Chris Regester, CCO of PlanHat, shares his story of an early-stage startup transforming into a successful global SaaS business. He shares the importance of identifying and nurturing talent, and the power of a client-centric approach in building and scaling a software company. Chris discusses PlanHat's unique focus on post-sale customer management and how bootstrapping shaped their business culture. The conversation offers practical advice on creating value, maintaining profitability, and the critical role of customer objectives in driving business growth.

Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with

myself, Matt Best and my co host, Jonny Adams.

Hello.

Hi Jonny. And today we are joined by the fantastic

Chris Regester. And Chris is one of the founding members and

current CCO of plan hat. Plan hat are a customer platform

built to acquire service and grow lifelong customers. Chris

is also a wealth of experience in growing and developing SaaS

software organizations over his illustrious career so far. So

Chris, thank you for joining us. It's fantastic to see you. I

know SBR and plan have been partners now for some time, and

we talk a lot about customer success, or as it's often known,

CS for short, and what would be a fascinating place to start

today's conversation. Just talk to our listeners a little bit

about where things started out for you and how your journey

began.

I started my career at a great company called

meltwater, which at the time was like 40 people. They were just

launching in the UK. It was like a PR tech company, very small.

They'd come out of Norway. I was launching in UK, joined there in

a sales and account management sales and CS role, and then very

quickly moved and opened up the business in Asia Pacific. So

they wanted to grow very quickly internationally. They took a

team to the US. They took a team of two to Hong Kong. I turned 23

the day I moved about a month after I moved to Hong Kong,

moved over and started building up the business, and spent best

part of seven years over there. So running sales, CS,

recruitment, strategy, marketing, everything, building

up the business. Built into about 25 million. We opened in

Australia, we opened in Tokyo. We opened in Beijing, Shanghai,

Guadalupe, Delhi, Singapore. Hire people in those locations,

bring them at the Hong Kong incubate and then open up the

office. So then ran that, ran that region, which was a great

big adventure. And then by the stage, meltwater was about 100

100 and 20 million AR globally, and it had grown very quickly in

all these disparate markets. And they wanted to start up a

revenue operations function. I was asked to take that on. And

the idea was to kind of herd the cats and bring the madness back

and try and build some sort of, you know, central processes and

central strategy and connectivity between all of the

disparate offices around the world. So I moved back to

London. This is where my first daughter was born, and then

moved into a rev ops role. And that was kind of the journey

from about 100 million, 120 million, to about 450 so this

big exciting thing. Did lots of acquisitions, and I was in the

rev ops role, ultimately took the company public. Big, big,

big adventure.

That is quite the journey, and the international

element there as well, right? So fascinating to experience all

those different cultures, especially as you're building

something new. That must have been really interesting.

I can't underestimate how important

getting international experiences in a career. At one

point, I also ran our San Francisco office for a little

while as well in the middle of that thing. So got some us

experience too. But working and building out Asia Pacific was

just so enjoyable, just so many fun experiences. You know, how

do you hire an office in Delhi? If you've never been to Delhi

before? For example, there was just so many we ended up with an

office in an art gallery in a shopping mall, which was

fantastic and quirky, but also strange. When everyone's

working, sat on the phone talking to customers, and, you

know, mums are pushing, you know, prams past the office

window. So lots of exciting adventures along the way.

Chris, it's lovely to have you on and even hearing

the story there is, is fantastic. What was fascinating

about your story there was around the journey that you've

been on, you know, without putting you on the spot too

much, what's the one standout thing that's enabled you to

continue to grow? You know, from lessons learned, if you think

back to that time where you started, you know, what's that

one thing that's really helped you to continue to grow?

It's a hard one. One genuine lesson that I

learned from the founder and the CEO of meltwater, which I think

is just like a it's a beautiful truth, and it's something that

just makes so much sense. He just said, like, talent is

talent. Doesn't matter where you are, doesn't matter what your

experience is. Talent is talent. And so you just have, you have

your eyes open talent. Like, of course, you can't build a career

on your own. You have to build it with the people around you.

So just look for talent. That was what we found building in

Asia Pacific, sort of how I worked in the US. Talent is

talent. You just got to find the right pockets of it.

And that's fantastic. And a recent guest on this

podcast, we were talking about employee satisfaction being the

forerunner to client satisfaction. And I think you

know, talking about focus on talent, focus on people, and

seeing that as your key leverage and your key opportunity for

growth is, I don't think many naturally think like that. And I

think that's a really fascinating bit of insight. And

we really want to dive into this concept of client centricity

with you today. But as is customary on the podcast, and

just before we get into the meat of things, we'd love to hear

something that was particularly interesting in your week.

Okay, well, recently, I had the good

opportunity to go to the Olympics, which was, I think,

just phenomenal. And there are so many elements to it that were

that were fascinating. I saw the British gymnast Briony Park win

the gymnastic trampolining, which was extraordinary. If this

whole software thing doesn't work out, I'll probably go off

the gymnastic trampolining next. But the most entertaining part

of it for me was we went out to the north of Paris and went to

this hockey match. And I'd say, you know, guarantee them. I. She

played a lot of field hockey growing up, I'd say the vast

majority people in the audience had never seen a hockey match

before them. Suddenly, the people sat around me had never

seen a hockey match before in their life, but it was France

versus South Africa, and the amount of passion and love that

was shown during that match was just amazing. The I'd say that

the hour and a half of the match, it was the most important

thing in everyone's life. And just seeing all these French

people, who, you know, everyone knew before the Olympics had

been very cynical and skeptical about popping planning in a

totally Parisian way. I can say this because my family's part

French, but they, you know, very reason they've been, you know,

complaining. Oh, so it's been said, I'm going to leave and go

to the south of France and get out. But then they were there,

and in the moment, they were absolutely belting out the

Marseilles. They were just belt. It was just phenomenal. Just

endless, endless chanting of Ailes. But then also, like, you

know, what is this sport? How does it work? It was so much

fun.

