#TDSU Episode 195:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:44 - The burnout crisis in CS

00:05:54 - Is it the job or the company?

00:10:54 - Personas problem in customer success

00:12:28 - Solutions need a part two

00:13:24 - Empathy vs. entertainment on Reddit

00:14:00 - Wrapping up, but not for long

📺 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 Erika Villarreal:

Erika's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erivillarreal/

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:04)

I love Reddit, but not because I care about people that might come off.

[JP] (0:07 - 0:08)

Stop the show.

[Dillon] (0:18 - 0:30)

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 JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:30 - 0:34)

Hey, trying to eat more salad this year. So salutations.

[Dillon] (0:34 - 0:49)

It's because we are recording very early on in the year, so that it's clear to everybody. That's JP's resolution salad. And we have Rob with us.

Rob, you want to say hi? What's up, lifers and laughers and lovers? Now you're just copying other people.

[Rob] (0:49 - 0:52)

Live, laugh, love. Who said that? Nobody said that.

I said that.

[Dillon] (0:53 - 0:53)

Gandhi. Literally.

[JP] (0:54 - 0:54)

Gandhi?

[Dillon] (0:54 - 0:59)

On the episode. Did she really? And we have Erika.

That's a shout out for Erika. Erika, can you please say hi?

[Erika] (1:00 - 1:05)

Hello, y'all. Coming in from Texas. So y'all seems fit.

[Dillon] (1:06 - 1:12)

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

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Erika] (1:12 - 1:19)

Yes, of course. So happy to be here. Finally, Dillon, after a couple of months of trying to get this in place.

But I'm happy to be here.

[Dillon] (1:20 - 1:21)

You make it sound like it's my fault. Was it my fault?

[Erika] (1:21 - 1:49)

It's actually my fault. It was definitely my fault. And I want to acknowledge that for everyone in the public listening.

But now that I've gotten that off the way, I'm Erika. I'm a strategic customer success manager at Eptura, a workplace leading platform that focuses on workplaces, people, and assets. I have been in this strategic role for actually a year as of today, which is kind of like fun.

[JP] (1:49 - 1:49)

Yes.

[Erika] (1:50 - 2:17)

Lots of things going on here at my company. And, you know, like. Yeah, clap it up.

Clap it up. And yeah, lots of exciting things happening at my company. We recently came from a merger in 2022.

So it's been fun and exciting, you know, like managing multiple products and now leading with global customers, helping them, you know, realize value out of our solution. So very excited.

[Dillon] (2:17 - 2:25)

Very cool. Well, Erika, there was no need to apologize. Nobody needed to know that we.

I'm trying to do this.

[Erika] (2:27 - 2:30)

For a year, Dillon. It's been a year.

[Dillon] (2:31 - 2:44)

Erika's awesome. Nobody is judging her. I want to get that out there.

But Erika, 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.

[Erika] (2:44 - 5:54)

For me, it's thinking about how we can continue to help CS teams be successful. You know, that's a topic that I want to talk about today. And it comes basically from a lot of, you know, reading and following different channels, talking on LinkedIn, meeting with a lot of CSMs last year who are suffering from burnout.

You know, like you talk to people and you get the sense that they have lots of work. They feel overloaded, not supported. You know, many of the CSMs that I talk to who want to quit CS or people that have really like went all of their way to transition into customer success.

Last year, I have a friend who all that she wanted to do was get into CS. And then she started her role. Four months later, she's like, I'm not cut out for this.

And she quit. So those type of things, like I've been hearing a lot. And I know that Reddit is not the best place to go and read.

Like, I don't want to I don't want to be judged here. But I don't know. Last year, I found this channel, you know, customer success channel in Reddit.

And I started following the channel precisely because, you know, I like creating content for CSMs and trying to help them be successful. I try to create content that helps them overcome the challenges of the role. Right.

So I felt like that was a place to start. I wanted to hear what CSMs were, I don't know, facing the challenges that they were leaving, what they had to say about like their current company and the struggles that they're facing. Right.

And after, you know, receiving all of these email notifications on my, you know, email from this Reddit channel was like, oh, my gosh, like all they do is complain. And I think that it's the place, right? Because they don't want to be out there saying these type of things with people knowing who they are.

But at the same time, I think it's the type of conversations that need to be had, right? Like, whether it's like the chats that I'm having during my coaching sessions, like, by the way, last year, I joined Pathway, CS Insiders community for coaching program. And in this type of like, feedback that I've been getting from CSMs, not only from Reddit, but from my conversations in my coaching sessions, like, I feel like it's a real struggle.

And because I am not only hearing it from Reddit, it makes me feel like there's like some sort of like big problem out there that maybe needs to be addressed in a different way. Like, and it kind of like begs the question, like, is it a CSM problem? Or is it a leadership problem?

Or where do we sit today, right? So that's what's been on my mind. I'll let you ask questions, debate this.

What do you think about it?

[Dillon] (5:54 - 6:47)

I have just one question, and then I'll give it up. But we recently had on Mr. David Karp, who leads all of customer over at Disco. And he said something similar.

He wanted to talk about riding the roller coaster and making sure that we're fostering camaraderie with our colleagues and whatnot. But he also mentioned that he used the roller coaster analogy because it's scary. And sometimes it's fun, and sometimes it's not so fun.

And we acknowledge that there are times where there are certain personality types who maybe just shouldn't ride the roller coaster. Do you think that there's a subset of those folks on Reddit or that you've talked to, probably those personal conversations, you're more qualified to judge. But do you think that there's this group of people that need to just get out and do something else?

Maybe they were sold a bag of goods about what CS actually is?

[Erika] (6:49 - 6:58)

You know, that's kind of like a tough question. Because if I think about this person that I just described, was like one of the people- Oh, what's their name?

