#TDSU Episode 155:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:06 - Missteps in post-COVID priorities

00:03:57 - The doorman fallacy explained

00:05:59 - Lessons not learned from past mistakes

00:07:00 - Owning a number: the path to influence

00:08:18 - Evolution of Success Coaching programs

00:11:14 - Closing thoughts and future plans

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Andrew Marks:

Andrew's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-successhacker

[Andrew] (0:00 - 0:14)

That's the worst thing that you can be doing, right? The last thing that we need to be doing is taking the people who are responsible for driving customer lifetime value, right? Which is a lower cost to acquire that revenue because they're from your existing customers and get rid of them.

[Dillon] (0:23 - 0:43)

All right, guys ready. What's up lifers and welcome to the daily standup with lifetime value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man, Rob here.

Rob, do you want to say hi? And we've got JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:44 - 0:46)

Just trying not to stretch out the neck hole.

[Dillon] (0:47 - 1:15)

Interesting. And we have Andrew with us. Andrew, can you say hi, please?

What's up everybody? Andrew nodded approvingly when JP said that very weird statement. I think this is going to be an interesting conversation.

You know what I'm talking about. I do. See, you keep gesturing towards your shirt, JP, but remember there are people listening and not watching.

Anyway, I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Andrew, thank you so much for being here.

Would you please introduce yourself?

[Andrew] (1:16 - 1:46)

My name's Andrew Marks. I am the co-founder of Success Hacker and we have a product called Success Coaching. I've been in customer facing roles since hell, since I was in college, since before I went to college, as a matter of fact, and the customer facing lifestyle has always been part of my life and something that's important to me and my founding partner, Todd and I decided that we wanted to impart our wisdom to all those willing to listen that we've collected over the years.

[Dillon] (1:47 - 2:06)

I like the phrase customer facing lifestyle. We should talk more about that another time. Andrew, because I've got a lot of ideas and thoughts around that phrase in a good way.

Andrew, you know what we do here? We ask one simple question of every single guest and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So can you break that down for us?

[Andrew] (2:06 - 3:19)

What is on my mind? There's so many things on my mind about customer success, quite frankly. The thing that's been top of mind lately, though, has been, I feel like we haven't learned from our mistakes.

I feel like there's a, and that's a timely. It's a very timely. I'm talking specifically about, well, there's an overlap here, too. A post or during COVID, okay, there's the overlap. During COVID, everybody said, oh, we got to hire salespeople.

We got to get rid of customer success. That's the worst thing that you can be doing, right? The last thing that we need to be doing is taking the people who are responsible for driving customer lifetime value, right?

Which is a lower cost to acquire that revenue because they're from your existing customers and get rid of them. Or repurpose salespeople into those roles because you're wired differently. Right?

And so I'm seeing that again, and I'm seeing that pretty extensively, given what we do. We sell training programs and yeah, there is some personal bias in that. I want people to, I want them to buy more training, but at the same time, you're not going to, you're not going to keep your customers and you're going to really damage your financials if you think throwing bodies from a sales perspective at a problem is going to solve it.

[Dillon] (3:20 - 3:55)

And I think the problem may be ill-defined, right? I think people see it, they see it as a dollar signs problem, but they don't properly like then further stratify that as the difference between retaining customers and gaining new customers and the different opportunities that each provides them and the efficiencies and ROI for each one of them. And so I think that's where the ROI is big.

Yeah. Yeah. Huge.

Rob, why don't you jump in here with your breadth of experience and talk about how you've seen this undulate over the years.

[JP] (3:55 - 3:56)

I got a good one.

[Andrew] (3:56 - 3:57)

I got a fresh one.

[Rob] (3:57 - 3:59)

I have a fresh one. You guys haven't heard this one.

[Andrew] (4:00 - 4:02)

Isn't that fresh pH or fresh with an F?

[Rob] (4:02 - 4:02)

Oh, both.

[JP] (4:03 - 4:05)

Check your pH levels, Rob. Check your pH levels, baby.

[Rob] (4:06 - 4:15)

The doorman fallacy. I'm going to teach you about the doorman fallacy. Doorman.

You guys have heard of it? Did you make this up? No, I did not.

I did not. Make it up on the floor.

[JP] (4:15 - 4:16)

No, no. Is fallacy with the pH?

[Rob] (4:16 - 4:16)

I could.

[Dillon] (4:17 - 4:17)

What?

[JP] (4:18 - 4:20)

Is it fallacy with the pH?

[Dillon] (4:20 - 4:23)

Oh, please. No, please. No, it's not.

It's okay.

[JP] (4:23 - 4:24)

Rob didn't pick that up.

[Rob] (4:25 - 5:52)

I'm going to call this the, yeah. So this is the doorman or door woman fallacy. Basically imagine, okay.

There was something I heard about where like some hotel chain, they hired these expensive consultants to come in and evaluate the operation. And they were like, now, why are we paying this door person to stand here? They don't really need to stand here as a concierge.

They're not really doing anything. So they draw up all these figures and these models that show that, oh, if we get rid of these people and we replace the doors with automatic sensors, then it's going to be way cheaper in the long run and the hotel does this. And what happens is that all sorts of other problems then arise that the door person was unknowingly handling.

There start being people loitering around in the hallway entrance area, people leaving doors open, leaves piling up, garbage piling up, there's all this stuff, these little things that you didn't know that the door person was doing. And so these consultants like got it totally wrong. And I feel like that's the case for customer success for teams that have gutted customer success is they don't realize there's all these little bits and pieces that we were picking up the slack on and now companies are suffering as a result and that's my biased view.