Love that energy, right? And it just get, getting

energy from, from places, so we don't necessarily expect it. And

I mean, I know I didn't get a chance to go in person, but just

even hearing it on the TV, it was, you could, you could almost

sort of feel the power coming through. And as a rugby fan,

I've had many experience in the stad de France listening to that

being chanted in my ear. Yeah, they really get behind their

team. It's fantastic to hear that support.

So much passion.

It's fantastic. Wonderful, Jonny. What about

you? Can you live up to that high standard?

No, I can't, because it does draw me back to

then the 2012 Olympics in London, I have to say, when I

was fortunate enough to go. And I think one of the things that

spun out for me is I was fascinated by the weird and the

wonderful events that went on in the Olympics at that time. So

yeah, brilliant for you talking about that, Chris, and thanks

for sharing the story. For me. You know, it's been a bit of a

realization we're about to have our first baby, slightly

nervous, panicking. What we're trying to do is we're trying to

train our one year old Spaniel, and he's a working car Spaniel,

so they have high levels of energy. And what I'm coming to

realize after the third training session with this trainer is

that it's not the dog that's being trained, it's definitely

me, and then you can see the improvement from session one

session two, or the lack of improvement. And I feel that

from the outcome of that, I'm about to go on a journey that's

going to change my whole world. From being a parent. I'm a dog

parent at the moment, I'm going to be a human parent soon, and

I've really got to recognize that a lot of this is going to

be driven from good parental leadership, good awareness, good

understanding, and I'm dreadful with the dog, so I better pick

up my quality with my new child that will be arriving, but I

can't wait to be a dad. Matt, what about you?

It's funny how we seek inspiration in some of the

strangest places. But I've had a reflection of my own. Over the

last couple of weeks, I've been back out on my bike a little

bit, which has been really good and really energizing. But for

once, I've stuck with it for a sort of for a period of time. So

rather than doing one ride and then giving up for another three

weeks and then going back and doing it, I've done sort of back

to back, fairly decent bike rides recently. And something I

noticed, if we think about this in the context of growth and

sales, is how the power of, kind of sticking with it and then

tracking your progress. So I've climbed the same hill three

weekends on the bounce, and the friend that I go riding with

shared the Strava link and the PB that we achieved last week.

And you just think that's that those little wins, right? It's a

small goal, but these just stepping stones that gives you

that motivation and that drive to go forward. So yeah, that's

what I was celebrating in this past week. Awesome. So Chris,

diving into your experience and the insight that you could share

with this audience, when it comes to kind of client

centricity, we talk a lot at clients about client centricity

with our clients, but also for ourselves. And I think I see

that the importance of having a client centric approach. And

obviously plan hat is really built around that, and the plan

hat CRM software is built around that client centric approach,

and it's perhaps unique focus in perspective of the customer,

rather than perhaps coming at it from a sales or marketing

pipeline perspective. So how has this client centric approach

shaped the development and growth of plan hat in your eyes?

And how do you ensure that that kind of permeates throughout

every level of the organization?

That's a good question, you know. So context,

so plan head is about 200 people around the world where, you

know, we refer to Plan head as a customer platform. You know, we

sell a CRM software, a CSP software and a professional

service software. And you know, the idea is that people can

manage the entire lifecycle and customer within plan had, but as

you rightly said, We rightly said, we've come at it from a

post sale point of view. So we said, if you look at, you know,

traditional CRMs today. So Salesforce, your HubSpot,

they're already built pre sale. So HubSpot starts life as a

marketing tool. Salesforce starts life as sales automation,

sales pipeline in that just starts life focusing on post

sale. And our rationale there is that post sale is just

inherently more complicated, more data. The data is time

series. There's more activities. The activities are more complex,

and it's more cross functional, and it's inherently you're

trying to build a more complicated and solve a more

complicated set of problems. Then you are pre sale. So it was

felt that it was very natural to start post sale, solve the

complex problems, architect around complexity, and then

bring that and add in the pre sale components. It's wrong,

which is what we've, you know, which is what we've now done.

But in doing so, we bootstrapped the business for a very, very

long time. So, you know, when we started the company, handful of

people and we said, Look, we're not going to have any commercial

team members. We're not going to do any marketing. I'm going to

have any sellers. We're just going to have people who are

trying to figure out what this set of problems are that we're

trying to solve and the right way of going about it. So for

the first four or five years, totally bootstrapped. No, not

really a salary insight. And are really building this out,

thinking very hard till we had about 100 employees, which is a

lot for bootstrapping. And you know, then it gets pretty scary

as well, because when you bootstrapping, you typically

only have three months of salary in the bank account, and you're

always a little bit nervous. You have a bad quarter, and suddenly

it all goes a little bit sideways. But then we did a very

large Series A, and we raised $50 million series A but because

we've been bootstrapped, it's very much in our DNA that

anything you do has to generate value, and you don't just spend

unnecessarily. So even today, we've barely touched that 50

million because, you know, our culture is to run the business

profitably and ensure that everything is focused around

value, value creation of every individual. There's no fluffy

roles, there's no flappy work. It's value. And when you have

that mindset, you realize that at the end of the day, the

reason you exist is to deliver objectives for your customers.

