Experts of Experience - #6 Jan Young: Why is Customer Success Crucial in SaaS?

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Explore the forefront of customer success with Jan Young, a visionary in post-sale strategies. In this episode, Lauren Wood delves deep into Jan's expertise, exploring her revolutionary approach to post-sale strategies in the SaaS world. Jan, the founder and CCO of Jan Young CX, shares her unique perspective on customer-led growth and go-to-market alignment, offering invaluable insights for businesses looking to thrive in today's challenging market.Jan discusses the multifaceted nature of customer success, the importance of strategic advice post-sale, and the critical role of customer success managers. Learn about the exciting intersection of AI and customer success, and how emerging technologies are reshaping the way businesses interact with and understand their customers.Tune in for a comprehensive look at the latest trends and strategies in customer success, and how you can apply these lessons to drive your business forward.If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to rate our show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@ExpertsofExperience?sub_confirmation=1 Imagine running your business with a trusted advisor who has your success top of mind. That’s what it’s like when you have a Salesforce Success Plan. With the right plan, Salesforce is with you through every stage of your journey — from onboarding, to realizing business outcomes, to driving efficient growth.Learn more about what’s possible on the Salesforce success plan website: http://sfdc.co/SalesforceCustomerSuccess (00:00) Preview (00:24) Introducing Jan Young (01:10) The Misconceptions of Customer Success (04:44)The Importance of Post-Sales in SaaS(06:07) Customer Success in Diverse Industries(11:20) Navigating Market Changes and Layoffs(15:02) Aligning Customer and Company Success (26:48) AI's Impact on Customer Success: (38:09) Balancing Efficiency and Human Connection(41:17) The Concept of a Joint Customer Success Plan: (44:52) Closing Thoughts and Advice

You literally will go out of business. You will just continue to bleed money. If you treat everything post-sales as like the little sister function, or just assume that it's going to happen, because if the marketing or sales promise doesn't set the customer expectations up correctly so that they will partner in this post-sales motion, then you lose that customer as well. Hi, and welcome to Experts of Experience. I'm your host, Lauren Wood. And today I'm speaking with Jan Young, a customer success consultant, coach, and community builder. Jan is the founder and CCO of Jan Young CX, where she supports post-sale leaders in customer-led growth and go-to-market alignment through courses, consulting, and coaching. I'm so excited to have Jan on the show today,

not only because she's our first customer success expert, which we're going to get into what all of that means, but she's a true advocate for the customer and resource to those of us operating in the post-sale ecosystem of the SaaS world. Jan, how are you today? Great, great. And I thought you would also add that through this, we discovered we live down the street from each other. Yes, exactly. And we're neighbors. So exciting. And we're new friends. So this is a really great moment for us to get to dive deep on the record because we have so much to talk about. So, Jan, I know that both you and I, we both work in the customer success world. And something that we both experience is that this term customer success is so often misunderstood or just not really understood.

So I'd love to just start it off before we even get into what you do and everything. Just give everyone in your own words a little bit of knowledge of what is customer success. Yeah, no, absolutely. I'm really glad that you're starting there because I think it's important. You know, so often customer success is misunderstood as being customer service, which is really important, but it's not the same. And so when, the way I think about customer success is that it is primarily focused on the post-sales motion, which is everything after you sign on the dotted line. And so it can include onboarding or implementation. It can also have under the roof professional services. It also includes support, right? Because you want to have a

customer-centric support. It can include things like customer education and, and customer marketing, right. And how you're communicating with your customers or helping them adopt and optimize your product. And it certainly can include things like CS operations, you know, in terms of how do you, you know, the business intelligence of understanding your customers and stuff. And then, but really, truly, when you talk about a CSM, a customer success manager, their responsibility for, you know, like their first priority is to be the strategic advisor to the customer. And that is, you know, in part helping them to adopt and optimize the product. But it's also then to ensure that you are meeting, you know, sort of renewals and expansion, you know, where you're looking at cross-sells and up-sells, right?

