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Net Revenue Retention: The Golden Ticket Debate

March 11, 2024 Gary, Andy & Tiana Season 1 Episode 14
Net Revenue Retention: The Golden Ticket Debate
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gtmPRO
Net Revenue Retention: The Golden Ticket Debate
Mar 11, 2024 Season 1 Episode 14
Gary, Andy & Tiana

Good day PROs!

Ever thought about the effects of CS on Net Revenue Retention? Listen to this episode to get the golden ticket on who does your company really serve, and how to mordenize CS to understand why LMM companies really need them.

Happy listening!

Go be a PRO!

Conversation starter: Mark Kosoglow's LinkedIn post.

Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Good day PROs!

Ever thought about the effects of CS on Net Revenue Retention? Listen to this episode to get the golden ticket on who does your company really serve, and how to mordenize CS to understand why LMM companies really need them.

Happy listening!

Go be a PRO!

Conversation starter: Mark Kosoglow's LinkedIn post.

Speaker 2:

So let's get her done get her done One second here and see what.

Speaker 1:

I haven't done a Larry the cable guy in a while. We had a fishing trip to Erie, pennsylvania, for steelhead and Like that was every other, every other word out of our mouth get her done. Yeah, you're done, man. We were getting her done that whole trip and caught a lot of steelhead too.

Speaker 2:

So we Know Tiana probably doesn't know that reference, so we'll have to send her a Little YouTube short on a minute there. Well, she definitely knows him if she's watched cars, the movie, the Disney movie. He is Mater, oh Mater, oh Mater.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's Larry the cable guy.

Speaker 2:

She just loves me for my body.

Speaker 1:

Well, that movie I just brought it up recently, that's. It's underrated. That's a wonderful movie.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the GTM Pro podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than 50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership Without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support.

Speaker 2:

Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Okay, we got a good one today, so we are. However, a very important team member down. Tiana is in routes to Columbia the country, not the city in South Carolina, but we'll see what we can do without her. She's. She keeps us in line and has prepared as well. So, safe travels, tiana.

Speaker 2:

But so we're talking about really net dollar retention, net revenue retention, nrr, as Is. This really makes sense as a North Star metric anymore. And and for those that may or may not have seen it, there's a lot of Führer recently to Customer success platforms, catalyst and to tango came together, and there's a lot of speculation of why that is. They came as part of a merger. I don't think it's a surprise Generally in the space that we probably will see a lot of mergers as companies hit the wall from a growth perspective, as scale really starts to become an issue, as technology and platform Consolidation continues to roll forward, as just companies seek to be more efficient with the tools that they're using and who is using them. But one of the the side effects that I think spilled out of that was that the very visible Chief revenue officer, mark Kaziglou mark, forgive me if I just pronounced your last name. It's been rather spicy about his view on the market and how we think about Customer success as a function and Spark some debate. But but generally the point of it is he feels like Companies have Treated CS like a Operating cost and, you know, almost a necessary evil in pursuit of net dollar retention and, not surprisingly, are really starting to question the investment in with that mindset, questioning the investment in Customer success as a means to drive that net dollar retention. And as we evaluate this, you know we can't help through our buyer. Let growth framework to be thinking about it really Honestly is kind of the wrong question or wrong perspective. It's not about Solving CS or customer success as much as it is getting back to what is the problem we are trying to solve. And if we take NRR right, any, any metric, any set of metrics that that are monitoring or measuring a business, especially as it relates to Investment capital. Investment capital are meant to be a tool to help assess and understand the Investibility of the underlying business and If you take any asset class in which you're investing, there's a depending upon what your objectives are.

Speaker 2:

It really all comes down to price. How much am I paying for this asset and what did I expect the return to be for this asset? Well, the return on a software business is it's expected ability to grow, and at one point it was all about growth at any cost. Now we're actually beginning to come back to earth and I will. I think Andy and I will both readily admit that we are old-school cash on cash return People and that's how you create value over time.