Because as you build a business very quickly, all of your

revenue, all of your inherent value as a business, is in your

customer base. It's not in your new business pipeline that's all

hopes and dreams and forecasts, but the actual business is in

your customers. And so as you scale a business, what matters

is, can you deliver objectives to your customers, and over

time, can you retain and grow them? So I think that bootstrap

nature of the business just inherently makes you value

customers so much more. You know, if you have an idea and

you know, someone gives you 200 grand, and then you, you know,

you get a kind of a proof concept idea, and you turn that,

you get 2 million in seed funding, then all you care about

is churning out that pipeline and proving that you're going to

land new customers. But if you're having to fund the

business yourself, you realize, like, No, we need the customers

to renew. We need them to grow, because that's how we're going

to make payroll. So it's very much in our DNA to focus on

customer centricity and customer value, because otherwise the

business would have fallen apart very early on.

That's a great set of statements that have lots of

value within themselves, and I can make some assumptions on one

of the points you made earlier around complexities from

onboarding onwards, just for the listeners. Could you just

describe a couple of examples of the complexities.

Yes, I think that if you, if you transplant,

it's like there's more complexity and data. So

traditional CRF systems already built around transactional data,

right? So an opportunity can be open or closed, deals can be won

or lost, like typically, things exist in a binary state, and

that's how things are. So you look at HubSpot data or

Salesforce data, everything's very binary, but when you're

dealing post sale, what matters is time series data. So that

just means it's more complex data, and it's just, you know,

just infinitely faster amounts of data you got to think about

because ultimately, post sale is about understanding current

state, comparing it to prior state, and thereby inferring

future state. And you're trying to do this across everything,

right? So all your data has to be on a time series you can

understand development. So there's just vast amounts of

data, and you need that time series in all of your product

analytics and ticket volumes and email threads, in survey

results, in product feedback, and you name it. Every concept,

even revenue, ultimately, is time series, right? What are

they spending with you over time, and is it increasing or

decreasing? So there is a sort of inherent nature of time

series in modern recurring revenue businesses and many

other types of business. And then there's also this process

complexity, where, if you imagine a marketing and a sales

funnel, it's a relatively linear set of processes. You develop

pipeline, top of funnel, then at some point, you know, BDR gets

engaged, they hand it over to an AE, or whatever your model is,

and ultimately it closes. And whether that's, you know, with a

human or as automated as one company versus another, but once

they're a customer, there's so many things you got to think

about. So how do you onboard them? Are you onboarding the

company or the different users? How do you ensure there's

adoption? What about change management from prior systems?

You know? What about when you have any product rollout, you

got to do it all again. What do you do around renewal? What's

your renewal strategy? How do you do stakeholder management?

Every company ultimately moves up market at some point, like

there's just so much, there's so many more processes, and they're

more complex, and critically, they go on forever, right? They

go on free. It doesn't stop it like, oh, close one. Let's move

on. It goes on forever. So it's just inherently more complexity,

both on data and process.

And you know, thank you for the explanation. It

resonates, you know, you look at the buyer complexity, so the pre

sale piece and how those squiggly lines can sometimes not

make. That linear approach as well. But what you've just

described there feels like the if you were to draw that image

out as you described, it would be a really complex set of

processes and lines all converging and moving away from

each other at points. So that was really, really helpful.

I think the interesting thing for me here as

well Chris is the and coming from a sort of CS background

myself, I think there's all of that complexity that exists

within the team in terms of process and the journey that the

overall additional customer journey complexity. The other

thing is the various different integration requirements. And I

think, like that's such a huge part of it. It's always sort of

liken this to my experience in the the trading world. And if

you have a front end trading platform. I like a Bloomberg or

whatever, that define what it is, because everybody starts

there, right? It's the first, it's the it's the point of

contact for the end user. So the trader is originates the

activity, and they originate it in that platform. Therefore that

platform dictates downstream, and it's those middle and back

office systems that have to do all of the joining together, and

the seller tape and the glue and the staples that that knits it

all together. And I guess that's where, again, plan hat and where

it's originated with this client. First is going to have

that complexity of right? We need to take from a billing

system. We need to take we need to pull from a IT Service

Management System. We need to pull from the product itself,

because we need to understand what that usage looks like, and

that extra layer of complexity there in implementation causes

more challenges, but it's so critical as a CSM having all of

that in a single pane of glass view in order to serve the

customer most effectively.

Yeah, I think that's so interesting when you

think about kind of enterprise software, and you know,

ultimately, near respect to a plan out what you care about is,

yeah, how sticky is your product? And one of the key

things is, just like you say it's like you need to be, you

know, if you're a point of data entry, you're just inherently

more sticky than if you're just a data recipient, and so you

always want to be a point of data and just like typically

ticketing tools, you know, the ticket is created there. It's

sticky in, in the stack. Likewise, the new business CRM

on the on the post sale side. Of course, you know, you know, CSMs

account managers are working with their customers all the

time, so there's data entry to that level. But in general, in

many organizations post sale, there's just not been as

influential as the sales organization or the support

organization. So it's less sticky. I think you're totally

right. But for plan head, yeah, the extensibility, native

integration. So we have sort of this vast library of native bi

directional, no code integration. So the idea being

that you could quickly connect data, then organize it, and that

starts to give you the power of the organization. If you're on

the post sale side, there's also, you know, firmographic

data and enrichment you need on the pre sale side, it's kind of

the same story, right? You've always got to bring data

together.

