Customer Success Helps Focus Product Direction

And that's what customer success does.
It helps you prioritize working with your ideal customer profile and segmenting
your customers in a way that you're not spending a bunch of resources on a
customer who is not producing the revenue to cover those resources and identifying
those opportunities because that's what the CEO, what the C team is struggling
with is like, we need to do this feature.
We need to do this product.
Our product needs to do that because everyone has a different perspective.
Hi, I'm Karl, and I'm Danielle, and this is productly speaking.
We're product managers by trade and here we explore the world of product management.
It's people and their stories.
We promise to keep it entertaining and maybe you'll learn something.
Shall we give this a go?
Let's do it.
On today's episode, we're going to discuss how a strong focus on customer
success can catapult a pre-seed or seed company and help focus the product
direction.
We'll also talk about setting expectations both internal and external to a business.
Our guests today have made their careers all about servicing customers and
ensuring their success.
Amy Taylor Mitchell has most recently served as the director of customer
success for Juniper networks.
Trevor Mishler has most recently served as the director of global support for
a startup.
Together, they've since joined forces to start a company bringing customer
success discipline to series B companies.
At Real Success International, Amy serves as the CEO and Trevor serves as
the chief customer officer.
Today, they will help us understand how customer success discipline is
critical to ensuring product adoption and thus the success of a business.
I am pleased to welcome to productly speaking Amy Taylor Mitchell and
Trevor Mishler.
Thank you so much, Karl and Danielle.
And we really appreciate you making time for us today.
This is really exciting.
I think, you know, the thing I'm really excited about with the industry and with
Real Success International is just what it represents for me.
So I started off in economics and finance.
I was a bank VP for 12 years doing outside sales calling and, you know, love
that, love getting to understand the customers, you know, what motivates them
to do the things that they do, understanding them better so that you can,
you know, kind of predict what, you know, what's the next thing that this
customer might like to do.
Unfortunately, in 2008, you know, that was not a good time to be in banking.
So, you know, I was very lucky to have a very good friend, Deborah Curtis, who
brought me into IT.
So basically I started a whole new career and I was really fortunate to see
the birth of customer success from, you know, not only a US perspective, but
also globally, you know, very fortunate to have worked, you know, leading teams
not only in the US, but also in Latin America and also to lead teams for
federal government.
And so, you know, understanding how different table stakes are for these
different groups, you know, really helps you understand the complexities of it.
So I think that my cross-functional background and then, you know,
multi-geo experience brings a unique perspective to real success
international. And, you know, there would be no real success international
without Trevor Mishler.
So I had the pleasure of working with Trevor for many years at Red Hat.
You know, I was always impressed by Trevor and was so excited when he asked me
to be a part of this organization.
So, Trevor, would you like to introduce yourself?
Yes, thank you so much, Amy.
And thank you for the compliments while returned to you.
And thank you for joining RSI and being our leader and helping us to grow.
But, yes, I've been in the customer success industry for over 10 years.
I think I just say over 10 years now, because if I say more, it sounds like
I've been around a little bit longer than I should be.
And, yes, Amy and I met at Red Hat.
We were both support relationship managers at the time.
Coming from a startup and then going back into the startup world, we have all
recognized, you know, some pain points and customer success for startups.
Really, that's what RSI was born out of, is recognizing the need to have customer
success at different levels from pre-seed to series A and on, hopefully to IPO
or whatever XA strategy the company determines is best for them.
Yes, Trevor, that brings up a really interesting point.
And you're talking about pre-seed and seed companies and, you know, starting to
get into series A and series B.
What are some of the unique needs of companies at those stage compared to
those that are a little bit more mature?
Really, pre-seed, you know, it's just funding is a big struggle.
You're on a very limited budget.
It's likely that you're funding yourself or you may have an angel investor that's
helping to fund your product and really trying to determine what you're going to
do, what is the best product for your customer and who is your ideal customer
profile can be very challenging, not changing your product in a way that is
going to put off your investors and put off your potential customers.