Speaker 2:

Consider it the Warren Buffett model. It's not the greater fool theory about what we think we can get. I will fully admit that there are lots of cases where people have made lots of money. We work, I give you we work as an example. There were a lot of people that made a lot of money, but on the backs of the greater fools who bought in, and at a higher prices. But in terms of creating a company of enduring value, no, it didn't happen. There's still value there. Ultimately, somebody's going to get that thing out, buy it at the right price and be able to create something out of it.

Speaker 2:

But it's all about the ability to generate a business that can, that can reinvest the capital that it creates through free cash flow At rates of return higher than what they have to pay for that capital. And that is the goal. And sometimes there's windows of opportunity to take advantage of that. And so, sorry, that was a bit of a long-winded way to think about this, but net NRR is just a metric that says, hey, if a company has, basically, from the same sets of customers, more revenue next year than they have this year, then theoretically that is a capital efficient business.

Speaker 2:

Now, what we haven't looked at is what did it take for them to get there? And so that's when, as we think about, okay, as as CEOs of lower middle market companies, you are faced with demands on investing in product Engineering, marketing, sales, customer success. Where do you deploy this capital and how do you think about it? And right now there are a lot of questions about the investments in customer success and peeling that back, but again, we're asking the wrong question or defining the problem in the wrong way, which is let's come back to what creates net dollar retention in the first place. So I'll pause there. Andy, if you want to jump in and rescue me from my monologue, that's awesome.

Speaker 1:

I was just nodding and rolling along with it. I mean, I think it's really important to define that problem, which is it's not really a CS thing, it's a happy customer thing, it's a moment of value thing, it's a well, what we would define as a buyer led growth thing, which is have you identified a value, of value in the first place? The best fit customers out in the market? Have you gotten some to sign up for your product? It doesn't have to be the whole company. This is where the expansion comes in. Maybe the happiest customers start as smaller customers and then they grow into bigger customers because they're happy, but it all revolves around happy customers and people that are getting value out of your product. That all starts with knowing that where we come in, and I think help with companies of this size is helping them identify who those customers are and how you get to happy customers with that, with the product you offer, with the solution, with the way you apply your solution.

Speaker 1:

Onboarding is one example of that which ties to CS, but it all starts with happy customers. I think that's where the mechanics of CS go awry. We start thinking about the components. Do they have good analytics? Do you have great product analytics, do you have great processes? Do you have great tools? Are you able to outreach to customers and do they hear you? Those are all really important, but those are great assets to have in place once you've identified the very first question, which is who are we serving?

Speaker 2:

well, yeah, so you bring up the point of it all really, which is it goes back to fundamentals. That's why we you'll hear a lot about buyer-led growth, because it is our own star, which is because go-to-market is business model design. The entire thing is around understanding what is the problem your buyers are having, your customers are having. How have you put that solution together to help them achieve value ie business outcomes, ie the ability to create their own value, and what is a reasonable share of that value that you can extract as revenue because of that? Now, the problem we have is that that changes literally every day, because the market changes every day. Their needs change every day, the way that they approach the problem changes every day. So it is that's why we say go-to-market is a system, not a project. And so if we tear this all down and think about it to your point about moment of value, we're ultimately trying to get a customer to a moment of value and we have to think through okay, if I can get you there and I can keep you there, then we have an opportunity to retain that customer. But in terms of designing the business model in order to continue to have a share in the value that you create. You need to be very thoughtful about how you price and package your product. And this is where we get into the product led as an example, sales led. We get so distracted by all of these motions that we just don't think about okay, if I'm the buyer and I have to make this decision relative to what I'm asking you to do or what the constraints of the organization are, how am I getting you, how can I get you to that moment of value with the minimal amount of friction as possible? And a great example is the opportunity for the product led movement around freemiums, free trials, free forever's, pilots, e-commerce like month-to-month plans all of those things that then grow in over time to sales led.

