00:00:01
Bryan Whittington
Hey everyone. Brian Whittington, with this episode of the talent sales and scale show today, we have Gary Mitchell from across the pond. He was, he was posting with, Marcus couchy and we're talking about customer success and how people screw it up and what are the KPIs around customer success? And I said, Hey, if you're such a smart guy on this, why don't we have you on the show and make us smart too? So that's how Gary landed here. So welcome to the show, Gary.

00:00:30
Gary Mitchell
Hi there. Hi there, Brian. Nice to be with you.

00:00:33
Bryan Whittington
Nice to have you. All right. So, Gary is with, HQI right? So what's that stand for again?

00:00:40
Gary Mitchell
Yeah, it stands for high quality interactions, which is something I believe in, if we can all have highly quality interactions, then we get on well together, we understand each other and we make progress together.

00:00:52
Bryan Whittington
Crazy thought. If we knew how to communicate with one, another life would be a lot easier. So. All right. Gary, you're running the HQI about this stuff. Why in the world, should we listen to you? What makes you such an expert on this stuff here?

00:01:07
Gary Mitchell
Well, I always share the, when somebody calls me an expert, but I'll do my best and I'll let you, and the audience be the judge of what I can bring to the party. I, I bring a different voice. I'm not from sales or marketing or sales enablement, but I'm from a transformation background and a strategy development background. For 30 years across Europe and the U S I've been, first I, I tried to rescue big transformation programs for people. So, that was my core experience and where I learned about all the functions and how they joined together, into something like a common purpose and latterly I've been working with private equity, backed businesses, trying to, build, bring their senior teams together to build strategy together and really tell the story of where the value is in this business. That, future investors can get excited about that and where we all come together, where sales and transformation and strategy, development comes together is around the subject of customer success.

00:02:23
Gary Mitchell
Because ultimately if you can make a set of customers successful, you can grow and you can actually maximize the future value of your business. Okay.

00:02:33
Bryan Whittington
Okay. So there's an awful lot there. Now you talked to originally, when you started off with rescuing transformation initiatives, what's the stat, it's something insane. Isn't that? How many transformation initiatives or how many initiatives actually fail? Do the stat off of that?

00:02:53
Gary Mitchell
Well there's various stats. Yeah. Various stats are, abandoned about, but more than is comfortable. So a fair number. Yeah.

00:03:05
Bryan Whittington
So quite a lot. Now how help us understand? I mean, why do those transformation initiatives not work? And then how are you tying that into customer success?

00:03:15
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. Well, the link is the following. Firstly transformation initiatives don't work because the large ones are cross functional and customer success is cross-functional. The tie-in the way to rescue a large transformation program is to focus is to actually bring back all the functions onto a common focus, find the finishing line. The finishing line usually is something to do with what kind of customer journey do we need to build to be successful, to get out of this alive, firstly, and also to create future value so that we have to join up the functions on a common view of what it is we need to build in order to call this transformation program completed. That is a customer experience that they can describe and as joined up and actually customer success is part of that experience.

00:04:23
Bryan Whittington
Interesting. You're suggesting that if I can I identify and build the right customer journey, that's going to directly tie in and be the key contributor to a successful customer success or a successful customer relationship.

00:04:42
Gary Mitchell
Yes. I mean, the challenge on both is, well, firstly, the challenge on the customer journey is no one function owns the customer journey. So you can't find an owner. Everybody has a view, right across the pitch. So, marketing sales into deployment, into support and account management, they all have a view. Let me ask you, or let me ask your audience, how, if I came to your business, where would I find the customer journey written down? Who's got that right. When I turned around big transformation program, that's the first thing I do is break out the 3m post-its and get the functions together and say, right when we finished, when the S the it system is in, how does it, how is it all gonna work? And what happens then is actually you get real engagement because people then have the right debate about what the end point is.

00:05:51
Gary Mitchell
Once you've got the outcomes, you can get the plan. That's the customer journey and takes care of the customer experience. Now, let me take, well, let me ask you another question about customer success. If you take the life cycle of a contract of a B2B service or a technology, the technology product or piece of software or something, if you take the life cycle, how much investment is put by the business, into the portion of that life cycle, where the customer achieved success? The answer is very little. We put a lot of investment in finding customers, a lot of investment in securing customers, a lot of investment into onboarding them. We kind of wait and hope the phone doesn't ring, we're waiting to be fired. We go back and try and renew or retain them. Actually, firstly, we don't put any investment into the portion of the contract where the customer is achieving success or not.

