Customer Success as a Competitive Advantage

0:00 [MUSIC] >> Today, we have Miranda Dinkonsky, a battle-tested executive who has helped define what it means to do customer success in tech. She has led the charge at some of the biggest names in tech, like Lending Club, HelloSign, and Swiftly, and now, she's the Chief Customer Officer at FEXA, the company bringing AI to facilities management. We're so excited to have her here today to share her story and how companies can use customer success as their competitive advantage. Miranda, super excited to have you here. Really appreciate you being on the podcast today. Not only do you have an incredible professional background, but you also have a very,

0:42 very powerful personal story. I'd love for you to share a bit about your background, some of the things that have inspired your upcoming book. I know the working title is from there to here. We'd just love to hear how you got to where you are today. >> Yeah. First, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here talking to you about this topic. I'm very relevant, I think, for a lot of folks trying to figure out their path, not only professionally, but also personally. Yeah, a little bit about me. I am working on a book right now. Working title is From There to Here. That could change. Who knows what it's going to actually end up being,

1:23 because we're not going to actually launch it until later next year. But it does touch upon my journey from childhood through some professional learnings that I've had. I shared with you in an earlier call. I grew up in a home that wasn't too kind, was filled with poverty and unkindness, and then was a very, I guess I shouldn't say very young single mom, but by today's standards, I was a young single mom. I got married fresh out of high school, ended up divorced when I was four months pregnant, raised my son on my own. I, for a short period of time, was on public assistance, receiving welfare, Medicaid, all the assistance you can get from the government,

2:17 and managed to put myself through college, get a degree while working full time with a baby. So it was quite the journey, but I look back on it now and I wouldn't change anything. Well, maybe a few things, but for the most part I wouldn't change anything because now I have a lovely son who's 24, almost 25, and I'm still young. So I get to go out and explore the world in my mid to late 40s and have the love of a child who has now become such a fantastic contributing adult. Like he's a really good human. So yeah, that's a little bit about my journey. Decided to finally sit down and write a book. There's a lot of ins and outs that I'm not gonna go into here,

3:13 but I talk about food insecurity, dealing with a mother who struggles with mental illness and how that has shaped my leadership style. And also maybe how it has made me a little more sensitive to the temperature in a room. I'm very well known for going in and taking the temperature of a room and trying to figure out how do I react? How do I show up? How do I adjust? And sometimes I read the temperature wrong and that can definitely impact how I react in the moment.

3:52 Sometimes I read the temperature spot on. And that also can impact how I move forward or adjust. So these are all things I'm gonna be talking about in this book. - Amazing, amazing. And it's such a strong story in those type of moments or periods of time. Just one, they make you appreciate being on the other side of it, but also it makes some of the things that you do day to day probably feel a lot easier. Like if you can get through things like that, then being executive at a tech company, it's kind of a walk in the park. I know-- - Yeah, certainly. Some days it doesn't feel like it though, right? Because we're humans

4:29 and we tend to live a little bit more in the moment and those hardships seem so far away now. It seems like forever ago, while it does shape me and it is always going to be a part of me, it does feel very far away. And I will say, I'm not a perfect human. I don't think any of us are. But yeah, I do try to remind myself, I've seen worse things. I've been through worse things, especially when I'm dealing with things like helping wind a tech company down that isn't making it or having to do layoffs, some of the more difficult situations. I do pull from that previous energy just to remind myself that this too shall pass and tomorrow will be a new day.

5:20 - I love it, really, really powerful. And I think one thing, I don't know if it speaks to probably the level of empathy that you build during times like that, but I know you did, you found yourself getting really, really deep into the customer success function of a business. And I, myself, I spent a lot of time in customer success before doing RevOps. So I've led customer success teams. The biggest team I had, we had about 40 CSMs. It was a global team managing around 50 million in revenue. So it was a very fun job, I loved it. And I think there's just so much to it that people don't appreciate. But how did you end up getting into customer success?

