#TDSU Episode 277:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:35 - Thoughts on customer success

00:02:57 - Everyone's job vs. nobody's job

00:04:28 - Reading public reviews

00:06:56 - Expanding customer engagement

00:07:18 - Sales team learning by visiting

00:10:15 - Importance of customer proximity

00:12:46 - Building product feedback loops

📺 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 Ricardo Araujo:

Ricardo's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardonevesaraujo

[Ricardo] (0:00 - 0:19)

But it's really understanding people, what's the impact their product is having on their problems, right? So it was really, really interesting to see that that's the first step, read the public reviews that your product has, and then start scheduling calls, try to reach out.

[Dillon] (0:28 - 0:44)

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 Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi?

What's up people? And we have JP with us. JP, can you say hi?

[JP] (0:45 - 0:46)

Are you afraid of the dark?

[Dillon] (0:46 - 0:48)

No. Is that a pickup line for you?

[JP] (0:49 - 0:50)

You ever watch Nickelodeon?

[Dillon] (0:50 - 0:57)

I did, but I thought we were doing puns. And we have Ricardo with us. Ricardo, can you say hi, please?

[Ricardo] (0:58 - 1:00)

Bom dia. Hi for you.

[Dillon] (1:00 - 1:08)

Hello.

Hello. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Ricardo, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Ricardo] (1:09 - 1:21)

Welcome. My name is Ricardo. I live in Portugal and work for different companies across the globe.

I have two kids, married, and I like to have fun. That's it. Hell yeah.

I like to have fun.

[JP] (1:22 - 1:23)

That's it.

[Dillon] (1:24 - 1:30)

That's what my Tinder profile used to read. Are you afraid of the dark? I like to have fun.

[Ricardo] (1:32 - 1:34)

That's a good way to start.

[Dillon] (1:35 - 1:52)

Ricardo, thank you so much for being... I said used to, I'm not on there anymore. Ricardo, thank you so much for being here.

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 can you tell us what that is for you?

[Ricardo] (1:53 - 2:43)

Well, that's a great question. There's immediately a jargon, which is, yes, is everybody's job, right? And I think that's one of the oldest codes I see across all the standard industry, but it doesn't happen like that.

So you still have a customer success team across every company that you'll find. Focus on doing whatever they think it is customer success. So one on my mind is, everybody should go to the trenches, listen to customers, talk to them daily, and understand what their challenges are, and try to see if your product is doing whatever you do, right?

And solve their problems and help them to be successful. So in a single sentence, that's what's on my mind for the moment.

[Dillon] (2:44 - 2:56)

Put your money where your mouth is, right? When it comes to customer centricity and this customer success philosophy we talk so much about. JP, what's this make you think of?

[JP] (2:57 - 4:27)

The customer success is everyone's job as a saying, but then everybody's job when it's the job, right? Everybody want to be a CSM. Everybody ready to be a CSM, right?

You know what I'm talking about. Dillon knows. Dillon is Paul Moon.

But yeah, yeah. No, that's a good call out, Ricardo, or even if it's not maybe a call out, I hear what you're saying. That ability to sort of put CS in Fileen's basement, you know, sort of like down there and then sort of say like, oh yeah, you know, like you go do whatever it is that you do and sort of allow it to exist in this questionable realm of value.

And I think, you know, we often hear about this discussion. We usually go in from, I feel like the revenue side where we start talking about owning numbers and how we show what we do, like numerically. But what I'm hearing, you know, what you're saying is everyone should go in the trenches and talk to the customer every day.

It's sort of going in through maybe more of the qualitative entrance of like seeing like when you see what CSMs are really doing every day, then that's a different way to appreciate or value what we're doing.

[Ricardo] (4:28 - 6:56)

Yeah. JP, one of the things, going to the trenches, sometimes it's not that hard, you know. You just, you can start simply reading the public reviews your product have, you know.

So you go there, you read it. There's a story of a friend of mine, Mario. He was actually, one day he reached out to the company and says, you know what, I've read all our public reviews.

And I was like, how many we have? Like at the time, 343. I still got the number because it was really like, wow, OK, you read them all?

Come on, you're kidding me. And he said, no, I'm not kidding. I read them all because now I understand what they are saying, the good and the bad.

And that's when I started realizing that we need to do that. We need to do often. It's not just the call that you jump in and let's try to, or the survey that you send out for the great NPS score that you're trying to get.

But it's really understanding people, what's the impact your product is having on their problems, right? So it was really, really interesting to see that that's the first step. Read the public reviews that your product has, and then start scheduling calls, try to reach out.

Depending on the CS team that you might have, you know, some companies it's fully digital. The other ones are you go, you travel, you go on site and work side by side with your customer, especially doing the QVRs. But it doesn't need to be a QVR.

You can actually stay there and talk and see what's going on and work side by side with them. One thing I did, one tactic I used in the past was calling an initiative rent-a-desk. So I would ask customers to, Hey, do you guys rent-a-desk so I can go there and work side by side with you?

And I would travel there, stay for a day, would do my work, but would get time to get a coffee with them, to have conversations and see in real life how the product was being used, you know. It was a development platform. So I spent a lot of time working with developers and listened to their complaints and all the things like, damn, this is too slow.

Okay. Too slow. And I was thinking, so no.

So it's easy to get those type of real and honest feedbacks when you're working side by side. You just need to create that opportunity and the trust zone for them to share with you.

[Dillon] (6:56 - 7:17)

Riccardo, can I clarify though, that you think everybody within an organization should do this, not just CS? I mean, I think it sounds nice and romantic for CS to travel and sit next to their users on a regular basis, but how about your salespeople and your engineers?

[Ricardo] (7:18 - 10:12)

Yeah. So let me give you a current example on what I'm doing with the sales team. It's a company focused on robotics and automation.

