#TDSU Episode 205:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:07 - The amoeba of customer success

00:03:34 - Biology and customer success

00:07:21 - Whales, cows, and CS roles

00:08:49 - Expansion vs. distillation

00:10:30 - Psychology, AI, and evolution

00:12:33 - Divergence and the future of CS

00:13:49 - Until next time

📚 Books

The Compleat Strategyst by J.D. Williams: https://www.amazon.com/Compleat-Strategyst-Primer-Strategy-Mathematics/dp/0486251012

📺 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 Mickey Powell:

Mickey's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mickeypowell/

[Mickey] (0:00 - 0:32)

They weren't satisfying me. Like that was snacking and I was looking for a meal. I think what we're experiencing similar biology is kind of like an evolution where people have tried to go figure out customer success and everybody's doing something their own way.

And that's important. You need many different species, many different lines of genetic diversity. But now we need to collapse down that genetic diversity to get an apex person role function.

And there needs to be an evolution.

[Dillon] (0:37 - 1:05)

Are you ready for this? Are you ready? All right.

You guys want to jump in? What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value where we're giving you the fresh new customer success ideas every single day. Guys, I'm laughing because J.P. is being a ham. Anyway, I've got my man J.P. here. J.P., do you want to say hi?

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

How you want it, baby? Spiral sliced, baked. I'm your ham today, baby.

Be going ham.

[Dillon] (1:13 - 1:20)

And we have Rob with us. Rob, would you like to respond to J.P.'s comments in any way?

[JP] (1:21 - 1:24)

Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the bodies hit the floor.

[Dillon] (1:24 - 1:49)

And we have Mickey with us as a guest, not as a co-host. Mickey, would you like to say hi? Hi, everybody.

Thank you. Thank you. Consistent.

You're consistent, Mickey. I'm just waiting for somebody to finally call out the reference. Flanders?

Hi, Dr. Nick. Oh, it's Dr. Nick. I think we talked about that a long time ago.

[Rob] (1:49 - 1:57)

We didn't talk about it, but I had said previously, what did I say? Howdily doodily, neighborinos or something like that. And I am your host.

[Dillon] (1:57 - 2:06)

My name is Dillon Young. Mickey, thank you so much for being here as a guest and not as a co-host. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeah.

[Mickey] (2:07 - 2:23)

My name is Mickey Powell. It's Mickey like the mouse or the mantel, whichever you prefer. And I am...

Yeah, there's the Rorks. There's the Roonies. There's the 40-ounce malt liquor.

[Dillon] (2:24 - 2:26)

Okay. All right. Proceed.

[Mickey] (2:27 - 2:59)

There's many, but there's only one me. I am an amoeba of customer success and AI and operations. I don't know what I am, really.

That's always constantly evolving. But I have spent the last 11-12 years in customer success, taking on as many possible roles and failing at most of them that I can. And I'm here today through sheer determination and drive to not be a failure in life.

[Dillon] (3:00 - 3:33)

All right. With an introduction like, I am an amoeba, you really made sure I wasn't alone in the weirdness that I started the show with. So thank you so much, Mickey.

Mickey, you know what we do here? We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So I've got a guess, given your personality, Amoeba Mickey, but why don't you tell us what it is?

Biology is on my mind.

[Mickey] (3:34 - 3:38)

Biology. Go ahead.

[JP] (3:38 - 3:38)

Tell us.

[Mickey] (3:39 - 7:05)

Yeah. Let's go back real quick. 2014, I took my first customer success job.

I didn't know what customer success was. But I got hired and they said, figure out how to stop people from cancelling because we're going to try to raise our Series B. And investors generally don't like churn.

So I got on the phone, started talking to customers. But then I also started doing some learning. Shout out to Lincoln Murphy, found his website, started understanding a little bit about what this customer success thing is.

Fast forward 10-11 years, still on that learning journey. But a couple of years ago, I had the stark realization that everything I read in customer success, though it was useful, I had a deeper question that it wasn't answering. And I didn't know what that question was.

And I didn't know how to formulate it very well. So I decided to go more foundational. Okay, if customer success things aren't answering those questions, I need to go learn other things just like rapid fire.

I read economics, I read game theory, I read psychology, I read data science, I read philosophy, anything and everything. But I was trying to go backwards in time to things that are more foundational. And because it just it seemed to me that all the questions and all the answers I was looking for were starting to come from those things, not from the things that are being produced today, not that those don't have value.

But they weren't satisfying me like that was snacking and I was looking for a meal. I bring up biology, because I now am formulating a theory that the phase that we're in, I'm talking all sorts of different people and leaders and everybody's frustrated and everybody's, they're overwhelmed, and everything seems like it needs to change and it needs to get simpler. And I think what we're experiencing similar biology is like an evolution where there's a bunch of lineages of things like people have tried to go figure out customer success, and everybody's doing something their own way.

And that's important in that exploratory phase, just like, you need many different species, many different lines of genetic diversity. But now we need to kind of collapse down that genetic diversity to kind of get an apex person role function. And there needs to be an evolution and everybody's kind of craving this they're craving simplification, more foundational principles.

So I'm looking to biology, to try to understand and reinterpret what we have seen the last 10, at least 10 years for me 15 years for kind of the broader customer success function. And I'm getting a lot of value and a lot of learning from biology. And then I'm tying it to my love of AI because I'm like, as soon as chat to be came out, I just went full like, manic learning.

I went through the roof in terms of energy and trying to learn whatever this thing is. So I kind of see this intersection of like organizations, biology and AI, that's really where I'm thinking and learning and writing. And hopefully someday soon, it will happen.