6:07 What really drew you to that part of the business? And what was the catalyst for getting you involved? - So it wasn't deliberate. I didn't deliberately plot out a path to customer success. I kind of fell into it by chance. If you could rewind 25, maybe a little less than 25 years ago, I ended up getting a job at a company named LionDellBazelle. And I was there for nine years. And that's really, truly where I did my first customer success type role where I was managing a portfolio and I was responsible for the success of this group of customers. And how I got the job there is, quite frankly, I speak Spanish.

6:55 And they were looking for someone in Lansing, Michigan who could come in and run this set of accounts that needed someone to speak Spanish. Very small group of individuals to pick from in Lansing, Michigan. So I got, I'm very lucky. And we didn't call it customer success. We were doing account services or customer service or anything but customer success. Customer success wasn't a name I heard of until nearly a decade after that when I made the journey out to Silicon Valley. And I was able to actually put a word to what I had been doing for the last decade. I'm like, oh, okay, this is what I've been doing. I'm not doing customer service.

7:40 I wasn't doing customer support. I wasn't just waiting for customers to reach out to me with problems. I was proactively managing these accounts, trying to make sure that they had everything they need to be successful. And that's when I really just put, I dove in. I dove in the deep end and started building teams. I went from being a practitioner to somebody who brought all that knowledge I had from that very large 40 plus billion dollar a year company and just wrung it out, like soaked it all in, wrung it out on multiple tech startups, which now I'm on my 11th company. So yeah, it wasn't deliberate. It was happenstance.

8:25 And I'm so thankful that I landed here because for me, customer success is like the perfect merging of three of the core areas of my brain that need constant stimulation, I guess is the right word. So I have a very analytical process driven brain, the little type A. I'm a lot type A, not a little. So I love to take messy things and make order of them, build process, get things organized. I mean, look at my bookshelf behind me, right? Color coded. Everything's like an organized by color. It makes my heart happy, even in my living room. If I have a bookshelf and has three books over here with an elephant, I have three books over here

9:15 with an elephant and a little basket in the middle, right? Like everything needs to be organized and a little symmetrical. So there's that side of my brain. The next side of my brain where the customer success really feeds it is this human side, being able to build these relationships, make an impact in customers day to day. It's my job and my responsibility to make sure that our customers are getting strong ROI on the money they're investing in the products and services they buy from the companies I'm working at. And then thing three, because I've moved from practitioner over to leadership, it's quite frankly, helping professionals grow their careers.

10:05 It's something I'm the most proudest of. When I look back at my 20 plus year career at this point, all the folks that have worked in my org or I've partnered with outside of my org in customer success or outside of customer success, watching them grow from being ICs to leaders or move from customer success managers to engineering or to marketing or to wherever their heart desires, that is the third part that being in this role has afforded me. So those are the three parts of the brain that it just, it's like to dink, to dink, to dink, it makes it happy. Yeah, and I think customer success is so conducive to finding those people early in their career

10:52 with a lot of raw talent, potential, a will to succeed, but may not have a specific domain expertise that you need in maybe other functional areas. And I feel like it's a really good place to shape someone who's growing in their career. I know it did for me. I felt like I would go into a company and they're like, we know he's good, but just not exactly sure where to put him. And I think customer success was that home for me where it's like, he's great in front of customers, he's passionate about what we're doing. It was just gonna find a way to make customers happy. And I think it's just such a great training ground. And I find a lot of joy in that too.

11:34 When you take somebody early in their career and you just see them develop all these professional skills and then go on either continue on in CS or like you said, it's just a great entry point to get into other areas of the business too. Absolutely. I will say the landscape of customer success that has significantly shifted over the last five years, especially not to be a Debbie Downer, but especially with the changing of the investment landscape and how money is not freely flowing like it was for many years. A lot of customer success teams have done major reductions in force and it is making it a little bit harder for those junior folks to get an entry way

12:23 into customer success. It used to be one of the bigger launching pads in an organization, now it's a little more competitive because you have a very saturated market with incredibly talented customer success professionals trying to find their next opportunity. But one thing I do tell folks is if you have domain expertise outside of customer success, that can be your way to get into customer success if that's what you desire. I'll use two examples. I worked at Swiftly for four years. We served public transit agencies. We were a platform that powered everything from the behind the scenes analytics to help people make decisions on how to optimize public transit

