Gain, Grow, Retain Podcast

This week, Karessa Parish, Growth Marketing Manager at ClassTag joins Jeff to talk about the connection between scaled CS and marketing. Here are some of the key takeaways: Look for ways to automate things that you do over and over Evaluate your content to align with customer self-service needs CSMs should be facilitators rather than information keepers Give a space for customers to talk to each other Examples of scaled ways to grab your customer's attention Connect with Karessa here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

QBRs are a topic of conversation almost any place that CS professionals gather. That is because they are a vital tool in helping customers understand how your product aligns with their business goals. The problem is these meetings have become another task, and one that many customers are skipping. So how do you move from the old way to a new, more engaging way of talking to customers? Make it more about them instead of you Share metrics and slides ahead of time - bonus points for recording a video companion! Share info about what stakeholders will be interested in specific information Open actual call with a chance for the customer to get clarification, but spend the majority of the time asking open-ended questions Identify scheduled meetings that you can join and share Create a 1-page document with post-meeting action items What are some ways you are shifting into a new QBR framework? ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a m

Going above and beyond for your customers seems like a no-brainer, but is it really? Data shows that performing 'Hail Mary's' for your customer doesn't have any greater impact than simply meeting their needs. Matt Dixon shares some tips on what you should be focusing on, and the good news is it is relatively inexpensive in terms of money, time, and resources. We need to move our customers from signature to value as quickly and efficiently as possible. Allowing your CS team to focus on making the customer journey as painless as possible results in a bigger impact on customers and your bottom line. Connect with Matt here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

It seems intuitive: you increase retention by delighting your customers. However, data exposes the fact that something that takes a lot of effort and often the increased expense doesn't bring the results you are looking for in terms of loyalty, retention, or even advocacy. Instead, strong value and ROI come when companies look for ways to reduce the effort our customer have to expend to be our customers. Jay takes a look at how teams can work to make reductions in efforts that equip our customers for success by making our companies easier to do business with. ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Jay is joined by Christina Lock, Founder and CEO of Catch Talent. We talked about trends in the labor market and what she’s seeing across the tech companies her team works with. Here are the questions we went over: What are the trends you see in both the job market and the labor market? How are employers responding to shifts in the labor market? What roles are most in demand right now from your perspective? How have the requirements changed over the past several quarters? There is a downward trend in candidate experience in tech, even when labor is in peak demand. Candidates being “ghosted,” lengthy and indeterminant processes, excessive assignments, etc. Why is this happening? How can hiring managers make the best decisions possible while streamlining these processes? If you’ve recently been let go, what are the top two or three things you can do to make yourself the most marketable? ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a

We need our CSM's to become more "strategic". (What that really means, no one will ever know) BUT, here's an easy way to *start*... Coaching your CSMs to get better at asking open-ended questions AND listening. Open-ended questions often begin with words such as "Why" and "How." Or they can use phrases such as "Tell me about..."

Today we are joined by Michael Tuso of Callypso as he brings his experience from sales and account management to share practices that customer success leaders can use: Building account maps can help you identify the right people Sets the stage for consistent account practices Finding ways to build maps at scale and community-driven techniques ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Make your champion the hero of the story when dealing with their finance partners. Here are 3 ways you can do that: 1) Help prepare them around how to defend the ROI of your product - remember to think about inputs and variables to the model. Think like a lawyer - you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. 2) Beyond ROI, help them understand the downside of not using your tool. Think in terms of cost (particularly labor) and lost efficiency - the story/narrative is important here. 3) Make sure to highlight beyond your product, the other benefits that they would be missing - access to community/peers, industry expertise, integration/data that flows to other systems. Make it about the ecosystem, not your product. Numbers. Story. Ecosystem. You have to be solid on all three fronts. My guess is you have 1/3 today - if you can nail 3/3 it helps you going into your renewals this year. What else can you do to prepare your champion for the CFO conversation? ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, kn

This week, Jon Johnson, Principle Customer Success Manager at UserTesting joined Gain Grow Retain to talk about how to scale in an enterprise environment. Building trust and showing value is a foundational part of the process but segmentation becomes the key to success. Create buckets to segment Get specific Simplify Scale can help you identify the right conversation with the right person at the right time. Connect with Jon ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Jeff and Jay come together to talk about three possibilities for leveraging ChatGPT in scaling your Customer Success program: Customer Discovery Key Contact Insights Strengthen Content Learn how using ChatGPT can help speed up some of the processes your team is doing, increasing the value of the time they have to spend with the customers. ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Data is the after-thought but it is the currency that will run your scaled customer success programs. Far too often we have our teams spending time in tools/data/systems when they should be spending time with customers. Jeff and Joel talk about why data is becoming important and how to use it to your advantage in 2023.   You can find Joel here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

