Future Proof Your Teams and Career with Rod Cherkas of HelloCCO | Episode 061

This week, we are pleased to bring you a conversation with Rod Cherkas, a SaaS veteran, consultant, author of two books on customer success, and vocal contributor to the CS community. 

Rod and Alex discuss his past at Marketo and Gainsight (among others), his newly released book REACH, as well as where he sees the CS profession heading.

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:18 - Rod’s Background and Path to CS
00:02:42 - Journey from Product to Customer Focus
00:03:45 - Intuit’s Customer-Centric Approach
00:04:27 - Applying Experience Design Principles
00:05:02 - Hello CCO
00:07:00 - Developing Executive-Level Skills
00:09:08 - Practical Impact of REACH Framework
00:10:29 - Importance of Marketing Playbooks
00:11:16 - Commercial Focus in CS Teams
00:13:03 - Learning from Digital Marketing
00:15:45 - Embracing Digital and AI in CS
00:16:15 - Prioritizing Accounts with Growth Potential

Enjoy! I know I sure did...

Rod's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodcherkas/
Rod's Website: https://hellocco.com
Rod's Books:
- CCO Playbook: https://amzn.to/3y44XBS
- REACH: https://amzn.to/3Wn5wAm

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This episode was edited and sponsored by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by my good friend and fellow CS veteran Dillon Young.  Lifetime Value aims to serve the audio/video content production and editing needs of CS and Post-Sales professionals.  Lifetime Value is offering select services at a deeply discounted rate for a limited time.  Navigate to lifetimevaluemedia.com to learn more.

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Lifetime Value Media
Lifetime Value aims to serve the audio/video content production and editing needs.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

The role of a customer success team and customer success managers is changing, yeah, and that individuals that have those roles need to accept that the skills that are going to make them successful in the future are not the skills that they necessarily got hired for in the past.

Speaker 2: 0:43

Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience Podcast with me, Alex Turkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Digital CX Podcast. It is so great to have you back this week and every week.

Speaker 2: 1:21

I'm Alex Turkovich and I'll be guiding you on this wild ride today, which is. It's going to be a good one today because if you have ever read the Chief Customer Officer playbook or his new book Reach, of which I have copies here, you'll know exactly who we're speaking with today. It is none other than Rod Cherkus. He's an industry veteran. He's been in CS for a long, long, long time. Industry veteran, he's been in CS for a long, long long time. Speaks about it, consults about CS as part of his consultancy firm, which is HelloCCO.

Speaker 2: 1:54

Just a marvelous human being with a lot of great stuff to say. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Rod Cherkus, because I sure do. Anyway, rod, welcome to the show. It's been kind of a long time coming and I'm glad we kind of made it happen. And you know you, I've been really excited to have you on the show because obviously you know your books sit on the shelf of pretty much every cs professional and you have such a wealth of experience and knowledge but yet you keep your finger on the pulse and so yeah, I've really been looking forward to this convo with you.

Speaker 1: 2:31

Thank you. I'm glad to be here with you, Alex.

Speaker 2: 2:33

Yeah, I mean, look, obviously this wouldn't be a podcast episode if we didn't talk about your background a little bit. And while I don't want to go crazy deep, one thing I did find interesting is that early on in your career it seemed like you were very product marketing focused and you kind of made that jump kind of when CS started to be a thing, and so I wanted to kind of ask you a little bit about that. You know what that was, what that impetus was for you to make the shift from kind of more product focused to customer focused.

Speaker 1: 3:04

Yeah, well, what you're referring to is my time at Intuit, where I worked early in my career. That was my first kind of long-term job. I worked there for almost 15 years and at the time the product management teams were really the center of the company. Intuit made Quicken and QuickBooks and TurboTax, and the company's special sauce was that they were very much into understanding customer experience, design and making software that was so easy for people to use. Quicken was one of the first pieces of software that helped propagate using personal computers way back in the 80s and early 90s, which is an insane amount of time ago, and the way they did that was by really trying to understand customer needs, going and watching people in their homes and in their businesses, watching them behind one-way mirrors, doing a lot of primary research and then building software that was so easy to use that you'd never think of going back to the previous way, and so that was where I learned some of those core skills.

Speaker 1: 4:15

I ended up having an opportunity to work in our QuickBooks payroll business, which was Intuit's first and largest recurring revenue service. The things I was responsible for I ran all of our post-sale operations of getting payroll customers set up, helping make sure they had good support experiences, getting them renewed, expanding. We had some add-on services forms and we could help them do it, do their tax tables, all the things you'd recognize as part of what sort of customer success is, or the post-sale experience. But that function didn't exist and so we were kind of building it out and my big aha from my time at Intuit was that you could apply those same experience design principles that Intuit got great at in building software into services, touchpoints, into your first experience to go live, into getting support, into getting renewed, into expansion.