I just I'm hoping the soon part is important. I will kind of introduce a more broader theory like, hey, this is what I think we have now seen.

[Dillon] (7:06 - 7:20)

Anytime the topic of an ology comes up, I know exactly who I'm going to first. And that is JP. So JP, why don't you tell us what this makes you think of or the questions you have?

[JP] (7:21 - 8:48)

Yeah, it makes me think about sometimes animals that we don't think are related, but they happen to be. I think I've read somewhere that like whales and cows are related, which is crazy. But they're doing very different things, y'all.

I mean, whales and cows, they're doing real different things. I don't know about whale milk. I don't know if I would be able to metabolize that, but I'm not interested in trying out my lactose boundaries.

But I say that to say that- I can't wait to see how you bring this back. Well, what I'm saying is like, whale and cow is still good, baby. You know what I mean?

We need both of those things. And so I think a lot of the narratives around CS, referencing what Mickey talked about, the frustrations and everything, to me, they feel like everyone's trying to stuff a whole lot in these boxes. And my mind was like, why don't I back up a bit and go back to the roots of things and really think about what are we really trying to accomplish?

I think that CS right now is really broad. And I think that there will need to be, I'm going to say more of a specialization than standardization. I think Mickey, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm talking maybe a little bit more about standardization.

I'm thinking like, that's not good.

[Mickey] (8:49 - 10:16)

Not exactly. I think that's a good point to clarify though. We've tried a bunch of things.

Now I'm saying distill down the principles of those things and build from there. So I'm not saying get rid of your own special circumstance because there will be special circumstances. What I'm saying is figure out what the fundamental principles are of customer success.

Because it's hard to do that in the beginning when you don't know a thing. You have to do it in hindsight. You have to look back.

And by the way, I give credit to the O-series models from OpenAI for opening my eyes to this. Long story short, they figured out how to use two models where one of them explores. And then the O-series model says, nope, those two paths are wrong.

That's the right one. And it distills down. So they're starting to be able to compress intelligence into a tighter and tighter area.

And then from there, you can build. So it's kind of like expansion, distillation, expansion, distillation. But what stays are the core fundamentals that never change, or at least they're very rarely changed over time.

So I think we were in an expansion mode. And now we're in a distillation mode. And that's where people are frustrated because they're like, I don't want to go find all the new things and all the new specialties.

I want to get down to the root and then apply it.

[Dillon] (10:16 - 10:30)

All right. Now I get to close the loop on my joke, which is when anybody talks about ologies, it's actually Rob I think of. Though it's typically psychology.

So Rob, I'm sure you have an opinion on all of this.

[Rob] (10:30 - 12:33)

Yeah, the question is just how to condense it to the remaining time. I feel weirdly seen. And Mickey, you already know this.

Weirdly? Weirdly seen. Just because it's not just psychology, but my background includes, my academic background at least, it includes so many of the topics that Mickey was talking about between evolutionary biology.

That was a big part of my studies. Theory was a big part of that as well. Game theory and animal behavior is very interesting.

And then also philosophy as well. I actually started my academic background studying philosophy. And I moved into psychology and then animal behavior by extension and evolutionary biology by extension because I needed a more scientific way to view these complex problems of the world.

And so I'm feeling super intrigued by how our field is developing because to your point, Mickey, we're seeing different branches of schools of thought in a way that haven't happened before. And that's putting a lot of pressure on our industry. We're seeing a lot of survival of the fittest, right?

I mean, we're seeing customer success get lopped off of organizations where it doesn't have a fit. And I think to your point, Mickey, that's all accelerated by AI and the clash with revenue that we've had as an industry. So what we've talked about a lot on this show is everything from, Mickey, when you mentioned first principles of customer success, I'm thinking about conversations we've had around defining your organizational charter in customer success, which is very difficult to do.

But I've been working on some exercises to help with that. We've talked about different personas and identities of customer success. JP and Dillon and I have talked also about, are we going to see in the next few years like the development of different coaching trees in customer success?

Like, oh, you know, you come from Mickey Powell's school of thought, that kind of thing. And I'm so intrigued by the intersection of these different philosophies with our line of work. But I don't have a grand theory of it yet.

I think, Mickey, though, I'm working on it.

[Dillon] (12:33 - 13:43)

So to put a nice little bow on this, JP, I think your comments were bizarre, but also on point of how, you know, that's evolution, right? And while cows and whales are very different to us, back in the day, their descendants were much more similar. And we're going to continue to see that divergence within customer success.

And Mickey, to your point, I am thrilled and excited to see how you put it together or how you build that storyline. And then what happens once those diverge? And there is some daylight between those two.

What do we do? I mean, that's really my, I'm going to think about that a lot. You held up a book while Rob was talking.

That's what he was alluding to. I'll toss that into the show notes so people can take a look. It's called The Complete Strategist, but it was not spelled correctly in any way.

So I'm going to have to put that in the show notes for people to find it. That is our time, Mickey. Thank you so much for sharing this, for tantalizing us with some future endeavor.

Hopefully it comes to fruition. Until that time, we've got to say goodbye, Mickey. Thank you.

[VO] (13:49 - 14:25)

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 general inquiries, please reach out via email to hello at LifetimeValueMedia.com.

To learn more about advertising on The Daily Standup and the Lifetime Value Media Network, please reach out via email to advertising at LifetimeValueMedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.

Do you have a story to tell, an opinion to share?

Join us on The Daily Standup.