The Wisdom Wall

“I think often people miss more than they hit, and this is especially true now, because before people would often say, and boards would say, you need to hire for the person you need four years from now, right? Because you're going to be growing so fast, and you need to hire that person that can help you get to where you…”

“In fact, if you, uh, investor says, who are some of your customers I can talk to? If my opinion, giving them a weak reference is worse than no reference. It literally dilutes your whole pitch process and value.”

“In fact, if I give you one piece of like advice from the beginning, it's don't just hire a bunch of CSMs, maybe one or two. It's heretical for me to say, by the way, but it's true. Go fix all your processes, your product, make it so you can scale without a crazy number of people.”

“There are so many companies out there that hire CSMs as a band-aid over the customer experience, over the product.”

“Every market has a certain number of buyers and eventually get to the point where you started selling to a lot of those buyers. Now doesn't mean you won't sell to more buyers, but often like the number of new buyers, like the number of new logos grows, grows, grows, and then flattens out, right?”

“Like, it's easy for somebody to join a company and leave, like, 90 days later. It's really hard if somebody leaves, like, a year and three months later after joining, because they've already put their imprints on the team, they've hired new people, they've reorg, blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden, they're…”

“This is why when you get to really big companies and really storied companies, there's very little senior hiring. Most of the people in these huge companies grew up in the companies and moved around”

“And actually, ironically, SMBs sometimes need more hand-holding, because they have less internal capability, and they're, like, more distracted, so it's kind of weird, like, you know, the smallest customers sometimes need more help, so.”

“And if you wait till you start slowing down a lot and then need to go launch something new, but you have to create it and you have to raise money for it. And that might take three, four or five years. You're in a trap, and so kind of that really, really can hurt the business, because you're basically slowing down, and…”

“I think what's a little counterintuitive is when a customer hasn't gotten value or isn't happy, Sometimes actually this extra thing can actually tip the scales.”

“The, the whole thing falls apart when you have some vision as a founder, CEO, entrepreneur, or even if you're a functional leader, and the people underneath you don't believe the same things, it's all a house of cards.”

“It's not acceptable to let yourself work all the time and get burnt out because that sends a signal to your team. And by the way, you're not a good leader when you're burnt out.”

“So this idea that you get one big deal and it's the sign of something new, I'd encourage you to get two or three before you scale up”

“frankly, a lot of those deals at the end of the quarter that you push in because it's a special pricing model. You're desperate to get your number. Maybe you buy their product. If they buyers, I'm sure none of you have done that before. Maybe we've done that a couple of times. Almost all of those blow up later on.…”

“I'd argue the biggest part of time to value is not your technology. It's how people implement it. Cause people spend a lot of time on indecision.”

“And one of the things very practically I wish I'd done is build a database of your addressable market. Now, I don't mean that BS slide you show to investors that says your addressable market is like ten billion dollars or a trillion dollars. I mean the real one. Who are the buyers that could buy from you?”

“custom deals seem great at the time, but make sure they're really worth it. They have to be big enough to worth it and be worth it. And then invest in back office systems early. So your accounting, your CPQ, all that stuff is pretty good. I'm not talking about when you're a little startup, but if you're at 102 hundred…”

“If all you have is CSMs and like a kind of a people-driven approach, then it looks like everything requires a CSM. And so kind of what I would say here is just early on, get a lot of the basic stuff in place. Like, you know, people should be able to open a ticket online, have a great documentation site, maybe consider…”

“If you are in a position where you're founder or CEO and you're trying to recruit people, the way you structure it, the way you talk about it will influence who you can recruit. And you're not gonna be able to get the best people if you don't make it part of your core.”

“What you need is an integrated journey from sales to customer success, because the truth is, your customer is trying to achieve a business outcome. They're trying to generate more leads for their business or make their employers happier or grow their sales, right? They have a goal and whether they're talking to sales…”

“What we would say if we revise this now is that customers churn eventually because they always want more value. They always want more, right? They're not buying your technology for a point in time. They're buying your technology so that you can constantly deliver more for them.”

“there's a second funnel that we need to all consider, which is now I've got a customer and how am I constantly delivering more outcomes to them, right? And how am I constantly getting them more value such that they become leads for me because they become leads, what we call customer success, qualified leads to either…”

“customer success is a two-way street, and the best CS teams out there are bringing their customers into the customer success process, creating what we call a mutual success plan with that customer. Right? Where the tasks aren't all assigned to your company. Some of them are assigned to your customer to go through…”

“Every single person, once you get to like 50, 75 employees, You need a CS operations person. Don't just hire CSMs. CSMs are really important, but just like you have in sales, salespeople and sales operations people, you need customer success operations to understand the leading indicators, to define processes, because…”

“operationalizing that whole process of the stakeholder change. And this is so easy to do. And frankly, even if you're 10 people in your company, It's critical. I'd argue it's even more critical when you're 10 people in your company. Because honestly, the reason they're a customer is because they were excited about your…”

“if you're a hundred people, a 150 people, I recommend potentially even having somebody in your, in your CS team who's kind of that interface point with the product team.”

“What I would say today in 2021 is the best way to do that's the product, right? It's one thing to send customers emails and get on calls with them and zoom meetings. It's all great. But the best way to do it is in the product.”

“So for example, you're a SAS company, you're twenty million of AR, you're selling to enterprise and your retention is 78% gross. Work on your retention, right? Like, yeah, right. But if you're a SaaS company and you're selling to SMB and your retention is gross retention is 90%, 92% work on expansion, right? Like you,…”

“Number one thing is in the last 10 years, customer experience and customer retention was a job of the customer success team. Now product teams are getting super engaged in how do I drive sticky features and sticky usage? How do I drive user retention onboarding and use the product as the best customer success manager?”

“I think the customers are willing to wait, but they want certainty that is more than the agile model delivers. This is a real hard problem. They're used to the old model of, Hey, it's going to ship in Q three of 20, 22. And it's like, I don't know what I'm shipping next week. This is agile. We're, we're not trying to…”

“when you're a SAS customer, you are buying the roadmap, like in the on-prem customer, you're buying the product and you might use the roadmap, but you might just stay on that old version. But in SAS, you're buying the roadmap. And so therefore the roadmap is actually very strategic.”

“a SPF is kind of an incentive on top of the core plan to help people kind of redirect their activities. And so there's an opportunity to have a SPF around renewals, uh, particularly for your focused accounts, like maybe pick a list of the 20 renewals that you could really use sales as help and give a SPF that says,…”

“If you have a product that people use. Once a week, once a month, once a quarter, it's dangerous. It's much easier to rip out.”

“a lot of people, what they do is they sell the software. They end up working with the junior people to get it deployed. The executive lose track of it. They quit. Somebody else comes in and says, what the heck is this stuff? And do we get any value? And people are like, I don't know what it does.”

“as one principle I was going to share is I think one thing that's reasonable for you to think about as a CEO, founder, executive is whatever you're doing, everyone else is doing or more. So if you have your spreadsheet open of your budget and you're like, what can we cut? What can we slow down? Where do we stop hiring?…”

“If you can show an investor a slide, that's just like how you're approaching your customers. I think it goes a long way. It's not, you don't need to automate it. You don't need a ton of processes, just like a simple concept of what you're trying to do.”