And it's really when you're looking at the land and expand subscription model, it is everything after land. Maybe I should have said that first. Everything after land. It's everything after land. And it's the way that companies stay in business. When you're a CSM, you should be thinking about how to make your customers successful in their business, meeting their objectives and that sort of thing, but also because that's what makes your company successful in their business. And so I love CS because it really is at that intersection between the customer and the company. And it's strategic and it's interesting and it's fun. And my idea of fun, you know, and the people that you meet in it are just, you know, smart and strategic and generous and kind and empathetic and, you know, just all of the above. So I, this, you know, once I found this community, I like, yeah, I, I can't leave it.

So I can expand on it, but I can't leave it. Thank you for that explanation. And I think what I want to underscore in what you shared is that it's so multifaceted and there is it. It changes depending on the business and the customer and what the customer needs and what the business needs. And there's so many different ways of going about it. But in its true essence, it's really that team that is focused on making the customer successful, as the name describes. And, you know, that's the thing is so often people think that, oh, well, CS isn't any

one thing because it can look so different depending upon the product and the customer base. But that's not really true. There are some foundational, fundamental ways in which you approach it. It's just the way that you apply it might be different because of those variables. And it should be, right? And you were talking before when you introduced me about being a community builder. We have, well, we're going to be rebranding it from CS Office Hours because it's become

more than just the weekly meeting. But in the new year, in 2024, we're going to be focusing just on that, is just how CS looks in so many different industries. Because you look at cybersecurity, it's on-prem and it's cloud-based. And that changes then how you're working with customers, what data you have to understand how they're doing with your product and all of those things. So it can be different depending upon all those things. Yeah. So paint the picture for our listeners. What do you do in the realm of customer success? How are you involved? What do I do personally? Yeah. Tell us how you support the customer success community because you are so involved in it. And I think it's important for people to really understand, yeah, how, how you are supporting the customer success

community. Oh, well, okay. Um, it's funny. I usually, uh, pontificate as you know, about all kinds of things that I don't usually talk about myself. So I am caught a little off guard, but, but as long as I can, you know, talk about in terms of the community, I think I can do it. But yeah, so like with CS office hours, this has been going on for, I don't know how long, maybe a couple of years. We, we, but I was an interim VP. So, okay, let me start. So I've been consulting in various capacities with founders and, and startups, especially since 2016. And then I started to focus more specifically on the post-sales motion, and I joined a boutique customer success consultancy. And then through that, I was doing a couple of different interim roles and things like

that, where, you know, especially when the market was so hard to hire folks. They needed someone in there while they were trying to hire someone. So through that, then I would both consult and try to transform and improve their CS program while also looking to hire my replacement. In a particular case, I guess a couple of springs ago, I needed to hire a VP, five CSMs, an onboarding manager, a support manager, and I also wanted to hire CS Ops. And when I posted about that, I was posting about little things. Anyway, when I posted about all of those roles, I got like 80 people who all wanted to have a half hour meeting with me that couldn't work. So I said, oh, come by these office hours. But then all 80 people aren't going to get those 10 jobs either. So we just kept meeting. And then when we started, you know, and then I

was traveling and someone else was like, oh, well, I can keep it. You know, I can do the meeting this week. And we just kept meeting. And then I was talking to somebody in customer education and she was just fantastic. Oh, you should come and talk to this, you know, improv group that we, not improv, but a small group of folks that we keep meeting. Anyway, so then she came and then we had customer marketing person come the next day and the next week. Anyways, it's just and then we started a Slack community to support it. And and and now there's a book club and then there's like job search cohorts. And now we're going to do collaborative groups for CS leaders and for for CSMs. And anyway, so it just kind of keeps like turning into something, right? So, so it

needs to be rebranded to reflect that, but that is one of the things that I guess I do for the CS community, but, um, but just, but, but so many people contribute to it. You know, I, I feel like I create a space for it, but, but so many people are contributing. It's not just me. So that's one thing, I guess. But then otherwise, what I really love is coaching. And I've really started to focus in on CS leaders who are having that difficulty and sort of getting over that hump to be executive leaders. Because so often I see in organizations where they're not given a seat at the executive table and they don't know how to make a case for themselves to be there. And I think that that's really critical that they are, however,

