Rethinking Customer Success Playbooks with Mike Lemire (Live from Startup Week Boston)

Sean Lane 0:07 Sean, Hey everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood, companies in hyper growth. My name is Sean Lane. For a long time post sale, teams never got as much love as they deserved. Teams prioritized revenue growth over revenue protection. And even when we as operators spent more time post sale, it was usually a pretty human intensive exercise, assigning these customers to this human being and hope for the best. Look, I recognize that I'm not saying anything groundbreaking by declaring that companies should care about customer retention, but the recipe for how to retain, grow and provide value to your customers is certainly changing. Do I need an am and a CSM? What about renewals? What about a scaled or automated version of CS I wanted to talk to someone who has witnessed this evolution firsthand and had to make some of these calls that someone is Mike Lemire. Mike is a serial Customer Success executive with successful runs at companies like toast, HubSpot and overjet. Mike recently launched his own executive coaching firm, harmonic leadership to support startups and their leaders as they grow. I had the chance to catch up with Mike in person as part of our series of episodes from startup Boston week at Suffolk University. In our conversation, we talk about how to pick the right post sale team for your product. We talk about what customer success folks can learn from marketers and why your CS team's success all comes down to the right combination of trigger points and action items to start though, because so many of the folks at startup Boston week were from early stage companies, I asked Mike to define for us the role of CS in those early stage companies. The way Mike Lemire 1:58 that I think about the evolution of an early stage company is typically you've got an engineer to build the product, then you bring on a sales rep to sell the product. And for a while, that sales rep has to maintain the relationships with the customers that they sold. Then eventually that gets to be too much, so they'll bring on a customer success team, and that customer success person manager tends to do all the things post live, right? And then I start to see it break out into individual disciplines. So the first one to break off of the all in one CSM is customer support, right? Let's get those day to day tickets. Let's get 100% of the reactive work off the plate of the CSM and onto a ticket based customer support rep. The second thing that splits out then is an onboarder, right? Let's bring someone in, an implementation specialist, an onboarding specialist, a welcome specialist, whatever it may be, who then make sure the customer hits all the activation milestones they need to be successful. Then the CSM is able to focus on proactive engagement with the customer and making sure they're seeing maximum value, then I start to see a separation between customer success manager and account manager. That separation may come a little bit earlier, but a lot of it revolves around the need for post sales growth, revenue growth, and if a CSM, in its purest form, is focusing on consulting with the customer on how to maximize the benefit of the platform. They may not be the right fit for them, having commercial conversations with customers, driving expansion opportunities or high upsells. That's where I see. It's sort of that final split into account management, and we'll talk a Sean Lane 3:34 little bit more about the roles and responsibilities of those teams. But I think one of the other reasons why you need the level of specialization you're talking about is it's really hard to find people who are good at all of the different skill sets that you just described, right? And so like, if we just focus on the CS versus a distinction, you either need incredibly commercially minded CSMs who can do selling and find opportunities for the upsells you're talking about, or you need really customer focused sales people who are experts in the product and can focus on all of the usage and ultimate outcomes for their customers as you find them. And so that can be a pretty tough needle to thread. Is that how you think about the distinction for the types of people you want to bring into those types of teams? Mike Lemire 4:16 A little bit? Yeah. And so the way that I think about as I'm building a team, especially in these early days, where you haven't really specialized out yet, is I like a mix of people. The way that I think about it is there are customer success professionals who care about customers with their heart. And so it's Friday, 430 they get that emergency email, they're going to respond because they know that that's going to have a significant impact on the life of their customer. And they really do care about that person. And then I've also got CSMs who care about that customer through their wallet. That's a pretty big churn threat, and I'm not going to hit my goal this quarter if I don't respond to this. And I like, frankly, to see a mix of CSMs who care about their customers through their wallet. That foundation, if you get the right mix early on, allows you to. Row pretty neatly into those specializations, as opposed to, if you just bring in all people from the field that you're supporting who are just technical specialists in that