Pulse Europe 2024 Day 2 Keynote
Ready to see what’s next for Customer Success? Day 2’s keynote is where it all unfolds. Brent Krempges, Gainsight’s Chief Customer Officer, teams up with leaders from SAP LeanIX, Learnship, and Harri to drop real, no-fluff strategies on scaling your business and keeping customers locked in. Then, it’s time for the 2024 GameChanger awards—spotlighting the trailblazers shaking up customer success, community, customer education, AI, and product experience. But we’re just getting started. Leaders from Spryker, Genesys and Ontra will reveal how they’re harnessing team strengths to drive serious success. This is more than a keynote—it’s your chance to tap into insights that could completely transform how you lead, work, and connect with customers.
Please welcome back to the stage, Gain Sight CEO, Nick Mater.
[MUSIC]
>> Hello.
>> Thank you.
>> Who's excited for day two?
Let's hear it.
All right, who's exhausted from last night?
Anyone, any one party?
I love, I heard, I did not go to the party.
I had a bunch of things to go through, so I'm so bummed.
But I heard it was awesome.
I heard there was crowd surfing.
Is that, did that happen?
Somebody crowd, who crowd surf?
Raise your hand, did any of you crowd surf?
Apparently not, nobody's willing to admit they crowd surf.
But I'm so happy that you got a chance to connect.
I saw in the hallways and just everywhere people building
relationships, and that is so great.
As I talked about, human first matters a lot to us.
So today, we get to meet a bunch of great humans doing amazing
things in the world of customer success around digital, around
AI, and then around being great leaders.
And then you're here for me at the end.
So, before we do that, I want to welcome the stage a newly
promoted gainster, we call them gainsters a gain site.
We, as many of you know, obviously the chief customer
officer role at gain site is pretty darn important because it
represents the whole community.
Also matters to our customers.
And Brent, who you see his name up there, has been a gain site
for a long time.
Oh, actually, if you go to the next slide, he's not there enough.
So Brent has been a gain site for more than a decade and ran our
pre-sales team.
And one of the things I thought about for our next CCO is we all
want to connect that customer journey together, right?
Pre-sales sets the expectations, post-sales delivers on those
expectations.
So I decided let's merge them together and give Brent the new
CCO role.
So I want to welcome Brent Crankies to this stage.
Welcome.
How you doing, Brent?
What's going on, buddy?
Doing awesome.
See you, Nick.
You're good, man.
All right, cool.
Good luck.
Take it off.
Thank you so much.
Good morning, everyone.
Thanks again, Nick.
I'm so incredibly grateful for the opportunity to serve as the
newest CCO at gain site.
Since stepping into the role, I've been digging into several core
areas across the business and, you know, obviously facing the
same challenges that you all are, which primarily is how do we
continue to deliver the same exceptional customer experience
or elevate it without continuing to incur cost and even more
importantly burn out our teams.
And yesterday you all heard, you know, it was filled with great
insights around AI, how to build a new CCO.
And how to build a new CCO.
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So to start, how would you describe the business case that you all developed
for your digital first customer success strategy?
Yeah, it's a good one.
So we have something like 250,000 learners a year.
And a high proportion of those have high touch.
Because we believe in human first, like gain sight.
But we found that we were, it was impossible to try and meet that without
having an army of people.
So scalability was really our business driver.
How can we get a personalized touch to every one of our learners without having
to have an army of people to do that?
Makes sense.
Others?
Go on, you go.
So for us, it's the next is an enterprise tool, right?
So we didn't have that long tail of SMB that is often the reason for digital.
For us, it's hyper growth.
So as a scale up, we had very ambitious goals of growth.
And we reached them and over achieved them over and over again.
And the last year, we were acquired by SAP.
So now we are even growing faster.
So we are just like unable to hire and bring up talent as fast as customers are
coming in.
Which is our case for why do we need to do this digitally?
Yeah, and for us, we work with huge franchise brands, some McDonald's.
For example, in the US, they come on board quite quickly and it's not signing
one McDonald's.
It's signing every single franchisee in that system and then trying to train
them up is quite challenging.
So, again, it supports us in doing that, obviously.
But also just like simplifying outcomes is quite key for us as well.
And we want nothing worse than a sales person asking for a reference.
How can we digitize as much as we can to get people into G2 and chat about us.
And that's helped us quite a lot as well.
Great. Super helpful.
I think the next one, and I know a lot of us struggle with this, is where did
you start and how did you scale across segments?
I know a lot of times you see organizations start within, well, maybe a digital
segment or a tech touch type segment.
And then it's hard to start to expand across the other cohorts of your business
So I'm curious where you all started and then how are you able to expand if you
have across other BU's
or other segments of your customers?
You want to go for it?
Yeah. We started by making sure we had the data in the right place to start
that journey.
We didn't want to start a fragmented journey, which we couldn't scale
effectively.
So putting the right tools in place was a starting point before we started any
segmentation.
And then with us, we're quite lucky that we just work in hospitality.
So the message can be quite unified and it's more persona-driven engagement
that way.
So that's where we started and then scaling up to enterprise.
It's amazing when you send a journey, orchestrate a message out to like 1200
primary admin.
They all think it's personal and they all email back to you.
It's like, "Okay, this is great. I've got a respond."
But like, that digital touch is quite incredible.
Even doing like Christmas invite parties this week, everyone just thinks, "Oh
my God, I'm going to invite to a party."
And I'm like, "That took five minutes."
That's what I mean.
Those little things like magical moments.
Yes. Amazing.
Others?
Yeah, we asked about getting the data in place first as well, but also looking
at what we wanted to achieve.
We didn't just want to replicate what was being done in a manual way.
So using the data to really personalize the messages that we're going in.
We've got two kind of end users.
We've got our program owners, our program admins, who are buying, but we've got
the learners as well.
We've got to be looking at one of the right journeys that we need to customize,
that we need to build for them.
And that's been really successful.
I think we and my colleague will correct me if I'm wrong afterwards.
But we orchestrated like 12 different journeys and sent something like 700,000
emails since that point in time to various points on our learners' journey.
And it's been really successful.
That's amazing. Anything you'd share?
So we first looked at segments.
And because we don't have the SMB, we started the mid-market.
But then we also started looking at customer life cycles.
So we have a very strong focus on onboarding and how do we digitally onboard.
Because that's where you start, right?
And then afterwards it's easier to educate customers in a digital manner if you
already started it that way.
But generally the way we think about digital is it shouldn't be a segment.
Because anything you use for segment X.
So for example for us, what is useful for mid-market customers, enterprise
customers can benefit from it.
And everyone independently of segment should have access to a one-on-one
conversation if it helps them in that specific point in time.
So we're moving away from a digital segment to provide a digital experience for
everyone on the customer journey.
And with that strategy then you basically looked at it by life cycle stages or
that engagement model versus the segment.
And that's how you deployed the programs.
So I think you can break it down into a million segments.
Probably, right? We all tried this.
Yeah, we're looking at life cycle. We're looking at complexity of use cases.
And also really is this customer stuck. Do they need help right now?
Can we provide a digitally or an scalable matter or do we have to do a piecing
engagement, right?
So really depending on the use case.
That's amazing. So we've kind of hit on it a little bit.
But as we look at these different approaches, curious when it comes to tools
and strategies that have been the most successful for the business.
And we kind of hit on it a little bit but probably a little bit more on the two
inks.
Yeah, I mean for us the biggest set of tools is one game site in being able to
pull two diverse sets of data together and make it look like one set of data.