because we're in such a critically function, that critical role. And so I really focus on that as well. There's a number of different things that I guess I do. Yeah. And I love communities. So I'm in lots of different communities. Yeah. But yeah, I think that really strikes me about the thing that really strikes me about your work is that it's very much focused on giving back to this kind of like little sister function called customer success that has so much opportunity and potential to make massive business impacts. And I know you and I have spoken about like the state of customer success today, and it is something that is changing quite a bit as the market changes. You and I are speaking at the beginning of November 2023. We've seen a year of a lot of layoffs. There's probably more

coming. Organizations are shifting. We are no longer able to just pump money into acquisition. We really need to focus on retention and our customer. And the needs of the customer success team are changing quite a bit. And so I wanted to ask you kind of at this point in time, and especially in the work that you're doing and supporting all these leaders, what are customer success leaders facing in the market today? Yeah. Well, first I need to pick up on that little sister comment because that doesn't sit well with me, right? And it shouldn't sit well with anyone. And it shouldn't sit well with founders and CEOs and the executive team. go-to-market leaders and that alignment across all the go-to-market executives and aligning with the customer because you literally will go out of business. You will just continue to bleed money if you treat everything post-sales as like the little

sister function or just assume that it's going to happen, right? Because it will not, you know, like there's guaranteed that your product, whoever's listening to this, your product has customer friction. Somewhere in there, there is some place in which, you know, and it does. And I love that product-led growth has brought that to light because now we have product managers who are looking at like, why aren't they converting from here to there, to here, to there? You know, and that needs to happen with our products where we are building products with the customer in mind so that they can use them easily and use them and meet their business goals, their objectives, right? But then when you think about that,

CS leaders, you know, one of the things that CS leaders need to think about is how do they really communicate these things effectively when they're talking to the head of product? And they should be equals, you know, in any of these cases, because they're representing the customer to the point of helping the company achieve its own goals as well. Right. And so, you know, when they're, you know, you need to bring the data and you need to show, you know, that there are, you know, that there are challenges because, because companies lose money if you don't, if you're losing customers at any point, maybe it's through onboarding isn't smooth, or maybe using the actual product isn't working very efficiently for the customer. And you can tell when these things are getting tripped up, right? And if this happens, then,

and this is why I think ultimately the customer-led growth model is the one that we need to aspire to because it also allows for any sort of digital aspects that product-led growth brings, but also allows for the human aspect and where humans work best with our human customers. But, you know, it's just, you know, how do you bring the data into the discussion and how do you show that it either has the capacity to make the company money or lose the company money, right? And from that then also, because we're leaders not just for the company, but also for the customer, where is it critical for the customer? What's the most critical thing that the customer needs? And helping people within the company to focus on that and understand that this is what we need to build for, which is why I also focus on go-to-market alignment too, because if the marketing or sales promise doesn't set the customer expectations up correctly so that they will partner, you know, in this post-sales motion, then you lose that customer as well, right?

So, you know, there's the whole alignment that needs to happen across the board. But now, tell me a little bit more about customer-led growth. I think this is something I see a lot in the realm of customer success because this is the world that I operate in, but I'm not sure that everybody understands what that means per se. Could you define that for us? Yeah, sure. And it's funny because people over in customer marketing will talk about customer-led growth a lot, but I think that where they see that, they're focusing more on customer advocacy and how that feeds in. And so maybe I should kind of step back a second and just talk about just the economics, right? So if you're looking at, and I was talking about

this recently over at RevCon, I think, was the conference. But basically, when you look at the expense of bringing in a new customer, right, that's, you know, the customer acquisition cost. That's 5x compared to just like the 1x of the cost of, you know, maintaining a customer, right? But when you look at some of the additional, you know, costs, incremental costs for, you know, what it costs to help them adopt or optimize or, or, you know, or, you know, expansion or, you know, renewals and things like that, when you get all the way to the end of that journey for the customer where then they are, you know, they've optimized everything and they're ready to be advocates for you. Then that's also when they start to bring in new customers because they love your product. And when, you know, they want to tell people about it or when people are asking them what would you recommend they're recommending, right?

