Are your customer meetings focusing on your product or your customer? If you are spending time talking about your product, you are leaving a lot of value on the table (and probably finding it difficult to get your customers to keep coming back for more). This week, Bob London and Jeff Breunsbach spend some time talking about how a shift from a product focus to a more strategic role that supports the high level goals and needs of your customer can increase the impact and alignment you have. Move ...
May 01, 2023•42 min•Ep. 269
Your customer won't wake up tomorrow thinking "I cannot wait to use XX product more today!" Jeff Breunsbach takes some time to look at the role change management plays in product adoption. Look for ways to reduce customer effort Identify business problems to solve Update processes where necessary Identify customer stakeholders who will be impacted Integrate into their existing tech stack Moving into helping customers through change management with a new product adoption can help you be seen as a...
Apr 17, 2023•7 min•Ep. 268
Are you making sure your meetings are 'Can't Miss'? In this week's 10-minute trumpet, Jeff talks through some simple ideas for not only using meetings strategically, but adding simple before and after processes that can hep you make a lasting impression and stand out. 'Do the simple things really well' ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn...
Apr 13, 2023•8 min•Ep. 267
Rod Cherkas, CEO and founder of HelloCCO, joins Jeff Bruensbach this week to talk about creating predictability and stability through consistence processes, which come from building consistent skills. In order to make this happen, CCOs (or those who aspire to become one) should focus on: Building cross-functional relationships Communicating effectively Segmenting customers and building plans for each segment Use 1:many processes for repetive CSM work Help stakeholders learn customer experience C...
Apr 10, 2023•37 min•Ep. 266
CSMs are really in the business of helping our customer champions become really great change management experts. Let's prepare our customers for the people, process, and technology updates necessary to adopt our product Connect with Garrett here Connect with Michael here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out mor...
Apr 03, 2023•39 min•Ep. 264
Customer success teams aren’t here to simply train the customer on using a product. Customer success teams are change management agents. Helping guide a customer to an outcome through people, process and technology habits. Reframe the thinking for your CS teams. Join the conversation. ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another....
Mar 30, 2023•7 min•Ep. 265
This week, Greg Daines, CEO of ChurnRX joins Jay and Jeff to talk about churn benchmarks. Some key highlights: no statistical alignment between whether satisfied customers stay (CSAT) inertia is real - make sure you aren't giving your customers a reason to leave story telling the history of your relationship is a good thing measurable results is one of the largest factors in longer retention make sure your customers are measuring results bridge the gap here, especially if results measuring is di...
Mar 27, 2023•50 min•Ep. 263
Are your churn benchmarks telling you what you think they are? Jay Nathan takes a look at the Churn benchmarks for SaaS leaders by Greg Daines, CEO of ChurnRX and some of the results might surprise you! Jay shares some key takeaways for 5 of the 10 benchmarks reviewed in the report. CSAT - no statistical correlation between customer reported satisfaction and customer lifespan. Customer Results - is your customer achieving measurable results and is your CS team including this in conversations? Ne...
Mar 23, 2023•18 min•Ep. 262
Are your CSMs operating with a single point of contact? Damien Howley, CCO of Whip Around shares how having a Strategic, Tactical, and Operational focus in your customer relationships not only prevents that single point of failure when a main contact leaves, it strengthens your customer knowledge in a way that cannot be done with a single relationship. Learn what this looks like in real life, and how to effectively ensure your CSMs are utilizing this process well. Connect with Damien here Buy Da...
Mar 20, 2023•33 min•Ep. 261
Are you using scaled CS as a universal engagement strategy? If not, you are missing out on giving your team the chance to build out their roles due to lack of bandwidth. In building relevant and actionable content, it is important that you: know the persona know the product know the market share best practices have a variety of content types webinars workshops 5-7 minute recordings in-product guies templates social media The result of a strategically planned content library that is easy to acces...