And what are some of the ways that customer success can help with that at
those early stages?
Well, the first pillar of customer success is choose the right customer.
I think that's where you see the failures start with startups in the early
phases is they don't determine who's going to be their ideal customer profile.
So if you're building a product and a lot of times, especially within the
open source community, you're going to have a lot of input from community
members of what they want the product to be.
If you set the wrong expectations, you're not going to find a customer that
actually appreciates the value of your product.
And, you know, it's just like with any relationship, you need to set the
expectations right from the beginning so that you have a sustainable
relationship.
If you start a relationship and you think you're headed towards a marriage
and that is not exactly what the other person in relationship is looking for,
down the road, you're going to have some issues of sustaining that relationship.
And it's kind of that with, you know, making sure you choose the right
customer, that they recognize the value that you're adding to that relationship
and that it's sustainable throughout their roadmap.
So it's developing a product today that can also change in the future to meet
those customer needs.
A lot of times you'll see people will have customers come on board in the
early stages and then the product changes in a way that they didn't expect
or their expectations weren't exactly voiced in the beginning.
And so they churn later on in series A or series B type companies.
So do you think that we get some of that churn just due to not understanding
the customer as well as we thought we did?
Maybe we've used a persona and we've maybe looked at the wrong aspect of that
customer.
Part of it is that and part of it is understanding our product, especially in
sales teams, you know, they'll, you'll explain the product to them as a
product manager and they may be selling something different than what the
product actually offers.
And then obviously down the road, that really interferes with the adoption
because the customer was expecting something and they're not getting the
future that they wanted or they're getting something totally different that
is disrupting their environment.
And Trevor, I think what you mentioned is really, really important on two
levels because I think one of the levels, you know, that I've seen a lot is,
you know, just from a Kano model perspective, you know, like from project
management where you end up with, you know, here's table stakes, here's, you
know, what the customer would need to be, quote unquote, delighted.
You know, here's what's unacceptable for the customer and understanding what
that means for your ideal customer profile.
And in addition to that, you know, what that looks like in different geos,
because, you know, one of the things that I was really fortunate to be able to see
in my career is table stakes for Latin America looks very, very different, you
know, from a cultural perspective, from what we would expect in the States.
And, you know, even what's expected in Western Europe, for example, table
stakes is a lot more accessibility to their team, to their named resources.
And later hours of, you know, being able to contact and interact with these
people, you know, having really deep interpersonal relationships.
And that is not something that's wanted in other areas of the world.
And I think, you know, understanding that how that scales, how that doesn't
scale and, you know, how to work with your specific customer subset is so
critical. So, you know, I think that's one of the big things and there is a
model that, that is, you know, that includes enough of, you know, the
delighters from the different Kano models, you know, to be scalable is really
critical to you.
How do you identify what those table stakes are?
And maybe, Trevor, to your point, get ahead of sales conversations so they
don't define what your table stakes are for you.
In my opinion, kind of identifying what those table stakes look like has a lot
to do with talking to your sales folks, because we all know sales is the hand
that rocks the cradle for, you know, the total relationship, you know, from
previously being a salesperson myself.
I know how very hands-on I was, you know, with customers I fought so hard to have.
Understanding, you know, hey, these customers are safe, you know, being
shared with others.
But, you know, just really having a good conversation with your sales staff, you
know, what do these customers expect?
You know, it's 10 o'clock at night.
There's a, you know, a critical outage.
Who's the customer going to contact?
What are their expectations about you personally as their salesperson or as an
executive at the organization for action in these situations?
And once you really have a good two-way conversation where, you know, it's not
just the customer telling you what they think they need, but also you telling
them, you know, the art of the reasonable.
I think those two things come together very importantly.
To your point, the customer will tell you what they want, but it's not
necessarily what they need.