And so then when they, or they might be sales references or whatever the case may be, that actually is a 0.1x incremental cost. So when you compare that 0.1x of getting a customer in through an advocate to a 5x getting a stranger to your company in through customer acquisition costs, that's a 50x difference. That's 50 times difference, right? And so that's why it's so valuable, not only for the customer lifetime value that you're able to grow your customer

and you need to at least get to that break-even point, and then if they leave even at that break-even point, you haven't started to make revenue and you have to pay 5X to get them in, right? So to get a new customer in. So you're losing money, right? This is how companies go out of business and lose money is if they're not doing this successfully.

But the 0.1X is why then you want to get to that point of customer advocacy. So the point one X is why then you want to get to that point of customer advocacy. So the process for customer-led growth then, what it means is not only that you're thinking about the customer throughout the process and from all of these different angles, from marketing, sales, CS, product, engineering, operations, every different function within your company has the customer as the North Star, right, when you think about it. So that is customer-led growth when their purpose is, what I'm working on now, how does that serve the customer and what they need to be successful?

And that is purely because when you do that and they are successful, then they're the advocates that are bringing in the 0.1x cost of the new customer compared to the 5x. So it becomes the most economically viable way. But also none of this is new. When you're using Salesforce to tackle your company's most important goals, failure is simply not an option. That's why their most highly skilled advisors, Salesforce CTOs, are available to help you succeed with expert guidance and implementation support at every step of the way. Learn more about Salesforce CTOs at sfdc.co slash professional

services. If you go, I mean, chat GBT is going to actually update to now it's going to have data up to April 2023. But if you go and look at the, you know, the old version that's, you know, from 2021, it was there from before. It's been around. This is the land and expand model, right? But when you had cheap money, no one cared about that. It didn't matter. And it's fine. You know, the focusing on growth back then made economic sense, sort of. Even though you could make more money this other way, they didn't have to. Now you have to. And now really people should be educating themselves about customer-led growth and how to align so that they're aligned with the customer. And so, yeah. So I am really interested on helping CS leaders get to that executive level, but really I'm focused on helping companies

get to having that customer North Star. That's what really needs to happen. A hundred percent. And I think it's... I know I'm preaching to the converted here. I hope it's helpful to people. I've always been converted. No, but I think it is so important.

Like having been a customer success leader, I think it always felt like I need to work harder and I don't want to be a martyr here, but I had to work harder to have that really impactful seat at the table. And part of the reason was that I was brought in to like, make sure the customers stay happy. But there was this like opportunity that no one was asking me to take around like, well, how do I actually like, how do we make more money in this area? Because at the end of the day, money is the currency, right? And so if I can come to the table with some really strong numbers and arguments towards investing further in this area, then, you know, we're all going to get better. But I think it's just something that a lot of

organizations, a lot of companies aren't necessarily asking of their customer success team when that there is so much opportunity in focusing on that post-sale phase. And when you say happy, like I was never so angry as when I was reading a post on LinkedIn. This was maybe over a year ago now. And somebody was trying to, like, you know, they were so excited that, you know, that they called themselves, like, the happiness department. And I wrote, like, my angriest post.

I was like, no, it's not about happiness. You know? Like, they might be happy. They may not. But are they getting business value? And don't get me wrong. I have some, you know, longstanding relationships with some of my former, you know, customers from when I was an individual contributor. You know, people I love dearly that I've become friends with.