00:07:04
Gary Mitchell
Secondly, there is no transparency or actually the wrong transparency where we measure customer noise or satisfied dissatisfaction. We measure incidents, incident, resolution, and complaints, right? We don't measure success at all. All this of course is changing because we're going to the software as a service, the SAS world, where we want to belong transactions. Actually if we implement something and the customer doesn't use it, we get no money. Now we're becoming more interested in customer success because success means more transactions, which means we actually get paid. The world is changing and people, this is why we're here talking about customer success, really because the world's changing to a transaction based revenue world.

00:07:58
Bryan Whittington
Well, okay. There's going to be some people streaming about that long line that you just said. Transactional based world, and they're going to say, no. I'm not transactional. I'm relationship. I'm very relational, right? We're this is a very complex blah. I, I have a great relationship with my customer. This isn't transactional at all. What would you say to that person?

00:08:21
Gary Mitchell
Yeah, I mean, I guess I was, there's two definitions of transaction. There's a sales transaction where you get money for implementing the service or software. There are the service transactions themselves that generate revenue. The relationship guy is right, because actually transactions don't measure success, but they are an indicator that somebody is interested. Now I would say what we need to look at from a customer success point of view are two things. One is, consumption and the other is, adoption. Okay. If you look at, you can see here, Brian, I can talk for England and slowly I'm coming back to the subject of KPI. Finally made my way back. Here we go. Now consumption is the transactions were talking about. Okay. Consumption in a software as a service, where do you get a world you get paid for consumption, then that's great. Now people are more interested in measuring consumption, at least the billable items, but what we're not measuring in consumption is how the customer is using it.

00:09:46
Gary Mitchell
Okay. And that I call adoption. Okay. So this is what people are using. How widely are they are using and how deeply they are using. And I'm using software here. Okay. The other thing is who is getting the value. Customer success, we can measure, people measure customer ROI. The big mistake is to imagine customers only as a business entity, people like Splunk will articulate very well on Marcus. Calc is post podcasts about customer success is all about making individuals and the customer successful and understanding the transformation you are, bringing to an individual within the organization. Preferably those individuals are also people who are decision-makers on the, or your service or software. Adoption, is all about how people are using it. It's who is using it, how are they using it and how and why that creates success. Now that's more difficult to measure. There's a couple of ways of measuring it, for example, thinking about it.

00:11:11
Gary Mitchell
Are people using standard functions that are easily replaceable or are they using differential differentiated functions? The functions that actually differentiate you from your customers? Because if people buy your thing, a new standard stuff only then you can be easily replaced. If they're using differentiating functions, it's more difficult for customers to use a way move away. In strategy, we use words like sticky solutions and build them out. This is really what is meant by sticky, which is people are using, which had a differentiated for their own uses. They're not using them as a reference they're using your tools or services for their fundamental workflows and in core for core value chain operations, rather than supporting, functions. You kind of need to measure these things where your tool is being used in the business and how deep,

00:12:23
Bryan Whittington
Well let's unpack that a touch. Now, whenever you say core functions versus, support functions, right. Or I forget the exact language that you said, I messed that up. Can you give us some examples there what's one that's just ubiquitous where we're going to get replaced pretty easily versus a really specific one where it's a differentiator for us. Can you take us out of the abstract and give us some tangible?

00:12:48
Gary Mitchell
Yeah, let me, big, easy ones are, if I'm using a CRM for sales and it holds my pipeline and we manage our Salesforce using it, right. It's tough to replace. Right. If we're using a tool that helps us analyze stuff, it's on the side. It's not a core, it's not as cool. We can replace it. Or if we're using a tool, the HR tool, workforce planning or something like that, it's not as core as the, it doesn't hold the core of the business. It helps you.

00:13:29
Bryan Whittington
Okay. Maybe another way of saying that is if it's not a vital business function, that is going to be extremely painful high-risk to replace I'm easily replaceable. I really look at, take care of, worry about, my customer satisfaction, my customer success, how they're adopting it, consuming it, and who's really benefiting from it. Is that a good summary?

00:13:56
Gary Mitchell
Yeah, I think so. I think so. It's a bit that, I've mainly been involved in customer success and the software as a service and the FinTech world where people, and the FinTech example I have is a reasonably well reasonably sized payment processor. So card payment processor. I mean, they support, I don't know if you've heard in the U S banks like Revolut and Starling the challenger banks in the UK. And, they process the transactions, but actually being a fairly successful company. It's it's, I would still say it's small to medium compared to the very big players in the FinTech space and what that forces you to do as a small to medium player with surrounded by big players in the FinTech space. As you need to find your way where you can live successfully, right. Amongst the alligators, right? So one might call that positioning.