I'm going to challenge the, you know the

notion businesses use different platforms, and they may or may

not be aware of plan hat, they may or may not be aware of other

platforms that they could use. I'm trying to understand the

value. If I'm sitting in my business now and I'm running at

10 million Arr, or I want to grow to 100 million. Do I need a

certain model that would then constitute to look at the

customer first? Do I need to be a certain growth level to look

at the, you know, the starting point? Because when we talk and

advise our clients now, there's a lot of noise in the market at

the moment of rip out Salesforce, implement HubSpot,

and I'm like, Well, why? Well, it's Vogue. So I'm just curious,

because if I'm a user of another platform, like, how do I know

when the flip happens? How do I know where I'm going to get the

value as someone that they might use that moving forward?

Yeah, and I guess there's, there's many

different answers, right? There's many different scenarios

and situations. I mean, what we see on the post sales side, we

see a lot of organizations that, you know, if you think I just

the evolution of any company, you know, you one of the first

tools you'll buy as a CRM, right? You always start out in

spreadsheet, and then at some point you move to a CRM, and

often that's Pipedrive or HubSpot. And then historically,

the story is when at some point you get a Salesforce, and then

at some point you say, oh, you know what? What about our

customers? What are we doing there? And they're like, Oh, we

got a CRM, or manage it in in a CRM. So immediately you're like,

Oh, we're going to use the sales tool for this other and it's

sort of just like, that's the first move. You're like, oh,

it's kind of weird. You're like, Oh, why don't we make the

finance tool team work? And they're like, no, no, no, we get

an ERP. But it's like, the set, for some reason the post sales

team, like they're going to work in the sales tool. So there's

that kind of first move that is sort of subliminally happened in

many organizations over time. And what we've seen is that 70%

of our new business today is organizations moving post sale

out of Salesforce and into plan hat because, like, it just

doesn't work, you know, if we're honest, and I think it doesn't

work for a number of reasons. Like, one, is that, you know,

the transactional data element, it's very hard to have time

series data in Salesforce. Two, you need an you know, typically

at scale, or any form of scale, you need administrators. It

becomes very expensive. It doesn't feel modern. And three,

you know, Salesforce clearly has an issue around usability. It's

very rare that you go out there and you're like, hey, who loves

Salesforce? And all the AES are like, Hey, I love Salesforce.

That doesn't happen. And so what we're trying to do, the plan

had, is trying to say, look, let's build out a tool that has

sort of enterprise level data management for this data

complexity we talked about with. Consumer grade usability. So one

nice way I think of thinking about plant head is, you know,

sort of the data capabilities in Salesforce, or the usability of

a Monday.

And I really like that explanation inevitably, you

know, it's, there's a lower cost of retaining customers, there's

a great return of growing customers as well, right? And,

you know, we work so hard to acquire. Well, what platforms

are we really prioritizing to enable? I'm a user of one of

those platforms, as referenced from pre sale, and I agree the

functionality is dreadful. And I think sometimes my cynical self

goes, Do they just not develop that? Just to really infuriate

me and keep me sort of level locked in their platform because

I always want more, like, it's just, I don't know, maybe that's

just my crazy mind thinking there. But it's great to hear

about how plan hack can help with one of the most important

aspects and being client centric.

I think that also, to me, talks to the challenge of

the evolution of CS. And Chris, I'm curious to get your thoughts

here as the value of CS in a business and how to demonstrate

that value, and how to quantify the value, because so often,

again, it's very it's a little bit perhaps more binary and a

little easier to quantify that value of a sales person by their

success in closing and winning and winning work and where

you've got someone in CS. CS is still so often seen as a cost

center, which is kind of crazy to Johnny's point of it being at

the heart of retaining your climate that you've worked so

hard to get. What does that mean for not just for plan hat, but

just in your experience? Chris, like, what's your there's not

necessarily a direct question there, but I'd love to get your

perspective on CS and where you think it fits and how you think

it should be seen, and how plan that maybe helps do that.

Yeah, so I think, you know, the first thing

that I would take issue with is, is just like CS, I think that

that is, and it's a terrible late, totally manufactured

concept, as always, just like, it's also important to just

acknowledge it was like it was manufactured. So there was a

company, one of our competitors, nickel gainside, and they're an

amazing marketing machine, but they manufactured a concept

called customer success because they wanted to sell a product to

a group of people. So it's like, it's perfect category creation.

They did an exceptional job. They did such a good job. They

actually wrote a book about it called category creation, where

they talked about this. We created the category to sell

seats and build a software company like and it's just

absolutely the Salesforce playbook, but done for over

sale. But I think that, like, it's the wrong it's the wrong

framing. This was never a category. It's not a category.

People have managed their customers since the dawn of

time. There's nothing new, you know, as I always you know, say,

if you went in, you know, what's the original recurring revenue?