13:13 to the front end of making sure passengers had their real time passenger information available to them in their apps. We hired a lot of folks from public transit because that domain level expertise was so important to get credibility with these public transit professionals. That's one example. Another example, if you don't wanna go so vertical, is if you worked in sales before or you worked in customer service or customer support before, there are a lot of technologies out there that serve sales folks, that serve customer service folks. That is a different type of domain level expertise. It's not a vertical SaaS, so to speak. It's horizontal.

13:58 But that is also another great way for folks to be able to get their entry point into customer success. Say, hey, I know how to speak the language of sales. I did it. I was a salesperson, so just two ways to turn the tides around a little bit to find their entry point if that's what they seek. Yeah, I think that's great advice. And I've definitely put together teams that had a mix of those skill sets, how people got into my CS teams before. And you're absolutely right. We're seeing this with the companies that we're working with as well. They're not investing as much in headcount on a traditional CSM role.

14:40 But what I do find is if you do have a CS organization that is owning the revenue portion of the existing book, they tend to get more resources. They tend to get a little bit more influence in the organization. How, in your experience, how have customer success orgs or teams you run, how have you fought for that position to own the revenue on the existing book?

15:12 So I've been very fortunate that I haven't had to fight for it. I tend to join early enough in an organization where these things are just being figured out. So I will give that perspective. I will also give perspective. I was at a larger organization for a short period of time where we didn't really have a true upsell motion figured out. So yeah, sorry, I'm noodling on this live review, but let me tackle this a few ways. Yeah. First, we'll talk about this from kind of like a crawl, walk, run motion. And I will say if you are a CS leader listening to this right now, and you are trying to figure out how to tie your customer success team to revenue,

16:00 like really like tune in here because it is crucial. If you can't own revenue directly, that you figure out a way to tie the activities and actions your team does to revenue and work hard to attempt to get your CSMs. And if you own support and professional services in other departments, like separate that out, but get your CSMs into the S&M spending on P&L, sales and marketing. Like that's where you want them to live. Those align items in P&L are generally associated with revenue generation. And if they sit in COGS, they're looked at cost of goods sold. And that is one of the first places that when you're making cuts in an organization,

16:45 you look at COGS first, and then you look at other areas of the organization. You don't tend to go to sales and marketing with a caveat marketing spend is always one of the first ones that get looked at. There's always a caveat, right? So crawl, what you're gonna do is one, make sure your CS team is running a very strong value-based motion, especially if you're in a B2B enterprise play. I'm talking you have contract values that are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I think this stands to even if it's bigger than that, millions of dollars, which I've managed as well. The value cycle is a way for you to tie business outcomes

17:33 at your customer back to your product and actually tied numbers to it. You have your soft value, your hard value. Soft value is a little fluffier. It's about sentiment. It's about, you know, you're helping make people feel a certain way more versus hard value is more, we saved you X amount of hours, X amount of dollars, X amount of head count. It's a little bit more measurable and you can tie that to dollars. It's always good to have a mix of both, but really lean heavily into hard value. That's your crawl. Once you do that, you can then tie that together with upsell opportunities that come from the value cycle conversations.

18:21 So this is kind of moving from crawl into walk, but one of the things I do is I give my team what's called CSQL goals. So if they're not owning the upsell opportunity directly, they are responsible for getting a certain amount of customer success qualified leads through their normal course of business with their customers and get that over to sales. Then as a leader, you track those CSQLs, how they perform, how much revenue comes out, what the close rate is, what does that funnel look like? And I would put money that CSQLs, I would put money on this, that CSQLs probably have a higher close rate and a shorter close time

19:04 than leads that come in through other channels. But again, you wanna put the numbers there and make sure you're tying that all to money. Speak the language of your CFO, right? Speak the language of your board. The one motion is if this makes sense for your business, train your teams on how to actually close those upsells instead of putting them into the pipeline for a sales rep. This is not the right motion for all customers and all companies, I wanna be clear. Where I see it makes sense is when it's a less complex sell and on top of that, or less complex sale, I promise I know how to speak English most days. I'm sorry to reckon on it too.