00:15:06
Gary Mitchell
Yeah, you need to find your position and in your position, you need to find your halo customers or your key customers. You need to find out the reason why your customers will come to you rather than consider going to the big players. That is all about understanding who your customers are and what they need to do, with themselves, their own strategy and how you enable their strategy. The example I'm using is somebody who takes challenges, small challenge of banks or wannabe challenger banks, one would be fintechs. It would, that may evolve into, FX, wallets, and all of that stuff. You may have all been to challenger banks and helping them establish minimum viable products and move them, help them grow. That, that the number of customers who have used that product helped them grow out the, capabilities and the features of their product to grow their own communities so that the FinTech ideas work and where their interest is actually, growing their customer's business.

00:16:25
Gary Mitchell
If they grow that, if they're successful in providing a platform that customers can help to grow their own business, then actually they win. Customers, success became really meaningful then, and you had to say, okay, I'm an FX wallet provider. I, so we need to attach them to all the FX stuff. We need to give them debit cards. We need to get them nice looking debit cards for need to get them, all the accounts, connection to the banks. We then need to provide them with a path to add functionality to that. And, and they get, they can define customer success by what their customers need to grow.

00:17:14
Bryan Whittington
Okay. It's kind of curious, right? Whether you're,

00:17:18
Gary Mitchell
These things, you can measure these things are measurable. It's a roadmap, so that is measurable.

00:17:24
Bryan Whittington
We're going to go down to that measurable second and, or path in a second here, but it's really rather incredible. We're talking about cross-functional where we're bringing in marketing sales deployment, whether you call it, operations, what's the word I'm looking for? Support. Yeah. Whatever you fill in the blank, right. Delivery, right. So you fill in the blank. It's cross-functional. What you're really saying, if I can make this super simplistic, really determine your strategy to bring the best value to your customers with the least amount of friction through the whole entire buying customer journey. They are a customer, make sure that you're absolutely crystal clear on who's going to benefit making their life ridiculously easy so they can adopt this and consume it. That consumption is going to be either on a per user, per month or per whatever that consumption looks like. If we make that others focused on the end user client, not necessarily the bigger customer, the bigger company, but the end user of it, we make their life so easy.

00:18:41
Bryan Whittington
There would be a real vote if we fire, if they got rid of us, if they fired us. So we that's really utopia. That's what we're trying to figure out here. Is that correct?

00:18:52
Gary Mitchell
Yeah, kind of, yes. The device for me. Hey, I say it as I see it, Brian, now, I want to add something is really what I should have said. Yeah, I'm a, no, I'm a farmer's son. So I'm a bit blunt at times. Now I say as, two things, firstly, there's a sales culture change that's needed. Okay. Firstly sales have got to expand the horizon from, I just got to get as many sales as possible. I've got to get as many different organizations over the line, to get, to make my numbers. What we've got to do is we've got to take a longer term view of, what I've got to get the right type of customers over the line who are going, we are going to be able to make successful because they fit what we've got. Therefore I'm going to win because I'm going to add the advocates and I'm going to, have better retention, right? So there's of a culture change there on how do we get better advocates and how do we get better retention? Where we focus on customer success, sales, need to focus on customer success to get those two things.

00:20:24
Gary Mitchell
Very often we're pressured into our, quarterly targets. We, we scrape a few people over the line that don't quite fit.

00:20:32
Bryan Whittington
Well. That's what I was going to. As long as you have your second point written down, I was going to hit on this one is getting the right customer close one. Yes, that is a sales issue because we need to hit our number. Two, I would think that's more of a leadership issue, but then within that leadership it's leadership of sales, leadership and marketing leadership of rev ops are what are we doing at that top of the funnel to be able to drive down and disqualify bad fit opportunities out so we can ensure that we have right fit. And I'll give you the softball question. Why in the world is that so important to do, to make sure that we have the right fit?

00:21:12
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. They, if you haven't defined what the right fit is, there's no way you can enforce or talk about it. And, and really, sales saying, well, I can't, if I'm a sales leader and those things, well, I can't influence the rest of the organization. You influence the rest of the organization, how I influence future investors with strategy. You tell the story, you tell the story of the customers that we need to be getting. Okay. Whether that's the sales leader who does that, or the CEO or the marketing person or the problem is it's not clear. Who's going to tell this customer success story when it's so painfully obvious that for retention and advocacy it's needed and profitability it's needed, who is going to tell the sale, the customer success story. That's problem one, which I don't have answer for you, Brian, because actually you're looking at the person who is usually brought in to actually get people around the table and create these stories.

00:22:18
Gary Mitchell
Right, right. Unusually people only bring me in if there's a problem, a big problem, because you can't afford me otherwise what you need. It's, that is the issue in the organization. The second issue online.

