#WFU Episode 15:

In this episode we welcome David Gunn, Vice President of Customer Success at SundaySky, to chat features, value, and making the same mistake twice:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:03 - Owning your mistakes as a CS leader

00:04:44 - The email disaster that exposed a flaw

00:07:04 - Feature training vs. real value realization

00:10:26 - The challenge of proving ROI in renewals

00:13:25 - Why CS teams struggle with product feedback

00:17:18 - The telephone game of customer requests

00:20:50 - When you can’t use the product you support

00:25:20 - CS enablement vs. sales enablement gaps

00:29:54 - Learning from mistakes: Just make new ones!

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/

Sign up for the Lifetime Value newsletter: https://lifetimevalue.link/subscribe

[David] (0:00 - 0:18)

If I hadn't dug in further, I certainly wouldn't have been able to make that point and articulate it clearly to my product team. If I was just trying to explain the use case and play a game of telephone with them. So instead what I did was I just had a really deep conversation with the customer.

Tell me why, tell me how that impacts your workflow. How would that change make your life better?

[VO] (0:19 - 1:04)

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.

Stino, 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] (1:05 - 1:36)

Hi everyone and welcome at yet another episode of the We Fucked Up So You Don't Have To podcast. In today's episode, we have the most genius guy that is going to talk about, I think, the best topic that often customer success managers avoid. But before we go into that topic, I want to introduce to you all David Kuhn, the vice president of customer success at SundaySky.

Hi David, how are you doing today?

[David] (1:36 - 1:51)

Hey Stino, good to see you, man. I'm really good. Awesome.

Are you excited to share some fuck-ups today? I am so excited to talk about this because I've been doing this a long time and I can say I fucked up a lot. So I think that we've got plenty of content to go through here.

[Stino] (1:52 - 2:02)

I think it's just also the base of our profession, right? It should be on our resume. Instead of what we've all done is basically a long list of all of our fuck-ups and how we fix them.

[David] (2:03 - 2:18)

Yeah. I was just telling my team the other week, look, we're going to mess up along the way. You guys are going to make mistakes.

That is okay. I just don't want you to make the same mistake twice. So make a new mistake, learn a new way to fuck up next time.

And I think if we can do that, you're always going to be learning.

[Stino] (2:19 - 2:31)

So for anyone looking out for a job, start listing up your fuck-ups and how you learn from them. I think that is also the new way to get hiring manager attention. Like, hey, this is how I fucked up, but turn it around, hire me.

Honestly, yeah.

[Melanie] (2:31 - 2:33)

Someone give it a try and let us know.

[Stino] (2:35 - 2:44)

Please, please do. I want to know if anyone is brave enough to do this, please do it. No, awesome.

So David, what kind of fuck-up are we going to talk about today?

[David] (2:44 - 4:31)

All right. So today I want to talk about the lesson I learned about drinking our own champagne, eating your own dog food, whatever silly metaphor you want to use. But early in my career, I was a CS leader at a platform that was basically an online organizing platform for nonprofits.

You were able to do your email from the tool. You were able to do your fundraising from your tool, your event coordination, your email surveys, all of that stuff in one platform. And I did my standard protocol.

I went in and created an email in Gainsight. I linked out to a SurveyMonkey link. I sent them the results and man, I got blown up.

Every one of my customers was just like, oh, so they sell an organizing platform and yet they're using this Gainsight tool to email everybody. And they're using SurveyMonkey to message them and they must not have faith in their platform. It was awful.

I spent so much time cleaning up and apologizing and explaining my rationale. But the truth of the matter was, the reason I didn't use the survey tool internally was that it just wasn't that great. It didn't do what I needed to do.

Instead of going out, trying to use it, sharing my feedback with the product, I did what I guess a lot of our customers had probably done. They had just found something else. And so that lesson was a painful one to learn.

It was a rough experience. It was basically showing my customers that maybe I didn't have enough faith in my own product and it made them question why they should too. Since then, I've tried really hard to really come into every company I've been at with the mentality of we have to drink our own champagne.