But they, I didn't meet them because they wanted a friend. I met them because we were in business together. And if they needed to move on to a different product that was going to make them money, they were going to do that. Totally. And they should because everybody needs to stay in business. If you're not delivering on that value and helping them meet their objectives. But it's funny when you were talking about like, the other thing that really resonated with me though is when you're talking delivering on that value and helping them meet their objectives, you know, but you know, it's funny when you were talking about like,

the other thing that really resonated with me though, is when you're talking about like being that leader. And I know this, it, we often feel like, why do we have to explain what CS is and, and what we bring to the table and how they should be understanding this post-sales motion. And, and, you know, it's hard not to get sort of a chip on your shoulder. But then I was kind of realizing there isn't really a function that doesn't have to

do that, at least to some degree. Even when we think, you know, from the post-sales motion, we're looking at sales like, oh, they have it easy. Everybody's focused on sales and stuff. But even still, and they get more of the enablement and training, that kind of stuff. Or even like tools. They get to spend money on tools that we wish we had, right? Things like that, right? Or we end up having to use tools that were set up for sales that don't really help us in the post-sales motion and all those things, right? My blood's boiling.

Yeah, right. Like all those things, right? My blood's boiling. Yeah, right. Like all those things. However, and so it is up to us to make the case for these things that we need, right? But the thing is like even sales, like sales, first of all, very hard job, but also sales, like they have to explain, like, you know, you can't just say like, you want us to now make a million dollars. Like, do we have the pipeline? Are we set up to go through it? Do we know what is our messaging?

Do we have the ICP to find? Well, you need things to set yourself up for any of those things as well. The CTO. The CTO is like, yeah, sure, you want us to build the product like this. But in fact, here, you can build X or you can build Y or you can build a little bit of X or a little bit of Y. So it's always up to our, as leaders, it's always up to us to explain, this is what I bring to the table. This is how it's going to help our company. And this is what it takes to do it. Like all of us have to do that. Marketing feels like they're the first that's laid off.

CS is like, yeah, but the whole CS team is laid off and all those kinds of things that have been happening since the economic shift. We haven't even talked about that, right? I mean, I think there's a lot there. I mean, for example, I have a client at the moment who called me the other day and he's like, I just found out that they're laying off the entire sales team and my customer success team is now responsible for everything. And I was partially like, that is like great. Like now

you're getting like the torch is being handed to you. And also there's a lot of pressure now because the entire company is riding on you. So I think it's, yeah, there's, I would love to hear your kind of what you're seeing there and how the market is shifting the importance of customer success for better or for worse. You know, it's funny. I did hear about that from somebody as well, because, because there weren't a lot of new sales to do, then they just basically gave that responsibility of both the hunting and the farming to the CS team. Now, one of the things you want to think about is, are you really setting them up for success, right? So, you know, are they getting the enablement, you know, the training, you know?

Also, what are you doing to set up that pipeline, you know, to, you know, also what are you doing to set up that pipeline, you know, and what other things are you doing to allow customers to almost do self-serve, you know, sales as well, right? So it does vary. I've seen also companies where they take all the CS team and turn them into account managers, sort of like focusing more on the hunting than the nurturing to renewals sort of thing and expansion. You know, I've seen, you know, just in some companies where they just get rid of the whole post-sales motion altogether and just assume that customers will be okay. You know, I personally think that especially when you do something like that, that, you know, they probably won't be and your company is probably going to see, you know, more numbers go out the

door kind of thing. But, you know, I think though, this also gets into some of the things we were talking about before when we were chatting before today is when you're looking at AI or when you're looking at how product and how the product can enable more self-service, there's a lot of opportunities, both in terms of just setting your product up better, setting up your data and telemetry better to understand what's happening with your product and your customer, but then also just AI and how everyone can be more productive or just understanding your data better and things like that. There's a lot of opportunities there too. For sure. There's so many opportunities and that's something on this show that we

love to talk about. So I'm glad that you brought it up. It's a perfect segue into touching on AI. And I wanted to talk about and I wanted to hear your opinion on how are you seeing AI impact customer success? And what are some tangible examples of that impact? Well, I see a lot of products getting developed, some around sentiment, some around analyzing, you know, the trends, you know, in terms of usage data, you know, for some, and for some products, usage data is very important and for others, you know, less so, but still you want to, I think, understand how your customer is using your product regardless and where those friction points are. So there's definitely either new products coming on the market and also current products that are incorporating AI in ways that are really important. So I think there's going to be a lot of opportunities just with that. But then also I just think when it comes to productivity, personal productivity,

that's going to be important. When it comes to if you're using a CS platform or any, there's even like, there's even some products out there that are using AI to help you identify revenue blind spots, are primed for, you know, selling into and things like that. But then when you're looking at productivity, there are whole ways in which I think our jobs will change because AI will be able to help us identify across all of this data that we have, but we don't have time to analyze what is actually where we should be focused in terms of how we should prioritize our day, how we should be prioritizing our week, how to be more proactive in our work.