00:22:37
Bryan Whittington
Also, before you move to that second issue is, what I was expecting you to say, and that came out was profitability. I think too many people miss this, I was with an organization, way back in the day. There was such high turnover that we couldn't hit profitability, let alone net revenue targets because we would sell them. Three of them would, we'd sell one. Three of them were walking out the back door and they were curious as to why in the world aren't we haven't hitting revenue targets. The reason was we're using our most valuable because it is so expensive to get net new customers. If I spend all of that time, money effort on getting a net new why in a world, would I not then reap the profitability of that net new buy retention, satisfaction, cross sell upsell. My customer acquisition cost goes down because now I'm getting introductions from these really satisfied people.

00:23:40
Bryan Whittington
Shorten sales cycle makes everything better profitability up. Now I'm tr attracting other like-minded ideal customers. I mean, it just makes sense to me and it baffles me. I mean, you have, it seems to me that I'm not alone in this, that I'm seeing this out there. It baffles me why more customers or clients or more companies are looking at it this way. Am I all wet on that? I have like this.

00:24:07
Gary Mitchell
No, no, that is absolutely correct. And how it works. I I've coined a phase in the phrase coined the phrase in the, strategy world to capture this. I say the financial cart is leading the, build the future horse in businesses. What happens is the financial and operational plan for a business is so strong that you're driven into short term quarterly. Well, you're almost driven into, a functional silo competition with each other, right? You've all got your budgets. You've all got your numbers. You don't have to make your numbers. You have to make your budgets. You're competing. Okay. What happens is all of these things that you're talking about, sales holding off, not selling to bad customers and waiting for the good customers to be good and ready. That takes second place to the numbers, right? Because we're all paid by the numbers. We're not paid on the lumps.

00:25:20
Gary Mitchell
There's only a few people paid on the long stuff, right? So I mean, the way I like to talk about it is the financial car is a very strong thing. It sets the culture of the whole business. Now the build the future horse, which should lead the financial card, right? Because you have to build a company and then that delivers your money. Right? Right. Most of the build, the future horses are, ill or dying that I see they don't exist because I go in, I go, right, where's your strategy. Nobody's got it written down. Nobody can give it may people, I get functional presentations. There's no joined up strategy and there's no definition of who the future customers are going to be and why they're the best customers and what customer success looks like, that will then drive all of these behaviors. What happens in businesses, Brian is that this stuff is not defined and it is not shared by all of the functions.

00:26:27
Gary Mitchell
So therefore it doesn't get done. It's not the priority because the financial plan, the financial and operating plans of businesses are the most powerful things in those businesses. They have a culture and activities, all of their own. Now I come in high quality interactions and say, okay, you keep those financial and operating plan activities because they are important. You can't run out of cash, you must make money. What we are going to do is we're going to work on the, build the future horse. We're going to work together to talk about who our future customers are, who our best customers are and what they see as success and what we need to build in terms of a customer journey and experience, to deliver, to help them deliver that success. Actually once you start doing that, you start to get functional alignment and you start to get people talking in the right way, but there is no, environment, no place where these people have the chance to talk about that.

00:27:44
Gary Mitchell
Maybe there's annual strategy your way, day and a weekend. If the us is anything like Britain, they all go out, go in a hotel and get drunk together and play a few rounds of golf. Right. They don't really answer.

00:27:58
Bryan Whittington
Right. It's called team building.

00:28:00
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. I mean, it amuses me because I do, I used to do two day strategy, way days. The second day you can write the whole bloody day off, cause they're all hung over and that's when you come together and build a plan together and you're going to, well, how good is this plan? They're all drunk.

00:28:23
Bryan Whittington
A hundred percent. No. I'm really glad that you hit this. Cause I was chomping at the bit to say, it's not an either war. It's a both. And you can't. Yeah, it has to be a both. What we can't say is, well, we can't hit these revenue targets because we don't have this done. Nope. You can't say that. You can't say, Hey, hit these revenue targets. In spite of the fact, we don't have that. Nope. You can't say that. It's a both fan, Hey, we need to hit those revenue targets. The way we're going to do that is get everybody talking, get this thing planned out. If, as his state doesn't work, we need to figure out what's future state. What will work? I mean, that's too few of us have that, both and thinking it's really either or rather than both. I'm really pleased that you said, Hey, you got to figure on both out.

00:29:14
Gary Mitchell
You've got to figure the boat out. You've got to have them. And, and it is, I call my company high quality interactions because I bring these interactions to bring the functions, to work together, to work on the cross functional vision components of either fixing the customer journey or building the future business. Okay. The first thing we do is we build a story that we all agree on. And, once we've got that, actually the rest is easy, but it's crossing that threshold and realizing we have to set a set time aside to do that.

00:29:56
Bryan Whittington
All right. Keeping an eye on the clock, let's do two things. Let's hit, actually three things. Let's hit that second piece, which, what was your second point that you're going to make? And maybe that it came out of our banter.

