In this episode, Jay Nathan, EVP & Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic, discusses the proper mindset to scale customer success, the challenges of counting on customer relationships, and his homegrown customer success community, Gain Grow Retain.
Today’s episode features an interview with Jay Nathan, EVP & Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic. Higher Logic is an industry leader in cloud-based engagement platforms with a data-driven approach that gives organizations an expanded suite of engagement capabilities.
By serving in a variety of executive roles across customer success, product, services, and account management, Jay has developed a powerful methodology for building, leading, and scaling SaaS companies serving a wide range of end markets and customer sizes.
In this episode, Jay discusses the proper mindset to scale customer success, the challenges of counting on customer relationships, and his homegrown customer success community, Gain Grow Retain.
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“And now, as you take on leadership roles, and you know this because you do the same thing, you solve problems for groups of customers at a time, not just one at a time. And that's the beautiful thing about customer success and having a more strategic role, go-to-market planning, and all these other pieces is that you're actually solving problems at scale, which is more fun ultimately than solving them one at a time, at least for me.” - Jay Nathan
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**(04:11) Jay’s journey to Higher Logic
**(12:35) The importance of community in CS
**(18:54) The Gain Grow Retain podcast
**(29:51) Relationship, value, and engagement
**(39:11) Quick hits
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This podcast was created by the team at Totango. Design and run best-in-class customer journeys with no-code, visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration and optimization, and predictable scale-up growth. Join over 5,000 customers from startups to fast-growing enterprises using the industry’s only Composable Customer Success Platform. Start for free at Totango.com.
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Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn
Learn more about Gain Grow Retain
Jay: And now, you know, as you take on leadership roles, and you know this because you do the same thing, but you solve problems for groups of customers at a time, not just one at a time. Right. And that's the beautiful thing about customer success and having a more strategic role in go to market planning and all these other pieces is that you're actually solving problem at scale, which is more fun ultimately than solving them one at a time, at least for me.
Narrator: Hello and welcome to CS No BS, your practical playbook for delivering net revenue retention, the Holy Grail of Customer Growth, hosted by Jamie Bertasi, COO and President of Totango. Today's episode features an interview with Jay Nathan, EVP and Chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic.
Higher Logic is an industry leader in cloud-based engagement platform. With a data driven approach that gives organizations an expanded suite of engagement capabilities by serving in a variety of executive roles across customer success, product services, and account management. Jay has developed a powerful methodology for building, leading and scaling SaaS companies, serving a wide range of end markets and customer.
In this episode, Jay discusses the proper mindset to scale customer success, the challenges of counting on customer relationships, and his homegrown customer success, community Gain, Grow, Retain. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsor. Don't get stuck waiting on a rigid time intensive build for your customers success software.
Start right away and see immediate value. Totango, the industry's only composable customer success platform. Enjoy a modular platform that enables easy iteration and optimization to drive predictable scale up growth. Start for free Totango.com. And now please enjoy this interview with Jay Nathan, EVP and Chief Customer Officer at Higher
Jamie: Logic.
Jay, thanks so much for being here. I'm super privileged to have you. And just, you know, uh, really wanna thank you for your time on joining our podcast.
Jay: Absolutely. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Jamie. You're welcome.
Jamie: You're welcome. Okay, so let's jump right in. Tell us a bit about your company, higher Logic, you know, what does it do and what's the scope of your role?
Jay: Sure. Yeah. So Higher Logic. We're a customer community platform company, and so we help our customers scale customer success utilizing community strategies and technology underneath that, I'm sure we can get into a lot more detail about what that means later, but, uh, my role is, I'm. Actually responsible for one of our business units, and I'm our Chief Customer Officer, so our business unit that sells into B2B and B to C organizations.
I, I oversee that and then have the responsibility as cco. Awesome.
Jamie: So how big is Higher Logic? Maybe give a little bit more background on the company, number of customers, that kind of thing.
Jay: Yeah, sure. We, so we've been around since the late, uh, I don't know, what do they call it? The Knots 2007 2008 timeframe.
We have about 3000 customers worldwide. Serve two markets. We serve the association market, and if you don't know what that is, nonprofit trade organizations, professional organizations on one side, and then B2B tech, SaaS technology companies on the other side, and also b2c. We have a lot of, like plg, a lot of big name brand kind of.
So they deploy our technology to help scale the engagement with their. Drive net retention and also reduce their cost. And that's a big topic we're seeing right now. I imagine we, we dig into that a little bit here today too. Efficiency is just a big focus of why people would deploy customer community software.
So about 3000 clients team is about three hundred and fifty, three hundred seventy today. Uh, we're based on the East coast, so, um, Arlington, Virginia is where our headquarters are, although we are. A fully remote workforce now. So that's been a transition we've gone through over the past two and a half years since I joined the
Jamie: business.