We have to use our tool internally and really be customer zero, the biggest advocates we can of our platform.

[Melanie] (4:32 - 4:39)

I'm curious about something, David. Were you aware that it just didn't function the way that your customers needed it to? Did you have that feedback?

[David] (4:41 - 5:20)

Admittedly, the survey function at that company was actually one of the lesser-used functionalities. We didn't have a ton of customers that were using it. I didn't have a good reason as to why or why not they weren't.

We just knew it wasn't really there. When I started trying to send this out, I realized, oh, this is kind of a pain in the butt. I could tell, oh, this isn't going to work for my use case.

And so I pivoted. I went to a tool that I knew from before. I knew it worked.

It's a pretty standard survey tool. And it wasn't until I had a really vocal customer that called it out that I realized, oh, yeah, I'm having this problem. Somebody else is too.

[Melanie] (5:20 - 5:25)

Yeah. Yep. Exactly.

So what came out of that?

[David] (5:25 - 6:16)

So it was a lot of public mea culpas and a lot of outreach to our customers and explaining that customer outreach isn't quite the same as donor outreach. But I think what really came out of it was me going back and talking to my colleagues on the product side and saying, look, this was embarrassing. This was a tool that I wasn't able to use.

And we need to talk about why that is and how we can make it better. And that, for me, was really the start of my realization of the need for a tighter interlock between the CS and the product works and really being able to say, look, this is the feedback I'm giving you. I'm hearing I'm feeling it myself.

My customers are telling me day to day. And this is something that I want to be able to share with you guys, because I think it will help things improve over time.

[Stino] (6:17 - 7:03)

Was it more of a problem like when you first started out that your introduction into the tool was not necessarily, hey, this is the value of the tool, but more or less, hey, this is how you want to do it. This is where you click. And then this is where you click to do this.

And this is where you click here to do X, Y, and Z. Because I do have the feeling that the majority of CS leaders or whenever you're joining a new company, that the product training is more from a function point of view instead of more of a value training. So was that the case when you first started the company where people were like, hey, I'm just going to explain how the tool works.

The rest is for you to figure out instead of more, hey, this is the problem that we're fixing. This is the value that we want to generate with it.

[David] (7:04 - 8:50)

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that was definitely the case. In that particular company, I actually joined as an enterprise account manager.

I was doing sales, essentially. And so my training initially was around like, hey, here's the value pitch. Here's a brief 15 minute demo that you need to memorize and just do this over and over again.

And so that was my early introduction. And then I realized I didn't love sales and I moved into CS. I got to talk more with our customers and find out more about how they were using it.

I had a little bit of a headstart here because I was in non-profit fundraising before I got there. And so I was a development director trying to use a different fundraising platform. And then I came here and I was selling it to other people.

But what I was seeing was as I was starting to talk to customers more and not just prospects, this was no longer theoretical. When you're talking to prospects, it's, ooh, like what's possible? What can I do?

Oh, this is going to be great. When I'm talking to customers now, they're like, so I've been using this for a year and this is what I actually think. And sometimes it's different.

And it took me a while to actually get in seat and use it myself and realize the same thing. And I think it's a little bit of what you're talking about too, Stino, is that I was really good at knowing the tactical, how to use it. But what I wasn't really great at was articulating the value realization.

And I think that's something that was from being a little newer to the career, being newer to the tool. And it's something that I'm striving to do more and more as I progress. And it's something that we're trying to do at SundaySky right now.

We're talking more about value realization, making sure that we're doing more to use the platform internally and engage with our customers and get experience. So we know, wow, this is a great tool or wow, this is something that we can improve.

[Stino] (8:51 - 10:25)

Yeah. Because the thing is, I do think that senior leadership, not necessarily CS senior leadership, but just senior leadership in general, is when they're hiring, they're just so focused on getting that new hire up and running. To be like, hey, this is how the tool works.

This is the handover for your clients. I've written everything down in our CRM tool. Here is it.

Go for it. Have fun. And that's also something that I make myself guilty on as well.