This week, Ian Hurlock joined us to talk about how your techstack can impact the data your customer success team uses to understand customer behaviors. In order to build a personalized and effective customer journey, your team needs to be able to understand the behavior of your customers. This comes from data that is not just information focused on sales behaviors, but includes every interaction on all platforms. This is often something that will need strong cultural buy-in to achieve. Your techstack is critical in being able to gather this behavioral data. What do you currently have and what data is missing? Use testing to understand the impact of different initiatives and pathways on your customers to figure out where you will get the best results so you know what to prioritize. Without a strong data set from an aligned techstack, this is not possible. You can find Ian here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to c

Mary Poppen (CCO at involve.ai) joins Jeff today to discuss how personalizing the customer journey positively impacts their experience. Most of the time, personalization is a strong component of the high-touch model, but Mary shares how data can be used to build the same experience at scale. She gives practical suggestions about how to use the information you gather to create these high-touch experiences regardless of the customer type, and discusses some of the tech stack that can help support the CSM in providing a personalized journey for each customer. You can find Mary here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

This week Jay Nathan is joined by Wayne McCulloch, CCO at WalkMe where they discuss specific ways that a CCO can have an impact on the CS team no matter how long you have led them. Hear the process Wayne used to lead the CS team and create organization-wide initiatives (with strong employee empowerment) and a 3-year implementation plan as the entire staff focuses on better serving their customers. You can find Wayne here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.  

This week we are sharing a podcast that was published in January 2022. Jordan Silverman joins Jeff to talk about onboarding and implementation and how this timeframe is critical for customer retention. Making sure the customer journey is more customer-centric rather than company focused can help make sure your customers are seeing a very quick time-to-value, helping to increase the likelihood of retention for them. The first 30/60/90 days and having a plan to bring those activations and impact to the customer strengthens their usage. He shares how his team works to avoid the tunnel vision into what customers are doing as a whole, allowing a more holistic view of how you can support the work they are doing. Listen to some ideas that Jordan shared that can encourage customer investment in the process. You can find Jordan here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we c

This episode from April 2021 has Ryanne Koch (Doumet) joining Jeff to talk about how metrics support the strategy conversations that help your CS team move from reactive to proactive. Using data well can help identify where and when to bring in your product within the customer process as well accurately identify customers in danger of churn, Learn how the team uses renewal surveys to identify trends across your book of business and how they utilize decks to scale customer conversations, allowing them to focus on the story and trends rather than just reciting data. You can find Ryanne here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

This week, Kristi and Jay talked about a variety of topics that give you some insights into who they are, how their early work experience helped shape them as CS leaders, and things they do to help themselves take some time to reflect deeper into their own lives. You can find Kristi here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

This week, Michael Cooksey, Head of Qualtrics XM Community walks us through how community has moved into the intersection of a variety of departments to bring a customer experience that has had a large impact in retention and growth. Michael shares the ways that community can be successfully used as a digital first touchpoint while still building and maintaining relationships. He also shares some tips for those considering the addition of a community as scaling becomes more of a necessity for so many organizations. You can find Michael here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.

Jan Young joins the team to talk about helping CS teams avoid the 'gap filler' moniker by bringing data from various sources together.   It is important to look at scaling from a 1:1 approach (foundational model) to a more digital and scaled approach to allow a focus on strategy and relationship building.   Joining with a comprehensive look at data, this helps you provide stronger customer enablement and builds an understanding of the big picture of your customer health and growth.   Using a variety of sources (AI, data from other teams, etc) can help you apply the right data at the right time.   You can find Jan here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success.   We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page.   GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.  

This week Kristi Faltorusso joins Jeff and Jay as they discuss the lessons they have learned in the course of parenting that apply to CS. Patience through preparation and awareness, guidance through transitions and experience, and learning true needs through good questions are just a few of the areas that they show how the skills they are using with their kids can be applied to the needs of the customer. You can find Kristi here ----- Gain Grow Retain exists to connect people, knowledge, and ideas to advance the state of customer success. We're on a mission to connect B2B SaaS customer success leaders so that we can learn from one another. Check out more at GainGrowRetain.com! Or follow our GGR LinkedIn page. GGR was co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan - be sure to follow for customer success content.