Tell us a little bit about your journey and how you ended up, uh, you know, running this business unit and as, uh, chief Customer Officer at Higher Logic.
Jay: I joined Higher Logic in July of 2020, and hopefully most of the people that listed this podcast know about the gain, grow, retain, community, gain, grow, retain.
It's a bit of a tongue twister. We call it GGR for short, but it's a community that we launched during really in the. Earliest days of the pandemic. And I always tell people, we actually launched it in 2018, late 2018 when we started our podcast called Gang Ro Retain as well, and got real active talking about customer success topics on LinkedIn.
So fast forward to the pandemic, everything was starting to shut down. We, we started, um, I had a consulting firm back then, and we just started this office hours call for anybody who was interested in joining. We kept it wide open, it was on Zoom and just brought people together. What are you planning to do during, you know, the pandemic?
Like, how are you gonna handle all the issues that you're now seeing in your workforce and your customer base? And before we knew it, a, a true community had been born higher. Logic had been a customer of ours from a consulting standpoint. So I had worked with the team. Prior, had a relationship there and, um, I was talking with Kevin, my now boss, our CEO one Friday afternoon about some go to market strategy, partnership options, stuff that he was looking at in the CS space.
And, you know, one thing led to another and then six weeks later the transaction was done. And, and we, we joined Higher Logic and brought gain, grow, retain with us. And now ggr is actually part of how we get back to the customer success community and, and engage. So it's, uh, it's a pretty cool story. I. Of how we ended up here.
Jamie: It is a, it is a cool story. Yeah. Super interesting. But how about you personally? Like what was the road to chief customer officer? Why not some other
Jay: role? Yeah. Well, good question. Um, I, so I started out my career in technology. I was actually an engineer right out of school. Engineer might be a strong term.
I was more of a developer, I guess you could say. Um, but always real hands on technical database work analytics. That was really where I cut my teeth and that all serves me very well today in leadership roles and that. Us to really understand data and get insights and that kind of thing. But started down that path, got into services world and so my first software company that I joined was a company called Black bod.
I moved to Charleston with my family in 2005, and that's where I live today in Charleston, South Carolina. And, uh, worked for Black Bought and, and ran a, a services organization there that, that served a software business or software customers and, you know, learned what it was like to scale and grow a professional services organization.
Then I went into product management for a few years. Of course, when you're in services, you see all the problems with your products, right? And then you think you can go fix them. So then you go to product management. It's a, it's actually a pretty well defined, uh, path. We have a lot of folks from our services teams.
Today that have gone on to product careers, which is really cool. Did that for a few years. And then I got asked to come join a earlier stage startup in Charleston, where I had my first, what I would call executive role. So I reported to the ceo, was part of the meetings every week where we went through go to market, we went through, you know, business strategy, we went through operations, finance, HR customers, all of it together.
So got to see the big picture and. Really, I think that was a big growth point for me to be able to, to be exposed to the broader business like that in a smaller company. So when I, we sold that company, I left there and then started my own company. Ran that for a few years and then we, we did the gang grow retain thing and ended up here at Higher Logic.
So I don't know best way to describe it. Jamie is like a goat path ,
Jamie: you know, I think. So you didn't set out when you were 22 years old and say to yourself, geez, what I wanna be when I'm all grown up as a Chief Customer
Jay: Officer? I don't think there was anything called a Chief Customer officer when I was in college, but very few if there were.
Mm-hmm. . I mean, I don't know if you're remembering, but I, I don't. So it's a relatively new role and it's, I guess, you know, for context on that role, you asked what the areas of responsibility are Chief customer Officer really oversees, at least in B2B SaaS. Overseas, customer implementation, professional services, customer support and customer success, the, the part of the world that we probably talk about the most, but it's actually just a piece of the overall customer success strategy in any organization.
And it's got influence on go to market, on product in all sorts of different things. It's really gotta be a more cross-functional role at that level. But yeah, so no, I didn't anticipate. All right. But
Jamie: you enjoy it?
Jay: Yeah, I do enjoy it. I do enjoy it. I, I, I think, you know, even in the services world, I always enjoyed solving problems for customers.
And now, you know, as you take on leadership roles, and you know this cuz you do the same thing, but you solve problems for groups of customers at a time, not just one at a time. Right. And that's, that's the beautiful thing about customer success and having a more strategic role. Go to market planning and all these other pieces is that you're actually solving problems at scale, which is.
More fun ultimately than solving them one at a time.
