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#55: 2025 Customer Success = Empathetic Engagement

• Gary, Andy & Tiana • Season 6 • Episode 1

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Every business leader knows that understanding customers is key to thriving in challenging markets. In our latest episode, we delve into the game-changing role of empathy in customer success By focusing on genuine customer needs and democratizing communication within teams, organizations foster deeper connections that ultimately lead to sustainable success.

• Reflections on the challenges of customer acquisition in the current market 
• Democratizing customer insights using AI tools 
• The Spiced framework for sales and empathy 
• Need for clear communication on product features and their benefits 
• Emphasizing opportunities with “open to change” customers 

Gary:

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. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Now, welcome back, gtm pros. Happy new year. This is our first episode of 2025. And I think we're on like 55. This might actually be episode 55. How about that? So very excited, we took a few weeks off um, on and off, I guess, like a lot of you, with this crazy Wednesday schedule for Christmas and New Year's Made it a very chopped up piece, and Andy and I are both supporting our radio voices after having some sickness run through the household. So if there's an occasional mute, it's probably because we need to cough.

Tiana:

Like Andy just did, case in cough. Like Andy just did.

Gary:

Case in point, like Andy just did, awesome. Well, this will be a quick kickoff to the year. We covered a lot of ground in 2024, and we probably need to have a little recap on that. I think a lot of people are looking back at 24 and thinking about 25. Lot of people looking back at 24 and thinking about 25. But one of the common themes that we continue to hear, obviously, is that and actually Ray Reich, I think, posted something recently that reconfirms a lot of the stats that we've seen which is, generally, growth remains hard and is actually getting harder. It's getting more expensive. We all feel that, at least in terms of new logo acquisition, we have to spend a lot more work, a lot harder, to, frankly, get the same, or even less, than we have been able to do in the past Even the craziness of the Zerp era, or 2020 to 22 aside, of the Zerp era or 2020 to 22 aside and so what that requires now, in this era, is that we really think more holistically about how we do this, which is we're getting back to fundamentals, which is we need to do a better job of retaining our customers and expanding those customers, which is probably a separate podcast in and of itself as it relates to product strategy, pricing and packaging, but I think one of the themes that we've heard more and more is this idea of putting the success back in customer success and instead of running plays and processes and thinking about the mechanics of customer success like what do our customers genuinely need to be successful?

Gary:

And I think we over-indexed on process, over information. And the beauty of this approach is that, done right, it can actually be incredibly powerful and informative for your new customer acquisition efforts, and that is a intense empathy for the problem from the customer's perspective and then solving for that problem. And the reason that's important is that it's not uncommon in many cases that your product or service is, in part, a answer to the problem that you seek to solve. Otherwise they wouldn't be buying the product in the first place, but there's often things that are required of them outside of using the product in order to get the most out of the product. Lots of examples there where it's we provide, you know, some custom scorecards or we provide custom workflows or things like that that are very powerful.

Gary:

But the challenge is, if you don't really understand what workflow you want and what good looks like and where to start and how to think about the second and third order effects of that, then it's very hard to get value out of that particular feature. And so, in a lot of ways, the intense empathy for the problem is thinking about it more product agnostic and what does a what would an advisor or a consultant advise? Agnostic to the tool that you would need to do in order to do that and then provide jump off points for them to get started, based on their level of sophistication. And and that's, I think that, the part of the reason that there's probably heads nodding in agreement. We all hear it and we all say, yeah, that's probably a really good idea. But then when you think about actually putting that into practice like how do we create this intense, intense empathy for the customer and the problem inside of our teams that are already lean? That's the hard part. It is.

Tiana:

What's the first? Thing, you would do Like if you wanted to a company, because you just went into a company.

Gary:

Yeah, I, it, I'm, I'm actually thinking about that very thing. Um, I I. Well, first thing I would do is and this actually goes back to our digital salesroom conversation is I would democratize customer communication, insights from customer communication as much as possible, right and through some of the tools that we had a chance to dig into a little bit and others. With AI, ai enabled, we have an opportunity to do that, and I believe and we're very early in this process, but I believe what will result from that is the ability for people to see it in real time and how others actually begin to query and question what was said. What did they look for, how did they say it, what words did they use? That that's going to be so, so powerful, and there aren't many companies that have really done that yet. But that's that's first place I would start.

