Listening to Your Customers: The Signals You’re Missing (and the Growth You’re Leaving Behind)

Hey everyone, it is so, so wonderful to be here. But I gotta say, I'm ready to go home y'all. I don't know how you feel, but whoa, Vegas is wild, like wild. And New York's not?

No, New York is not. Not like Vegas, but I also think that like, maybe we're thinking, my definition of wild, I was in bed by 9 p.m. last night, building board slides for a huge meeting tomorrow. But here's why it's wild, and here's why I'm so ready to go home y'all.

I went to get coffee this morning. Holy smokes, it took me like 25 minutes from room to navigate through like a crazy lobby. People gambling at like 7.30 in the morning. It is bananas, and all I wanted was my coffee, so I could get back to my board slides.

And that's the convenience of New York. I don't have a clicker, do you? I don't have a clicker. Could we have a clicker?

Now look at this, for the entire thing. Well we are, but let me tell you what I miss about New York, and what I am so excited to get back home to, and that is my deli, my local corner store deli, where I can get my coffee at a moment's notice, and I miss it so much, y'all, that's my deli right there. Metropolitan Avenue and Olive Street in Williamsburg, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn to be exact, and this is a deli, and I don't know if you guys know New York at all, but it is not a corner store, that's where you're gonna get your produce. It is not a delicatessen, that's where you're gonna get your pastrami sandwich, and it is not your bodega, which, Bad Bunny made it very famous during halftime, which we love, and I love a bodega.

But if you're a New Yorker, you know it's typically who owns the store that defines what it is. But I gotta be honest, I'm reevaluating my relationship with my local deli, with the late night deli. I've been going there for 15 years, and they've been my go-to, I can get my coffee, no problem. They serve me my bacon, egg, and cheese, no problem, that's when I'm feeling a little bit, you know, indulgent.

But I can get my milk, I can get my ice cream, whatever I need, super easy. But something weird has been happening. So I went there a couple months ago, and all of a sudden they started self-serve checkout. Okay, I get it, right, everyone's moving to that model, they could create some efficiency, lower head count, I get it, but when I looked over, new customers were getting their bags packed, and they were getting this cute little tote bag with it too.

And I was like, well that's a little strange, I want my bags packed, I don't like self-serve checkout. And then I went back a couple days later, and they were closed for maintenance overnight. And when I went back, the next morning, everything had changed, completely new layout. I didn't know where anything was, and it took me two acts of time to do my grocery shopping, than what usually happens.

And then, Steph, there are some new customers there, who have got this really cool, like, digital map, of where to find things. I'm like, what the heck, why don't I get that? You didn't get a digital map? I didn't get a digital map, I was so lost and confused, how do I find myself?

But weren't you a loyal customer? I was a loyal customer, I sure was. And then, to boot, you know what else happened? People who have like, the ring, they got to connect it to the deli, where they would tell you what groceries you actually needed, based on your nutritional values at that time, and then giving you prescriptive recipes, to make those dishes.

And there I am, rapey customer, I don't get this stuff. What the heck, man? Okay, but you have a ring? I do have a ring, but it's jeweled, and it doesn't tell you what you actually need.

And I'll tell you, all these new delis are popping up in the area, so I'm like, well maybe I'll just go to a different one, because this is no longer, kind of in my price range, right? You have to spend $1,000 to get this service, and that's not what I signed up for. And the last straw, all of this, they're giving 25% off to new customers. Why don't I get that?

Okay, that's not true. My deli's awesome, you guys, and I still go to my deli. I love my deli so much, this is my nephew, that's my darling niece there too. My nephew has chosen a deli-themed birthday party for the first four years of his life.

So as his friends were doing crazy ninja parkour, and their parents had to spend for that trapeze school for the birthday party, my brother-in-law got to spend two bucks on a Haribo and a Coca-Cola for my nephew and his friends, that happened four years in a row. My nephew is now 15, he goes to this deli every single day and he gets a free banana, because that's how you treat loyal customers. So, who the heck am I talking about in this crazy convoluted story at the end of Pulse? I'm talking about us.

This is what most SaaS companies look like right now. Everything, the messaging, the budget, the attention, all of it is aimed at strangers, new customers only. 43% off your first order, free grocery packing, meals cooked to order. Meanwhile, the people who already trust you, the customers, they're standing at the counter wondering if anyone knows they still exist.

