Helping Sells Radio

Shawn Livermore is startup founder, entrepreneur, and tech consultant. With 21 years of consulting for over 34 clients, his body of work includes large-scale enterprise-level custom software implementations and high-volume web-based, cloud-based architectures & implementations.  I talked to Shawn about his new book, Average joe: Be the silicon valley tech genius and his Slow create framework, which anyone can use to become a genius in their field. More about Shawn: The Book: Average JoeThe Slow Create FrameworkOn Twitter: @shawnypants Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Kristen Hayer is the founder and CEO of The Success League and a board member of the Customer Success Leadership Network. Kristen and I argued about customer success budgets, plans, forecasts. And since it’s planning season, we thought we’d help you put your forecasts together and go get them approved. More about Kristen: Her website: The Success LeagueOn LinkedinOne of Kristen’s podcasts: Strike Deck RadioKristen’s other podcast: Reading for Success Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Mark Donnigan designs and executes marketing playbooks that produce real business results for early and growth stage technology startup companies. We talked about go-to-market engineering (what’s that?), anchoring customers to you as a category king, Christopher Lochhead (my favorite marketing podcast), how to spend that money you just raised, and we almost got to the “self-organizing buyer," but ran out of time. More about Mark:His website: Growthstage.marketingOn Linkedin Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

Irene Lefton returns to talk about her latest article, Five Steps a VP of Customer Success Needs to Get Started. As a customer success influencer and advisor, Irene is asked regularly to help startups design action plans for a new head of customer success. After building numerous plans, Irene noticed patterns. So, she built a framework.  The first and biggest and hardest step in her framework is called, “Listen and Learn.”  It’s the first step because you’d be a fool to start making customer success decisions before you understand the lay of the land.  It’s the biggest step because it requires a lot of time and energy to meet with all the right people (fellow employees and customers).  It's the hardest step because a motivated, type A, hard-charging, action-oriented customer success leader wants to make things happen right NOW, not sit around listening to people for 90 days.  But, as Irene suggests, by slowing down in the short term, you can speed up in t

The last time I talked to Nils Vinje, it was on Episode 197, and we talked about his new great leadership book,“The 30 Day Leadership Playbook: Your Guide to Becoming the Leader You Have Always Wanted to Be.” In it, Nils talks about four pillars of leadership. The third pillar is leading with communications, and this one got to me.  In particular, the part of leading with communications called “the power of frameworks.” I spend a lot of time asking Nils about framework-thinking on the last episode. So much so that Nils suggested we do another episode in which he would help me with one of my frameworks.  So that’s what we did.  A live coaching session. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been working on a framework to describe how we would grow one of our business units at ServiceRocket. I wasn’t calling it a framework, but I was using it as a mechanism for communicating our strategy, progress towards our goals, and to give the exec team a one s

You are not getting the most out of your people team to deliver the best service you can to your customers. And Colleen Blake, VP of People at Dremio, is here to help.  Most leaders of customer teams are putting together hiring requests because their teams are overwhelmed. “My team is going to burn out if we don’t hire more people. Then we’ll lose them. And our customers.”  That’s how most of us hire.  That’s the wrong way to hire.  First of all, it is reactive. We should want to be proactive. I mean, the first of the seven habits of highly effective people is “Be proactive” for Pete’s sake. It’s the first one.  Second, hiring people because our current team is busy exposes that we have a complete lack of understanding for how our business works. How can we run a business, if we don’t know how it works?  We can’t. So, Colleen Blake is here to help.  She offers two ideas for how to partner with our respec

Rav Dhaliwal is an investor and venture partner at Crane Venture Partners, and he wrote an article recently called, There’s no such thing as post sales. You might be thinking, as I was thinking, “Wait a minute, of course there’s post sales. We have pre-sales (marketing and sales), which is everything that happens before the sales is made. And then there is post sales (customer success, professional services, support), which is everything that happens after the sale.” Every software company has this. We need both to be successful, don’t we? We do. Dhaliwal says so in his article... To truly have any chance of becoming a company that can grow to millions in (sustainable) recurring revenue, you not only need a great product that you can market and sell effectively, you really have to figure out (and invest early in) how you are going to keep and grow those customers forever. Go to market is half the battle. Customer success is the other half. See. We need both. But here’s

In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to.  Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to.  Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to.  Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to.  Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/ Subscribe at helpingsells.substack.com

I know, I get it. We should give gifts to customers. It shows we are paying attention. It shows are thinking a little more about our customers than just, “when can we close this deal.” It’s just that I have received too many emails from sales people saying, “I’ll give you a pair of headphones or a fleece jacket or a gift card, if you meet with me and let me show you our "wiz-bang, automated, AI, big data, digital transformation, IoT, machine learning, data lake product" that will transform how you deliver value to your customers.  I have taken up sales people on this offer twice in my life. For two reasons; 1) the gifts were excellent and irresistible (see it works); and 2) I had some interest in the product type they were pitching. After a discovery call and a demo with each, I decided I was not going to buy the products.  The gifts arrived.  I felt a little guilt.  Is gifting worth it?  Buyers feel guilty and sellers feel cheated? Then, I spoke to Chels