And then Journey Orchestra has been our lifesaver.
Without that we wouldn't have been able to achieve what we've been able to
achieve so far.
It's far outweighed what we were doing before.
That makes me.
Yeah, we're one of the lucky four product game siteers.
So we've got communities that went live last week which is incredible to put a
community messaging out there.
PX as well. That's really good for end user and survey data to capture in a
moment.
Through the last two years I think we've done about 60 different surveys.
So like capturing that data and then being able to follow up has been really
useful and transform it for us as a business.
And be a Journey Orchestra. Bosses are challenging to me with tools because CS
and the ops team were embedded in games like the marketing team and then using
HubSpot.
So how do we push data from games like back in the salesforce into HubSpot.
So we're not messaging the same people twice.
So we've got incredible tools but it's just making sure that everyone has the
same message and not getting the same message device.
Contact data scheme.
Yeah.
Everything then said.
Okay. Good answer.
So yeah, of course we use games like CS and community.
But for me it's also the integration between the tools because you just cannot
provide good customer experience if the data is scattered and you don't know
what your marketing team is doing with your customers.
For us it's the out of both box integrations so we know between product
marketing, CS sales, what the customer is doing.
Awesome.
All right. I'm going to come back to you because you mentioned it earlier around customer
success outcomes and I'm curious when you think about just the whole digital
automation that you all have in place.
What are some of those like significant outcomes that you've seen from your
customers?
For us it was quite challenging to get kind of like business outcomes from the
sales team.
That was quite challenging.
So we kind of kicked it off from when a client came on board with us and we
didn't have them in place to kind of digitize as much as we can.
So we started by doing in-app surveys for our customers to say, "Hey, welcome
to Harry. What are you looking to achieve in the first three months for our admin users?"
And then kind of track that from there and then we can get benchmark data
straight away to say, "Hey, you've now achieved this because there's nothing
worse than trying to follow up manually.
You forget three months later to say, "Hey, you reduced your labor spend.
We're trying to automate that as much as possible."
So that's been really beneficial for us as well.
But then we kind of scaled it right down.
So we work with say the McDonald's use case, if you're a shift manager that's
using Harry and it's like their outcomes are very different to our ads.
Essentially that's looking to reduce their cost per higher and crazy metrics
like that.
So we're trying to scale it back or scale it down as much as we can as well.
So that's been really useful.
But the other thing we did as well is when we're tracking the attribute of
their desired outcome is then mapping that into Salesforce.
So then we can do automated, messaged, run product and functionality that can
support them outside of what they've got today as well.
So it's helped us massively in the upside cross-sell space.
So you're looking to reduce your time to hire Harry's thought about our chatbot
He would like to introduce you to Carrie and these sort of things have been
quite beneficial for us to digitalize them as we can.
And it's easy then to have conversations with the Revu team about CSP and a
proactive team and all the CSQLs they've got.
And that's quite powerful and quite quick.
I'll tie back to Revenu's key.
Others?
Yeah, I mean ours is linked to being able to recognize revenue.
So we have learners, they have between 18 and 70 sessions in their training.
It's language learning.
So one of the challenges we have is if people drop off, we can't recognize
revenue until they complete their course.
So if that's two years down the line, we can't recognize that revenue until
that point.
So if people drop off, we need to re-engage.
So we've been using our digital journeys to re-engage learners.
And that gives us kind of return on investment in two ways.
Learners complete their journey and therefore their language learning has been
more effective because it's taken in consecutive weeks or whatever that might
be.
But we can recognize the revenue faster from our business side.
So the customers getting outcomes, we're getting outcomes.
And we've had somewhere between a 35 and 40% re-engagement rate from learners
because of the outreach as we're doing,
which saves our trainer costs as well because we have to pay trainers if they
're sitting there waiting for their learner and the learner doesn't turn up.
So it works all round.
That's amazing.
Anything else you're cheering?
So for us, most of the things, or where we want to get is customer retention,
right? And then growing from there.
But that's a lagging indicator.
So it's always very hard to measure how digital is being into there.
So we actually look at the individual programs and things like open rate, click
rate, and then measuring if what we expect the customer to do as a result of
that campaign is actually happening in the tool.
So usage data is the main focus for us when measuring the success of the
program.
Well, actually just to kind of layer on top of that, I'm curious for all of you
And you think of like the effectiveness of your digital program.
So we've talked about how we quantify it.
But are there other things that you would say in terms of effectiveness?
Is it reach or how do you look at quantifying the effectiveness?
I think for short reach, it would just be impossible to do otherwise.
We've got learners all over the world.
So you'd have to have people everywhere.
And sizable quantity. We also deliver all our solutions from a customer success
and learner management in 11 languages.
Oh, well.
So you've got to be able to support that as well.
And we teach 36 languages.
Just the scalability side of things has been huge.
And we increased our learner to learning specialist ratio from 800 to 1200,
which means they can handle more.
Well, CS bucket business is probably the clear one.
Yeah.
Like talk to the CFO in our business.
It's like it's an easy one to talk about.
Just increasing ratios.
Yeah, increasing ratios like their bucket business, their NDR.
Like by CSM, that's the number one kind of metric.
So though your CSQL volume's gone up, we are still getting pressure on every
one of those games.
Yes, no matter how much CSQL you bring in, right?
Yeah, exactly that.
But we look at metrics such as, I'm going to talk after this of P-State.
We did a big project around like, "Wow, our team must spend most of their time
in things."
But we found that if our team are doing an EBR and their customer facing, we
generate like 0.7 leads on the back of that.
So like when you talk to those sort of things and efficiencies, why we need to
digital and get them in front of customers more like it's an easy conversation
to have continually.
Yeah, so I'm curious.
So what did you all, I mean, obviously, any time we, as leaders, execute on a
strategy, we don't get at 100% right every time.
And I'm curious, what are some of the learnings that you all could provide for
the group on things that maybe didn't go as anticipated or just any learnings
that you had as you executed on some of your digital strategies?
Yeah, a lot of the time it banks on people in your business and soon as someone
leaves, things do fall apart.
So the number one thing that we focused like back in 2024 was our own employee
retention and like what we do into nurture our employees, keep them in the
business.
Because soon as someone leaves, like that.
There's always a manual effort to set for junior orchestrator.
So looking after employees was like the number one thing we started with last
year.
And was that like ops was at CSMs was that just ops?
Yeah, yeah, so we covered the whole up structures.
Yes. So implementation CS support.
So that's where we started that and then how to support the business.
And then yeah, the knock on effect then is that we have the people in place to
then put the processes in and short that place.
I like the other learnings or suggestions for the audience.
I think our biggest one was first making sure we had a really good game site
admin that saved us a huge amount of effort.
But really knowing what you want to do, getting your understanding of the data,
what systems it's coming from, how does it hang together, how can you use that
data.
If you get that in place at the beginning, it makes everything else follow on
in a much easier way.
It's a foundational and basic or so key and you get I mean it's hard not to get
excited for all the crazy cool things you can do, but you're right that you
have to get.
I mean it's one on one but it's hard not to lose sight of that when you're
building these programs.
Yeah, it's easy to run away with all the cool things you can do.
Absolutely.
Just sorry, just the back on that as well.
We talk about community a lot of games site, but when you talk to other people,
you get a lot of ideas.
We spoke to Wigmore and two years ago and it's like these guys know what they
're doing.
Let's work with them a little bit more and because your CS ops or CS admin only
knows as much they know.