How many of you feel like you're running a new customer only business right now, despite your CEO saying, "We're customer obsessed." I think many of us would agree to that. I see a couple hands and I think many of us don't want to admit that, but that is what's happening. So, we're here to talk about this. People coming back are worth more than any stranger walking in off the street and unit economics show this to us.

Hi, I'm Jana, I'm COO and founder of Champion. We help companies turn their customer signals into pipeline and retention. But before Champion, I spent 20 plus years running go to market and customer facing teams. So, I've lived inside this problem that we're gonna unpack today.

And hey everyone, Steph Hartzog. I wear a couple of hats at my organization. Anybody in the room, a Seismic customer? Nice.

Oh yeah, that's awesome. We got the Seismic kicks on today. I lead customer marketing at Seismic. I also lead our corporate marketing program.

My first job in B2B SaaS was in customer marketing and that was before it was even a discipline. And that was two decades ago. And I've spent those two decades trying to convince organizations of the value that sits with its customers. And before we continue, I'm just gonna ask you, I know we look really great for our age, so just move past that, okay?

(audience laughing) Oh, God. (laughing) The reason the daily story resonates so strongly is because the environment has changed, right? Top of funnel channels no longer work. We hear this all the time.

They're harder, they're more expensive. Lead volume is down, conversion rates are down, CAC is climbing, and AI is flooding everyone's inbox with so much noise, right? We're all seeing the same debates on LinkedIn. Is demand gen dead?

You know, should we have AI SDRs so that we can at scale message? And I'm gonna say something bold. Even though organizations are questioning this old playbook that they see is not working, they're still getting the budget. This is still what RevOps is talking about.

This is still where you see budgets going, and all of this work going is to building pipeline while the C-suite is quietly questioning the ROI around it today. So the old playbook assumes you can always find more strangers, but that assumption is more expensive every single quarter. And when I think about this, it seems like common sense. And it not only isolates the customer, but it feels morally wrong and intellectually counterintuitive in how we should be building our businesses.

We should be modeling it after my deli. Focus on the customers. So the question really becomes, what's the growth lever that actually works right now? And the answer is already sitting inside your customer base.

Here's the data that shows that unit economics I was talking about before. It costs five to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to keep one. And a 5% improvement in retention can increase profits by 25 to 95%. That's bananas.

And this data isn't new, but it's still not being acted upon. The C-suite knows this, they could recite this. And yet when you look at where the budget actually goes, where headcount actually goes, where executive attention actually goes, we're still mostly focused on building a bigger pipe. And the bucket is still leaking.

This is the picture that I want you to hold in for the rest of this session. New ARR is flowing in at the top. That's the pipeline. The C-suite is investing heavily to make that pipe bigger.

Sales gets demand, Jen. They get field marketing, they get product support, they get executive level support, they get all of this support. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the bucket, revenue is leaking out through the holes. And I like to envision, like you've got your poor CS reps, like trying to plug all of those holes.

And sometimes they don't even know where those signals are to help them proactively plug them up. Where's your help? So you're not alone in this. Marketing and RevOps should be helping you.

Not with one-off band-aid fixes, but with real alignment. And that's what we'll talk about today, because the harder truth is that most C-suite leaders today came up as VP of sales. I know it, because I am one. I came up that way.

And they know how to build pipe. And they know that the bucket is leaking. They just don't know how to fix it. They've only been taught how to solve for building more pipe.

And as an executive, we need to help them understand how to right-size this model. So how many of you feel like this today? You're running CS orgs that are a little bit lopsided in terms of not getting the support from marketing, not getting support from the C-suite. I am seeing a lot of- I see a lot of heads.

Heads nodding and shaking. Yes, and I feel your pain. But we're gonna talk about how to help solve that today. One of my favorite lines is we wanna focus on customers to build pipeline rather than pipeline to build your customer base.

And I think as soon as the C-suite figures that out, that is when we'll see exponential compounding growth. So the answer is not a tool, it's comprehensive. And this fix starts with listening because signals tell you where the holes are and they already exist within your company. And it starts with understanding where they are, what customers are telling you, and you're gonna build a system to actually act on them.

And that's what we're gonna talk about today, is that system. Awesome. All right, so let's see, we went one slide too many. Let's go back.

So let's talk about what makes up that system. So there's three components to it. How do you identify the signals? How do you drive first team alignment?

And last, how do you activate, I would say not even your tech stack, but your technology system. So before we dive into each of those pillars, I want to ground us in something. So I mentioned before, I've been doing customer marketing for a little while. And the favorite part of my career has been when I have heard about Nina who presented to her board and they celebrated the impact that she was having.