Speaker 1: 5:08

And I leveraged that into a career working at RingCentral. About 13 or 14 years ago as they were just getting started, they became a leader in sort of internet telephony and communications. I then worked at Marketo for almost five years where I ran their customer enablement and education organizations, and then later at Gainsight where I ran their professional services and training businesses, and so through all of this time I've been a post-sale leader. I've been a CCO. About three years ago I started a consulting business where I now help executives and leadership teams at fast growing, primarily SaaS companies and some other types of businesses to help them improve their financial results, their customer experiences, so that they continue to grow and scale and that's been a ton of fun.

Speaker 2: 6:05

And the name is brilliant too. I mean hello, cco. It's like you know, it's friendly, it's approachable, it's yeah, come work with me.

Speaker 1: 6:13

I'll get you started for success.

Speaker 2: 6:15

Yeah, and you know, I think one of the things that I really admire about you is that just the sheer, the volume, I guess, of content that you put out there, but the really kind of usefulness of what you put out, which is to say you know you've written a few books the CCO playbook, and then you know your new one, reach, and then also, but also like you have all these wonderful guides on your website and things like that, suffice it to say like you're a wealth of resources for especially, you know, customer success leaders out there, which is cool, but then also it's like helping to set the blueprint for people who want to aspire into those realms, right?

Speaker 1: 6:53

Yeah Well, thanks for the encouragement there. I'm lucky to have worked at a number of companies and spend time during those years working with peers, and we were all really learning together. This is a customer success, and the role of a chief customer officer is a relatively new function compared to CFOs and CMOs and IT leaders. So we're all trying to figure out what those best practices are, and I like coming up with frameworks and then trying to get them across in easy to understand ways. And the good thing is people out there like having some structure. They like having ideas rather than having to figure it out for themselves. It at least is a starting point with a template or a framework or a way of thinking about solving a problem, and I've put this together. As you mentioned, on my website at rodchurgoscom, I have lots of downloads of you know, screenshots and spreadsheets that give you a starting point for you know value calculators or skills to develop or onboarding processes, and then I turned that into a book.

Speaker 1: 8:03

A couple of years ago, I kind of could see in the market that there were a lot of leaders that were taking on roles they weren't quite yet skilled enough at, because it's a relatively new function the role of being a C-level executive and being on the CEO staff has a set of expectations and a lot of leaders that were potentially candidates for that just didn't have enough experience yet and weren't necessarily operating at that level.

Speaker 1: 8:34

And through my work with my clients and over my time, I had identified a set of skills that I believed and that the market tended to value, that people could be developing throughout their career to make them better able to become those executive level leaders whether it's a VP or an SVP or a chief customer officer level and I assembled that into a book called the Chief Customer Officer Playbook.

Speaker 1: 9:00

And you know I get notes and messages on LinkedIn from people like every week saying, hey, I've read this and I use it and it's on my bookshelf. And I was at the Gainsight Pulse conference and had dozens of people that I didn't know come up to me, look out for me and say, hey, I've read your book, it's really useful. I had somebody come up and had both of my books. I wrote a new book that came out a couple of weeks ago called Reach, which we'll get to in a minute, and he had dozens of Post-it notes in the chief customer officer playbook, which was really sweet to see. So it's very rewarding that people are using your resources, but mostly it's also a way that we can all, as sort of one of the ways that I contribute to helping to build up the customer success function and the customer facing executives.

Speaker 2: 9:52

It's so funny because you probably experience a lot of the similar things that I do with this show, which is to say you put stuff out there and you don't really know who's reading it or who's consuming it. Or like you know who's taking what from it until you go meet some people in person and it's consuming it. Or like you know who's taking what from it until you go meet some people in person and it's oh cool. You know I'm glad some of this stuff is resonating or glad it's not resonating. I always love that feedback too.

Speaker 2: 10:16

But you know to your point, cs I mean we all know CS is a relatively newish things in the realm of like corporate organizations, and you know, I think especially in the realm of like corporate organizations and you know, I think especially in the realm of digital, there's so much kind of untapped goodness that we're getting into where I feel, like you know, cs is really maturing as an organization. Much in the same way that you know marketing organizations got into, you know, automation and those kinds of things many years ago. We're just kind of getting hip to in CS as a broad theme. So I know one of the things that you talk about, you know quite often is, like you know, some of that marketing goodness and those marketing playbooks that can inform you, know how to really execute and build a solid digital strategy. Are there some like key things you want to hone in on with regards to how our lessons learned in other departments can really help inform our digital stuff?