Mar 16, 2023•8 min•Ep. 260
This week, Karessa Parish, Growth Marketing Manager at ClassTag joins Jeff to talk about the connection between scaled CS and marketing. Here are some of the key takeaways: Look for ways to automate things that you do over and over Evaluate your content to align with customer self-service needs CSMs should be facilitators rather than information keepers Give a space for customers to talk to each other Examples of scaled ways to grab your customer's attention Connect with Karessa here ----- Gain ...
Mar 13, 2023•36 min•Ep. 259
QBRs are a topic of conversation almost any place that CS professionals gather. That is because they are a vital tool in helping customers understand how your product aligns with their business goals. The problem is these meetings have become another task, and one that many customers are skipping. So how do you move from the old way to a new, more engaging way of talking to customers? Make it more about them instead of you Share metrics and slides ahead of time - bonus points for recording a vid...
Mar 09, 2023•9 min•Ep. 258
Going above and beyond for your customers seems like a no-brainer, but is it really? Data shows that performing 'Hail Mary's' for your customer doesn't have any greater impact than simply meeting their needs. Matt Dixon shares some tips on what you should be focusing on, and the good news is it is relatively inexpensive in terms of money, time, and resources. We need to move our customers from signature to value as quickly and efficiently as possible. Allowing your CS team to focus on making the...
Mar 06, 2023•47 min•Ep. 257
It seems intuitive: you increase retention by delighting your customers. However, data exposes the fact that something that takes a lot of effort and often the increased expense doesn't bring the results you are looking for in terms of loyalty, retention, or even advocacy. Instead, strong value and ROI come when companies look for ways to reduce the effort our customer have to expend to be our customers. Jay takes a look at how teams can work to make reductions in efforts that equip our customer...
Mar 02, 2023•17 min•Ep. 256
Jay is joined by Christina Lock , Founder and CEO of Catch Talent . We talked about trends in the labor market and what she’s seeing across the tech companies her team works with. Here are the questions we went over: What are the trends you see in both the job market and the labor market? How are employers responding to shifts in the labor market? What roles are most in demand right now from your perspective? How have the requirements changed over the past several quarters? There is a downward t...
Feb 27, 2023•42 min•Ep. 255
We need our CSM's to become more "strategic". (What that really means, no one will ever know) BUT, here's an easy way to *start*... Coaching your CSMs to get better at asking open-ended questions AND listening. Open-ended questions often begin with words such as "Why" and "How." Or they can use phrases such as "Tell me about..." 💩 Did you accomplish your goals in Q1 2020? ➡️ Tell me more about your goals from Q1 2020... 💩 Has your business been affected by the recent recession concerns? ➡️ Wha...
Feb 23, 2023•7 min•Ep. 254
Today we are joined by Michael Tuso of Callypso as he brings his experience from sales and account management to share practices that customer success leaders can use: Building account maps can help you identify the right people Sets the stage for consistent account practices Finding ways to build maps at scale and community-driven techniques ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS cust...
Feb 20, 2023•39 min•Ep. 252
Make your champion the hero of the story when dealing with their finance partners. Here are 3 ways you can do that: 1) Help prepare them around how to defend the ROI of your product - remember to think about inputs and variables to the model. Think like a lawyer - you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. 2) Beyond ROI, help them understand the downside of not using your tool. Think in terms of cost (particularly labor) and lost efficiency - the story/narrative is important here. 3) Make sure...
Feb 16, 2023•7 min•Ep. 253
This week, Jon Johnson, Principle Customer Success Manager at UserTesting joined Gain Grow Retain to talk about how to scale in an enterprise environment. Building trust and showing value is a foundational part of the process but segmentation becomes the key to success. Create buckets to segment Get specific Simplify Scale can help you identify the right conversation with the right person at the right time. Connect with Jon ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to...
Feb 13, 2023•55 min•Ep. 251
Jeff and Jay come together to talk about three possibilities for leveraging ChatGPT in scaling your Customer Success program: Customer Discovery Key Contact Insights Strengthen Content Learn how using ChatGPT can help speed up some of the processes your team is doing, increasing the value of the time they have to spend with the customers. ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer...