When I was able to help Wayne unlock the outcomes that his team had been trying to drive for months, and Warren, he was able to celebrate his team by speaking on main stage at our customer conference. And when Sam was actually awarded the Rising Star Award for her work that she had done while she was at Adobe Workfront. Yes, I have a former customer in the room. That's awesome, hi Sam, that's awesome.

Those are the moments that get me up every morning and get me so excited about what I do every day. There's parts of my job that are really hard. There's parts of all of your jobs. My husband led customer success for a year and I saw how hard it is.

And it's building spreadsheets, it's creating status updates, it's building decks, it's pasting in content into email after email as you send notes to customers. And I sat and listened to the keynote this morning and I have to admit it resonated with me. I definitely am overwhelmed by AI. I'm excited about AI.

I'm nervous because I have kids coming up through the school system and it makes me nervous. What does it mean for them? Like all of these feelings. But one of the things I'm most excited about is that I have built my career in service to the customer.

And I see on the horizon a world where AI and the agents that are being built will help me go back to my passion of serving the customer. And so all of what we're gonna talk about today is in service to the customer. So these are signals that exist in your organizations today. You guys are a group of really talented professionals and your departments have optimized in order to be able to make really good decisions.

And based on that, you have a ton of value and insights that you can offer the organization. But what's the problem? Is that we aren't linking arms across our organizations and rowing together. And that's where the opportunity exists is how do we cross functionally begin to link arms and understand our customers truly.

And if we don't, the cost is so high. Let me tell you about Kyle, okay? Kyle was a customer advocate of mine. I worked with him very closely.

He was on reference calls, he was doing case studies. He was the guy that I would text when I needed something urgently. And he was very engaged in his accounting meetings, he was in the community, he was doing all the things that we want our most passionate customers doing. And then I got an email one day and Kyle's like, hey, I'm going through a lot personally and professionally.

I got to back off the advocacy stuff for a little bit. Like, okay, what happens? We see peaks and valleys of that. I didn't really think too much about it.

Six months later, Kyle turned. And I was like, wow, that was like out of the blue. But then I found out that Kyle had stopped engaging in the community. Kyle had stopped attending the meetings with his account team.

We as an organization, as Kyle's partner failed, because we weren't connecting the signals across the organization in order to be able to be his strategic partner. So here's the good news. We don't have to convince anyone anymore that the customer matters. This is a new era.

But we do have to start rowing together. I'm a graduate of Gonzaga University, go Zags. We had an amazing crew team. And you would go out and watch them compete, and it was like magic.

But if you had went to their practices on the first day of the semester, it was a little bit of a different story. And that's where we're at, is that we have to start to learn how we link arms, and we come together as an organization. So Gee, can you talk to us a little bit more about what that looks like? Yeah, absolutely.

So I've found in leading full go-to-market, you've got to move towards the same goal in order to drive exponential compounding results, as Steph mentioned, with the row team. So getting that unified view is not a technology first problem, it's an alignment problem. The linking of the arms. And I want you guys to think about two things to keep in mind as you build this.

One, alignment happens in a specific order. And if not, it doesn't truly stick. You've got to start top down. So that's company level, you move to departments, and then it reaches the individual initiatives your team is running, all with the same goal in mind.

It balances growth, regardless of what team we're talking about. Second, this is a constant feedback loop. I don't know if you went to Tiffany from Asana, her session earlier, but she talked about creating first team alignment, right? Education and community together, meeting weekly, because this allows you to be iterative, it allows you to share the signals, it allows you to be looking at that same story.

And so it's a muscle, right? I talked to them once as an alignment. I shared how many case studies I did this quarter. Again, that's not alignment.

And so this has to be part of your week to week and sometimes day to day as you're building it. And it enables you to iterate and be agile. And I promise you that following this framework we're gonna go through, will lead you to a more strategic seat at the table, which means more internal advocates for you, which then means more results, more buy-in, more budget. And it's creating that team approach.

So step one is that company level alignment. This means knowing the two or three metrics that actually matter to your board. And yeah, I know we all know this, right? It's gonna be ARR, NRR, margin, market share, something of that formula.

And you wanna be able to connect everything your team does back to at least one of those, if not two of those. And if you can't draw that straight line from your reference program to NRR, it's gonna be very hard to fund it next year. So you really wanna think about what those actions are, what that story is to map them together. And so this is what it looks like on paper.