area, they really won't be motivated on the commercial growth downstream if you need them to focus on that. As Sean Lane 5:14 someone who has designed comp plans for post sale teams, that last part is pretty important, even though CS folks typically have a smaller percentage of their ote tied to variable components, CSMs still really care about the performance that they are measured against, and even more, they care about the impact of their work on their customers. They truly care about their customers, which is what makes the folks in these roles so admirable. Now let's talk a little bit more about the specialization that Mike alluded to in early stage companies. He explained this trajectory of a post sale organization that first specializes support, then implementation, then Customer Success versus account management. And that last distinction is the one that I was most interested in talking to Mike about, because it's the one that I hear most hotly debated in the market today, with falling retention rates in many SaaS companies, there have been plenty of leaders who have questioned, do I really need both AMS and CSMs? So I asked Mike what he thought and how he helps his clients think through that very question. I think it's Mike Lemire 6:20 somewhat dependent on how urgent the need for post sales revenue growth is, and if they don't have the ability to wait around and they need sort of immediate growth, or depending on the go to market motion, right, sometimes I've seen where they're selling less modules growth that way, and it's more of a growth through expansion. We need our AES to stay out there, bringing in new leads. This account manager is coming, going to come in post pilot and really maximize the expansion opportunity and continue to sell in that way. That makes sense. But I tend to always recommend starting with a pure customer success manager first. I think the longest the best relationship you can build with a customer is a customer who sees significant value from your product. And I've found that customer success managers who are able to act as a consultant and act as a resource for a company, helps get them seeing the maximum value out of your product. Selling is significantly easier if they're seeing the ROI than bringing an account manager in six months into the relationship to really push on continued investment. So varying degrees of ability to do that for different companies. But if I had my druthers, that's what I choose. Sean Lane 7:31 I think the other thing that I would add to your list, things that they act as, is they act as the face of the company when things are not going well for that customer. Right? You and I were talking right before we started about a recent episode of our show. Episode of our show with Brett queener from bonfire ventures. And one of the things that he said in that conversation was like, Look, Mr. Mrs. CSM, the reason your function exists is because the product is actually not ready to stand up on its own right now, and therefore you have to be there to help your customer through the problems that they face that the product is not quite ready to solve, or that the product is basically broken in order to resolve the issue that you actually have. And so I think his point was basically like, yes, there's this distinction you can make between all these different roles, but especially for early stage companies that the product isn't quite there yet you are there to supplement the service that the product is basically meant to provide. Yeah, Mike Lemire 8:24 absolutely. I mean, you know, a lot is it? HubSpot is pointed to as sort of this, like beacon, pun intended of startup success in Boston, right? And I was there in the early days and back when we had, you know, pictures on the wall of every employee and and that was what we were doing as CSMs, like the product was good, not great, and so we were there to make sure we were coaching them and supporting them and baptizing these customers and the methodology of inbound marketing so that they understood how to operate and use the tool that was fine to get that value out of it. As HubSpot has matured, and as product development has matured and more tools are emerging that are allowing for in product messaging or communication with customers to pull them through that journey. You're seeing that sort of paper over product efficiencies with the CSM happen a little bit less often. It's also, you know, in the era that we're in with the cost of capital right now, you don't have that same opportunity to just raise around and hire 20 CSMs to paper over product efficiencies. Companies have had to become a lot more mature sooner than they had been in the last five or six years. Sean Lane 9:35 Mike acknowledges that you have to be more cost conscious when it comes to your post sale staffing and your product needs to be able to stand on its own without such intense human support. And Mike's HubSpot call out is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. One, it can be a little dangerous if you're an early stage startup, to model your org design against a massively successful public company. And. Do people are gonna do that anyways. So my question for Mike was, what should people be stealing from those larger companies, especially as more and more organizations are trying to create these scaled CS orgs that have fewer