Experts of Experience - #30 What Are The Biggest CX Mistakes and How To Avoid Them

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

On this episode, Anita Toth, the Chief Hidden Revenue Hunter at ATI, discusses churn and customer success in the B2B SaaS industry. She shares insights on common mistakes businesses make when trying to avoid churn and emphasizes the importance of building an authentic view of the product from the beginning. Anita also highlights the cost of not focusing on churn and the need to uncover hidden revenue opportunities. She discusses the limitations of NPS as a metric for measuring customer satisfaction and suggests alternative approaches.Tune in to learn:Why building an authentic view of the product from the beginning helps avoid customer surprises and reduces churn.How uncovering hidden revenue opportunities is crucial for increasing customer lifetime value.The reason NPS has limitations as a metric for measuring customer satisfaction and alternative approaches should be considered.Why shifting the mindset from acquisition to post-sale is essential for long-term business success.Why trusting intuition and listening to customer insights are key for customer experience leaders.–How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more.Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org.

Churn is becoming a bigger issue. Your consumer's being frustrated, and I think it does force us all together. The higher your churn rate is, the less profitable the company will be. You might be able to scale, you might be able to grow, but you won't do so profitably. The focus isn't often on reducing churn by creating better customer experiences. It's often this focus on acquisition. It's a real mindset shift to realize your greatest profits sit in your customer base. I have this diagram looking at the customer relationship being similar to a dating or romantic relationship. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host,

Lauren Wood. Today, we are going to dive into the world of churn and customer success with Anita Toth, the chief hidden revenue hunter at her company, ATI, Anita Toth, Inc. At ATI, Anita and her team uncover hidden revenues within B2B SaaS companies, and they employ what they call the Customer Churn 360 system, which leverages scientific research to pinpoint revenue opportunities and enhance market share by understanding customer behavior and feedback. So today, we're going to get her take on some actionable insights and innovative strategies to boost your customer lifetime value, reduce churn, and solidify your business's position in the competitive landscape. So we clearly have a lot to dive into. Anita, how are you doing? I'm doing really well. I love talking about this stuff. So I think we're going to have a lot to dive into. Anita, how are you doing? I'm doing really well.

I love talking about this stuff. So I think we're going to have a really interesting conversation. So yeah, I'm ready to begin. Great. Well, in taking a look at your website and following you on LinkedIn, it is very clear that churn is a conversation that you love to have. And so my first question for you is, why do businesses fail when trying to avoid churn? I know that's a big question,

but if you can give us some insights into what are some of those common mistakes you see companies making? Right. I think, you know, looking at the macro level, the biggest thing is having a misunderstanding of the difference between a potential customer, so pre-sales, and what needs to happen post-sales. So I have this diagram. If you pop on my LinkedIn profile, you can see it. It's also on our website. And it's looking at the customer relationship being similar to a dating or romantic relationship. So the biggest thing is companies, we understand what acquisition is like. We understand what dating is like. It tends to be more tactical. It's short-term focused.

It's, you know, there's one goal in mind and that is getting to the wedding or getting the potential customer to become an actual customer. But that's where things get really challenging. You have this little period called the honeymoon period. It's both in romantic lives as well as in customers' lives. Like we've all had this when we've become a customer. You have your expectations. You're hopeful that whatever product or service you bought, you're going to have whatever expectations you had met.

And in that little honeymoon period where your expectations are not being met, well, the seeds of churn are being planted along there and you can dip into something called buyer's remorse, where very quickly you're like, oh, you know what? This is not what I thought it was going to be. And so some customers churn out right then very quickly. Others, you know, hang around a little longer to see if things will change. But the biggest thing is understanding that marriage, just like having a customer relationship, is not the same as dating.