Speaker 2:

But that is a function or a tool that so often got misapplied to industries where companies couldn't do that, even if they wanted. To Give you an example often in highly regulated situations government, healthcare, finance they can't just plunk down a credit card and buy a product off online because it's got to go through an entire procurement process, it's subject to terms of service and all of these things. So even though it makes sense theoretically and looks good over in this market doesn't mean that you can apply it that way. However, that doesn't mean that we can't take some of those principles to say how can we de-risk this entry point for you so that the entire procurement process procurement and sales process gets easier, so that we can grow over time?

Speaker 2:

In some cases it may be so arduous to do that that it's actually better for you to swing for the fences at the sale. But the only thing that's going to dictate that is your buyer and their procurement processes, and so you really have to know that and you're building your engine around those realities. You can't take an engine that works over here necessarily and say, oh, that's going to work over here.

Speaker 1:

You have to know that.

Speaker 2:

That's the key phrase.

Speaker 1:

So I always talk about having empathy for sales and being put between a rock and a hard place to sell something but not having all the information or not having the right leads or basically not having the backdrop of buyer-led growth as the catalyst to be able to sell a product or service. They don't know this is an ICP coming in. They don't know what the right scenario is to sell against for that ICP. They don't know the job to be done and they're doing marketing. In a lot of cases they're coming up with that almost on the fly with a particular prospect. I have a lot of empathy for sales. Think about CS. That's that times 10. Because then they're trying to come up with all of that plus get them to happiness. So sales gets them to okay, I'm ready to sign. Cs has to get them to being a happy customer. If it's all the wrong fit leading up to that, that makes that job well, it makes it impossible.

Speaker 2:

One thing I'd say. So when we say happy, it's too open-ended, it's like it's not about happiness. In fact, I'll give props to Lincoln Murphy, I think it's, I can't remember the name of his firm. Anyway, he's a customer success guru. I'll call him. He's been saying this for a long time, maybe a decade. Is that customer success is when your customer achieves their desired outcome with the appropriate experience that's what I thought was brilliant, because it's not just about achieving an outcome.

Speaker 2:

For example and here's a great example is that, yes, I can get the customer to achieve their desired objective, but if their experience, or their expectation of the experience is a lot of hand-holding and they're paying $2,000 a year, you have a mismatch. You are right for turn, because your economic model cannot support that, and so that's why you have to have the appropriate experience over the line with that. So that's customer success. It's not about happiness. It's about those two things coming together.

Speaker 1:

I know you didn't mean that, but just I'm trying to keep the concept relatively simple, just in terms of, in that vernacular, that CS has a harder job, even when the things leading up to it, the inputs, are misaligned. Right, you don't have ICP, you aren't tied to the job to be done for a particular segment, like if you don't have your hands around. That, that's super hard.

Speaker 2:

And here's what we're advocating for is tearing down to the core issue Class example about getting people to success. We go and we do an analysis and we find that for customers that use these seven features, that they're far stickier and have a probability for expansion than those that do not. So what do we do? We set out to say, well, we need everybody to use those seven features, but those are not what create the value. It's not the use of the features that create the value. We need to go a layer deeper and understand what is it about the organization? For example, it could very well be that those organizations that are using those features what is it about their organization that actually there is a propensity for them to use those features? Is it an organizational structure? Is it a philosophy, is it a goals? Is it growth? Is it what's going on in their company that causes them to do that? Or is it just they have an aggressive champion who's out to really make sure that we are maximizing this?

Speaker 2:

It's not about the use of the features. It's about what's going on to drive that impact. The features are part of what theoretically can support that, and I think that's where so many companies from a back to your point about what we've fallen into from a customer success perspective is it's been all about us. It's been all about what we need you to do so that you don't churn on our product versus. I need to understand what obstacles exist for you internally to get you to successfully have whatever period for whatever product you have.

Speaker 2:

But my guess is that years two, three and four of an organization's use of your product are very different than the first 90 days, the second 90 days and we very rarely think of it in those terms.