19:53 At least you can speak Spanish too. Yes, yes, I'll blame it. I have two languages going on in here, I'll blame it on that. When it's a less complex sale and when your CS teams work incredibly closely with the persona that would be signing or getting this across the finish line internally. Those are two boxes. If you can check those off, there are many other boxes, but those are the two simplest boxes. If it is a complex sale that requires a lot of convincing, a lot of technical resources, different personas to get involved, I'm not saying CSMs shouldn't do it, but I'm saying those are the types of selling motions

20:46 where I do consider having an account management counterpart to go in and do the actual sale. Now, as part of the run motion as a CS leader, I would highly suggest if you are considering having a sales counterpart or an account management layer, if possible, the account management layer should sit within the same org as the CSM. What this does is helps you avoid the finger pointing that can happen around, I got that CSQL, I got that upsell leaning, no, no, I got it, right? You just squash it, you create joint goals around NRR and let the world work itself out that way. The more you divide that upsell motion and you don't have the goals aligned,

21:39 the more friction you're going to insert in the process within your org. >>Do you find a common structure that we see, you find pods where you're bringing, and I normally say it like this, you have a CS leader, you have a sales leader, but they orient their teams into pods. Do you see that being successful? Do you see a lot of challenges with that? I know a lot of people are trying to adopt that structure. >>I see pods as being successful, but you have to work at a company where it makes economic sense as well. So if your average contract value is $20,000 a year, it's probably not gonna make sense for you to have that much attention going to an account.

22:28 If you're working as something, and you gotta figure out where that line is for you, but if you're working at a company where your contract value's on the higher end, you probably can afford the spend to support a pod structure. And I would also say you have to look at your green space too. If you don't have enough green space to support the pod structure, which is available to sell, available to expand products, again, pod structure may not work unless you're a much larger organization, smaller organizations, you might have one account manager that covers your entire portfolio because you don't have the available green space

23:13 to support two, three, four account managers, right? So then you don't have a pod structure if you have one or two AMs and you have 10 CSMs. That's not a pod structure, right? So, you know, I guess it's, my answer is it depends. That's usually the answer for everything. It depends on, you know, your revenue. It depends on the size of your organization. It depends on the complexity of your sale. It depends on how much green space you have available. It depends on, you know, the relationship your CSMs own and drive and what kind of CS motion it is. - Yeah, and I don't mind that it depends answer as long as you tell me what it depends on.

23:57 I think that's totally fair, but I think that makes a lot of sense. So, complexity of sale, level of relationship you need with the customer. And then also, I'm sure like talent internally can kind of play like what structure you can accommodate at this point in time too, as you grow. And I'm sure I've seen them iterate and change. As you grow, your needs may change. You may be attacking different markets. You're going up market. Now maybe you need pods for up market accounts. As most things, it'll look a little different in the future. Yeah, totally agree.

24:36 - Another thing, maybe you can speak to this. I know it'll depend, but maybe you could give us a couple of frameworks depending on what the structure looks like. I have found it unbelievably challenging. Even though I've done hundreds of these projects, I still find it very challenging to come up with comp plans for customer success, sales teams, account managers, and you have multiple people involved in deals. What are some successful models that have worked for you to make sure you're incentivizing the right behavior and also paying out what's fair for whatever activities are going on too? - Yeah, yeah. What has worked for me is a very simple model.