00:30:06
Gary Mitchell
The second point was that in terms of customer success, sales probably learn a lot about the customer and what success means to them. Actually the customer's thrown over the wall and onboarding and support have to learn either, have to learn it again. If they see it as their job or just ignore it totally. Just implement a piece of software and then wait for the phone not to ring. Right. So there's a disconnect.

00:30:39
Bryan Whittington
That we really need to work on that hand off.

00:30:42
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. We're throwing away our opportunity.

00:30:45
Bryan Whittington
Well, you keep, and I want to get the KPIs here in a second, but you keep coming back and saying strategy. I think a lot of people are going to say, well, that's too, mumbo-jumbo that's too. Wishy-washy so help me tie in. Whenever you're saying strategy, I'm thinking, what's your one year, three year tenure, walk me through how you're saying strategy. How are you using it with customer success, please?

00:31:12
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. I mean the first thing, the strategy, there are several horizons, as you indicated, the 10 year is the big value vision. Who do we want to be? That's all about who are we? Who do we want to be? But there is a three year which actually turns that who are we into tangible, talk about double objectives, and talk about trouble, objectives that are different from where we find ourselves today. So you can have the conversation. You can't have the conversation who do our customers need to be in 10 years, that's too abstract, but you can, in three years, you say, right, these are our customers today, who are our customers tomorrow. And that gives you the chance. In fact, when I build strategies with private equity businesses, smaller, private, between a five and a hundred million pound turnover revenue, the first thing you do is you look at who their existing customers are.

00:32:20
Gary Mitchell
Every time I find that there are segments of the customers upon which success will be built. There are also segments of customers who are fucking pains in the ass, right? We hate them. They hate us. They're drains on our resources that they don't say nice things about us. Actually they are not people we should be doing business with, but they're just people we got on board because we needed to do to get some business and some sales and decent revenue. Yeah. We needed the revenue. Now when you're Megan strategy and you'd go back, go to the customers who we serve today, and then you go three years out and you say, which of these, this customer segment, will it be the same lower will it grow? And you will find always there are about six stagnants and two or three of them are the future.

00:33:21
Gary Mitchell
You say, well, okay, why are these people, our future? And then you get into those success components. Well, these are the people who are trying to do X and Y and they're in this stage of their development and this is what they need. And they need somebody. Our software or our service brings them back. The way we do it, they really like it. You actually get into that success conversation. And it's.

00:33:50
Bryan Whittington
I was missing that's, that was a missing piece. Whenever I think strategy, I think internally, right? What's our strategy. What you're doing is you're flipping that around, which is really wise. I'm looking at this from what is my customer strategy or what's my customer success strategy, who is the customer? Because whenever we help people hire salespeople specifically, what most times people don't do is they don't consider the buyer's journey. They don't consider the maturity of the market. They don't consider the complexity of the project. They think a salesperson is a salesperson, a sales person. They look at it inwardly as a, as opposed to from the other end of the table. So I was absolutely missing that. You're doing the same thing from strategy once. Let me try to tie this in and make sure if I'm connecting the dots here. Once I then figure out my customer journey, where are they going to be in three, five, three to five years from now, start to read the tea leaves.

00:34:50
Bryan Whittington
Obviously it's not going to be crystal clear, but I can anticipate trends and all that good stuff. Once I do that and identify that, bring out the customer journey, figure out what the friction points are. How did the friction, those how to get all of our inner part into inter departmental, or our different business functions to work properly. Once I have that identified, then I flip on the other side and say, okay, if that's true, what's our internal business strategy to execute this plan. That kind of a summing that all up?

00:35:24
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Cause there's what you just described. There is identify a core customers and what you have to do to win, to grow them. And, and I want to just add something on which is the, and this is always the case. There are always referenceable or halo customers that other customers look to and god, if those people are doing business with these guys, then I should have at least have a look at them. Okay. It's more noticeable in smaller private equity businesses. Cause I'm I go in and I go, well, okay, here's your segments who we all six referenceable customers, the six customers that everybody else will respect. If you write about your successes with them, you'll get attention and people then, and I don't know, well, you've got to go and get them because that your next 40 customers are down to those next six that, your six referenceable customers will generate 40 or 50 or a hundred customers.

00:36:26
Gary Mitchell
Okay. Got it. For me, it's very clear, but I'm a non salesman. Also it's easier for me because I come into these businesses with a blank sheet of paper and I don't know what they do. I'm not obsessed with, for example, software businesses. Oh, look at our platform. It's great. It's got these features and I'm going, I don't care who wants it. Right. We should do in sales too, by the way. Yeah. I don't care who wants it. Why do they like it? Right. I, and what, because once I figured out who wants it and why they like it, then we can look back at ourselves and say, well, what's stopping us. We look at the customer journey and you've got well marketing. We're not actually communicating to them effectively. We're not, we're not engaging them in sales correctly. Actually when we make a pig's ear of onboarding them and we don't measure success with them, we don't actually accompany them.