You start with the growth targets, then you wanna identify the strategic pillars behind them. Funny enough, again, Tiffany shared earlier, she calls them the big bats, and that's exactly what we call them. What is the company doing to be able to reach them? Those are the strategic pillars.

I was GM at a company called AirCall, and when I joined, I was part of the C-suite. We sat down and we created our first team alignment, and I'll talk about how to do that in a moment among your peers. But what we did was we created our strategic pillars for growth. To give you an example, ours were going up market, expanding the North America region, and it becoming our number one market.

That's why they hired me as part of that strategy. Thank you very much. And then thirdly, it was really diving in deep into our tech partnership model. We wanted that to be our number one growth channel engine.

So these were our big bats, our big pillars. Once you know that, you can then create your strategy at the team level in order to really fall into play, and how that looked from a first team example. I mentioned wanting to grow the North America market, and our other pillar was tech partnerships and technology integrations. So before we decided what integration we should build next, we had to look at what is the North America market asking for?

EMEA wanted teams, North America wanted a new sales force integration. This is how you create decision making through the lens of the C-suite. All right, so this is what I've teased. It's creating first team alignment, and it's a page straight out of the C-suite playbook.

It's what we did, what I just shared at AirCall. It's aligning around those pillars. You can do this, you can borrow this. Think about your peer group.

This is who you want to create first team alignment. And you go a layer down, and you disseminate that information, and you help your direct reports create their first team alignment. And this is what's gonna help you kind of build together. It allows you to see the impact that you are all making.

And so think about if you went up to your director of sales or your VP of sales, and you say, "Hey, I see you want to increase win rate. "What if I told you I can help you do that "by 5% this quarter?" Understanding their goals will allow you to speak their language. It'll allow you to then share what you're struggling with or what you need help with, and they're now incentivized to help as well. And so this creates that first team alignment.

So this is the what. Now I'll show you the how. So again, I love frameworks. It's not rocket science, y'all, right?

It's about how do we navigate complex problems in a very simple way, and it's by driving really powerful questions with your counterparts. I've found that these four questions are pivotal to building this first team alignment. What are your goals and targets? What are your company pillars, right?

What customer signals do you use today to drive growth? If you were me in my role, what would you focus on, right? Building trust is pivotal in this, and so it can't be a rapid fire, as y'all know. Your customer success, leaders, you know that it really takes the unfolding.

You want to peel that onion and ask more questions. So when you ask, "What are your goals and targets?" A great follow-up question to ask, what are you struggling with? Or what metrics, what KPIs are you gonna work on with your team as the low-hanging fruit to reach those goals and targets? It will help unfold the ability to support each other because you might be able to be part of that solve.

So this is creating trust. So what you want to walk away with is one, meet with each cross-functional peer on your first team and ask them these four questions and all of the great follow-up questions that you'll have as a result of it. And then second, understand how to speak their language and which parts of community advocacy CS they'll actually care about so that they see this as invaluable to them hitting their objectives, right? And now you're primed to understand what you can do and they're primed to know what they can do and you're ready to workshop together.

And so this is what it starts to look like on paper, right? As sales is focused on moving up market and win rates as I had shared, CS could be focused on churn and cross-sell like we all are right now. Product is focused on enterprise adoption. Marketing is focused on qualified pipeline.

But when you map this out side by side, something really interesting starts to happen. You start to see where your work plugs in. And now I'll bring this to life, right? A customer with high adoption because of a killer onboarding experience which brings them to value faster now has a strong high value engagement that turns into not just a case study but a it's now building pipe for marketing.

It's cross-sell evidence for CS. It's roadmap validation for product and it's proof in an enterprise deal for sales that now has a higher likelihood and a faster time to close. And so this enables the sales team to do more with less. And again, this is where we see that compounding impact.

So one person, one asset, four departments served driving revenue and cutting cost. So when you go back, create your first teams. So if we go back in time for a minute, this is the, oh, this has a build. Let's see how this works.

This is a version of a slide I've used pretty much my entire career. I'd like run around, there's a lot of my CSPs in this room. Like I'd run around to your team calls and I'd be like, we can be a strategic partner as customer marketers. We can work together.

And I'd go to team meetings and everybody would nod and say, yeah, this is great. This looks awesome. And then the questions I would always go back to my CSP. Do you have a customer for the reference call?

