#TDSU Episode 268:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:07 - What’s on Noble's mind about CS

00:03:01 - Transitioning from sales to CS

00:04:17 - JP's tips for CS success

00:08:24 - The challenge of landing a CS role

00:09:56 - Rob's unexpected sales journey

00:12:48 - Rob’s value model of expansion selling

00:13:48 - Noble's thoughts on discovery and solutions

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Noble Todd:

Noble's LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/in/nobletodd

[Noble] (0:00 - 0:20)

I was looking for a while. I feel like every customer success role right now has hundreds of applicants within a day of being posted. So it's tough to get noticed when you don't have any customer success roles on your resume.

So I don't know if that's everyone's experience. That was my experience. So my thought was I have to work at a company and make that jump internally, which is what I did.

[Dillon] (0:30 - 0:40)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:40 - 0:41)

What's up?

[Dillon] (0:41 - 0:45)

And we have Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:46 - 0:47)

What's up lifers?

[Dillon] (0:47 - 0:51)

And we have Noble with us. Noble, can you say hi, please?

[Noble] (0:51 - 0:52)

Hi.

[Dillon] (0:52 - 0:57)

Hi. And I'm your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Noble, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Noble] (0:57 - 1:38)

Yeah, my name is Noble. I'm a customer success manager at Auctane. We are kind of a semi conglomerate of like nine different software companies all wrapped up into one.

So I work with the merchants who utilize any of our softwares to really just help adopt new features, workflow improvements, savings on their shipping spend. Almost all the companies that are under the Octane umbrella are around shipping and logistics for e-commerce type brands. Anybody really who's packaging up any sort of products, putting a label on it and shipping it off to customers.

[Dillon] (1:38 - 1:51)

I wondered if it was that Octane, because whatever my wife is buying on a daily basis, I see Octane in my email digest of mail we're receiving at least once a week. So that's you guys.

[Noble] (1:52 - 1:54)

Accutane, which a lot of our customers call us Accutane.

[Dillon] (1:55 - 1:58)

No, A-U-C-T-A-N-E.

[Noble] (1:59 - 2:06)

Oh, well, I'll have to look up to see what's going on. Maybe she's starting a business on the side you don't know about.

[Dillon] (2:07 - 2:26)

I don't think so. I think it's probably a small e-commerce brand that never like white labeled or it's like shipping directly from whatever. That's not the point, guys.

Noble, you know what we do here. We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Noble] (2:27 - 2:59)

Yeah, so I'm a little bit newer into customer success myself. I had experience working with Rob at a prior company and working along his team to develop some outreach to customers that I was bringing on board from the sales side of things. So throughout that process, it was a really attractive job function.

I really appreciated what sort of work goes into customer success. But today what's on my mind is really just making the transition from a sales motion to a customer success motion.

[Dillon] (2:59 - 3:01)

So you were previously a salesperson?

[Noble] (3:01 - 4:13)

Yep. My whole career has been account executives for various software companies out here in Austin. Why did you make the move?

Like I said, it was working with Rob's team at that company we worked at. It was just eye-opening to really understand the differences holistically of what the role's purposes are in sales. It's really just you're selling the sizzle.

You're not selling the steak. It's really just, hey, this is the outcomes we can help you achieve, this, this, and that. And then you send it off to implementation and then customer success takes over from there.

And customer success is really the team that really gets to help those businesses solve problems X, Y, and Z, not just talking about problems X, Y, and Z. So getting to have more of a problem-solving mindset and working alongside these businesses to solve these problems is a much more fulfilling job function for me. I'm much more aligned with that and it's rung through since I've started this role five months ago.

And yeah, so I'm just really excited about that part of customer success. And I'm just really helping businesses to solve the problems versus talking about the problems we can solve.

[Dillon] (4:13 - 4:15)

And how long have you been in this role?

[Noble] (4:15 - 4:16)

Five months.

[Dillon] (4:17 - 4:29)

Wow. Okay. JP, you're no longer the newbie.

