#TDSU Episode 214:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Wu-Tang Financial

00:01:46 - Why early ops matter for CS growth

00:02:17 - Scaling struggles without operations

00:03:52 - Operations as a success environment

00:05:03 - Rise of the data horse

00:07:20 - CSOps remains in the shadows

00:08:04 - Should leaders wear all the hats?

00:10:17 - When CS gets too technical

00:12:23 - Bye bye

📺 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 Hannah Brotherton:

Hannah's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hbrotherton/

[Dillon] (0:00 - 0:35)

You asked if that was chill. I'm just going to put my foot down in a way that JP refused to do and say we all need to take a page out of Wu-Tang financials books and diversify our portfolios. 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] (0:35 - 0:36)

Hey stay hydrated.

[Dillon] (0:38 - 0:41)

And we have Rob with us Rob. Are you also hydrated?

[Rob] (0:42 - 0:43)

Oh, yeah.

Get on the way.

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:44)

I'm sorry. What?

[Rob] (0:45 - 0:46)

Get on the way.

[Dillon] (0:46 - 0:57)

Okay. He did his research and we have Hannah with us.

Hannah. Can you say hi, please? Hannah, are you still in Mexico?

Let's just make sure.

[Hannah] (0:57 - 1:01)

Yes, I am currently in Mexico and I'm not like out running anything.

[Dillon] (1:02 - 1:13)

I promise you hesitated and I was like, hmm, I wonder and I am your host. My name is Dillon young Hannah. Thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Hannah] (1:13 - 1:25)

Yes stoked to be here. I'm Hannah Brotherton. I run CS operations consulting firm and have been kind of in the ops and CS space for about the last decade, which is crazy.

[Dillon] (1:25 - 1:46)

That is crazy. Cause I just learned what CS ops was like a couple of months ago. I guess I always knew it existed.

Hannah, 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 will you please share with us what that is for you?

[Hannah] (1:46 - 2:04)

Oh my gosh. Yes, because that's all I've wanted to do for the last 10 years. I have been thinking a lot about how important it is to have CS ops or an ops perspective early in companies evolution and how that impacts kind of long tail growth and scale.

[Dillon] (2:05 - 2:17)

Tell me more about what that means for you. And maybe we can do some addition by subtraction. So talk about an example of where that doesn't exist and how folks would benefit from having it.

[Hannah] (2:17 - 3:42)

Yeah. So for like the last two years or so I've been consulting. And so I've been seeing a lot of different companies at different stages and growth.

And so one of the things that's become really apparent to me is a lot of the companies that I get to work with early on. So maybe they have a CS team. I'm air quoting.

They're going on for all those listening with that ears. Maybe they have a CS team and maybe that team is one person, maybe a whole person. I don't know.

And what I've seen is that teams that have that kind of early stage CS and they pull in somebody that doesn't have to be somebody full time, but they have some operational support to start to think of like, how do we think about this in this moment right now as we scale and how do we get there more quickly? Lots of times when I work with accounts or companies where let's say like I come in and they have at least 10 CSM, sometimes 50 CSM, who knows, big companies and lots of times we're doing a lot of backing it up. We're doing a lot of okay, like we scaled really quickly.

We threw a lot of CSM's at a lot of different things and now we're having a problem creating kind of operational efficiency. So it's a lot of kind of we have to unbuild to rebuild. Whereas coming in early stage startups, these accounts now kind of hit this accelerator button as they start to grow their CS team much more effectively when they have the operational mindset from the ground up.

[Dillon] (3:42 - 3:51)

And as a clarification for me mostly, but we'll say it's for the audience. When you talk about operations, do you think more about processes or systems?

[Hannah] (3:52 - 4:23)

So for me, well, I'm like a weirdo. So for me, operations basically means the environment that you create that allow the people to be more successful. So that can mean processes, that can mean systems, that can mean enablement, that can mean a lot of different things.

But what are the kind of like structural elements that you are building into your environment that allow the humans to be like total badass? Can I say badass?

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

Yeah.

