Helping Sells Radio

We are all very smart people, and we want to use those smarts to help our customers. So, naturally, we define our customers' journey and then try to help our customers through that journey. Here's the thing. Just because we want this to be our customers' journey, doesn't mean it's the journey our customers want to take. Our customers have their own journey in mind, and they might not even know what they journey is yet. Go figure. Instead of defining the customer journey for our customers, Kia Puhm, founder and CEO of the DesiredPath, has created an intelligent framework for discovering and documenting our customers' "desired path" to using our products and then how to measure it. You will have many "ah ha" moments listening to this discussion and a few times you might even say to yourself, "Of course. It's so obvious now. I'm going to hire Kia's company to help my team do this." And, I learned what a desired path is. It is a thing.  Learn more about Kia: Her new website: https://www.thedesiredpath.

I wanted to talk to Paul Rush, founder of Substantial, a digital product studio, because he has an important point of view on selling without being in hardcore selling. Like you, Paul does not come from a hardcore sales background. Although his background is computer science and your background is in post-sales, customer-facing roles, you both are selling everyday without being in sales. Whereas Paul is selling his company services to prospects, you are selling product features, service offerings, and especially selling renewals to your software. And yet we don't think of our selves as in sales.  Please, if you learn one thing from this podcast learn this: You are in sales no matter what your job title is. And it's not that scary. Selling does not have to be about convincing people to buy from you. It is more about creating an environment that draws people to you and want to buy from you. There is science out there that indicates people buy from people they like. So all you have to do is increase th

Philip Bourne, Non-Executive Director of CEdMA Europe, and former Senior Director at Symantec, joins Helping Sells Radio to talk about his new book, Technical Training Management: Commercial Skills Aligned to the Provision of Successful Training Outcomes.  The book is released on 8 April 2019 just in time for the CEdMA Europe Conference in London. CEdMA is the Customer Education Management Association. The main premise of Bourne's book is that we need to "develop and deliver results that provide the customer with an expected return on their IT investment (which, in case we forgot means investment in our products)."  Get the book:https://shop.bcs.org/store/221/detail/workgroup?id=3-221-9781780174808 CEdMA: https://www.cedma.org/cedma-europe Connect with Philip Bourne on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-bourne-01a4a32/ Connect with Philip Bourne on email:  Bournesinuk@btinternet.com Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Many of us are growing their teams, and if you are like me, our instinct is to hire people near us. Me personally...I have a slight fear of finding someone remotely. There is a lot of trust that is necessary, and frankly, since I do not have my processes documented as well as they should be, it is daunting to hire remote help and believe they can deliver what I need. Not because the remote worker is not capable because I am not organized enough to set the right expectations and provide the right resources for a remote worker to be successful. That is on me. But after I spoke with nathan Hirsch is the co-founder and CEO of FreeeUp.com, I have an entirely new perspective and confidence that I can build and manage a remote team and grow like crazy. This episode is about helping you create a process for hiring, building, and leading a remote team. There is talent everywhere.  Learn more about Nathan: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nathan.hirsch Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/realnatehir

I could not believe my eyes. It said, in her post, that she quit her job to build the customer success community in Europe. She also said, in her Linkedin article, that she had no plan. Not many people quit something to start something new with no plan. Kate Forgione, CEO and founder of the Customer Success Network did. And you know what? I think the customer success community in Silicon Valley could learn a lot from what Kate is building out of London. In this episode, I talk to Kate about the customer success community in Europe, what CSMs can learn from the big four, five, or six management consulting firms about customer engagements, and how she built a growing and thriving community of customer success professional who host and run meetings across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Learn more about Kate and the Customer Success Community: Customer Success Network: https://customersuccessnetwork.org Customer Success Community: https://customersuccessnetwork.org/join Customer Success Network o

I recently re-listened to this episode with Heidi Gardner, Distinguished Fellow in the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School and author of Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos.  What blew me away (again) was the point she made about the need for us to be both a specialist in our field AND a generalist. The question was: "Should we be generalists or deep specialists?" Gardner's response was a direct, "Yes, And." "I don't think we have the privilege anymore of being one or the other." But there is a trend towards being specialists. We are all headed down that road. And yet, the world is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). In a VUCA world, there is a huge demand for multi-disciplinary perspectives to tackle complicated problems. Smart collaboration is the ability to bring together a group of specialists to solve VUCA problems. Those who can do that in service of customers are at a huge advantage. Smart Co

Donna Weber, President of Springboard Solutions, is back on the show to pile on the bone picking with too many software companies that don't listen to their customers. This is especially true during and sooner after the handover from sales to service. Donna argues that marketing and sales organizations are good at leading customers through a buying journey, and that when a deal closes, there is no equivalent or leading going on in services. Well Donna is leading the charge to change that by helping companies create orchestrated onboarding meant to bring internal teams together and lead the customer through the success journey.  Donna's blog posts we talked about: Customer engagement is the killer app: http://www.springboardin.com/blog/customer-engagement-is-the-killer-app Customer success starts with empathy: http://www.springboardin.com/blog/customer-success-starts-with-empathy Whoever understands the customer best wins: http://www.springboardin.com/blog/whoever-understands-the-customer-