humans and more automation supporting their customers? Is that even possible at early stage companies. Is it Mike Lemire 10:21 possible? Yes. Do I recommend it not always okay not to make this whole show about HubSpot. When you think about the HubSpot customer base and sort of the cult following that that company has had so often, they'll bring up the people at that company that they've had a chance to work with. And I really think, you know, people get excited about software, but people love working with other people. If you think about when you call a company that you're a customer of, and you get a really capable human being to answer the phone on that first ring, how delightful. What a moment that you get. And if you have a person that you can call who's gonna help you when you have challenges, it's a true game changer in your ability to use that product and maximize it. So I think if you want to create evangelists and begin sort of a flywheel motion where your customers are really going out and becoming a part of your marketing arm, having a dedicated customer success manager, having someone there to support them is key to that. Very few people are like, wow, that automation campaign really changed my ability to use a platform so they can. They yes, they can. And I think that's sort of directionally where so much of this is going, and I've been somewhat resistant in sort of bringing in AI based technologies to support our customers. Certainly when I was at toast, our customers were all hospitality based, right? They Sean Lane 11:43 care. Not people. Refreshing LinkedIn today, no, not at Mike Lemire 11:47 all. I mean, you know, we joked it's everyone's putting out fires, but these guys are putting out actual fires some of the time. And so they just wanted to talk to someone, and they're old school. They want to shake your hand, look you in the eye, know that they can do business with you, so an AI based chat bot to answer their questions while it may get them back on the floor sooner, depending on the question, it's not going to give them the same brand affinity that they would have gotten. Otherwise, Sean Lane 12:11 think what I'm hearing from you is one who your customer is, is a really important ingredient in making your decision about the type of CS model that you have, where your product fits in terms of the maturity of the overall market, right? If you are HubSpot 15 years ago, and you need to teach everybody what inbound marketing is that's very different than selling a product in a market that is much more mature and understood. And you don't have to educate the market about why this thing even exists in the first place, let alone how to use it. Yeah, right. And so those ingredients might change the way you actually have your approach for the folks that feel as though they're checking the right boxes with this low touch model. How do you go about shifting the way that the organization thinks about CS? Right? Because you can't just throw a human at every account in that situation. You can't just have somebody start working with that customer, because it doesn't scale. Yeah, so how should companies think about that shift in the way that CS teams are being staffed or asked to do the same job with much fewer resources? It's really Mike Lemire 13:14 tricky. And I see this. This conversation happens at every customer success startup or meetup I go to. Everyone's having this conversation right now. And what's really interesting is you have all of these leaders who grew into leadership over the last 15 years of startup where the best in class customer success teams had great touch points, had great coaching, had great playbooks to work with their customers, and now they're asking that leader who came up in that structure to throw it all away. The leaders that I have learned the most from in this one to many approach are marketers actually, because really, what we're building is a data driven automation platform that marketers have been doing for 20 years, right? So what are the trigger points, and what are the action items, ultimately, that we're thinking about with these and then when does a human get involved at some point in that funnel? So if you think about your customers like a prospect funnel, have they activated their product? Have they adopted their product? What's the timeline you typically see from activation to adoption? And from a vocabulary standpoint, for me, activation is a binary concept. Have they proven their ability to use the product? Yes or no, and then adoption is sort of a rolling, 90 or 30 day usage of it. When you're taking a look at the difference in time, how long it takes to activate, how long it takes to adopt, then you're bifurcating your workflow. Well, I'm going to send them this playbook, this playbook, or then introduce a human to pull them down. But if a customer is moving neatly through your funnel, activation, adoption, usage, evangelist, without a human touch, and you're able to pull them through email campaigns, webinars or in product messaging like Pendo, then you don't need that human touch. So Sean Lane 14:55 I agree with everything you just said, Great, here's where I think it will. Be very challenging in house for people to pull this off if they're not thoughtful about their approach. I think if you work in an early stage company, new business, new logo, acquisition