And I think that that's the fundamental issue as to why companies fail to prevent churn from happening. I think they just don't realize that pre-sales and post-sales are vastly different. This is such an important topic and something as a customer success leader myself for many years, this relationship to the sales team I found was always my most important relationship because it was so easy for us to butt heads because they were selling something that my team wasn't able to really live up to, or they were skirting around some of the sticky parts of our product that probably needed to be

shared early on so that customers weren't surprised once they actually signed on with us. And so it's just such an important point to consider is how do we create a authentic view of our product from the beginning so that people aren't surprised later down the line. I was actually listening to, I think it was something on Harvard Business Review's podcast last night, literally about this topic about how when you're selling and you are honest about a downfall or a part of your business that may not be all roses, there might be something that is a little less than ideal. Obviously, if there's something that's really bad, we don't want to have that even be something that we're selling. But if there's something that's a little less than ideal, mentioning it actually increases the potential that someone

will purchase because there's trust built in that honesty. And then moving into the post-sale side of things that you and I know so well, it really helps to build that relationship. And so what I'm not saying here is like, go out and shout from the rooftops, like what's wrong with your product, but having an honest reflection of what that product is, is so important to then building trust with the customer.

Having the right customer come in the door is one part and then two, their expectations being set so there are no surprises. And there isn't that buyer's remorse that you speak of. I think just even in the whole analogy of dating and the customer emotional journey, if you will, it's no different. Like if you're showing up and you look vastly different from, let's say, if you will, it's no different. Like if you're showing up and you look vastly different from, let's say, if you met somebody on a dating app and they don't look anything like what you thought you were getting, guess what? You're not going to be happy about that.

So I fully agree. And this is all business relationships are built on trust. And trust takes a long time to build, but can be dashed very quickly. So every single one of us, you and I, Lauren, all your listeners, we've all had experiences where we became a customer and very quickly realized, oh, this is not at all what I signed up for, or this product doesn't work at all, like I was told it was going to work. And, you know, very quickly, you go from this high of maybe, you know, I just purchased this, I hope it works, I hope it can help me, whatever it is, to right down in that buyer's remorse. And once you're way down there in buyer's remorse, very, very difficult to get a customer back up to the

point of, let's just hit the low bar of satisfied. Nevermind about making them happy or a raving fan or loyal, just the amount of work to get them up to satisfaction. So really it's setting the expectation from marketing that is continued through sales. And then when there's the handoff between sales and customer success or pre-sales to post-sales, then those expectations are in a narrow band versus what the customer expects and what reality is. The bigger that delta is between the two, the more upset the customer will be or the more negative emotions they will experience that will dip them into buyer's remorse. And you're also highlighting something just that I'm thinking of as you're speaking that post-sale isn't just post-sale. Like customer

success is not only looking at what happens once that customer is now our responsibility. It actually starts like churn starts from the moment someone is introduced to a product or the potential for churn starts at the moment someone is introduced to a product. It starts with that marketing asset or introduction that they see through the sales process, through the onboarding process. And then by the time customer success owns them, the problem has maybe already been started. So we really need to look from the beginning.

And so I'd love to understand a little bit because you work with companies to help them uncover their hidden revenue opportunities, not only just decrease churn, but actually uncover what opportunities do we have here for the customers that we're able to keep? And I want to understand for our listeners, what is the cost of not one, focusing on churn, and then two, really looking for those revenue opportunities? So we'll start with churn and then take it to the next level. Comes down to profits.

Pure and simple. The higher your churn rate is, the less profitable the company will be. You might be able to scale. You might be able to grow, but you won't do so profitably. And then, of course, if your churn rates are high, what do most people you know most people what most companies we saw this last year in 2023 end of 2022 as interest rates went up and you know vc funding was was reduced instead of focusing on the customer base to say wow what opportunities lie there companies went and we're like we we've got to acquire more new customers. That's the only way that we can bring revenue in. So as you stick with a higher churn rate, the focus isn't often

on reducing churn by creating better customer experiences. It's often this focus on acquisition. And so it's a real mind shift or mindset shift that needs to happen to realize your greatest profits sit in your customer base. You've already paid to acquire those customers. Now, how can you get them to stay longer? And at the same time, how can you float those opportunities that might be hidden within that customer base? And it's not just upsell and cross-sell, by the way. Those are the obvious ones that people think about. But there are ways to find competitive advantages that your customer base will be able to share with you. That's the hidden revenue. That's the real opportunity. Tell me a little bit more about that. Honestly, your customers have the majority of the answers that you're