So it's doing that deep dive of establishing an actual use case for the
customer and defining it definitively to that your product will offer it.
And also don't, don't be afraid to determine that this is not the right
customer because you're going to spend a lot of time and resources on customers
that may not be the right fit for your product that you could spend on, you
know, the right customer and also developing the customer or developing the
product in a way that meets that customer's need.
A lot of times, I think all of our default activities are to please the
customer or make the customer happy, you know, and you see a situation where
you have a product that's not profitable for the company that this customer
really likes, you know, and your natural, you know, desire is to see that
customer happy.
Well, is that, you know, the good of the company?
Is that the good of the customer long-term?
You know, understanding that I think is really critical.
Yes, the customer may have a feature request that they can already do with
the current product, having that education for the customer available to,
you know, having education in place so that you can teach them how to use the
product better instead of just changing the product every time to meet a feature
that they probably can already use the product to do.
Right.
Sometimes the workaround is better than building a new feature and putting the
team through the pain of building a new feature.
Exactly.
Do those educations also look like two-way conversations or would you start
getting into, I think, documentation and videos and all of the other good
media insert options here?
In my opinion, I think it's really important to start off with that
conversation, you know, and to have it several times, especially like in an
early seed stage so that you have customer feedback that you've heard with
your own ears.
But, you know, I think after that point, you know, it's important to get into a
more, a more scalable and sustainable model as well.
Yes.
And that's often a challenge for companies as they grow is sustainability
and scalability.
So you want to standardize your process.
You want to standardize your training programs so that they're easy to offer
to a larger audience as you grow.
And I think we get, you know, dedicating resources to do that really pays off as
far as making your company grow and making it scalable for the amount of
customers you need to get the revenue necessary.
Yeah.
So you've mentioned a number of different stages of companies, pre-seed, seed,
series A, series B, these are all very different points.
Should you go full in on customer success and doing some of these things you've
talked about at the pre-seed stage?
Or is there more of a ramp up as you start to grow into that?
I think it's very challenging in the pre-seed stage because you're really
hungry and you kind of just want to get somebody who will give you some money to
do whatever is necessary to get the product going and get the company
established, but that's where you have to be disciplined and making sure that
again, you're choosing the right customer.
Because if you get down that path, you know, you're going to get to, you're
going to reach a point where it's no longer sustainable and you're going to
have to pivot and fork to something different that you were trying to do from
the beginning, but got distracted by the money and quick growth.
Well, and coming at this from a product perspective as well, you know, both
product and customer success functions are fairly important to a company,
especially for its sustained and long-term future.
But when you're in those early stages, you know, you talked about money, you're
really just looking to get whatever funding you can get, then you get that
precious funding.
It's never enough.
And we've talked about this on other episodes of this podcast that you can be
red hat size and never have enough people, never have enough money to do all
the things you want to do.
So, you know, this isn't a problem that you typically get out of, but you know,
there's a lot of things you could invest in as a pre-seed or seed company.
You could invest in another engineer, you know, you could invest in any other
number of functions, but likely you're probably leaning towards another
engineer too, so that we can get features out the door faster.
Why would somebody in that point pick?
It's not just engineers.
A lot of times you'll see companies invest in more salespeople.
So you have a bigger pipeline.
And then what happens when you get a contract and you sign those customers
as far as onboarding.
So you get this choke point because you don't have somebody in customer
success that can drive the whole customer journey.
So you get a lot of sales in the pipeline, you close a lot of deals, and
then you have people coming out of onboarding in a red status.
You have a whole bunch of customers coming out of onboarding in red status
because you don't have anybody that can drive that onboarding and the adoption.
And sales happens on both sides of the customer journey, whether it's
pre-sales or post-sales.
So having that customer success mindset, or at least that function in place to
look at the upsell opportunities or the next sell opportunities keeps revenue
flowing throughout the customer journey.
I love that.
