#TDSU Episode 199:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:32 - Is it time to kill customer success?

00:03:44 - Weak leadership and lost potential

00:06:31 - Evolving or becoming extinct?

00:09:15 - What marketing’s past tells us about CS

00:11:56 - A future of specialization and growth

00:12:57 - Shedding labels, maximizing value

00:15:32 - The account management debate

📺 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 Lincoln Murphy:

Lincoln's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lincolnmurphy/

[Lincoln] (0:00 - 0:12)

The analogy is perfect. I just mean, you know, like I think there's a lack of respect and poor positioning when it comes to what we do after we get the customer, you know, that would, that's my big issue. And I think we have a lot of work to do.

[Dillon] (0:21 - 0:31)

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 with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:31 - 0:32)

How are you doing?

[Dillon] (0:33 - 0:40)

You weren't on mute. Thank God.

And we have Mickey with us. Mickey, can you say hi?

[Mickey] (0:40 - 0:40)

Hi everybody.

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:48)

Co-host, not a guest. And we have Lincoln with us. Lincoln, can you say hi, please?

[Lincoln] (0:48 - 0:49)

Hey, what's up?

[Dillon] (0:50 - 0:59)

And I am your host. My name is Dillon young Lincoln.

Thank you so much for being here. A celebrity in our midst. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Lincoln] (1:00 - 1:11)

Yeah. So my name is Lincoln Murphy. I didn't invent customer success, but I think I helped popularize it a little bit.

And, uh, lately I feel like now I must, I must kill it. At least in its current form.

[Dillon] (1:11 - 1:17)

Oh, I love it. This feels like very Greek mythology or something.

[Lincoln] (1:18 - 1:18)

Yes.

[Dillon] (1:18 - 1:32)

Um, okay. Well, Lincoln, 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?

It sounds like murder, but do you want to expound on that?

[Lincoln] (1:32 - 1:46)

Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's not murder if, you know, if it's ethical. What? Um, yeah.

Do you feel like what you're doing is right? Dig, dig yourself out of this hole.

[Dillon] (1:46 - 1:47)

I want to see how this goes.

[Lincoln] (1:47 - 3:44)

The best way to dig yourself out of a hole is to just keep digging. Right? No, listen, I think customer success, we're in a weird spot.

I think with customer success, like I said, I didn't invent it. You know, I, I do feel responsible in a lot of ways for popularizing it for better or worse, but at some point it kind of took on multiple lives of its own and went in lots of different directions and the thing that's been going through my mind is we basically have three reasons. Customer success is at a point today where there's not a lot of respect on it.

There's not a lot of seeing it for what it really should be inside of a company, which is a growth mechanism. And that comes down to weak leaders, egos, and gatekeepers. And we can talk a little bit about that, but I think ultimately customer success should be seen as a growth mechanism inside of companies.

But I really don't even talk about customer success that much anymore because of all the negative baggage associated with it. I talk about as you guys podcast is called lifetime. I talk about maximizing lifetime value.

That's the main thing. And you get that by getting your customers to stay longer. And over that extended lifetime, you get them to buy more often, hopefully.

Right now, the most efficient and effective way to do that is through this thing that we call customer success, or at least the mechanisms within customer success, but I kind of feel like it might be time to kind of just blow up the container called customer success and just take all the good stuff out and just start focusing on that. That's what I mean by, you know, I think it's time to kind of, if not kill customer success, just, we need to completely rethink what's going on here because it's, it's such a powerful mechanism and it's so positioned poorly. Doesn't have the respect that it should.

And everybody said, you know, we always wanted a seat at the table. Well, but nobody's really doing the things necessary to get and then keep that seat at the table. And that's kind of the, that's kind of the issue.

So anyway, hopefully we have like three to four hours to unpack this. Yeah. Right.

[Dillon] (3:44 - 4:32)

Is that. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the format. Uh, Lincoln, you and I have never met, and yet I feel like you are a plant for all of my ideas in that I complain a lot about leadership being the sort of maybe like the ceiling for customer success, whether intentionally or not. And then I also believe I don't encourage the destruction of anything.

I just think it will naturally evolve in such a way that customer success as a single profession or several specialized roles will no longer exist. And all of those skillsets will disperse back to more traditional departments and roles. But we're not here to stroke your ego or mine.

I want to give Mickey an opportunity to jump in here, ask questions about that whole, that whole murder thing.

[Mickey] (4:36 - 6:31)

I, my, my father reminds me that men have frail egos. So I do, and I needed to be stripped. I actually, I first want to say thank you to Lincoln because when I took my first customer success job in May of 2014, I had no idea what it was.