Jamie: Yes. At least a lot more impactful for sure. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, so then let's talk a little bit more about, um, uh, vanilla. Let's go there first. We'll come back over to gain, grow routine. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, alright. Um, you acquired I think something called Vanilla Forms if I forums, if I understand correctly.
And you launched Higher Logic Vanilla earlier this year, and you know, I obviously it looks like to be an amazing product, fantastic for community. So, you know, how do you see that being kind of a game changer for higher
Jay: logic? Yeah, so, Vanilla forums was, was, you're right, that's a company we bought in May of 2021 and they joined the Higher Logic family at that point.
And, um, it was that their product was really built from the ground up for, uh, the kind of customers that we serve and that we are, that Totango is, and higher logic is we're we're B2B technology companies and, you know, built from the ground up that way. Simple to deploy. That was the, the goal. Then also scale.
Open APIs integrated with a lot of other systems. We don't live in a vacuum. Nobody lives in a vacuum. Yeah. No software vendor. Unless maybe you're Salesforce, you can dictate everything. Right. But at the end of the day, we know we have to be a, a piece of software and a tool that integrates with a lot of other technologies in the ecosystem and a lot of other data.
So we brought the vanilla, we brought vanilla forms into the business, and then we rebranded it as a product. So we, we now call it higher logic vanilla, but it's still part of, you know, part of our overall customer engagement. The. Sweet of, of, of products and platforms. Yep. And I
Jamie: gotta, I gotta ask about the name, vanilla.
So can we expect chocolate and strawberry, or where'd the name come from? Well,
Jay: I think the name was originally meant to signify simplicity and so, and, and ease of use. And so that, that's, that's. Where the name came from to the best of my recollection. But the funny part about what you just said is higher logic's colors were, are still, our brand colors are bright orange.
So we always talked about, hey, this is perfect. We're gonna have dreamsicle now we've got the, you know, the bright orange coating on the vanilla inside. So, yeah. But vanilla, uh, hydrologic vanilla is the, that is the product that we lead with today. When we, when new customers come to us as, Your listeners probably are well aware.
It's if you have multiple products that, that do the same things and you're trying to have your customers or your sales team, sorry, decipher which one to sell, it can get complex. So we've decided to, to lead with the higher logic vanilla platform in our new business. But we have a lot of customers on the higher logic platforms that existed before we bought Vanilla Forms as well, and we take great care.
Jamie: Yeah. And all this, I'm sure all this creates complexity for, uh, for scaling cs, which we'll come back to in just a Sure. A few moments. Okay. So we talked about gain, grow, retain, which is awesome. An open community for customer success leaders in the B2B SaaS space. So why do you think community is so critical for business and for CS in general?
Jay: I think the world is changing a. What we did in the early 2010s in terms of lead generation, that was when inbound marketing really took, really took off. Um, it it, the world's just changed a lot in terms of privacy, in terms of the competition for people's attention, in terms of the, the way that customers expect you to engage with them.
I mean, even just the past two years, it's changed a lot. So community to me is much bigger. A piece of software or you know, a way of deflecting support cases. It's actually how you engage the ecosystem that you serve in a broader way than just your product. So gain, grow, retain is the perfect example of that There, it actually isn't, there's no product associated with gain, grow, retain the product is the ecosystem of customer success.
Leaders that learn from one another and the content that we. in that community for people to learn and grow and, and it, it's been really cool to watch over the past few years. We get, I mean, Jeff, who co-founded that with me, Jeff Brunk, some many people would know who he is as well. We get notes all the time from people that are, that are just thankful that such a community exists, that they have been able to get career opportunities and learn something and change from, you know, maybe being a teacher into customer success or moving from, you know, some other function within a technology company into customer success and.
It's really rewarding. We don't accept all that, all that gratitude. Well, we do accept the gratitude, but we don't, we don't claim that we were responsible for it because the community did that. We just sort of helped build the place for it to live. Um, but anyway, that's the kind of impact community can have and what, how that translates to a B2B technology company is, you know, you're helping people that are in similar jobs to one another learn how to be better at their jobs and, and, Get better at what they do and implement technologies in a better way, um, that makes them successful.
And that's what it's all about. Cuz customer success really starts with the individuals who are your points of contact, your champions, your, your users who need to learn. How to use your technology so that they can meet their business goals. So it really does tie in well with, with what we do in customer success.
The other piece of it, Jamie, is especially right now as you think about where we're headed from an economic standpoint, we're all gonna be asked to do more with less. I can almost guarantee that all your listeners are going through budgeting processes and looking at headcount right now. And the CEO and the board are gonna be asking, how can we do this again next year without adding as many head count as you think we need to add.
Right.
Jamie: Or even reducing, I think.