looking for. What most leaders don't know how to do is to ask so that you can find out what those opportunities are, what your customers are thinking, what they're feeling, what they like, what they don't like. Surveys are good. Although now with AI, we're going to see surveys disappearing. It's going to become what is ultimately the gold standard of customer feedback, and that is customer interviews. So most companies do not run customer interviews. Meetings where, you know, one-on-one meetings, not the same thing because customer interviews are standardized. So you get 15, you get 20 customers of a certain type. So let's just say you're turned to customers. You take 15, 20 of those, and you ask the exact same question. Because what you're trying to do is limit how

much noise you get by asking different questions. By standardizing it, you know you can compare apples to apples. And that right there is where you're going to start seeing opportunity. But the biggest opportunity is when you do the exact same thing with your best customers. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? Why did they stay? Why are they your best customers? What is fundamentally different about them than your customers that churned or your customers

that are in that middle, more neutral group? There's a fundamental difference. And then when I ask this question of leaders, well, why are your best customers your best customers? They usually say, oh, because they've been with us the longest or they pay the most. That's great, but why? And when you can get to the why and you compare your best customers to your churned customers, that's where your opportunity is. You are going to see so many differences between the two. And then you take that information and you flip it back into marketing so that you can

start attracting more of that best customer group. And that's exactly what you said, Lauren, starting at marketing, taking it through sales into the post-sales side. Yep. I'm so glad you mentioned customer interviews because this is something I do for my consulting clients as well. I'm assuming you do the same and having that standardized list of questions and going around. And I find so many companies that I work with, there's a little bit of resistance to it. It's like, I know we need to do customer interviews and I talk to my customers, but really going out and saying, we're going to have a conversation or we're

bringing someone in to have a conversation with you who you can tell everything to. We're not taking any offense. You can tell everything to this third party. It's kind of scary, I think, sometimes. I find there's a bit of a hurdle to come over. And I think part of it is because you don't know what you're going to get. Is it going to be bad? Is it going to be good? What are we going to do with this information? We're kind of on track right now. Is this going to throw us off? But it should, you know, we should be taking those insights and changing the business depending on what it is that our customers are really wanting and needing. And like you said, maybe changing our go-to-market

strategy and going after a certain subset of customers who we know not only really enjoy our product, but stay for a long time. They are much more valuable to us. So we should spend our effort going towards them, even if it's a smaller subset of customers than we initially thought. Absolutely. Absolutely. And two things I want to say. One is I find the reason why most leaders are afraid to do interviews is less about what they're going to find. But then it's one of those things that once something comes up and you become aware of it, now you are responsible to take action around it. They pretty much have some ideas of the good and the bad. But it's like, oh, great. Now,

if I've heard that there's 30 of our customers in this particular segment, all saying the same thing, or 90% of them saying the same thing, great. Now we have to address it. And like you mentioned, we're already on track going this way. And does this mean now we have to pivot? Does this mean we have to change? Is that going to be, you know, six months worth of work down the drain? That is real. Like I can almost see it when we're reporting results

that this like, oh no, now it means. To me, I actually think that's a good thing because if you're heading down the wrong way, I know I want to know before I get too far along and I've invested six months or four months into something. And then now there's that sunk cost fallacy. Well, we've already put so much in, let's keep going. And then the results are terrible. Yes, it's hard to, as a leader, to hear, maybe this isn't quite the right path.

Maybe you're close, but you need to pivot. You need to alter course. And that can be really, really tough, especially if your compensation is tied to that particular outcome. Totally. And you've got something's on track and it's looking good. And then now you get this information. So I really, like all the years I've been doing this, that is, that is sort of what's really at the root of not wanting to really dive too deep

into what's going on in customers' minds. Yep. Completely. And I just want to say for anyone listening, I know you know this, but it's a long game. And this is really what customer success is all about. It's why I love customer success so much is because it's not just thinking about the short term. How many people are we bringing in this month? It's really the long term. How do we build a business that is going to last and grow and increase revenues in the long run? And sometimes this information is hard or scary as it may be to hear is just such important information for you to think about the long-term strategy of your business. And so, you know, sometimes the feedback also just validates that you're on the right track,

which is also really great to hear, but it's important to listen to your customers. Just do it. Just do it. So I'm not even getting past my introduction here because we're going so deep on all this stuff. But I wanted to... I'm on question three. I jump around, but you know. But I wanted to ask you about a bit of a sticky topic these days, which is NPS and how we can really track the satisfaction of the customers once they have been brought in the door. And a lot of people are saying that NPS isn't a great metric. It doesn't tell us the full picture. It's kind of useless. I've spoken about this on this podcast. Really, some say yay, some say nay. I wanted to get your opinion.

