#WFU Episode 14:

In this episode we welcome Denny Burda, Chief Customer Officer at River Consultancy, to chat churn:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:07 - First male guest with big ideas

00:03:18 - The story of a perfect churn

00:12:53 - Budget assumptions and surprise churn

00:15:42 - Stakeholder change and shifting priorities

00:19:55 - Transparency and learning from churn

00:22:00 - The importance of tracking churn reasons

00:28:30 - Drafting a churn ICP

00:32:18 - Key takeaways from the churn discussion

And hey, we want to hear from you! What topics do you want us to tackle next? Reach out and let us know. Remember, we’re here to share how We Fucked Up So You Don’t Have To.

Reach out to Melanie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-faye/

Reach out to Stino: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijn-smet-%F0%9F%90%B3-330435a9/

Reach out to Denny: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennyburda/

[Denny] (0:00 - 0:20)

and may feel like that a customer churn is the biggest fuck up ever and their jobs on the line and things like that. I thought admitting that now 11, 12 years on doing customer success and services at the highest level with multi-million dollar deals in the balance, you can still do everything right and the customer will still churn.

[VO] (0:25 - 1:06)

Welcome to another exciting episode of We Fucked Up So You Don't Have To. Get ready to dive into the wild world of customer success with your hosts, Stino and Melanie. Join them as they peel back the curtain on their own mishaps and triumphs, sharing candid insights and practical advice along the way.

Steno, a charismatic head of customer success, brings his unfiltered wisdom to the table while Melanie, the seasoned customer success manager, offers invaluable career insights. Together, they'll laugh, learn and navigate the twists and turns of the customer success journey. So buckle up and let's dive in.

[Stino] (1:07 - 2:04)

Hi everyone and welcome at a new episode of the We Fucked Up So You Don't Have To show. Today, we're back at it at our little threesome. We invited the most stellar guest that I can think of.

It's the first male guest that we have. That is a first. So there is where we already fucked up.

We didn't uphold the gender quota, but now we do. Now, I've had the pleasure of meeting him in person at Pulse last year in the Netherlands. We had the most amazing conversation.

He is brilliant. He gave me a shit ton of ideas, which I'm executing right now. Maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't know, but service as an add-on, we talked about it.

I'm executing on it right now. He gave me the idea of an entire new revenue stream, which I'm super thankful for. He is from the States, but he has come over to the dark side of the land of stroopwafels.

He is no one other than Denny Burda.

[Denny] (2:04 - 2:13)

Hi Denny. Hi Stino. Melanie, thanks for having me.

Stino, we're doing this in English or Flemish, whichever you feel like.

[Stino] (2:18 - 2:23)

No, English is perfectly fine. I don't want Melanie to be left out.

[Melanie] (2:23 - 2:25)

I'll stare blankly at you both.

[Denny] (2:26 - 2:51)

Honestly, that's what I do in Dutch most of the time anyways. Important phrase if you ever come over to visit, also on the side is just ja hoor, which isn't an insult. It's just agreeing or act.

You can get through about 90% of conversations. I'm perfect. Fluent.

Yeah, thanks for having me guys. I'll do the best to defend the male species against the fair sex and give you some amount of quality or at least humor.

[Stino] (2:51 - 3:18)

We'll see what we can do. You have some big shoes to fill because we had some powerhouses on before. I'm super excited because you are insane when it comes to customer success knowledge and everything that you produce and put out.

Just talking to you enriched already my repertoire of being in customer success, but we're not talking about the successes that we put. We're here to fuck it all up. What kind of fuck up that you bring to us today?

[Denny] (3:18 - 11:23)

I thought I'd talk about a fucked up churn. Depending on the listener, they might say all churn's fucked up or you fucked up or the customer fucked up and you're happy to see him go. Whichever way you want to take it, but I thought it would be interesting.

As you said, I've been in customer success in one way or another for a little over a decade. Probably fucked up every way imaginable at this point, but I thought it'd be interesting to at least start because it's painfully recent for me. Just had last month in December, pretty much the perfect customer churn.

I don't mean I orchestrated them churning perfectly. We did absolutely, in my mind, everything, fucking everything right. Then to the point that two weeks before we were talking about the next bit of the work and they were like, sounds great, this and that.