If you are in the company for one, two, even three years, four years, five years, you're so deep into that rabbit hole of how it works on how you explain it that you are expecting someone else who is newly joining your team picks it up like this. And that is something that we as CS leadership then in particular need to be aware of that if someone new comes into the team that we really need to focus on that value aspect and not necessarily on how the tool works per se. Don't get me wrong.

You need to know how the tool works, but if it starts from, hey, this is the problem that we're going to fix. And this is how you do it. Instead of this is how you log in.

This is how you create something. This is how you export something. No one gives a shit.

No one, because they will turn in no time if they don't get any value, because nowadays it's super hard to compete with all of these tools on the market.

[David] (10:26 - 11:16)

Yeah, I think you're and I've been in a lot of different verticals. What I'm seeing is the person who may have purchased the tool initially may not be the one that has purchasing authority when renewal comes around. Maybe the belts have been tightened and now they've got to go up a layer of approval.

Maybe now the CFO is coming in and saying, hey, you need a 10% across the board budget cut. And so now every tool is being looked at and being analyzed for value add for ROI. And if your customer can't articulate that along the way, then it's going to be really hard for them to defend the purchase.

Yeah. We've got to be better at really talking about what is valuable about this and why it helps.

[Melanie] (11:17 - 11:58)

I think that's where storytelling comes into play too, right? If you can tell a story about how someone else is using this feature or what they got out of it or how you're seeing others have success with that feature, I think that makes a huge difference as well sometimes. And I will come back to this over and over again.

These are the things that I find in our user community is how they're using it, how it's changed their business, how amazing this feature is. And I will take all of those little nuggets and bring them onto calls with me because I don't use the software. I'm not an accountant or a bookkeeper, so I'm not using it on a daily basis.

I'm learning it and I'm playing around in there, but I need to hear from these customers how they're using it and then I can share that with my other customers.

[David] (11:59 - 13:23)

Yeah. I love that. We're in the process now kind of talking about starting up a community as well, but we do have the baby version of that in that using a voice of the customer Slack channel.

So when we have a really good customer call, I'm having the CSMs share, Hey, grab your call snippet and share it in that channel so we can hear what they're saying. One of the things that is always a little difficult is it's really easy to share a call snippet where the customer is like, Oh, I love your tool. This is so much better than your competitor.

And I'm really excited to be here. And this is awesome. You share that in the channel and everybody gets super excited, but it's those little snippets where they're like, well, I tried to use this and didn't quite work as I thought, or this was a little confusing and I didn't really get it.

And there's always my first gut reaction of, Oh, that's stung. But I've gotten better over time. And as I've progressed in my career of being willing to say, you know what?

That is super, super valuable feedback. And I need to be able to share that with the team as well. I need to be able to come back and say, Hey, look, they like this and this, but this is something that they're really unhappy about and make sure that it's not just CS that's in there.

It's product, it's sales, it's marketing so that our marketing team can know, Oh, these are the success stories that we can really harp on. Sales can be like, Oh, I can use that as a reference and product can know, Oh, okay. I'm going to double down on this feature or, Oh, okay.

We have some work to do on making this one a little better.

[Stino] (13:25 - 14:28)

100%. But I do also think in all honesty, we suck at providing feedback to product. Let's be honest.

We are not consistent. I don't know about that, man. I think I'm pretty good at it by now.

I think I'm proud to say you that I get to give feedback like, Hey, the customer asked this, but what we often fail to do, and this is something that's on the nose that we often forget it is the use case. It's really the use case of what the problem is that we're trying to fix. It's something that we know that we need to do.

And in often of times we do, but also equally 50% of the times he could just completely forget because we go from the understanding that if we communicate with product that the automatically know what the problem is or what the customer means. Remember that you need to be a baby and you need to ask why, why, why, why, why, why, why. So, but so we often forget that.

Let's be honest here. We fuck up on that part. Not on a daily, but on a weekly, if you check your feedback tickets after the recording of this podcast, you will find at least one or two that you didn't give the use case to.