25:24 And I don't call it a commission structure. I call it a bonus structure because I wanna keep the mindset a little different. When you hear commission, you immediately think sales. When you're bonus, you know, it just kind of puts you in a different mindset. At least I think, I could be wrong, but that's, yeah, so. - I think there's completely different connotations of each one. - 100%. So I usually do a bonus plan. I do 80/20 split. So it's 80% based, 20% bonus. I take that bonus, the 20% bonus, and divide it either into two or three parts that you're eligible for. I lean more towards two parts these days, but before I've used a three part,

26:11 and I'll tell you what each of these parts are. I'll start with the three part first. I used to have, it'd be 33 point, blah, blah, blah, percent, NPS, 33% gross retention, and then 33% net. So it was really heavily weighed towards, are you getting the right NPS score? If you have $100 up for renewal, did you renew it? And then how much did you grow that $100, right? And the renewal was your individual number. The NPS was a team company number. And the net was a team goal, like a company NRR goal. The reason why I did it that way, one, and also let me add, in a previous organization, I've had HR at a few companies.

27:09 I actually gave everyone in the company a bonus. It was a small bonus, it wasn't massive. It was a small bonus, but it was tied to NPS and NRR. - Nice. - Which just completely changed behaviors across the org. I mean, if you were an office manager, you had a small bonus, tied to NPS, NRR. I, if you were an engineer, you had a small bonus, tied to NPS, NRR. You would be surprised by just doing that little thing, how much people cared about how are we doing? What is our NPS this period? What was the feedback that we got? Is there anything that we could take action on? It just changed behaviors. And the same with NRR, it created a different conversation

28:00 when we were thinking through product roadmap, prioritization, and all of that stuff. So that's the first way. The second way, I've actually started removing NPS over the last, I don't know, half decade or so, if not more.

28:18 NPS has such a bad rap in the CS community.

28:28 And quite frankly, I think in some product communities as well, a lot of people just can't stand NPS as a metric. So I eventually removed it from the bonus plan and just tie it to individual gross and company net. Again, my goal is, is I don't care who gets the upsell across the finish line as long as it gets across the finish line. I don't want any finger pointing. I want partnership, right? And making sure the teams are aligned around this team net retention goal, drives the right behavior. And also tying CSMs to a renewals goal helps them keep in mind that you still have to drive outcomes, ROI, you have to get that renewal across the finish line.

29:16 This isn't all about now baby Sal. You've got to really drive meaningful value except especially in the past few years when everybody's been scrutinizing their P and L and their spend, you have to drive extreme value in order to justify that renewal. And I also would have a kicker in place for anything above like 115% net retention. Now you get a little bit of a kicker based on the upsells that get across finish line, stuff like that. - Yeah, I think I really liked having team goals, team mindset, and I found, I think a lot of people would say like, oh, well, how do you get people, you know, working on all cylinders for their book

30:02 and everything that they can impact. And I think it's a team sport. So, you know, we got to win the championship together, got to win the game together, whatever metaphor you want to use. And I don't think it hinders anyone from doing a good job. I think people have a lot of intrinsic motivation, a lot of other reasons why they're doing what they're doing. They're not doing things just for a commission check. They're not fully full on mercenaries. Maybe you'll find a few of those personalities on the sales proper team. But for the most part, I think people are trying to build a career, trying to build a reputation,

30:37 build their network with people they're working with, build their network with the customers they're working with. That was always huge. You never, you know, you have a great interaction with a customer, that relationship never leaves. So there's so many other things that I know people are working towards. And I think people like being on a team and winning as a team. So I really like taking, hey, there's a component that's individual, let's make sure you're doing, and you can measure it specifically on things that are in their control. But I like the majority of it being on kind of that team mindset. - Yeah, I totally agree. And I do think that, you know,

31:15 having the conversation with your CFO to get a company-wide bonus in place, or at least a bonus in place for the folks that directly touch the customers on a regular cadence can be very tough. So my suggestion to folks would be understand what your board cares about, understand what your CFO cares about. I said it already, I'll say it again. Understand what they're measured against, what success looks like. And then build your business case around, if we invest this, you know, half a million dollars or whatever it is for next year, these are the potential revenue outcomes we could achieve through increased NRR. And then also don't forget,