is the lifeblood of the company, people are going to be dispositioned to spend more of their time instrumenting the new business funnel, understanding why and how customer prospects become customers, than they are all of the examples that you just gave, even though all those examples are really, really positive, yeah. So how do you coach these, either CS leaders or CEOs to develop that partnership between CS and marketing? Because I don't think you know, we hear all the time about the relationship between sales and marketing. Yeah, we don't hear nearly as much about the relationship between CS and marketing, so how do folks foster that relationship and start to build the examples that you're describing Mike Lemire 15:46 any good startup? The biggest challenge is prioritization, right? It's not a question of, are there challenges? It's which challenges can you let burn a little bit? And oftentimes I see this one justifiably being allowed to burn right, like you're not raising off of, necessarily, customer success success, but off of go to market success, usually. So we need to make sure that that machine is operating for a bit. So I don't usually disagree with that prioritization, but it comes down to metrics and scorecards, right, which I know you focus a lot on scorecarding, and that can be, you know, if you're looking at not only churn, but the leading indicators of churn, the at risk profile for customers, and how successful are we at protecting a customer who's at risk as a flag that okay, we probably need to address this because we want to clean up a bad churn situation, or clean that up before we get into a bad churn situation. So pointing out what's going on with churn, or what their at risk profile is, and are we having to hire more CSMs to take all these at risk calls? Or do we want to get ahead of this by showing the customer value early on? So much like revenue growth is important, revenue protection becomes even more important at a certain point in scale. It's then I find that the customer success team, and the marketers are usually friendly, but don't have a lot of opportunity to work together. And I also find that marketers can be sometimes hesitant to share their products, to share their automation platform with the CSM, and that's where some of these CS automation platforms have started to gain traction. I'm not always sure that it's a needed it's an extra cost that you need to spend if you've already got an automation platform with the marketing team. It's Sean Lane 17:26 kind of funny that the catalyst for silos in a company might stem just from human apprehension to share their toys. But I think Mike is 100% right. CS can learn a ton from their peers in marketing if marketing is willing to share. When I work with companies and see totally different tools for marketing automation versus customer communications, it's easy to see how things could be more streamlined. In Mike's words, at a certain point you need to prioritize revenue protection and you need to pair the trigger points he talked about with action items, trigger points and action items. And by the way, I think CS ops can be the driving force behind these pairings, and in bringing together the marketing and CS leaders in the first place, my experience is that oftentimes folks don't even know what's possible. So ops can help to demystify that. And we need to bring a third key partner into the mix product. When you have all of these folks together to answer the questions you need answered, that's when you can really do incredible work. And Mike says it's all a matter of going back to revisiting your customer journey. Mike Lemire 18:39 It's that customer funnel or customer journey workflow. Where I'll typically start is, do we have a sense of where your customers should be at three months in what have they done? And if we can't answer that question, then that's where we have to start spending some time. The next question is, great. Has that been instrumented in the product? Is that knowable by a CS team? Is that somewhere in some database that we can pull that through into some point of record. If not, it's partnership with the product and engineering team to instrument that initially for our initial version. And you know, we don't want to blow the ocean. We want to make sure reaching just gets sort of the minimum requirements in place first, but then coach them to say, hey, as you're building new features, let's add this as a component going forward so that we can rebuild off of it. Then, once we've got the data points and we've got the preferred flow, it's where are the points where we need a human safety net to be introduced, to handhold that customer onto the next chapter? And what can be done with digital assets? To your point earlier, it's knowing their persona, knowing your customer, and you know, is a chef as a restaurant company. Are they going to be attending webinars all day? Probably not. But boy, do they work on their cell phone quite a bit. So that SMS automation and hey, do you want to schedule a call? We've got to hit yes. If you want to jump on a call with me next Tuesday, I'll put it on your calendar. That can work a little bit more effectively. Sean Lane 19:58 And I think part of. That too, is even knowing which questions you want to ask in the first place, right? Because if you don't understand your customer or