[David] (14:29 - 16:20)

Yeah, I think you're right. And I think the way I've gotten around that and the way I've given myself a little bit of a safety net is to really leverage your call recording software. So whether you're using gong or chorus or whatever else we're using Clary now, having that conversation with the customer and then sharing that, that call snippet with your product team, I think helps tremendously.

I remember distinctly at a previous company, I had a customer that was really hung up on. We really need role-based access controls. We need access controls.

And now it would have been really easy for me to go to product and say, we need our back right now. And the product team would look at me and be like, do you have any idea how complicated that is? What you're asking for is like months of sprints.

But what I was able to do in that conversation was say, well, tell me about that. What do you need our back? What are you trying to do?

What is the end goal that you're trying to accomplish here? It was about basically functionality that could be accomplished with foldering rather than true role-based access controls. But I wouldn't have gotten to that point if I hadn't dug in further.

I certainly wouldn't have been able to make that point and articulate it clearly to my product team if I was just trying to explain the use case and play a game of telephone with them. So instead what I did was I just had a really deep conversation with the customer. Tell me why, tell me how that impacts your workflow.

How would that change make your life better? And then I took that entire 20 minute call snippet and I shared it with our product team. And I was like, this is what I'm talking about.

This is what they need. And that opened my product leads eyes up enough to where they were like, okay, all right, now we can dive in on that. We can fix that.

And it's not, David, I'm not going to build out an entirely new functionality for you in six weeks. That's not going to happen. But it required getting in deeper and really understanding the why behind the why.

[Melanie] (16:21 - 17:00)

Yeah. I love that. The other thing that I've started doing is I have a good relationship with them.

I will ask them to share the software that they're using now. Because often you'll hear, I need to get out of this software. We need to move fully into this software.

And can you do this? And I need for this to happen for me to be able to cancel my contract or eliminate some of these softwares from my tech stack. So sometimes I'll just have them share their screen, show me what you're doing now.

Let me take a look at it. And then I can share those screenshots or a snippet of that recording with product just so they can see, okay, this is how they're doing it now. It really works well for them.

We're missing that. Can we build that out at some point in the future?

[David] (17:01 - 17:05)

That's great. Yeah. And I think it really helps you articulate the point a little bit better.

[Melanie] (17:06 - 17:06)

Yeah.

[David] (17:06 - 17:16)

I feel like we spend so much time as this idea of the voice of the customer, right? But sometimes the customer's voice is better than us being the voice of the customer.

[Melanie] (17:16 - 17:17)

Yes. A hundred percent.

[Stino] (17:18 - 17:37)

Also, and don't be afraid to put in your product team, just drag them into the call. That is also, just drag them. If they have something, if they don't understand the use case and you're basically the mailman or the transfer, you know, the telephone game I hate?

[VO] (17:37 - 17:38)

Oh yeah.

[Stino] (17:38 - 18:26)

It feels like the telephone game where it's like, yeah. And you say something like basically saying Simba saved Mufasa and by the end of the talk, it's going to be like Simba killed Mufasa. The telephone game also, there is where a lot of feedback gets lost in translation in particular.

So also there, wherever you have the feeling that is one, a high valuable client where the MRR or the AR, whatever you're tracking is super high and it's a high touch client or an enterprise client, don't be afraid to pull in your product team because also there you won't, you don't want to have like frustration with your customers that are you coming back with questions and they re-explaining other products still don't understand. That is not good for your relationship.

So in that sense, also don't be afraid to drag product back into that call.

[David] (18:27 - 19:18)

I would say I agree with that with a little bit of an asterisk in that you've got to have a member of your product team that understands a little bit about customer facing interactions because I've seen it go both ways. I've seen really great product leaders who were willing to have that conversation. And I've also had product leaders who have been a little too protective of their work and well, you're using it wrong.

You're not doing it right. And they don't have that customer facing emotional intelligence to be empathetic rather than they get really defensive about the product they've created. If you have a good product leader who can be empathetic and who can hear them out and communicate and not be afraid to kill their darlings, then I think it's a great experience.