Business is hairdressing. Because, you know, hair always

grows bad. But if you go into a barber shop in Roman times, like

the barber had to do the same thing, right? The barber had to

give a good haircut. Probably give some gossip, you know,

maybe try and give you the Nero, the narrow perm as an upsell,

and then you'll come back a month later and get another

chop. And that was the way it worked. It's, this is no

different. It's just like it's customer management is what it

is. CS as a concept is, is it a bit silly, and it's kind of been

brought up with this sort of, you know, fluffy rainbows and

unicorns, stories and all of these, like, weird terms. But

this is, how do you manage your customers over time, you know?

And what do you have to do? Well, you have to deliver

objectives that your customers want. And if you do so they'll

pay you more money, and that will just increase over time.

And this is business 101, you cannot run a successful business

if you are not successfully delivering objectives to your

customers.

I completely agree with you. You know, coming from

a pre sales, sales era and sales directorship, you know, customer

service was the term that was heard then I came into this

world of customer success. But in professional services, it's

called Client partners. And what I'm curious about Chris is

partnerships is a mutually beneficial end goal, right? It

has to be a win, win. We talk about that in a lot of worlds.

It's not about Win, lose or lose, win. So if you had a

choice, you know you referenced CS customer success, probably

not being or come from a certain origin. But what would you call

it if you had a choice, if you don't mind me asking.

I would try not to call it anything. But I think

what it is is long term customer management. That's what it say.

That's, that's what you're doing. It's over time. You're,

you're doing these things. But I couldn't agree more, like I

think the economics of good long term customer management are

really still not fully understood. And I have a great

anecdote to this, where recently I spoke to the CEO and the CRO

of a really famous, publicly listed NASDAQ company. It's a,

you know, essentially a B to B, household name, and we're

talking to them, and they have a, they clearly have a churn

problem, and it's in all of their public statements, they

have a churn problem that's been impacting the public valuation

or the market cap of the company. And we're talking with

the CRO about this challenge, and the CRO ultimately owns pre

sale and post sale, and we're talking about the structure of

their sales organization. He's like, Well, it's built for

velocity. This is built for velocity. I said, What do you

mean? He's like, Well, we're hiring young kids. We train them

to sell SMB as they. Succeed with SMB. They move up the

market, then move mid market, moves up to enterprise, and

that's kind of the path so that the entire operating model is

built around acceleration and velocity in new business. But

the challenge is, is all of those deals that those new new

guys are signing, all those SMB deals, 45% churn, 45% churn, and

this is their vehicle. So you think about the first impression

of these kids joining the company two three years in,

they're in an SMB segment. That's what they're learning.

Sell it, move on, sell it, move on, sell it, move on. And it's

killing the business. And you see the net retention of the

company going down with the market cap. And it's just the

economic model doesn't work if you don't rethink your business

around long term customer management, long term sort of

healthy, sustainable business practices. But this is, you

know, a household name in SAS, and the CRO is like, he is

exceptional, but his prioritization is, I want to

build a velocity based Sales Machine, rather than a long term

sustainable, you know, post sale organization. And I thought that

was such a it's such a truism of where many organizations are at

today.

So the solution to that challenge then, from your

expertise. What is the answer to that?

Don't sell deals that churn.

And so there's a lot of work that goes on for

this use case. So not only is a platform required to help with

that transition of decline to growth, but there's also a

people and cultural shift that that's required. There's also a

capability and skills element. There's a hiring FTE future plan

and this is where it gets super complex, but plan hat can inform

an organization of the metrics, right?

Yeah, so I think, you know, plan hat as a

technology, you know, we ultimately become the place

where you consolidate all of your data so you understand

what's going on with your customers, and where you manage

all of these processes, both pre and post sale, so that you can

report and understand the efficacy of what you're doing.

Plan had as a business. We then come in and also provide a whole

bunch of consulting, advisory services around what's the right

methodology to do it. Or we use great partners like SVR, you

know, to come in and advise on these things as well. I think

what you said is really spot on, that this is much more than just

a system. You can't, you know, if someone like, Ah, I will get

a system. It will all work. It doesn't. You know, that doesn't

happen anything. You don't sort of buy Salesforce and then sell

more. It doesn't. It doesn't work that way. But I think that,

you know, you know our topic being customer centricity,

that's a cultural thing before it's anything else. And it and I

think just, honestly, it's a top down cultural thing. If you

really want to institute it in your organization, it doesn't

just happen because people are like, Hey, I love the customers.

We put customer centric on the website. It's top down and it's

cultural.

I think one example you gave there of the household

B to B, clearly, that's an operating model. That's a sort

of directional challenge, which, as you said, is that is the top

down piece. There's the other bits that Johnny talked about

there around your training, enablement, coaching. There's

culture as a that could be used as a bit of a kind of umbrella

term, perhaps, that just sort of, yeah, that encapsulates a

lot of that stuff. I mean, we would see them typically

challenges around, you know, remuneration and compensation as

being kind of key drivers. Are we driving all of the right

behaviors? That's a bit more of the stick than the carrot. I

think there's for me, and what I've seen in various businesses

is, and this is linked very much to the culture, but it's almost

the people armed with or not necessarily armed, and that's

probably the point, but tasked with the job of looking after

the clients and growing clients and how they are seen in the

under the CRO CRO banner, in terms of the autonomy that

they're given, the capability to serve in the best possible way.