So what do you say? My most engaged LinkedIn posts, all I got to do is try to the pony of NPS. And people are all over it. So NPS was originally created for B2C. It's incredibly problematic in a B2B environment. And that is because in any customer, we're almost speaking for the most part as if it's one individual, but often it's an account. There's many individuals in it. And so the problem, one of the main problems with NPS when surveys are being sent out is they're not being sent out to the same group of people.

So decision makers should have a separate NPS from end users, from champions. And that is one of the key problems. They're all lumped in together. And so you have no idea, you know, when you get this final number, what does it, who, you know, what does it mean? Who is responding? And what is satisfaction? The second thing is even Fred Reicheld, who is the co-creator of NPS, has moved on from NPS. And he is now focusing on earned growth rate. So that is a metric that is tied to your customer base. Because NPS, if you read the history of it, was around loyalty.

And sure enough, companies that have high NPS tend to have higher loyalty. And sure enough, companies that have high NPS tend to have higher loyalty. But now with earned growth rate, what he's focusing on, and I love this, I absolutely love it, another hidden revenue opportunity is tracking referrals. Your best customers, again, they might not be the one spending the most amount of money, but you may have a pocket of customers that are referring like crazy. And first of all, referrals mean that you don't, they're free. They're free customers. You don't have to pay to acquire them.

They really are. And yet most companies do nothing with this. They don't have a referral system. And referrers, I have to say, are different from your advocates. Very different. They're two different groups. So even Fred Reicheld has moved on. Earned growth rate, a heavy part of it is referrals. So I will come back around to NPS. I think the days of NPS are done. I would rather see a company choose a more specific metric for their customers than something very general like NPS. Again, originally created for B2C, does not do particularly well in a B2B environment. And the third thing is the response

rates are so low now, they practically don't tell you anything. It's a lot of work to run an NPS survey and then let alone be able to fully understand and believe it. I, well, I'm not actually going to share my opinion yet because I have more questions for you. I have thoughts on it too, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the earned growth rate and how to really track that. Earned growth rate has two parts to it, paid and then the earned, which is through referrals. So Fred has a book called Winning on Purpose. It came out, I think, early 2023, maybe late 2022, somewhere in there. There's still some challenges around how do you set up and track the referrals.

So you talked earlier, Lauren, this is beautiful about some of the challenges. This is one of them. How do you track that, especially if you have a large customer base? I wish I could give an answer. Even Fred himself, hey, this is his baby. He struggles with it. I will tell you personally in ATI, I have my own referral system that I use and I track it. So I know who my top referrers are and I can nurture those relationships.

And again, you don't have to make this a big complicated thing. So I have my 10 people who are my top referrers and I love on those people like crazy. And then I have the next bucket, those are relationships to be nurtured. Maybe they've referred once, but they've not referred again. So those are, you know, relationships that I nurture. And then I have a whole bunch of people that have never referred and I don't know if they ever will. So every one of your customers is important, but let's be honest, the reality of our world is there are people on top, there are people who are in the middle, and there are people at the bottom. And so regardless of what your personal views are on it, that's just reality, whether it's in the

animal world, whether it's with humans. So that's what I do is I track and I have it. I use Airtable. That's mine. Again, I don't have thousands and thousands of customers, but you could just take your 1%, your top 1% and start tracking and nurturing those relationships in a very different way. And that's what I do. And it's been phenomenal for both them and for ATI. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is not an option. At Salesforce, they get it. They've made their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, available to help you with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of your journey. Learn more

