Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself, Matt Best and my co host, Jonny Adams.
Hello.
Hi Jonny. And today we are joined by the fantastic Chris Regester. And Chris is one of the founding members and current CCO of plan hat. Plan hat are a customer platform built to acquire service and grow lifelong customers. Chris is also a wealth of experience in growing and developing SaaS software organizations over his illustrious career so far. So
Chris, thank you for joining us. It's fantastic to see you. I know SBR and plan have been partners now for some time, and we talk a lot about customer success, or as it's often known, CS for short, and what would be a fascinating place to start today's conversation. Just talk to our listeners a little bit about where things started out for you and how your journey began.
I started my career at a great company called meltwater, which at the time was like 40 people. They were just launching in the UK. It was like a PR tech company, very small. They'd come out of Norway. I was launching in UK, joined there in a sales and account management sales and CS role, and then very quickly moved and opened up the business in Asia Pacific. So they wanted to grow very quickly internationally. They took a
team to the US. They took a team of two to Hong Kong. I turned 23 the day I moved about a month after I moved to Hong Kong, moved over and started building up the business, and spent best part of seven years over there. So running sales, CS, recruitment, strategy, marketing, everything, building
up the business. Built into about 25 million. We opened in Australia, we opened in Tokyo. We opened in Beijing, Shanghai, Guadalupe, Delhi, Singapore. Hire people in those locations, bring them at the Hong Kong incubate and then open up the office. So then ran that, ran that region, which was a great big adventure. And then by the stage, meltwater was about 100 100 and 20 million AR globally, and it had grown very quickly in all these disparate markets. And they wanted to start up a
revenue operations function. I was asked to take that on. And the idea was to kind of herd the cats and bring the madness back and try and build some sort of, you know, central processes and central strategy and connectivity between all of the disparate offices around the world. So I moved back to London. This is where my first daughter was born, and then moved into a rev ops role. And that was kind of the journey from about 100 million, 120 million, to about 450 so this
big exciting thing. Did lots of acquisitions, and I was in the rev ops role, ultimately took the company public. Big, big, big adventure.
That is quite the journey, and the international element there as well, right? So fascinating to experience all those different cultures, especially as you're building something new. That must have been really interesting.
I can't underestimate how important getting international experiences in a career. At one point, I also ran our San Francisco office for a little while as well in the middle of that thing. So got some us experience too. But working and building out Asia Pacific was just so enjoyable, just so many fun experiences. You know, how do you hire an office in Delhi? If you've never been to Delhi
before? For example, there was just so many we ended up with an office in an art gallery in a shopping mall, which was fantastic and quirky, but also strange. When everyone's working, sat on the phone talking to customers, and, you know, mums are pushing, you know, prams past the office window. So lots of exciting adventures along the way.
Chris, it's lovely to have you on and even hearing the story there is, is fantastic. What was fascinating about your story there was around the journey that you've been on, you know, without putting you on the spot too much, what's the one standout thing that's enabled you to continue to grow? You know, from lessons learned, if you think back to that time where you started, you know, what's that one thing that's really helped you to continue to grow?
It's a hard one. One genuine lesson that I learned from the founder and the CEO of meltwater, which I think is just like a it's a beautiful truth, and it's something that just makes so much sense. He just said, like, talent is talent. Doesn't matter where you are, doesn't matter what your experience is. Talent is talent. And so you just have, you have your eyes open talent. Like, of course, you can't build a career on your own. You have to build it with the people around you.
So just look for talent. That was what we found building in Asia Pacific, sort of how I worked in the US. Talent is talent. You just got to find the right pockets of it.
And that's fantastic. And a recent guest on this podcast, we were talking about employee satisfaction being the forerunner to client satisfaction. And I think you know, talking about focus on talent, focus on people, and seeing that as your key leverage and your key opportunity for growth is, I don't think many naturally think like that. And I think that's a really fascinating bit of insight. And we really want to dive into this concept of client centricity
with you today. But as is customary on the podcast, and just before we get into the meat of things, we'd love to hear something that was particularly interesting in your week.
Okay, well, recently, I had the good opportunity to go to the Olympics, which was, I think, just phenomenal. And there are so many elements to it that were that were fascinating. I saw the British gymnast Briony Park win the gymnastic trampolining, which was extraordinary. If this whole software thing doesn't work out, I'll probably go off the gymnastic trampolining next. But the most entertaining part of it for me was we went out to the north of Paris and went to
this hockey match. And I'd say, you know, guarantee them. I. She played a lot of field hockey growing up, I'd say the vast majority people in the audience had never seen a hockey match before them. Suddenly, the people sat around me had never seen a hockey match before in their life, but it was France versus South Africa, and the amount of passion and love that was shown during that match was just amazing. The I'd say that the hour and a half of the match, it was the most important
thing in everyone's life. And just seeing all these French people, who, you know, everyone knew before the Olympics had been very cynical and skeptical about popping planning in a totally Parisian way. I can say this because my family's part French, but they, you know, very reason they've been, you know, complaining. Oh, so it's been said, I'm going to leave and go to the south of France and get out. But then they were there, and in the moment, they were absolutely belting out the
Marseilles. They were just belt. It was just phenomenal. Just endless, endless chanting of Ailes. But then also, like, you know, what is this sport? How does it work? It was so much fun.