And can you help me figure out who we should put on main stage? And so there was a disconnect between what I wanted to be able to do for my CSP team and what I was actually able to do. But things look different at Seismic and I am so proud of the first team alignment that we work, we have done. So I told all of you that I'm a Gonzaga graduate.

Hold on. Yeah, it's kind of a Gonzaga. It's Gonzaga. Because they're the Zags.

Gonzaga, yeah. So our executive team rolled out our four value creation principles at the start of the year. They might be TCOs in your company or top priorities, however you refer to them. And I remember sitting on the all hands call and this slide came up and it said this is one of our four pillars for this year.

We're going to champion the customer. And this was my national championship moment. Finally, after two decades of working in this space, the customer was now at the center. And then of course my skeptical nature kicked in and said okay, I've heard this before.

Like customers are important, but it's different. We have dedicated my cross functional team. My colleague Katie Townsend is not in Las Vegas with us, but she is our fearless leader in the work that's being done. We have a cross functional group that is the entire front office that is part of this, including our AI innovation team.

And we have been doing a ton of work to build the customer system. And so it's like okay, great. You all got in a room and you put a slide together. Good job, this is awesome.

No, it was not just the slide. We sat down and we debated our ICP. We sat down and talked about what is the entry criteria? What is the exit criteria?

We talked about what we want customers to know, think, and feel, and do when they're in this moment. What assets have to be available to them? We did the hard work together. And so now, when we go to share with leadership the success of our customer marketing team, and we talk about the impact on retention and the impact on bookings, it's a shared conversation.

It's a shared celebration. It's a shared achievement. It's a shared fight sometimes, but we're doing it together. And so we've talked, okay, so let's reorient ourselves.

We've got a few minutes left in our presentation. We've talked about signals. There's signals all over your organization. You just need to be able to listen to them.

We've talked about building this first in alignment. We've got to link arms. We've got to start rolling that boat together in the same direction. And now we need a technology system that will underpin it so that we can go back to the business of focusing on building relationships and being a strategic advisor to our customers.

So I could spend a lot of time on this slide. How many in the room have had a customer marketer reach out to them this year and say, do you have a customer for fill in the blank? Okay, I see some hands. I see some hands.

How many of you in the room would love to know what your customers are doing to support your advocacy program? Okay, we have a couple hands in the room here. So that era is gone. When I started in customer marketing, up until last year, I spent a whole lot of time in spreadsheets and in Slack and on Zoom having conversations trying to figure out who my advocates were.

I don't have to do that anymore. And I finally get that moment where I can change the conversation that I'm having with my customer success team because I can be that strategic partner finally. And this is our tech stack. So we actually, I'm proud to say, working with Gianna and Allie and Emily from the Champion team, we were able to bring Champion into Seismic.

And Champion helped us do exactly that. They were all able to connect to all of our enterprise systems. So where Champion sits on top of Salesforce, the Gainsight products, as well as Seismic. And it's using AI to give me the signals to tell me which of my customers are happy, where they're happy, how they're using their product.

Can you imagine how easy it is now to source references based on all of that information? We're orchestrating this entire layer with Champion and Seismic in concert, including the customer story orchestrator. So if there's any case study folks out in the audience, I'm happy to talk about that later too. And we're activating it across a variety of channels.

And so we're back. We're back to focusing on the customer. It's not perfect. We have a lot to continue to build.

We're dealing with enterprise level challenges here. And so it's really easy for you to walk out of this session today and be like, okay, so you want me to connect all of my technology systems. You want everybody to play well in the sandbox. And you want my tech stack to be completely seamless.

Okay, this is hard work, right? So what we wanted to do is boil this down to what are some of the things you can go back on Monday and do that are gonna continue to help you move this forward. So if you don't already know, figure out what your organization has available in terms of the signals today. You might be surprised at how much is already there.

G talked about this a lot. She gave you four questions, like earlier in the presentation, where you can schedule time with a department head for next week and have a conversation about what they're being measured on. And how you can help support that, start to create that first team alignment. And then activate your tech stack, build a motion, pick a signal, meet with RevOps to build one thing around it and measure the outcome.

Prove the model, be able to have the conversation with the C-suite, and then build on the next one and build on the next one. Cuz I promise you it's doable. I'm not in spreadsheets anymore measuring the activity of my advocates. It's amazing, it's game changing.