Then all of a sudden, two weeks later, I got a notice that they didn't renew the contract. I'm not bitter. I'm petty, but I'm not bitter.

I won't name names or call them out. Name them. I like my job.

I want to keep it. They were a great customer. We had them for, I think, around about three years.

Maybe a bit of context. This is a services customer. Customer who didn't churn from the product, but was paying additional for services support.

Yeah, for about three years, we had a really strong relationship with them. Very large customer, thousands and thousands of users. We worked directly through their central IT team.

They used our products across, but then they pimped out my services team to different business units to handle there. It was going really well. They bought a package with X number of hours.

When the contract ended, they'd finished at 98.9% of hours. It wasn't me wasting that much of their time. We were pretty spot on with the work we were doing matched to the goals they had.

Probably the only real indicator, which anyone who's done CS for a while is always terrifying, is our key stakeholder changed roles. They moved on to a different team and this team came in. They certainly had different goals and things like that, but we had this really good start.

We explained to them everything we've been doing. Maybe it was a signal in the first conversation where we talked about where we've done the majority of work for them in the past year. They're like, ah, that's not very important to us, but okay.

Glad to know I wasted my time. It was fine because what we said is that's completely okay. Tell us about your goals.

Tell us about what matters to you. Pretty instantly, not only were we able to identify where their strategy lied, where they wanted to go, we were able to basically plan out the next year and a half of work from my services team directly tied to those goals. And we had really good conversations.

I provided them with documentation. We even started doing some of the work. Knowing that we were getting a new stakeholder in three months before renewal, I went into full pain in the ass mode.

The day they started, I set up the call. The weekend I had people from my team coming in and delivering on basically the results from that. I just told everybody, hey, we want to hustle.

We want to immediately show value and we want to show that it's aligned to their strategy. So on paper, everything's looking good. We get about a month or two out from renewal.

We plan a strategic onsite. I came in, we do a really great exercise. If you guys haven't checked out, it's just called value realization, but it's certainly reappearing in customer success.

It comes from the old school, big four consulting world, but it's basically really strategically talking with your customer top down. What does your CEO say in the boardroom, in the conference room when the doors are closed and the investors aren't looking, what matters? Is it saving money?

Is it innovation? So we did that work with them and you work it from the top down and then the down back up to really say, yep, here's everything we're going to do. And I planned out with them and it was the best I'd ever done.

I left that customer onsite basically high. I shouldn't have driven home. I was giddy.

I was like, we've nailed this. 18 months of work. We started lining up down to the who was going to do the work and what days.

They called in other teams. All of that feeling really good to the point that I brought a salesperson along, one of our solution engineers to kind of help demo some work. And halfway through he's like, I didn't need to come.

You had this covered. This was perfect. They're going to buy.

We have an internal praise system. And he's like, this was the best onsite I've ever. So here I am on cloud nine, just absolutely thinking I've nailed this, waiting for the promotion to come in.

And two weeks later, I am just grade A asshole. They renewed everything but us. Certainly an ego blow.

And it's time you've met me now. My ego is massive. So it can handle it.

But what it reminded me as I was thinking about you guys, the community you talk to, the fact that you've got everyone from some of the best minds in customer success down to people who are just getting started and may feel like that a customer churn is the biggest fuck up ever and their jobs on the line and things like that. I thought admitting that now 11, 12 years on doing customer success and services at the highest level with multimillion dollar deals in the balance, you can still do everything right and the customer will still churn. And so I hope maybe positive new year's resolutions for the audience.

Sometimes it's just not your fault. And I'm about a month on since finding this out. And I still go through, I don't know, what are the five stages of loss or grief?

And some days I am just like a petty bitch. And I'm like, I'm gonna go keep some cars. It depends.

And then other days, I'm like shooting my contacts from this company, like message and only like, miss you, like jaded x miss you remembering the good times. Like you were the best. Well, but for your audience, maybe it's good to hear that we can all do it absolutely perfect.

And sometimes the chart is just inevitable. In this case, really the customer's exact words where it came down to budget. And I'm like, don't bullshit me.

And they're like, no, no, really, like, we had the budget, we could have technically approved it, but the risk for them of their margins on budget were too great. And they're like, we would rather not push as far this year and see if we can get room in a year or two. And that's the thing too, that I think is an important lesson of you fuck up the churn, the renewal doesn't happen, the salesperson's burning effigies of you for not making them more money.