about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional services. Completely. If we love a product and we talk about it because we want to, or we refer someone to it because we think that it will Professional services. reflects that back to them and thanks them in some way, then you're just reinforcing that behavior. And so I cannot agree more. I'm always so curious why companies don't do this more often. It feels so obvious, yet it is somehow challenging. And even just like, it is difficult to know if someone's referred you unless you've given them some way of getting that information back to you using a referral code or some method to actually make that referral happen is you need to implement that in order for you to be able to track it most likely, unless everyone coming in the door is just abundantly honest about how they heard

about you and all of this. But coming up with some way of tracking it and also incentivizing the people who really love you to go out and share it. Like, I really don't think there's any harm in that and very beneficial for your business. Yeah. And I was going to say, so depending on the product, referral links, perfect. If that's the easiest way that you can do it. And then for other businesses where they're talking to sales sales can ask that question were you referred and if so who referred you great and that but it's just like a crm they have to then annually input that info but knowing who your top referrers are and building a relationship with them.

Like marketing has no problem putting the company's name on everything, handing out swag. That is easy. But yet here you have a free, essentially a free sales team referring in. And why are we not loving on them? Why are we not? And you would be surprised at the stuff I have sent. So first of all, first of all, I got to say this. If you are at all interested in doing this, marketing is swag. It has your company's name on it. If you are giving a gift for someone who's referring, and this is what I do, and I'm not talking big money, it is something personal to that person. So I'll give you an example. I just sent one of these last week in the mail.

He's been amazing. He's in my top 10, right? And his name's Darren. And he has his garishly awful looking branding, bright yellow, like hurts your eyes, just whatever. And then there's this image of him that I took a screenshot of off of video. And I put it on a mug. and on the front of the mug, it said, you're the best in his ugly, like it is, sorry, Darren, but it's true. It like hurts my eyes when I see this yellow, but it's in his brand color yellow. It says, you're the best. And on the back is that screenshot picture of him. I sent it, he lives in Spain. I shipped it from here to there. He hasn't gotten it yet. But what do you

think his reaction is going to be when he opens that up and there's a handwritten note, right, expressing my gratitude and how much I appreciate him? I think in total, it took me like, what, 20 minutes to do that from start to finish. And I know he's going to be blown away when he opens it up because it is 100% personal to him. There's nothing from ATI on there. There's nothing branded to me. It is branded in his company colors, the handwritten note. Like those are the things that really we talk about trust, but we also have to show that we value

people. And something like that, I can guarantee because that is totally about him. He's not going to throw that out. It's not going to go in a donation pile. I'm sure even if it cracks or the handle falls off of it, we'll probably reuse it for something else because it was so thoughtful, right? And about him. Again, you're 1%, even in your top half a percent of customers. If you could start making this motion happen very, very quickly, you'll start

seeing the benefits in additional revenue. Because if they've been doing all this referring for free, imagine if you give them that love, what a difference that will make. Completely. And I will just also say that sometimes those personal notes can, I think this is why people don't do it sometimes, is because it takes effort and thought and you knowing your customer really well. And so one, anyone who's customer facing in the CRM should be looking out for what is this person like? What is their unique interests? Like we should always be taking note of that so that it makes this gifting process easier. And then I will also share a tool that I use a lot for this. If I maybe didn't know someone that

intimately and couldn't come up with that really special, unique gift, a friend of mine started a company called Loop and Tie, where you send them a collection of gifts that they get to choose from. And it feels personal because they choose the thing that they actually want. I don't want to send someone a bottle of champagne that maybe they don't drink. Maybe they're just going to throw this away. I want to send them something they actually want to use. And Loop and Tie has been a great tool for me. So just plugging that right now because I love it. I wanted to go back to the NPS conversation a little bit because customer satisfaction is still something we want to know. Of course, if people are spending more, great. But if we have

them in a year or multi-year long contract, how can we really tell how they're feeling, how they're doing? And NPS has kind of been the, let's say, band-aid for that, especially in a B2B environment where we don't have that many people to create. I mean, maybe we do, but it's not like a consumer brand where there's thousands of people using your product. Maybe it's less than that and NPS can be tricky and let alone trying to actually get people to respond to the survey. It's just, there's not going to be enough coverage in terms of your customer base. So how else can people get an idea of their customer satisfaction to know if customers are at risk or if they're doing really well and we can start to reward