Peter Levitan knows something about adding value to companies. He spend 16 years in advertising at one of the largest ad agencies in the world, bought and sold three advertising agencies, and founded two internet startups, one of which was sold to Microsoft.  Levitan describes company value in a few ways. Sure, a company has value so it can be sold. You might call that the company valuation or market capitalization. There is another element of value. There is value in attracting employees who like what your company stands for and who want to come work for you and help you achieve your mission.  There is value in attracting customers who like you and want to come be your customer.  People need a shared mission.  Peter talked about a cyber security company called Clean.io. Cyber security does not sound like something that exciting. But Clean.io has a mission: to clean up the internet. Clean up the malware and phishing and social engineering and protect grandma from thieves stealing bank acco

Paul Reeves is a founding member and a governing council member of the customer success leadership network (CSLN). He has also built and led numerous customer success functions at software companies like ShotSpotter, TokBox, Zendrive, and Badgeville. And oh-by-the-way, co-founded Betterworks. I guess you could say he knows customer success. Inspired by the book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, Paul and I talked about how we might apply principles in this book with customers.  You might ask, “How can we get our customer success managers to apply the progress principle with customers?” After all, customers buy our software to do some job or solve some problem or achieve some outcomes. Sometimes solving that problem is far off in the future. It’s hard to visualize. It’s daunting.  If we could help our customers break that long term goal into small wins that lead to that long term outcome, we could ke

What is the value of a certification program? Faez Ahmed, senior director, training & certification at ServiceNow and member of the customer education management association Europe (CEdMA), has a create answer. He says, ultimately, the market will determine the value of your certification program.  The question is, “Can a software company create that market of ‘buyers’ who will derive value from the certification program?” As Faez describes, the answer to this question has three parts: First, from the customer education team’s perspective, it comes down to good certification design and building a quality certification that make people want to earn it.  Second, from the perspective of the company buying the software, it needs to continuously enable its workforce to develop new skills and capabilities…just to stay competitive.  Third, companies need to recruit and hire new people with the right skills and capabilities in all of the various software technolo

Many enterprise software companies face the question, “Should we create a certification program?” To answer this question properly, a company needs to understand it’s customers well. Kevin Streater, VP of ForgeRock University at ForgeRock, joins Helping Sells Radio to help us sort this out.  Kevin is also a member of the British Computer Society Chartered Institute for IT and a member of the Customer Education Management Association Europe (CEdMA) and prior to ForgeRock, spent numerous years running education services at SunMicrosystems. Kevin is eminently qualified to discuss the topic of building valuable software certification programs.  Back to the question, “Should we create a certification program?” There are two main things to consider: Will customers be proud to display the certification?  Is the certification resume worthy? If you are not prepared to to have customers answer yes to those two questions, you might not want to create a certification program.&

When we sign up a new customer, we make a bargain that looks something like this: Our customer will hold us accountable for delivering the product, the service, the results that they expect when they sign up. We can all agree to this. Most customers are not shy about telling us when and how we are falling short. The customer will hold us accountable.  This is a bargain, to be sure, but it is a one-way bargain.  According to Wayne Mullins, founder and CEO of Ugly Mug Marketing, there is (or should be) a two-way bargain that says that your customer expects you to hold them accountable for “using” the product or service and for “getting” the results they expect in the use of your product or service.  Mullins calls this mutual accountability. "It’s our responsibility to learn how to hold our customers accountable so that they are getting the results for which they came to us in the first place,“ says Mullins. How many of us really think this way?  It is a ha

If there is one thing I know about leadership and working and career is that when you interact with the CEO, or anyone on the c-suite, you need to minimize your time and maximize your impact. More practically speaking, you need to be the one who says, “I gotta run.” And then walk away.  “Well that seems counter-intuitive,” you say. “How can I maximize my impact, when I spend the least amount of time possible with the CEO?”  Easy.  The shorter your interactions, the more interactions you will have.  “What?!” That’s right.  Think of every interaction you have in the office. There is always one person who you see coming down the hall, and you want to avoid them. Mostly because you have someplace to be and this person will talk your ear off.  CEOs have even shorter attention-spans and much less tolerance for the details about how difficult your last customer escalation was. You do not want the CEO to see YOU coming down the hall a

Helping customers achieve outcomes from the products they buy from us is what services teams do. “Now...sales teams have to get on board with that,” says Steve Frost, vice president and managing director of revenue research and advisory for TSIA. “With all the uncertainty we are experiencing now, it's kinda hard to introduce something new to a prospect or customer. You’ve gotta provide some help and some guidance and value to the equation.” Steve explains that services team have been on this path for a while now, and it’s more important than ever that sales teams embrace this philosophy of providing help, guidance, and value.  Easier said than do, sure. But it’s not like we have a choice any more. The way 2020 is turning out, it’s more important than ever to double down on helping our customers.  There is no one more suited to help us figure this out that Steve Frost. Here are three things I learned from him to help us come out of this crisis stronger

We think we are so smart. We finally figure out that niching down on a narrow customer segment is the best place to start and then grow. It works. But as we grow, it doesn’t occur to us that our customers start to niche us. What does that mean?  Alex Goldfayn, CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute, and author of the new book, 5-Minute selling: The proven, simple system that can double your sales … Even when you don’t have time, explains that our customers put us in a bucket for that thing we sold to them. They get used to it. When they discover other problems and opportunities, they will seek solutions in other vendors because that is not what we do. That is how our customers niche us. They buy one thing from us and that’s what they think we do. If we don’t check in on them and ask them two simple but important questions, we might not be able to break out of that niche.  Alex is not telling us we need an entirely new sales process…just a new system for proacti