But at the end of the day, you keep relationships with customers, even customers that churn because if you were driving them towards success, you're first in line when they go to their next company or when they move into their next role. And so for me, the happy ending of the perfect fuck up on churn was this is two weeks after like, I got a response back from the customer. And they're like, we want you to know you did everything right.

We super value the conversations, the honesty, everything you shared. They're like, we're going to be honest, admit that we're going to steal most of your ideas anyways, but we're doing them on our own because we don't have the budget. But you knew us, you knew what we needed.

And that's what's keeping us with the product. So again, sometimes not every product fits, not every role fits, new stakeholders, new goals. There's things that are just completely out of your client's hands.

I had another churn years and years ago that churned because that boss was a brand new CIO. And he said, we will not use any external products at our company. We're going to just eat our own meals.

As they say, you know what happened? They churned and three months later, they renewed at a higher level because three months in that CIO was in full blown panic mode. Things were burning all around them.

Just remember SaaS, you can have the perfect product, perfect relationship, perfect motions, perfect go to market. Some people will still churn. If it's meant to be, they'll come back.

We were joking before we went on about Hallmark movies, right? Sometimes that handsome Christmas tree salesman you grew up with will come back into your life in his red and black flannel lumberjack motif. Just let him go explore university, head off to New York for your Eat, Pray, Love moment.

He'll be there when you get back, right?

[Stino] (11:23 - 11:34)

Oh, you're speaking my language. Now I need to move to the tiny island. I'm pretty sure that's how Melanie got married.

Well, just straight out of Hallmark, Melanie.

[Melanie] (11:34 - 11:38)

Something along those lines, yes. The perfect marriage.

[Denny] (11:38 - 11:48)

Having a stable career in customer success and running a podcast, you can support your partner's Christmas tree dreams. Christmas tree and small amount distribution.

[Stino] (11:49 - 11:49)

There we go.

[Denny] (11:50 - 11:53)

Behind three great romances, the person actually paying the bills.

[Stino] (11:53 - 12:07)

There you go. I went to the back city and went back to the small village and fell in love with a pottery maker. And now we're like ghosts from a scene of Ghosts Every Night.

We're like sitting behind each other.

[Denny] (12:08 - 12:15)

Is it spooning? Are you the big person pulling the pottery wheel? I don't know.

[Stino] (12:15 - 12:53)

I should ask him, but I will leave that to the imagination of the audience. I mean, I'm picturing the music. Well, there we go.

But back to this threesome. No, but the thing is what the question on my mind was like when you did that on site and everything was going good and everything was going great, that you had these amazing talks. Was budget, was that part of the conversation?

Or was that something that you were like, okay, but this is in the bag because we wouldn't have that onsite meeting if the budget wasn't there. Was it an assumption that you made? Or was that something that was discussed during that onsite meeting?

[Denny] (12:53 - 15:41)

Yeah, no, fair question. And so what's interesting is I knew that their predecessor, the one who had left our previous champ, had already gotten the budget approved. So I was never worried about our budget.

Apparently I should have been, but I wasn't. But what I thought was interesting is, again, this client was great. They were so transparent with me about basically their org's CIO had shared, this is what we have to hit for 2025.

And it was a 30% reduction in software costs. And this is where, again, I think I did the right thing in that moment is we said, great, let's look at how we can utilize the tooling you have. Where can we save you money?

Where can we help get you closer towards that goal? And so like I said, they told me afterwards, they're like, yep, you had all the right ideas. And so what we focused on for that onsite, I could have probably pivoted and send it to like beg and plead mode.

Well, just as long as you don't get rid of us, let me show you some other products that you bought from us that suck or something like that. I could have taken the moral low ground, as we say, the sunny one down by the beach and maybe said, don't invest here. But what we did is we looked at customer need and how can we actually help?

Like I said, it was the best, one of the best onsites I've ever run because we got down to businesses that, okay, if goal number one is save 30% on software, how do you do that? And like any good customer, the first thing they said is, oh, we'll reduce our licenses. And then I asked the question, I go, well, can you do that?

Because you had to up your licenses 500 last month, just so you won't do that. And so we did conversations about user hygiene, user cleanup, found a very marginal, but I said, where you can actually save money is when you adopt tools correctly, ideally assuming that's a good product, you save time, right? You save effort, you save that.