So like make sure they're connecting with other like minded people and getting
new ideas and give them the opportunity to present back to you as well.
They're finding absolutely new.
Would you add anything else on learning?
So I might be biased here, but if you don't have CS ops, you need CS ops.
For me personally, the biggest learning was we had enterprise CSMs, right,
coming from one on one interactions and I underestimated the change management
internally.
So it wasn't our customers who pushed back on, hey, why am I attending a web
inar now instead of a one on one meeting,
but CSMs who wanted to stick to the one on one interaction.
So if I could change something, I would probably start with the CSMs and
understanding that a digital experience is not versed by any means, if anything
better than a one on one.
Yeah, I would echo onto that as well that it's winning the hearts and minds of
the people who are going to use it.
And once we've done that, we've got every other department now queuing up to
say, can we do this?
Can we have this?
Which is good.
Sounds like a luxury problem.
Yeah.
And we can tell you more about it in our session at the end of the day.
Very well played.
All right.
So what's next when it comes to digital automation within your organization?
Yeah, I am.
Of course.
So we're looking at the AI features also in games side.
We activated it in the community.
I think it's a really good way of enabling your customers to do a lot of
service without you having to build anything.
I also believe that for AI, you will need product, at least in enterprise
software,
because we are, for example, developing our own AI functionalities within the
product.
So that's, in my opinion, not something that you can necessarily do for your
customers out of CS.
But AI is going to be one of next to digital and scale.
One of those things where you have to work together in multiple departments to
make sure that your customers are getting value out of it.
For me, it's given more time back to the CSMs to be human first.
You talk about that a lot, but all the technology now for remote calls and
transcripts and auto follow up.
That's amazing, but we want our CSMs in front of customers to spend time with
them, because relationships win renewals as well.
We know that as much as you do digital engagement.
If you know the person well and you know personally how they're doing, that's
really beneficial.
As a CSM, everyone starts work in the morning and they open their laptop and
they go, "Is that a CSM or is CSM meant to be with someone?"
It's crazy, right? This was 20 years ago, that's not where it would be.
What digital things can you put in place to make that a reality for everyone
that they can do what they love and talk to people?
Yeah, I think it's pretty similar across the borders and it's giving CSMs, it's
giving your teens time to understand what they need to do.
Whether that's through AI or whatever it might be, but you touched on it.
We're being asked to do more with less. It's the economic times and how can you
support that and still be human first and still be in touch with your customers
That's where we're trying to get.
Also, on the flip side, I think of it as I use myself.
We get so many emails now and so many automated LinkedIn messages.
It gets really frustrating but it's not personalized anymore.
As much as AI is going to personalize those cons, it's not that personal.
I'm getting 20 these a day and I'm not going to read through them all anyway.
Absolutely.
We had a funny story a bit about AI, so I was asked to put something together
for a LinkedIn post.
I went in, "Oh, Trachi PT, I'll ask you what it said."
That looks good, so I sent it to our marketing team.
Then I looked at a post that they just put on a LinkedIn that said exactly the
same thing.
Funny how that works.
Last one. We do a little word association.
Basically, I'm going to just say a word and then you just respond with either a
word or phrase of what comes to mind.
We'll start. The first word is digital.
Customer success.
This is the most prashed thing in the whole talk.
Digital.
You say customer success?
Transformation.
Scaling, lifting.
You know that's another word.
Well done.
Next one is journeys.
Essential.
Personalization.
Customer experience.
And then the last one. What is the last word?
It's scalability.
Now I've got to think of a word to go with the element of the thing.
It can't be digital.
Efficiency and effect.
I was going to say efficiency.
I'm going to stick with it.
This is the last word of this talk.
This is the last word of this panel.
You've got the word.
Awesome. Thank you so much.
This is incredible.
Awesome.
Thank you.
That was great.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I think so.
All right.
Thank you so much.
And now I'm going to welcome to the stage Rachel Bush, our head of customer
success in
Amia.
Very good.
Good morning.
Good morning.
All right.
All right.
So the game changer award recognizes and celebrates our customers who leverage
Gainsite products to change the game in customer success.
And these leaders make undeniable differences to their customers, their
teammates and their
partners.
So should we announce some winners, Brett?
Let's do that.
All right.
It's my pleasure to announce the first winner.
And this is the architect.
And this is all around utilizing our community product to really make that
difference with their customers.
I'd like to welcome on stage Jason Decreich and Demi Tuleh from Audetto.
Awesome. Hey, absolutely. Thank you. Hey there, thank you. Oh yeah, we have to
do it. There we go.
Thank you, thank you. Absolutely, thank you. Absolutely, thank you.
Alright, so next up we are going into the Challenger Award for Customer Success
And with that I would like to welcome Pedro from Lighthouse Intelligence to the
stage.
Hey, congrats. Yes, absolutely.
Thank you.
Next up we have the Defender and I'd love to welcome to the stage Chauru Smita
and Fernando Guadalas.
Congratulations.
Congratulations. Hey there, congrats.
Congratulations. Thank you.
Absolutely, thank you. Alright.
Awesome, thanks again. Thank you.
Alright, next up is the Dream Team and basically this organization does all
things
multi-product across the Gainsite Suite. So with that I would like to welcome
to stage Sarah from use in her entire team.
Yes, that's Padliodia, Brenonil and Patrick McCrudin.
Thank you, Rachel. Congratulations.
Hey, hey, good to see you again, good to see you.
Yay, good to see you. Absolutely, I didn't know you were all back there.
Yeah. Rachel to sing today again.
Yes.
Awesome, thank you again.
Alright.
And last but not least, we have the award for the Transformational Leader.
Unfortunately,
Hal Kingram from Commerce Tools Can't Be Here, so we've got Olivia Landolth
coming in to get his prize for him.
So let's welcome Olivia to the stage.
Congratulations.
Congratulations.
Congratulations. Absolutely.
We have to do a picture anyway.
Great, thank you. Awesome.
Can we take a good photo with them?
Oh yeah, yeah, I think. Are we doing it? Yeah, we are.
Yeah. We'll just make an executive decision.
Alright, yes, we are doing one.
Yeah. Who knows?
[laughter]
Oh my God, that's not out.
[music]
[music]
[music]
[music]
[music]
[music]
[music]
[music]
[music]
Awesome, thanks again.
Yay, thank you.
We're gonna pop the champagne now.
[laughter]
[music]
Awesome.
Alright.
[music]
[music]
[music]
Alright, congrats to the winners.
You're going here.
Yes.
So we're really happy to announce the launch of our
GainSight Customer Recognition Program.
And this program is dedicated to turning your passion for
GainSight into meaningful rewards and recognitions.
So by joining the program, you'll gain access to unique
opportunities to enhance your impact.
And whether it's sharing best practices,
participating in referral calls,
showcasing success stories,
you're really giving that valuable feedback to us.
So as you participate, you'll start to earn points that
unlock exclusive rewards.
And there are multiple tiers that offer exciting benefits
based on your engagement.
Alright, so at this time, we'd like to call up on stage our
Platinum Tier Gain Stars of 2024.
These Gain Stars have unlocked Platinum status in our program
and have earned a Letterman jacket.
So thank you all for your contributions.
Let's welcome all on stage.
[applause]
[laughter]
What's up, Ed?
Hey!
Hey!
Hey!
Good!
Look at you guys.
Absolutely.
He's back.
He's back.
Congrats.
Congrats.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
I know.
I know.
I know.
Congrats.
Congrats.