you don't understand that journey that you're talking about, then you don't even know where to begin in terms of developing these plays. And so how do you coach and how have you built your teams in the past to really make sure that they're putting themselves in those customer shoes so they know, okay, based off of the flows we've seen within our product, this is a behavior that we might want to be on the lookout for, and then ultimately build one of these actions around. Mike Lemire 20:29 This is where I my first interview is typically with a PM, right? A good Pm is able to explain this immediately, and they know exactly what they want the workflow to be they want they know exactly what they want the easier experience to be. I've also worked with organizations that don't have the strongest PMS available. So at that point, it's some customer research, right? And, you know, one of the things that was made me laugh about Brett's interview is he was talking about, you know, talks to a CSM about how many hours a day they're talking to their customers, maybe to the rest they're running internal playbooks, right? We have to get back to customer interviews, and typically, we'll launch a customer advisory board or something where we get a collection of friendly customers, or we're able to do those deep dive interviews with them in exchange for some sort of discount or Sean Lane 21:13 something. Who do you think's the right person to drive those right? So I think the example that yours gave it as a perfect one, right, which is just how many hours per week is a CSM on a call with a customer? How many customer facing calls do they have per week? Right? I think a CS leader is well positioned to set a goal for that and track it for some of these other plays. Or, let's say you're launching a new feature. I don't think that there is necessarily, unless you have a super strong PM, someone who is going to say, okay, when this thing goes live, or actually trying to do is activate X number of customers this month, and then what we're going to try to do is see if there's an impact on the retention of that cohort of customers, blah, blah, blah. You pull that thread all the way through, from the moment this thing goes live to looking at the outcomes of the retention of those customers, whether it's better or worse, 612, 18 months from now, there's a bunch of teams we've mentioned, CS, ops, marketing, product, who should be the one kind of setting the roadmap for this type of work and helping to make sure not only that the goals are set, but then someone pays attention to them months after the initial work is done. My Mike Lemire 22:17 preference is product. If I had my choice, I think they benefit the most from it. And I think some organizations gatekeep product away from the customers, and it's sort of the customer successes team to go talk to customers, bring the information back and bring it back to the product team. I love seeing product teams where they'll take a rotation on the customer support line for a couple hours a month, or they're having direct relationships with customers. I never ever want to gate a pm or a product leader from the customer base. They shouldn't have to ask my permission. They should just be able to go. So I prefer the product team, because ultimately they're going to get some key takeaways from that conversation that may make activation even easier, and we can sort of remove one of those workflows altogether, because it's just so much more intuitive with what they build, which is ultimately the goal, right? The best product is one that you don't need to talk to anyone about ever, but when someone does need to talk to someone, we want to give them the opportunity Sean Lane 23:15 to I've also come to believe that great product can make up for anything else, right? Yeah. Like, you could have a sub par CS team and a great product will overcome that. But if you have a great CS team and a sub par product, I'm not sure that even the best CS teams can overcome that. Do you buy that? I Mike Lemire 23:32 do. I do. I think it comes down to, you know, one of the reasons why so quick, when you start a CS team, what's the first thing you do to define at risk? It's based off of the customer temperature, right? It's the easiest one. CSM says they're red, they're marked as red. They're yellow, marked as yellow. That's okay, but what frustrates me about that is you can have a really happy customer who's not seeing value, who turns and you can have a really grumpy customer who's just a curmudgeon who feels red all the time, every time you're on the phone with them, but they're seeing a ton of ROI from the product, and they're gonna stick around so that human read on how what the customer temperature in is valuable, but it shouldn't be, end all be all to how we think about that. And so when you're thinking about sort of a great customer success team and a crummy product, there's only so much that that customer success manager can do to win over the hearts and minds of the person on the other side if they're not seeing the ROI from the product that they intended to see. Sean Lane 24:31 I've lost count how many times on this show I've talked about making sure product is in the room on go to market decisions. So I was grinning from ear to ear hearing Mike. Put such important responsibilities on the product org and look all