Jay: Mm-hmm. or even reducing, we're seeing a lot of that. I mean, just recently. Just yesterday, right. Meta laid off 11,000 people. It's not the only place that's happening by any stretch of the imagination. , we've got to change our mindset around how we scale customer success.
It's not a one to one business cannot be. Now, there's one to one activity that happens, but we believe, and I believe that that's backed by a strong community, a strong customer community where customers are getting value from from each other. They're getting value from you at scale, and they're still getting the human interac.
in a way that makes sense to them and for the
Jamie: business. Yeah, we, I totally agree. I think, um, to scale, you know, one of the things you've gotta really kind of figure out is a way that you can do as much with the technology and with, you know, all of your, um, other assets, including community, and then have your human beings doing the things only the humans can do.
And otherwise, I think what you end up with is, you know, a world where you have. Human beings doing kind of rote activities, which isn't really very, um, I would say very inspiring for, for most people. They don't wanna just go from like one cadence call to the next all day long, having the exact same conversation with a customer.
Right? That's not. They're not learning, they're not growing, they're not, you know, it's, it's kind of a, it leads to burnout. So I think for sure, for sure. I think, uh, there's lots of tools now, community being one of 'em, the CS platforms, like Totango as an example, being another where you could tap into this stuff to really help your team and take it to the next level and scale it economically.
Okay. So how has your focus on community then, uh, made you a better, more impactful leader?
Jay: Oh man. That's a really good question. I, I think just, just thinking, pivoting the way that I, that I think, again, like my background is in professional services. I was used to solving, you know, one problem at a time, handling one escalation at a time.
You know, 15, 17 years ago, you know, this, this wasn't my first foray in a community. I, I helped build a user community when I was at Black Bo back in the late two thousands and, You know, we, we did that for our developer community. We were launching a way for them to interact and learn from one another because we knew we didn't have all the answers always Right.
And it sort of goes back to what you just said as well, if a CSM is hopping from call to call to call. There's only so much value that they can offer as well. They've seen a lot that they haven't seen everything. What about having, that's for sure. People who sit in similar seats to one another learn from each other.
So I think for me, it's just been a, a journey to learn. And still, I'm still learning clearly. But, um, to learn how to build for scale, you also have to, it changes the way you recruit the kind of people that you put in your teams that can operate that way. It changes the way that you communicate and drive change because, Teaching people how to go from the one-to-one mindset to the, to the one toing and scaled mindset is different, um, or it's a skill set within itself.
Um, but I, I think, you know, it changes you in a lot of ways as you, as you start to think, you know, community. Community first with the overlaid human impact, the way you described it, right,
Jamie: exactly. So, hey, gang, grow Routine has a podcast, and I believe you actually co-host that podcast. So how's that experience been for you?
I, I love the podcast. I gotta say, oh
Jay: yeah. Well, good. No, um, that it, it's been really fun because we keep it sort of like you do very informal, what I like to call it. It's a conversation between hopefully several interesting people that we just record so that other people can listen in on it, and we talk about things that hopefully are topical and interesting.
We've been doing that since, I think I, I can't remember when our first episode was, like either late 29, 20 18 or early 2019, but we've got, I think we're coming up on. Pretty soon, 250 episodes. So what I've noticed is a lot of, a lot of organizations will start a podcast and you can tell it's hard to keep the commitment to it because they'll fizzle out after 15 or 20 episodes, which is fine.
Some podcasts are, are meant to be little miniseries, and that's okay, but we've always prioritized that as a way to just keep the commitment going. You know, I wanna, I wanna publish more on our podcast. We, we, at one point were publishing three or four episodes per week. It's a lot, but if you keep it informal, wow.
Um, it can be done. Mm-hmm. , we're, we're down to one episode right now per week, but they're a little higher quality. But, um, there's just so many great conversations that we get to have every week. I, I think everybody should be entitled to hear some of those. And so, yeah, it's been, it's been fun. We've met so many great people through the process.
I'm sure you have too, Jamie, and um, it's fun. Yeah. I never thought I'd be a podcast host. It sounds funny, but .
Jamie: Right up there with cco. Come on. You said you graduated school and you were a developer, .
Jay: Yeah, that's right, that's right. No,
Jamie: it's all great. Okay, so as EVP and chief customer Officer, what would you say is the biggest challenge you and your team face?
Jay: I think it, it probably has less to do with the role. Itself and more to do with just the stage of company that we're in. So we're 375 people. And you know, 15 years ago, I'm sorry, five years ago, this company was a, a very small business compared to what it is today. We've grown probably six or eight x and some of it through acquisition.
Right. So there's just a lot of change and, and part of what you have to. Sort of managed through with an earlier stage company moving into a mid stage company, moving into a large stage is the things you did to get to where you got aren't the things that are that you gotta do to get to the next level.