Love that energy, right? And it just get, getting energy from, from places, so we don't necessarily expect it. And I mean, I know I didn't get a chance to go in person, but just even hearing it on the TV, it was, you could, you could almost sort of feel the power coming through. And as a rugby fan, I've had many experience in the stad de France listening to that being chanted in my ear. Yeah, they really get behind their team. It's fantastic to hear that support.
So much passion.
It's fantastic. Wonderful, Jonny. What about you? Can you live up to that high standard?
No, I can't, because it does draw me back to then the 2012 Olympics in London, I have to say, when I was fortunate enough to go. And I think one of the things that spun out for me is I was fascinated by the weird and the wonderful events that went on in the Olympics at that time. So yeah, brilliant for you talking about that, Chris, and thanks for sharing the story. For me. You know, it's been a bit of a realization we're about to have our first baby, slightly
nervous, panicking. What we're trying to do is we're trying to train our one year old Spaniel, and he's a working car Spaniel, so they have high levels of energy. And what I'm coming to realize after the third training session with this trainer is that it's not the dog that's being trained, it's definitely me, and then you can see the improvement from session one session two, or the lack of improvement. And I feel that from the outcome of that, I'm about to go on a journey that's
going to change my whole world. From being a parent. I'm a dog parent at the moment, I'm going to be a human parent soon, and I've really got to recognize that a lot of this is going to be driven from good parental leadership, good awareness, good understanding, and I'm dreadful with the dog, so I better pick up my quality with my new child that will be arriving, but I can't wait to be a dad. Matt, what about you?
It's funny how we seek inspiration in some of the strangest places. But I've had a reflection of my own. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been back out on my bike a little bit, which has been really good and really energizing. But for once, I've stuck with it for a sort of for a period of time. So rather than doing one ride and then giving up for another three weeks and then going back and doing it, I've done sort of back
to back, fairly decent bike rides recently. And something I noticed, if we think about this in the context of growth and sales, is how the power of, kind of sticking with it and then tracking your progress. So I've climbed the same hill three weekends on the bounce, and the friend that I go riding with shared the Strava link and the PB that we achieved last week. And you just think that's that those little wins, right? It's a small goal, but these just stepping stones that gives you
that motivation and that drive to go forward. So yeah, that's what I was celebrating in this past week. Awesome. So Chris, diving into your experience and the insight that you could share with this audience, when it comes to kind of client centricity, we talk a lot at clients about client centricity with our clients, but also for ourselves. And I think I see
that the importance of having a client centric approach. And obviously plan hat is really built around that, and the plan hat CRM software is built around that client centric approach, and it's perhaps unique focus in perspective of the customer, rather than perhaps coming at it from a sales or marketing pipeline perspective. So how has this client centric approach shaped the development and growth of plan hat in your eyes?
And how do you ensure that that kind of permeates throughout every level of the organization?
That's a good question, you know. So context, so plan head is about 200 people around the world where, you know, we refer to Plan head as a customer platform. You know, we sell a CRM software, a CSP software and a professional service software. And you know, the idea is that people can manage the entire lifecycle and customer within plan had, but as you rightly said, We rightly said, we've come at it from a post sale point of view. So we said, if you look at, you know,
traditional CRMs today. So Salesforce, your HubSpot, they're already built pre sale. So HubSpot starts life as a marketing tool. Salesforce starts life as sales automation, sales pipeline in that just starts life focusing on post sale. And our rationale there is that post sale is just inherently more complicated, more data. The data is time
series. There's more activities. The activities are more complex, and it's more cross functional, and it's inherently you're trying to build a more complicated and solve a more complicated set of problems. Then you are pre sale. So it was felt that it was very natural to start post sale, solve the complex problems, architect around complexity, and then bring that and add in the pre sale components. It's wrong, which is what we've, you know, which is what we've now done.
But in doing so, we bootstrapped the business for a very, very long time. So, you know, when we started the company, handful of people and we said, Look, we're not going to have any commercial team members. We're not going to do any marketing. I'm going to have any sellers. We're just going to have people who are trying to figure out what this set of problems are that we're trying to solve and the right way of going about it. So for the first four or five years, totally bootstrapped. No, not
really a salary insight. And are really building this out, thinking very hard till we had about 100 employees, which is a lot for bootstrapping. And you know, then it gets pretty scary as well, because when you bootstrapping, you typically only have three months of salary in the bank account, and you're always a little bit nervous. You have a bad quarter, and suddenly
it all goes a little bit sideways. But then we did a very large Series A, and we raised $50 million series A but because we've been bootstrapped, it's very much in our DNA that anything you do has to generate value, and you don't just spend unnecessarily. So even today, we've barely touched that 50 million because, you know, our culture is to run the business profitably and ensure that everything is focused around value, value creation of every individual. There's no fluffy
roles, there's no flappy work. It's value. And when you have that mindset, you realize that at the end of the day, the reason you exist is to deliver objectives for your customers. Because as you build a business very quickly, all of your revenue, all of your inherent value as a business, is in your customer base. It's not in your new business pipeline that's all hopes and dreams and forecasts, but the actual business is in
your customers. And so as you scale a business, what matters is, can you deliver objectives to your customers, and over time, can you retain and grow them? So I think that bootstrap nature of the business just inherently makes you value
customers so much more. You know, if you have an idea and you know, someone gives you 200 grand, and then you, you know, you get a kind of a proof concept idea, and you turn that, you get 2 million in seed funding, then all you care about is churning out that pipeline and proving that you're going to land new customers. But if you're having to fund the business yourself, you realize, like, No, we need the customers to renew. We need them to grow, because that's how we're going
to make payroll. So it's very much in our DNA to focus on customer centricity and customer value, because otherwise the business would have fallen apart very early on.