And, you know, I think one of the important things that you've mentioned,
you know, just with the sales cycle is customer expectations.
You know, where are you going to go next?
And in terms of, you know, when we think about trying to innovate, you know,
how are we going to, you know, get to the next level with our product or, you
know, with our services, with our customer success, like how are we going
to intelligently implement customer success?
And I hate breaking it down the pre-sales and post-sales, but it is
industry concepts.
So I've always looked at the, as you know, pre-sales as the hunters, if you
think of the hunter farmer model of sales and the post sales as the farmers.
And so it's important to, at that point, it's important to really be a listener
and people need to be comfortable telling you what they think and telling you
where their pain points are and giving you the feedback you need to improve
the product and make it a revenue producing for the company.
Yeah, there's a Harvard business review piece that goes very much into some of
this in the idea that, you know, we've traditionally looked at personas to
figure out what customers need.
And that can leave you in a very bad spot because if you get the wrong data for
the persona and then you build for that wrong data persona, you're going to find
that your customers aren't buying what you want.
The article argues that you have to find out what those jobs to be done are.
And that is really a shorthand for what an individual seeks to
accomplish in a given circumstance.
Another thing to note is that those jobs are never simply about function.
They do have powerful social and emotional dimensions there.
So I would put this question out here now, how would you go about determining
the jobs to be done from that customer success standpoint?
I really like that.
And, you know, I think that's so important because, you know, what, what
you and Trevor were mentioning earlier in terms of, you know, when organizations
finally get funding, it's been such a long time, it's like giving money to
someone who's starving, you know, they're not going to maybe make the best
decisions about where to buy some food.
They're probably not going to buy some great vegetables.
It might be McDonald's because it's more convenient.
It's right there.
You know, and understanding that customers really do need some guidance in
terms of making the best spending decisions, which drives so much because
it's hard to get like good numbers around this, but I mean, something like
25% of companies that are in the series A to B phase do have a tendency to fail
because they don't have good plans around how to use their VC acquired funding.
One thing that we've seen a lot in IT is you got a product that's failing.
Oh, these people are working really hard.
We must, we must need more of the people who help on the customer end.
You know, and it's this tendency to kind of throw money where, where we see
bleeding as opposed to, you know, necessarily stopping that bleeding.
So maybe the problem is the product, you know, and not all of the people who
are trying to scramble to take care of it.
I think that's where guidance from companies, you know, like Real Success
International becomes so important in really being able to take an objective
look at the total customer landscape, the total company landscape to determine,
Hey, is this a good investment right here?
Does it really need to go over here?
You know, does it need to go into some engineering dollars to improve the product?
I think these are some key decisions that can be difficult to make when
you're kind of in an emotional headspace as a business.
Yes.
And, you know, a data driven world, especially with AI enabled data.
Now it doesn't take away the, the need for the human element for people
driving the decision making.
So we get siloed within our organizations.
We get siloed away from our customers, keeping that community going, you know,
having those events out in the community and getting feedback on the spot from
customers, what pain point they're facing, what use case they'd like to be able
to use your product for, and then not having those silos within your
organization where decision makers are not exposed to what's going on with the
frontline and not hearing what's going on.
Sales says a lot about what the customer wants and engineering says a lot about
what the customer wants, but you have to listen to all those voices and really
set up the process, set up the organization to enable that and keep that community
outreach so that your customers feel comfortable telling you what their needs
are and what they want to see going down in the roadmap for the product going forward.
I love that because I think it's important, not only inside the company,
but also externally, because you can definitely create a good internal culture.
It's not one of those speak up cultures where people are still, you know, waiting
to talk to you privately or maybe won't share, you know, hey, they're like, this
product is terrible for these four reasons, you know, and your customers should
feel the same degree, you know, to your point, Trevor, of like comfort with you
to be like, hey, you know, this is what really needs to be improved on this
product, because it's either your employees who will tell you, your
customers who will tell you a Reddit, you know, and I would definitely rather
have one of those first two options.