You know, the the level of experience that you're hiring.

I've seen organizations who see CS as a feeder into sales or

product, and it's sort of part of and it's your will you go

into CS through being a good support technician. So well,

that's, for me, is is fundamentally the wrong way

around, because CS is about developing, nurturing the

relationships of those clients that define your business. So is

that something that that you're seeing as well when you're not

necessarily just your clients, but also when you're out in the

market, is that still something that you think, that we're all

sort of working towards?

I think, I mean, I think you're hitting on

something that's very clearly, very clearly a thing I would say

at the top, on the on the cultural level. So, you know,

you talk about, you know, maybe culture is the rapper, and a

good way to reflect on it as an organization is like, Who are

the HEROES in your company? And in most companies I've ever

seen, heroes are either the seller who lands the big deal or

it's the engineer who, you know, builds whatever it is the fancy

AI integration. But it's typically, it's either an

engineer or it's a sales rep, you know, and that sales rep who

closes that deal and, you know, rings the bell or whatever they

do to celebrate, like, oh my god, you did it. Meanwhile,

there's some CSM who's gonna have to work that thing every

day for so long and and who gets remunerated off that deal. Is it

the seller who lands it, or is it the CSM who delivers the

continuous value? So I think it's a very interesting thing

now. And like, another way of like, who are the heroes? Is,

what are the stories? Yeah, and this is something that we talk

to our customers a lot about. On the post sale side, is the vast

majority of organizations, you know, they'll celebrate their

victories in in sales in a big way, and you communicate their

releases in a big way. So they're celebrating engineering,

they're celebrating sales. But the great stories that happen

post sale, they don't really get celebrated. They need to get

communicated that much. You know, we got this new customer,

and we onboarded them in record time, we just renewed our, you

know, we really discussed them a blah, blah, blah. We, you know,

whatever it may be, people don't tell those stories and share

those stories a little much so it becomes a little bit of a

self fulfilling prophecy that culturally, the other areas are

more prominent in the business. I think the recruitment path

into CS or into post sale roles was for a long time, what you're

saying, it's kind of like we used to joke about it, like, you

know, it's the elephant's graveyard. It's, you know, it's

that person that you really like in the company, like, Oh,

they're so likable. They're already great at anything. No, I

shove them in CS, and I'd say that that's how it was. I don't

think that's how it is now. I do think it's changing. And sort of

my theory on this, and my message to anyone who better

listen to it, is that your post sale team in the organization

should be the most aggressive team you have any organization.

And that's a fairly for many people. That's a counter

intuitive pointing no sales should be aggressive. But I'm

like, no post sale needs to be the most aggressive part of the

organization, because they're the team that needs to say no

more than anyone else. So they need to understand they don't

work for the customer. They work for the customer's objectives.

And so you align on what the objectives are. And then, like,

Hey, you want to go up that mountain, let's go. Get behind

me. Let's march up the mountain, or go there. And Midway, the

customer's like, oh, you know what? I want to go over to

there. There's a nice picnic that's going to have a picnic by

the river. And you're like, No, we're going up the mountain.

That's where we're going get behind me, we got to go. And so

they've got to have that assertive, aggressive mindset.

And I think we're seeing that happen more, and it's a little

bit to do with, you know, post sell teams becoming more

commercial and more ownership of revenue, you know, that's

driving that mindset, but also a recognition that you can't just

hire the, you know, the friendly, smiley, good culture

fit to manage the customers, you need someone who's strong and

assertive, because managing customers sort of, you need to

be able to triangulate between a deep understanding of your

customer, a deep understanding of your product, and a deep

understanding of their objectives. And if you can

triangulate between those three things, then you can deliver

value. And that's, you know, that's not a passive, you know,

happy, smiley, friendly person who can typically do that.

I mean, I love that golden nuggets coming out of

that. And one, one of the things that we, you know, when Matt and

I were planning this session we thought would be valuable, is if

you could touch upon that sort of customer centricity and how

to build that strategy into your business. And I feel that you've

touched upon a real, sort of important factor that I wanted

to amplify for the listeners. It was around connecting

aggression. I thought there's an interesting word you chose, by

the way, you know that's because that could be seen in a certain

way. But as you then went on to describe it was really

interesting about connecting the dots of the customer objectives,

which I think is lost in so many businesses. You might think

about what you do, what we do as a professional service firm is

that, I think it comes to the mindset shift of thinking about

outcomes first and then coming towards understanding how you

can support that client, and specifically, whether you're

working at plan out or SBR, you do a similar thing, right? But

understanding objectives and outcomes are really crucial. We

need to understand those of our client base and then work

towards those. If you're thinking about building a

customer centric strategy within an organization, one of those

things would be understanding your customers objectives. What

would be some of the other facets that make up a really

strong customer centric strategy?

No, I think that's a great one. So I think

that that's that's got to be, you know, almost the, you know,

top of the tree is understanding customer outcomes. But I think

it's a little bit, I would say, maybe bigger than that. So in

the anecdote I gave that SAS company, they've designed their

operating model around velocity. And I would argue, you know, you

need to design your operating model around customer outcomes.