That's a great set of statements that have lots of value within themselves, and I can make some assumptions on one of the points you made earlier around complexities from onboarding onwards, just for the listeners. Could you just describe a couple of examples of the complexities.
Yes, I think that if you, if you transplant, it's like there's more complexity and data. So traditional CRF systems already built around transactional data, right? So an opportunity can be open or closed, deals can be won or lost, like typically, things exist in a binary state, and that's how things are. So you look at HubSpot data or Salesforce data, everything's very binary, but when you're
dealing post sale, what matters is time series data. So that just means it's more complex data, and it's just, you know, just infinitely faster amounts of data you got to think about because ultimately, post sale is about understanding current state, comparing it to prior state, and thereby inferring future state. And you're trying to do this across everything, right? So all your data has to be on a time series you can
understand development. So there's just vast amounts of data, and you need that time series in all of your product analytics and ticket volumes and email threads, in survey results, in product feedback, and you name it. Every concept, even revenue, ultimately, is time series, right? What are they spending with you over time, and is it increasing or decreasing? So there is a sort of inherent nature of time series in modern recurring revenue businesses and many
other types of business. And then there's also this process complexity, where, if you imagine a marketing and a sales funnel, it's a relatively linear set of processes. You develop pipeline, top of funnel, then at some point, you know, BDR gets engaged, they hand it over to an AE, or whatever your model is, and ultimately it closes. And whether that's, you know, with a human or as automated as one company versus another, but once they're a customer, there's so many things you got to think
about. So how do you onboard them? Are you onboarding the company or the different users? How do you ensure there's adoption? What about change management from prior systems? You know? What about when you have any product rollout, you got to do it all again. What do you do around renewal? What's your renewal strategy? How do you do stakeholder management? Every company ultimately moves up market at some point, like there's just so much, there's so many more processes, and they're
more complex, and critically, they go on forever, right? They go on free. It doesn't stop it like, oh, close one. Let's move on. It goes on forever. So it's just inherently more complexity, both on data and process.
And you know, thank you for the explanation. It resonates, you know, you look at the buyer complexity, so the pre sale piece and how those squiggly lines can sometimes not make. That linear approach as well. But what you've just described there feels like the if you were to draw that image out as you described, it would be a really complex set of processes and lines all converging and moving away from each other at points. So that was really, really helpful.
I think the interesting thing for me here as well Chris is the and coming from a sort of CS background myself, I think there's all of that complexity that exists within the team in terms of process and the journey that the overall additional customer journey complexity. The other thing is the various different integration requirements. And I think, like that's such a huge part of it. It's always sort of liken this to my experience in the the trading world. And if
you have a front end trading platform. I like a Bloomberg or whatever, that define what it is, because everybody starts there, right? It's the first, it's the it's the point of contact for the end user. So the trader is originates the activity, and they originate it in that platform. Therefore that platform dictates downstream, and it's those middle and back office systems that have to do all of the joining together, and the seller tape and the glue and the staples that that knits it
all together. And I guess that's where, again, plan hat and where it's originated with this client. First is going to have that complexity of right? We need to take from a billing system. We need to take we need to pull from a IT Service
Management System. We need to pull from the product itself, because we need to understand what that usage looks like, and that extra layer of complexity there in implementation causes more challenges, but it's so critical as a CSM having all of that in a single pane of glass view in order to serve the customer most effectively.
Yeah, I think that's so interesting when you think about kind of enterprise software, and you know, ultimately, near respect to a plan out what you care about is, yeah, how sticky is your product? And one of the key things is, just like you say it's like you need to be, you know, if you're a point of data entry, you're just inherently more sticky than if you're just a data recipient, and so you always want to be a point of data and just like typically
ticketing tools, you know, the ticket is created there. It's sticky in, in the stack. Likewise, the new business CRM on the on the post sale side. Of course, you know, you know, CSMs account managers are working with their customers all the time, so there's data entry to that level. But in general, in many organizations post sale, there's just not been as influential as the sales organization or the support organization. So it's less sticky. I think you're totally
right. But for plan head, yeah, the extensibility, native integration. So we have sort of this vast library of native bi directional, no code integration. So the idea being that you could quickly connect data, then organize it, and that starts to give you the power of the organization. If you're on the post sale side, there's also, you know, firmographic data and enrichment you need on the pre sale side, it's kind of the same story, right? You've always got to bring data together.
