Helping Sells Radio

The purpose of customer success is to turn customers, who desire value and have bought your product, into customers who are getting value from your product. This according to Rick Adams, author of Practical Customer Success Management: Best Practice Framework for Rapid Generation of Customer Success. Since that is the purpose, customer success managers (CSMs) should focus their energy close this gap and help customers realize the value they were promised when they bought your product. Rick's book is written specifically for CSMs and lays out a framework for how a CSM can be successful at the job of customer success. In just one example for a competency that CSMs should master, and we talked about this in the show, is that the CSM should proactively seek further sales opportunities. This is a critically important competence. It doesn't mean CSMs should have a quota, and it's not an argument for who should own the renewal. It does mean that a CSM, who wants to be good at their job and maximize their c

Irene Lefton, customer success advisor and co-chair on the governing council of the Customer Success Leadership Network joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about the things we fail at creating and implementing customer journey maps. She wrote an article called, Five Common Failures of Customer Journey Maps. In this episode we unpack her article and one over arching theme is creating a journey detailed enough so we can create a predictable customer experience, but flexible enough so as not to become so rigid that we cannot respond to customer needs.  Learn more about Irene: On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irenelefton/ Her Linkedin Article: Five Common Failures of Customer Journey Maps - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/five-common-failures-customer-journey-maps-irene-lefton/ Customer Success Leadership Network: http://customersuccessnetwork.com/ Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it if you'd: Write a review on Apple Podcasts or where ever you

We talk about customer advocacy, but we rarely talk about employee advocacy. When you think about it, who has more of an affinity for your company than your employees? Why not enable employees to advocate for your company. If we really believe the mantra, "if we take care of our employees, they will take care of our customers," then why not advocate for our employees and help them build their personal brands along the way. Glenn Gaudet, founder and CEO of GaggleAMP, the first employee advocacy platform designed to leverage employees and supercharge your marketing efforts, joins Helping Sells Radio to help you help your employees take care of your customers.    Learn more about Glenn: GaggleAmp website: https://www.gaggleamp.com/helpingsells Glenn's book: https://www.amazon.com/Connection-Community-Conversation-Making-Business/dp/0615555160 On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/glenng/ Glenn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/glenng GaggleApp on Twitter: https://twi

Mary Poppen, Chief Customer Officer at Glint (now part of Linkedin) joined Helping Sells Radio to talk about how she implemented a low-touch, self-service customer success model and increased NPS at the same time. It seems counter intuitive that a company can do this. Most of us might think customers would want more service, more hands-on service, and more personalized service. But guess what? Mary listened to customers and guess what they said. Just guess. They said, "We want you to help us be more self-sufficient." Mary listened. Mary delivered.  Mary also talked about this during her talk at Gainsight Pulse Conference. But we got to the detail.  Irit Eizips of CSM Practice helped and co-delivered the Gainsight Pulse Conference talk with Mary. We talked to Irit about it at Pulse. Here is a link to her episode (#120): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/120-gainsight-pulse-2019-irit-eizips-says-customer/id1080713333?i=1000439320196 Learn more about Mary: Her Linkedin Article: https://w

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Keith Mattes, Gainsight administrator and program manager at Pearson. Keith talks about how he connects Gainsight, Salesforce, and Jira together to improve the overall customer experience.    Learn more about Keith:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmattes/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to David Sakamoto, VP of Customer Success at GitLab. At his conference talk, David gave people a recipe for “how” to instill a culture of customer success throughout an organization. And if it can be done at a 100% remote company, it can be done at yours.   Learn more about David:   On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsakamoto/  Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Guilherme Lopes, co-founder of RD Station. He came all way from Brazil to be at Pulse for the fifth time  to attend and to give a talk. He is part of the conference now. We talked to Guilherme about why he is stepping down as the leader of the 150 person customer success organization to lead a small group of 5 people inside his company’s product team. He made this switch because he believes strongly that he can capture his company’s next wave of growth by driving a product-led growth strategy.    Just one more example of how customer success and product are colliding in service of the customer experience.    Learn more about Guilherme:   On Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/guilhermefigueired