There's definitely some examples like in marketing where there are whole campaigns that used to take, you know, a dozen people, you know, like a committee of people, three weeks to sort of generate. And now it's one person, you know, working throughout the day, going back and forth, developing it, then sharing it with some people, getting some feedback, and then doing some revisions. And by the end of day two, you're good to go, right? And I think that some of the applications that I'll see, and I'm curious what you're seeing, but what I'm seeing is that, you know, the way that we have so many meetings and just like a simple tool to, you know, that really is specific to CS that allows you to have all of the notes and next steps

and all of those things written up that can then be not only just shared with the customer, but then swept into your platforms that can help you understand sentiment and prioritization and those types of things as well, right? And what were you going to think? No, I was just going to say, I mean, something, one, I think when it comes to customer success, efficiency is at least the lowest hanging fruit in terms of how we can use this technology to allow us to be more efficient in our work because there's just a lot of areas where we need to spend a lot of time. We're dealing with humans. They are not, you know, black and white. There's gray area and

we need more time to dig into that gray area. So the AI can help us to kind of deal with some of the black and white things and maybe even some of the gray as well as it gets better. And that's great. But the thing that I thought was interesting in what you just said, or the thing that I'm really excited about is also how do we ensure the voice of the customer is going throughout the organization? And I know in my experience, my team and I are having these incredibly insightful conversations with clients. And you really need to see or hear what they're saying word for word to really get it and empathize with the customer. And now that we are able to record calls in a way where we have transcripts and it's easy for us to copy and paste that information and send it to the product team and say, hey, here's how someone's

using your tool. You don't have to set up these kind of awkward interviews where it's a product person and a customer and you know it's like time consuming I can just give you this information and I can do it quickly and now we can really share and live and breathe the customer throughout the organization much easier and I think that's something that I see so many companies really struggle with because people are siloed and how can we start to break bridge the gaps between teams? Ultimately, it's like, do we have the time to do it? It's like, I see so often, oh, well, it's a hassle to like, write this out and do these reports and like, send it to the product team or the sales team.

And if it's easy, then I hope the result is that we become more connected. Yep. Yep, absolutely. I think that's a great way of putting it is becoming, you know, the opportunity to become more connected. But I think especially like we have so much data and even now, like we've had recordings of calls for a long time, right? The problem is, is I know that like, even in the go back to that call that was recorded and take that section and give it to the product leader and all that stuff. I didn't have the time to do that. And then I also had a team that I was managing that was having all kinds of calls. I didn't have time to listen to all those, right? But if you have a way to have not only all of those things sort of bubble up and where you can say, okay, and here's the section to listen to all those, right? But if you have a way to have not only all of those things sort of bubble up and where you can say, okay, and here's the section to listen to, you know, and this sort of

thing, right? So that you, but also to be able to do that across all of the calls and emails and everything so that then you can see the trending from it and it's brought to you instead of you going in and digging and finding it and, or having to listen to it and all of those things, right? Just the efficiencies from it. And then the other thing when you were talking was making me think about, too, like a way to connect that, too, though, across, you know, like if we are doing customer surveys and customer interviews and all of those things, ways to connect it, to

even also look at where we might be, you know, multi-threaded within an organization with our customer organizations and where are we crossing paths and maybe either duplicating efforts or working against each other internally in ways to help us be more efficient and effective that way as well. There's a lot of opportunities, I think, that we'll find that I don't even think that we know all the ways in which we're going to use it yet, right? And the other thing I heard that was interesting, I haven't mentioned this to you, but I'd heard that by 2030, like they're thinking of like 20 or 30% of our customers will actually not be human customers, which is to say, you know,