So I talked about Nina and I talked about Warren and I talked about Wayne. And these are the people that I get up every day and I'm so excited because I've had an impact on their careers. These folks are part of what was a customer advisory board at some of my past companies. And I loved customer advisory boards historically because it created a forcing function for the organization to swarm around our most strategic customers.

Well today, through signals, by creating that alignment internally and through technology, we're in a place now where we can have the technology do some of the hard work that gets us back to being able to focus on more than just the 18 customers that sit on your caps, but to focus on the customers that are growing in your customer base. And the cool aside is that Nina and Warren and Wayne continue to partner with me today. Nina's partnering, Wayne's advising, and Warren is consulting with us. So before we close, four things to take back with you.

One, your biggest growth opportunity is already sitting inside your customer base, but only if those signals are connected. Two, those signals without motion, they're just data. The companies that win are the ones that are building the motion. Three, alignment is what turns signals into revenue.

Build the permission before you build the program, so meet with your first team, talk about those signals, talk about that system, and have it be a co-sponsored initiative. You don't need to boil the ocean, as Steph mentioned, one signal, one motion, one outcome, then you scale it. And if you want a bonus workshop to take back to your first team on how to drive that together, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. And I'm happy to share some workshops that I've had.

Quick little anecdote, something that, a concept that I developed is this concept of the customer journey should feel like taffy. It's the taffy effect. And when you make taffy, you stretch it, you bring it back, you stretch it, you bring it back, you stretch it, you bring it back. And that's how you make really, what I'm told is delicious taffy.

But truth be told, I actually hate taffy, I think it's gross. But I love this concept, because that's how you create more out of this little piece of candy that is how you grow it. And that's what the customer journey should feel like, because we all know sometimes they go back a few steps and then forward a few steps. And it is this constant loop.

But by nature of how our organizations, how we're all structured today, we're departmental, and that's when you get broken taffy. And when you have broken taffy, the only person that really suffers is the customer. And that's when you begin to experience churn. And so, creating that first team alignment is gonna help you create the taffy effect.

So rather than trying to catch the fallout, you're really maximizing on the handoff opportunities. And that's the system that you wanna build with your first team and the signals that you identify together. So we have time for a few questions, so thanks to those of you who have submitted them. [APPLAUSE] That was a great question.

Thank you. Are you gonna ask? I'm gonna ask the questions for you, yeah. So you don't have to read, you can think, yeah.

I can't read the screen, so that's really helpful. [LAUGH] I know, end of the day, right? Okay, so how do we arm our leadership board, leadership to get on board, or to get board buy-in? My experience, this person's experience, has been that boards and investors want new customers, new growth, new verticals, which causes leadership to scrap a lot of our customer first initiatives.

Yeah, this is what we're seeing all of the time. There is an NRR number that they're probably looking at as well. And so what I would do is arm yourself with some of the unit economics around what it means to lose a customer. What I've been told by one of the partners at Primary Ventures is that one of her key secrets is always meeting with a CFO, because nobody asks them to lunch.

They are so starved and craving to share what they know. So my suggestion is go to your CFO first. Find out what it means to have churned customers and the impact that it has. And start to have them model for you that if you are able to uptick renewals by 1%, 2%, what impact does that have on your profitability?

So partner with your CFO to get the right language, to get the right metrics, to get those unit economics that are gonna speak very strongly to the board. And then you've created a champion as well, your CFO, who owns the budget. That's great. So, I'm gonna go with the second one here.

You shared that advocates influence both retention and growth within their own accounts and across others. For CS teams trying to connect advocacy to revenue impact, what metrics have been the most compelling and how are you capturing and measuring them in your tech stack today? This is a really cool tool called Champion that we use to- I guess I had to pump that one down. They have a really great booth out there.

Whoever's listening to that question, that's great. No, this is such an important conversation. And as you all know, Seismic is a revenue enablement organization. And we've been having a lot of conversations recently about being able to tell a board level story.

So we know that the board cares about growth. We also know that the board cares about retention. And so what we were actually able to do, we went into our data and took a look at how many of our advocate accounts were renewing. And how many of our non-advocate accounts were churning.

I can't share the exact numbers for you, but when I revealed them at a QBR at the end of second half, so in January, JAWS were hitting the floor. So being able to map the accounts and how they're growing and evolving based on the participation in your advocacy program, we've had significant success in being able to tell that story to leadership. So step one is to show the correlation between advocate to renewal rate versus non-advocate renewal rate. And then to go a step further, you can also look at advocate influence, right?

