Human-First Leadership: Fulfilling the Customer Promise
Fulfilling a customer promise means delivering exceptional experiences consistently. This commitment requires more than just customer satisfaction; it demands a customer-centric approach that breaks down departmental barriers and cultivates strong, customer-focused leadership. In this session, explore how a human-first leadership style can transform your organization. Learn how authentic leadership, characterized by vulnerability, empathy, and a commitment to personal development, inspires teams to prioritize customer needs. Discover actionable strategies to build robust relationships and foster a culture where customers feel genuinely valued and supported, driving your organization's success.
So welcome to day two of Pulse Europe 2024.
Hands up who went to the Pulse party last night.
Did everyone enjoy the band?
Yeah!
Who did any crowd surfing?
It's just Sam from Gaincite then, OK.
There's no party like a Pulse party.
You know that by now.
Welcome. This is track six crucial insights
for human first leaders,
and we have some incredible speakers lined up for you today.
My name is Harry.
I'm part of Gaincite's customer success team here in Europe.
A couple of reminders, as you probably know by now,
there is going to be a Q&A in Slido at the end.
Please drop your questions now for our speaker
and we'll take them at the end through the Pulse app.
You need to go to the home page, click track six,
and submit your questions.
OK. We're also going to be surprising with all of the content,
all of the slides, the audio recording from today,
probably within the next two weeks.
So go check out the Pulse library
for a copy of today's session.
OK. I'm really excited to welcome our first speaker on stage,
an incredible thought leader in customer success,
Laura Barnes, SVP of customer success, Amra Nules,
and also a spotlight winner of the Outstanding Women
in Customer Success Award,
and Gaincite's Game Changer winner in 2023
for the Transformational Leader Award.
A couple of fun facts about Laura
is that she recently got into Trempe-leaning.
Is that right?
OK, rebounding Trempe-leaning and has to bounce out of bed
every morning to go do it.
It's given her a whole new lease of life.
And also, she plays tennis for Kent in the UK,
her home county.
Laura's... OK.
OK.
OK, so you're not playing now. OK.
You're retired. OK.
Laura's session is entitled Human First Leadership
Fulfilling the Customer Promise.
In this session, we'll explore how a human first leadership style
can transform your organisation,
learn how authentic leadership characterised by vulnerability,
empathy and a commitment to personal development,
inspires teams to prioritise customer needs,
discover actionable strategies to build robust relationships,
and foster a culture where customers feel genuinely valued
and supported driving your organisation's success.
So please join me and give a huge round of applause
for our speaker, Laura.
APPLAUSE
Where's the clicker?
Hi. I'm so pleased to be here again,
and I really love the fact that this room is full.
It's brilliant to see everyone,
and I appreciate you coming to see me speak about this topic
that's very passionate and goes quite deep for me.
Delivering on the customer promise is something that,
as a CS leader, you want to be able to fulfil.
But doing it in a human first way is also one of the things
that I have really tried to do over the past seven years
in a role that I did,
and I have been exceptionally proud of what I did during that time,
and it was due to the team I built around me
in order to fulfil that customer promise
and do the very best by our customers.
And it was hard, and I'll take you through
some of the journey that we've been on together.
So I wanted to really look at how companies strive
to deliver to customers, but they don't quite make it.
And if I told you that 90% of businesses think customers
trust their company,
but only 30% of customers actually do,
it's quite a shocking fact.
And that's because there are just so many disconnections
across the process.
And marketing versus the reality is one of the things
that many companies prioritise marketing and advertising
over actual customer experience.
And they invest heavily in advertising, and the promises,
they just give so many promises,
but they neglect that they give those to the underlying infrastructure,
and the process is necessary to deliver that
across the whole organisation,
is one of the things that I think holds back
a lot of companies and a lot of SaaS businesses.
There's a short-term focus,
and that short-term focus is on quarterly earnings.
We're always trying to achieve that quarterly goal.
And there's also things that are just not aligned.
There's been a lot of cost-cutting over the past couple of years
in companies, and that is a very short-term focus.
And reducing customer success and removing that
as part of the organisational structure on GoToMarket
is the wrong thing to do because it is very short-termism.
There's also a lack of accountability,
often on delivering customer promises,
and employees just are not incentivised in order to do that
across to deliver the right customer satisfaction.
