They put it all on the line. And when you have that respect, you also have this sort of burning desire to serve, and to help them achieve their goals. not withstanding the fact that it's still the backbone of the American economy as we stand here today, small business, but you also learned that they need a lot of help along the way.

Mm-hmm. , Cause many of them are great at their craft, but not maybe so great at running an actual. So I, I think that that's been, being on the lead gen side from, from something older school, like Yellow Pages, to then transitioning to helping them when, digital marketing became a thing.

Mm-hmm. that was a big point in my career, sort of making that massive shift to help them generate affordable leads online. And now we find ourselves the next iteration of the transition, which is modernizing their business so they can run efficiently. so that they have the tools and the wherewithal to compete with sort of the national and regional players that are armed to the hill with everything they need.

And, and we don't, Oh yeah, we don't wanna see anything happen to small business Bill. So I think that I've sort of been on this journey alongside them the entire time with a profound respect and also, having learned to be a really good listen. And also with this subset of, of people being a motivator at times, letting them know that they can do this and that others have done this in the past to, to great success.

So I think that that makes me a little bit different.

Tell us a little bit about what Thrive does and how do you help organizations become better at what they do every day, or allow them to focus on what they should be doing. Yeah,

What that means is, what differentiates us a little bit, Bill, is that there's a lot of point solutions out there. You have sort of email marketing providers, You have single point CRM solutions, you have payment solutions. And what we found was that small businesses, as they started to adopt little pieces, they ended up with 17 log ons, 17 passwords, 17 places to go, and nothing that was interconnected.

So what we did was we designed really an an all in one platform where it does everything that you need to help you get the job, to help you manage the job, and then to help you get credit for the job. So, to be more specific, things like it has a CRM that's sort of like the central nervous system, where small businesses can keep data and records and understand what people have purchased.

Then we have marketing tools in there, whether it's text or email reminders. Mm-hmm. , we have the ability to send digital estimates and invoices and even to collect payments, generate reviews. Have an interactive website. It really runs the gamut. And I think that's been a key to our success, is identifying a problem, which was people wanted to, they wanted to adopt technology, but once they started doing it, it was like a second job.

You had to go here for this and here for this, and export here and import there and thrive really solves that problem for people. And I think that that. A key component to the success that we've had so far. approaching 50,000 small business customers across the United States and beyond.

That is awesome. There's a platform allow for everything from like the solopreneur one person shop all the way to. I forget the, the, what is the proper definition of a small business? Is it like up to a hundred people?

Right. Interesting. Yeah. And it's, a lot of these businesses, they're having some really good success, even in the challenging times that we're in. But they need to be more efficient. They have the spirit, they have the desire, they see the roadmap of where they want to go, but getting there is really difficult unless you're organized, right?

Unless you have a, a streamlined way to conduct business on a daily basis. That's

Right. I just from an experiential perspective, It creates a lot of confusion and just complexity when that's the last thing you have time for, frankly, as a small business owner. Let, Let's talk Grant a little bit about your role, so your chief customer officer at Thrive. A lot of organizations just, I think the proliferation of the role may be over the last couple of years a lot of organizations are starting to define differently.

So tell our listeners about what is your role at Thrive? How do you approach it? what is the remit.

So we, we have the client experience team, and then probably the piece that, that we spend a ton of time on is, if you think about this bill, my team owns sort of the first 120. Of a customer's life, right? Mm-hmm. , which is the most integral piece, especially with small business. Now, I'll get to that in a second.

So we have the SDRs on my team. I get to work with them. We. A sales team, which has broken into sort of different teams, some of which serve local feet on the street that we have across the United States, across Australia as well, who are out there, who have strong existing relationships with people, with business owners, and they sort of bring them to the software sales team.

Think about it, having like an engineer in the software and, and we have a lead source that owns relationships out there. That brings us. Then we have your typical demand gen motion. We have our version of enterprise, which is going after franchises and becoming sort the, the central nervous system for, for their franchisees.

And then we have the onboarding team. We have our client success team, which is post onboarding. Mm-hmm. and even the monetization team. So we stay really busy. on my team, it's about, no kidding, about 320 people.

I think that's a pretty neat model, frankly. When you think about sort of the onboarding piece you mentioned like an on the onboarding is really critical. What's different maybe for a small business relative to a mid-market or even a large enterprise where you guys are dedicating and carving out that space to make sure that onboarding its.

So it's actually a reason why many of the people that have been our competitors, they can't wait to start serving small businesses and then get the heck to enterprise level because it's difficult. And if you don't do it right, churn is high because adoption is low. So we focus on an engaged user, which means we invest heavily in service, all of our onboarding.