00:37:22
Gary Mitchell
You go, okay, well we know who we're aiming. We know what they want. We know what we're doing wrong. You look at what should we do? And I, people make a big thing about strategy, as if it's a big academic thing, right? But you look at entrepreneurs and you look at turnarounds. I w I, I look at when I go into big corporates bandwidth for change. I look at strategy, I know my outcome is what are the five things you guys are gonna do together in the next 18 months that will put you in a significantly better position to achieve your three year goals then where you are now. Right? Because I know it's no more than five things because there's only eight of you in the senior team. And then you've got your key lieutenants. You're busy doing the day to day business. I can't load on 50 new projects, right? Yep.

00:38:28
Gary Mitchell
There's otherwise, we're going to be living in failure with those projects. I'm gonna force you as a team to tell me those five things, to tell me as a team and agree on those five things and commit to those five things that are going to put you in a significant position. They will never take you significantly better position. They will never take you all the way there, but they are going to move the needle. They're going to change the game. We can go and communicate that to the organization and the organization is going to go, Hey, these guys are actually talking more authentically to us now because they're not pretending they're going to make the perfect business now, but they're committing to do five really good things that I can see will make a big difference. And I'm more likely to believe them. Absolutely. Okay.

00:39:21
Gary Mitchell
So now, sorry.

00:39:23
Bryan Whittington
No, no, we're good. I love that. Right. So, and, definitely check it out. I mean, you get those ideas from whether traction EOS are scaling up for an Harnish or hanging out with Gary Mitchell here. Whatever it is, focus on those three to five critical things per quarter, you can only do so much, like you said, over 18 months. Those 18 month critical projects, you got to break down into bite sized pieces on a quarterly basis and make sure that you're doing it. I absolutely wholeheartedly couldn't support you more on that. However, that said, we're running out of time. So let's get to the KPIs. What are the, some of the KPIs that I should be looking at? How do I measure this? I don't even know where to start help.

00:40:03
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. The first thing is to define customer success, but then to have a framework. I've been working with, a VP of sales in Europe of a big American company, kind of new company, which is on, retail sales, enablement, or growth. And, we developed a, a framework. It's called ACE, a C E adopt consume, expand, right? And actually the guy I'm working with said, no, I'm having pace. So pipeline of real projects, sorry, prospects. I win them. I go into adopt, I get people on board. I go into consume when the customer is realizing value and success to get to ROI. I go into expand where I actually deliver expanded services and products into the customer, sometimes called upsell to increase their level of ROI. What we simply have done is put out on a chart with vertical columns, with a pay and a, a C and a, and we've listed a set of tick boxes in each set of things we can see in each customer that prove, have we got the right guys in the pipeline?

00:41:33
Gary Mitchell
These are characteristics of our target customers. Have they adopted well, we've implemented it, the stakeholders, there's a set of things in there. Are they consuming? So how do I measure that? How have I got visibility of it is the customer measuring it, my able to measure it through our platform, are they consuming and then expanding, which are the logical extension products. Now, this is where the way that is tailored to the customer, they expansion because the extension products and services are not for everybody. You measure the appropriate ones, but what this gives you is the chance to measure the value or the customer success or the customer value for every single customer. You can plot them on a chart and you can plot your customers about where. Are they in the pipeline that they're adopting? Are they consuming? Are they expanding? And what is their level of adoption consumption of expansion, according to how many of those boxes you've ticked.

00:42:46
Gary Mitchell
Okay. And that's the kind of maturity.

00:42:49
Bryan Whittington
Okay. I'm going to dive down more deeply on it. I'm going to skip over pipeline because that's really Stage-Gate management checklist manifesto. I'm going to skip that.

00:42:58
Gary Mitchell
Well, it's all say it's defining your target customer. What are the attributes of your target customer?

00:43:05
Bryan Whittington
Right. I would hope that you would have had that already at the top of the funnel, the ICP, all that stuff. So I'm gonna assume that's already done. Now. Let's talk about adoption. What are some specific KPIs that I want to look for within adoption?

00:43:19
Gary Mitchell
Well, the adoption is more or less. They, this is about the, have you installed your software? Right? Are they using it? How many users, they've got a small amount. I think users on board are the stakeholders or to it, is it integrated with the rest of the environment? Okay. So there are things, how.

00:43:49
Bryan Whittington
Are you measuring that though?