of these play ideas. They're great trigger points and action items. Great having all these cross functional partners together in the room, great. But the instrumentation and plumbing that makes all of this possible should. Be overlooked, and if your knee jerk reaction to putting that plumbing in place is to reach for a CS platform, Mike says, not so fast. Mike Lemire 25:09 There are plenty of customer success platforms, right? There's gain side to Tango turns here. They're all good. I've never personally purchased one, and in fact, I've moved them out of organizations because of what we're talking about, the dirty secret is they're kind of redundant to the automation platforms that you already have in house. And so if you're dealing with a true startup, especially as we talked about with the cost of capital today, and you want to be financially responsible as a CS leader, take a look at the resources you have internally. And if everything is an input and a decision making criteria and then an output based off of that, you probably have some tools that will allow you to do that. So the first thing you know, when you think about Gainsight, the customer health score, is sort of one of the marquee benefits that will come out of that someone actually has to build that customer health score and the elements that make up that customer health score. Well, if you have a tool like Looker or sigma or a data visualization tool, you can pretty easily build out the formulas that will give you that score. If you have that score associated with an account record, you can pipe that into Salesforce, right so now you've got a trigger set to work off of, if score is greater than x, do Y once something's in Salesforce. And if you've got a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, you can then trigger an action off of if score is greater than 80, send them a case study request. If score is under 20, trigger the CSM to reach out for a call, and that's a task on the account record that they can then action on. I mean that right there is kind of the nuts and bolts that most companies have pretty early on that they can build to execute on if it gets a lot more mature and a lot larger, and you've got rev ops folks, and you've got biz ops folks, and you can have a gain site administrator, by all means, go nuts. Yeah. I also Sean Lane 26:50 think that that exercise, in addition to potentially simplifying your tech stack, also makes it incredibly clear which of those activities to your first point should include a human versus which things can be automated. Because once, if you can get to that very basic decision tree input output that you're describing, yeah, maybe we could automate that. But there's going to be certain things, certain activities driven by a customer success team, that can't be automated. And I think that all of a sudden makes it crystal clear for you, as you're building your team, okay, these things that we're going to try to try to automate and really lean in to systems versus these are the things that we're going to need a human being, Mike Lemire 27:26 yeah, yeah. And I think some of the stuff where you haven't been able to see automation, or I haven't been able to see automation solve is on the extremes of the relationship, right? So when you've got a customer who is a significant churn threat, boy, do email automations not when you've got a hot customer, right? They're not just one email away from being safe. Like, you got to get on the phone, you got to talk to them. Sometimes you even got to get on a plane and go meet with them, right? Depending on the size of the account, and then on the other end of the spectrum, right? Like the customers we I mentioned the flywheel concept a little bit, those customers who are right on the precipice of being an evangelist, right? They don't need an automated piece of swag to do that. If you get on the phone for 15 or 10 minutes and you say, I just wanted to let you know I pointed out the way you're using our product to our marketing team, because of how awesome you guys are, and sort of build them up, I think, to borrow Brett's term as a master on the software, it really excites them. It changes the way they view you as a vendor, and then they will promote you, and then you get all the flywheel benefit from that. I Sean Lane 28:28 also think that's where the partnership between all the different teams that we talked about has the moment to shine, because if you do have that super hot customer, and there's this automation that's going out because somebody in that organization click the button that triggered the trigger point and the action item that you described, and no one knows that that campaign exists, it's going to be a problem. Yeah, right. And I think the best versions of an ops and CS partnership is you've got people who have enough business context to bring that to the automation, right, as opposed to just that automation, you know, being off in a corner somewhere, or like you as the sea, as a leader, submitting a ticket to somebody who has no idea what the customer journey looks like, and saying, hey, I want to send this automation like the idea is good, but there's going to be moments where you need to be like, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Like, we need to pull back on this. Or we need to, hey, I know that this thing's going to go