[Dillon] (6:59 - 7:01)

I'm not gonna shout out names.

[Erika] (7:01 - 10:53)

But I'm just gonna say this. She's one of the people who had been, I don't know, attending our Women of Customer Success sessions here in Dallas that I've met in person and that I talk to very often. And she seems the type of person that could be a really good fit for customer success.

It's not like the type of person that you say doesn't like talking to customers or that you feel like would not be a good fit for the role. She likes helping people. She has all of the intrinsic things a CSM should have.

But then she's facing, she gets into this role and then she starts, I don't know, managing hundreds of accounts without the tools necessary to do it, right? Without the processes in place, with crazy metrics that say you have to meet with 60 customers this month and log, I don't know how many calls and then do this and do that. And also have this list of a whole of other things that you need to manage and take care of, right?

And she's just not in the place or the company might not be in the place to, I don't know, provide all the tools necessary for her to successfully do her role, right? So I think it's a combination of both. I do think that there's some people who wants to do the customer success role and might not be a good fit.

But I also think there's a huge amount of people who are a good fit for the role and they're just not set up for success, which is the topic for this conversation, right? So for me, it's like really understanding all of these companies, startups or whatever, that might not have all of the processes in place from the beginning, what can those CS leaders do to really understand what struggles their CSMs are facing and what are they doing to solve for those challenges, right? Do they understand the workload for the CSMs?

Have they even done a capacity analysis to understand whether or not they can manage this amount of accounts? Do they have the systems in place to do it or not? Are we measuring the CSMs with the right metrics?

So all of these questions arise that make me think that it's not necessarily a CSM problem and it might be a combination of both, right? But without CS leaders really diving into this and making the necessary analysis and studies to really grasp what needs to happen to help the CSMs, CSMs are gonna continue to feel overwhelmed. They're gonna continue to feel overloaded and they just wanna, want to continue to get out of CS, you know?

That also makes me think about my experience last year, you know, like last year, as I mentioned, we went through a merger, lots of changes happening in the organization. It was like very overwhelming, right? And this year I felt completely different from how I felt last year.

And the reason of why this year, well, I'm sorry, 2023, 2024, it's what I'm comparing. I'm confusing years here, right? What made the difference for me between one year and the other was all of these initiatives that the CS leadership team did at my company to help us CSMs do a better job, right?

Putting systems in place, we implemented PlanCat, all of the processes for upsells and expansion. We had CS enablements to learn the additional products and to learn how to sell these products and meet our, I don't know, upsell targets, for example, right? Enablements such as success plans, enablement for getting executive sponsors to our company to build executive relationships, you know, like all of these things that we did helped our team be better at their job, right?

But our other leaders from other organizations are doing the same thing with their CSMs or not. It's the right question. So I don't know.

I just feel like it's a two-way thing, right?

[Dillon] (10:54 - 10:58)

Rob, why don't you jump in? Because I know you see this at scale, right?

[Rob] (10:58 - 12:13)

I will try to keep my answer brief just in the interest of time. But Erika, I have to start by saying thank you for calling out such an important issue in our industry. As you were saying that, my internal monologue was saying, can a customer success team be successful without customer success?

Which is kind of an interesting way to ask, like, can a sales team be successful without sales, right? Well, maybe the sales team is actually more successful when they sell less, if their quotas are more reasonable, if their expectations are more reasonable, and maybe the same applies for product and for marketing. And again, yeah, for CS, for all these functions, it's such a healthy and refreshing reminder.

What I really like that you said too, is you broke it down, like, is this a CSM problem? Is this a leadership problem? Without a shameless self plug here, I will say it's possible that it's a, what I've been calling lately, a personas problem.

That different CS teams have different personas and we don't have a shared vocabulary to describe, this is the persona of this CS team and that's why they require this capacity model and this set of tooling versus this other persona that may look different. It may be more enterprise versus more mid-market or might be more hands-on versus more digital or various other responsibilities.

[Dillon] (12:13 - 12:27)

Do you want to send folks anywhere to pre-order your book about the five personas? I'm working on it. I'm one intro deep.

Yeah, you're using this to workshop, I can tell. JP, why don't you jump in?

[JP] (12:28 - 13:24)

Oh, I just want to say, I really appreciate your call out, Erika. It's clear that you are very in tune with CS and that you care a lot. Hearing about you go on Reddit, it didn't sound like you went on because you wanted to hear what people are saying because people on LinkedIn don't have anonymity and they're thinking about their careers and so the content you get there is going to be more different, more filtered, maybe not quite people are willing to go to that level.

We should have you come in on a part two, maybe where we can talk more about some of these solutions or some of these actionable things that we can actually go forward because someone may see this and I think they'll feel very heard and validated and seen and then they may be like, and where do we go next? Stay tuned, y'all, stay tuned.

[Dillon] (13:24 - 13:52)

Yeah, we are out of time, Erika, but I think actually we should absolutely try to set that up and get you to come back and talk about some of the things that maybe the recommendations you've given to mentees or how you've thought about it personally or maybe stuff you've seen on Reddit that's helpful. You go to Reddit to empathize with folks. I go there just to witness the mess.

The two main reasons people go to Reddit. I love Reddit, but not because I care about people. That might come off wrong, but.

[JP] (13:54 - 13:56)

Stop the show, stop the show.

[Erika] (13:57 - 13:59)

Rewind, rewind and restart, please.

[Dillon] (14:00 - 14:10)

Please come back, but this is a, I think it's a super important topic. It's obviously a little bit bigger than the time we have. So please come back soon and let's talk more about it.

But for now, we do have to say goodbye.

[Erika] (14:10 - 14:13)

Goodbye, and I'm happy to be back. So let's book it.

[VO] (14:14 - 14:49)

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.

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