I'm going to challenge the, you know the notion businesses use different platforms, and they may or may not be aware of plan hat, they may or may not be aware of other platforms that they could use. I'm trying to understand the value. If I'm sitting in my business now and I'm running at 10 million Arr, or I want to grow to 100 million. Do I need a certain model that would then constitute to look at the customer first? Do I need to be a certain growth level to look
at the, you know, the starting point? Because when we talk and advise our clients now, there's a lot of noise in the market at the moment of rip out Salesforce, implement HubSpot, and I'm like, Well, why? Well, it's Vogue. So I'm just curious, because if I'm a user of another platform, like, how do I know when the flip happens? How do I know where I'm going to get the value as someone that they might use that moving forward?
Yeah, and I guess there's, there's many different answers, right? There's many different scenarios and situations. I mean, what we see on the post sales side, we see a lot of organizations that, you know, if you think I just the evolution of any company, you know, you one of the first tools you'll buy as a CRM, right? You always start out in spreadsheet, and then at some point you move to a CRM, and
often that's Pipedrive or HubSpot. And then historically, the story is when at some point you get a Salesforce, and then at some point you say, oh, you know what? What about our customers? What are we doing there? And they're like, Oh, we got a CRM, or manage it in in a CRM. So immediately you're like, Oh, we're going to use the sales tool for this other and it's sort of just like, that's the first move. You're like, oh, it's kind of weird. You're like, Oh, why don't we make the
finance tool team work? And they're like, no, no, no, we get an ERP. But it's like, the set, for some reason the post sales team, like they're going to work in the sales tool. So there's that kind of first move that is sort of subliminally happened in many organizations over time. And what we've seen is that 70% of our new business today is organizations moving post sale out of Salesforce and into plan hat because, like, it just doesn't work, you know, if we're honest, and I think it doesn't
work for a number of reasons. Like, one, is that, you know, the transactional data element, it's very hard to have time series data in Salesforce. Two, you need an you know, typically at scale, or any form of scale, you need administrators. It becomes very expensive. It doesn't feel modern. And three, you know, Salesforce clearly has an issue around usability. It's very rare that you go out there and you're like, hey, who loves Salesforce? And all the AES are like, Hey, I love Salesforce.
That doesn't happen. And so what we're trying to do, the plan had, is trying to say, look, let's build out a tool that has sort of enterprise level data management for this data complexity we talked about with. Consumer grade usability. So one nice way I think of thinking about plant head is, you know, sort of the data capabilities in Salesforce, or the usability of a Monday.
And I really like that explanation inevitably, you know, it's, there's a lower cost of retaining customers, there's a great return of growing customers as well, right? And, you know, we work so hard to acquire. Well, what platforms are we really prioritizing to enable? I'm a user of one of those platforms, as referenced from pre sale, and I agree the functionality is dreadful. And I think sometimes my cynical self
goes, Do they just not develop that? Just to really infuriate me and keep me sort of level locked in their platform because I always want more, like, it's just, I don't know, maybe that's just my crazy mind thinking there. But it's great to hear about how plan hack can help with one of the most important aspects and being client centric.
I think that also, to me, talks to the challenge of the evolution of CS. And Chris, I'm curious to get your thoughts here as the value of CS in a business and how to demonstrate that value, and how to quantify the value, because so often, again, it's very it's a little bit perhaps more binary and a little easier to quantify that value of a sales person by their success in closing and winning and winning work and where
you've got someone in CS. CS is still so often seen as a cost center, which is kind of crazy to Johnny's point of it being at the heart of retaining your climate that you've worked so hard to get. What does that mean for not just for plan hat, but just in your experience? Chris, like, what's your there's not necessarily a direct question there, but I'd love to get your perspective on CS and where you think it fits and how you think it should be seen, and how plan that maybe helps do that.
Yeah, so I think, you know, the first thing that I would take issue with is, is just like CS, I think that that is, and it's a terrible late, totally manufactured concept, as always, just like, it's also important to just acknowledge it was like it was manufactured. So there was a company, one of our competitors, nickel gainside, and they're an amazing marketing machine, but they manufactured a concept called customer success because they wanted to sell a product to
a group of people. So it's like, it's perfect category creation. They did an exceptional job. They did such a good job. They actually wrote a book about it called category creation, where they talked about this. We created the category to sell seats and build a software company like and it's just absolutely the Salesforce playbook, but done for over sale. But I think that, like, it's the wrong it's the wrong framing. This was never a category. It's not a category.