Speaker 1: 11:16

Yeah. So I think the point that I would make around it is that the role of a customer success team and customer success managers is changing yeah, and customer success managers is changing and that individuals that have those roles need to accept that the skills that are going to make them successful in the future are not the skills that they necessarily got hired for in the past. What's happened in the past 12 to 18 months is companies are focused increasingly on profitability. They're looking for many teams, particularly the customer success teams, to contribute more to top-line revenue growth, and one of the ways that comes across is that CSM teams are looked at to help, if not just identify, expansion opportunities. In many cases it's to sort of nurture and grow them and in some businesses, to actually close them, and that's a different skill set than CSMs have had. I don't think that's going away. I think that CS teams need to become increasingly commercial. Now that doesn't mean that they are salespeople. They're not pitching, they're not forcing customers to buy things, and that's not what salespeople do anyway. Customers to buy things, and that's not what salespeople do anyway. But they do need to be more aware of how the work that they do can help increase the propensity of a customer to buy more with you, right, and to be listening for and uncovering those expansion opportunities, primarily in ways that provide more value to customers. It's not about I'm selling them more stuff. It's about a mindset of I'm providing more value to them, right. If they have one part of their business that's using your solution and getting tons of value from it, why wouldn't another business unit also get value from that? And you know you brought up this concept of you know what can we learn from marketers?

Speaker 1: 13:04

I was at Marketo in the early 2010s when Marketo, hubspot, eloqua were helping and contributing to the development of what became digital marketing.

Speaker 1: 13:16

That was data driven, that was leveraging information about behaviors on the internet and other channels, and before that, marketers were largely focused on brand and brand awareness and aided and unaided awareness.

Speaker 1: 13:33

Companies like Marketo and I ran our customer enablement and our customer education function. One of the things I'm really proud of is we weren't teaching people just to use Marketo. We were teaching them how to be digital marketers, because their bosses didn't know and they were saying, hey, go learn and we'll send you to courses and we'll help you know, we'll support you with this Marketo training, and so we were teaching people how to do the job that they needed to do in the future and I think that is kind of where we're at right now in customer success is that the function is changing and people need to accept that there are new skills that they need to develop or they're not going to find themselves, you know, sort of in demand. I hear that a lot now that you know customer success teams not that they want people that sold in the past and were sales leaders, but that they're inclined for it, and so you're either going to move along or you'll get replaced.

Speaker 2: 14:34

Yeah, it's definitely this dichotomy of helping customers to achieve value and outcomes and those kinds of things, but always with an eye towards, okay, what opportunities does this uncover for me? Or what you know? What ways in further deep into the product mix can we, you know, can we look into by solving some of these problems? And also, you know, how can the how can you know, expansion solve the problems that we're talking about today with, you know, with the customer? It's a, it's an interesting blend when it comes to CSMs and I think you know, if you look at digital specifically, a lot of people kind of poo-poo digital in terms of putting it in a corner and say, hey, look, it's like this is how we're going to do the one-to-many and this is how we're going to cover our lowest segments and those kinds of things. But I think especially, I mean I was blown away with GPT-4.0 coming out and to me it just really highlighted the implications of what we can do digitally to tee up those things, so that then the CSM can come in on the back end and really drive the value home and drive home those conversations. So it's like this merging of technology and human in a way that, to your point. A CS org, either on the leadership or the individual contributor level, is going to have to be hip to this stuff.

Speaker 2: 18:32

Like if you're not paying attention to this stuff now, you're going to be behind the eight ball going forward.

Speaker 1: 18:38

Yeah, this point that you made about digital is. It's an end of how customer success teams need to function. I not every company can grow and not every company is at risk of churn. So in the book that I wrote, reach is an acronym for this framework to help identify and prioritize customers that have growth potential and how to uncover and leverage that growth potential. So R is relationships, engagement, actions, customer value and horizons. I'm not going to go through all the details of it, but the point is is one of the steps in applying this methodology is to prioritize your accounts by which ones have the highest growth potential.

Speaker 1: 19:27

I trademarked a concept called the growth propensity index so you can quantify a customer's growth potential.

Speaker 1: 19:35

If you're a CSM and let's say you have 50 accounts, what you want to be able to do is identify which of those accounts have growth potential that you can focus on to contribute to the top line revenue growth, which accounts might be at risk of churn or severe dissatisfaction that might cause other problems or cause downgrades.