I was learning all these new things. So I'm Googling and I landed on Lincoln's website and he was the first person that made sense of this thing for me. So thank you, Lincoln, for all your writing and all your wisdom that you shared, because you didn't know what you, that you were forming, how I viewed that world, but you did, and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that effort.

So thank you. I also agree with you that customer success needs to transcend, that there needs to be an evolution. I'm going to plug a little bit of AI, cause I haven't talked at all about AI today, and that's the, that is the big thing that I care about, because I think that this is finally giving us the frame to view it, what has been starting to be learned in the field of AI, specifically large language models in that whole paradigm, is you need to build these big expansive models, but then they become incredibly inefficient and expensive to run. And then you can use other models to distill down to the set of things that are necessary, which makes them much more efficient without sacrificing the intelligence, so to speak.

And I think that is the moment that we are in with customer success. We're in this distillation mode of cutaway, everything that doesn't matter, get down to the things we've learned over the last Lincoln, gosh, you probably been doing this for 15, 20, you know, 16, 30. Yeah, exactly.

It's like, yeah, however you, however you define it, it's probably been your entire career, but I agree that we're in that moment and yes, we, we would need five hours to unpack that fully.

[Lincoln] (6:31 - 8:04)

But I like that analogy. And I, I think, you know, maybe just, this is the way things evolve. I've never been involved in a, an industry or whatever we call this thing, you know, from beginning to kind of see its life cycle.

So this is new, new to me, you know, over the past 15 years. So I don't know if this is just how things naturally work. I don't know if, you know, when sales was invented 3 million years ago, you know, if, if, you know, the same kinds of things happened and then eventually we got to where we are today.

I don't know, but it's just interesting to see. It's frustrating to see, frankly, you know, I hear from people all the time that are like, well, our org just got laid off and you start talking to them and you find out it's the leader was somebody that, that never positioned customer success right with their leadership. They didn't advocate for their team, you know, and, and all that stuff.

And then you kind of dig into it deeper and you see that all the things that they were doing were, were customer success stuff that we were talking about 10 or 12 years ago, and they never evolved with it. I had a conversation with a CS leader at a very well-known PLG SaaS company that we would all know and probably all use. And I swear it was like talking to someone, like it was like a time machine.

And this was a leader. This was high level leadership in this company. I was like, this is insane.

So there's another aspect to it. There's people like learn something a long time ago and then never, never learned anything else. Adapt.

Yeah. It's like, how is this happening?

[Dillon] (8:04 - 9:14)

I do wonder though, and Rob, I want to make sure you get an opportunity here, but I think the closest analogy Lincoln I've seen is the way marketing has evolved over the past 30 years. Probably had a really hard time initially, particularly in the SaaS universe, quantifying its impact. Eventually got to a point where it was all about attribution, attribution, attribution, and qualified leads of some and impressions and things of that nature.

And I think that's the same path we're on, but I guess I would also at the same time, like I want to empathize with these leaders, like the example you just gave Lincoln of if it's not their job, if it's not their career, then how much time do they truly have to sit down and learn about something that is evolving at light speed? Like I think of like HubSpot, I get what inbound marketing is about, but if I sat down with somebody who lives and breathes inbound marketing, they would think I'm an idiot and I just wonder if we're, we're maybe asking too much for these folks, but Rob, I know you have a time limit here, so I want you to maybe piggyback off of what I was just saying.

[Rob] (9:15 - 11:07)

Yeah, this is good. I mean, it's kind of a funny full circle moment for me because similar to Mickey Lincoln, I remember being on the Caltrain and, you know, 2015, 2016, when I lived in the Bay Area, reading some of your articles and like trying to wrap my head around what this customer success thing was. And, and it's interesting too, cause you know, my conversation with Dillon, the, the, one of the first conversations I've had with Dillon was around this notion that should customer success die, so to speak.

And so I've been thinking about this for a long time too. As recently as today, I mean, I posted on LinkedIn about this and you know, that's gospel, so, yes, but this has been like the big question that I've been trying to formulate throughout this year where I'm asking myself, is this not a matter of customer success dying, but is this, to your point, Lincoln, is this the growth moment where we see a branch in the evolutionary tree of customer success? Similar to what, you know, you were saying Dillon, that this happened probably in marketing and from what I've heard from my friends in marketing, you know, there was a point in time where people's kind of batched together everything that was like advertising and field marketing and, and content marketing and, and all these different forms of marketing.

Well, you know, I think it's, it's actually okay. And it's acceptable that maybe we are just, we're not, we don't have to kill the concept of customer success as much as develop a common vernacular for the different subtypes of customer success and the corresponding metrics and the corresponding reasons why they exist to their respective businesses. Mickey, to your point, the role AI will play in this, I think, is that it amplifies that graduation, that branching in a very big way, in addition to what you said about it cutting off the things that, you know, maybe weren't quite so central.