After Nils Davis, author of The Secret Product Manager Handbook, and I shared a panel at the January Customer Success Network Meetup, it seemed natural to further the discussion on the podcast. We go deep into how product management and customer success team can work better together in service of the customer. My favorite part of our discussion had to do with how to say "no" to customers. Actually, we don't say "no." It is more a matter of prioritizing, how to communicate that to customers, and more importantly, how to listen to customers and dig into what they really want when they ask for a feature. Hint: It's not always the feature they are after.  Learn more about Nils Davis: His website: https://secretpmhandbook.com/ All the Responsibility Podcast: https://alltheresponsibility.com/ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsfRtYYC4198qAsUVllDg6w The Book: https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Product-Manager-Handbook/dp/1983838934/ The Persuasion Course: https://secretpmha

As Paul Henderson describes in his book, The Outcome Generation: How a New Generation of Technology Vendors Thrives Through True Customer Success, "customers buy technology products and services to achieve an end outcome. Success comes for a customer when they achieve that bigger outcome. Therefore, customer success programs should focus on enabling that bigger outcome." And yet....as many of us know, few technology vendors focus on helping customers achieve those outcomes. We've been picking this bone with the customer success industry since we launched Helping Sells Radio. Paul is a rare voice advocating for customers...for helping customers deliver the results they're after...which is why they bought your software in the first place. If a customer buys your marketing software and their pipeline does not go up, why keep your software...they should just hire a marketing agency. If this marketing company wants to keep this customers, it better help the customer increase the pipeline....not just "use the produ

David Apple, Gemeral Manager of US and VP of Customer Success at Typeform joined the company to run sales. It wasn't long before Typeform didn't have a problem generated new sales. People were signing up for Typeform like crazy since it was such a good product. Typeform wanted to turn it's attention to retention and expansion and asked David to build a customer success function. David was deliberate about what he created, a customer success organization with six distinct teams: support, customer education, customer experience, customer outcome managers, sales, operations. In that order.  Don't let it breeze by you that customer education came second. David described this structure quite well on the OV | Build podcast (link below). Of course, I wanted to take the discussion with him about his customer education team further. That's why he's on this episode of Helping Sells Radio.  So, listen it.  p.s. Notice he called customer success managers, customer outcome managers. We didn't talk about tha

Thales Teixeira, Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, has a new book out TODAY, as of February 19, 2019, called Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption. The book is about digital disruption, but not in sense you might mean. It's not about inventing new, blow-our-minds-innovative products. It's more practical than that. It's about (my words) "interrupting" the customer journey and insert yourself there, and introducing your product or services to one single step in that journey. Win there. Then expand. I loved the framework, and you will notice when you listen to my conversation with Thales, I was a little blown away. Learn more about Thales:  Get the book on Amazon: Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption His Website: http://www.decoupling.co/ On Twitter: https://twitter.com/ThalesHBS On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thales-teixeira-391

Adam Avramescu is back on the show for the third time to discuss his new book, Customer Education: Why Smart Companies Profit by Making Customers Smarter. Adam offers some important advice. If you are thinking about building a customer education function, Adam wants you to ask yourself, "What is your customer education charter?" This matters because education can make a direct contribution to any and all steps in the customer journey. And when you are starting out, you don't want to try to address everything. You want to pick one of the steps, then go make friends with the team that owns that step in the journey (for example, marketing or sales or customer success or support) and together define clearly how education can make a difference. We need to work more collaboratively in service of our customers.  "Make friends with the teams that are actually out in front of customers," explains Adam. "If you don't, you don't have empathy for those teams or for the customers they serve."  Effective cus

If you sold sales software to sales people, and the software promised a specific outcome, how would you help customers achieve that outcome? You might publish that outcome on a dashboard in your product and place it in a highly visible location so your customers can see it every day. You might also overlay a target on the dashboard so customers know the number they need to achieve and the gap between current state and goal state. You might also color code the dashboard to make it even easier to understand current state. This is just what Adam Honig, founder and CEO of Spiro.ai does in his CRM product. The outcome Spiro is designed to help customers achieve is having more meaningful conversations with customers. Sales people spend 40% of their time doing administrative work in CRMs when they should be spending more of that time on high value tasks, like talking to prospects. While conversations with prospects does not necessarily lead directly to new sales, it does put sales people in a position to succeed. So

Here's the problem with consulting. An expert comes in, advises, and leaves. OR. If more than advise is needed, a consultant is hired for a long term engagement to actually do the work. Months and months of billable work occurs. Call it staff augmentation that is very expensive. Eventually the consultants leaves, the engagement is over and very little of the capability remains with the client. This is a good short term solution to a problem. Andrew Marks and Todd Eby, co-founders of SuccessHacker don't think is approach is good for the consulting firm or good for the client. They don't consider a client engagement successful unless they teach a client what they need to know so they can continue to do it themselves. "We don't want to be there for a long time. We want to come in, teach clients what they need to know, and help then get on the journey." SuccessHacker approaches consulting with an education mindset. How do you approach engagements with your clients?  Learn more about Andrew and Todd and