People have managed their customers since the dawn of time. There's nothing new, you know, as I always you know, say, if you went in, you know, what's the original recurring revenue? Business is hairdressing. Because, you know, hair always grows bad. But if you go into a barber shop in Roman times, like the barber had to do the same thing, right? The barber had to
give a good haircut. Probably give some gossip, you know, maybe try and give you the Nero, the narrow perm as an upsell, and then you'll come back a month later and get another chop. And that was the way it worked. It's, this is no different. It's just like it's customer management is what it is. CS as a concept is, is it a bit silly, and it's kind of been brought up with this sort of, you know, fluffy rainbows and
unicorns, stories and all of these, like, weird terms. But this is, how do you manage your customers over time, you know? And what do you have to do? Well, you have to deliver objectives that your customers want. And if you do so they'll pay you more money, and that will just increase over time. And this is business 101, you cannot run a successful business if you are not successfully delivering objectives to your customers.
I completely agree with you. You know, coming from a pre sales, sales era and sales directorship, you know, customer service was the term that was heard then I came into this world of customer success. But in professional services, it's called Client partners. And what I'm curious about Chris is partnerships is a mutually beneficial end goal, right? It has to be a win, win. We talk about that in a lot of worlds.
It's not about Win, lose or lose, win. So if you had a choice, you know you referenced CS customer success, probably not being or come from a certain origin. But what would you call it if you had a choice, if you don't mind me asking.
I would try not to call it anything. But I think what it is is long term customer management. That's what it say. That's, that's what you're doing. It's over time. You're, you're doing these things. But I couldn't agree more, like I think the economics of good long term customer management are really still not fully understood. And I have a great anecdote to this, where recently I spoke to the CEO and the CRO
of a really famous, publicly listed NASDAQ company. It's a, you know, essentially a B to B, household name, and we're talking to them, and they have a, they clearly have a churn problem, and it's in all of their public statements, they have a churn problem that's been impacting the public valuation or the market cap of the company. And we're talking with the CRO about this challenge, and the CRO ultimately owns pre sale and post sale, and we're talking about the structure of
their sales organization. He's like, Well, it's built for velocity. This is built for velocity. I said, What do you mean? He's like, Well, we're hiring young kids. We train them to sell SMB as they. Succeed with SMB. They move up the market, then move mid market, moves up to enterprise, and that's kind of the path so that the entire operating model is
built around acceleration and velocity in new business. But the challenge is, is all of those deals that those new new guys are signing, all those SMB deals, 45% churn, 45% churn, and this is their vehicle. So you think about the first impression of these kids joining the company two three years in, they're in an SMB segment. That's what they're learning. Sell it, move on, sell it, move on, sell it, move on. And it's killing the business. And you see the net retention of the
company going down with the market cap. And it's just the economic model doesn't work if you don't rethink your business around long term customer management, long term sort of healthy, sustainable business practices. But this is, you know, a household name in SAS, and the CRO is like, he is exceptional, but his prioritization is, I want to build a velocity based Sales Machine, rather than a long term
sustainable, you know, post sale organization. And I thought that was such a it's such a truism of where many organizations are at today.
So the solution to that challenge then, from your expertise. What is the answer to that?
Don't sell deals that churn.
And so there's a lot of work that goes on for this use case. So not only is a platform required to help with that transition of decline to growth, but there's also a people and cultural shift that that's required. There's also a capability and skills element. There's a hiring FTE future plan and this is where it gets super complex, but plan hat can inform an organization of the metrics, right?
Yeah, so I think, you know, plan hat as a technology, you know, we ultimately become the place where you consolidate all of your data so you understand what's going on with your customers, and where you manage all of these processes, both pre and post sale, so that you can report and understand the efficacy of what you're doing. Plan had as a business. We then come in and also provide a whole bunch of consulting, advisory services around what's the right
methodology to do it. Or we use great partners like SVR, you know, to come in and advise on these things as well. I think what you said is really spot on, that this is much more than just a system. You can't, you know, if someone like, Ah, I will get a system. It will all work. It doesn't. You know, that doesn't happen anything. You don't sort of buy Salesforce and then sell more. It doesn't. It doesn't work that way. But I think that, you know, you know our topic being customer centricity,
that's a cultural thing before it's anything else. And it and I think just, honestly, it's a top down cultural thing. If you really want to institute it in your organization, it doesn't just happen because people are like, Hey, I love the customers. We put customer centric on the website. It's top down and it's cultural.
I think one example you gave there of the household B to B, clearly, that's an operating model. That's a sort of directional challenge, which, as you said, is that is the top down piece. There's the other bits that Johnny talked about there around your training, enablement, coaching. There's culture as a that could be used as a bit of a kind of umbrella term, perhaps, that just sort of, yeah, that encapsulates a
lot of that stuff. I mean, we would see them typically challenges around, you know, remuneration and compensation as being kind of key drivers. Are we driving all of the right
behaviors? That's a bit more of the stick than the carrot. I think there's for me, and what I've seen in various businesses is, and this is linked very much to the culture, but it's almost the people armed with or not necessarily armed, and that's probably the point, but tasked with the job of looking after the clients and growing clients and how they are seen in the under the CRO CRO banner, in terms of the autonomy that they're given, the capability to serve in the best possible way.