32:04 don't be short-sighted in your revenue forecast modeling and just think of the current year. Think about the total lifetime value. If you're adding a percent of, you know, NRR or percentage or decreasing your term by 2% through incentivizing the right behaviors, what does that mean for the lifetime of your customers, right? So those kinds of conversations tend to net more fruit when you're able to pay a full picture of not just the now, not just this quarter, not just this year, but let's talk two, three, four years out, a decrease of 2% and churn, what that does to the overall value and increase in NRR, what that does to the value

32:48 for the next two or three years, right? >>100%. And something that we do at LeanScale quite often, a project we'll engage with our customers is what we call growth modeling. So we'll say, hey, for 2026, you want to go from 10 million ARR to 20 million ARR, we're going to reverse engineer that into a plan. How many reps do you need? How much marketing spend do you need? And the biggest component that impacts the model is what your NRR assumptions are. So-- >>It's crazy, right? >>If you have great NRR, it means you have to hire less salespeople, you have to spend less in marketing. I mean, it dramatically decreases the cost

33:30 of your overall GTM spend just by making sure that that number is keeping customers, growing them. If you have an NRR number that really is underperforming, especially if the NRR is especially under 100%, you have to compensate so much with more sales and marketing spend, and it's so much more expensive. >>I totally agree. When I'm talking to more junior CS folks trying to explain this, I usually just paint a picture of like this. Imagine you have a bucket, and the capacity of your bucket is 100. So it's like 100% is your full bucket. And if you keep the hose on and it starts leaking over, now you're over 100%.

34:17 But now we're going to pop a hole in the bottom, right? And now you got water coming out the bottom, water coming at the top, and then you pop another hole and another hole, that's your churn. So if you have too many holes in your bucket, you got to either overcompensate for it by selling more. And I don't care if it's upsells, I don't care if it's new logo, but you've got to overcompensate to keep pouring that water in, or else you'll never overflow it, overflow the bucket. Or you got to start plugging those holes. You got to fix the churn, right? And I always think that's such a great visual for somebody just to think about a bucket, you put a hose in,

34:57 that's your revenue, you want to get it to 100, and then you want to overflow it. And if you can't overflow it, you have to look at the reason why, you got to look at where the holes are. - Yeah, and it impacts the overall picture the most. If you have all of these dials that you're trying to fine tune, and you're saying, oh, we can increase our win rate or decrease our sale cycle, or increase our efficiency on marketing spend, like, yes, those will help, but nothing will help more than increasing your NRR a couple points. It'll save you, for some companies that are even in like series B, series C phase,

35:37 increasing NRR a couple points could save millions of spend on your overall GTM spend. - That's crazy, right? Yeah, it's the area where I see so many, I would say early stage startups kind of fall short, and that'd be very deliberate about how they're doing it and the investments they need to make. - Yeah, they really take it for granted, thinking, great, our customers are here, we have an amazing product, I'm sure they'll stay. But there's so many nuances, and the market's getting unbelievably competitive, especially in SaaS. I think there used to be these moats where, hey, we invested a lot in engineering time, we built up this product,

36:17 now people can spin up the same product in a matter of weeks. So your value proposition in the market is so much less around the features and functions that you have in your product, and starting to index a lot more towards brand and experience than I think people realize. So this is an area I hope as we see those barriers of entry lower, that people will realize, oh, we need to be investing in, I think of those two buckets, brand more. How do we tell our story so it resonates in a real human way with people? And then how do we make sure we give the best experience possible for our customers? So I think having a functional product

37:01 is absolutely just table stakes, but there's so much more you need to do. - Yeah, yeah, and that's especially true, and you'll hear me use B2B enterprise again and again, but that's especially true if your customers are investing a significant amount of money in you. Some of the smaller tools, they can get away with just existing, right? They can get away with having a great help center, being responsive in their support org, if there's a problem, having training videos out there, the more digital play. A lot of the larger products that are a bigger investment, both in implementation, but also just revenue dollars,

37:45 they require a little bit extra these days because you have to balance out the competition somehow. If you all can check all of the boxes, then what do you do? You have to differentiate, right? - Absolutely. One thing, as I mentioned this earlier and we were prepping for this, it wouldn't be a podcast in 2025 if we didn't talk about AI. So I'm gonna have to ask it, my obligatory question of how is AI being used in customer success? And for us, we're always not the fluffy stuff, which none of this conversation has been like that at all, but just what are some real practical AI use cases that you're seeing? If you have any tools that you really like right now,