Hey, good to see you.
Congrats.
Back again.
That's right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yeah, good to see you.
That's what we are.
Congrats.
Another one.
Alright.
[music]
That's really nice, okay?
That's like a nice and cool.
Yeah.
Alright.
[music]
Awesome.
Alright.
Thank you guys.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
[music]
Alright.
So, in recap, work your way up to Platinum's status in this GainStar program,
and you can get
it that incredible jacket next year.
So with that, join the movement and let your advocacy shine.
Fab.
Well, thanks Brent.
Absolutely.
I'm going to talk about the
community and the community.
It's around digital customer success and for your panelists.
And also fair, helping me recognize our community and announce the GainStar
program.
So what I'd like to do is show you off stage.
Yes.
I don't need that.
Thank you.
I'd like to bring a few more.
A round of applause to Brent.
[applause]
What I'd like to do now is bring a few more stars to the stage and introduce
our next panelists.
And what we're going to do is dive into the topic of elevating team performance
So please give a warm welcome to Pablo Kern.
[applause]
Hello.
See you.
Welcome.
Please have a seat.
Liam McDauer.
[applause]
Hello.
We'll go for a hug.
And last but not least, Bridget Deater.
[applause]
We'll go for a hug.
We've been hugging.
[laughter]
I'm going.
[applause]
All right.
Okay.
So I think it would be quite a nice way for the audience to get to know you a
little bit more.
What I'll do is have you all give a brief introduction about yourself, your
role, what you do at your company, and then we'll dive into the icebreaker.
So the icebreaker is what is an unexpected skill or hobby that you have.
But then how does that benefit and come into your working world?
So Liam, I'll start with you.
Okay.
Thank you.
So Liam McDauer, I'm based in Galway, Ireland.
And I'm Vice President for Customer Success Strategy at Genesis.
Genesis is the leader in the Cloud Contact Center, AI or Power Experience Orche
stration Market.
And there I've led Enterprise Success Teams, led the scale team globally, and
now I'm focused on strategy.
Thank you.
And prior to Genesis, I spent seven years at Microsoft, just when they were
building and scaling up their customer success unit.
And the interesting part?
I'll give you two.
One is this is not usually here, so I'm doing Movember with a group of guys at
work.
My wife made me promise to shave it off before this morning, but I didn't.
I don't know. We say stick. Now I stick with the stash.
It's too bad.
Interesting hobby. I like trekking. So this time last year I met at Evers Base
camp.
Oh.
Wow.
And how does that translate into the working world?
I think I know I can do a lot more maybe than I thought I would have been
capable of having got there mentally and physically.
In this role, you do need resilience determination.
I kept that.
What about yourself, Bridget?
I'm Bridget Diders. I'm a Vice President for Customer Success for Entra's
Contract Automation Business.
Entra is AI legal technology for the private markets.
My role is looking after our consumption based business.
So we are not on a renewal schedule with our customers. We are purely
consumption.
So I look after that part of our business globally.
I started at Entra in Europe in the London office as the first person outside
of the US.
I've recently relocated to the US.
And I think something that's sort of formative about my journey into customer
success as we started as generalist account managers and have just this year
made the transition into pure customer success.
I've heard other speakers talk about a similar transition and I'd love to
connect if you're in the process of doing that or thinking about doing it.
So that's kind of the journey that brought us to customer success and I'll talk
more about that later in the panel.
I really bracked my brain for something interesting and unexpected.
Morning's good.
Well, it's mundane, but I love arts and crafts.
And I love doing things with my hands and creating something especially if it's
kind of a day project.
And it translates into work and that creative outlet and that quiet sort of
contemplative time is when I do my best creative thinking.
And it's kind of like having a great idea in the shower.
When you're not thinking about something you really can reflect and come up
with great ideas.
So it is very mundane or not that I miss no Everest base camp over here.
But I do enjoy it.
What was the last thing you made?
Well, I'm in the middle of a very large needle point project.
So I'm giving myself credit for that because it's taken like 80 hours so far.
So it's not done yet any day now.
But yeah, so it's a big needle point pillow thing.
Well, post on LinkedIn will see your end goal.
Yeah, give me time.
I started it in 2018, so.
It's a long time.
And, Barb, what about yourself?
Yeah, I'm heading customer success at Spryker, which is a digital commerce
technology.
And we just turned 10 last week.
And we also just entered the Garden of Magic Quadrant as a leader last week.
So really exciting.
Looking forward to the side effects here.
Before I was more in a classical sales organization before Spryker.
So with hunting, key accounting and so on.
And actually I got to know the field of customer success when I entered Spryker
two and a half years ago.
Into a very well organized setup.
Customers for life, we call it.
There we have customer success, partner success, community, expert services and
academy.
And when I entered customer success, I was taking care of the strategic
customers with the team.
And with the trust and the ability to change over the two and a half years.
We restructured customer success completely more on the industrial focus.
So we have an industrial goods automotive team and consumer goods team with
team leads.
They are reporting into me.
And then individual contributors, a value lead, who's following the program
matic approach of cross and upsell.
And digital customer experience.
We have an experience lead on the team also working cross functional with all
the CSMs.
And then this year we took the whole renewal motion into customer success.
And we have a lead here who's taking care end to end of the whole process
working with the CSMs to standardize the contracts because scale up.
We have a mess of contracts to be honest.
Like all different versions, service level agreements.
And there was something we really needed to improve.
And I'm very happy that we opened up for change and doing that in a better way.
Fantastic.
And your unexpected skill or hobby?
I would not call it a hobby, but I'm not 40 yet and I have five kids.
So...
Wow, okay.
But you can tell, you can learn a lot from raising kids.
And have a wonderful family and kudos to my wife who managed that all.
Yes, yes, yes.
But the youngest ones are 10 now.
So we are kind of in a better situation.
And she also follows her passion being a yoga instructor.
Again, yeah. So of course, but managing a family and I'm very close to my kids.
And it's very important to me also in traveling.
I think there are a lot of similar things when it comes to leadership and also
concentrating on the individuals and the strengths and every child is very
different.
Absolutely.
And so every colleague is.
Well, I think that's a nice kind of bridge into our first question.
You're saying, "Bridget" around building out the team here in Europe and then
recently relocating back to Chicago.
Yes.
And so when you first took over your team, you're tuned back there.
What key indicators did you access to understand where improvements were needed
Was this purely driven by data?
Did you rely more on conversations?
Talk us a little bit through that.
Yeah, we had this opportunity to start from scratch in a lot of ways when I
took over this role.
So we went back to basics and fundamentals and we read the customer success
handbook.
We read the seven pillars of customer success and we sort of designed a
constitution for what we wanted this team to look like.
In terms of KPIs and metrics, we were in a really fortunate state where goal
number one of this transition from being generalistic,
account managers to customer success was to do no harm.
We had great retention metrics.
We were doing really well with upselling and cross selling.
And we just wanted that to continue.
But what we were finding was that we had overextended account managers and we
wanted some people focused just on the retention and value generation work for
our customers.
And then we wanted to partner with the sales team to really drive the revenue
and the growth.
So, like I said, we were really focused on do no harm.
We wanted to maintain or, you know, of course improve our retention metrics.
One thing that we did look at quite carefully was just the number of accounts
per CSM and what the right number was.
There was an effort to optimize in the process of doing this and make sure we
were best leveraging technology to make our CSMs as productive and as impactful
as possible.
While also making sure we were staffed appropriately and resourced
appropriately.