And really a lot of the first time, especially in the open source community,
the first time the decision, a lot of decision makers are hearing about your
product or somebody from the open source community, you know, someone who's kind
of fallen in love with the product and really wants their company to use it and
wants to be a champion for your product.
And so you should definitely collect those customer success stories as they not
only inform future customers, but they inform you about what your customers are
really seeing is the value of your product.
And it may not be what you think the value of your product is.
Yes.
You know, you listen that, oh, you know, they really liked this feature.
They're really concerned about scalability.
They're really concerned about latency, which oftentimes is what we think the
product is, and then they may add a few more things of how they've used your
product off label to make their lives better.
And then you realize, wow, now we have another source of revenue, another source
of customers that can really use our product.
And we'd never realized before because we didn't have those conversations or you
write your survey based on what you think the customer should be looking at.
And you find out that they're using your product in a different way that's
enhancing their lives and enhancing their business.
We love it.
That almost comes back round to allowing your customers to use their work around
instead of building new features.
If you're constantly reactive to feature requests, then you're never going to
learn those subtleties or those new ways of, of using your products that
could bring you to new markets.
That's an excellent point.
So you'll lose the nuance.
I'm pretty sure there's a podcast about that somewhere.
I think there is.
Maybe it was even by us.
Determining the jobs to be done.
You know, we've talked about that's a very, very critical thing, being able to
understand that, you know, being able to understand what the feedback's really
telling you.
Actually, we had another session on this season with Jennifer Scalf, where we
talked about trying to get through the signal to noise ratio when talking to
customers and how to understand what they're actually telling you.
So that's another good one to listen to as well.
But once you have a grasp on those jobs to be done, what can customer success do
to help the company make sure that it's on the right direction to address those
jobs to be done?
I think one of the big things from my perspective is there are so very many
data points.
The interesting thing to me is being fortunate to come from a cross-functional
background.
You know, I'm aware of other data points, you know, financial ones, for example,
that are very important to be able to see, to see the whole customer landscape of
what's actually going on.
Because just to give a terrible example, one organization where I worked, you
know, we had this customer, this customer loved us, very large customer.
And, you know, they would get on stage, talk about how great we were, you know,
we were really proud of them.
Every survey we sent out to them, like NPS, the customer effort score, you know,
survey, all of the other ones, everything was great, great, great.
They loved us.
Well, then it became time for us to do our upsell, which was very sizable.
And then the customer didn't do it.
And we were like, oh, you know, how could this happen?
They didn't have any money.
We didn't know that, you know, but that was the one data point we were
missing. And that's why I think it's so important to, you know, to have somebody
who's very experienced with the customer service landscape, particularly for your
very high level, high dollar customers that have complicated environments to be
able to see things like this so that you're not surprised.
And, you know, I mean, especially like Trevor, for example, with his background
and, you know, in finance and working with FSI customers, you know, he's
definitely aware of some additional data points, you know, that I'm not from my
background, you know, in federal government and international.
And so, Trevor, I don't know if you have any other kind of thoughts around that
too.
Well, I think if we just look at happiness, we want customers to be happy.
And happiness is not having everything you want, it's wanting everything you
have. And I don't know if you've worked, I'm sure you've all been in companies
where they they're doing a million things, 100 miles per hour, and they're
changing direction three times a week, trying to be everything to every
customer. When they should focus, you know, and that's what customer success
does. It helps you prioritize working with your ideal customer profile and
segmenting your customers in a way that you're not spending a bunch of
resources on a customer who is not producing the revenue to cover those
resources and identifying those opportunities, because that's what the
CEO, what the C team is struggling with is like, we need to do this feature, we
need to do this product, our product needs to do that, because everyone has a
different perspective. And I think it's good, you know, as a team, to have that
cross collaboration, where we sit down and we talk about the problem, and we get
the different perspectives, whether it's a product management perspective, or a
sales perspective, or a customer success perspective. And then, you know, we
determine the priorities. And, you know, who are the at risk customers based on
all those priorities and how we can can better service those customers as well,
so that we not only retain revenue, but we also grow revenue, and we have a road
map. Having, you know, a structured way of doing that produces the results that
we're looking for in retaining and growing customer base.