them for that? Or yeah, what do you think? It's huge. First of all, something like customer satisfaction, those scores, if you're using like an actual CSAT, which is, that's transactional. That is like, what happened just immediately before? Are you satisfied with the results of that? Well, there are times I've been satisfied with the results of it, but I'm still planning on churning. So I can give, yeah, thumbs up. It was good. I'm satisfied. I'm happy, but I'm still leaving. I'm not happy with your overall product. This is where it becomes important to have multiple places where you're collecting that type of feedback. So it's in meetings, surveys right now. I mean, we're still using them. So ask pointedly, where are they feeling? What are

they feeling? Do they want to stay? Do they not? On my website, there's a list of 45 customer questions that CSMs can ask. And it goes all through that. Yeah, it's amazing. It's free. So it's on the resources page. You can download it and I can give you the link for the recording here as well. It's amazing in getting sort of beyond the surface level answers of, oh yeah, things are good. Because you've got to come at this at different ways, right? Like we all have, we're all busy. We have our social face, our public face. We have our, you know, what we're like at home. And it's like, how can we sort of keep testing different ways to see, okay, well, they said this, and then I heard this, and then I heard this.

Oh, wait a minute. If I'm linking those up and I'm really listening, it sounds to me like maybe they're not really happy even though they tell me they are. So that list of questions, and actually that list of questions was from a LinkedIn post I did, and there were like, I think 150 different questions I got, and I boiled it down to sort of this top 45. So you can start asking those questions. And the questions are for different parts of the customer journey. So on onboarding during that time, sort of midway through and then pre-renewal, so that you can get a better idea because NPS and customer satisfaction, they're context poor.

You really don't understand the context in which, especially NPS. CSAT, you do because it's transactional. You have no idea. Why did somebody give us a five? Oh, and then you find out they just had something really crummy happen right before they took your survey and it really colored their view. So that list of questions is really great because it follows along the customer journey. So you can be taking little data points all the way along and then part of it is still gut feeling,

like there's that little element in there where you're like, I'm watching this data, I'm listening. And they used to talk about this, but they no longer do. Maybe I need to ask deeper questions. Yeah, completely. And what I love about this too, is it's really bringing the human element back into our work. It's about actually listening to what does this person really care about? What does success look like for them? Are we achieving that or not? How can I pick up in their tone of voice or the words they use if they're actually satisfied or not? Because you can tell. And what I actually think is interesting as we enter this age of AI, and I've had a number of guests speak about this. Actually, my first podcast episode ever with Matt Dixon, who wrote the Challenger Sale, spoke about how we can now use predictive analytics to actually

predict what someone's NPS score would have been based on things like their tone during call recordings. So that kind of sentiment analysis, how often are they entering into the product? How are they showing up for meetings or responding to us? We can now start to take all of that unstructured data and put it into models that will then show us this customer actually isn't as happy as you think they are, because maybe they're a really friendly, nice person. And when you speak to them, they're like, oh, yeah, everything's fine. But they never use your product, which means they're probably not going to renew. Like, let's take all the insights

that we have, including our human intuition of how something is going, and we can actually create an assessment of it. And around that human intuition, it's interesting how AI is with the sentiment analysis, like kind of able to pick it up. But I don't personally think we're totally there yet. I think we still need to speak to people and we always should speak to people human to human. How is this going? Is this solving your needs? Is it not? Why not? And really understand what's going on for our customers. Yeah. And we're going to see more of this. So AI coming in and giving prompts, suggestions on what you can say next, all of that. We've developed over what, millions of years, this gut feeling. And I don't think that that will ever go away. We want to