Right? And at some point, I won't be the right fit to take us to the next level either because my experience goes only so far. And so, It's all change management and how, how you, how you drive that. I think that's, that's been the hardest thing. The, you know, leading through the pandemic has been the hardest work I've done, I think in my career because we've done it all virtually.
We've managed a lot of change here in the two and a half years that I've been at Higher Logic, you know, lots of other outside factors affecting. Right. The political unrest, it wasn't just the pandemic, it was political unrest. It was, uh, or I shouldn't say political unrest. It was politics and social unrest and, and a lot of different dynamics going on.
And so when we all look back at this, I think in a few years, and now we're getting ready to go through something completely different, although still hard, right? I think we're all gonna sort of pat ourselves on the back a little bit that we, we've been able to lead through. Because it's been a very, very tough time.
Not, I mean, for individual contributors and the people on our teams. A hundred percent leadership too, we're people
Jamie: too. Exactly. Yeah. I agree completely. I think it's like just kind of so fascinating because the world changed just one day. Right. You know? And. It's really never gone back to the way that it was.
I mean, you mentioned for you guys that you were, you've now went kind of overnight to fully remote and, um, you know, you're reading now so many interesting articles about all these companies trying to get all the employees to come back to the office. Right. The most recent one being Elon Musk's comments with Twitter and everything else.
I know. Geez. But, um, but I think that, You know, as a result, you know, the employees really do like working from home, but at the same time, that creates some challenges. Like even in the CS world, I see this as, you know, these challenges because how do you grow, right? As a, as a, say, entry level csm or let's say like a teacher, you're describing someone who's great in the classroom, but has had a, had a mid-career switch to being a csm.
How. You know, have those opportunities to learn and to, um, just, you know, kind of identify mentors for yourself in the organization. You know, think back again, like coming back to your own career. You were at the, you were, you know, the engineer and now you're the chief customer officer, and you obviously did that by learning from other people as you went along.
I mean, What if you're not interacting with other people, how are you gonna learn? You know, it's so, it's so challenging. And what are some of the techniques you guys are using, uh, to kinda overcome that? Hopefully not, hopefully not spying. Right? No tracking ,
Jay: we are not doing that. Um, but, well, I think there's a, there's a couple angles to that and that, that really puts the onus back on the leaders to be better leaders and use the tool.
Like frankly, we've had a lot of the tools to do. In a virtual way for a long time. The pandemic sped up digital adoption and digital transformation for a lot of companies by a decade. Right. So some of it is the tools and technologies you use. Look at Miro, look at mural. Uh, mural is a customer of ours, by the way.
Mm-hmm. , look at gong. Right? Great platform for, for being able to listen and coach. So yes, you are spying a little bit there, right? But it's really in the spirit of coaching and, and listening. What are your customers saying? How are your, how are your teams reacting? But then it's in the management cadences that we put into place as well.
I'd be lying if I told you we had it all figured out, Jamie. But you know, some of the things that we do are really trying to put together, I call 'em containers. So places where, you know, we're not gonna have a meeting on every single thing to do coaching and sort of performance management, but every person has a one-on-one with their manager every week or two weeks, right?
Every one-on-one has a shared agenda that you populate beforehand. If we can just do that step alone. Helps people feel better about the conversations that they're having and more confidence in the one-on-ones that they're having with their leader. The biggest connection that people have with the company is with their direct manager.
So those are two little tiny steps that we've taken to make sure we actually measure that. We measure it. Yeah, so those are, that's a, that's a container where things get solved. We also have team containers, so we have something we call a working team concept at Hi. And our, our CEO is big on this, Kevin, if, if you've got a cross-functional initiative or a cross-functional problem to solve or an ongoing need, then you should have a working team for that.
So we have working teams for all kinds of stuff that aren't just. Groups of CSMs working on things. We have that too. But this is where I'm sitting in a room with my cto, with my ceo, with my chief product officer and our chief strategy guy, and we're literally talking through the problems of the week together.
Not in an overly structured way, but really more of a like, let's build camaraderie. Let's build some trust between us and let's go solve problems. Like that's something we do every single week. Um, we have monthly business reviews where we take a metrics driven approach to looking at the business, and we bring a lot more people in at the management level so everybody in management can see how we're thinking about the business.
As a business and holding it together. We have town halls on a quarterly basis. We have weekly updates. Our, my ceo Kevin, is one of the most consistent human beings on earth. He's, he was a, a chief operating officer for a decade before he came here, and he has done a weekly update via video for our team every single Wednesday since the pandemic started.