Speaker 1: 19:56

And then you're going to have a big chunk of customers that are doing just fine, right, they're not at risk of churn, they're not high growth potential, and I often work with my clients the maintain group and so you might focus your efforts on growing the companies that have this high growth potential or trying to turn around and address the issues with your at-risk customers. But the maintain clients you shouldn't necessarily need to be spending as much time on, and that's where your digital programs can provide a lot of value, because it's not particularly useful for CSMs to spend one 50th of their time with each of their 50 customers. You won't move very many of them forward, either in saving the at-risk ones or growing the high potential ones, and so I think that this is sort of a play or a process that, through digital, you can maintain the relationship. It can still be personal, can still be providing lots of value, but not necessarily in a way that's taking up that much of the CSM's time.

Speaker 2: 21:01

I'm going to yes and you on this, because that's a good thing to do in professional etiquette, apparently In your book, in the engagement section of reach so that would be E one of the things you say is recognizing the lack of engagement can be valuable early warning signed and provides the opportunity for proactive intervention.

Speaker 2: 21:22

This heads up enables you to take targeted actions to re-engage those customers. So my yes and is your digital motion is like the maintain element of it, but then to add to it like there's customers who just don't engage, and that's where the attention needs to be a lot of times with your digital programs, not in the sense of, hey, we're just going to send them another email and see if they engage, but more in the data analytics, insights element of things where it's look, this subset of customers is not engaging. What playbooks can we run with a scale team or a pool team or whatever it is, to re-energize this group of users and customers to engage with your stuff, so you can then move them into maintain or even the expand bucket Right right, yeah, in the reach model it is generally designed around identifying customers that have expansion potential.

Speaker 1: 22:23

So you might have a company that you're working with. One of my clients makes real estate technology software and so they sell into companies to help them assess the utilization of their office space and their workspace in buildings. And let's say they're working with one company and it's in one floor of one building in one city. They might find that is it being used optimally in that one floor and building? And if they can increase the engagement, they know that there are other buildings and other cities that you can expand to. So this concept of engagement is, you know, can be a driver of this expansion. But you need to make sure that they're seeing value right. Are they using it for space planning? Are they using it for understanding whether they have enough conference rooms, whether people are actually utilizing it, how they physically design the space? So there's lots of different ways that you can use what engagement means.

Speaker 1: 23:28

Yeah, and it's often not just the customer success team's responsibility. You might find that there are groups of customers that are not engaged because your onboarding process wasn't getting customers started quickly or getting them using some sticky features.

Speaker 1: 23:44

So a lot of times when I work with my clients, we'll put together a maturity model that says, okay, before onboarding is over, they have to be using these certain capabilities, because those five things are predictors of retention a year later. So it's not always just what can you do right now to turn it around, but how can you build out a thoughtful set of experiences so that you don't have the engagement issues later.

Speaker 2: 24:16

Yeah, beautifully said, I love it. We're going to go take a slight left turn and actually go back to the fundamentals, because one of the things that I do ask all of my guests is to get essentially their elevator pitch of digital CS, and I'd be curious to know, if you were talking to somebody who didn't know what CS was, or sitting on an elevator for 10 seconds, what would you say, what would your elevator pitch of digital CS be?

Speaker 1: 24:37

Yeah, so I believe that there are a couple of different elements of digital CS, and it's a way that customers can be learning to use your product the first time and then understanding additional best practices and use cases without necessarily needing to talk to a live individual. Now this can happen through, you know, thoughtful email nurture. I believe there are a couple of different characters. One is you can use email and other direct communications. You can have in-product experiences things like WalkMe, that move customers through and help them learn.

Speaker 1: 25:15

There's a variety of different self-service resources, like FAQs, customer education websites, learning paths, and then there's a whole sort of group of things that I call one-to-many, where you may be interacting with a live person, but it's not on a one-to-one. So these can be group training courses, they can be webinars on relevant best practice topics, they can be office hours, and so when I work with my clients to help build out a digital strategy like yesterday I was talking with one of my clients where we're doing this for a large company hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and curate into these learning paths or experiences so that it doesn't feel as overwhelming that you have to start because it turns out they have a ton of content in their community. They've run these webinars, they have a really thoughtful customer education site, but it's not very well organized and sequenced and grouped into use cases. So it's not that you're just creating it, but going back to that early experience from Intuit. How are you thoughtfully designing how customers experience it at the right time and guide people through it?

Speaker 1: 26:44

So it's not just thrown out there, and then you have to find it.