have it. It's there for a reason. And so I think the challenge will be in now discerning when do I listen to the AI prompt and when don't I? And I go by this feeling I'm getting that even though it's telling me that let's say this person's at risk and you find out that they really aren't, but it was just, you know, humans are fallible. Humans built AI. AI has biases and everything else too. So I think it's an excellent tool. I really do. I am not anti-AI. I actually think it's brilliant for, like you said, taking all this unstructured data, but you still have to bring in some critical thinking. Yep. I think it's a great thought partner. That's what I think of as AI. This is a thought partner. It's like, I mean, many of us work at home alone now and this can kind of be your colleague of like, how does this look? Can you help me reword this? Like, that's what AI is good for. ask you about how you've seen companies transform. Because you mentioned the mindset shift of going from purely acquisition focused to also thinking about what happens post-sale. How do we build trust from the first moment? How have you seen the companies that you work with change in really applying some of the techniques and approaches that you bring to the table. I would love to say that it's been a massive change across the whole industry and everybody's, you know, jumped on board and focused on retention.

Sadly, that's not the case. I will say, though, the companies that are really open to digging into the, I don't like to say the minds of their customers, but in many ways, that's what it is. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? Why did they do what they're doing? Those companies really have an advantage. And so it's the clients that we have are already, they're already fairly open-minded just by nature of what we do. So then it just, they take the data that we give them through those customer interviews, and then they can just really accelerate what they're already doing. And I think that that's the biggest difference. On the whole though, software and it's still,

it's so heavily focused on new customers, new acquisition. Like even we talked about like a referred customer is a new acquisition, but yet companies aren't really taking advantage of this. So I think it still comes down to when times are tough, especially what we do is we protect. And by protecting ourselves, we go back to what we know and are familiar with, even if the outcomes aren't the best. And so this renewed focus again on acquisition speaks to the time we're in. And when there's not so much focus on survival, then there's more opportunity to become creative and then maybe question our mindsets and should we do things

differently and what does that look like? So I think for the next little while, I'm starting to see some changing attitudes, which is wonderful. Some of the thawing is happening, but it's going to take about 12 to 18 months before things really change and settle. And I think then we'll see again this sort of renewal, more creativity, just being more open to other ways of acquiring or keeping customers. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, and generating revenue. Yeah, and generating revenue.

Right? But I fully agree with you. I mean, I think of it as that short-term versus long-term approach. When we're feeling really tight, we need to just think short-term, how do we get to the next month? And it is harder to think long-term, how can we start making some investments in our business that are going to take us further, better, faster, you know, all of that in the in the long run. So, yeah, I completely I completely hear you with that. What are some of the ways that you approach helping organizations to shift their mindset from that short term to that long term or that acquisition to really getting creative about the post-sale? First of all, it's not immediate. It takes some time. It's really in showing opportunities that are being missed and then market pressure. Really, that's what it comes down to. It is

a discussion of money, plain and simple. I wish it was something else, but it's not. It is really tied to, hey, your competitors are doing this, you're losing market share. Maybe it's time to start looking at something different. And the answer lies in your customer base. And so then we run a set of customer interviews, 15 on those churned customers, 15 on your best customers. And then right there in the comparison, you can see those opportunities. And that becomes really the initial or springboard to larger conversations. Because I think I mentioned it earlier, it's starting to take what your best customers are doing and taking that information and making a link between customer success and marketing. Customer success knows

the customers best. So it's how do you get that data out of customer success into the hands of marketing so they can start attracting better fit customers, which we know then, you know, sales can close faster. They become much better post-sales. They tend to refer more, like all of those things. But you've got to get that engine going somehow. And it starts, sadly, talking about what you're losing out on. There's a lot of missed opportunities here.

So let's start talking to your customers and identifying them. Completely. And starting with your customers, because we can hypothesize all day about what it is we think our customers want, or obviously looking at the data, looking at usage data, how are people responding to things? That is very helpful, but there is nothing as powerful as actually hearing it from your customer's mouth and them saying this worked for me. This didn't work for me. I've been using this tool, but I don't actually feel like it's solving my problem or whatever it is they have to say. We need to actually hear that, hear from their experiences. And so it's, yeah, it's the first place to start. I've also found in my own work when I reflect those things back to business leaders, like this is what your customers are saying. And this is a big time getting buy-in from senior leadership on things that you're trying, you know,

intuitively your customers want and need, get it from the mouth of your customer, have your customer share. This is what's happening for me because that creates that real tangible thing for leadership to see and make a decision around acting on. I would love to give a tactical tip if I could. Lauren, you teed that up beautifully. And that is that here's your tactical tip. This is what we do when we're reporting to our clients. And that is take video snippets of that particular thing and don't show one don't show two show at least three different customers saying the exact same thing they can't refute that so what it so really what you're trying to do is overcome whatever stories they've told in their mind.