Does
he
Jamie: record it or he just has like a Zoom
Jay: meeting? No, he records it every week. Oh, okay. Mm-hmm. . Um, and so, you know, we, we've taken a lot of steps just to drive a cadence of communication and to identify where do we need additional places. to communicate better. And what do we communicate in those different containers?
Um, we just had an executive team offsite, and one of the things we did was we said, okay, let's take a second and stop and back up. We have a daily standup for our executive team and we have a weekly executive team meeting. How's it working? Is it what we want it to be? And we're reevaluating that now. So there's, we're constantly looking at it and trying to refine it as well.
So I think if you're not working on it, that's the problem. Are you ever gonna be perfect? Probably not, but you gotta be working on these things,
Jamie: so. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, totally. And I think the daily standup is tough too. Sometimes when you, things that worked in person are tougher in a remote setting, especially in a global setting, right?
Cause you get to a point where you've got people all over the place. The problem is there's not a great time. You know, to get everybody at the same time. So that's why I think things like the video that your CEO's doing, kind of an interesting idea. I, uh, saw, saw a, uh, talk by a woman who ran, um, apple, uh, stores.
She was formerly the CEO of, um, Burberry, and she basically recorded like a 32nd video. And I don't remember if she said she did it every day or every week, but it was very frequent and it was, uh, but very, very short on person on purpose so that people would. Open it and read it, you know, listen to it and that kind of thing.
So it's interesting, you know, just see how just even those, those types of, um, methods are changing. Cause I guarantee you, your CEO probably 15 years ago, never thought he'd be doing that. No,
Jay: probably not. . I mean, I mean, what is that, that the, the parallel to that in our own personal lives are Instagram reels, TikTok, like it's these short snippets and.
If you're really, you're onto something there, because if you can get in the cadence of communicating more regularly, people look at video or even see like, you know, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. People will feel like they know me because they see me pop up on their LinkedIn feed every other day or whatever it is that I, you know, get around to posting and, and so there's a salience factor there too.
My leadership is still here. I don't see them every day, but I'm hearing from them. Yeah, there there's, that's there. There's a lot to. .
Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Okay, we better get back over to customer success. This, this is probably one of our instances. It's the name of the podcast is Cs, no Bs. Maybe we'll switch gears into some of the, some of the thornier issues there.
Okay. All right. So you've said customer success is a matter of focus on just three things, relationship, value and engagement, and can you explain how you see these three facets working?
Jay: Yeah. Well, I mean, first of all, every, every relationship you have with a customer is based on value. Typically, there's a contract, right?
And a contract is really just a document that says, Hey, here's how we're gonna exchange value dollars for product and service. That's it. Now we know we can't lean purely. A contract, we've gotta deliver on that value, which is the whole premise of customer success. Right. And sometimes, oftentimes it does take relationships to do that, but I think relationships go broader than just the CSM relationship with the customer.
Well, like we've, like we've touched on. We've had record turnover over the past few years in our companies, so of our customers, and so you can't necessarily only rely on relationships. You have to consistently deliver value with your product. Now, sometimes those relationships will are going to help you.
Often they do when you have hiccups in that exchange of value. So very, very, very symbiotic. The engagement piece to me is, It's sort of back to that salience factor. I feel like even with our customers today, just like when they were prospects or accounts that we would love to have as customers, you are having to fight for their attention because they have 20 other vendors that are also trying to have acute br or trying to meet with them on some kind of cadence where they can understand where things are and, but the, but the real question is how are you engaging them?
Outside of having a call, do they have a, do they respect who your brand is and what you're providing for them as a business? Or do they just respect or have, have that interaction with a customer success manager and is it deep enough with the brand to really validate the exchange of value that's in the contract?
So I think all three of these things hang together in a really interesting way. Now, I don't know when I wrote that, so I probably have a bunch of other ideas too that we could add into the mix. . That's how those three things hang together for me.
Jamie: All right. How about another one, another set of your words coming back to you for con for comments.
Word haing. Me. . That's the video of you putting out a lot of stuff here, so it's so fun, Jay. Okay. You've written that most customer success teams deliver on a one-to-one basis, but tech touch is dead. What would your recommended approach be instead?
Jay: Um, yeah, I don't, I've never loved the term tech touch.
because what I like instead is scaled human touch because nobody wants to be touched by your technology. , no offense, right? Nobody wants to be touched by our technology, but what people do want is authentic engagement. . And if you can do that at scale, if you can write like a human being, don't write like you think a company should sound.
Um, that's really what I mean by that. And it's not just like tech touch, I think a lot of times implies us just hammering our customers with emails, that's not really what we need, right? That's not really what they need. So I think it's a combination of community engagement. The hi scaled human engagement might be as a company, our CSM might not need to be in the middle.