You know, the the level of experience that you're hiring. I've seen organizations who see CS as a feeder into sales or product, and it's sort of part of and it's your will you go into CS through being a good support technician. So well, that's, for me, is is fundamentally the wrong way around, because CS is about developing, nurturing the
relationships of those clients that define your business. So is that something that that you're seeing as well when you're not necessarily just your clients, but also when you're out in the market, is that still something that you think, that we're all sort of working towards?
I think, I mean, I think you're hitting on something that's very clearly, very clearly a thing I would say at the top, on the on the cultural level. So, you know, you talk about, you know, maybe culture is the rapper, and a good way to reflect on it as an organization is like, Who are the HEROES in your company? And in most companies I've ever seen, heroes are either the seller who lands the big deal or it's the engineer who, you know, builds whatever it is the fancy
AI integration. But it's typically, it's either an engineer or it's a sales rep, you know, and that sales rep who closes that deal and, you know, rings the bell or whatever they do to celebrate, like, oh my god, you did it. Meanwhile, there's some CSM who's gonna have to work that thing every day for so long and and who gets remunerated off that deal. Is it the seller who lands it, or is it the CSM who delivers the continuous value? So I think it's a very interesting thing
now. And like, another way of like, who are the heroes? Is, what are the stories? Yeah, and this is something that we talk to our customers a lot about. On the post sale side, is the vast majority of organizations, you know, they'll celebrate their victories in in sales in a big way, and you communicate their releases in a big way. So they're celebrating engineering, they're celebrating sales. But the great stories that happen post sale, they don't really get celebrated. They need to get
communicated that much. You know, we got this new customer, and we onboarded them in record time, we just renewed our, you know, we really discussed them a blah, blah, blah. We, you know, whatever it may be, people don't tell those stories and share those stories a little much so it becomes a little bit of a self fulfilling prophecy that culturally, the other areas are
more prominent in the business. I think the recruitment path into CS or into post sale roles was for a long time, what you're saying, it's kind of like we used to joke about it, like, you know, it's the elephant's graveyard. It's, you know, it's that person that you really like in the company, like, Oh, they're so likable. They're already great at anything. No, I shove them in CS, and I'd say that that's how it was. I don't
think that's how it is now. I do think it's changing. And sort of my theory on this, and my message to anyone who better listen to it, is that your post sale team in the organization should be the most aggressive team you have any organization. And that's a fairly for many people. That's a counter intuitive pointing no sales should be aggressive. But I'm like, no post sale needs to be the most aggressive part of the organization, because they're the team that needs to say no
more than anyone else. So they need to understand they don't work for the customer. They work for the customer's objectives. And so you align on what the objectives are. And then, like, Hey, you want to go up that mountain, let's go. Get behind me. Let's march up the mountain, or go there. And Midway, the customer's like, oh, you know what? I want to go over to there. There's a nice picnic that's going to have a picnic by the river. And you're like, No, we're going up the mountain.
That's where we're going get behind me, we got to go. And so they've got to have that assertive, aggressive mindset.
And I think we're seeing that happen more, and it's a little bit to do with, you know, post sell teams becoming more commercial and more ownership of revenue, you know, that's driving that mindset, but also a recognition that you can't just hire the, you know, the friendly, smiley, good culture fit to manage the customers, you need someone who's strong and assertive, because managing customers sort of, you need to be able to triangulate between a deep understanding of your
customer, a deep understanding of your product, and a deep understanding of their objectives. And if you can triangulate between those three things, then you can deliver value. And that's, you know, that's not a passive, you know, happy, smiley, friendly person who can typically do that.
I mean, I love that golden nuggets coming out of that. And one, one of the things that we, you know, when Matt and I were planning this session we thought would be valuable, is if you could touch upon that sort of customer centricity and how to build that strategy into your business. And I feel that you've touched upon a real, sort of important factor that I wanted to amplify for the listeners. It was around connecting
aggression. I thought there's an interesting word you chose, by the way, you know that's because that could be seen in a certain way. But as you then went on to describe it was really interesting about connecting the dots of the customer objectives,
which I think is lost in so many businesses. You might think about what you do, what we do as a professional service firm is that, I think it comes to the mindset shift of thinking about outcomes first and then coming towards understanding how you can support that client, and specifically, whether you're working at plan out or SBR, you do a similar thing, right? But understanding objectives and outcomes are really crucial. We need to understand those of our client base and then work
towards those. If you're thinking about building a customer centric strategy within an organization, one of those things would be understanding your customers objectives. What would be some of the other facets that make up a really strong customer centric strategy?
No, I think that's a great one. So I think that that's that's got to be, you know, almost the, you know, top of the tree is understanding customer outcomes. But I think it's a little bit, I would say, maybe bigger than that. So in the anecdote I gave that SAS company, they've designed their operating model around velocity. And I would argue, you know, you need to design your operating model around customer outcomes.