And I go, what if we put you on the course? So this is the trillions around development, software development and things like that. I said, what if we can save your developers two hours per week per developer?

What if that's our ambition? And so we actually, we took it that way. And we did a bunch of workshopping and brainstorming and finding the pain points in their customer journey and their end user saying, okay, this is what they complain about.

This is what takes their time. This is what takes our time, the central IT. And we just started working through that.

And so again, I laid out the table perfectly. I set the fine China down for them, told them exactly what they needed to do. And the end result was great.

That's what we're going to do. But again, sometimes I think when it comes to churn, you just have to focus on the bigger picture. And for us with this, the bigger picture is that they're still a loyal customer, that they're growing with us and that they trust us and that they know we're there to deliver when they need it.

That's certainly better than I did in my younger years. I can give a conversation of actually I fucked up and they churned. That's also a benefit to the listening audience to have something to say, look at that idiot.

[Melanie] (15:42 - 16:10)

You said something that I thought was kind of interesting and maybe I misunderstood. So tell me if I'm wrong here. But you said that you had done work for them for a year before.

And then when you talked to them about it, they said that it didn't matter to them, that work that had been done for the previous year. I'm curious what that was. What was happening for that one year where it was no longer a priority for them or had the conversation happened where those were the goals and then that shifted?

[Denny] (16:10 - 18:43)

Yeah. So to fill that a bit more, basically this is a customer who's purchased multiple products, so different product lines. The previous champion we had who owned the whole suite of tooling had, with our services team, put most of the effort into one specific product line.

That's what mattered. That's what they were selling to their business units basically to maximize value on that product. The new product owners who came in had used the product in its early stages, didn't like it, basically said, it's not for us.

It doesn't mind that for that company, I think somewhere around a quarter of a billion dollars of business goes through that product and those teams, because it's what powers their sales teams and also their tech team. They don't like the product. So for them, it's not a focus.

We're still actually engaged with them trying to say, hey, like it or hate it, you're still doing a lot of business through it and you probably don't want to ignore it. But their focus and what mattered to them was very much in another field of our products. So they said, this is where we see our space to hang our head on.

It wasn't that the work we'd done hadn't gotten them to a point that they needed to be, but it was that when anyone who's experienced stakeholder change realizes every stakeholder is going to come in with their own prerogative, their own initiatives. That's a challenge of CS, isn't it? Because your job, sometimes it's to make the customer look good.

Sometimes it's to make the customer happy, but it's always to make the customer successful. And so now it's a lot of saying, hey, actually you can give zero shits about this product, but you still need to do it well. Or you can say, I'm so glad you're a fan of this product and we're going to help you succeed and look great.

I always, when I do customer success mentoring and people say, how do you kind of grow or develop this champion? I say, ask yourself the honest question, what can you do to get that person promoted and drive it that way? And that's not usually happiness.

I've actually helped some real assholes get promoted, right? Again, the temptation to name names is always there, but they know who they are. But you got them the success they needed to move on to the next stage of their career.

And some of them will thank you for it. Some of them couldn't care less. You were the stepping stone, but in customer success, that's our role is how do I make sure you're so successful that you advance within that company because your company advanced.

The flip side of that coin is making sure that they don't go, oh, well, I moved up to this role because Denny's the greatest CSM ever. They go, no, we succeeded because X products allowed us to do X mode or X function that much better. And now I'm going to go present that to our CEO and board of directors and take my pay raise.

[Stino] (18:46 - 19:55)

Well, the one thing that I really loved you saying is that, for example, the churn is 90% not the CS fault. I think we need to break open that barrier of my fault, because especially in the beginning days, your first churn is a heartbreak. That is for sure.

That one hits personal. That is below the belt, hits personal, even when it's a perfect customer. So what are tactics to bring it into the open within the company?

Like whenever there is a churn, I'm also asking you basically the same question, because I want to hear on how other companies run it, because we suck at it. There is where I fuck up. We do have a churn post-mortem, but I am struggling to get it more into the open.

I'd say it on the leadership meeting, but company-wise there isn't that place to get it noticeable on why a customer churn. Was it budgeting? Was it because they no longer drive value?

Because a feature was missing? Those are valid churn reasons. So how would you break that open to the rest of the company?