out next week to this hot customer, so let's make sure we get ahead of that. Look around the corner, stop that from going out. But I think it takes a really fluid and strong relationship between ops and Cs in order to actually be able to acknowledge and then take action on that knowledge. Mike Lemire 29:33 Yeah, it does. And it's funny, there was a meeting at HubSpot while I was there. It started as this marketing meeting. So sales and marketing a real, real, beautiful name. Love it, yeah. And so the customer team and the product team would sit in that and they would talk about, sort of like, what are the leads coming in? How is it working? And then eventually that evolved into a semester meeting, which is sales, marketing and customer team. And so we were talking about the entire life cycle from web. Site visitor through prospect to lead to customer up to evangelist in the way that the entire journey was flowing. It was so great to hear products, the questions they would ask and who they would ask it to. And then you would also be able to see, oh, this is my person that I can connect with after that meeting and sort of bring them into a project I'm working on. I Sean Lane 30:17 think it's great that they were even there, right? Because not to make the word even worse, but like, the small stomach or me, does not have the word product involved in it, and so it would not shock me. And this is actually a conversation I've been having a lot with people recently, which is, the next time you're in an important go to market meeting, look around and take notice whether or not product is in the room. Yes, because I think, to your point, sales, marketing, customer, that's usually what people consider to be kind of the three legs of the go to market, stool and rev ops supports primarily those three groups. But especially if you're going to have any sort of product led motion, or a product that's based on consumption or billing users or whatever, you have to have that tight alignment with product in order to pull off anything that we've talked about today. And I think a lot of times they're not even in Mike Lemire 31:05 the room. Yeah, there was a piece of software that I just hit my radar. It was pretty interesting, called devreb. Have you heard of DevRel? I don't think so. It was cool, you know. And it was sort of, I think that human relationships here are really valuable and including them in it. But one of the thing that was interesting is this product will take a look at your support tickets and your CS notes, and then it'll cluster it into themes, and then it'll start to create JIRA tickets based off of those themes to kind of fix some of those issues. And then it'll look at the JIRA tickets and cluster them into themes and put it into product roadmap, and sort of, it's almost automating that voice of customer role that's starting to come in and do some of that. So, you know, as much as much as I think it really is important to have the product team have a seat at the table and be able to listen and participate in a lot of these conversations. I am seeing some products that are starting to support that relationship from Customer Success back to product. It's going to Sean Lane 31:52 be super interesting how products like that change the way that the interaction between different teams within an organization develop, right and so like, sales and customers are a good example. You typically would ask the sales rep to take down all their notes for why somebody bought, and then make sure that those get passed off to the implementation group or the customer success group. It's never right. The notes are terrible. And so like AI is a great example. People record all their calls. Now you shouldn't honestly ask the rep or the Solutions Consultant what happened, because it's all there if you're a CSM or a CS leader listening to this right now, as all of these changes take place, what's your advice for them about where they should lean in in terms of their new skill development? Because the job's not going to stay the same no matter what right people are going to question ratios. People are going to question the function itself. And so if you're encouraging them to take advantage of all of the new technology and opportunities that are available now, where would you tell them to lean? Yeah, Mike Lemire 32:51 I think so there's sort of two different paths. I think there's a very technical oriented path and a relationship development path. And I think what will never change is having strong people skills. So I mean, we are not lacking for the amount of webinars you can attend on how to handle a hot customer or how to handle an escalated customer, but spending the time and get building up that skill set and how to de escalate frustrated customers, or how to use your relationship development skills, is going to be key. And I'd say that's the first thing that you should work with. And if there are people within your organization that are great at that, work with them. On the technical side, I think that who is a master of Gainsight, who's a master of Salesforce reporting that's going with AI, it's going to become less and less valuable over time, but knowing your product will be really, really valuable as well. So I'd say, if you're not getting to know your customers or how to communicate, get to know the product inside and outside