But I've also had issues where I've brought in a product lead and it sent me back because they were too aggressive with the customer and the customer didn't get careful.

[Melanie] (19:19 - 19:52)

Oh, that's such a good point. I'm having memories of sitting on calls with a couple of members of our engineering team and just like, maybe we should just end the call now. So embarrassing and cringy.

They weren't used to being on customer calls. And so they didn't necessarily know how to act or what to say or what was appropriate. And I would just shake my head and try and guide the direction in a different way.

But you really have to be careful who you're bringing onto the call and prepping for it beforehand. So you know what they're going to say and how they're going to be talking to the customer.

[David] (19:53 - 19:58)

Yeah, definitely. I don't know if you guys remember the movie Office Space from like 30 years ago.

[Melanie] (19:58 - 19:58)

Yeah.

[David] (19:58 - 20:11)

But one of the scenes that I replay in my mind constantly, is the guy that's I'm a people person. I talk to the customers. So engineers don't have to.

And I'm like, oh, that's my job. That's what I do. I talk to the customers the engineers don't have.

[Melanie] (20:11 - 20:13)

Yes. Yep. So true.

[Stino] (20:14 - 20:50)

That is indeed so true. Going a little bit more to the original fuck up, where I do love that you need to work with the tool yourself. And the value training should be there.

But what about if you're working for a tool that you can't use yourself? Because for example, I and Melanie, I know your current company is as well. I work for a tool that was built for accountants.

I'm not doing accounting. Like Melanie, I know you are in the same space. You're too cool to do accounting.

So how would you approach that? David?

[David] (20:50 - 22:49)

Yeah. So I have approached that in the past. What we've done is turn that into kind of a cross functional initiative.

At my previous company, we had a tool that was really more for developer workflow optimization. I'm not a developer, I don't code. But we had a dev team, and they were building this tool, and they were using it to some extent.

But what we did was take a member of my CS team, and partner them with a member of the engineering team. And we started a customer zero initiative to where we said, all right, we're going to start using this platform internally. We're going to start setting up the metrics measurements that we would, just like anybody else would, and make sure that we get a feel for this, and get feedback from the people who are actually in it.

It was funny because it was moments of the same flashbacks to what I was saying 10 years prior to this, is we'd say, hey, why aren't you using this module? Or why are you using this report? And we're like, well, we tried, but it's not really that accurate.

So we didn't want to use it. And I was like, well, then we fix it, because our customers aren't going to use it if it's not accurate. You have to use a tool like this.

You have to use your tool in some form, or at least have somebody that you trust use the tool, and be willing to tell you honestly, warts and all, what they think about it. Yeah, this is great. I love this.

This is cool. Or, oh, no, I missed this functionality. I'm sure if you were to talk to the accountants in your org, and get them to play around with the tool, I hope they're using it.

But if they're not, are they willing to say, like, oh, I like this, but QuickBooks does this better, or whatever it may be, get them to be honest with you about it. I mean, your own internal team is an easily accessible customer zero group. It's an interview panel that you have at your beck and call whenever you need them.

So why not leverage them? That's super valuable.

[Melanie] (22:49 - 24:15)

I think that's really valuable, too. I think the other thing that is an issue I know in past roles that I've had is not being a user of the software myself, struggling with enablement, not necessarily having product relay, why a feature was built, what it's for. If I don't have the industry expertise, or I'm not doing it day to day, it's really hard to drill down and see why did we come up with this feature?

Why did we build it? What is it doing? Who's going to use it?

All of those questions, even right now, I still struggle with that on a weekly basis. There is not a lot of information that comes down to the customer facing teams. And so I spend a lot of time and have done this in other roles, too, where I just have to play around, use it myself, try and figure it out, go to the community.

I think that's really important, and almost a waste of time for me. Yes, I need to be testing and using it. But I also need to have that information upfront so that we put out a feature, I start getting emails, the customer calls get booked, and I need to know what I need to know to train the customer or have them focus on where the value is there.