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Beatriz Datangel, who runs product at TruSTAR. The customer success category is expanding and Beatriz  is at the leading edge….because as she says, “you cannot have a customer succeed with the right product.”    Learn more about Beatriz:   On Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/bzdata/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Aaron Thompson, general manager at Success Hacker. We walked around the expo floor, talked to a few people and even had a cameo from Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight.    Learn more about Aaron:   On Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/athomps/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Mike Sasaki, Head of Customer Success at Mitek Systems. His company is participating in three conferences at the same time in San Francisco, and he chose to attend Gainsight Pulse 2019.   Naturally.    Learn more about Mike:   On Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasakimike/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Sumeru Chatterjee, head of customer education at Gong.io. He is two weeks on his new job and took the valuable time to attend the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019.    Learn more about Sumeru:   On Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumo/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Star Hofer, director of customer success at eCompliance. She has been to Pulse five times and still has things to learn. She came this year to focus her learning on how customer success and sales can work together better.    We also took a topic diversion…Star was scheduled to run a 50 mile ultra marathon in Ontario one day after Pulse. Naturally, we had to ask her about that.   Learn more about Star:   On Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/starbedwards/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Gereint Collier, customer success lead at ITGL. What’s different about Gereint’s customers role is that his company is an authorized Cisco partner so they do customer success for someone else’s software. What’s the same is that Gereint is supporting customers by helping them achieve outcomes. It helps that Cisco is driving customer success through the partners and ITGL is leading the effort.    Learn more about Gereint:   On Linkedin:    https://www.linkedin.com/in/gereint-collier-31bbab26/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Kolten Keeney, director of customer success at Comcate. Kolton talks about selling and servicing SaaS software to government agencies and how customer success plays a role in helping government achieve outcomes.    Learn more about Kolten:   On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/koltenkeeney/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talk to Nils Vinje, who has been to every…single…Pulse. That is rarefied air. Nils reminds us that in order to become advanced at customer success, teams need to master the fundamentals. This is an important point…Advanced = Fundamentals.    Learn more about Nils:   Glide Consulting: https://glideconsultingllc.com   On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nilsvinje Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

We took Helping Sells Radio on the road to the Gainsight Pulse Conference 2019 to talk with ecosystem partners, customers, speakers, and conference attendees about their experience at Pulse and maybe a few other things.    In this episode, we talked to Irit Ezips, CEO of CSM Practice. She gave a talk with Mary Poppen, Chief Customer Office at Glint, about implementing a low touch, scalable customer success model and increasing NPS. Irit talked about her framework and Mary talked about how she applied it to increase NPS 40 points.    Learn more about Irit Eizips:   CSM Practice: https://www.csmpractice.com   On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eizips/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

It's easy to say that we care about customer adoption, that our priority is to help customers adopt our products. The problem is that customer/product adoption is meaningless. Or at least it's too vague to be useful. It's not like we can run a report on adoption, can we? Megan Macaluso, VP of Strategic Development at ESG joins the show to talk about how we can measure adoption...more precisely. Not only does she lay out specific measurable customer adoption metrics, but she explains that the best way to learn what customers value (and therefore what to measure) is for customer success teams to pay attention to what customers are saying, look for patterns, and turn those patterns into hypotheses that the product teams (or data science team) can test. This is how we turn anecdotal data into objective data.  Too often we get dismissed when we bring up anecdotal stories like, "Customers hate the new green button." Product teams scoff and think to themselves, "You had two whole conversations about the gr

Win/Loss reason is a simplistic way to report in wins and losses, according to Alan Armstrong, founder and CEO of Eigenworks. What we really need to do is understand what was the decision, how was it made, what was the quest, how stable was that decision, were we at risk of losing, and in future deals like this, how secure can we be in our positioning? These questions help Alan get to the non-obvious surprising findings in both win/loss and churn/retention analysis. Let's face it, win/loss reasons never say you were outsold and win/loss reports from your CRM rarely tell the real story. In this episode of Helping Sells Radio, Armstrong explain how he digs deeper, talks to customers in the context of their story, to find out the real reasons they come to you or leave you. It is almost never the reason you think it is.  Learn more about Alan: Eigenworks: https://www.eigenworks.com/ Alan on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/awarmstrong/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

User adoption is not easy. We all know this, and yet we are doing ourselves any favors when we treat the customer go live date as the main goal of brining on new customers. Even if we are not doing it intentionally, we get so wrapped up in getting the customer up and running, we get to the go live date and allow ourselves to be relieved. "Whew! Now that that's over, we can move on to the next customer." We should be treating the go live date as the beginning, not the end. We talked to Jason Whitehead, CEO of Tri Tuns, specializing in customer success management and IT user adoption. He helps us understand how to break the mindset of "go live and go home." Learn more about Jason: Tri Tuns Website: https://trituns.com The blog post we talked about, How to sustain high software user adoption: https://softwaresuccessblog.com/2019/05/how-to-sustain-high-software-user-adoption/ Jason on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonwhitehead/ Tell us what you think of Helping Sells Radio We'd love it

"Innovative, new products are difficult to understand and we have only seconds to help customers understand why they should care." According to April Dunford, author of the new book, Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It, position is the way to do that. The way we look at this at Helping Sells Radio, positioning is a way to help customers discover that our product can uniquely help them solve a problem and/or achieve some outcome. Of course April says it much better that we can, and we had her on the show just to make sure.  Positioning has been around for as long as marketing has...which is to say, it is not hip and cool, like conversational marketing or customer success marketing. But. It is one of the most important things a company can do to help prospective customers find you. Here is the big time problem that April is on a mission to solve: almost no one deliberately positions their product, and that turns out to be a huge mistake because when