00:43:52
Gary Mitchell
Well, you can measure it with number of users. You can measure it with whether your onboarding is complete. You can measure it, whether the key stakeholders on the onboarding have signed it off and agreed. What will you do at the end of adopt as you agree, what consume means, right? So you agree customer success. You it's rather like the stage gate or the sales is you agree the contents of the next stage at the, I mean, I've stolen it off the scale set stage gate of sales, cause you basically say, no, you've got to stage gate, the sales pilot put one in the customer success. That's all I'm saying, adoption. Really, maybe another.

00:44:32
Bryan Whittington
Way of saying adoption is implementation and then consuming as what others might call adoption. So let's talk about the KPIs.

00:44:41
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. Yeah. I just realized that the example I gave you at the head of the call actually is cross purposes with this one I've worked on with my client. I've only just realized that's how bright I am bright. The things I talked about in adoption earlier, or in consumption, so this is what are they using? Where are they using? So you've got things like seats and transactions they're consuming, right? But actually it's the quality of consumption that we need to, get at because the quality of consumption a Cray is how we measure stickiness. That will be how are they using it? In what way are they using it? are they using the differentiating functions? And the other thing on consumption is how they measure success in their words. The people I'm working with this is, sales, margin increases on retail lines. Okay. The using tool.

00:45:53
Gary Mitchell
It's customer in consume you add customer success in the customer's own words, because the customer doesn't give a rat's ass about retention and doesn't give a rat's ass about stuff that you care about. If you actually measure things, the customer cares about that opens the way for you to have a customer success conversation with the customer. So you can define them in adoption. You can define them in the sales process and you can continue to engage with the customer on metrics that are important to them. The secondary thing that drives out is during the consume stage, you can actually work with the customer. If you're measuring their success, in their words, you can engage them on creating case studies and marketing that customer success, which can actually enhance your building of your sales funnel.

00:46:50
Bryan Whittington
Got it. Now let's take this and put some application maybe in a non SAS, non technology type play. I would think that the same process would align because this is process not, this is process and methodology. I would think that you would be able to put this to product, put this to us service. It might be more difficult to, especially in a service identify, adopt and to consume. I would think that if you thought through it, that same methodology could apply.

00:47:22
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. I I'm absolutely positive about that. The reason I am is because my early experience was transformations with big retailers and what a retailer is trying to do. They're trying to sell you one thing, but also to sell you other stuff, right? Retailers and retail brands, they're trying to actually sell a story and sell success and define success in terms of the Dubai, the brand. They're trying to actually expand the number of articles you own and the number of times you visit their retail store. It's defining what success means to your customers. I think goes down to individual customers, buying individual items, because actually if you're an outlet on Euro, a home Depot or something, and then you want repeat purchases, you measure repeat purchases, but you have to define what, how purchasing from you contributes to that customer's success or wellbeing that I think they've got a bargain.

00:48:32
Gary Mitchell
Did they think they bought the best thing? Do they think they're safe and secure because you'll use your after sales services. So good. How, how do you contribute to their wellbeing? It's a great thought process, whatever you sell.

00:48:47
Bryan Whittington
Yeah, absolutely. That's why I love methodology, right? Because no matter what you're doing, you can align that methodology just need to do some tweaks and changes and adjust a few things up, but all, ultimately it's the same methodology throughout. Son of a gun we're winding down on time here. So let's rapid fire this. I mean, based upon your experience, scary, what are maybe some of the biggest challenges or mistakes that you've seen others make that you can share with us so we can avoid doing those same mistakes?

00:49:16
Gary Mitchell
Well this is a very long list and it's time to select isn't it? No, I think it's something we touched on is that we haven't got a clear vision of our, who our target customers are and what makes them successful. And, and that just having that helps people talk because if sales and the other functions are talking about customers, so we know it's a, a core customer, we'll have a different conversation that if we know this customer, isn't a goal customer, it's a pain in the ass. We'll make different decisions in different, have a different dialogue. Yeah.

00:49:58
Bryan Whittington
Well, and the funny thing is I'm guilty of this by the way. I see this time and time again, especially with the number of clients is we're not willing to do the hard work of thinking. We're so busy being busy that we won't slow down in order to speed up. We won't slow down to do the hard work of thinking that deep work to be able to, speed up and scale up without having our wheels fall off. I couldn't agree with you more on that one. Okay. Your best hack, whether it's around talent, how to hire it, that talent management sales development, whether from a marketing or whatever the case, in this instance, customer service or scaling up of the business, one sales hack or one hack for us please.