How they are helping drive new pipeline, whether it's serving as a reference or a referral, and that shows the new business growth as well. Love that. I can actually combine those two. Yeah, go for it.

Yeah, the next two, you wanna combine those? So we had a question come in around how often should cross department alignment calls happen so the company stays aligned? And a follow on question about who's driving expansion. So talking a little bit more, you guys remember I talked about our value creation principle a couple of slides ago.

We meet twice a week and our CEO attends one of those two meetings so that he can keep a pulse on how things are progressing. And then we've built work streams that are happening off cycle and the work streams are coming back and reporting into the core task group. So we are spending a lot of time, but that's a benefit that comes from having a company priority like that. And one of the topics that we tackled in that cross functional group was expansions.

So nobody singularly owns expansions. And that's the question. It does not happen on its own. And so we spent a good cycle time saying, what plays do we wanna run?

What's the ICP we wanna run? What content do we need? Do we have everybody enabled on it? And I mean, you can see just in that list of four, there's like six teams across the organization that have to be part of that.

And so by having this cross functional group that could sit down and have the hard conversation, we were able to parse out the parts and pieces. And then our arms were linked and we were moving forward together in order to be able to drive those expansion motions. So it's the challenge is there's no one person, which is why that first team alignment is so important. Yeah, really well said.

The only two things I would add to that one is I speak to customer marketers every single day, all day long. They want to help influence, proactively reach out to them and fold them into the mix. They are craving and starving to drive impact alongside you. And second, last week I was at a RevOps conference in Brooklyn.

It was really, really cool. But what everyone was talking about and all RevOps leaders were talking about is that they're the CRO's new chief of staff. They're the right hand. They're the ones that are truly thinking about how to find that missing revenue that top of funnel is no longer providing.

And so they talked a lot about helping to influence the entire journey. But guess what? When they actually got up on stage to present, and I'm talking like Figmo was there, OpenAI was there, really, I mean just top notch brands. They all still talked about top of funnel.

And so I highly suggest you reach out to your RevOps teams to say, hey, we're here too. If you're outside of marketing ops, they're great, but they're really thinking about the tech stack. And really infuse yourself with the RevOps folks that are thinking about how to find that missing revenue and fold them into the expansion conversation. Then our last question here.

So some companies have community super user programs and that's maybe owned by services and support. And then you've got customer advocacy and marketing. Customers might fall into both. So how can these types of programs thrive together?

Because both works can be protective of their own program that they own. Totally. And I've run into this before. It's hard because you don't know the dynamics of any one of you in the audience.

But what I always try to do when I run into this and get into kind of organizational of I should own this or you should own this. Is I try to hit the timeout button, back to basketball again. And say, how does the customer experience us? Is it confusing for them to be participating in two programs?

Do they understand what they know by being, what they're doing by being part of them? And turn it away from the internal conversation and turn it outward. And if you're at a point where you're still at an impasse, then I typically go do voice of the customer interviews and say, hey, this is the feedback we actually got. Let's listen to that.

And so I always try, you guys have heard me say it five times now, it always comes back to how do we be in service to the customer? And I think in doing so, it's identifying what does the customer need to receive at each of those different programs at the programmatic level. So what is the purpose of community, both to the customer but also to the business? What does advocacy need to provide to the customer and to the business?

And then you're going to combine with those leaders around that and then you will have the right kind of flow through each of those. And to share a little bit about your model, which I love, you guys really think about community sits up here. It's really that broad perspective with hundreds of thousands of users. Then you've got advocacy, which is kind of like a subset of that.

These are the folks that are showing really strong value and voice and want to participate in that. You have your top 30, right? And then from there you've got your executive program. So all of these programs can exist as long as you truly define who is it right for, what is the impact they should receive, and what should the impact be for the organization?

Look what happens when you have a vendor who listens to you and your company strategy discussions. [LAUGH] All right, thank you both. This was wonderful. I will just say as closing, I know G has a plane to catch.

But I know the champion team is here in the hub area. I'm also happy to chat with anyone about the whole tech stack. I could talk to you guys for a couple of hours on the tech stack. So if anybody has questions or wants to continue chatting, please hang around.

But thanks for coming today. Thanks for your service to the customer. You do hard work every day, and we appreciate it. Yeah, and feel free to come back.

Please fill out the survey under the agenda for G and staff. I know they'd love your feedback on this session. And one more to go. Thanks everyone.

Thanks for joining us.