And, you know, I was trying to think of like a new label for it. Like, do we call it customer success post-ac, but just for, for, for it's really like, it's all biology.

[Mickey] (11:07 - 11:39)

We all keep pointing to biology, so just call it out. It's bio, like we can look, we can look to these other areas to inform what we are seeing. Like, I'm not afraid to like, be like, let's be more fundamental.

There's a, now there's always going to be a new like version, but I have been reading a lot about biology to understand customer success in AI. And there's a lot of parallels and I'm not going to go any further because then we're going to get crazy and we're going to need another five hours, but call a spade a spade.

[Rob] (11:39 - 11:55)

You know, it's interesting. So my grandfather started practicing dentistry in like the forties when people could still presumably think a dentist would cut your hair. Like, but that profession, those professions clearly broke off in a very different way.

Good.

[Dillon] (11:56 - 12:57)

And even orthodontics from there, right? Like, I think that specialization continues to branch off for eternity. Typically like, and we use this and now Lincoln, I want you to jump in here in a second to, to close this out with any final thoughts, but we use this analogy all the time.

I know for me personally, and on this podcast of this idea of sales, we all know what sales does. They bring in new revenue, right? But if, and if somebody says they're in sales, you get that they have some level of ownership of that task, but they could be an SDR. They could be a sales engineer. They could be a revenue ops person, but you get that they serve that higher mission. And then there are some people who are full cycle, they do it all. Right.

And so I think that's another way to look at where we're probably headed is. And, and, and the problem is we're in the middle of it. So we see all the thrashing, but in another 10 years we'll be like, oh yeah, it's, it's obvious that that's the way it was going to go.

But Lincoln, why don't you take us out of here?

[Lincoln] (12:57 - 15:32)

Yeah. I mean, I agree with that. I like that sales analogy.

Like if you're in sales, whatever part of sales, whether you own the entire process or you're just a part of it, like everybody gets that instantly. I actually like all, all of these analogies and it's, it's you're right. We're in this.

So it feels very messy and it feels very, it can feel like they're really negative or you can feel very positive about it. I tend to not ever do that. I tend to stick, stick to the negative side.

No, but I think, I think there's a lot of possibility here. I think it's just, if we need to shed a label because there's holding us back. Fine.

Like, I think we need to not just say we let's, we have to hold on to this thing because this is just how we've been doing it. I don't really care what we call it and how we move forward. And a lot of people say that, but I actually don't care.

What I do care about is what we're trying to do here. And that is maximize lifetime value of the customer, get them to stay longer, get them to buy more, more often over that extended lifetime. Now the customer is worth more.

And if we kind of just look at it that way, you look at that. Well, that, that is something that happens across the entire customer lifecycle. It is that holistic approach to the customer.

It starts even before acquisition and goes all the way through the end. If we can just look at it that way and start positioning things that way, I think when you say, this is what I do, it's like, oh, okay, so you're not just, you know, here to make customers happy or you're not here to just retain customers. You're here to maximize their lifetime value, whatever that looks like.

And then we can get into all the different ways that that happens. I think that's the thing that the only problem I have with the sales and the marketing analogies is this, people understand the need to acquire customers. So even if you're talking about, you know, like brand marketing was kind of like, well, there's no, you know, how do we measure performance on that?

We don't, it was still a thing that was out there to like go to market. The whole go to market thing, it was, it was to get you in front of new customers. That's I think the only reason like those things, that analogy falls apart just a little bit, just a little bit in that what we do with existing customers, there's still like this misunderstanding about the value of existing customers for some weird reason.

So that would be my only issue with like that analogy in terms of the way things evolve and break down. That the analogy is perfect. I just mean, you know, like I think there's a lack of respect and poor positioning when it comes to what we do after we get the customer.

That's my big, my big issue. And I think we have a lot of work to do to, to reposition all of this again, whatever we call it, to just make people say, gosh, this really is like an incredibly valuable part of our business.

[Dillon] (15:32 - 16:05)

So. Well, I'm just going to pull a pin and throw a grenade in this room and close the door as I walk away, which is, I'm pretty sure that is what, when I hear the word account management, that's actually what they're managing the accounts that you have. Now, I know we all think it's got the sales stigma to it, but that's, but that's how I understood account management to be.

And part of management is maximization. Anyway, that is our time. I'm not taking any questions on that last statement, Lincoln, you'll have to run back if you want to discuss it more, but thank you so much.

We'd love to have you back anytime for now. We do have to say goodbye. Awesome.

[VO] (16:10 - 16:42)

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 lifetime value, media.com.

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