and how it works within the ecosystem of the tech stack that your customers use, spend time using some of the other pieces of software that your customers use Sean Lane 33:58 too. Yeah. I mean, I think on the customer side of your split, there's so much to be learned and shared between sales and Cs of just how you practice for those moments, how you role play, how you train, right? Like, there's a lot there. And then I think on the technical side to your point, like, yes, that is going to change, but I also think there's going to be a pretty small group of people who can effectively operate at the intersection of all the groups that we just talked about right like that is not an easy thing to do, and I think just as many of the soft skills you need on the customer side are required to be at the intersection of all of those different teams, because you got to bring everybody together, articulate the problem, articulate the path to get there and then ultimately get everybody moving in that direction. So I think even though the path and the jobs day might have that split, some of the skill sets might be pretty similar. Mike Lemire 34:51 Yeah, it's funny, too. I mean, if you talk to some CSMs, say, great. Like, what happened with this customer before they got to you? Like, what was their journey before they. Even got to the sales team. Not every CSM knows that. I think some of the strongest CSMs, and to your point of that, like all of these things coming together, technical and people abilities, a great area to start is, do you understand the entire buyer's journey? Do you understand the entire customer journey? Can you map that out? Can you articulate it? Because if you can, if you just know, if a customer calls me on this, I answer it this way, then you're not going to be as effective in being able to build out some of those and thinking about, what are those journeys? What are the trigger points we need to identify, and then, what are some of the actions we need to create to support them? Sean Lane 35:41 Before we go, at the end of each show, we're gonna ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months, excluding yours, of course, I Mike Lemire 35:53 would say the good enough job. The good enough job. It talks a little bit about, why do we work? What are we working for? What are we trying to do with our lives, with our families? And I think it's really easy to sometimes, especially in tech, get caught up in sort of the next IPO, what's going on here and and so it gave me some nice perspective that I've been trying to apply that's awesome to my decisions. You have to Sean Lane 36:15 check that out. All right. Normally, I would ask someone favorite part about working in OPS, your honorary here today. So I will ask you, favorite part about working with ops, Mike Lemire 36:24 how quickly they can generally get shit done. There's not a significant blocker. But you don't go into ops to get bogged down. You go into ops to solve problems and move pretty quickly. So some of my favorite partners in the business have been ops people, because of Sean Lane 36:36 that flip side. Least favorite part about working with ops, Mike Lemire 36:40 least favorite thing about working with ops would probably be the ones who like overthink things and bring in you don't want to solve everything with a new piece of software. Oh, great, yeah, I've done this with this at my last company. Let's bring that piece of software. And as we've talked about earlier, I really like to use the resources we have already someone Sean Lane 37:00 who impacted you getting to the job you have today, I would say Rebecca Mike Lemire 37:03 gutner. She was one of my first managers at HubSpot, and she took the time to invest some leadership training in with me when I mentioned the fact that I was interested in leadership, she put together a PowerPoint deck for our next one on one about the different requirements that are needed to be a good leader. This is just something she did as sort of a day to day manager. She's since grown into a great executive coach who coached me over the years and really inspired me to give back and start coaching executives myself. Sean Lane 37:34 That's awesome. All right. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday, give Mike Lemire 37:39 a shit. Give a shit about the people around you. Give a shit about the way that they're developing in their career and the way that their day to day flows. People will not remember the deck that you worked on until 11 o'clock for the q2 board meeting, but people will. It's a little bit cliche, but people will remember the way that you treat them and the way that you make them feel. And so if you care about the people around you, good things will happen. Sean Lane 38:10 Thanks so much to Mike for joining us on this week's episode of operations. Also a special shout out and thank you to the entire team at startup Boston week for hosting us and letting Mike and I have a conversation live on stage. If you like what you heard today, make sure you are subscribed to our show so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you learned something from Mike today or from any of our guests, please leave us a six star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Six star reviews only. All right, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time Unknown Speaker 38:41 you.