So JP, I want you to share all of your hard-earned secrets about CS with Noble. Go.

[JP] (4:30 - 4:35)

Wow. Thanks for the intro. That's great.

I'll be able to pull something up real quick.

[Noble] (4:36 - 4:37)

Yeah. Free consultation, JP. Come on.

[JP] (4:38 - 7:57)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I think that on this show, though, I don't know if you know, but there's a predilection for feeling like people that transition from sales into CS sort of are better positioned to sort of succeed in customer success. I think around a few things, including sort of like that drive that a lot of sales folks have, which sometimes those can get into customer success out of, definitely referring to myself here, but as well as many others where we don't want to be too salesy. But I think it's really important.

Something I've learned as I've been in customer success, Rob, you clickety clackety. Something I've learned in customer success is that you do need to have some amount of that drive. It's just that it is perhaps applied maybe in a different way than it is in sales.

And sales and CS have been positioned like lions and hyenas as these two sort of competing forces. Of course, that's to all our detriment, right? Because the friction point is supposed to be that sales has the opposite mantra of CS, which a lot of times we say in CS, you want to under-promise and over-deliver.

And I think in sales, maybe people just want to over-promise to get the sales done, right? They want to get their quota. But that brings me to the other point that I think will be a strength of yours is being very conscious of quota, being not afraid to have those conversations with people, I think is very much an asset because I know for me, I've had to learn on the opposite side, how to really, really stay in the discomfort, the friction that comes in customers' interactions.

So I think of an example, I'll just say in sales, I think that you're used to, okay, we need to have a difficult conversation with procurement about numbers. You really have owned your ability to negotiate and to handle objections. And I think that that's something that really does come into play in customer success, because even if the deal is closed, and so the customer's there for whatever terms, maybe it's a year, maybe it's a multi-year, and now you're there to prove value, part of that is going to be, say, level setting or setting boundaries around what comes, maybe you need to set boundaries around what's included in that license. And that may not be that you're on a choker like Princess Leia or Jabba the Hutt, that they can just yank you around, right?

You need to set some boundaries. So I think that there's a lot of analogous things that you already have with you for being in sales for so long. I just think that it's just being applied to, okay, you've already paid, now we're trying to realize the value.

And sometimes the customer is in their own way, and that's the way you're handling the objection.

[Dillon] (7:58 - 8:23)

Yeah. Noble, that was a whole lot. What part of that would you like to respond to, or all of it?

I agree with everything JP said, by the way, but I think there was many intertwining thoughts around the relationship between sales and CS. And I do wonder how easy it was for you to get your job, given a background in sales. Were you looking for a while, or tell us a little bit more about the journey?

[Noble] (8:24 - 9:40)

Yeah, I was looking for a while. I feel like every customer success role right now has hundreds of applicants within a day of being posted. So it's tough to get noticed when you don't have any customer success roles on your resume.

So I don't know if that's everyone's experience. That was my experience. So my thought was I have to work at a company and make that jump internally, which is what I did.

But JP, something that you mentioned that is something that really coincides with the way I work is you'd mentioned under-promising and over-delivering. And the term that I use is just managing expectations, because I remember hearing it once somewhere and it's true. The root of every disappointment or disagreement or problem between two parties is missed expectations.

So yeah, managing expectations is huge, is really, hey, I don't know how much I can help you with this. Sometimes that's the true, raw honesty that you have to convey. But I'm going to work alongside you and I'm going to do my absolute best to try to get that, get you to where you want to be and to help you drive the outcomes that you're looking to drive here and see and validate or devalidate when and where we can make those differences.

[Dillon] (9:41 - 9:54)

Ironically today, we are recording this on the same day we publish an episode about Rob getting somebody fired at a company. And so Rob- I didn't get anybody fired.

[Rob] (9:56 - 10:15)

I've never gotten anyone fired. Except for last time I fired anyone, I fired myself because we were downsizing. I thought you meant Noble and I worked together.

I was like, I'm going down with the ship. I was the last person I fired.