So for example, you say, well, in marketing, when they're

filling in a lead form on the website, that lead form should

have categorizations to what they want to achieve, that

information needs to be there for sales rep and CRM, so that

they can then have a very defined narrative around those

things. But it's refined. Then you have a kickoff call when

they convert, what are your outcomes? This is what we

understand. This is how we go deeper in it. And then that's

reviewed every quarter and and sort of you, you build a

framework around objectives that becomes a consistent language

and narrative that a prospect hears, a lead hears, and a

customer hears, and they hear a continuously, no matter who they

talk to in the organization. When they read your newsletter,

they hear the same language. When they look into product,

they see the same language like that, familiarity around

objectives is very, very powerful. So that operating

model of a pure alignment moving product, you know, what products

building, what marketing is talking about, what sales is

pitching, you know, CS is delivering. That's, I think, the

core of customer centricity when you're thinking about about

objectives. And then, and that's sort of like a virtualization of

it. And then I think you also can think about it horizontally,

where you say. So it also needs to, you need to realize that

it's not just the group of people who are, you know, it's

not just the customer managers or the CSMs, but the once

they're a customer, it's now a collective responsibility, and

that's sort of another piece you have to operationalize. So does

everybody understand their role and responsibility towards the

customer, and what they've got to do, you know, to get the

customer towards their objectives, which very often,

you know, isn't, isn't the case. And there's so many interesting

kind of operational tactics you can bring in to kind of drive that.

So Chris, circling back to what you shared earlier,

around how plan hat was was formed, and the nature in which

you were able to do that through bootstrapping, but with a

continued focus on value and delivering value to your

customers. If you're out there and you don't make necessarily

have that option, right? Maybe you can't bootstrap it yourself.

How do you stop yourself from getting distracted by those

other things that are out there that might pull you offline and

remain focused on delivering and focused on value to the customer?

I think it's, to some extent, you know, if you're

not bootstrapping and, you know, say you're, you know,

capitalizing the business with investment. You know, at some

point it's just like that's become, you know, the way the

world works. You know, at some point, you know, when a VC looks

at your business, they understand that your growth will

slow to the point of your net retention. So if your net

retention is 120% your growth will become 20% over time. So

the sort of this, like, you know, we're all intrinsically

motivated to drive growth from our customers, because

ultimately, that's how people are going to value the business.

When you look at, you know, when you look at analysis of ARR

growth of a company against NRR of a company, you get a higher

multiple valuation if your nr is higher, rather than, if your AR

growth is higher, which I think is, for a lot of people, isn't

immediately obvious. You sort of assume, or I got 100% growth,

everyone will value us massively. But actually, if

you've got 100% growth or 60% net churn, you don't get a good,

a good valuation. So, yeah, I think that's, there's a little

bit of, you know, it happens naturally, and then a little bit

it's just sort of, it's a discipline that we're all

learning, I would argue that most, or many, many companies

have been about built without that, and you can, of course,

survive for a very long time by just focusing on new business.

You know that, you know, we've all, you know, been in companies

that have done that. You can do that, but like this, you know,

SaaS, company I mentioned, you know, they did incredibly well.

That's why we all know their name. But now it's not

sustainable, so I think that has to be its recognition, like, at

some point you need to figure this out. So it makes a lot of

sense to do it early on. And one of the things that I'm seeing

now, which I think is really interesting, is what a couple of

things. So one is that more startups are thinking about post

sale and customer life cycles earlier on than they were

before. That's very, very clear, right? It used to be these sort

of think about, how do we build a product and sell it and then

product and sell it? And then, you know, it'll be a perfect

product. Life will be good. But instead, now we're seeing more

people think like that, and more people building it into the

product. Which is where I think this will all go in a couple of

years, is that products will hold the objective and, you

know, everything will be, you know, you productize customer

management, which makes a lot of sense over time.

That's really interesting, the concept of

productizing, customer management, and I guess there's

that on that journey working out where to point your resource in

the in the most appropriate way to maintain and develop and grow

those relationships. If you're sat listening to this podcast

now, and you're a business that's starting to see an

increase in churn, let's say you're a software business,

you're starting to see an increase in churn. You're not

really sure where it's coming from. You've got an established

customer success team. You've got a healthy pipeline of new

business. Where would you advise someone in that position to go

look first?

So I think the foundation to a lot of these

things, it's hard, and the hardest thing about per sale is

it is different for every organization. It's just like the

moment anyone starts talking in generic language around post

sale. There's no point in listening anymore, because it

is. It's just different. Are you selling to enterprise, selling

to SMB? Is it a vertically integrated What are you selling

like? There's so many things to it, but there's clearly

something around you. Need to identify cohorts in your

customers, and you need to look at cohorts by multiple different

dimensions. So look at cohorts by size. What's their spend with

you? What's that potential spend? By geography? Look at the

year of sale, product constellation, all of those

things you need to look at cohorts see if you can isolate

problematic cohorts and positive cohorts is clearly a thing.

There you go. Look at life cycle. You know you want to

have, at all times, a rudimentary life cycle. And you

want to have some sort of kind of North Star indicators of

outcome success or outcome achievement. Some people talk

about that as a health score. I think that you know health

scoring, so some good things to them, some silly things to them.

But you need some sort of North Stars of, is there, you know,

are we? Are we achieving outcomes with our customers?

They seem to be the foundation so segmenting, thinking through

a life cycle, ensuring that it's being executed, and then having

some sort of, you know, guiding metrics around outcome

achievement, they're the foundational pieces we always

you know, try and coach people towards.