And there are misaligned incentives across the business,
so you're going to have sales teams focused in on delivering
from leads to effectively delivering on the revenue
and driving their booking number.
You've got the support team focusing on cost-cutting
or ensuring that they're doing things
in a most efficient way for answering customer questions.
And then you've got customer success
that are focusing on delivering maybe cross-sell, up-sell leads
and advocacy and NPS.
Those are the things and retention.
So you've got all these different teams
that are focusing on different things,
and why do you think we don't actually deliver
on the customer promise?
And I think those broken promises
don't hold the relationship all the way through.
And that's why we start to see churn,
and we really start to see the full down
within the kind of operations and infrastructure
of the company, and that's where I think
customer success is in a privileged position,
because we see everything end-to-end
in order to represent that within the company,
and represent that at many different levels
across all of the different teams.
And so, how do you really bridge that gap?
Well, it's about prioritising customer experience,
and it's about ensuring that it is allocating,
it's about allocating resources accordingly,
and using technology, so all of your systems
in your business to be aligned to do that,
and investing in training and development for your people,
because if your people are not trained in the product,
how can they really help their customer?
And it comes down to also investing in that
so that the employees feel that they can do the best
by those customers, and then it's about measuring
and monitoring, and it's about ensuring the employee
can feel that they have authority to make those decisions
that's going to make a difference to the customer,
because nine times out of 10 during a customer's life cycle,
things are full through the cracks,
get stuck, have to go back and forth.
It's not fluid, and trying to keep that fluidity
across the whole business is very difficult,
unless you've really looked at it from an infrastructure
and organisational structure.
And so it also needs the feedback,
and the measuring and the monitoring of that feedback
from customer success, from customer satisfaction and NPS,
and really helps to, you're listening to those customers,
but you also have to action.
You can listen all you like, but if you're not actually
putting action in across the whole company
in order to change things on what customers are needing
from you, you're breaking that customer's interest.
So for me, how I went about this is around empathy.
Empathy is one of the grounding qualities
that I look for when I'm recruiting.
And I have a great deal of empathy, and I lead with empathy.
And understanding those needs and pain points
are so, so important.
And then putting action plans in place
in order to obviously change that.
But by not understanding how your company operates properly
around a customer journey, you're
going to work in your silo, and you're
going to do the very best of that customer.
And it's just not going to ensure
the fluidity to help that customer get through
from the onboarding through to adoption and consumption.
So there's so many friction points
in that whole journey across all those teams
from how the product goes to market,
to how it's then marketed, and how it's glossed around
all of these promises.
And it's about how we then go and sell that product,
and how we go and ensure that we start to deliver,
or a partner's implemented, and there's lack of training
in how partners should be implementing to a best practice.
And then it goes through to the adoption and consumption.
And once you get through to that point,
everyone's just exhausted.
So who's really looking at the outcomes
and how you deliver that, and how you sow the whole organization
up in order to do that and deliver those outcomes.
So I've done this, and I spent a lot of time doing it
and about incredible momentum across the company.
And it really put me in a great pace, personally.
It also was rooted in a passion to change the company
for the customer.
It was hard work.
There was a lot of resistance from different levels,
but there was a whole buy-in at the top.
So it was easier for me.
And it took a lot of negotiation, and I actually
outlining what all the problems were across the business
and why customers are feeling the way they were feeling
when we got the MPSA results.
And really listening to what they had to say
and then change those things.
So that change management process is incredibly important.
And there was a readiness assessment
that was presented yesterday around change management.
And I went to that session, and it was exceptionally good.
And that readiness assessment could
be used in doing something like this.
And I think it's about realizing you
have the capability to do this.
And you have the understanding of everything
end-to-end as a CS leader to actually challenge this
and make small inroads every single quarter in order
to take the company on a different journey.
And you have everything end-to-end.
You see it all end-to-end.
And that is the most inspiring piece,
because you can see where all the friction points are,
where you don't have a racey, where
you need to get people's buy-in, where
you need to ensure that everyone is measured in the right way,
and how you can influence getting a measurement across all teams,
not just the customer-facing teams, but product and marketing.
And everyone should be really focused in on a customer metric
that joins everyone together and is measured at the end.