And when customer number one says it, maybe they can go, whatever. That's just, they're an outlier. While customer number two, who's maybe one of our best customers is saying that, oh, wait a minute. Now you have a third and they're saying the same thing. And all three of these are our best customers and they're all saying that. Okay. Maybe, just maybe we need to have a look at this. And that's why it's very, very critical when you're interviewing customers, you interview them in segments.

Keep all your churned customer interviews the same, same questions. And then also your best customers. Because if it's all over the place, then there's opportunity to be like, yeah, but that customer churned and doesn't really matter. They're not with us. But boy, oh boy, do you ever get their attention when you say, yeah, so we spoke to 30 of your best customers and this is what they said. And we heard eight of the 30 say this. Maybe there's something going on here you may want to have a look at. Great tip.

Love it. Well, Anita, I have two last questions for you. The first is, I'd love to hear about a recent experience that you had with a brand or a company that really left you impressed. What was that experience? Tell us about it. This program that I joined about creating referrals, referral partners, a referral system. I had an onboarding call. I was really, really surprised at how well they had gotten to know me. And they've been phenomenal at supporting me as I took this course. So it's called Rich Relationships.

So R-I-C-H is actually an acronym, but don't ask me what it is. Probably the word referral or refer or something like that. Refer something is likely the R. The rest I have no idea. It has been amazing. I love them. And if that doesn't sound like a good thing, when I talked about the gifting and all of that, it's actually called Giftology. And it's the same group that does it. So Loop and Tie, I'm going to check them out because guess

what? That fits very well with what I do with Giftology and now this referral system. They've just been phenomenal. And especially when I was really struggling in the beginning and just wrapping my head around how the whole system works. Now that I've got it set up, it's gorgeous, but it took me a little bit and they've been fantastic. Awesome. Well, I'll have to check that out as well. Those are great insights. Thank you. And then my last question for you is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? I think the one piece of advice, it's like those old tried and trues. There's a piece that you have to trust yourself. So it's trusting that if it feels like there's

something more that you could be doing, then there probably is. If it feels like you might be off track, then you're getting that gut instinct for a reason. And if something really, really matters to you, fight for it and trust yourself. You know, collect the data. Like you said, getting that buy-in. It's not instant. It's not a one and done.

But if your gut feeling is really saying like, there is something here that I know can be a game changer, not just for the company, but for the customers, and you really believe in it, trust yourself and go for it. Such, such important advice, truly, because especially in a customer facing role, especially if we are in customer success or customer experience, and we are that customer facing person, we get to hear a lot about their experience and we get to really see how, what it is that we're selling, how our

customers relate to it in the longterm. And we get to pick up on a lot of insights. And just like you said, listen to, trust yourself, listen to that intuition of saying, something's not right here, or this has been an issue for multiple customers, but maybe it's looked a little bit different. Dive into it, understand it, follow that intuition. Because again, this is, we're talking about human relationships. There might not be blatant data that says, look here. Sometimes you have to follow that intuition

to then find that blatant data, but it might not always be so obvious. So thank you so much for sharing that, Anita. It's been so wonderful having you on the show. Can't wait to see what's next for you. Yeah, thank you. Really, really excited by it all. And I think the biggest thing that came out of our discussion today is, you said it so beautifully, this is still human to human. AI will be there and it's going to change the way we do things, but we're still humans, you know, involved with other humans. That's whether it's B2B, B2C, just whatever it is.

And what are those fundamental tenants? Trust. We want to feel valued. We want to feel heard and respected. And I think if you can hit on all of those four and find ways to build them into the communications, the process, everything that you have to do with your customers. It's going to be reflected in how long they stay. Yeah, completely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, Lauren. Take care. an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce AI and data. And it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work side by side with your team and turn your AI and data vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support from the best of the best. To learn more, visit sfdc.co slash professional services.