Speaker 2:

And then, as we move forward, we use product usage signals, which can be both false positives and false negatives, to help us try to understand what could be a risk to them leaving, not expanding or whatever.

Speaker 2:

When we don't spend the time to really understand or find ways to discern what's going on at the organization, where the dynamics change, where there's no longer a fit or we have work to do, we have to lean back in. There's a classic case there's a new champion or there's a restructure or whatever the case may be, or, frankly, the market has changed and there's different ways to solve for it, or they've matured to another level where our product no longer fits that need. We don't want to lose those customers, but the reality is we haven't done a good job of evolving with them, so it's it's like. That's what I think is. Frankly, the root of the issue is that we were using customer success as a blunt force instrument to drive a metric that we wanted to drive, versus really understanding success and what our customers need from us to get there and that can be pretty mundane.

Speaker 1:

Right, it could be one feature. We as a company, and especially as a founder who built a product, thinks everyone should see the world through our eyes and like, why wouldn't you use all this entire product from day one? It's going to do all these things for you. It's going to change your life. Everybody's going to be happier at the company using the word happy again but everybody's going to get value out of this because it does all these things. It's great.

Speaker 1:

That's the mindset, right when you break it down, and especially when you get to that point of, say, 10 million in revenue. That when we talked about this last week about finding those patterns and what's, you also mentioned something very important too, which is not only finding those patterns but finding the places where maybe the best on ramp for a very good chunk of your customers is only that one feature and it is easy to onboard them and that's a beautiful thing because it costs you less. They're getting to that first phase of success pretty quickly, which is good. That gets you traction, that gets your product traction in their company, and then additional things can come from that. You have a roadmap. You're always releasing features. Those additional things are your chances at expansion.

Speaker 1:

But the starting point doesn't have to be everything all at once, and we see that a lot, I would say. We see people saying like you should just you know that first call right Onboarding. It's everything you hear about everything this product does and it's not matched to where they're at Right. I think that's a key thing that gets lost sometimes.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think that's so. Here's the challenge. Right, let's bring it back to. If you're the CEO of a lower-mental market company, great, what do I do with this? So we've got.

Speaker 2:

First of all, we have to understand the economics of our business and where we are and, ultimately, where we want to be. So is NRR still the North Star metric for a business? I would argue emphatically 100% yes. Now the challenge is how you get there. It is a metric. Again, what is its purpose? It is a metric that is a tool that theoretically helps an organization and investors have an indication of how investable this business is. What kind of cash on cash returns can it create doing that? So the real question is how do you get to that NRR? And I think that's where the rub lies. So if your starting ACV product is $5,000 and over time you have some subset of that that max out at like $10,000. But the way that and there's good growth in the business and you have 120% NRR.

Speaker 2:

So the first thing is well, let's first look at your logo, retention, the little units that you book, because retention starts the day you sell. If you sell to your point, you start selling bad fit customers or you start getting ahead of yourself relative to your product to do or going into new segments. Guess what? You've just opened up Pandora's box of churn and then you dump it on CS. Try to be heroic, to try to save those customers. That is the organization's induced issue and CS has to be the one to deal with that. So we got to address that right up front. In a way, you think about it as almost a point in time of this is our ICP, and if we've done our job well, we have not just superficial firmographic attributes around ICP, but we actually understand the dynamics under the business. We almost have like a scorecard grade that says we have booked an A customer, and so our expectation is that we should have outstanding results with this customer.

Speaker 1:

Early retention indicators as well.

Speaker 2:

Everything, onboarding, expansion If we understood from a fit perspective their organization, if we do our job appropriately, should have outsized impact with our tool, and then we would understand are we seeing through the revenue engine A's, or do we start to see B's and C's? Hey, hallelujah, we're booking new deals and what have you, but they're not a fit. That's risky. We open up a whole Pandora's box. It's going to come back and bite us a year later. So we have to know that.