38:32 I know there's so many popping up in the market, we're on product hunt, like monitoring, and it feels like every two seconds, there's a new tool that we can use, but what are you seeing in the CS landscape? - Yeah, so one, I do think we could potentially hot take being a little bit of an AI bubble. I live here in Silicon Valley. I'm just telling you, I know, I know, I know. Like the billboards say it all. I'm just saying, like all the billboards Silicon Valley, it's like AI, got AI. So just some practical use cases, practical AI use cases that don't require a ton of investment, first and foremost, there's so much you can do with chat GPT.

39:20 So much you can do, especially if you work with publicly traded companies. For example, publicly traded companies, they have to put out investor statements, they do earnings calls, they put out their annual presentations about this is what we're gonna focus on, these are the pillars, yada, yada, yada. If you are supporting any of those types of customers, go out, find those DAX, find those transcripts of those recordings, toss them into chat GPT, tell chat GPT who you are. I am a CSM at Bob's Donuts. We are the biggest SaaS provider of sprinkles, right?

40:07 I'm making this up, of course. This should be a real company, it might be. And my goal is to have a gross retention of 95, net retention of greater than 115%. Currently we are at 87 and 100. My goal this year is to make sure I'm putting goals in front of my customers or partnering with my customers to create goals that drive hard ROI. So we talked about that hard value, soft value. Here are their earning statements, here's their vision DAX, here's the yada, yada, yada. What do they care about? What should I focus on? And you would be blown away. Chat GPT is gonna go read hundreds of pages for you, it's gonna tell you exactly what's going on,

40:57 it's gonna tell you how it's relevant to your product, it's going to tell you the goals that you should be partnering with them on, the personas that you should be trying to get introduced to so you can reduce single threaded relationships. It will totally create a plan for you, an account plan. So that's thing one. Thing two, this is so, so simple. But my God, I don't know how I would ever live without it. AI note takers have just totally changed my life. I'm so lazy, even though I have a notebook here now. That's just a jot down stuff Anthony, that you say to me so I don't forget. I mean, I'm just drawing doodles and stuff, but yeah, I have one too.

41:41 Yeah, I'm over here doodling. AI note takers, especially the ones that come out with your action items. Huge time saver, huge time saver. I think a big mistake I see a lot of CS leaders making right now when it comes to AI, is they're trying to make the biggest flashes. They're trying to figure out how can I use AI to save me on hiring a CSM, which great, good for you. I think the best thing that you can do as a leader right now though, is to figure out the things that your teams are doing that it's like death by a thousand cuts that will save them so much time that it frees them up to do what matters most, one, the things that require critical thinking

42:31 and two, the things that require human to human relationship building. So start out, have your teams do a daily, weekly, monthly spreadsheet, just tell me what you do daily, tell me what you do weekly, tell me what you do monthly. If there are things that they're doing on there that don't require critical thinking, you don't wanna pay them to do that. You can have AI do that. Figure out how to create custom GPTs, figure out how to incorporate AI to solve those things and then that'll free them up to give your portfolio so much more attention that the NRR will just follow. It will follow. The next thing I will share, there are a lot of tools out there.

43:13 It's almost like it can be overwhelming. Look for things that have a bit of social proof. So if you are like me and you're functioning with limited budget and you don't have a bottomless bucket of money to go out and try all the AI tools, one, look for free tools, try them first. Two, look for social proof. Social proof, social proof, social proof. I have a feeling in the next probably couple of years when some of the funding runs out on these investments that have been made over the last year or two, we're gonna see some of these things kind of poof evaporate and then those with social proof will probably stay. So that's my advice there.