And a lot of that is, I think, is around retention
and how you put product to market.
And the product needs to be adopted.
And you need to be able to ensure that everyone
is aligned on those goals.
And it's defining those key stages
and defining the moments that matters to the customer.
But also, where are the pitfalls?
You can put something fantastic up on a whiteboard.
And we did exactly that.
But it was operationally, how are we going to do it?
And you can align all of your systems to do this.
It takes a lot of work.
I mean, I'll say it's going to take a year.
It might take two years.
It might take three years.
But at least you're on the right track in order to do it.
And the fruits of it are incredible.
So, defining and delivering the customer's desired outcomes.
So even challenging product.
We've just gone and put this product to market.
How are you expecting a customer to adopt it?
And what does it actually mean for the customer?
Yeah, you have a user case and you go to marketing.
And you put that user case out to market.
And you go and sell it.
Now what?
What does it mean to actually get to implementation and adoption?
What are those stages of adoption?
And what's the outcome?
And how do we tie it all the way back
to the original objective that that customer was really
wanting to achieve?
And then it's about how you ensure
that customer is being-- is really focused in
on how they are achieving.
And are they achieving anything?
Have they achieved anything over the period of time?
Because those results that you can show them
that you're getting, even if it's tiny,
is better than they had before.
So the retention of that customer is far greater
than a customer that's not achieving anything at all.
Because you can't actually prove anything around that.
So therefore, you need some kind of form of tracking
in order to do that.
So define the race.
You understand the customer perspective
on their experience.
And do some-- once you've aligned everybody to this
and you've got a race set out as to who does what,
it's actually taking some test customers
and putting them through it before you roll anything out
to the rest of the organization.
It needs to be able to work.
But here is one of the most important pieces,
which is empowering the team.
So how you go about understanding
those different departments and empowering those employees
to make those decisions that benefit the customers
and giving people autonomy to do that.
And that was one of the things that I built in
when I-- in my last role.
It was about the autonomy to make decisions,
no matter what level of customer success you were,
you had the ability to make those decisions
and we would back you.
It was the right thing for the customer.
And it was a culture that we built around that.
And it really did give a cohesive way of operating,
not just us and how we created this team that was just so
immense and wanted to be together,
but how that was then seen across the rest of the company.
And how individuals within that team
did feel empowered in order to do the best thing for that customer,
or challenge and bring things out in order for that
to be managed across the whole business.
But that way of operating is really
being an ethical leader and doing the right thing all the time.
And it comes from really understanding
what your values are as a leader and what
you want to be able to empower and ensure
that your team are going to deliver
and how you go about doing that.
And those values really sit around trust and honesty
and building loyalty and fellowship.
But that comes from, I think it comes from me
being just so accountable and responsible the whole time
to do the right thing that I always
wanted to work with a team that had cooperation
and that there was harmony and there was not
a bunch of people infighting the whole time.
So there was these things that I really tried to enforce
and put around the rest of the business.
But I really did fight for my team.
And there was moments where I really
went above and beyond in order to do the right thing
by a person because it just wouldn't have actually
happened if I hadn't have gone and fought for it.
So that purpose and that ability to have integrity
and do the right thing all the time
creates that authenticity of leadership
where people do want to follow you,
do want to be part of your team.
And it also, it creates resilience as well.
And I became very resilient to a lot of situations
that I went through.
And taking the company through that type of change
is hard.
And there is a lot of individuals.
Everyone is quite cooperative.
But there is particular individuals
that you have to go and influence
and give them the understanding and tell them
the consequences as to why we're doing things.
And what's going to happen if we don't do it?
And those are the things that really start to resonate.
And working with your CFO is incredibly important
in trying to do a project like this across the business.
So it comes down to open and honest communication,
really fosters that ability of trust and loyalty.
And obviously you need a charismatic leader.
You need somebody that really represents the company
and really wants to do the right thing by the company
and also by the team.
And having somebody in that position who really believes--
and I think this is one of the things
that it comes down to is belief.
You have to believe that you can do it.
Because if you don't believe it, the rest of your team
are not going to believe it.
And there are days where you don't believe it
because you come across a barrier.
And you need to get over that barrier.