Feb 06, 2023•25 min•Ep. 250
Data is the after-thought but it is the currency that will run your scaled customer success programs. Far too often we have our teams spending time in tools/data/systems when they should be spending time with customers. Jeff and Joel talk about why data is becoming important and how to use it to your advantage in 2023. You can find Joel here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS custo...
Jan 30, 2023•39 min•Ep. 249
This week, Ian Hurlock joined us to talk about how your techstack can impact the data your customer success team uses to understand customer behaviors. In order to build a personalized and effective customer journey, your team needs to be able to understand the behavior of your customers. This comes from data that is not just information focused on sales behaviors, but includes every interaction on all platforms. This is often something that will need strong cultural buy-in to achieve. Your tech...
Jan 23, 2023•31 min•Ep. 248
Mary Poppen (CCO at involve.ai) joins Jeff today to discuss how personalizing the customer journey positively impacts their experience. Most of the time, personalization is a strong component of the high-touch model, but Mary shares how data can be used to build the same experience at scale. She gives practical suggestions about how to use the information you gather to create these high-touch experiences regardless of the customer type, and discusses some of the tech stack that can help support ...
Jan 16, 2023•34 min•Ep. 247
This week Jay Nathan is joined by Wayne McCulloch, CCO at WalkMe where they discuss specific ways that a CCO can have an impact on the CS team no matter how long you have led them. Hear the process Wayne used to lead the CS team and create organization-wide initiatives (with strong employee empowerment) and a 3-year implementation plan as the entire staff focuses on better serving their customers. You can find Wayne here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to ad...
Jan 09, 2023•41 min•Ep. 246
This week we are sharing a podcast that was published in January 2022. Jordan Silverman joins Jeff to talk about onboarding and implementation and how this timeframe is critical for customer retention. Making sure the customer journey is more customer-centric rather than company focused can help make sure your customers are seeing a very quick time-to-value, helping to increase the likelihood of retention for them. The first 30/60/90 days and having a plan to bring those activations and impact t...
Jan 02, 2023•37 min•Ep. 245
This episode from April 2021 has Ryanne Koch (Doumet) joining Jeff to talk about how metrics support the strategy conversations that help your CS team move from reactive to proactive. Using data well can help identify where and when to bring in your product within the customer process as well accurately identify customers in danger of churn, Learn how the team uses renewal surveys to identify trends across your book of business and how they utilize decks to scale customer conversations, allowing...
Dec 26, 2022•37 min•Ep. 244
This week, Kristi and Jay talked about a variety of topics that give you some insights into who they are, how their early work experience helped shape them as CS leaders, and things they do to help themselves take some time to reflect deeper into their own lives. You can find Kristi here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one anoth...
Dec 19, 2022•59 min•Ep. 242
This week, Michael Cooksey, Head of Qualtrics XM Community walks us through how community has moved into the intersection of a variety of departments to bring a customer experience that has had a large impact in retention and growth. Michael shares the ways that community can be successfully used as a digital first touchpoint while still building and maintaining relationships. He also shares some tips for those considering the addition of a community as scaling becomes more of a necessity for so...
Dec 12, 2022•43 min•Ep. 243
Jan Young joins the team to talk about helping CS teams avoid the 'gap filler' moniker by bringing data from various sources together. It is important to look at scaling from a 1:1 approach (foundational model) to a more digital and scaled approach to allow a focus on strategy and relationship building. Joining with a comprehensive look at data, this helps you provide stronger customer enablement and builds an understanding of the big picture of your customer health and growth. Using a variety o...
Dec 05, 2022•35 min•Ep. 241
This week Kristi Faltorusso joins Jeff and Jay as they discuss the lessons they have learned in the course of parenting that apply to CS. Patience through preparation and awareness, guidance through transitions and experience, and learning true needs through good questions are just a few of the areas that they show how the skills they are using with their kids can be applied to the needs of the customer. You can find Kristi here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ide...
Nov 28, 2022•42 min•Ep. 240