Uh, exchange, right? If, if we can connect one of our customers to another one of our customers that sits in the same, in the same seat and has the same job and they can collaborate with one another, that's scaled human touch, right? Just many to many. So I just, I bristle at the term in some ways the concept, but I think it's a, this is really just, you know, community to me is so much bigger than sending a bunch of emails to our customer.
Jamie: Yeah, I totally agree. I think, you know, we refer to as digital, you know, our digital engagement, our digital touch, this, this kind of thing. And I think it's appropriate really for all the segments of the customers. And you know, you do see a lot of folks who are thinking of that only as something for the really the smallest customers.
But I think if you have something of value, like let's just say your CEO video, right? Or the, the head of Apple stores video was talking about, that's a digital engage. And that would apply to all employees at your company, not just, you know, employees of a certain type because it, it adds value to your point.
So, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Super
Jay: interesting. And actually we hear that a lot. Um, people will stand up scaled. Customer success programs because it's hard to keep up with the demand and the long tail of customers. But then the next thing they'll tell you is, oh man, we realize that those programs don't just apply to the long tail of customers are we have enterprise customers that come get value outta those programs as well.
And so I, I, I think you're spot on. . Yeah.
Jamie: You know, and also it's interesting that you should mention about, we were talking about kind of growing the CSMs and how do you move your career forward? And I know that that's, uh, something that's of interest to many people. The fact that, let me see if I can remember what you said you were saying about that.
It was, um, Now I'm losing my, my own train of thought here, Jay. Hold on. It's gonna come back to me in a second.
Jay: Was it hard skills versus to soft skills?
Jamie: Oh, no, no. It was about, you know, it was about the idea of, um, about, uh, CSMs kind of understanding and growing from just having that kind of one on one cadence and to understanding how to build out a digital program or these other kinds of things that are kind of the way of the future, right?
As everyone's gone through digital transformations. One of the things that I'm thinking that we should really maybe try and do is do more programs along those lines to bring the CS community along as a group. Because what I find from interviewing CSMs a lot of times is that, that what they've experienced thus far has been that one-to-one touch, and I have to believe people would be very interested, interested in learning these additional skills that are the, you know, kind of the way of the future.
Jay: I, I completely agree with that because, . And I think it, there's a couple of facets to it, Jamie. It's, we think like a, think like a business owner, , right? We all have to think like business owners. We should, um, and I think we are business owners, Jay. Well, we are business, business owners. Yes, absolutely. But the customer success community at large, this is one area I would like.
And I see it, it's happening, but the community needs to continue to grow and think like business people in as much as they think as customer people. Because if you're a CSM or a manager of CSMs and you see your team on 15 calls a week answering the same thing over and over, like what's your first inclination there?
Is it just to do more of that and hire more head? or is it to solve that problem in a different way so that it, the business is more effective. Right. And I can do more with fewer headcount. Like that's just being a good steward of the resources that we have allotted to us no matter what part of the organization you sit in.
That goes for even outside of cx, right? Exactly. Outside of the co
Jamie: organiz. Totally. And, and I think that's the kind of thing people are using Totango for, to be able to track that stuff and kind of understand, you know, oh my God, look, I'm getting the same question, you know, across my entire customer success team, you know, three times a day you add that up and find another way to get that thing answered proactively and you get all that time back.
Right. So I, I totally agree. I. . And so, but I think what's needed a little bit too is like just this, this opportunity for the industry, for people to come along in their thinking and to come along in their learning and so forth. And I think that that would, you know, that's something that's, um, and you see a lot of that in LinkedIn, right?
Where people are kind of all about, um, you know, the one to one customer relationship. And ultimately the, the challenge here is you and I both know it's tough to hire great cs. And then even if you hire great CSMs, if you have a very successful business, you're gonna add customers a lot faster than CSMs.
Jay: That's right. And then it's tough to keep CSMs. It's tough. . I mean, it's back to that, right? It's, yes. So it it, there's room for both. There's absolutely a necessity for both, but I think we have to do both. And what we haven't done as an industry is the scaled piece very well. But I think we're not gonna have an option going into 2023.
It's gonna. Everybody's looking at it. ,
Jamie: I guess it's like going fully remote. We're on board.
Jay: We're making it happen. We're hitting the tipping point, whether we like it or not. Most, most, um, most, I shouldn't say most, that's a very broad statement, but a lot of technology companies have never been through a recession before.
Right? I mean, a lot of the people that we work with have never been through a recession before. This is the first time this will force. 2023 will be a year of change for our
Jamie: industry. I'm gonna, I'm gonna date myself and I've got, say I've gone through two already. This is my third.