Andy:

I honestly think the bar to getting to conversational intelligence right now isn't very high, to at least get started with it and we do it all the time right With chat, gpt and there's tools like momentum, which can really like pump up your ability to gather, you know, let's say, spice right, but like really good, powerful pipeline type data from your um, from your prospects and and and load it in there and have a nice dossier for that.

Andy:

But just using simple tools and using stuff that you can record from sales conversations or conversations with the internal team and pumping that through and getting better at distilling that down to the core. The pith, if you will, of what makes for an ideal customer, what makes for the real problem you're solving for them, and continually refining that. It doesn't take that much to get started on that. But to me that is the starting point always is get some feedback loop. If you will going on the conversational intelligence side, starting with an internal team, because your salespeople are there all the time, right, and you're doing deal reviews and you're doing all that stuff, you can add a layer to you mentioned. Democratize that, gary, but really structure that right, create filters for it and create a system for gathering that information and then pushing that out to any conversation that are taking place with buyers customers and distilling that down into okay, they're saying the same thing over here about what they're doing here with our product.

Gary:

Yeah.

Andy:

That's that to your point, gary. Ultimately is something that's going to be useful for new logo and so on, but starting with, how can I just get better at serving my customers? Who's not doing that? What everybody else here who's saying this is fantastic If they're not saying it's fantastic. Are they not doing that Right?

Gary:

And you, you brought up Spiced, which you know we've talked about in the past, but for those it's a that aren't familiar, it's a winning by design framework that they've had for a long time. Um, that stands for situation, pain, impact, critical event and decision. And, uh, the, the insights from the call are only as good as the questions that are asked, and so that is really the purpose of the framework, and if you just peel it back to its basics, what you're ultimately trying to do is have intellectual curiosity for what's actually going on on the other side of the proverbial phone, right, what's going on on the other side of the screen and being able to deconstruct. Okay, those conditions create these problems and pain. I now have a level of understanding of the severity of that pain and the and the business impact that's created from that and so on and so forth, and so, um, to that point, it's using the great place to start as existing customers, to almost reset with that, and one of the best places to start is actually in the sales process, as they start to become customers, to pick that up. That's where we are focusing specifically, right, doing that as part of the sales process.

Gary:

But now let's continue it down the road into onboarding and into customer success, so that we have an understanding of the conditions or constraints on their ability to expand, adopt features. What's holding them back? It's 99 times out of 100, it's not because they don't know about the feature or don't understand the feature. It's because there's something else that's keeping them from that. There's a stakeholder that doesn't believe in it. There's a policy or a program, or lack of understanding of what are the inputs that are required in order to get value from that feature. It's typically more business-related stuff. That's actually the obstacle.

Andy:

And we can't see that stuff out. They don't want to, they don't want to have like the tolerance for figuring that all out is pretty low these days.

Andy:

yeah, right, so you want to and? And the empathy side is look, your, your buyer, is not omniscient about their company's buying process a lot of times. So saying, hey, when we work with people just like you, they need to do these things, and just telling them that and giving them a format with which to you know, work from on that, some kind of you know checklist right, can be so helpful. It can be so enabling to the buyer, because they're, you know, they may be a little bit junior or they've never bought for a company of their size or whatever it may be. Giving them a starting point is super helpful. It's usually a bad idea to give a buyer or prospective buyer too many jobs.

Gary:

Well, especially now, right, because it's the whole point of most solutions is that you it's an efficiency play right. It's ultimately I'm able to do more with less. And so when you give me jobs that are required to actually get more out of this, then and it's, and there's no challenge, there's no guidance. It makes it very challenging.

Tiana:

Yeah, I think it's also about like knowing how the person would actually use it. So if you know exactly who you're selling for, then you know what their knowledge is on the app that, like on the software that they would be using for that specific job, result right. So if you think they're very techie people, then of course you can make your software like very techie to them. But if it's not, then I know for a fact that there's this company that they're trying to use this. I don't want to name names, but it's like an information tool.

Tiana:

So you try to look up people there and they told me the surface, the UI, is just so hard to understand for them and if you really think about it, they're just trying to look up people, look up companies, and it's just an information site to them. It's just a very specific Google search to them. So you should make it as familiar as possible to them and at the same time, you should make your own people like the people that are selling this. They should know what it's for. So I would make the people actually use the product. Tell me what's good in it, what's bad in it.

Gary:

It's a novel idea.

Tiana:

Is it easy to use? You're selling it. You should be able to know how to use it right.