Customer Success has taken the world by storm. And customer education is a pillar of customer success, says Dave Derington, Director of User Enablement of Azuqua and Adam Avramescu, head of customer education and training at Checkr. Think about it. Customer success is all about figuring out how to keep customers happy and get them to use more of our products. If that is customer success in a nutshell, then Dave and Adam argue that customer education is the answer to those questions. Said another way. Education sells more product. It brings more customers back. It fosters loyalty. It gets customers excited about your product and your company. It builds community.  Customer education cannot solve all of your problems, but it can set customers up for success.  We also talked about Dave and Adam's new podcast CELab: Customer Education Labs. It focuses on customer education and their first episode is about how to get started with customer education. Here is a link to the first episode: CELab: https://c

Sue Duris, director of marketing and customer experience at M4 Communications, comes into the studio to talk about the similarity and differences between customer experience, customer success, and marketing. We started with customer experience. Sue says her favorite definition of customer experience comes from Forrester, which says that it's every interaction or touchpoint a customer has with your brand. Every. Interaction. Bill had to ask, "Doesn't that include the experience our customers have when we send them invoices? What if the invoice looks like we created it manually. What if it was sent from a "no-reply" email address? What if the customer has a question about the invoice and no one gets back to her? Does the accounts receivable manager need a promotion to customer experience manager?" These are the kinds of questions we talk about with Sue on this episode of Helping Sells Radio.  Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Helping Sells Radio reaches across the pond to speak to David Jackson, CEO of TheCustomer.co following his recent talk at Gainsight's Pulse Europe 2018 titled, How to Construct a Predictive Health Score With or Without Usage Data. David gave that talk  with Charli Rogers, Vice President, Client Success at Yext. The subject  alone is more than enough reason to have David on the show. But digging further, David has a unique perspective on product-led customer success, which is timely with Gainsight's acquisition of Aptrinsic, and his views on simplifying customer are music to our ears.  Learn more about David: David's company: https://thecustomer.co/ On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjacksonuk/?originalSubdomain=uk On Twitter: https://twitter.com/@tweetdavej/ That blog post on simplifying customer success: https://thecustomer.co/2018/10/19/simplifying-customer-success/ David's product-led customer success eBook: https://thecustomer.co/2018/07/17/product-

We talk about the customer journey. But the term journey implies there is a path, and customers take the path. If customers are unique, and most of us think they are, then wouldn't they take their own path? And if each customer takes a unique path, then how are WE (software companies) supposed to manage that? The answer is: We aren't. That's why I like that Ellie Wu talked about moments. Ellie Wu, Senior Director of Customer Success at SAP Concur and a top 100 Customer Success Influencer, joins Helping Radio to talk about owning moments (not the customer). WE talk about a lot of other things too, including fawning over her Linkedin videos, whether to hire a customer success executive or a customer success manager first, and we even talked briefly about Olympic skeleton racer, Noelle Pikus Pace and how she overcame the possible destruction of her Olympic dreams with one statement from her doctor in her darkest moment.  Learn more about Ellie: Ellie's latest Linkedin Video. When you see it, you will

What would you do, if you could split off a small team of developers and could direct them on changes to the product that customers hound you about every day? This new team, your team, would work in parallel to the product development team, unencumbered by the restrictions of the product roadmap. No more begging the product team to listen to you. No more making the case that this customer is special and this feature is important. No more explaining to customers, "I promise, I'll pass that along to our product team." What if you could make those changes happen? What if you could be a true voice of the customer? This is what Mel Bilge, customer experience led at Learndot by ServiceRocket can do. Jealous? In disbelief? Well, we talk to her about how it works, why she did it, and why Mel thinks this could be the future of the product / customer experience mashup.  Learn more about Mel: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melihabilge/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Jay Gibb is the founder and CEO of a B2B SaaS company called CloudSponge and a partner at a distributed software engineering consulting agency called Arizona Bay. Arizona Bay builds software products for its clients, usually SaaS products. Roughly 10-20% of Arizona Bay's customers are "ideal customers." An ideal customers in this case is defined by someone who comes to Jay and already has pre-sold an unbuilt software product. Think about that. Jay's customer has sold, to their customer, a software product....then they go to Jay and ask his firm to help them build it. Jay, his customer, and the customer's customer get together and start making it happen. But this isn't even the best part of the story. The next level of customer that Arizona Bay gets is someone who wants to build a software product, knows what they want, but they do not have pre-sales. Jay helps them get pre-sales, so they can become an ideal customers. "I'll give them a bunch of mentoring and advice, and I'll send them down the path of ge