So, those were the main things that we really looked at.
But it was really fun in that we got to design this department.
I didn't inherit an existing customer success department.
So, I think that's why we kind of got to work together and create what we
thought.
And then we brought in the wonderful John Lofi who is in the audience somewhere
who is a customer success absolute professional.
And so he came in and really taught us even more great skills for customer
success.
So, it was collaborative, but over the process of the year, it was really back
to basics, almost academic exercise.
You touched upon the account ratio and saying account managers were overburd
ened.
How did you agree upon what the right ratio was?
So, this was something that we're still tinkering with.
And the connection between customer success and our sales efforts is a really
close one.
And so, the process was we actually wrote, I spent a very long time writing
something like 150 row spreadsheet of every task that we did as account
managers.
And we tried to bucket that and say, is that more appropriate for a revenue
organization or is that more appropriate for a customer success organization.
So, that's how we did this.
And then I did this job for a long time and I was a account manager, customer
success person.
And I knew how much time and how high touch certain customers were.
So, we really tried to titrate it between how high touch are these customers
and how much effort do they take if they're in the AA strategic category versus
where can we leverage CSMs and have a higher ratio.
It's an art and non-science, in other words, I wish I could give you a formula,
but it's not that simple.
So, Liam, turning over to you, I'd love to hear about you're talking around
your roots being in Microsoft being one of the first CSMs and growing CS there.
And now here at Genesis, you said one of the key criterias for your priorities
is elevating your CSM team and also the digital side of things.
So, you've been involved in quite a lot of significant change.
Were there any particular strategies that you found effective implementing
change?
And as we know, when there's change, there's certain fear.
And so, I'd love to also hear how you addressed fear within the team too.
Yeah, I mean, it's all about the people right at the end of the day.
So, you know, you can evolve the tech and the AI and all this amazing stuff,
but it's really change management.
Early involvement from field CSMs and teams into the design of the process
change so that they feel involved.
You've taken their feedback.
You've helped design the solution.
And using frameworks like Adcar from ProSci, which is a great change management
process, I would encourage people to look at,
but really get that early involvement and awareness of the change while you're
doing it.
Which I think, and that was what we used in Microsoft.
We built that org from sort of 10 CSMs to 12,000 when I left.
Quite a big growth over seven years.
And in Genesis, the CSM role is evolving as we're all talking about here with
AI and roles changing.
And I think as leaders, what's really important for CSMs is role clarity.
So, you know, we keep hearing, hey CSMs are asked to do everything in every org
if different.
So, what we're doing at Genesis is sort of pairing back the role.
So, again, early involvement, we've surveyed the field CSMs.
Hey, where do you spend your time?
We're looking at what they're telling us.
And if you look at that pie chart of what they're doing, we're looking at the
non-value ad and, you know,
trying to eliminate it so that they can focus on the human side.
It doesn't all have to be AI. It can be old-fashioned automation.
You know, it can be, hey, we're going to, you know, put a team offshore to do
some of the manual
transaction-based things initially before AI.
And then when we look at what the CSM is doing, we've identified a set of core
competencies.
So, outside of HR and performance management,
but what are the key things the CSM in the changing role needs to do?
Things like business value realization that might be newer.
And we've two dimensions for those competencies.
One is what are the things a successful CSM needs to do internally in the org?
So, how to get stuff done, how to network, you know, and then customer-facing.
So, you know, the usual EBRs, but value realization, things as well.
And then we've implemented a super simple self-assessment framework.
We tested it in APAC, actually, in AGM. We're going to roll it out.
We're at the CSM, you know, just a simple office form, but, you know, ten
questions. It takes 30 seconds.
They self-assess. They're manager self-assesses.
We get a nice spider chart on these key competencies where they are.
And there's a dialogue around, well, you know, here's what we think the ideal
role model is.
What are the gaps and how do we get you there?
And to your point on fear, like when we started that, it was, oh, this is
performance management.
You know, I want to maximize my spider chart.
So, there was, you know, there was a level of honesty and maturity and how we
approached that.
And I think because we involved the CSMs in what those competencies were,
it didn't feel like it was a threatening, you know.
You know, we didn't time it would pay rise cycles, of course, just so we could
really separate.
But that's been something we're rolling out now.
And I think that really gives both the CSMs themselves, but also our
stakeholders in sales and across the company.
Hey, here's what we're doing in customer success with a lot of clarity.
So that's working for us right now.
I do find with fear it is enlightened or it's enhanced by ambiguity.
So if you're going through that exercise and trying to define what the core
skills are and looking at particularly use cases,
that really starts to dampen the fear.
Pablo, over to you.
I'd love to learn a little bit more around the definition of success and how
that might have changed.
So, in tougher economic environments, has your expectations on team performance
changed?
Yes, I mean, first, also connecting to what you just said Liam, it's about the
people and also how Nick opened the stage yesterday.
It's a human business. It's a people business.
And having the people in the focus of everything you do, I think that's very
crucial.
It's important, not only customer facing, but also internally.
And I mean, our team is now 16 people and I try to hold regular one-on-ones
with them and also measure success beyond just facts and figures,
like the ability to change, the ability to be open for innovation generally,
and also to take on ownership for maybe side projects and also listening in
like,
what do you think we can do better?
Like, never accept the status quo. So, that's a very important measurement.
I use as a soft skill on a regular base, but also, I mean, it's more about
quality than quantity.
Also, CSM should really work on the relations and on that human meaningful
touch points with customers.
And that was also a natural path we entered, like when we started almost two
years ago,
and we connected with ever after, where we have our customer success hub based
on to work on the topic of digital customer success, to give some more freedom to
the CSMs
and not taking care of all the nitty gritty stuff and also opening up for the
customers to be able to have a self-serving portal in place,
like where they can enter our documentation, roadmaps, session, academy,
everything we offer basically,
and also see what was the last meeting about with my CSM or do I need to
prepare for the next one.
So, we measure success also here, like how is the ability of the customers
coming back to that platform.
Do they revisit that? Is the CSM keeping track of meaningful engagements?
I don't like to call it like DBR or EBR or whatever.
It's a meaningful meeting and it can use tools we use or questions with a
digital business review
or with a transformation map, but it's more about really knowing where is this
customer going to as an organization,
but also as a person, what are their personal interests, how can we help them
to elevate their performance to take the next step in their career.
And I think it's going on to the thread of this conversation. It's really
important that when we're redefining the role of a CSM
that we have quite concrete guidelines and that's very known within the CSM but
also in the wider organization.
Because if you're talking about meaningful conversations, I don't want that to
be open to interpretation
and also actually is it meaningful in the stage that they're accountable for?
So I'm going to talk about CSM sometimes feeling overwhelmed. It's actually our
role to provide the guidelines on accountability.
It's these two stages that you're accountable. Meaningful looks like these
behaviours from the customer adopting these particular features.
Providing that level of clarity gives the CSM that ownership to actually
succeed.
Absolutely. And I mean, if you see the customer journey, it's a very, very wide
field of where the CSM needs to be
and needs to be on top of things. Like, a CSM kind of needs to help to adopt to
technology or to your product,
but on the other side also working on the expansion and growth and then also
standing in for the interest of the company,
like having up and cross cell. I mean, it's a very wide range and we ask for a
lot.
Yeah. Bridget, interested to hear your experience recently around the
definition because you're being able to build that with your hands from the
start up.
How have you redefined what success looks like? And are there any key metrics
or KPIs that you've really attached to that?