So for example, you say, well, in marketing, when they're filling in a lead form on the website, that lead form should have categorizations to what they want to achieve, that information needs to be there for sales rep and CRM, so that they can then have a very defined narrative around those things. But it's refined. Then you have a kickoff call when they convert, what are your outcomes? This is what we
understand. This is how we go deeper in it. And then that's reviewed every quarter and and sort of you, you build a framework around objectives that becomes a consistent language and narrative that a prospect hears, a lead hears, and a customer hears, and they hear a continuously, no matter who they talk to in the organization. When they read your newsletter, they hear the same language. When they look into product, they see the same language like that, familiarity around
objectives is very, very powerful. So that operating model of a pure alignment moving product, you know, what products building, what marketing is talking about, what sales is pitching, you know, CS is delivering. That's, I think, the core of customer centricity when you're thinking about about objectives. And then, and that's sort of like a virtualization of it. And then I think you also can think about it horizontally,
where you say. So it also needs to, you need to realize that it's not just the group of people who are, you know, it's not just the customer managers or the CSMs, but the once they're a customer, it's now a collective responsibility, and that's sort of another piece you have to operationalize. So does everybody understand their role and responsibility towards the customer, and what they've got to do, you know, to get the customer towards their objectives, which very often,
you know, isn't, isn't the case. And there's so many interesting kind of operational tactics you can bring in to kind of drive that.
So Chris, circling back to what you shared earlier, around how plan hat was was formed, and the nature in which you were able to do that through bootstrapping, but with a continued focus on value and delivering value to your customers. If you're out there and you don't make necessarily have that option, right? Maybe you can't bootstrap it yourself.
How do you stop yourself from getting distracted by those other things that are out there that might pull you offline and remain focused on delivering and focused on value to the customer?
I think it's, to some extent, you know, if you're not bootstrapping and, you know, say you're, you know, capitalizing the business with investment. You know, at some point it's just like that's become, you know, the way the world works. You know, at some point, you know, when a VC looks at your business, they understand that your growth will slow to the point of your net retention. So if your net
retention is 120% your growth will become 20% over time. So the sort of this, like, you know, we're all intrinsically motivated to drive growth from our customers, because ultimately, that's how people are going to value the business. When you look at, you know, when you look at analysis of ARR growth of a company against NRR of a company, you get a higher multiple valuation if your nr is higher, rather than, if your AR growth is higher, which I think is, for a lot of people, isn't
immediately obvious. You sort of assume, or I got 100% growth, everyone will value us massively. But actually, if you've got 100% growth or 60% net churn, you don't get a good,
a good valuation. So, yeah, I think that's, there's a little bit of, you know, it happens naturally, and then a little bit it's just sort of, it's a discipline that we're all learning, I would argue that most, or many, many companies have been about built without that, and you can, of course, survive for a very long time by just focusing on new business. You know that, you know, we've all, you know, been in companies
that have done that. You can do that, but like this, you know, SaaS, company I mentioned, you know, they did incredibly well. That's why we all know their name. But now it's not sustainable, so I think that has to be its recognition, like, at some point you need to figure this out. So it makes a lot of sense to do it early on. And one of the things that I'm seeing now, which I think is really interesting, is what a couple of
things. So one is that more startups are thinking about post sale and customer life cycles earlier on than they were before. That's very, very clear, right? It used to be these sort of think about, how do we build a product and sell it and then product and sell it? And then, you know, it'll be a perfect product. Life will be good. But instead, now we're seeing more people think like that, and more people building it into the
product. Which is where I think this will all go in a couple of years, is that products will hold the objective and, you know, everything will be, you know, you productize customer management, which makes a lot of sense over time.
That's really interesting, the concept of productizing, customer management, and I guess there's that on that journey working out where to point your resource in the in the most appropriate way to maintain and develop and grow those relationships. If you're sat listening to this podcast now, and you're a business that's starting to see an increase in churn, let's say you're a software business, you're starting to see an increase in churn. You're not
really sure where it's coming from. You've got an established customer success team. You've got a healthy pipeline of new business. Where would you advise someone in that position to go look first?
So I think the foundation to a lot of these things, it's hard, and the hardest thing about per sale is it is different for every organization. It's just like the moment anyone starts talking in generic language around post sale. There's no point in listening anymore, because it is. It's just different. Are you selling to enterprise, selling to SMB? Is it a vertically integrated What are you selling like? There's so many things to it, but there's clearly
something around you. Need to identify cohorts in your customers, and you need to look at cohorts by multiple different dimensions. So look at cohorts by size. What's their spend with you? What's that potential spend? By geography? Look at the year of sale, product constellation, all of those things you need to look at cohorts see if you can isolate problematic cohorts and positive cohorts is clearly a thing. There you go. Look at life cycle. You know you want to
have, at all times, a rudimentary life cycle. And you want to have some sort of kind of North Star indicators of outcome success or outcome achievement. Some people talk about that as a health score. I think that you know health scoring, so some good things to them, some silly things to them. But you need some sort of North Stars of, is there, you know, are we? Are we achieving outcomes with our customers?
They seem to be the foundation so segmenting, thinking through a life cycle, ensuring that it's being executed, and then having some sort of, you know, guiding metrics around outcome achievement, they're the foundational pieces we always you know, try and coach people towards.