[Denny] (19:57 - 20:01)

Melanie, I'm going to let you go first so I don't get accused of mansplaining anything.

[Melanie] (20:05 - 21:43)

So two things that we've done that work really well in my role right now, we have a churn report that we call it. So whoever needs to be looped in on the churn report, I fill it out. I explain what happened, what the situation was, what I could have done better potentially.

Their feedback, their reasons for leaving, it goes to the head of CS. And then if they're a legacy client or someone that has had a relationship with some of the leadership team, they'll reach out to them. But otherwise it's just kind of filed away.

But one thing that I really liked in a previous role was going back to these Slack channels, right? We had a Slack channel for churn. Any account that churned went into this Slack channel.

And then me as a CSM, and if the AE was involved, we had to write notes about it so that it was visible to the company. Everybody could see what had happened to the account, what we tried to do and feedback from the customer, like what wasn't working or what that churn reason was. That was interesting because there were reasons that I could pick up on.

I could start to put things together and had notes for when that thing came up in the future with another potential churn risk, right? I could sort of piece things together or talk to that CSM or that AE and figure out what I could be doing a little bit better. But it was kind of nice for visibility.

And also as a CSM, when you get accounts churning, you kind of feel a little bit alone, right? So when we had a pretty big CS team and so I would see other accounts churning, you don't feel quite so bad. It's not just you, it's other people that's happening to you.

There may not have been anything you could do, but it was visible, which I liked.

[Stino] (21:43 - 21:53)

I love that. We all need to have the Kumbaya churn channel where we're all like sitting around the campfire and like offering emojis.

[Melanie] (21:53 - 21:54)

There were plenty of those.

[Stino] (21:55 - 21:59)

I'm going to do that and I'm calling it the Kumbaya churn channel.

[Denny] (22:00 - 22:13)

That's beautiful. Otherwise you could call it I fucked up and so did you. We all fucked up.

We all fucked up, so we all have to deal with it. That is a good one. Actually, I like that.

[Stino] (22:13 - 22:15)

I like that. That's even a better name.

[Denny] (22:16 - 28:26)

Yeah. Melanie, you're spot on and something I love about that about the tracking of it is when you track churn in a historical way and keep it together and you're not just looking at I think the traditional churn metrics, what percentage churn, what number, what segment did they come from, but you actually track the why. You're tracking valid data points, right?

You're actually tracking what matters. Sorry to any CSMs who were unaware of this before this meeting, but our job is data points. I don't necessarily agree with a lot of the data points people tell us our job is, but when it's like our metrics are solely NRR and EBITDA and blah, blah, get the fuck out.

But what I think people forget is we have, as CSM, if you're doing your job well, no one understands the customer better. You are in line to say exactly why a customer. And it's tough because there's always two answers to that.

There's the data answer and there's the emotional answer. And sometimes customers turn purely on emotional and other times customers churn purely on data points. We did, adoption wasn't high enough, or we didn't get the value promised out of the tool and things like that.

But I encourage every single person who has churned to actually run the post-mortem with the customer. If you've done your job well, and they've been with you for a while and you built trust, you hold that almighty CSM trusted advisor role that we aim for. If you can just say, Hey, I'm really sad to see you go, but I'm hoping you'd be willing to do me the favor of really helping us understand and don't hold anything back.

Don't worry about my feelings. Walk us through the journey from when did we start to fall on the churn radar and go through it? And that's actually something we've done before too.

We'd actually like sit and have almost like that. When did the relationship turn? Was it not enough value?

Did I not buy you fancy enough things? Or was it just, you got bored over time? And so we do that with customers.

And now it's something we teach and train on is actually having a good breakup is a good thing. Much like I said with the client, they still respect you and trust you afterwards. There's always opportunity.

I actually, I think about a customer I had in my very first CSM role. So this was about seven years ago. I'd actually just left that company, but I'd been working with this customer for three years there.

And they shot me a personal LinkedIn message and they said, Hey, would you be willing to do an hour call? We're evaluating one of your competitors from the company we just did. And we want to know if we should stay or if we should go.

And I said, let me check two things. One, I'm not violating any contracts because I don't want to get sued. And I said, two, would you be willing to let me share your insights with my former employer?

I still had a good relationship with them. It wasn't like I lit office furniture on fire on my way out. I said, I think they'd be really interested to know.