Speaker 2: 26:47

Yeah, the word curation comes to mind, and I think a lot of people who are really early in their journey on digital sometimes all it takes is just like looking around a little bit and seeing what you already have and curating it into this, you know, into this set of experiences. That ultimately, you know, is like it's like good first wins, Like if you're just getting started in this digital stuff, just chalk up some quick wins, curate your content, drive some specific things with like super low effort. See how that, you know, see how that works out while you're building that broader strategy and building the investments that go into that too.

Speaker 1: 27:23

I was at into sorry. When I was at Marketo and later Gainsight, responsible for the education organizations, I learned a lot about and got to work with other experts and sort of how adults learn. And particularly now it's quite different, right, the likelihood of somebody getting sent away for a two-day training workshop doesn't happen. You have to figure out how do you train somebody to do something or help them learn in like a two minute video in these bite sized pieces, and have them experience it so that they are enabled, not just figure out how to do it once. So there's kind of two terms I would talk about. One is this concept of a learning path, where you're thoughtfully bringing somebody through a process that is appropriate for them, what is their persona, what is their job or what problem are they trying to solve and what are the small steps they can learn. And the second is this concept of a maturity model you know thinking back to what are the basic skills and then you can learn some more advanced skills and then ones after that.

Speaker 1: 28:28

I find that companies often try to teach people how to use the most advanced skills really quickly, but they don't know all of the underlying skills. I have teenage kids and they're learning math and you need to take algebra before you take advanced algebra and calculus and other things, because there is a set of skills that things build on and, whether you're learning about, you know how to do marketing automation or how to do PR. You know leverage, create online surveys. There's basics that you need to know and then it gets more advanced. So how do you sequence it in a way that makes sense for your customers?

Speaker 2: 29:07

Yep, it's the. It's that foundational stuff, you know. Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about the show. Did you know that roughly 60% of listeners aren't actually subscribed to the show, on whatever platform they're listening to it on Now? As you know, algorithms love, likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. So if you get value out of the content, you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well, please go ahead and follow the show, leave a comment, leave a review. Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show. And while you're at it, go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Speaker 2: 29:50

Now back to the show I've recently been. I guess I don't know if pleasantly surprised is the right word or I don't know. I don't know why I'm surprised about this, but, like I've recently encountered several companies who have gone through their onboarding flow, like Perplexity AI is one. There's a AI automation platform called Make is another Notion is like this, where their onboarding flows are very, very micro learning focused, right. So you've got a series of emails that come out, and all of these three examples I just gave do something that a lot of folks don't do, which is like they actually number their series of emails that you're getting, so like one of seven or one of eight or one of five or whatever it is.

Speaker 2: 30:42

And that little simple thing I found so refreshing because, as a learner, you want to know where you are in the course. You want to know where you are in the journey, and sure, there may be other stuff you want to learn later on, but at least to get through the basics. Okay, next seven days I'm going to receive an email. Each email has two paragraphs in it and maybe a short video to watch. Perfect, I'm down with that. I can spend 10 minutes a day going through that to learn how to use the tool better. And it's like simple things like that are relatively cheap, inexpensive, easy to put together but yet remain like a huge miss for a lot, a lot of companies Providing context about why those things are important.

Speaker 1: 31:25

I find too many companies that jump right into here's how to use the feature and not helping to set out what's the problem that you're trying to solve first, so that people know when that capability might be. You know might be helpful what is the business problem you're trying to solve or what is the use case. And if you just, even at the beginning of a short video that you create, say, hey, this is what our software does. Or you know, if you're trying to learn about your competitors and monitor their online what people are saying about your competitors you know on different social spaces, then that's how you do it in our software. You tell a story. You tell a story right. This whole storytelling concept is really important. It was a whole section in the chief customer officer playbook. One of the really important skills is the ability to tell a story, that it's not just about the data and the bullets and the results, but how can you communicate it in a way that people can remember.

Speaker 2: 32:26

Yeah, absolutely, and people remember stories.

Speaker 2: 32:28

That's so true. Speaking of stories and sagas, I feel like we are in the middle of a massive saga, which is this whole generative AI thing that's coming into fruition and into our daily lives more and more, on a daily basis. There are more tools. The cost of development is plummeting, and so there are just tools coming out of our ears. There are new generative AI models coming out every day, it feels like, or every week.

Speaker 2: 32:57

You know, you've got Google working on stuff and you've got open AI working on stuff, and all the big players are just working on these miraculous things.