Tiana:

So, to generally make your whole sales team actually use the product and tell you what's good and bad about it. Is it user-friendly, is it easy to get into, and friendly is it easy to get into and, like annie said, right, not giving the buyer too many jobs. Learning how to do it is also just such a huge blocker when people want to buy something. When I don't know how to use something that I'm about to buy, I think about it like 10 times because I don't want to start thinking about the learning curve of it.

Gary:

So, yeah, easy to use as something well and to that point, right, it's, it's, it's, it's a great example, kind of this more tailored Google search, right, if that's, if that's the moment of impact, like, if that's the outcome that I want, then, as I think about onboarding or customer success, whether it's a PLG motion or otherwise, what is the most efficient path to get you to that aha moment, that moment of impact, right when you're like, oh, now I get it, now I see the value. Now, because I've seen the value, I'm probably a little more willing to do some work. Right, because now I've validated that there's value here. And so now I want to understand a little bit better. But so often, even in onboarding and new feature adoption, with customer success, we walk you through the whole 18-step process to get up and running. Here, mike, that again goes back to the empathy of understanding where you are, how important it is to you, and especially when, two things, when it's a big feature that requires a big process change. It could be game changing, but there's a lot of cognitive load that I now have to think through. There's a lot of risk in us changing our process. I got to think through a lot of the unintended consequences. How is this going to impact reporting. There's a lot of stuff I need to think about. So break it down into steps for me so I can get there. So break it down into steps for me so I can get there.

Gary:

Or there's relatively seemingly minor changes to features that happen along the way, but when you add them up and you combine their usage together, it's like it actually drives a pretty meaningful impact. But they're not all released at the same time, so we expect people to just remember that these things are released and use them together, versus pulling it all together and saying here's how all these features work together to drive the outcome that you desire. Or better, andy, what you said is you're dealing with this pain. Let me show you how these collection of features help solve that pain. Solve that pain and again, if I, the faster I can get you to a moment of impact. Whether you are a brand new customer coming in on a PLG motion or you're an existing enterprise customer, and I'm trying to teach your team how to do it. It's like that's a universal truth.

Andy:

The PLG thing's so funny too, right Cause it's. It's such a veiled way of like let's get somebody in the door but not really give them a starting point. I'm not saying these people are lazy or they don't want to put in any effort. To your point is it's got to be, it's got to be right size for where they're at, for what they see as the value in it, and it's got to be piecemeal enough so that they can accomplish it without like this huge upheaval. To your point, like, if it's an org, org level thing, that's a big deal and that's so hard and so daunting, especially for a relatively junior champion buyer to say like gosh, it's the whole risk aversion thing, right, it's a powerful force.

Gary:

And we kind of meandered a little bit. But so back to your original question, like what would you do? First, we talked about democratizing those insights, but the insights are only as good as the questions that are asked. And where do they fall in? And and it really comes back to just read the reality of the buyer's world and how they're dealing with it.

Gary:

Related to that, yeah, so a lot of organizations are already doing podcasts or interviews of some sort, and it's amazing to me how rarely those are shared internally, like the expectation is that people are just going to listen to the podcast or whatever. But in a lot of ways it's almost like. It's almost like. You know, we're sports fans, so it's the, it's the, it's the breakdown of the plays after the fact. So you know, especially with the subject matter expert, who really typically that's a founder, a head of product, it could be somebody in marketing. It could be a solutions engineer, it could be somebody in customer success, could even be a salesperson, like there's a, there's a variety of product. It could be somebody in marketing. It could be a solutions engineer, it could be somebody in customer success, it could even be a salesperson. There's a variety of people who really understand the customer and the problem. And so, as we are actually having conversations with customers about a certain thing, there's the opportunity to kind of break that down, take the podcast or series of podcast episodes and say, like here's, here's what's going on behind the hood. Like here's how they describe it, here's what it looks like. So you're, you're investing time and effort in teaching the organization about the very industry that you serve and there's so little effort that's actually applied to that In a lot of ways, depending upon, we have some clients that intentionally, for good reason, hire people with previous experience in the industry.

Gary:

Right. But even then, the expectation is that each of them comes with their slice of what they believe the industry is, versus what is our worldview and point of view on our ICP and that customer's problem and how they think about it. And let's pool together all of those insights and all of those perspectives so that we get a 360 degree perspective, versus assuming everybody has the same perspective and people are coming from different stages, different size companies, they are all in the same quote industry, but they're all different and so, um, I think that's that is more of a almost an employee development approach. Um, that can, that can really pay dividends.