the robots are coming. But to say that if you have AI working for you and other ways of, you know, sort of, you know, AI, so not necessarily like the robots are coming, but ways in which we have, you know, things working for us, that that in a sense becomes a, you know, also another customer in a way and in ways that we don't anticipate yet. 100%. It's so interesting. And yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. We don't even know what is to come fully. The more that we start using these tools, the more that we will be able to expand on it. I recently had a conversation with Matt Dixon, which is another podcast episode. I highly recommend if anyone's interested in AI and how we can, like some of these technologies, Matt has a really amazing outlook on it. And one of the

things he was talking about was predictive surveys, where we don't actually need to go to our customers and ask them the questions, because we actually have so much unstructured data that AI can now put together to say, this is what they would have given you on that NPS score. So we can actually like start to get those insights. Of course, I think we should always ask our customers for feedback, but it allows us to really see, you know, all putting together all that other information, not just what someone said on a day where they felt really good or really angry, you know, it can, we can kind of get more insight there. Yeah, there's a, there's a couple other thoughts. So there's a company out there using AI, that when you're doing a survey, it makes it conversational, and it can adjust based upon

what you say back to it, so that you can actually through a survey, even sort of dig into the topics that they're bringing up and still get the five data points that you might need, right? Or what I was thinking of earlier when we're talking about, you know, how to be more productive. When you think about all the data there is when you're using Slack, right? There are tools that are out there on the market now that are basically using AI to take all of the information and understand all the things that you've said about your product, all the ways in which you've responded to customers or internally, and what's the latest on all these different, whatever, answers that you might have from your customers.

And especially if you're working with your customers in Slack, that it can even then respond to them in Slack and say, based upon the last time, you know, these other conversations you've had, here's some initial information that I can give you. Is this helpful? And then if it isn't helpful, connect you to a human. But if it is helpful, they're done. And it allows for you to have the context and to scrape all that information that you've already typed out that you already have, that you've already shared. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's great. So kind of building off of this, efficiency is amazing. And I think efficiency is something we are talking about a lot in business as costs are being cut teams are being cut we need to be really focused on finding these efficiencies everywhere

but at the same time I think customer success is still a very human team and we still need to develop human relationships with the humans at at least, that are our customers. I don't know about the robots yet. I haven't studied those ones. But how have you seen teams push efficiency while still balancing that human element? Yeah. Even the Slack products that I was just talking about describing, part of what drove one of the founders to develop that was because he saw how much time the CSMs were spending on just trying to gather that information and retype it again and this sort of thing when really it's already been said. It's already out there. It could be formulated already for the customer, right? So when you think about all the time that we spend on either repetitive tasks or things

that could be so much easier and more efficient, right? Then what does that free us up to do? It frees us up to do, actually, this goes back full circle to what I was talking about at just describing CS, right? When you think about what are CSMs supposed to do, they're supposed to be the strategic advisors, enabling the customers to meet their business objectives, right? And so if everything is done with that goal in mind so that they do that, become the advocate, so that they do that, buy more,

so that we become more successful as a company, right? So if that's what they're supposed to be doing, then it allows them not only for all of the ways in which they can save time and focus on more prioritized projects. But then also when they're interacting with the customer, it allows them to be smarter about what they should be doing, right? Because even the information that it brings up, like this is what's been trending and happening in your meetings with these customers. This is, you know, this person is a detractor or an advocate. You know, like all the ways in which you can prep for your meeting, you don't have to go through, listen to stuff, read stuff to prepare.