44:00 >>Yeah, I think those are great. I think account research, which can take a ton of time to do. And then I also, I'm a big fan, I use Fireflies. And then, you know, Fireflies, you can also build an agent within Fireflies to help you create tasks in a certain output that you want or hey, listen for these type of things and give me this information at the end of the call. So that way you have some prompts to really help you do that. And I think that's phenomenal for a CSM. >>I add at one tool, Gamma, have you used Gamma App? >>I haven't, mm-mm. >>Oh my gosh, try it, go out. There's a free version, Gamma App, if you're somebody who does a lot of presentations

44:45 like I am, it is brilliant. I mean, it will blow your mind. I spend so much time building decks, building slides. What I do is I put my outline, I just have a conscious stream conversation with my chat GPT. I want to do a presentation on how to lead CS orgs at $50 million in revenue. I want to cover ABC, XYZ, I walk it through everything I want to cover. And I say, can you please create a slide by slide summary that I can use for Gamma? It does it, it creates the slide by slide. I take it to Gamma, I tell it, please make my presentation hot pink 'cause I love hot pink and use cartoon characters and include this data and blah, blah, blah.

45:39 And then it just right in front of you spits it out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's beautiful. >>Oh, amazing. >>Absolutely. >>I mean, yeah, I think I'm still doing a lot of this in manual mode, especially like internal presentations. So when we have our monthly meetings, we have company off-sites, things like that, where yes, that would be tremendously helpful. And I assume, can you upload some templates? Like if you're doing QBRs or monthly reviews with customers. >>You can do your hex codes, you can do your own company artwork, of course. And you pay at a certain level and you can get the SOC 2 compliance and all of that type of stuff too,

46:16 if that's something your company needs. I'm not working with gamma, just to be clear. I know that I sound like an advertisement for them right now, but you could-- >>You sure you don't have a referral code that I need to include in the video? (laughing) >>No, but I'm so pumped about it. It blew my mind, the art of the possibility, right? When I saw that, it was like, holy smokes. How did I go from fax machines to this, right? >>I know, I know what's next. I really wanna think about it. >>Oh yeah, that right. >>No, those are really, really helpful. Practical AI use cases, help your CSMs be more effective, help your CSMs be more efficient.

46:58 Yeah, maybe you do a couple of those things well. You can hold off on a headcount or two, but also you can make sure your customers are getting an even better experience 'cause you have CSMs equipped to do their job really, really well for them. >>I agree, and I'm not saying the goal, and I know I kind of made a little bit of a equip at the idea of the leaders out there trying to do all these big things so they can not hire. I get it, that's gonna be probably a natural outcome of getting more efficient, you'll need less heads. But I look at it from a little bit of a different perspective of I want my CSMs focused on doing maturity matrices,

47:39 collecting goals, having regular cadence conversations that are centered around those goals, driving ROI, value, yada, yada, yada. Let AI do all other stuff and let your CSMs focus there. And not only are you gonna see the outcomes in your revenue, you also just have a happier CS org. >>Without a doubt, without a doubt, which can be retention, which saves your recruiting costs, all of that.

48:07 That's amazing. Well, Miranda, this has been really, really good. Thank you so much for sharing the level of depth and breadth across the CS function. Also, thank you for sharing your personal story. It's really powerful. My mom was a single mom for a period of time. So I know some of the challenges that come with going through that and to be able to have the grit to get to where you are today is just really, really inspiring. I'm excited for your new book to come out. I don't know if there's a pre-order list, but I'd love to be on it so I can get a copy. But I really appreciate you sharing how teams can use customer success

48:46 to be a huge competitive advantage. We talked about how the barrier of entry to build tech and tools and SaaS is really, really lowering. You're seeing the speed of iteration and development and shipment of new features and products accelerate. And one of the best ways to differentiate your brand is through the service and experience that you give to your customers. And having a personality behind the company too. I think that goes a long way when the market's saturated with a lot of tools. And also, I appreciate you sharing all of the practical insights on structuring the teams, building the teams, commission, bonus,

49:24 whatever comp plan you need to put in place with the team. And then of course, practical AI examples. So Brandon, thank you so much. Really appreciate you being on here and can't wait to see what you do next. - Thank you, I appreciate having me. (whooshing)