And so I think the enablement side, we don't know what's going to launch in terms of the features until the day it happens. So it can be really hard sometimes to prep and be aware of what I need to sell or what I need to understand when that happens.

[David] (24:15 - 24:21)

Do you think that's true for your new business team as well? Or do you think that's a problem just exclusive to your CS org?

[Melanie] (24:23 - 24:31)

Yes, I would say exclusive to the CS org. I think sales has more enablement and more training and they make the time for it.

[David] (24:31 - 25:17)

That's exactly what I was going to get at, is that there's definitely a sales enablement role in every company, right? And there's not always a CS enablement person. But what I've tried to do over time is just kind of weasel my way into those sales enablement trainings.

Hey, so you're doing that with sales, can my team listen into? You're already doing it for 20 people, can I add six more CSMs? It really does kind of reinforce this need of getting the CSMs to understand the value proposition.

How do you position this? The sales people are learning this. And I think that's a, to your point, if you're not going to those meetings, then you're just, here's a new feature.

The worst is when they don't do that sales enablement training. And then the marketing collateral for the feature release is talk to your CSM for more details. And then the CSMs are like, what now?

[Melanie] (25:17 - 25:18)

It's my worst nightmare.

[Stino] (25:18 - 25:19)

Right. All of the above.

[David] (25:20 - 25:55)

Yeah. And so I've really tried in the last few orgs I've been in to really push to make sure CS is in the room when they're doing those sales enablement trainings. Make sure that we are in the loop with not only what's coming down the pipeline from product, but also, hey, marketing, what's the communication plan for this?

What are you saying? How are you telling them to engage with the customers? Because there may be an email that we want you to use or a Zendesk trigger that we want to leverage or something, but you really have to make sure you're in the loop because sometimes CS can be an afterthought and that's, you've got to really advocate for yourself to be in the room and be part of the whole process.

[Melanie] (25:56 - 26:18)

Yeah, that's so true. I do need to focus more on that because I just find myself, you know, it's kind of frustrating, right? I don't look forward to these releases because I'm like, okay, I need to set aside an hour of my time and play around with it and ask dumb questions to the product team.

I'm always that person, right? Can someone tell me what we're doing this for or what this means? But if I don't ask, I mean, I'm sure I'm not the only one who asks the questions.

[David] (26:18 - 26:39)

Oh yeah. I like being the one that asks the dumb question because I typically find that it primes the pump. If I'm willing as a leader to ask the dumb questions, then the rest of my team are okay asking not quite as dumb questions.

They probably understand it a little better than I do because they're more front lines than I am. But if I can ask a really dumb question and get the ball rolling, great. Now we're having a conversation.

[VO] (26:40 - 26:40)

True.

[Stino] (26:41 - 28:25)

I have the feeling that we all, that we talked about this so on the nose that we're like, we know that we can do this, but we often forget because it's like some part of the basics. Like it seems so obvious, right? We know that we need it, but it's often so easily overlooked when we start somewhere new or we have a new team member joining.

It's so easy to get caught up in that rabbit hole of day-to-day operations where like, you should know this. There is no such thing of knowing something already or the value training. So I think the major key takeaway for me would definitely be value prepping across all the boards, not necessarily for your CS team, but literally if you're listening in and you are in senior leadership, make it part for everyone of your company, because I dare to ask you, go to marketing and ask for value our tool is bringing and how we bring that tool.

No one can't answer that. Well, they could, but not in a precise way as our customers may be expected to drive the value. We always go from the assumption, like we think that the customer wants to see this in the product, has that based on their gut feeling, marketing things like, yeah, I think customers would love this, but does is basically the same or like, oh, we have a new feature.

We think the customer should use this, like this, get rid of those assumptions and really go heavy on that value training based on the feedback that you're getting from your customers. That would, for me, be the major takeaway of your fuck up. It's all of our fuck up.

[Melanie] (28:25 - 28:28)

Yeah, it is. Collective fuck up.