Speaker 2:

Going in the other is if getting them to a moment of value, getting them to where they need to be so that they are successful, requires a bunch of human effort and you're a $5,000 to $10,000 product, you have a problem, your economics are upside down. That's a product problem we have. And or if the experience of those customers coming in, their expectation of the experience, is that you have set yourself up for failure because that is economically unsustainable, and so now we have a product issue we got to figure out is it possible for us to deliver on their appropriate and expected experience in a manner that doesn't require so much human involvement? In fact, it could actually be better, and let's go solve for that.

Speaker 1:

And love you all. But you just described all happens before CS. That's all resolved before CS. Certainly things and we talked a lot about this can happen on the margin to improve CS, but that's not the issue.

Speaker 2:

You know another. It's interesting the parallel threads here. So I think in a lot of ways, I heard this conversation kicked off very early in the year from Jason Lemkin of Saster and it came out of his conversations with CEOs is they were coming out of 2023, planning and looking at 2024. All of them not all of them I wasn't in the conversations, but the resounding theme was do we, what is the role of CS? Ceo is asking this, like what I did. Is I look at this.

Speaker 2:

This organization is bloated. It's now 20% of my revenue, maybe more. We've got all of these specialists we keep as we grow. It's voracious consumer of additional resources, like I. Just we got to rethink this thing and for a long time, when it was all about growth at all costs and NRR, it didn't matter like you just keep feeding the beast. Well, now it does.

Speaker 2:

And one of the things that he said on a recent podcast I think it was with Lenny's podcast that thing went like two hours, but it was fantastic every minute of it was he advocated for a VP of free, which is, if right now for a lot of companies they have a free product, they have a premium or just an outright free product that is the most powerful acquisition force for new customers into their business. Yet nobody really owns the experience. It's a little bit of product, maybe it's growth, maybe why? Because there's no revenue tied to it, it's just a lead pool. If that's the vehicle that literally takes your acquisition costs from an 18-month payback to a six-month payback, if that, why wouldn't you have somebody whose job it is to make that an outstanding experience? Which goes back to our zone map.

Speaker 1:

It's putting the right people in the right place doing the right things. I would argue if your CS team gets too big, you're starting to resemble a tech-enabled service. Right when you really break it down. If people are struggling to get two moments of value that much, where it's requiring almost one-on-one coaching from your CS team to teach people how to use the product properly in the context of their business, that's too bespoke, right. But you can't run a bespoke business at scale.

Speaker 2:

Even then I agree with you 100 percent. But caution that when you say tech-enabled service, you can hear CEOs around the globe saying because suddenly my multiple went from well today four or five to six times revenue to two times EBITDA.

Speaker 1:

I'm not suggesting they are. I'm saying that's what it would look like no, that's my point.

Speaker 2:

But at the same time we'd also hear the other side of the aisle saying software as a service. There are still service in software. That's why I think, be careful when you're absolutely right. To me it's a spectrum which is in some cases. The beauty of software as a service is that you have much higher margins and you have additional at the margin. Your contribution margin is greater because your costs rise in a nonlinear fashion to your revenues, whereas when you move more towards the service side, you can only go so far before you have to just keep adding people.

Speaker 2:

The reality probably lies someplace in the middle. I think you can have an absolutely exceptional business model and still have services oh yeah, to still have a professional service model If you've designed your model appropriately, which means you've designed your go-to-market appropriately, which all has to do with. Let's start with the problem that we seek to solve. Let's build a product around those. Let's package it in such a way where we can bring down the friction and adoption on the front end but create plenty of pull-through expansion paths as we continue to solve problems for them. At that point we're not pushing additional features. It's our job to make sure that they know about them and connecting them to business outcomes, but ultimately, they are pulling them through and we're managing through that Again. I think that's where this fixation on NRR has gone astray, which is that's when we hear about weaponizing. Cs is we had an NRR goal and so we started, and I've seen this firsthand. We have account management teams that are focused on cross-sell, upsell and they are cramming stuff down customers' throats.