Jay: Yeah. Yeah. 2008, 2009, 2001.
Mm-hmm. . Yep. I was coming outta school in 2001. It was
Jamie: tricky. It was tricky for sure. Okay. Let's see. What advice would you give your younger
Jay: self? Be more vulnerable and ask more questions. Don't think you know it all. . Sometimes I still have to re remind myself. .
Jamie: Mm-hmm. . Yep. Yeah, it's interesting. I guess when you're younger, I think all of us are like this, right?
You feel like you have to kind of project that confidence all the time. Mm-hmm. .
Jay: Yep. Yeah. No, so that, that's it. Yeah. Interesting.
Jamie: Okay. Um, onto a couple more personal questions before we wrap up. So, what's something you read, watched, or listened to recently that you can't let go?
Jay: Oh. There is a book called Setting the Table by Danny Meyer.
Have you heard of this book before? I have not. Mm-hmm. Danny Meyer is the founder of Shake Shack. Oh, I love that place. And even. Beyond Shake Shack prior to Shake Shack, many very, very successful restaurants, uh, in New York. And it's cool because his whole, his whole spiel is about hospitality, and I think the way that he implements hospitality in both the high touch world of a fine dining restaurant and the scale.
Model of like a Shake Shack, fast food. I mean, if you've ever been to a , you've been to a Shake Shack, that's high scale, right? But the experience is still amazing, and the quality of the, the value of the product you get is amazing. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . Um, so I just really like the, the concepts in that book and it inspired me.
And a lot of times I think we get, we sort of get into this echo chamber of customer success. Um, but that, that's one that, that's, it's a book that's completely outside of it that I think has a lot of applicability, but, It's just completely different at the same time. The other book that I really, really enjoy, have enjoyed for years, and I've got it right up here myself, behind me, it's one of the orange ones.
It's called The Sales Acceleration Formula, and it's by Mark Roers, who was the, I think he was the first. Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot. But that book, it's a sales book ostensibly, but it's about customer success and it's about Oh wow. Using content and education to drive value for prospects which turn them into customers.
And I think it's, it's also, you know, from that perspective, it's a, it's a book about community and so our world, all the changes that I mentioned earlier and how, how people's attention and buying habits are changing. I think that book and those concepts continue to be very relevant today, even though the technology and the techniques may, may be evolving, but very much, very much a community book.
So I like that one too. There's probably a bunch of others as well.
Jamie: Okay. Well no, those are two good ones. Love that. All right. What advice would you give to someone else starting out in your role today?
Jay: Um, in my role at my company or in my role in general,
Jamie: however you'd
Jay: like to do it. I think you got to really focus on the people first.
First focus on the requirements. Let me say that first, focus on the requirements. What do you need from a business outcome perspective and then a strategy perspective. How will you go achieve that? How will you win? And then do I have the right people in the right places to make that work? Because if you get those three questions answered, everything else gets easier.
It's when we have the wrong people, in the wrong roles, in the wrong places, doing the wrong things, that everything feels difficult and hard. And I've been in both situations in my career. So, you know, start with some clarity around what you wanna achieve, how you wanna achieve it. Make sure the skill sets and the both the skill and the will of the people that you're working with lines up against that strategy and you, you will have a much better chance at winning.
And then this is all about operationalization. You have to. If you, if you wanna do those things, you have to go measure what you expect, monitor it. You can't just expect it to happen. So this is a very active role. It's not a passive
Jamie: role. Yep. I agree. No set. Forget. All right. If you weren't working at your current company or in CS at all, what would you be doing?
Jay: I would probably be a musician of some sort if somebody would pay me to do that. I don't know if I'd be making any money on it, but I would be, if you go read my LinkedIn profile, it says, Dream in retirement is to start a Jimmy Buffet cover band, and that's what I would love to do. It would be so much fun.
So, It'd be something having to do with music. I don't know if it'd be a Jimmy Buffett cover band anymore, but yes, it would be music. Well, there's kind
Jamie: of like a hamburger theme here. We've got the Cheeseburger and Paradise along with the Shake Shack book, so I, I'm thinking you're like, you know, kind of a, a red meat lover Jay.
Jay: You're piecing my life together for me. This is great, .
Jamie: All right, so anyway, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and I just wanna encourage everybody to connect with me Jamie Bertasi from Totango or Jay Nathan from Higher Logic on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you and. Thanks so much again, Chang.
Thank you. That's it for
Narrator: this week's episode of cs, no Bs with your host, Jamie Bertasi. If you enjoy today's episode, please leave a rating or review and tell a friend. This podcast was created by the team at Totango Design and run best in class customer journeys with no code. Visual software that delivers immediate value, easy iteration, and optimization and predictable scale up.
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