Speaker 2: 33:06

And I feel like you know, right now we're in this things and I feel like you know, right now we're in this. We're in this kind of wild west area where, you know, it's just fragmented all over the place and there's use cases left and right and there's all kinds of things, and it can be very easy for someone to just throw their hands up and go away. I'm just going to wait until this thing matures a little bit, but I feel like you know they might be behind the eight ball if they do that, and I know that you, you know you've put together kind of like a list of use cases and prompts that's on your website. That's very useful and you know I've talked about this as well. But are there maybe some suggestions that you would have for you know, even individual contributor CSMs on the ground floor, on how to utilize this stuff and how to start integrating it into their day-to-day basis?

Speaker 1: 33:58

Yeah, not long after ChatGPT came out in November 2022, I started every couple of weeks I was having a Zoom-based working session with customer success leaders, some AI experts, folks that are sort of practitioners, and we've been sort of following and learning as we go about how you can use AI and chat, gpt and other models in post-sale functions. And I think you mentioned an important trend is there's a lot of companies that are starting and have point solutions to solve very different problems. I haven't seen a ton of adoption of that yet. I think companies are still taking slow moves, but I do think it's very important to try things and learn and innovate, because it will be important. So what I encourage folks to do is find ways to use, even just using ChatGPT if your company has access to ChatGPT Team, which is one of their offerings so that information you put into ChatGPT isn't used to train the broader models. That's all the big problem of keeping company information sort of secure. Maybe you have an enterprise version of that, but there's lots of super interesting ways. There are some applications that are, you know, sort of being used to summarize meetings, and that's great, although I think that's going to lead to sort of spam fatigue, where after every meeting, you'll get a summary notes. So it's more about how it can be useful to you in taking action. But another one is just how, for example, how you prepare for discussions with your customers.

Speaker 1: 35:42

Right, I talk, I work with clients. I've been leading my consulting business for three years and if I have a company that wants to talk with me about how I can help them, I'll spend and it can be a crazy short amount of time doing research on what this company does and how I might be able to help them. So I might be able to. If it's a public company, I can download their annual report or a shareholder presentation or an analyst day summary, turn it into a transcript, drop it into ChatGPT and even if it's not a public company, you just say, hey, what does this company do? I worked at Marketo, so you might say I have a meeting with Marketo tomorrow. Give me a summary of what Marketo does, what business units it has, and if you were the head of marketing in that organization, what are some of the challenges that you likely face.

Speaker 1: 36:39

And it is crazy how useful it is. Is it 100% perfect? No, but it's incredibly useful. I had another company that was trying to expand sales into Comcast and you can say what are the different business units and how could our solution be used in those various business units and it comes up with an amazing start. Again, it's not perfect, but it's a shortcut to provide insight. So I really encourage people to find little ways that you can use it. Probably a year ago now I assembled a list of 250 prompts for different post-sale teams. If you do implementation or support or customer success or education, what could you put in as questions and prompts into ChatGPT to get out. And things have changed so much, but there's still sort of that same concept of explore and see how it can make you more productive.

Speaker 2: 37:36

Yeah, yeah, it's super smart and to your point. You know ChatGPT isn't to be completely trusted. Like you wouldn't want to copy and paste an email that it generates for you out of you know, from a prompt right into a customer email without reading it first and wordsmithing it and making sure that it's in your voice and making sure that it's entirely accurate, but it like gets you 80% of the way there. It's like a massive assistant.

Speaker 2: 38:02

Another kind of shift for me recently has been the use of perplexity instead of Google. You know. So top tip, if you're out there, go check out perplexity. I think it is a paid plan, but like it is an answer engine. They call it an answer engine instead of a search engine and you can use it just like you would. You know Google, but what it actually gives you is you know generative AI, summaries and information and context and background and all this kind of stuff to like what it is you're actually searching for, instead of having to weed through sponsored links and all this weird experience that Google has right now in their search results or whatever.

Speaker 1: 38:41

Let me give you an example of how I worked with one of my clients to leverage AI. So one of my clients that makes software for brands came to me and we were trying to put together a digital onboarding experience, right? In this particular case, one of the elements was a sequence of eight emails that you might send once a week. She had came to me and said hey, I've got this 12-week project to do this, and I said, okay, let's see how we can shortcut that and maybe get something out in a week or two. And so we went into ChatGPT and what we said was okay, here's the business that we're in. Here are our customers.

Speaker 1: 39:22

I'd like to create an email stream to help new customers get onboarded. I'd like to send out eight emails in week one. I'd like to do this in week two. I'd like to do this in week three. Give me a draft outline of those emails. And it comes up with a draft outline of the emails and you can, you know, add, say hey, a little bit more here, a little bit more there. And then you say give me a draft of the email.