We've also made this shift to really focusing on meaningful engagement. In this
environment, we're hyper focused on picking up on signals of potential unrest
with our customers early.
And so we think one of the best ways to do that is to be in front of them
physically or, you know, over Zoom and really talk to them and get their
feedback.
So that's been something that I'd say in the beginning of this transition, we
were focused on the journey and the stages and ramp up.
And now we're really taking a look at the environment and saying, I think we
need to focus on engagement and giving guidance about what does meaningful
engagement look like.
At what point are our customers forming opinions about the company, you know,
and at what point can we intercept those opinions and hopefully make them
better.
So we're really focused now, I'd say, on developing more guidance on engagement
I think that, you know, in terms of KPIs, things have not changed. We are still
focused on retention.
We're still focused on having the correct account ratio. Something that we have
kind of in this environment taken a look at is how we're measuring performance
relative to the market.
So we did a lot of work in CS, you can't control the market environment. You
may be doing a terrific job as a CSM doing absolutely everything you're
supposed to be doing, you know, and doing it well.
But the market's down and so customers are churning or revenue is decreasing.
And so we've actually created a metric to measure of team performance relative
to the market.
And so on the market's up, we're always trying to outperform the market. If it
's down, we take that into consideration when setting targets.
So we have a wealth of data that we were able to leverage to do that, but
creating this, we found that it would help the CSM's not be distracted by the
market, but still whatever the market was, try to outperform it.
And so that's been, that was a lot of work by some of the folks in the audience
here. A lot of work trying to come up with that metric.
And it's been very, it's been very reliable. So that was one of the ways that
we kind of changed our KPI approach.
You know, part of the question was also about how do we, what are the trade off
s between short term wins and long term sort of long term wins or long term
successes.
Something else that we've done is our customers were giving us feedback that
they wanted to continue working with us, but price was becoming an issue.
That was because of their constricting budgets. And as a CSM, what do you do
about that? You know, that's not really, you can kind of help them realize the
value of what they bought in the first place.
But when it came to conversations about price, we actually worked with our
strategy team and we came up with pricing packages that would be tailored to
our customers needs.
So in that way, we were able to retain the customers and we're in the process
of adding more and more products.
We want to retain them so we can continue selling them products.
And so it was this, we needed the short term win of giving them a pricing
package that met our business objectives, but also their business objectives,
while also preserving this opportunity to sell them our other products because
we have an excellent loyal install base that we really wanted to capitalize on.
So that's kind of the trade-offs that we're thinking about in terms of short
term success versus long term success.
And I'm hearing quite a lot of collaboration for different departments to get
to that. It's a company-wide.
Yep. Yeah, I think Nick, yesterday was talking about that.
Slutman quote, that customer success is a company-wide endeavor.
It doesn't need to be sort of second off into one department. That really is
true. When we see a retention risk at our company, it's all hands on deck across
departments, product and sales and strategy are all coming together, marketing.
We're all coming together to address this. So it really is a team effort.
Music to all my ears. And I'll probably give it to you, Liam, just to round us
up.
So with AI, and I think you touched upon it a little bit, has that changed or
adapted your approach to leading team?
Yeah, I mean, you've got to be looking at that, right?
So we're looking at AI in our own product stack.
Right.
We've had it in it since 2018, probably when it was just called machine
learning.
But when we look at our CSM roles specifically, I mean, we're looking at things
like CSM productivity, just using chat GPT and various things,
along with building it into our digital journeys.
So, you know, automating the cohort analysis, creation of content and outbound
campaigns, automating the signals that we're going to get back from, from Gains
ide and other systems of the record.
And really trying to embed that in our, you know, when we look at our ARR
segments, we're really trying to, you know, tackle that bottom and that long
tail with digital technology to scale and really focus on the high touch
accounts where we really need that high level of the human interaction.
Yeah, it's something we can't ignore now.
Okay, so to round this up, because our time is coming to an end, we'll play a
little game just as Brent did.
And so I'll say a word, and it's the first phrase, word, interpretive dance,
whatever you want that comes to it.
Okay.
Pablo, your word is collaboration.
Giving the power to have an impact.
Giving the power to have an impact.
Bridget, accountability, trust, and Liam, innovation.
Smart people.
Not AI.
Fab, well, thank you so much for being on a panel with me and we're discussing
all about team innovation.
So, let's give a warm goodbye and closure to Liam, Bridget and Pablo.
Thank you.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you so much.
[MUSIC]
All right, so it's my pleasure now to welcome back to the stage our CEO, Nick
Meta.
Thank you.
[MUSIC]
That was awesome.
[MUSIC]
How cool was that?
That was amazing hearing from all these inspiring speakers and also seeing
those incredible jackets.
Who wants one of those jackets?
Those are amazing.
So, great job by our team and all those game changers and all the game stars.
And as you know, this event is all about you.
So, so cool to hear from some of you and be inspired.
So, the party is going to keep going today.
Well, it's not a party.
It's sessions, but the sessions are going to keep going.
And so, this is not the closing, I want to say.
But I do want to share some thoughts as we go into day two.
Now, one thing I'll also say up front is we're committed to Pulse Europe every
year across lots of different places.
We've done it in the UK, we've got Amsterdam, and we got a new home for next
year.
So, I want to announce Pulse Europe 2025, which is in Ireland, in Dublin.
Who's excited to go to Dublin?
[APPLAUSE]
Awesome.
So, my team put this photo in the slides, and I was like, are a thousand people
going to be able to fit in that little bar?
But I guess we're going to try.
We're in this little venue, right?
It's also interesting because I did Google Image like Dublin, and bars are the
first couple things that come up.
So, we're going to have a lot of fun there.
It's going to be great.
But, something you know, I like to close out with a talk on the human side.
I think it's pretty much every year at every Pulse for, god, like, eight, nine
years.
Really try to get us out of this work mode into a different mode that's all
about what we are as human beings.
And I always channel Brene Brown, who some of you know, Ray Zirinifino Brene
Brown.
Yeah, a lot of people know it's an amazing motivational speaker, author, and
she talks all about the power of vulnerability.
And she is truly the pioneer in bringing vulnerability into business.
I know from talking to many of you, you do the same thing in your teams.
You try to share who you really are as a human being.
And most people, when they start that journey, are afraid.
They're like, can I really talk about like who I am and my problems and my
challenges?
Or do I need to talk about how everything's great and we've got it all under
control?
Well, it turns out being really vulnerable is a superpower.
And you know, Brene Brown came up with it, but I've seen it and many of you
have as well.
So I was like to talk about something that's on my mind, a challenge that I've
gone through,
and maybe something that might be relevant for you.
So unfortunately, it is a challenging time.
We talked about that yesterday, right?
But it's a challenging time as human beings, right?
With so many different things happening.
Uncertainty in the world, geopolitical things, you know, inflation that we've
had, AI, right?
There's all this uncertainty.
Stress is something that we carry every single day and we don't necessarily
admit it, and
we don't open up to others.
Maybe we don't open up to ourselves, but it's there with us all the time.
And so the question is, how do we power through this next phase, which is a
steep climb, right?
Like maybe we were on this like flat plateau or even going downhill during 2021
, and now we're this very steep climb.
And it feels every day like, oh my God, am I going to be able to make it?
That's the thing many, many of us struggle with, right?
Including me.
And so that happens by the way at work, but also it can happen in life, not
related to
the economy, right?
I've had a lot of stuff I've dealt with, you know, people deal with things
around kids,
relationships, parents, all these things that are hard.