And it's about how you overcome that barrier, too.
Grows you as a leader.
But that true belief inside is so incredibly important
in order to drive change at this scale.
And investing in customer success, not taking it out,
but investing in how it operates is also really important
because it should be part of go-to-market.
And if it's not, you're too siloed.
And you are very much thinking about how you represent yourself
all the time and justifying how you should be measuring your team.
And is it enough?
And are they going to take us out?
Are we showing enough value?
And it's not just to the customers.
It's a constant-- and I was having a conversation with Annika
just now-- it's a constant battle
to show where you sit in the organization
and what you're actually contributing to.
And if you are on a dashboard and if you are sitting alongside
the metrics of driving leads and you
have the partner team, you have the sales team,
you have the SDR team, the marketing team,
and customer success, you're going
to see the ability to drive those leads and those leads
that close, you're going to fly.
Because it really-- the relationship
you have with your customers and if you lead by empathy
and do it in a human-first way, and really,
it's about the success of how that customer is feeling
that you're going to help them achieve their goals,
that all of those things just emulate into trust.
And those customers are going to trust you
and they're going to ensure that they're
going to look at other opportunities to grow with you.
So I feel that it's a real foundational piece
in order to deliver the results, but also
a operational capability and infrastructure capability too.
So that support-- providing the dedicated teams,
but also providing the real level of support
that can really inspire those exceptional customer
experiences is really important.
So in terms of what does success look like,
what are you really trying to achieve?
Well, you're trying to achieve increased growth,
increased customer satisfaction, reducing churn,
and building those deeper relationships.
So that over time, that's the growth of the company.
And I think a lot of companies don't really
appreciate the level and the ability for customer success
to retain, grow, and build that trust.
And that's why you have a customer success team.
But the level of growth that you can get out
of existing customers is huge.
And on the leaderboard and you're
driving 45, 50% conversion on the leads
and the other teams are just way, way down.
It really shows what you're contributing
to the rest of the organization.
So all employees need to think first, customer first.
That's about working with HR.
It's about working with the culture team.
It's really looking at how and what impact they can have
at every touch point.
So thinking about being customer first
from a product perspective, being customer first
from a marketing perspective, from an AE perspective,
how and what do they need to do for long-term growth.
And it really depends on how everyone's measured.
But that customer first is going to come from customer success
and from the support team and the professional service team
because that's what they do.
However, all customer facing employees
need to know that life cycle.
And I can't iterate enough how important it is
that life cycle is defined out and a race is defined out
and how everybody interacts with everybody
across the company because it takes out the friction
for the customer and also gives accountability
and responsibility to teams during those pieces
of the life cycle.
And so it comes down to the--
there needs to be, as I said, the infrastructure
and tracking capability to join everybody up,
join that customer journey up and identify
where those points of growth could be
or the points of retention risk.
And where could those actually be?
And what is the plan once you see that retention risk?
What do you do about it?
But that needs to be way more automated.
And we have a real opportunity with AI,
but we also have a real opportunity
to help start building this within our businesses
because it is so siloed.
There are so many systems that sit
owned by different parts of the organization.
So you'll have Salesforce being managed by the SalesOps team,
Gainsite being managed by the customer success team,
ServiceNow being managed by the support team.
You've got all these systems as well as finance owning
all of the billing systems.
All of these systems all sit with different teams
and nothing's joined up end to end.
So that capability of doing that across the data
from the business is like the first step
and how you actually operate this.
And then there's thinking about what the customer really needs
in terms of the value framework that you should be putting in.
What are those outcomes?
So you go sell it, you build it, you create the dream,
and then you go sell it.
And what about delivering for those outcomes?
How do you build a value framework around that?
And the way we did it was look at what's it going to take
to deliver 25, 50, 75% of adoption?
And during those, that 25%, what does it mean to adopt 25%,
what features get us there?
How far along do you actually get to achieve your user case
that you started out with at the beginning
in the sales cycle?
And actually join it up with telemetry and work out,
are you achieving that for that customer?
Because that's what's going to really provide the outcome
is to how you go do it and then go back in the QBRs
and tell the customer how it needs to be delivered.
It's going to be, it's being delivered, sorry.
And what you've done for that customer.
So, as I, you know, I can't history,
this is just so important for me now.