Did I just answer all the questions?
That was it. You finished. Nobody has any other questions when you have that type
of silence. It's right, you know, so we're on agreement. Yes. Well, I mean,
honestly, I think we've done a fairly good pass of the topic. Danielle, do you
want to give us our closing question?
My spontaneous definitely haven't thought about it before question. Yes, that one.
Okay. There's a blip in the matrix, and you've got an extra day in your week. You
can travel anywhere. How would you spend your time?
I guess that goes to each of you individually.
Yeah. Well, I don't know, you might choose to spend the day together. And then
there's your answer.
That's fantastic. Just personally, and I know Trevor is too, I'm a big world
traveler and say this is a hard question to try to try to answer maturely. But,
um, you know, I would definitely from a business perspective want to go visit,
you know, some of my top customers and by top customers, I mean customers with
the most complicated environments, with the most, you know, aggressive goals
about how they want to grow their environments and have a face to face
conversation with them to understand, you know, what drives their motivation to
do this? Why, you know, what's their why, you know, how did they get into this,
you know, to really deeply understand what types of things drive the customer
and the company, and then to understand, you know, how in the art of the
possible, we can work with them, you know, to try to get to some of those
kind of delighters that I was talking about earlier.
But also they'd have to be in exotic locations, right?
Your low temperature, 80 degrees or greater. I'll go anywhere.
That is a much more business focused answer. I was just going to say, I would
go scuba diving. I didn't realize we were still talking about actual customer
success, but I would go scuba diving if I had choice of that day off.
You can. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you guys so much.
Thank you for making time for us both, Ivy. This has been really great.
And, you know, we're so proud to be a part of the podcast and thank you.
Thank you. It was good having you on.
Yes, thank you very much. Appreciate it.
And Trevor, it's good to see you again.
Yeah, it's good to see you as well.
That was really cool and so much fun to talk to two people instead of one
person. And it's fun.
Yeah, I agree. That was, that was a different experience this time.
That was good.
There's lots of talking. What did you think? What did you learn?
Yeah. So a couple of points that I really liked was that the first pillar is that
you want to choose the right customer. So often we choose the customer that's
convenient, but may not be right for what we want to do.
And so I think that was a really key point that was brought up during this
discussion. I also really liked the statement because I feel it's not just a
business application, but it's also a life application piece.
Happiness is wanting what you have, not having everything you want.
So I felt that that was pretty poignant of a moment.
Danielle, what did you think?
Yeah, that, that happiness is wanting what you have.
It feels kind of one that written on the wall behind me in my office or something.
We can make that happen.
We sure can. I really liked hearing that workarounds aren't always a bad thing.
Don't just jump to building new features because a customer is asking for it.
If they have a workaround, there might be some value in that itself and some
learnings there. And then also just giving space to allow for the value of
the product, not being where you think it is.
Customers are going to utilize your thing in different ways.
And so really kind of deep diving into that understanding where all these value
points are and that kind of customer landscape as a whole is super valuable.
I also really liked the call.
I think it was Amy that said customers often throw money at the bleeding point,
not the root cause of a problem.
And that I think is just so true.
That's going to sit with me for quite some weeks.
I think.
Yeah, that was a good one as well.
I like that too.
I can't write that on the wall though.
Let us know what your takeaways were.
What comments made you think?
What new thoughts did you have listening to this week's podcast?
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listening to an American and a Brit natter on about product management.
I don't think you can call it nattering.
I guess actually we did stay on topic and it's not technically nattering.
Exactly.
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