00:50:43
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. I mean, it's to do with what we talked about before. People don't make the time. Actually what I do for businesses, 50% of the value I bring is actually putting time in the diary to actually have conversations about these things. If there is not time in the diary, and there is not a facilitator who can help functions, who don't usually talk about these things, and don't usually, and don't really know how to start talking about these things, then the conversations don't happen and they get postponed and then they never happen. We live in a, we just were having the same old conversations about the detail forever. I would say if you want to change things, start the conversation, build, some shared, a shared view, shared beliefs about what good customers are and what they believe is success means. How we have to be configured as a business to be able to do that.

00:51:46
Gary Mitchell
Well, that's not that difficult if people think it's massively difficult, we need to do a lot of research. No knowledge is in your business. The knowledge is inside your business. It's, it's happening every day. Just get a room while you can't now just kind of, get a break in a zoom room, and get some structure and start to have these conversations. You'd be surprised on what you agree on.

00:52:15
Bryan Whittington
Yeah. It, it, you already have it get a good facilitator and that was it. You already know it. You're already doing it, resources that you might recommend, whether books, podcasts, guys, how in the world can we get a smarter smart as you on customer success?

00:52:31
Gary Mitchell
I, I operate from, Patrick Lencioni's, of cross vertical. One of his books,

00:52:42
Bryan Whittington
Five dysfunctions of team.

00:52:44
Gary Mitchell
No, the one on organization health. What's that called? I had it. Then I went out of my head. It's very good. It's very good. Look down is let's not death by meetings. No, it's the one that brings it all together. He introduces the concept of organization health. An organization. Health is all about having shared focus and shared purpose.

00:53:07
Bryan Whittington
Oh, son of a gun. I have that in my library queue, so yeah.

00:53:10
Gary Mitchell
Yeah. I've got it over here on my, Oh, I can't find it. The wash again. I don't know where it's gone.

00:53:16
Bryan Whittington
Well, I'll tell you what, so let me ask you this one or I'll look it up. What's the future hold. What, what trends do you see coming down the pike?

00:53:29
Gary Mitchell
Yeah, that's a difficult one. I mean, I don't know why I'm speechless on this. I'm working with a $2 billion company on strategy at the moment, and it's all about the nine trends that are hitting FinTech companies. And, I'm going now, I'm speechless. This, the COVID has changed everything. We all need a new plan right now. All we going to plan the same way as we built the old plan or are we going to do it differently? and I would propose that we do it differently, looking outward rather than inward first. I would look out with the customer and try and define our future customers in three to five years and talk about them and almost, turn them into a persona. Who are they? What are their concerns, role model talk their language and not think, I'm in FinTech and the smaller companies are doing this.

00:54:36
Gary Mitchell
The small companies are actually identifying individuals to sell their service to and understanding about their lives. If we did more in larger companies of actually understanding the individuals, were doing a great job for and understanding why that was, I think everything's going to get more personal is my long, really long winded answer to your short question.

00:55:02
Bryan Whittington
I agree with that. I mean, I'm already seeing it. Everything is changing because it's so noisy out there. How do we differentiate? And it's not speaking louder, speaking more often about your differentiators. It's really showing it and looking at it from your buyer's perspective. So couldn't agree with that more. Was it the advantage by Patrick Lencioni?

00:55:25
Gary Mitchell
It was the advantage and it just went out my head in a minute.

00:55:28
Bryan Whittington
There we go. He has some great stuff. I was just talking earlier about his other book, getting naked. So love it. Love it, love it. All right. Oh my gosh. I'm getting all choked up. I'm so excited over here. Hey, so Terry, who should reach out to you? How should they do it? And why should people reach out to you here?

00:55:45
Gary Mitchell
I'm on LinkedIn, Gary Mitchell, LinkedIn, and I'm on a few. Do Gary Mitchell, LinkedIn strategy or Gary Mitchell program rescue, then you can, you'll get me. Yeah. Why should you link the, why should you reach out? I will ask people one question. If you're looking at transformation and you're not excited, why are you not excited? Because transformation should be by definition, moving to a better place. And that should be exciting. The only two reasons why you shouldn't be why you are not feeling excited is because you haven't defined that better place. Well, enough to be excited about it. Or you are worried about your organization's ability to move to that better place. In which case you probably need me because I do both of those things.

00:56:38
Bryan Whittington
Love it. All right. Hey everyone. I can't thank you enough. We got a lot of stuff out of this let's practice pace. Let's look at it from our buyer's perspective, let's really understand our buyer's journey. From that, we can ensure that they are going to be raving fans for us, shut down, or really reduce the cost of our customer acquisition and make our life easier. Those are all the reasons, my sense of why we should really focus in on that customer. Success really appreciate your time and insights here, Gary, a lot of fun. Appreciate it. Remember gang, it's not knowledge it's application of this knowledge. Get after it, do something, have some fun help the community out. Would you be good entrepreneurs? See everyone.