Speaker 2: 39:52

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 39:54

And it gives you a draft. So it's clearly not a copy and paste. I'm ready to go, but it gives you the structure of an email, right? If you say here's the name of my company, here's what we do. In the first email, I'd like to introduce our chief customer officer. This person, I want to send them a link to our support website and also introduce them to our academy, and then, in week two, I want to introduce them to this particular program in the academy that they should take these courses, and in week three, going to walk them through how to submit support cases. And we, you know like you, provide a little bit of context and it gives you a shockingly good early draft.

Speaker 1: 40:40

Again, I'm not suggesting that people copy and send, but a lot of times people don't know where to start, and that's why I wrote these books right, because the best practices are so dispersed that you don't know where to start. And so, whether it's putting some of my frameworks in books, on my website at rodchurgiscom, I have a part where you could download lots of templates and spreadsheets and places to start. It's not perfect, but if you're trying to come up with a value calculator, here's a framework or structure for how to do it. If you want to have an account expansion plan, here's a template to start with. Again, it's not always perfect for you, but it at least gives you a framework for it, and I find that's one of the real values of ChatGPT or similar solutions is it gives you a start, and a lot of people struggle with getting from that zero to the V1. And then they can edit their good editors or they can apply it to their business. So I'm a real big fan of using it to improve productivity in certain ways Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 41:48

And for me, one of the really tangible benefits has been just the reduction of decision fatigue. If you're using these tools, it's almost like you have a partner in crime to talk through stuff with and it's not all on you to make certain minute decisions that, in the aggregate, like really add up and lead to you just being zonked by the end of the day. You know it's, it's nice to, it's nice to have that little personal assistant there, you know, to help you through some of that stuff. And you know even those small decisions of okay, you know, what should I start thinking about for this email and that email and this message here? And, like what you know best practices, like sometimes I'll ask it for best practices on certain things and it gives me, you know, response of five things OK, yeah, but then there's like that one thing where I didn't think about that. Let's include that as well. It's like a gut check on some of this stuff, which hopefully then gives you more confidence to move throughout your day.

Speaker 1: 42:51

Yeah, no, totally. I think it's great. I led a panel about a month and a half ago with executives that included folks from Google, like AI, experts from Google, stanford and Anthropic, and we were talking about whether people should feel for their jobs, because I know that's a concern and what we kind of took away, and I think was the consensus, was that it's not going to take your job, but your hiring managers are going to be more likely to hire somebody who is fluent in using it to supplement their job than somebody who isn't Not. A ton of people are around and kind of remember when the internet started and the internet made many of us much more productive.

Speaker 1: 43:39

Yes, maybe we had to learn some new skills, but I'm still working. Lots of people are working, unemployment rates are low, but at the time, people who could do research on the internet or leverage the use of data like we were talking about earlier with Marketo and here is at HubSpot and Eloqua became much more valued than people who resisted it, and I think that's sort of the case that is going to happen in our professional environment People that can leverage AI in their daily workflow, whether it's with a purpose-built tool that your company buys or by supplementing it with Grammarly, by using ChatGPT to help you come up with ideas or write job descriptions, or whatever it is. It's just very useful as a productivity tool that people should get familiar with.

Speaker 2: 44:33

Couldn't agree more. Are there any tips or things that you want CSMs or CS leaders to kind of keep in mind as they go through the rest of this 24 and into 25? Like, what would you say to folks in terms of you know what's ahead, what to pay attention to besides generative AI, I guess?

Speaker 1: 44:55

I would really ask people to pay attention to what's important to their CEO and their executive teams, right, regardless of what you were hired to do, regardless of what your job was in past years, it's really important that you listen to what their priorities are and how they get measured, so that you can make sure that you're aligning what your team is doing to. Hey, we need to grow top line revenue. Our bookings are slow, you know our new bookings are slow and we're not hitting our board plan. Then talking to them about net promoter scores and account health isn't going to be very helpful. Right, because they don't care, unless there is a direct tie to something they care about retention rates, net expansion rates they may not care.

Speaker 1: 45:52

They're going to be asking about productivity because they care about margin and many SaaS companies need to be increasingly break-even or profitable so that they don't have to go back and raise more money in the public markets or in private markets. So you need to be thinking and proactively coming up with ideas about how are your teams being more productive, how are they prioritizing where they spend their time and resources. So make sure that the work that you're doing contributes to something that is in your top three of what your CEO cares about.

Speaker 2: 46:27

Yeah, that's really wise and, I think, something that not everybody does. I love asking other leaders around the company like what are your go gets, what is it you need to go do this quarter and next quarter, and how can I help you do that?