Like this is like the biggest revelation.
I was doing all of this in my last job
and then I read this book and it's called Revenue Operations.
And I had a conversation with Stephen DeOrie
who wrote this book 'cause I was so excited to find it.
It's basically the manual as to how you do this.
It's how you can build your organization
but you need to have the confidence and belief
to go and do that.
To go and provide that type of insight
to the rest of your leadership team
as to what's happening across different parts of your org
and how you can change things.
And it is a company-wide project, yes.
And it needs sponsorship, yes.
But if you are going to do something like this
and you are going to try and turn the company
in a different direction,
this is what you need to really look at
because you can do it yourself.
You can have that influence to get that changed.
And I never got all of the way
but I did do a hell of a lot of the journey.
And I was so proud of what I got done.
But we are siloed and the life cycle
within the business needs to be defined
and that we need to be able to put those systems in
and we need to be part of go-to-market.
If you're not part of go-to-market,
you are not in the right place
because all of the data that you have that I described,
you've got marketing operations,
you've got the product ops team,
you've also got sales ops,
you've got customer success ops,
you may even have professional services ops,
you may even have support ops,
all those ops teams all siloed at the moment,
who's looking at how those operations teams
can be pulled together under one leader
that can really help identify
where the growth in those accounts is,
where the risk in those accounts are.
And those are the things that can really be born out
of building little hubs of teams,
whether it be an AE, professional services person
and the CSM that come in to help.
You've seen a flag in the system
and you're now on the account.
You can see that you can grow it by X amount
or you can retain it.
And that retention of that customer
is way more important than going out
and bringing in a new customer
that is not part of your ISP
because that's gonna make the whole journey so hard.
And I know most of you see that a lot.
But the advanced analytics and the AI
that we can put into this whole story now
is going to really elevate how we operate.
But you, you know, the opportunity customer success leaders
have to initiate that and work with the finance team
and work with the rest of the organizational leaders
to flag this.
It's a hard slog at the beginning,
but once you start getting momentum
and start working around a customer first mentality
with the HR and the culture team,
you really start to see this.
Everyone wants to work in a place
where we do the right things
and we succeed together as a team.
And this is what I see is help,
will help many organizations
provide the opportunity for turning around growth
is changing how we look at the infrastructure
and the processes within our companies.
'Cause it is about lifetime value
and it is about profit in the end.
Couple more slides.
So what helped me, I've told you some of it,
how you represent the customer and the experience,
company transformation needs sponsorship,
you need somebody that's really gonna help you.
You need one and then you need to go and work on the others.
But with one person sponsoring you
at that exact level, you're going to start to see momentum
and it's about how you go and present the data.
It has to be data driven,
it has to be customer experience driven
and you need to show how it can be done
and what needs to be done.
And, you know, you need to work out
before you go in to see them,
what types of individuals need to be
in that transformation project.
Help people see it's possible,
that's that belief thing that I talked about.
And driving that customer first vision
and building your case through data,
having the persistency,
you gotta be persistent in doing this stuff
'cause it's hard.
And then really proving out that test case segment two.
So even if you could do it on a mini scale
and to show that it could be better
with a number of different components or changing things
and putting a customer that, you know,
that comes through the sales team
through a different process
to see how different things work.
So it's a way from organizational change first
but actually testing things would be a good way
to actually get influence and ensure that
people really do listen
'cause you've gone and tested things beforehand.
And then it's about taking action,
implementing and just watching it grow.
And going in, being bold,
be bold and say what it was,
it was gonna help the organization do in doing
in terms of improving retention, reducing churn,
growth 'cause you're not losing those customers,
you're gonna grow them.
Improving the ability for,
if you're looking at value framework as well
and you're going end to end,
you're really gonna start to see those customers
that haven't seen the value as much
because you know you've defined out
how you're gonna track it,
you're gonna start to see those customers
really want to work much more with you
because that's what's gonna drive the customer happiness.
And in summary,
it's about a company wide approach
and positioning CS in the go-to market
and being a revenue ops type business.
You've got sales ops, sure.
But this is about tying all pieces of data up.
Then it's about the people
and what's the CSM promise?
You need to define that promise.
If you don't define it,
how are you going to really know your why?