[Dillon] (10:16 - 10:32)

Well, that's how it works. Aside from immense gratitude for trying to rebuild your reputation for you, Rob, by saying he loved working with customer success so much that he wanted to get into CS. What do you have to say, Rob?

[Rob] (10:33 - 12:24)

Well, I wanted to comment on a segue from a couple of things JP said. There were three things that I was click clacking about, by the way, JP. I replaced it with a pen because to be polite.

You mentioned three things, JP. I heard hunger. I heard incentives around expectation setting and then objection handling.

And those are like three really good fundamentals that call out some of the key differences, perceived differences between CS and sales, but actually they really shouldn't be differences. And it's interesting for me because Noble, you also mentioned problem solving, right? And that's also a perceived difference between sales and CS.

I think in the ideal world, we're all doing all of these things. We're all hungry. We've all got aligned incentives and we've all got the right expectation settings.

We can all handle objections. We can all problem solve. And so for me, Noble, the interesting thing is I'm coming at this from the opposite direction where my career in customer success has forced me to be this reluctant salesperson at times, initially reluctant salesperson.

But now it's like my favorite thing to do during the day is to work on sales. I spend probably eight to 10 hours a week of my work week. That's just a rough estimate.

I can get you the exact numbers because I track all my hours because I'm a maniac like that. But I spend a ton of time working on sales for myself. And that's where I actually find the new problem solving for me.

I'm finding problem solving on the level of the client, customizing a package that works for them. And I'm finding problem solving also for my own perspective, my own skill development. I can feel myself growing and developing new models, new ways of thinking, new frameworks, new objection handling, reframes and stuff like that.

I even this week, I think Dillon and JP will make fun of me because I came up with a new model, a new framework. Oh yeah. And told us about it.

[Dillon] (12:25 - 12:28)

A screenshot of the deck under construction.

[Rob] (12:29 - 12:48)

Yeah. It's called the value model of expansion selling. Because I'm like, customer success people, they don't want to sell.

But what if we do it through the lens of value? So value stands for validating the fit, assessing the customer situation.

[Dillon] (12:48 - 12:50)

You're turning this into an infomercial.

[Rob] (12:52 - 13:41)

So value, well, sorry, validation, assessment, link to your solution. You only link to your solution after you've covered the pain discovery of the client, unblocking and then execution, signing on the dotted line. So I found that in the way that I presented that to the group that I presented it to, they were like, okay, I could be open to this.

I'm a customer success person, but I could be open to this because the key thing is that it puts customer discovery and customer value assessment first. Whereas in customer success, a lot of times we jump to say, sales is all just in your face pushing a product on you, which is not the case for the best sales people. People like you, Noble.

I've seen you handle really delicate situations where you put the client first. Dillon, I think you're going to say something. Sorry.

[Dillon] (13:41 - 13:47)

Yeah, that's our time. But Noble, I'll give you an opportunity to take us out and respond to what Rob just said.

[Noble] (13:48 - 14:31)

Yeah. It's really all in that discovery is until you can properly just understand their situation, where they're at, what they're experiencing, maybe relate to them internally or out in the open, however you can. Get on that same side of the table as them.

And at that point, and you can confirm that back with them, what exactly they're experiencing and what they're looking, where they're looking to be. That's when you can really diagnose and prescribe a solution and then get to work on solving that problem. And that's absolutely true in CS, in sales, when you're just talking to friends and deciding what to do for the night, it bleeds into everything.

It really does. It's just a human to human skill set.

[Dillon] (14:32 - 15:02)

That is our time, Noble, but I love it. I think it is an ongoing conversation about breaking down those walls. And we're all salespeople, right?

The age old saying. Noble, what I would love is if you come back in a couple of months and tell us what this journey has been like for you going from sales to CS, particularly in the same company. So you can kind of compare apples to apples of what that experience is like.

But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Noble] (15:02 - 15:05)

Absolutely. I would love to. All right.

Bye, everybody.

[VO] (15:11 - 15:47)

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