And I think it's okay to do this afterwards so that you don't have to deal with like desperate salesperson motions because they hear you looking elsewhere. Like explore, compare us to a competitor honestly, and then let's hear it go. But the fact that they reached out to me after they knew I'd left, and this was almost probably six months after I'd left, was that trusted advisor relationship.

They were willing to still tell me a story that matched it. And in the end, they stayed with my old employer because they said, you know what? As much as we miss Denny, as wonderful as he was our whole world, the tool's still doing what it should.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't. But when I think about money, when I think about the kind of story of the Slack channel, there's so much that could be going in there. If you had somebody who was kind of in the data storytelling analysis, I'd just tell them to go read that channel for the past two years worth of messages and start drawing the data points.

So not just who churned amount of money, what segment, but can you identify how many of those customers churned from legacy? Okay. What percentage of that was our churn per year?

And then you can actually draw that line if you're a good business leader, not just CSM, but actually in charge of revenue for the org, you should be able to go, okay, we need to either address our legacy products or understand that this is our predictable churn rate. And I think too, businesses need to stop being scared to churn. Churn happens.

And again, even perfect churn happens sometimes because the customer just believes the grass is greener on the other side or the other product had a really good marketing campaign. I think we talked about this a bit this time. So sorry to bore you with it again.

But one of the things we talked about when we met at Pulse was this idea of customer acquisition costs versus lifetime value, or essentially how long until that customer actually pays for the effort it took to get on the ad. Right now, customer acquisitions at 5X, which is the highest it's been in 30 plus years and lifetime values sitting at around two and a half to three years. Average churn is 18 months, which means most of the customers you're getting in are leaving before they paid for themselves.

Businesses can cheer on how much new business growth they have. But if you don't understand churn, if you don't respect churn and value it and actually learn from it, you're actually just saying, congratulations, we spent more money than we made. If I went and told my mom at the end of the month, I don't think I'd be sleeping in the same bed.

I'd be out on the floor. I don't even get the guest bedroom with that pitch. So if you're in CS and if you're dealing with churn, don't make it your weakness.

Don't make it your shame point. It's okay to be mad. It's okay to go back and go, oh, I fucked up or where did I run the questions.

But at the end of the day, you have customer relationship. You have both the technical data, the did they churn because of a feature or a lack of feature, et cetera. You also have the relationship sentiment and that customer story.

And that's your CSM superpower, right? The fact that you can speak to both those sides. And yes, it's great when you can talk about your champion customers and how they're adopting and share that and craft your ICP around it and all that.

But you can do it on the flip side too and say, hey, if we know legacy customers are 9% year over year churn rate because they aren't willing to pay more to move to the new environment. And there's this product on the market that's cheaper than the legacy product, but does 75% of it. Know you're going to either change your product or lose those customers over time.

[Stino] (28:26 - 28:29)

Basically drafting your churn ICP.

[Denny] (28:30 - 30:27)

Yeah. And that's the thing too, James, wherever he is just like shuttered because my mind started thinking about this, but we had a product at our last company. And I kid you not, it's a dead, well, near dead product now.

Like they've stopped selling it, they're sunsetting it. There's a few customers left on it, but this product was immensely expensive. Around 200,000 was the starting price for it.

This was in the legal tech space, selling to law firms. Lawyers are not the most patient bunch in the world, just FYI. And this product was snake oil.

And literally when the company I was at said, we acquired this company, you're going to be in charge of the CS for this team. I said, what did I do to piss you off? Because I knew the product was snake oil.

And the reason I knew that is their churn, they boasted the highest sales. I don't know how they sold them that this was a good product, but they sold the product for a bunch of money. We're saying, hey, this brings us in 30 million a year or something, which for the legal tech space was a lot of money.

What they didn't point out was their churn rate was 56%. Whereas that churn was often in the normal churn range of 12 to 18 months. Here's the problem.

Their average implementation time was two years. So they had customers churning before the product ever worked. And I remember going to the CCO of the company just started almost at the same time as acquisition.

I said, you need to know this and you need to understand this. I said, I know this company very well. They had another product that was a competitor of the product I've started in.

I said, you need to know this will cost us more money than it will ever make us. And what drove me insane. And again, red flag for anyone CSM job hunting right now, they described their CSM role.