And you need to understand all of your teams why too,
understand what those people are trying to do.
I really focused in on a lot of the development
of the team too and what was needed
and how we were gonna do that.
And lots of people through the years
that I worked in my last job really grew
because we had clear understanding
and they had clear understanding of development plans
but we also had a lot of succession plans as well
and we put in different leadership layers
and people came through the ranks
and you had really phenomenal careers
in our last business.
So the processes as well,
are we taking you through in terms of how you can do it
and what those playbooks could look like
in terms of changing the company
to do something like this
but really working out how customers
are measured through the journey
and also how they measure you.
That's so important.
And then what's the success criteria
we've talked about but the,
how this be shared across the business
and how do you really ensure around the delivery
of customer centricity?
Defining that is of utmost importance
because otherwise you just don't have that dream
as to what you're actually moving towards.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- All right, thank you Lara.
Also, we're gonna take some questions now.
So please jump into post-Europe app,
track six, submit your questions and let's get going.
Right, Anita, thank you for your question.
Lara, you mentioned the importance
of finding your own values.
For example, trust, empathy.
Is there a particular exercise
that you would recommend for leaders
finding their values and leadership style?
- Yeah, yeah.
So I don't know whether you can get it on,
you could Google it
but there is a list of values
and if you reach out to me on LinkedIn,
I will send you my list of values 'cause I've got it
but it was like, there's just hundreds of them on one page
and you spend a good half an hour and you go through
and the ones that jump out of the page
and resonate with you, they're your values,
they're what you stand for.
I've done a lot of this with coaches
that I've had over the years
but I really understand what I represent and who I am
and why I react in certain situations to things
and I wouldn't say I'm emotional, I can control it
but it really does build inside
when I know it's really important to me
and that's because of the deep value.
So if you're getting in touch with me on LinkedIn,
absolutely I'll send you the list of values.
- Awesome, right, next one.
What metrics or indicators can be used
to assess the impact of human first leadership
on customer experience and organizational success?
- Great question.
I think the metrics and indicators can be used.
I think that
starts with what do you wanna be?
So what do you want your department to be?
How do you want to be seen
and how do you want your CSMs to operate
and be known for?
And what qualities are needed in order to provide
that overall vision of what you are trying to achieve?
When I started out, I was at Site Corps seven years,
I built it from scratch
and I had a clear understanding of what it was gonna take
to run 3,500 customers.
And I was laughed at within the first few months
of I said, you can't just give me 10 CSMs,
if you want me to do a full coverage model,
I'm gonna have to have 50.
And they were like, you haven't a laugh.
And when I left, there was 75 within the CS team.
So it did include operations,
but I was right because I had a vision
and I knew what we were gonna need to build it out.
But those, the human first leadership metrics,
I think it comes down to how you want to be seen
and are you being seen in those ways?
So the metrics of, it's a very difficult question.
I'm trying to think of specific things,
but it's setting out your goals
and how you wanna be seen.
And then, and actually throughout the organization,
you're gonna see people that either come to you
and ask you for a job because they wanna work for you
or they're going to see what you're doing
and compliment how you're operating
and how your team operate.
And I used to get that a lot.
One of my leaders or CSM would go into a meeting
and I would get compliments from the AE
or one of the professional services or support leaders.
Those are the types of things.
I think it's more tangible, it's more emotional.
You'll know if you're actually achieving those
metrics and you could do it based on feedback.
I think that's, I can't, I can't think of anything else.
- Good answer.
Okay, I love this next question.
How do you foster a customer-centric approach
when you are but one department in a sea
of offering different attitudes?
- Yeah.
So I see it in a very big picture.
I see it as we're very privileged to know
how our customers are going through
an end-to-end journey with us.
And we do see it, if you start to open your mind
and not look at it from just what you're doing
in terms of a siloed CS perspective,
how the impacts start from building a great product
and going out to market and selling a dream,
it's about doing the right things by customers
doing the right things by customers,
having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve
to the customer but also internally.
How do you want to be seen?
And
doing lunch and learns, and I mean,
they're not the answer to lunch and learns
but the biggest thing is actually understanding
everything end-to-end and then ensuring that you're using data
to pull from the NPS what customers are experiencing
and then working out how you navigate that back up
to the put implement and then, you know, they've been working
with a partner that they've had to chop out
because they weren't trained enough.