Speaker 1:

It's something again. We look at this from the lens of a CEO running a lower-milled market company is that's something to be wary of in your financial statements? We're just the Reddit S1 came out right, they're going public or whatever, and they have like a 400-something million not against research and development. This is like a chat like this is like a social blogging platform. Like how are they spending that much money on R&D? So the question is are they building something new or is that literally the tech debt to run that damn product?

Speaker 1:

But that's an extreme example of something like that sticks out like crazy in their financial statements. If you have a huge number against CS and that comes out. That comes out when you're selling your company and you have to explain that. So either you have a very good story against it, like look, there is an education component to what we do. We help people run their business in this way. We get them to this point and then they can do it on their own. But there's this piece of that. You can tell that story. That's fine. But if it's, I've built up this army of people to both retain and then to cram products down people's throat, and it's mechanized and it's weaponized. That is a red flag, because it's like, well, that's not going to last. I mean, that's a taking time bomb, so it's one of those things that's like it's not necessarily bad, but it will raise the question.

Speaker 2:

The most CEOs today are faced with the question can. First of all, they're terrified to make changes with customer success because, frankly, there's not enough knowledge inside the organization to know if we change this, what's going to happen to our gross and net retention. But in many ways, it's asking the wrong question, because what we're faced with now with AI another example is you was a clarinet that came out with the. We put in place an AI chatbot and it's taking the place of 700 support agents. All of a sudden, cs stocks fell in half, call center stocks, everything just like cratered. Yes, is there some technical efficiencies in that, but it's asking the wrong question. Can we do CS more efficiently? The question I would have is what should you be doing at all? Like literally tear it down to the studs and rebuild it, which is okay.

Speaker 2:

Well, what, and from the lens of the buyer, what do our buyers need in order to be successful? And to you, as you pointed out, a number one it is well, retention starts the moment you book a client, the moment you sell them. Are they the right fit? And what expectations were set through the sales process to make sure that we are indeed aligned and that they're going to the experience that they're going to expect and our ability to deliver against the objective are realistic, that alone you could probably fix a huge portion of your revenue or your net revenue retention issues.

Speaker 2:

If you solve that first, then, when they come on board first, are you starting over and asking them all the same questions? Are you taking the ball and saying, okay, I understand that these are your expectations and here's what we're going to do, and that we need to get you to these waypoints internally so that you have a business case that allows for you to get this adopted? Do I have a strong champion who has the sway in the organization to make this happen, or do I have somebody who's out over their skis with a great idea who now has to convince the organization that this is something that they need to do? Two very different onboarding experiences for companies that could look identical on paper. We have to know that.

Speaker 1:

You have to and running the business. You were talking about 24 planning and I thought you were going to kind of bring that to the A's, b's and C's a little bit. Where you know your business so well, you should constantly be seeking to know more about your business. That's actually a fundamental premise, I would say, of what we bring with fire-led growth as well. You're seeking to understand your customers better, how they find value, your business model better. But this is where and I'll have a meme out on it at some point about the serenity prayer If you're planning and you get better at this, you are better able to identify A's, b's and C's not only that are coming in the door and by A's, b's and C's, just for clarity.

Speaker 2:

it's the grades that we talked about An A fit, a B fit, a C fit.

Speaker 1:

Thank you. You can identify them better and they're already in your portfolio. You're making a conscious decision to say you know what, I know I can't affect much against the C's, I don't have something for them, or maybe it's C's only in a certain context. Maybe there's mixes and flavors and again, you get good at that. You can identify that. You can identify A's who don't need much in terms of physical onboarding. There's an efficiency play, like you can tech-punch, virtually onboard them and they can get going and maybe you have an account manager assigned to them. But they're only doing things on the margin because you're just helping them get up to speed, because they know where they're going.