[Hannah] (4:24 - 4:47)

Okay. To be like the badasses they want to be instead of being kind of held back by, oh, I have to do this stupid thing each time I have a customer call or, oh, I have to update all these, whatever it is. You guys probably get to do all those things that make you kind of go like, oh, I just want to be like a rad CS person, not necessarily like a data horse.

[Dillon] (4:48 - 5:03)

Data horse. That is an awesome, we've got to find a way to turn that into some merchandise. JP, in the middle of your laughing fit, can you in some way create a greater audio visualization of the data horse analogy?

Come on.

[JP] (5:03 - 7:20)

Oh my gosh. You know, my mind, it just didn't go to a great place. I'm going to avoid being a data horse here.

We're all worse off for it. Let me, let me pivot. Let me pivot.

Look, I think it's great when there is a CSOps person because it means that they are investing in customer success. So yes, like I have never in my career worked with a CSOps professional. I have looked at it as something like, oh, could I maybe do this?

We have had, I think one guest on before who does CSOps. So we don't hear too much from the CSOps folks. I think we should hear more because it seems like a lot of the time they're like in the shadows and stuff and sort of making things happen behind the scenes.

Right. Like, you know, but I really think that what CSOps does is so great. I think that ideally a company has, I'm just going to take this position, ideally a company, I'm going to take a position right now.

Not, not of a data horse, but a company should have like CSOps and a CSP hopefully, you know? I mean, I can, period. I'm not going to say all that.

I'm not going to say all that. I'm just like, you know, I always ended up having to put things together through Google suite, shout out to Google. Y'all want to sponsor us, come on down.

But I'm always having to put things together and it's just great to know if there's somebody like you Hannah, who's sort of taking a look at things, thinking about like, how can we, you know, maximize our efficiency? What KPIs actually, you know, really matter and just having someone who can actually speak to maybe that person, you know, in finance or someone who can speak to these other parts of the organization that can really, you know, enrich the experience CSMs have. So, you know, more, I'm, I'm, I know it's going to Rob, but I think it would be interesting to hear, and maybe this is what you do on your page, people to hear more about CSOps consulting, we usually don't hear as much CSOps consulting.

We usually hear more about CS consulting, which is what Rob does.

[Dillon] (7:20 - 8:04)

So before we go to Rob, it seems apropos, or it is a fantastic opportunity for ops consulting, because it seems like a thing that it's one of the last things that get invested in with CS, or maybe it's, we don't think that maturely, and part of the reason is I'm going to segue this back to a question that I had Hannah and answer, you know, as briefly as possible so we can give Rob his, his pedestal, but do you think folks can get away with their leader serving this function early on, or do you think it's best served being a separate individual oftentimes from the outside, get the feeling your answer is going to be yes, because this is what you do, but I just wonder how you think about that.

[Hannah] (8:04 - 9:46)

I mean, I think it depends on your finances and like what you're trying to do. So I think that like for me, like I talk to a lot of leaders just like on the side that like they don't have a budget to hire an ops consultant. One of the things that like I recommend, I'm like, I don't know how like chill this is, but one of the things that I recommend is like there's a lot of CS folks or even rev ops folks that are working like W2 jobs that are smart, really incredible people that like you could literally talk to them or be like, yo, could you help me out for two hours a month?

You know, like I'm trying to solve these problems because I think what happens is like when we depend on a leader to be all the things which is like, yo, what leadership is great. Okay, that sucks. That's why I don't want to be a leader anymore.

But if you depend on them to be all the things and wear all the hats, it's really hard to focus on that like mechanical function because in a lot of times like a leader, especially like early stage customer success, like they have to go to the biggest impact area as quickly as possible. And so a lot of the things that operations does is they kind of start building the ground as you're moving forward and running and if you're the person running like you don't have time to build background. And so I do think yes, like if you have resources to hire somebody rad, does that person need to be full-time?

Heck no. Like I work for tons of companies where I'm working, you know, between like five to five billion hours a month. It's not you don't need somebody full-time to start.

It's more just like having that as part of your vision as you start to really run, you're going to be able to go faster because your path is smoother.

[Dillon] (9:47 - 10:01)

You asked if that was chill. I'm just going to put my foot down in a way that JP refused to do and say we all need to take a page out of Wu-Tang financials books and diversify our portfolios.