With customers, there's no time limits. We seek to simply understand during the sales process, which is why it's great to have them all under sort of one, all 120 days under one shop. The entire sales process simply seeks to understand and define clearly the problem the prospect is having at this moment, the impact that it's having on their business, and then how we can be the solution and solve that.

And that kind of language and talk track now carries on from the moment the first SDR makes contact all the way through. Not just onboarding, but client success management as. , it takes a lot of handholding. Mm-hmm. , small business owners don't only need help identifying the problem, but also actually implementing the software and using it.

And we're willing to do that with no time constraints. No. Oh, it's extra for this, or you only get two hours. We've found that we have industry leading churn that's in the low twos while serving the small business sector because we build great relationships and I think they. Their success is extremely important to us.

It's not just lip service. And as you can imagine from a business bill, as we get higher engagement, we get higher retention, higher ndr, right? All of the, the, the great benefits that come with it as well. So it's worth the investment in our estimate. Estimation go. And the message that we like to send people is we're not going anywhere.

We've defined this market for us. We have a passion for small business and their. We're not trying to go upmarket or down market. We're, we're in the sweet spot where we're going to live forever and serve this segment because they need us and we need them. Very

Yes. Are there any other kind of must haves or must nots perhaps, that you guys just say, We're drawing a line here. We, we will always stand for this when we're, But we're also gonna draw the line here, right? Like, don't ever expect something like this type of experience from.

Mm-hmm. , I believe this will get to the root of your question. We don't pretend that we're going to run it for them. We're there is coaches Right. During the onboarding process and as we deepen engagement with our client success managers, we don't tell them we're gonna do this. It's not a do it for me service.

It's a do it with me at the beginning, and then it's a do it on your own with 24 service available when you. And I think that that's where we draw the line. We have a lot of customers that say, can I call you three times a month to do that? And we are so client focused, but at the same time, Bill, this is the old give a man a fish or teach a man to fish , like for their own good.

We inspire them to know that they can do this and that with all of these tools and. they can sort of, after, after that first 120 days, we're always here to support them, but that they're gonna be running it on their own. And I think that is, that's very different for that sector. If you think about leads, traditionally it was always do it for me.

Do it for me, do it for me. And now they immediately default to software Do it for me. But you can't, I, I can't input people into the CRM on a daily basis. I can't send you. So I think, educating on that and, and again, inspiring, letting 'em know that they can do it. And then offering the unlimited coaching that we do for four months.

I mean, that's, and then you can call us anytime after that, but it's pretty regimented for the first 120 days bill. And I think that's sort of a, a line in the sand, but it's for their own good as well.

Do you see also that you want people being active users of the platform? If they're not active up front, probably they're not gonna be active over the long term. Or like how and how do you bring them back from that?

Because when they decide to forge ahead with us and, and to make the decision to purchase and implement, this platform, that's the most excited they're going to get until that first onboarding call. Yeah. so we really do focus on a time to first value, Right? Sort of making sure that within the first five days of that first onboarding call, they're using the software to help solve the problem that they identified.

Was a major pain point for them and having a terrible impact on their business. That's the importance again, of even starting with the sdr, having the, the prospect, the customer really verbalize this is the impact this problem is having on my business, and put it to dollars and cents or time wasted or, misallocation of resources and what that means, even if it's a simple bill as a feature.

When roofers go out on estimates, if somebody doesn't show up, if they're not home with gas prices and inflation and labor, that's a massive, massive financial impact. Yeah. So implementing things like text reminders, email reminders, et cetera, have they seem so to you and I with dealing with Amazon and big business?

Right. You seem so like Dove. Of course we take it for granted, but small businesses are just now adopting that technology to help them. So the impact is real,

Whether you realize it or not, if you've got one employee, you're still creating culture as the business owner. How does, or, Well, you don't have an HR unit if you, you're a three person shop. You probably don't have an HR organization if you're a 20 or 30 person shop as well. How does the work that you do, maybe think about maybe your larger clients translate into being or delivering a customer led culture?

Like is it the time savings so you can focus on the things that you're building, the culture that you wanna build? Is it something maybe that's embedded in the platform? Like how do, is there anything in there that you all say we're actually helping companies become better? Not just operationally, but also from a cultural per.

So we're very focused on. Our software makes their employees lives easier. So from a cultural standpoint, if you're saving them an hour or two a day, or you're saving them from, having to call people to remind 'em that they're coming out cuz text and email is replaced with that. And then that person can do a job that they deem more important, more like a bigger role in the company and not just the sort of the, the nuts and bolts boring stuff that can be automated.

These. I believe that it, it empowers people at their organization while at the same time making their jobs happier, making their days easier, and that's gonna have a tremendous impact on culture, right? Everybody feels as they're, they're aligned against stuff that's more important, while at the same time the other stuff is still being done.