And we deal with those while we deal with hard things that work too.
And I think we've all seen it, right?
Like we've seen the world of the money raining down and the promotions and the
raises in
2021, right?
And the company growth, and we've seen how that has ended, or at least it's
slowed down a
lot.
It doesn't mean businesses aren't doing well, but it's not the same as it was
before, right?
And then what that means is it's tough.
You know, again, I said this yesterday, but on a human level, it does break my
heart.
Every one of those LinkedIn posts from people looking for a job, open to work,
people that
are very talented, but they just haven't had the breaks that some of us have
had.
And I try to help as much as I can.
I'm sure many of you do as well.
And so we know that there's this human backdrop of challenge.
And so the question is, how do we get through this challenge?
Now at game site, we've also gone through these challenges.
We're everyone's the same, right?
We go through all the same stuff.
It doesn't matter that we're game site.
And for us, we've had to go through as a company kind of a reset.
And the reset was, who do we need to be in this new, tougher environment?
We don't want to lose what makes us great.
It makes us unique.
We also want to evolve to what the world looks like.
And I'm sure many of you trying to do this in your teams, and actually the
panel we just
talked about was all about that, about leadership and change, right?
And so we've had to evolve.
We call that game site 2.0.
And that wasn't a marketing message for all of you.
It was actually for us internally.
We launched this at some of our internal events.
And we said, game site is going to continue to have the things that we love.
But we need to evolve.
We need a different level of grit and hustle and just intestinal fortitude to
get us through
these really challenging times.
And you heard a little bit about this.
We went through kind of a before and after for our team.
I'm just sharing literally the internal sides.
We went through and said, look, we have started out as a collection of products
, and now we want to be this customer OS.
And while that sounds awesome in the audience, that's a lot of people's stuff
moving around.
You know, everyone's used to operating independently.
Maybe you've been through this.
You have to merge teams together.
Not easy, right?
Another example, you know, our whole company is the foundation is software that
has like
data entry and rules and all that stuff.
Many of you use game sites, so you know what I'm talking about.
And that's not just our customer success product.
Pretty much all of our products, and I'd argue most of the products and
software are you
enter data and you have rules and you have workflow and then that does stuff,
right?
And this new world of really using AI and digital was foreign to all of us,
including
us, you know, a few years ago.
And it required us to change skills in the team, bring some new people in, some
people
weren't able to make that transition, and that's hard too.
So some of you may be going through this right now.
Another example, if you kind of thought about what are the things that you want
to keep
the same?
Because that's an important thing.
There were two for us.
There was human first, which you've heard a lot about.
And then there was community first, all about this, right?
This is the pulse is the thing that I will defend with my last breath,
literally.
It's like the most important thing to me.
And so we went through this transition, and if you're thinking about this
transition
to your company, I actually encourage you to do this super simple exercise, 1.
02.
Whatever you want to call it, you know, old, new, whatever the terms are, how
do you help your team get through this new climb, this new phase of growth that we are all
going through?
And then I don't know if you're doing the same thing, but I then went through
my own
exercise of what does Nick 2.0 look like.
Now hopefully it doesn't actually look like that.
I don't know, maybe one day I will merge with technology.
I kind of excited about that.
So, you know, what does that look like?
How do I need to evolve as a CEO?
There's some things I do reasonably well, but there's things that I can do a
lot better.
Things I suck at.
But you hear people say, "I suck at this," and you think, "Oh, that's bad."
And it's like, "No, that means I haven't reached my limit.
I can do even more.
I can get even better."
And hopefully you feel the same way that you're not great at everything,
because if you're
not great at everything, that means you can get better in the future.
And so I went through a personal journey that really highlighted this, this
whole kind of
evolution evolving, climbing to new heights literally, because I took my 18-
year-old daughter,
who's in university.
She's a second year in the U.S.
and I don't get to see her as much.
So we had this trip planned for like a year and a half.
It happened in July.
And the trip was to fly to Tanzania and climb Mount Kilmejaro.
Has anyone climbed Kilmejaro?
Anyone hyped it the year?
Okay, there you go.
A few folks.
I like that there's not too many hands because that makes me feel special here.
So it's an incredible, incredible experience, but as you're going to see, it
was challenging.
And it gave me a lot of lessons that I'm going to take forward and maybe some
of these are
relevant to you too.
So Kilmejaro is the largest mountain in Africa.
It's also the biggest freestanding mountain in the world, meaning there's
nothing around
it, which is incredible when you see it.
It's truly just goes straight up and it's not like the Himalayas.
It's really much on its own.
It's 19,341 feet, which I'll remember forever.
How much is that a meters?
Does anyone know?
Approximately.
19,34.
What?
Five and a half thousand.
That doesn't sound as good as the 19,341.
So I'm going to go for the feet, not the meters.
It's very high.
Obviously, ever since 29,000 feet, so it's much higher.
But you know, it's pretty good.
And so I went through these seven lessons on this journey.
I thought I'd just share them with you if they're helpful.
That's great.
And each of them has been almost like a letter to myself for what I can do
going for it.
So the first one is that, you know, when I did this hike, you know, it's a hike
, you're not doing any technical climbing.
It's a hike.
It's a steep hike.
But when I did it, I thought this is awesome.
This is the biggest mountain in Africa.
And there's something called seven summits, which is you climb the biggest
mountain in every country, you know, ending with Everest, but along the way you do Denali
and all the
other ones, mamblanc, and I don't know the one in Australia, but there's one in
Australia too.
And you climb all of those and then you reach your seven summits.
So I said, I'm going to do the Kilma Jarl, and then I'm going to do the other
six summits.
That was what I said.
Now, spoiler, I'm not going to do the other six summits now.
That's the end.
That's until the hour of the presentation.
So, you know, it was challenging.
The entire way is really the last day, which is called the summit day, where
you go up
4000 feet in the last day.
But that day was incredibly hard.
But we did get to the top.
And that's a picture of me and my daughter.
My daughter's there in blue, her eyes are closed.
I'm like almost dying in yellow.
Actually, literally as I'll tell you.
And so I'm at the, we at the top, but we weren't the fastest at the top.
Asha had my daughter actually beat me at the top.
But we were in a group of 19 people.
So we were two of 19.
Two of the others were Asha's best friend and her dad, and then everyone else's
strangers.
And I will say that when the guides were talking about that final day of the
summit, they said,
hey, if you need help, we will help you.
We'll carry your bag that last day.
Because nobody will ever ask if somebody carried your bag in the top.
And everyone will ask, did you make it to the top?
And as you think about it, sometimes at work, that's the same thing.
You can ask for help.
And you can also see that sometimes you're not created something.
Like I was not the best at all in climate.
In fact, in the 19 people, I was the second to last to get to the top.
The last person was a woman who was a cancer survivor and who had a cold and
flew that day.
So I beat her, but I didn't beat anyone else.
And that didn't feel normal for me.
But I got to the top and I actually didn't care at that point.
I just wanted to be there.
And it was amazing.
And so going to the top and being mediocre at something, whether it's at work
or otherwise,
was a lesson that I took away.
And I was comfortable saying, you know what?
I'm not going to be the best.
I can still get better.
So if I did it again, I'd be better.
But I'm not going to be the fastest.
The fastest person, by the way, ever to do Kilmejaro, when I did it in six
hours, the normal is seven to ten days.
This person sprinted up 20,000 feet and then sprinted down 20,000 feet.
So I don't know who that person is, but that person is definitely tougher than
I am.