[Hannah] (10:01 - 10:02)

Yes, Rob.

[Dillon] (10:03 - 10:03)

Go ahead.

[Rob] (10:04 - 10:10)

Yeah. Thanks for thanks for not quoting. So to directly Hannah, what was that noise you made before?

[Hannah] (10:14 - 10:16)

that making problem.

[Rob] (10:17 - 12:23)

I so no, no, no, no, no. Here's why I asked I have never felt my existence summed up in one sound. So as you just like that immediately brought me back to it was 2016 and I was trying to figure out customer success and I had a commute on the Caltrain in the Bay Area every day and that became like the time where I processed all my and it was, you know, at that time customer success resources were pretty scant.

Yeah, and certainly csops resources were very scant, but that was when I would try to research. What is this Salesforce thing? And how does the back end work?

And what does that look like? And and you know, meanwhile, I was fighting these distractions. Like what is this gainsight thing?

Like I know I love gainsight. Don't get me wrong, but it was way premature for when we had just like three five customers. Yeah, so I think what I really like you called out a barrier there.

This is a somewhat of a complex topic in my mind. You call that a barrier there around budget. Totally correct.

I think there's other barriers people have to like the folks in the CS space may lack the time they may lack the interest in the more technical side of CS. They might like the skill set or the practice and they might be dealing with a lot of internal challenges to to to win people over internally who don't even understand like what it is that customer success is I did get feedback from a CEO recently who told me Rob, you know what? Look, I think we're good with like the 80% use case.

I think we can move on and skip all the technical ops stuff that you really want to get to and I know you're a junkie for this stuff, but I was like, okay, that's a valid point. So it's also partially knowing like when enough is enough. I think the people who excel in this phase of customer success that we're in are some of the folks who who become just total junkies for this domain though.

You know, I think it's in the it's in the CS ops communities where you find the people who are absolute geeks and I've had the pleasure of BSing with Dillon and JP about this a ton. So I would say even when those barriers exist there are communities and there are topics that and there are people who want to have these conversations.

[Hannah] (12:23 - 12:48)

Well, and like I think a miss on like CS ops part is like you think about like marketing operations or sale ops. Like those are they're alive. There's a lot of people pay for that.

Like it's a real live thing. Like the problem with like CS just in general and then that transfers into CS ops is like we don't have any metrics. Like everybody's measuring different things.

Nobody knows what to measure. Why is that? Because there's no ops.

[Dillon] (12:49 - 13:54)

Well, it's you can point to a lot of different things. What I think is I'm going to go a step up actually because I don't think I'm even prepared to unwrap what you just said Hannah and I think they're so very different personalities. You would never expect your head of sales to also be your rev ops person.

Just think differently and talk differently and organize information differently. One is typically very good at it and one is typically notoriously bad at it. And I think it's the same for any of those organizations.

They're marketing people who are absolute savants at lead conversion, but they don't understand how to display that on a dashboard. Yes, right. And so to answer the question you you sort of vacillated and I understand why but I just think they're different people.

That's why your leader shouldn't do it often in the as soon as you can invest even a couple of hours a month. Like you said in having somebody else do it. It's just going to supercharge you because they think differently.

[Hannah] (13:54 - 14:19)

Yeah, and you're asking questions like lots of times with a customers that I work with where I'm not necessarily as hands-on and building a ton of stuff. It's less about it's more about asking questions. And so it's just questions that like you're not thinking about as a leader because you have five billion other questions you need to think about but in reality, it's just creating kind of a wider aperture for different questions and what we're actually trying to investigate.

[Dillon] (14:19 - 14:41)

Love the way you said that that is our time Hannah, but this has been fantastic. We had two different camera situations here. Rob turned his off for a few seconds, but JP he had to cover his camera for a while there when we had our that little segue about I don't think he can handle himself during that.

So this was a ton of fun. You are welcome back anytime. But for now, we've got to say goodbye.

[VO] (14:49 - 15:19)

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 find us on YouTube at lifetime value and find us on the socials at lifetime value media until next time.

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