So when I'm getting handed this team of CSMs to come under my remit, they were told their job, the phrases were save churn, prevent churn, make customer happy. And that was their job.

[Stino] (30:27 - 30:29)

Don't need to do as a customer.

[Denny] (30:30 - 31:11)

Yeah. Literally, if you're on LinkedIn and you're scrolling CSM roles, and they use the phrase churn or prevent churn or stop churn, that company is certainly not worth the job. If you find a company that's a proactively help us develop our ICP or help customers be successful, that's our job.

It is no CSM's job to save churn or prevent because that problem started with sales motion, or it started with the product itself. So never, ever like CSMs out there, if you hear somebody say it's your job to save churn, like you churn, you get out.

[Stino] (31:13 - 31:21)

Awesome. I love that. So to wrap up this episode, because I think Melanie's dog wants to go outside to play in the snow.

[Melanie] (31:22 - 31:25)

In the minus 30, we're all excited for that.

[Stino] (31:26 - 31:47)

No, I want to wrap up and because this one was stored with major key takeaways for me. So if we can do a little bit of a round table of what we remember and what we're going to try to implement or just keep doing, because daddy, you implemented the majority. So let us do a round table.

Melanie.

[Melanie] (31:47 - 32:18)

Okay. My key takeaway is share your learning. So what you can piece together from churn reasons, churn feedback, and then apply it to accounts that you're working with or clients that you're seeing those kinds of flags or risk factors and try and get as much info as you can learning from others to apply it to your accounts.

And then just know you're not alone as a CSM, there's going to be churn and just share what you can with the team or the internal org.

[Stino] (32:18 - 32:22)

Love it. You Denny, what is the thing that you're going to keep on doing?

[Denny] (32:23 - 33:00)

Well, the first thing I'm learning is to shut up and listen more because Melanie's had amazing points to this whole thing. So we probably should have just let her speak. And honestly, my learn, or at least my reminder, we learn plenty in CSM, implement very little, but my learn is exactly what you said, track, track over time and whether it's success, whether it's churn, be in the data business and keep understanding the story because it's not a quarter or a half or even a year, which we get caught up sometimes, right?

Because those are the sales motions. That's the go-to-market, that's the revenue reporting, but our journey with customers should be multi-year. And so our lessons and our data and our stories should be multi-year.

[Stino] (33:02 - 34:40)

100%. For me, it's two ticks, sending those Facebook mom, giffy, glittery gifts to your customers. Well, after they churn just to keep the relationship going, that's something that I'm going to do.

No, but I do love the fact that you need to do the off-boarding equally as good as the on-boarding, because like the examples that you mentioned is that you never know when people are coming back. And if you're being an asshole in the off-boarding and being nasty and closing down the account, yeah, that's something that you don't want to do. So that is for sure something that not that I'm, I am already doing it, but that's something that I will keep doing into account because as Denny sometimes refer, like I love to be a patty bitch as well.

So I'm going to keep that in mind to keep on doing that as well. And the other thing is the visibility, like we do have post-mortems within our CSP, but be leaner when it comes to the reasoning that we can track those data points, because we have the reasons because they will, they need to fill it out. If they churn themselves because we're subscription-based model, don't be lazy and go in and have that reason as a data point.

If you're going in more to that CRO revenue leader direction, that is something that will help you out. And drafting basically that churn ICP, I think that is equally important as a new customer ICP. So I really love that advice.

On that note, I think it's Denny, you took one for the man. This one was stellar.

[Denny] (34:41 - 34:46)

I'm glad I have not let our machismo down at all. Yes.

[Melanie] (34:46 - 34:50)

Our favorite male guest so far.

[Stino] (34:50 - 34:52)

You are the first.

[Melanie] (34:52 - 34:53)

Number one.

[Stino] (34:53 - 34:55)

Number one in our books.

[Denny] (34:55 - 34:57)

This has been an absolute blast.

[Stino] (34:58 - 35:27)

Awesome. We enjoyed it so much. For the people listening, you can link with Denny on LinkedIn.

If you have any further questions on how to rename a Slack channel, ask those budget questions, anything else. He's amazing. He has the best advice.

So if you want to link with him, definitely connect with him. If you have any questions for me or Melanie, you know where to find us. And we can't wait to catch you at another episode of We Fucked Up, so you don't have to show.

See you soon. Bye.