So number two.
So this climb, figuratively and literally, is just seven days.
It's there's your dirty, your gross.
You don't shower.
It's just everyday step, step, step.
There's a term in Swahili called "polipole" which basically means like slowly
walk, right?
And you have to go slowly because the altitude keeps increasing.
Step, step, step every single day.
There's actually not much time for enjoying the sights or appreciating nature
or reflecting on what all this means because you're just going every day.
And then you sleep in the tent and it's cold and then you get the next morning
and you go, go, go, go, go, go, right?
Every single day.
And I think that in some ways, this idea that the real work is the grind is
what we all do.
You know, I think in 2021, maybe some of our colleagues or teammates expected
that, hey, three months you get a promotion, right?
Six months you get a promotion.
Yes, you're running a huge team now because you're 23 years old, you're VP,
right?
Great, that's awesome if you did that.
But for most jobs, it's a grind every single day.
And you want to, I love the grind in my job.
I love the emails.
I love the Zoom meetings, you know, which I know not everyone does.
I love just connecting with people.
And I feel like if you don't love the grind, you're in the wrong job.
The grind is the job.
And that was my experience.
It was just a grind.
It was amazing, but it was just a grind.
Third one.
So, you know, some of you might know, I was like super lonely as a kid.
Like I didn't have any friends and it was really rough.
And even to this day, I feel lonely a lot.
So I was afraid of like being alone any given point in my life.
And it turned out on the mountain, you end up being alone a lot.
You know, you're climbing alone, you want to be alone.
My daughter had her friend there so she was sometimes hanging out with her.
And so this idea of solitude, which was really scary to me, was actually like
amazing.
And I think many of us experience this where you get that chance to totally be
on your own,
even if you're an extrovert, and it feels really good, right?
It doesn't matter if you're an introvert or extrovert,
Expert, solitude sometimes is really healing.
Now, another thing that's healing is oxygen.
So, let's talk about the big part of the story.
So it turns out humans need oxygen.
Does anyone know that?
Or I don't know if you learned it in biology class or not.
Yeah, barely I didn't know that.
So, the last day.
So, first, you know, six days, or I guess going up is about four days.
First, three days.
It's fine.
I was like, this is easy.
Why do people say this is hard, et cetera, et cetera?
The fourth day, which is basically called the summit day,
where you actually wake up at midnight, or you wake up at 10 p.m.
And then you start the summit at midnight because they want you to get to the
top at sunrise.
So you're hiking in the middle of the night.
You've got these lamps on, your head lamps.
And there's this one trail.
It's a narrow trail.
Everyone is hiking.
It's beautiful.
It's like a Christmas tree.
All the lights up and down.
And so I start that hike.
I put my, you know, air pods in and, you know, just start hiking and listening
to Hamilton
and Taylor Swift and different things.
And Taylor Swift can get you through anything, by the way.
So, and I'm taking, you know, one step, then the other, one step, then the
other, right?
I'm not going to fall off the station, right?
And I climb, hike and hike and hike.
And my daughters are behind me and she's with her friend.
And actually, at a low side note, it started getting harder at like, you know,
the climb
started at about 15,000 feet.
And then at 16, it was like, ooh, this is a little hard.
And at 17, it was like, that's, this is challenging.
I got to really dial in to get up to the top.
My daughter and her friend, it was like super easy for them.
They were like singing and dancing and it was so annoying because, you know,
you remember
around somebody who was like, you're struggling and they're just doing it so
great.
So, anyways, I was, I kept going.
And then at about 17,000 feet, roughly, I was like looking at the person in
front of me.
I was like, wait, why do they have four feet?
And I was basically seeing double.
And then I was feeling delirious and just completely out of it.
But luckily, I was kind of like a, at that point, like a drone just going up
the top.
And so I got to the top and 19,341 feet.
And I'm at that very top, you get that photo that you saw previously.
And I'm like out of it.
But we get the photo.
And then apparently, Asha tells me that I asked like six times, did we get the
photo
yet?
That's not good.
And then the guys who were amazing looked at my lips and they were blue.
And I was basically running out of oxygen.
I was 30 minutes or something away from dying.
And now these guys are experts.
I wouldn't.
It was fine.
But they take me down a few thousand feet.
They give me the emergency oxygen.
It took a few hours, but I got relatively back to normal.
I mean, I don't know.
I might have lost half my brain cells.
You guys can tell me.
I don't know.
I have no idea.
But I think I was fine.
And we started hiking down.
And this experience of whether it's literal oxygen or figurative oxygen, it
shows you
how important it is.
And sometimes it's okay to ask for help along that way.
Now find a little epilogue at a few thousand feet.
No, actually it was a couple of days later, so way after the end of the hike.
Asha said, we were looking up the mountain because we were in the grasslands of
Africa.
And we said, can you believe we were up there?
And I said that.
She's like, wow, it was amazing.
And I said, but there's snow.
Look at those white snow cap tops.
How come there was no snow when we got to the top?
And Asha said, we climbed through snow for three hours.
And I don't remember any of it.
It's a little bit like going out in university and getting a little too drunk
and not remembering
the next day.
Now the next one has nothing to do with work.
But Asha was with her best friend.
And I was so happy, they were friends for years and years.
And sometimes she would spend time with her best friend and not be with me.
And she said that I feel guilty that we're not together.
And I told her, I was like, look, at the end of the day for me, the most
important thing
is you're happy.
And whether that's with me or you're just off on your own.
And so I would say fatherly pride, parent pride is underrated.
It's a huge thing.
And I'm sure some of you feel that way.
Now continuing, we got to the bottom.
And going down is actually hard.
Actually in some ways it's harder because you're like slipping and all that
kind of stuff.
And so I slept, I'm not the most coordinated person in the world.
I slipped like dozens of times.
And so my hand looked like this.
Luckily these are the bandages.
You would not want to see what's under those.
It was bad.
Every single part of my hands were scraped up.
And I think that those scars that you get and I still have some here, they do
remind you
whether it's in figurative scars or literal ones about the amazing things you
got through.
The challenges you were able to tackle that maybe you didn't believe you could
do.
Those scars are what helped remind us of who we are.
And that's pretty amazing.
Now the last one, which is up here, is a little bonus.
Okay, so this is my mom.
And we get to the bottom, Asha texts my mom.
And so we get to the bottom.
And my mom texts back.
My friend 75 and Climb and Killen Bijar.
What's wrong with your dad?
So sometimes you need somebody in your life to check you and tell you you're
not as good
as you think you are.
And in my case, I actually happen to have that person for my entire life.
So yeah, it's been amazing.
No, she's awesome.
So I share all of this because we all go through that evolution.
And sometimes it's a gradual ascent.
And sometimes you have to go like this.
Right?
Sometimes it's like that summit day.
And you have to define who you are in this next phase.
And so if I left you with a few things and maybe these are helpful, I would
just say
the lessons I talked about, sorry about that, the lessons I talked about, and
don't think
they're coming.
Let's see.
Let me go back.
Yeah.
Are all about, I think, work too.
You know, being open to being mediocre, learning, growing, you know, asking for
help, recognizing
the grind is what it's all about, everything I see here.
And most importantly, embracing the scars you have.
Because as I said, those scars are what prove to you and to me and all of us
that you can
make it to the top.
So with that, enjoy the rest of Pulse, and I look forward to seeing you soon.
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We hope you enjoyed the keynote session.
Time for a break now.
Refreshments and snacks are available throughout the venue.
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