Fantastic. And Jonny and I both kind of nodding along there. I think we would, we would absolutely concur with that. I've got one final question for you, and this might be a tricky one, but obviously, at plan hat, you use plan hat, right? What of the features, if you had to pick two features, would you say that your team appreciate most from the product?
We did a new thing recently, which I thought was interesting and a good example. So I think when you have an organization, whether it's you know, a sale, whatever team it is, like you, one thing that is becoming clearer and clearer is like, you need to be measuring how people are spending their time at scale, not not at a micromanagement level, but on the post sale point side, that could be things like, maybe you institute a new idea of like, we're going to
start doing ebrs. EBR makes sense. We're going to do executive business reviews of our customers. Sounds logical. We should do it. But then if you're going to institute that, you're going to spend all this time setting them up and building them out, then you've got to measure what actually changes as a result of doing them. And I think a lot of people don't do that. They're just like, let's start doing this thing intuitively. It sounds like it makes sense, and
then six months later, like, hey, was it worth it? We've spent 1000 hours on that thing, and you don't know. So one of the interesting things that plan had is that it's very flexible data model, so you can really measure absolutely anything against any other data point. So one thing we did recently was we launched a whole bunch of new sequences to our customers. And so these are really to drive education and adoption of our users. And what we did is we decided we were going to AB test
it. So we built out all these sequences, you know, informing people about ways to use the, you know, the product and whatnot. But we sent to our SMB customers, our mid market
customers, we purposely didn't to the enterprise. And then, you know, we sent this out a bunch based on various triggers in the system, and then in June, we were able to do analysis on it, and we saw that users in the SMB and a mid market cohort who'd been receiving these sequences, their adoption of 65% higher than users in the enterprise customers who not been receiving these sequences, despite all being kind of new users within
the same period of time. So there's huge rally for our team and for our customers around the ability to kind of one, you know, push this stuff out and engage with all of your users automatically. You know, we're engaging with all these users our team is managing, you know, without having to do anything, but to really, really evidence the impact of it, which was,
which was really powerful. I think another thing that our team likes a lot, and a lot of our customers use as well as we have this concept of collaborative portals, where you could take absolutely any of the data in plan had, and you can share it in real time with your customer. If you imagine you're an organization who's got 10,000 customers, and you know, as the kind of Pareto law 8020 thing going on. It's got these 8000 customers, they generate 20% of revenue. It's not, you know,
they're important, but not so important. But you still want to give them a really nice a really nice experience. So what you can do plan hat is you could auto generate dashboards showing their usage, or auto generate presentations around their usage and their objectives, because you got all of that data in plan hat, and automatically share it in this portal. So then they have this destination they can go to, and they're seeing, over time, how their usage is improving, and they're seeing
the ROI. So even though you as a team aren't spending all the time doing it, the customer is still seeing the transparency in the ROI and that it's aligned with their objectives. So we use them really heavily and so on. And then there's one, one thing that we're doing now, which I think is, I think is actually a really interesting concept, where in these portals, a customer can go in and update information there, and that information, if they update it, that can update back into plan
head. So if you imagine, you know, generally in post sale, the way people have thought is like we as a company, as a vendor, we need to choose the kind of content we're going to send to our customers, because we are smart. We know what they want. We know that a user with low adoption, they need this content, they need that content, and so on. But now the customers
can go into a portal. They can select it. So it's like, when you're a kid and you have those, you know, choose your own adventure novels, and, you know, you roll the dice, and then it's like, in the corner there's a treasure chest. In the other corner there's an old lady, and you're like, you know, you go to the old lady and she turns into a gremlin, or whatever happens, like those, those kind of fun books. But it's kind of like that now, because in the portal, the customer could be like, you
know, you can ask in a portal, what are your objectives? The customer selects two, and that automatically drops them into sequences that start to educate them around how to use your technology to achieve those objectives. So it's like a choose your own adventure, but sort of reversed customer management, which I think is a very interesting thing. It comes back to what we said a moment ago about productizing customer management.
Chris, you said it goes back to productizing customer management. That's real sort of demonstration of of how that comes to light. I think one thing that really jumps out to me, and if I go back a number of years, back to when I was a CS or a cam management practitioner, and you think if you could have any wish, it would be to automate some of the management of some of your smaller customers, and to provide you with relevant insight at the right time, so
that you can be relevant to your customer. And I think actually what you've just articulated there, for me feels like exactly that. It's like, how do we take you know, and that's for me, is the sort of the fundamentals of good customer management, is understanding your customer, understanding. You provide value to your customer and making sure that you help them in seeing that but also getting it. And I think actually those features that you just articulated, I think, really enable that.
Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a fantastic discussion about client centricity, and it's so great to hear how plan hats out there helping some of those client managers or CSMs or account managers, or whatever we want to call them, to really do the very best job, to continue to deliver value for their customer. And I think just client centricity at the heart of growth is what we wanted to
talk about today. And I think actually, if we circle back to that, what we've explored are some really, really great ways in which to do that. And Chris, you shared some fantastic insight with our audience. So on behalf of Jonny and I would like to thank you so much for joining us on the Growth Workshop Podcast.
Thank you for having me.