So I believe we have an impact on the retention of our clients' employees as well.

Right. I love that. Absolutely. I love that view. Yes, absolutely. How do you, so a big topic in the experience space is measurement and how organizations measure success against the customer. How do you think about that, maybe for your own team, but also from a corporate perspective? How are you measuring success for Thrive from a, from the customer's?

over the course of the last 12 months, which is really high stepping. Mm-hmm. , when you consider everything external going on in the environment. Right. So that is the key metric. Everything else stems from there. Of course, we look at transactional NPS and relationship nps, which we believe both are very good predictors of future success, right?

Yep. But really the biggest impact to churn, to likelihood to expand. Which dovetails into both of those, into ndr, obviously, and impact on nps. it all comes back to an engaged customer. An engaged customer is happy, they feel productive, they're feeling tremendous value, and they really appreciate the service that they got to get them to that point, which aids us in referrals.

So I would say the key metric that we look at, it's actually a stroller on our internet, right? It's actually every day it's updated, right? It is. Is engaged user metrics.

They see it when they go on your internet, they, they're reminded how important that is and what they can be doing in their role, no matter what the impact is, large or small, towards making sure that users or your clients are engaged and, and leveraging the platform. I'm curious, Grant, like one of the big topics in from a chief customer officer perspective is, within the c.

How, and you really do touch a lot of different things, which is just awesome. What are some of the best practices you've seen in influencing your colleagues at that level? Or even maybe, you're having conversations even at the board level, customer experiences more and more being a, being put on the board agenda.

Can you tell us a little bit about, so maybe two questions in there, and I'll throw the first one at you. How do you influence the broader organization and you've got an expansive agreement to begin with. Thinking about your CEO or your chief technology officer, or head of sales, et cetera, like how do you influence those folks across the C-Suite?

It's critical because one of the key components to growth, maybe the most critical, especially in this day and age, where it's not really growth at all costs anymore, as like read the room, right? Things have changed. Now it's responsible growth. Given the market conditions. You gotta keep your customers, gotta keep your customers, love your customers.

You gotta expand the spend of the customers that you have cuz it's so expensive. 14 x more expensive on average to go get a new. So I think that's real. I don't think anybody really bats an eye at me anymore when I say, we should add this touchpoint, or we should do this bit of research, or we should beta test this.

And I think that when you do things in small test groups and you can come with less anecdotes and more actual data, people are very open to it. But the direct and obvious impact to retention is the play that has always worked for me because you really can't argue that's not. You really can't argue that we'd rather just go find new customers if we don't do a good job with these, which is why we are different.

We have chosen to, invest heavily in service, in human service, not just tech touch, but a lot of human touch. But that makes us a rare bird, You know? You know better than anybody. Typically if you're serving small business America, b2b, you're in like the four to 6% monthly churn. Yeah, we're in the low twos.

Yeah. That delta, the investment we make more than pays for itself. That's awesome. I hope that

And if you can't share it, that's fine, but how are you thinking about customer experience as a board level agenda item? Is that something that comes up?

I feel, I think I even, we used to back in the one blurb from one customer and everybody says, Yeah, everybody feels that way. Right? , We have surveys upon surveys and data point upon data point from different arenas. And when you can bring all that to the. Then all of a sudden, once the the board hears about that and sees that, then they want to know how's engagement this quarter?

Yeah. Is engagement up or down the relationship NPS more so than transactional, the relationship, the 12 month nps, is that up or down? Because these are key indicators based on data of our future trajectory and of what's to come. So I think it's become a very comfortable conversation once you show the data and the material impact that you're making, even if it's on a smaller scale.

Then after that people, they feel the need to know, you know? Yeah. Because again, retention is key. Nobody has gobs of money right now to go drop millions upon millions to acquire new stuff for a ungodly cost off of Google, which is so out, outrageously expensive now we all know that. Right? To to, to buy clicks, et cetera.

To buy media. That yet it's not a struggle anymore. Two years ago, yes. But now I think people get it, you know?

I think that's very special. By the way, I'm curious to see how you think the role of the chief customer officer may evolve over the next couple of years. Right. We've seen a lot of change. It's a relatively new role. When you think about other C-Suite roles, certainly, where do you see the role evolving or maybe even just from the perspective of, how do you see your own role maybe evolving too as the chief customer?

We've built this sort of team selling approach, right, Which also allows us to. , but that reporting up through the chief customer officer means that everybody is talking the same language. Mm-hmm. , We have a well scripted way in which we communicate with customers from the first time you meet us. Right? All the way through onboarding and beyond, into expansion of usage, and then expansion of spend.