Speaker 1:

There's a whole bunch of flavors of this, but the Serenity Prayer comes in where it's like I know where I stand today, so that's have the wisdom of where I stand today. I know where I can make an impact and I know where I probably can. I think if you get there, you have a much better framework and console with which to make impacts to your business and ultimately improve the value, but at a minimum. Next planning cycle I have a lot better view of that. I also, along the way, know where my retention is more likely to land. As far as a percent value, I know I'm able to really model that out.

Speaker 2:

Yep, fantastic point and I think to wrap us up here I think it goes to what we say over and over again is that this is more than ever. This is a complex operating system and any change you make in one part of the system affects other parts of the system. If you seek to optimize a metric in one part of the system, then there are unintended consequences of that. I think we are in an era where NRR is that locally optimized consequence To fix it or to grow it or expand it. It became the CS component, some product, but largely CS. Probably the words of caution that we would provide CEOs and lower middle market companies. Honestly, don't get sucked in. Don't take the bait on having the solution be what to do with CS. Back up, look at the system and really goes back to our buyer zones piece, so the zones through which your buyer goes to understand what you can affect. That compound together actually puts you in a better spot. That means again, as we said before, it goes back to you.

Speaker 2:

Could go all the way up to what kinds of leads are coming into the engine. Are we targeting the appropriate types of organizations? Do we have our? Let's take that grade all the way up, at least superficially we could say we at least have organizations that are coming into our engine that exhibit from firmographic data that they could be A's, and then throughout the sales process, we continue to confirm that when we get into better understanding of the dynamics associated with it. And it could be that firmographics and the organizational design of the company decentralized versus centralized, in multiple locations versus single location and you know, small teams supporting large, whatever your sets of dynamics are, your product serves a type of organization better than it does others and understanding that. But even then we still have the human component, which is we can have two organizations that exhibit the exact same dynamics and attributes and everything else, but we have one champion who, frankly, has been there, done that, has struck swagger and has the mandate to go implement this tool, to go do that. They basically are going to make it happen and they've got the sway inside the organization to make sure that people do what they need to do to make it successful.

Speaker 2:

Then you have another situation where perhaps it's a more junior person, whatever the case may be where they don't have that. They're aggressive, they see the promise of it but they don't have organizational support. Again, those are two very different ways to onboard a company, and we need to understand that before we go in. And so it's not a CS problem, it's a go to market problem, and we need to tear down all the pieces which then leads us to with that in mind. Now, how do we think about what is needed from a customer success perspective to get our customers to these moments of value in onboarding in subsequent 90 day increments inside of their first year? What information do we need for larger customers? Whatever your portfolio may look like, they're all going to be different, but we need to break it down to what the customer needs, not what we need to do to protect our NRR.

Speaker 1:

You can establish that and can communicate that. That will tell a great story against why you're doing what and spending what, against CS.

Speaker 2:

Yep, and I think it's this, this, therein lies the challenge and why, quite honestly, it is CEO led Is that it is. It is not a single department issue, it is a GTM issue and we need to coordinate those changes so that they happen and they compound on each other. And they can be relatively small changes, but when we think about the buyer's experience through each one of those pieces, they compound on each other to have massive impacts on what can happen, versus Overhauling the CS organization and making all those changes and if you've changed nothing before that, expecting anything different, you may be more efficient, but you it's not likely you're going to drive a different outcome. So, all right, we covered a lot there and we'll synthesize that down in.

Speaker 2:

We encourage you to check out our GTM shorts. We send those out every week. You can visit us at GTM pro dot co and sign up for our email newsletter and we'll go into more detail on that and certainly also check us out on LinkedIn both Gary and Andy, as well as GTM pro on LinkedIn as well. So until then, have a great week and we'll see you next week. Bye, thank you for tuning in to GTM pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as revenue leader, offering insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit GTM pro dot co. And continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey Subscribe, engage and elevate your go to market skills. Until next time, go be a pro Unאן.

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