And then, you know, they have then gone on
and they've had an incredible experience with their CSM
because they've supported them all the way along the journey
as well as the support team in helping them.
And, you know, those types of, those types of real-time feedback
from a customer across a whole journey
elevates how tough it is and then it's about ensuring that
you can bit by bit show from those,
that real data point from that customer that you're then going in
and helping affect people to think about the customer
from a departmental perspective and then going in
and talking to product and, you know, the product team,
be the person that goes in with those data points
and talk to the product in their product team.
They might have, you know, a couple of hundred people
on a product call every month and be a speaker at their meeting
and, you know, stay the same thing to every single department
and give them that vision and view and eventually it does create momentum.
And if you can work, if you've got a customer first value
for your brand at work, go in and work with the culture team
and the HR team to help initiate that and pull it into how you work,
how we go to market with the marketing of the product
and how it can be more, it can resonate to be customer first.
So it's really how you go about working with the different departments
to influence and create that momentum and build the wave.
You've got to be, you've got to have a lot of tenacity
and you've got to believe that it can happen.
Module gains.
Can we just get the timer down on the screen here
so we don't run over please?
Okay, I love this question because every time he's asked,
"Do you always hear a different answer?"
Do you think customer success should be more commercial?
And if so, do you think empathy and being commercial can coexist together?
Yes.
(Laughter)
There you go.
There you go.
Customer success has to be commercial.
If you're not being commercial, you're left behind.
How are you ever going to justify your existence
if you can't put a number to your team?
And it really does make a huge difference.
And that's what it's said to you about being on a leaderboard
with the rest of the teams.
If you're going to create leads or drive leads,
they need to see how they convert.
They need to see what you're driving.
And they need to see the impact of the difference between a sales person
going at and they should be negotiating closing.
That's what they're great at.
But a CSM can drive leads from being a trusted advisor
and understanding.
They have a deeper level of relationship with that customer.
They can understand what the customer needs.
Across the rest of their tech stack to understand and see if they need
any further product from you.
Or do you think empathy?
So I do think you can be still empathetic and be a sales person
because you should be understanding what the customer requires
and what they need rather than going and selling a dream.
You can actually sell the reality if you can put in place the measurements
in order to drive outcomes.
There you go.
All right, we're going to take one last question.
When your organization faces a financial or operational crisis,
how do we ensure that decisions made during those times
still prioritize customer value and the promises made to those customers?
So I took you through some of the things that organizations do wrong,
which is they have such a short-term focus.
And it does cause operational crises because they pull out people
from a lot of the ops teams, don't they?
Or they remove customer success or they remove marketing or people
that are actually there helping the journey move along and they start
to remove those individuals for cost purposes and margin purposes.
You've got to have the data to help show.
And this is what I said about, you know, if you are,
if you have metrics that you're proving, the value that having a CSM
on something in comparison to the value that you can get from,
you know, a new salesperson prioritizing that value,
sorry, ensuring that you're using the data to show that the customer success
team is operating profitably is huge.
And I think during that time, it's going to take a dip with customers
if they start taking cost out.
And that is the risk that these companies take.
And unfortunately, you've got to have a lot of the underlying data
to show why a CS team is so critical for the retention of those existing
customers during a time of new business isn't coming in as fast as they'd like it.
And that's why they require a CSM team.
Awesome. All right. Thank you, Laura.
So just before we end, as I mentioned at the beginning,
you will get a copy of Laura's presentation and the audio recording of today.
There should be in the Pulse library in the next few weeks.
I saw people taking pictures, but you will get a copy of the slide deck.
Please be sure to give some feedback to Laura via the Pulse mobile app.
You can win a 50 euro Amazon gift card if you're lucky.
Just a quick reminder, if you're registered for the session in Track 1 in the
main stage,
then you've got 15 minutes to get to that session.
If you're in this track next or any other track, then you've got 30 minutes to
get a coffee
or go visit the Gainsight booth or whatever you want to do.
And please, will you now join me in thanking Laura for her incredible insights
today.
Thank you, Laura.
[applause]
Enjoy the rest of Pulse Europe.
[silence]
