Making Customer Success a Core Part of Your Business

From Day One

Be IntentionalNo Illusions

MANY OF OUR ASSUMPTIONS ARE

WRONGWow….I love Cauliflower

Dan Riordan

• B.S. Electrical Engineering Not my passion

• 6 Start-ups.. Seen it all

• Current: scaled from 15-100 and 8 figures in ARR run rate

• “Question everything” is my motto

“Customers buy on hope, they renew on experience!”

“It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.”

Epictetus

• $1M – Started Customer Success

• $6M - Became intentional

• 8 figures and scaling - our entire company revolves around CS

Create a Rhythm of Success

• Company

• Employee

• Customer

Trust, Intentionality, Leadership in all you do

Lack of trust comes from lack of good communication

“Chief enemy of forward momentum is confusion”

Company: Intention • We set our company mission and values purposefully

• We use the OKR process to drive clear communication of goals & objectives

• The basics matter: How we recruit, interview, on-board etc. is all purposeful

Company Branding

• Why do you do what you do?

• The basic issue: more jobs than people

• Office environment is strategic for productivity, collaboration, and growth

• What would happen if every candidate sat in your company for an hour and just listened?

• Intelligent technology

• Help people complete processes, tasks, and make better decisions

• Employee value prop

Company

Employee

Trust

• Without trust and safety = self preservation

• With trust, speed goes up, costs go down

• Trust allows vulnerability

Intention

• Employees must make progress

• 66M millennials in workforce

• 2/3 will change companies by 2020*

*Deloitte  2016  survey

Neglect

Lack of communication

Undeveloped skills

Change jobs

• Lower turnover

• Shortened time to fill new roles

• 76% of candidates want to know what makes it an attractive place to work*

Employee ExperienceLeads to:

*LinkedIn  Survey

Employee’s Role in CS

“9% of customers lured away by competition, 60%are thrown away by employee indifference!” Journal of Marketing

“Management acts on leading indicators of good news and lagging indicators of bad news”

- Andy Grove

Customers• CS is the game changer

• CS puts us on the leading edge of bad news

Intention

• Drive for small wins, day one

• Behavior modification in small steps

• No illusions around engagement

Customers

Branding

• Technology has disrupted it all

• Everybody has increased visibility into your organization

5 Ideas to Put into Practice

1. Clearly stated “why”

2. Progress: Ensure your employees, clients, etc. are learning

3. Ask questions: Don’t assume, teach

4. Be present: “The concept of always being reachable makes

us present nowhere”

5. Trust: Low-trust society; build a high trust workplace

Q&A