Ask Me Anything w/ Jay Nathan & Kristi Faltorusso

Jeff Breunsbach

Hi GGR - 

Let's run an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with @Jay Nathan and @Kristi Faltorusso as part of our CS Blueprint podcast.

On June 24th at 12pm ET, we'll be answering your questions live on LinkedIn and posting responses here in GGR.

So...

What questions do you have?
How can we help you think through a challenge? or opportunity? 

We're here to help, so ask away!

Muneer Mubashir

Nice. look forward to it.

Kristi Faltorusso

Would love to see some questions come through.

Jenni Washington

Love this, thanks for setting up the event!

I've been listening to so many podcasts and following you both for your amazing content. I still struggle as I am putting together the overarching journey for our enterprise customers and how to format it so that it quickly illustrates the big picture for leadership while giving enough detail to be the jumping-off point for the individual play books that align to the journey milestones. Any help with templates or pointers would be much appreciated!

Jenni

Kelli Shea

How early should Customer Success become involved in an opportunity with a prospect?  In my experience, Sales isn't as well versed on a customer success strategy as they are selling the product and value proposition.  But so many companies rely on Sales to convey the importance and impact of Customer Success during the discovery process.  Customer Success is such a huge part of companies realizing the value of their investment and I have seen that this topic specifically isn't teed up well during presales.  Does it make sense to have a face of customer success part of that presales process?  Or is there a better way to bring Sales into the fold of our universe so they can adequately sell not only the product but Customer Success as a whole?  Should there be a CS consult as part of the presales process or before finalizing the details of the implementation?   

Brian Hartley

What needs to happen in our vertical to build on the narrative of CLG (customer led growth)?

  @Chris Hicken has been talking a lot about this too, so curious to hear everyone's thoughts

Outside of the "traditional" CS experience, what traits do you look for when you hire that have helped shape your team?

What are traits you look for in a company to determine if they are "truly" customer centric?  (A lot of companies claim to be)

Chris Hicken

Only thing I'd add to this @Brian Hartley is that Customer Led Growth is part of the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 Success Leaders.

Kasen Wysong

I'm fairly new to the CS game, about 3 years into my career. I'm the only CSM for the small startup I work at and one of the things I've been tackling is trying to show the value to increase user adoption (of our platform). Right now we're competing against the status quo. It's an old, established industry (Commercial Real Estate lending) - any tips for increasing adoption rates and showing the value to customers?

Thanks for what you guys do! Love the GRR community - woot woot!

alex allyn

I love this question because customer success can be a key differentiator for customer impact & value when done well and can be an effective "proof point " for sales around ability to achieve certain ROI and adoption targets. 

Your sales team should be able to articulate a value proposition for client success and it's a must do if it's a differentiator for "why buy" and "why stay/ why pay" with your organization. If you havent had a session to craft one with them, it sounds like now is your chance. When I was in sales, I leveraged a very effective "how do I" versus "what if" visual for CS vs service to start the conversation around a differentiated customer relationship and outcome my org could drive.

alex allyn

Sounds like a pretty fun time to define CS in your industry .  I recommend aligning with your clients on "what success looks like " for your key stakeholders…" how will you know you've made a good decision? What outcome would convince you to recommend us? ". Partner with your clients and delivery team to ID  the metrics you may be able to track toward those outcomes. Clients will often get derailed in as you think about an evolving set of "best in class "metrics you could always share that with clients as a (peer) benchmark. Have a living set of initiatives that you jointly need to work on to accomplish levels of adoption, engagement or other results that you ID, roadmap and help drive around your solution. Based on your own metrics of client value, figure out the right cadence to report on how you're doing, gain feedback, and make adjustments. In short, collaborate with your clients try things and measure which actiona impact retention and propensity to expand business with your organization.
Good luck!! fun work ahead!

Patricia Awan

The CS Blueprint is back!! I've been missing this podcast!  

My question: CS and CX - how do they co-exist in your organizations and where does CX sit in the org structure when compared to CS? How do you get buy-in from the whole company on how important CX is to your CS activities? 

Tyee Dugan

A sales team should be able to speak to the value of customer success in order to differentiate the company's services and improve chances to win the deal. One way to amplify the voice of cs through sales is to help arm sales with messaging and collateral; and communicate to the sales leader that if there are deals that could benefit from bringing csm in towards the back end, you could resource cs earlier. Your last point about bringing cs to finalize details of the implementation: would this be for helping the deal close or ensuring that sales is selling a solution that cs can implement and deliver? These may yield different answers. For example if it's the latter, it may be a good idea to implement this for certain types of products, integration complexity or deal sizes.

Rachel Provan

With the advent of CS Ops, it's becoming clear that there are many ways to specialize in CS - marketing (to existing clients), expansion, learning and development, technical onboarding… how specialized do you think it will become, and how do you think that will affect career progression?

Thanks!!

Rachel Provan
Director of Customer Success at Doodle AG

Patricia Awan

Hi @Jeff Breunsbach did this happen?

Kristi Faltorusso

No, sadly we had to reschedule due to my schedule. We are working to lock it down - Worst case it will be next Wednesday