So I think that that might be very different for people watching right now or listening to hear, but I believe that that's vital because you'd never want any friction. Right. Or disjointedness, if that's even a word. Yep. May have have just made that up. It is now, man. As it as it passes from sales to onboarding.

Mm-hmm. . And when you have your systems, your processes and streamlined with one thought process from one sort of senior executive, I really think that helps a lot.

Right, and those handoffs, to your point, Not in every case, but sometimes they can get chunky and create the environment where our customers like, did I really make the right choice? Obviously, which is a big deal from a SaaS

SDRs are trying to get them engaged with something by using our software to message them right away. Yeah. And then during the sales process, you're literally saying, Well, why don't you take a little. They're touching it for whatever problem they're trying to solve. We're showing them how. And then onboarding is really just a continuation and deepening of what they've already done with an SDR and with a salesperson.

So you're able to script it like, like a Broadway musical almost. And, and, and it's just, it's not that it can't be done through teaming. It can, but to your point, typically you, you're more likely to end up siloed and disconnected and. Friction and bumpiness because you're on different systems, processes, thought processes, et cetera, when it's under two or three different shops.

[00:26:28] Grant Freeman: questions, not the every question came

[00:26:34] Grant Freeman: guest?

got a list.

this comes from the CEO of, of a technology company, artificial intelligence, and really interesting show it what has been the biggest struggle. I'll tell this a little bit because I think he was looking for, maybe for maybe a founder, but like what has been the biggest struggle you've encountered in building the business or the one mistake perhaps you'll never make again professionally?

I was like, I can do this so everybody can do this. And then you see engagement as like, there is none. It's shelfware immediately. Right? So I wish that I had, tested more back then adoption and what it takes to adopt versus just making an assumption that because I can do something, they should be able to do it.

As naive as that sounds, that was where I probably started five or six years ago with this thinking, Oh, fly off the shelves and everybody can just configure it and and use it. And then, from there, I think people do think that we're a bit crazy and different, which we're okay with the fact that we have so much human touch and so much handholding and have made a conscious decision to invest in service.

But I would implore anybody out there, whatever it takes to gain engagement, it will pay you back big. Again, in retention, in expansion of spend in hence NDR in nps and in referrals that you're able to get as well, which brings down your cost of acquisition, as we all know. So, I, I, I, that would be my answer to that question, if that's okay.

It's

Well, I just went through this process and it was super easy. I don't know what people are having such trouble with. And it's like you are one out of a million customers, right? Like you are not the experience. You're not the persona. Right? So

That's what it is like, and intimately knowing them like I'm listening to calls and talking to customers like real small businesses, and I. Sometimes people that even serve that segment, they've never actually just sat and spoken. Mm-hmm. . Because you would understand, and I wish this, again, this is pointing the finger at myself, I wish I had done that more with regards to software and adoption six years ago.

So talk to the actual customer, understand their daily lives, their, their plight, and Sheldon, you care and hand them the thing and say, Can you do it? and they'll, they'll be, Honestly, I, I'm not even time for this. Right? So,

All

[00:29:30] Grant Freeman: Oh boy. Let's see. Well, Bill, so moving forward, obviously we know that there are a lot of external factors that are gonna be impacting businesses, big and small. We also know that the lifeblood of any organization is the ability to affordably acquire new customers. And I think that's something that everybody's struggling with now.

So I would ask your next guest, what plans do you have or how do you believe you can accomplish or anybody out that can accomplish really lowering that cost of acquisition in times like we're having now? That would be my question

Of a company. They're, they're an agency, so that's gonna be really interesting to put in front of him. I'm excited to do that. All right. One last question before we wrap up. Really interesting conversation, Grant, by the way, thanks for your time, but where do you go for your inspiration?

And when I say that, yes, my family and yes my friends, but it's the small businesses, the stories that I get to. Of how our platform has changed lives. I mean, it could literally, like, I've got goosebumps right now just saying it because you're talking about people that had two or three employees that started in their garage and now have 20 trucks, and they accredit it to the service that they receive to the product, right?

To the ability to become more efficient and effective and really gain the ability to scale and grow and achieve their goals, dreams and aspirations. That's all I. Mean, if we're helping one or two of those people a day, let alone scores of them, you don't need to look anywhere else. It's, it's better than a book.

It's better than a movie. It's real life changing people's lives through what we do on a daily basis. So I, I think that would be my answer to that Bill. Very,

It's been wonderful to have you on the. everybody. Grant, Freeman Chief Customer Officer at Thrive, which is an end-to-end platform to help small businesses grow and, be better at what they do every day. Grant, thanks again for your time. We'll see you. Thank you, Bill.

[00:31:49] Bill Staikos: All right everybody, Another great show.

We're out. Talk to you soon