So what are we doing is that sales team are traveling to understand what's going on in the warehouses and in the factories floor. So they really understand the pains that the customer have. It's part of the sales cycles that we have.

You have to go on site and see the things. It can't be just a call. It could be.

If you're selling robots, it could be because you know that when you're palletizing or depalletizing, everybody doing the same. It's the same option, but you have to go there. You have to see the conditions that they have, and this is a very specific one.

So sales teams for the moment, when I'm working, they have to go on site. They have to do it and they have to understand it. The other thing is what I did also in the past is that you can create workshops where the CS teams or in this case, the customer success managers or technical success managers that follow up currently, they will do workshops with the sales team, showing them what is the real scenario, providing them context.

How do developers work or how do operators work? That is the type of feedback that you can share and you can share with concrete messages, emails, recordings, there was a point in time where we shared, we sold our product to, not to the devil, but to an evangelical church to develop applications. And they sent us a recording saying, God bless us and bless the team that is supporting us in this journey.

So you see, we could share that with the team and the sales teams in the organization because that was the context that we were having there. So you can create, if you can't force them, you can create internal workshops to share that. It's really interesting.

A great example that I saw a few years ago coming from Zendesk, they had a wall of shame where they would share the cups where people were having lunch. So they would feel ashamed from the product. Like I don't want to be in a company that has all this wall of shame.

At the same time, I think it was the same example, they would ask the customer to send a pair of shoes, a used one, so they could actually join with the cups that Zendesk did at the time. So you would see NP in the customer's shoes. So you can have all these examples and tactics to highlight the need of knowing your customer, knowing their pains, and if your problem is solving the problem or not.

[Dillon] (10:13 - 10:14)

Rob, why don't you take us out of here?

[Rob] (10:15 - 12:46)

Ricardo, it's a good reminder because what a world we live in where we need to remind people to talk to their customers. I just find it so funny because that's the funniest thing when I log on to LinkedIn and obviously LinkedIn is the source of all truth. And we see people saying like, you have to talk to your customers.

I'm like, what world have we gotten into where we need to be reminded to talk to our customers? It's crazy because I grew up in a world where my first customer, I literally lived in his basement and I went into the office with him every day, came home, had dinner with him, helped his kids with their math homework, went to sleep. Well, after working with the co-founders to rebuild the product, I did this for six months.

And it's funny though, because even then I still struggled to understand the customer. In my next job, I remember it was really funny. I had the most embarrassing moment because I didn't spend enough time with our customers in the early stages.

And I just tried to operationalize customer success instead of learning the customer and building the journey first. I had this conversation with a customer where they were talking about how they get these work waivers. And I was like, man, we really got to get that number down, huh?

And the guy's like, dude, what are you talking about? That number, we love work waivers. And I was like, oh, I thought it was a bad thing to get a work waiver.

I thought that means you're not getting paid for your work. And he was like, you have no idea how our business works, right? I was like, I'm fine.

Hey, I got to go to my next meeting. I don't know if you guys have ever seen a sports announcer who has not played the game. It's just a disaster.

As opposed to Tony Romo being like, yeah, I don't know, Jim. Someone who's played the game, knows the game, knows ball, is completely different at their jobs. And the only way we can do that, a lot of us who haven't had the backgrounds in our client's industry is exactly what you're saying, Ricardo.

It's to spend time. I see this with consultants as well. Consultants get a bad rap that they haven't done the work.

And here they are advising on things like customer journeys and expansion motions and stuff like that. If they haven't done the work, it's not nearly as compelling. So I agree with you.

I mean, I think in terms of the voice of the customer, I think it's so important to be that close to the customer. I think in terms of, I think there are some interesting things to watch out for when it comes to the proliferation of this advice where like, maybe we should all be close to the customer, but I'm one who believes that, I've seen a lot of advice lately, like the whole company owns churn. I'm like, yeah, that's probably true.

But at the end of the day, one team has to be on the hook, has to be responsible for churn.

[Ricardo] (12:46 - 14:54)

Well, that's true. The same thing really is with product, right? Everybody's focused on the product development.

Everybody understands or should understand and know the product. Not everybody is using or developing, but you should constantly bring in feedback to build your product itself. So I think it's everybody's job to ensure that the company will have success because that will be your success, your team success.

At least it's the way I live when I join a new project is really trying to get everybody involved, understanding what is our product? What problems are we solving? How are we delivering it?

And this keeps reminding me that from time to time, I need to go back to the trenches, bring all the people I can with me and share. It's not about, well, I get it. You have the typical CS.

We need to keep the churn low. We need to take a look. In some cases, we need to take a look about the expansion usage.

We need to take about the adoption. But you need also to understand and get the feedback, get the vibe, get the vibe while using, right? Your users.

When I was creating and getting built, well, actually not creating, building up a community, it was a strong community. You had to spend a lot of time in talking to them. One funny story was that everybody was complaining about, well, yeah, but my manager doesn't allow me to do that or my manager doesn't give me time to do the proper training.

So, you had to go around and you had to talk with their managers trying to understand why they don't provide enough time to develop, you know? And so, sometimes it's not the end user of your product that is unhappy. Sometimes it's their manager because they are not fools.

They're not getting the result that they were expecting with the adoption of it. And you have to understand that also, too, right? So, it's really, really impressive how listen and listen and listen, the impact that can have in the entire company.

It's huge.

[Dillon] (14:54 - 15:09)

Ricardo, I love it. That is our time, but I can only imagine, I think you managed to tell a half a dozen stories in this 15 minutes. So, I can only imagine you have more.

You're going to have to come back and share them. But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Ricardo] (15:10 - 15:14)

Well, can I say in Portuguese? I would say adeus and see you next time.

[VO] (15:38 - 15:56)

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