I think I've talked to the guys about maybe asking CEOs, their perspective, CEOs of companies that have gutted their CS teams, but I don't know. I think it's an interesting angle.

[Dillon] (5:54 - 5:58)

JP, before you jump in, Andrew, I saw you, you wanted to say something. So why don't you go ahead?

[Andrew] (5:59 - 6:35)

Well, and the thing that's frustrating is that we went through this with COVID and they got rid of all those folks or they started gutting it and then they came back and said, wait a minute, this was a mistake. We got to hire. And I actually, during COVID and towards the tail end of COVID, our business freaking skyrocketed because of that.

And so it's okay, once again, we're not learning from our mistakes. I also think part of the problem though, also has been, and I've had a lot more discussions lately on this is, and this has been something that we've waxed poetic about for years, customer success needs to own a number.

[Dillon] (6:36 - 6:40)

Hmm. Ooh, it doesn't matter what the number is.

[Andrew] (6:41 - 6:47)

The number is in a growing company. What do you mean? Well, it doesn't matter what the number is.

Yeah. Well, I think the number couldn't be one. Okay.

[Dillon] (6:47 - 7:00)

But the number, no, I mean the makeup of the number. Some people say it's a purely revenue number. Some people are fine with it being like a CSQL sort of situation.

Others it's NPS. But when you say number, you're referring to dollars, right?

[Andrew] (7:00 - 8:17)

I'm talking dollars. CSQL is dollars, right? I'm talking dollars.

There was one point I was talking to an executive friend of mine at Salesforce, and he was telling me how the CRO just was assigned a billion dollar revenue number and the CCO is assigned a $2 billion revenue number, right? In a growing company, your sustaining revenue quickly outpaces new revenue. So why in God's name would you not have somebody responsible for that sustaining revenue and you should own that number.

You own number, you have power, you have influence. These executives are like, I don't want to own a number. And even CSMs, I don't want to own a number.

I'm not selling. Well, first of all, you are selling. So let's get past that misnomer.

You are selling every single freaking day. Everything that you do, you're just not doing it. You're not doing greenfield selling.

You're doing internal selling. You're selling value. You're selling that expansion.

You are selling yourself. You're selling your trusted advisor status. So you better get comfortable with selling.

And if you own customer success, you need to be comfortable with owning a number because if you own a number, you have power, you have influence. JP, go ahead.

[JP] (8:18 - 9:12)

I mean, speaking of selling, you know, I've taken the customer success level one, level two, great, great training. I'm curious about the level three and the level four when we're talking about these programs that you do at Success Coach, which I think is great. Your company was one of the first that I found in the space.

And you were one of the first resources that I came across that not only had some training, but also, you know, different things in the industry, right? Like you do reporting on like jobs and all these other things to really help someone who may be coming in who doesn't have an idea. And I've talked to some companies.

They may have a bunch of their CSMs go through a training. I'm curious about this level three and four. I know that your level one and two, I feel like are pretty well known.

And the program itself was well known. But I would like to hear just a little bit more about maybe those, what your intention behind those was.

[Andrew] (9:14 - 11:11)

It was really just taking it beyond the foundations, right? Level one and level two were actually level one, level two. Originally, we're all a single level.

When we first rolled this thing out six, seven years ago, it was a 24 week live coaching program where we recorded a lesson and then we dropped it. And we gave people a few days to consume it. Then you got on the phone with us and we talked through it.

Yeah. And sidebar on that. We actually, before we actually built the entire program, we had it all laid out.

We had all the outlines, but we only recorded the first three weeks because we wanted to pull the MVP approach and make sure that people will sign up for it. And then freaking 35 people signed up for it. We're like, holy shit.

And we're committed. We're recording content on Sunday at midnight, dropping it on Monday so that we could talk about it on Thursday. It was crazy, the early days, but that was always meant to be the foundation.

24 courses, 24 weeks was way too much commitment. So we split it up and that's how it became one and two. But then in three, four, and actually we now have level five, we picked a few things that we felt were taking you to the next level, a little more strategery, things like in level three, we talk about segmenting your book of business and how to effectively and strategically segment your own book of business.

We talk about problem solving and decision-making. We even have a couple of career building courses in there. And then level four, level five, we went really deep in some topics.

So if you remember in level one, we had taking a consultative approach. We talk about thinking customer first. We talk about active listening.

We talk about storytelling and asking good questions. We actually have standalone course to go deep into those topics. And we're going to continue to add that type of stuff to the library.

And we're actually getting ready to release a whole new set of products in the new year. Yeah, really jumping down on enhancing what we have and as well as the topics.

[JP] (11:13 - 11:13)

Awesome.

[Dillon] (11:14 - 11:56)

Andrew, that is our time, but I say this sincerely, you ought to come back and tell us more about those products. Would love to hear about what you're doing too. I think we talked so much about the definitional debates within CS and it'd be really interesting to see how you guys are thinking about that and maybe serving that market or trying to, I don't want to say control the narrative, but you guys are a respected voice in the space.

So how are you using that voice to help folks not just educate, but maybe point folks in a certain direction? Like you said, with owning a number. Anyway, we are out of time.

Love this conversation. Please come back soon. But for now we've got to say goodbye.

[Andrew] (11:57 - 12:12)

Awesome. Hey, I appreciate you having me on. And as you can tell, I love talking about this stuff.

So, and you guys are cool to hang with, right? And just remember my favorite coffee cup there, right? This is how I wake up every morning.

[Dillon] (12:13 - 12:20)

For anybody on audio, it was an expletive laden coffee cup. All right.

[JP] (12:20 - 12:21)

Come on YouTube.

[Voiceover] (12:28 - 12:59)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.

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