So all of that is at your fingertips. The ways in which you might advise them. There might be some AI guidance on, you know, here are some things or here's some white space or ways in which, you know, and also when you think about like even in the sales process, right, the conversations they have and that could be pulled in to our tools so that we understand what they're trying to achieve with the product. So when you're thinking about a joint customer success plan and how impossible it is to do that, so people don't do that very effectively, all of that information can be carried in from the very beginning. And then you're just, you know,

you're just working on updating that information and you can ask like the true sort of discovery questions and really understand your customer if you're doing human to human. And there's probably going to be ways to do that in a one-to-many way and in digital ways for those SMB, you know, and customers, you know, and customers that you can't afford to spend as much time with, but still need that care and attention as well. Yeah. I got really excited when you talked about joint success plan, because can you just explain for everyone? I'm just assuming less people know about customer success than I would like them to know. So explain what a joint customer success plan is. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to school. Let's talk about it. So really just a joint customer success plan means

that you are working jointly with the customer on it, first of all, but that it's a success plan, which means what were their original objectives in purchasing the product? And is your product helping them meet those business goals, right? Sometimes it's, you know, saving time, saving money, making, um, uh, being more productive or, um, making money. Um, you know, something like that is usually sort of at its root. Um, you know, there can be other business objectives, but those are the basic ones that you hope are part of it because that makes your product more critical, right? But in any event, something around there and making it specific so that then you can really measure and show that you're meeting that or not.

So what is the baseline? Where are they at right now with that goal? And what are they trying to get to in the next quarter or over the course of the year that would help them not only achieve their business goals, but also want to renew with you or maybe expand to other products, right? They're meeting their business goals, you're meeting yours. That's why you're doing a success plan. But ultimately, you have to make certain that the customer is achieving the value that they need. And doing a success plan is what you need to help keep them on track. And I have not seen a product out there that makes it easy to do that. And so

instead, it ends up being captured on Excel sheets and put into, you know, PowerPoints and all these other things that can never be fully updated. And so if anyone is listening to this, please incorporate it into your tool. Please, you know, make a tool for this, you know, because this is the crux of what CS should be doing with your customers, and it is the hardest thing to do because we don't have the data. The data isn't easy to pull together, and we don't have the tools to do it. And it needs to be able to be also shared with the customer, by the way. It's not something you should be looking at internally.

An internal plan for that, that's an account plan. This is joint because it's something that the customer should be able to see. And there should be somebody on the customer side that is accountable to their part in it as well. It's a partnership. It's a partnership in getting this done. It's how they're using the product that helps them achieve those goals anyway. Yeah. Well, thank you for explaining that. And also for the great business idea. For those of you listening, if you make this tool, please reach out to us. We would love to hear more about it. Well, Jan, this has been so much fun to talk to you and to hear about everything happening in the realm of AI, where customer success is today,

how customer success can be more effective. I'd love to close out with just one last question, which is, what is one piece of advice that you think every customer experience leader should know? Whether you're working in customer experience or working in customer success, you need to think about not just the customer experience and the customer perspective, which you absolutely do. And, and companies often don't think about enough, but you need to think about revenue. You need to think about the customer's revenue and the company revenue. And, and I think that, um, leaders too often shy away from that. And it's to everyone's detriment to shy away from that.

That's why actually I'm building a course about that for CS leaders to think of themselves as revenue leaders to get the information they need, right? Because it is about the revenue, and we shouldn't shy away from that at all. It is to our customers' disservice and to our company's disservice to not enable that we should all be meeting our business objectives and goals. That's great. How can people find out more information about you and your course? I'm building the website now. So hopefully by the time it's published, I'll, I'll have it. And I'm going to do a rebrand around, around that as well. But so I guess for now I'd say, just contact me through LinkedIn. Uh, it's just, you know, after the LinkedIn stuff, it's just Jan-Young-CX, I guess. Jan-Young-CX. Yeah. Because it's Jan Young CX. But again,

the course will have a rebrand. So just find me and I'll get you there. Follow Jan on LinkedIn too. She has so much great content and information community that you can join. It's wonderful. So Jan, thank you so much for joining us. And for those of you listening, if you enjoyed this episode, please like it and subscribe to our show for more. All right, everyone have a beautiful day and I will speak to you soon. You are a business leader with vision. You've seen the future as an AI enterprise thriving with Salesforce's agent force and it is bright. Getting there? It's a little fuzzier. Don't worry. Salesforce CTOs are here to work with you side by side and turn your agent force vision into a reality. We're talking expert guidance and implementation support

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