Fantastic. And Jonny and I both kind of nodding along

there. I think we would, we would absolutely concur with

that. I've got one final question for you, and this might

be a tricky one, but obviously, at plan hat, you use plan hat,

right? What of the features, if you had to pick two features,

would you say that your team appreciate most from the product?

We did a new thing recently, which I thought

was interesting and a good example. So I think when you

have an organization, whether it's you know, a sale, whatever

team it is, like you, one thing that is becoming clearer and

clearer is like, you need to be measuring how people are

spending their time at scale, not not at a micromanagement

level, but on the post sale point side, that could be things

like, maybe you institute a new idea of like, we're going to

start doing ebrs. EBR makes sense. We're going to do

executive business reviews of our customers. Sounds logical.

We should do it. But then if you're going to institute that,

you're going to spend all this time setting them up and

building them out, then you've got to measure what actually

changes as a result of doing them. And I think a lot of

people don't do that. They're just like, let's start doing

this thing intuitively. It sounds like it makes sense, and

then six months later, like, hey, was it worth it? We've

spent 1000 hours on that thing, and you don't know. So one of

the interesting things that plan had is that it's very flexible

data model, so you can really measure absolutely anything

against any other data point. So one thing we did recently was we

launched a whole bunch of new sequences to our customers. And

so these are really to drive education and adoption of our

users. And what we did is we decided we were going to AB test

it. So we built out all these sequences, you know, informing

people about ways to use the, you know, the product and

whatnot. But we sent to our SMB customers, our mid market

customers, we purposely didn't to the enterprise. And then, you

know, we sent this out a bunch based on various triggers in the

system, and then in June, we were able to do analysis on it,

and we saw that users in the SMB and a mid market cohort who'd

been receiving these sequences, their adoption of 65% higher

than users in the enterprise customers who not been receiving

these sequences, despite all being kind of new users within

the same period of time. So there's huge rally for our team

and for our customers around the ability to kind of one, you

know, push this stuff out and engage with all of your users

automatically. You know, we're engaging with all these users

our team is managing, you know, without having to do anything,

but to really, really evidence the impact of it, which was,

which was really powerful. I think another thing that our

team likes a lot, and a lot of our customers use as well as we

have this concept of collaborative portals, where you

could take absolutely any of the data in plan had, and you can

share it in real time with your customer. If you imagine you're

an organization who's got 10,000 customers, and you know, as the

kind of Pareto law 8020 thing going on. It's got these 8000

customers, they generate 20% of revenue. It's not, you know,

they're important, but not so important. But you still want to

give them a really nice a really nice experience. So what you can

do plan hat is you could auto generate dashboards showing

their usage, or auto generate presentations around their usage

and their objectives, because you got all of that data in plan

hat, and automatically share it in this portal. So then they

have this destination they can go to, and they're seeing, over

time, how their usage is improving, and they're seeing

the ROI. So even though you as a team aren't spending all the

time doing it, the customer is still seeing the transparency in

the ROI and that it's aligned with their objectives. So we use

them really heavily and so on. And then there's one, one thing

that we're doing now, which I think is, I think is actually a

really interesting concept, where in these portals, a

customer can go in and update information there, and that

information, if they update it, that can update back into plan

head. So if you imagine, you know, generally in post sale,

the way people have thought is like we as a company, as a

vendor, we need to choose the kind of content we're going to

send to our customers, because we are smart. We know what they

want. We know that a user with low adoption, they need this

content, they need that content, and so on. But now the customers

can go into a portal. They can select it. So it's like, when

you're a kid and you have those, you know, choose your own

adventure novels, and, you know, you roll the dice, and then it's

like, in the corner there's a treasure chest. In the other

corner there's an old lady, and you're like, you know, you go to

the old lady and she turns into a gremlin, or whatever happens,

like those, those kind of fun books. But it's kind of like

that now, because in the portal, the customer could be like, you

know, you can ask in a portal, what are your objectives? The

customer selects two, and that automatically drops them into

sequences that start to educate them around how to use your

technology to achieve those objectives. So it's like a

choose your own adventure, but sort of reversed customer

management, which I think is a very interesting thing. It comes

back to what we said a moment ago about productizing customer management.

Chris, you said it goes back to productizing

customer management. That's real sort of demonstration of of how

that comes to light. I think one thing that really jumps out to

me, and if I go back a number of years, back to when I was a CS

or a cam management practitioner, and you think if

you could have any wish, it would be to automate some of the

management of some of your smaller customers, and to

provide you with relevant insight at the right time, so

that you can be relevant to your customer. And I think actually

what you've just articulated there, for me feels like exactly

that. It's like, how do we take you know, and that's for me, is

the sort of the fundamentals of good customer management, is

understanding your customer, understanding. You provide value

to your customer and making sure that you help them in seeing

that but also getting it. And I think actually those features

that you just articulated, I think, really enable that.

Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a

fantastic discussion about client centricity, and it's so

great to hear how plan hats out there helping some of those

client managers or CSMs or account managers, or whatever we

want to call them, to really do the very best job, to continue

to deliver value for their customer. And I think just

client centricity at the heart of growth is what we wanted to

talk about today. And I think actually, if we circle back to

that, what we've explored are some really, really great ways

in which to do that. And Chris, you shared some fantastic

insight with our audience. So on behalf of Jonny and I would like

to thank you so much for joining us on the Growth Workshop Podcast.

Thank you for having me.