Gary:

The point of that that's often underlooked is that, whether you're a salesperson or a customer success person, support person, marketing person, it allows you to think on your feet. You're not guessing at what you need to do, because when you start to listen to a sales call, or you're in a sales call or you're talking to a customer, when you have empathy for the problem and you understand what's going on, you ask better questions and you're able to piece together the patterns. You don't have to be an expert, because we have the luxury, when we sell something to people, that we're talking to multiple people at multiple companies about the same thing. So we get the ability to see these patterns that even they who are immersed in this don't get to see, and so we have an opportunity to to, with that understanding, ask better questions and actually anticipate what they're running into, and then we're in a better spot to propose a solution, whatever that may be.

Andy:

Yeah, what you were you reminded me of is going back and listening to phone calls running, running a call center, right, and it was really uncomfortable sometimes, like you'd hear your salesperson, order takers in a lot of cases for this inbound stuff, but they'd say something or you know it would be, it would be wrong, like it would be really wrong and like the instinct was I just want to hang up, I don't want to deal with it, right, I just, but it's formative.

Andy:

So, to your point on all this, especially when you can start to pattern match and start to see okay, you know, I'm seeing this same sort of thing over. Yeah, the vertical industries are totally different but their situations are really similar and when we're talking to them we're missing this thing here, right, and bringing that together and saying you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead, I'm going to be a little uncomfortable and and get in there at that level and really try and hear that stuff. But it is, you got to start, you got to start doing. That, I think, is kind of part of the point.

Gary:

Yeah, and so, andy, before we hit record you were talking about there's, I think I mentioned there seems to be general optimism around where we are from a business perspective. I think that's mostly because we at least know we have an election behind us, so we know one way or the other where we stand, and we've got capital markets that seem to be behaving and we have Great cuts, yeah, just. And I think there's businesses when we have a little bit of like, okay, we don't, we don't have this great giant, unknown Businesses tend to, you know, move forward and invest in their rate. Anyway, there are a whole bunch of reasons, but it still feels like there's a lot of caution from an from an acquisition perspective, and I don't know that so much as it's caution, as it is almost paralysis. Acquisition perspective, and I don't know that so much as it's caution, as it is almost paralysis, like maybe not having conviction around what exactly we need to do next and you know, kind of kind of uh, moving forward with, with caution on how to deploy things, which means that it's like, back to the point, acquisition of new business is challenging, but this, when we all but the problems continue, the problems are pervasive, and so I think that's where, as we start thinking about what are the steps that we can take to better position ourselves for that new logo acquisition, we can spend a bunch of time and effort around trying to capture people that are already in the market, and everybody's doing that, and that's why it's so expensive.

Gary:

But what about the people that are open to change, as our friend Tito calls them, that aren't yet there? By the way, if you haven't listened to that episode, go back. We'll have to figure out the number, but look for Tito's episode in GTM Pro Archives. It's a great one. Open to change, open to learn, open to buy, open to change. That aren't yet there, but they're there from a problem perspective, they're deep in the middle of the problem, and you speak to that like like bingo. So that's where this empathy thing comes in, is really powerful. Is you're using that exploration of empathy and teaching of empathy with customer success early in the sales process? What have you? That same information, though, is what tells you what to go talk about when you're getting out into the world from a from a demand perspective. When you're getting out into the world from a demand perspective and to me that's why it's one think about the two things we talked about democratizing customer insights through the channels that you're already interacting with customers, and this employee development of empathy for the problem. They feed every part of the business and whether it's whether it's, you know, customer acquisition, whether it's a sales process, whether it's whether it's a success aspect, even even support from that standpoint. And so that's why it's we're always looking for points of leverage where, if we're going to deploy time and effort against it, can it deliver compound benefit. Those two things that we just talked about are great examples of that.

Gary:

Okay, well, this was a little bit of a short one. We're kicking off the year. We spent too much time chattering and catching up amongst ourselves beforehand, so we need to stay on time here. But we're excited, lots of stuff going on this year and we're off to you know, here we are first full week of the year, in 25. And, as Andy said I was talking about this the other day we're talking about what we're going to get done in Q1. And if you fast forward a week, there are 75 days left in Q1. That doesn't sound like a lot. We really have to focus, focus, focus is critically important there. Until then, stay warm. See you next week. Go be a bro. Bye, thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco 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.