[Stino] (28:28 - 28:39)

So how do you put it? Put a mirror in front of you. This episode was basically a little like I never felt so naked in an episode like this one.

[David] (28:41 - 28:47)

I mean, I guess you're welcome or sorry. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

[Melanie] (28:50 - 28:50)

Okay.

[David] (28:51 - 29:54)

Anyone else major takeaway before? One last thing I'll say, because you just reminded me of this is you mentioned like coming to a new org and doing this over and over again. I've had the pleasure of working with many different companies over time.

And every time I come to a new place, the mentality that I bring with me is, okay, this is a do over. What do I wish I had done six months earlier at my last job? What is the thing that I wish that at my last role, we did a little too late or we were playing catch up or whatever.

And if you can come in and say, this is a fresh start, this is everybody's facing the same problems. Every CS org I've gone into, it's the same thing. It's, you know, let's build out process.

Let's build out structure. When you come in, it's just, okay. I remember that this was a thing.

This came and bit me at about six to 12 months. So let's start thinking about it now. Let's start structuring the team the way we need to now.

Let's start making sure we have the playbooks in place now, because if you don't, then you're going to be on your back foot and you're going to be making the same mistakes over and over. It's okay to fuck up. Just find a new way to fuck up each time.

[Melanie] (29:54 - 29:54)

Yeah.

[Stino] (29:54 - 30:15)

We need to put that on a t-shirt. Basically, you can fuck up, but fuck up in a different way the next time. Yes.

David, if we ever do merchandise that is going on and the first buck that rolls off that production belt is like, we're going to send it to you because that will be my mantra.

[Melanie] (30:16 - 30:18)

And we'll share some royalties.

[David] (30:18 - 30:23)

I love that. That's great. This will make up for the fact that I can't share this podcast with my mother.

[Melanie] (30:26 - 30:32)

Hey, we did not curse at all really this entire time. It was very clean, very PG.

[Stino] (30:32 - 30:48)

I was scared because Rachel, your marketing director, she was giving me this scared eyes and be like, it's fine. But giving me that stare and the meme simultaneously, and I was like, oh, I need it. I was trying my best.

I think we did okay.

[Melanie] (30:48 - 30:49)

We really did.

[Stino] (30:49 - 30:54)

Well, but to make up for it, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Sorry, Rachel.

[David] (30:55 - 30:56)

Guys, this was so much fun.

[Stino] (30:56 - 31:45)

I really enjoyed this. This was. We keep on upping and upping the subject of these episodes because it gets real.

Everyone knows about Churn, but I really think this was a topic that we often are scared about to talk about because basically is exposing ourselves as we are good CSMs, but saying that we fuck up, not really grasping the value of our tool at one point in our career, because we can't use it or we don't use it. And if we can't use it, we don't look towards internally to the team that should be using it and asking them for their feedback. So in that sense, I think it was like a really honest episode.

So thank you so much for holding up that mirror for us, David.

[David] (31:45 - 31:49)

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and cancel my therapy session for this week.

This is all I needed.

[Melanie] (31:50 - 31:51)

And it was free.

[Stino] (31:51 - 32:48)

It felt like that. It felt like that. I don't need to pop up Xanax for my anxiety later.

I'm like, good. This was so therapeutic. I love that.

I love this for us. David, thank you so much for joining the we fucked up podcast. Sorry, Rachel, for everyone listening in.

If you want to link up with David, you can definitely find them on LinkedIn. So if you have any questions on how he grew into that value prepping proposition and how to train his team from now and earlier in his career, don't hesitate to reach out to him. I was going to say them because I was also mentioning SundaySky because they have this amazing tool that can help your day to day operations because video messaging is the new thing.

If you have any questions for me and Melanie, you know where to find us. And the next time you will hear an episode, we will be live together.

[David] (32:49 - 32:49)

And that's exciting.

[Stino] (32:50 - 33:02)

Where we will record another episode of the we fucked up so you don't have to show. Thank you so much for listening. And thank you, David.

Again, thank you, Melanie. And we will see each other soon. Bye guys.

Bye.