Speaker 1: 46:39

Yeah, it's really important, and I saw some data that Nick and Kelly, Nick Metta and Kelly Capote just published yesterday on LinkedIn, saying that something over 50% of CS leaders had changed jobs in the past year, out of a pretty big sample size of their customer base. And I would ask and invite all of those leaders going into those roles to make sure they're having conversations with their CEO and with their CFO. What do you expect from me? How can I contribute to the organization? Because I don't think that the answer is always obvious. Right, that it's always well, just retain our customers and keep growing them and make sure they're healthy. There might be very specific metrics that they care about that their board is looking at. That has been an issue in the past that they need to turn around so that they look like they're doing their jobs well. Yeah, and so the measures of success aren't always obvious. They're not. Just go onto the internet.

Speaker 1: 47:43

Take a look at what metrics are important for customer success leaders or CCOs and go do that there's often some important metrics or stories that your CEO needs to be able to explain better than the board that you can contribute to.

Speaker 2: 48:00

Yeah, sage advice. Appreciate that as we start to round this out. I would love to know, rod Chargas, what's in your content diet? What are you paying attention to? What are you reading, watching, listening to all that stuff?

Speaker 1: 48:14

Yeah, so you know, as I mentioned, I'm listening to what's important for CEOs and boards, and there are basically three trends. One is this, one that you've been on top of driving digital experiences with the outcome Like. It's not about because it needs to be digital, it's because it enables you to do things in a more cost efficient way to drive improved profitability. And great experiences is for post-sale teams to contribute more to top-line revenue growth, which is what I address in the book REACH with the framework to help post-sale teams have a model for themselves, to better uncover expansion opportunities, help get them closed. And then the third is innovating around AI, of starting to learn how you can drive impact in your business, of starting to learn how you can drive impact in your business, often through internal process improvements and, in some companies, increasingly through better customer experiences.

Speaker 1: 49:15

So those are the three trends. I tend to have some on LinkedIn. There are a handful of people that I tend to follow If any of your audience is interested. I kind of have a one pager I send out to my clients that says, hey, these are the top events or podcasts and people that you should be following. People tend to really appreciate that. But whatever you can to keep learning about those three areas, yeah for sure.

Speaker 2: 49:41

Well, look, I've enjoyed our time together. I enjoyed reading your books. They were very insightful.

Speaker 1: 49:59

I enjoyed reading your books. They were very insightful and, you know, I would encourage obviously anyone who's interested in learning more to pick them up. But then also, you know, have a convo with you. Where can people find you and engage with happy to talk with you. You can email me at rod at hello ccocom and we can talk about areas of interest or how I might be able to help you in your organizations, and then my books are available on amazoncom so it's pretty, pretty easy to find me still waiting for the audio book versions.

Speaker 2: 50:25

Man.

Speaker 1: 50:26

I didn't do that, yet I did try to. There are some of those websites that can clone your voice to read text. And I put a couple of paragraphs in there and it wasn't great. You know, my books have lots of stories and company names and I found that it would take me just as long to go back and try and re-edit all of them than to just do it the first time.

Speaker 2: 50:49

Also, I only have a threshold of about a minute or two listening to those that are so obviously like fake before I'm like, oh, I couldn't imagine listening to a whole book of that.

Speaker 1: 51:01

Yeah, I wouldn't do that, but I was curious. You know, just in the learning I'm like, well, you know I got.

Speaker 2: 51:05

Yeah, I probably had half a dozen people that have asked for the audio book.

Speaker 1: 51:06

You know, and just in the learning I'm like, well, you know I got. Yeah, I probably had half a dozen people that have asked for the audio book.

Speaker 2: 51:11

I'm sure there's more.

Speaker 1: 51:12

That would otherwise do it, but I've I've had a lot of readers, so the paper. I'm a big fan of paperback.

Speaker 2: 51:17

Yeah Well, you got a good voice for it.

Speaker 1: 51:20

We will, we will do it.

Speaker 2: 51:22

Yeah, cool. Well, thanks again for the time again for the time.

Speaker 1: 51:29

I appreciate it. So, yeah, it's been. It's been real Great. Thanks, Alex, for doing this. I appreciate how you're contributing to our learning and best practices. We all have things that we like to do you doing your podcast, me doing my frameworks and books and we're all helping to up-level the skills of our customer success and executive post-sale leaders. So thanks for what you're doing as well.

Speaker 2: 51:49

Yeah, you got it Ditto. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success definition word map and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom. This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, Dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content, video, audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent you. I'm Alex Terkovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.