Masha
Thank you Bradley for taking the time. I just gave some facts on us, could you do the same for me? Like, what are you up to these days? What's your role? But also, how did you end up in Customer Success more generally?
Bradley
You know, I'm from a pretty small town—Biloxi, Mississippi. Maybe forty to fifty-thousand people. Now I live in Austin, which is the city you can't stop talking about when it comes to this country. I've always loved customer service since my first job at Sonic. Then to McDonald's and then to GameStop, and then Hilton, and then, you know, I got my first taste at startup life. And that was it, when I started working in a startup. That's what I love. I love helping people. I love remembering what it's like to be on the other side of the counter. How I wish someone would talk to me if I were on that end. That was all the motivation I needed. It's a very self-motivated industry. So here I am. And now I'm with Upside. I'm one of their Associate Directors of Account Management. It's been a good foray in that position, you know, a lot of CS, a lot of Account Management.
Masha
Very, very cool. If you don't mind my asking, how are you folks organized at Upside? We've heard of a lot of different sort of configurations. Like, who reports up into Customer Success, and where does that report up into?
Bradley
Yeah, so Customer Success at Upside is a pretty interesting organization. It's less Customer Success and more of an Account Management piece. So account managers.. We have a VP of Account Management, the director of Account Management. It's very much more Sales oriented than Success. That's interesting because a lot of people don't realize Customer Success.. is almost definitely a mix of Sales and Customer Support. They create this baby, that is Customer Success. So it's a pretty rigid and expected hierarchy when it comes to Account Management here.
Masha
If I could turn the question around to your previous sort of experience. From what you see in the industry, what do you think is the best way to organize Customer Success for success? And what is the worst?
Bradley
So I'm actually a pretty big proponent of let's say, the generic way of organizing Customer Success. I think that at the very top, definitely your VP. Or, you know, whoever's the equivalent to your VP. Underneath, you have a lot of directors. Your Director of CS, your Director of Operations, your Director of Renewals.. whatever the case may be. And then I would finish that off with a bunch of enterprise CSMs. Then you have several other Customer Success managers after that. That would be the best way to set that up, in my opinion.
Masha
And where does it roll up into? I think this is the key question of contention.
Bradley
So I would roll into, let's call it mid to senior management, that's what I'm gonna do. Now, it's not so much like that right now. But every other profession or industry I've ever been in where I was in CS, it was basically mid to senior. So it'd be a step above enterprise CSM, per se. And then either the equivalent or right under director. That's where I'm at with that.
Masha
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. It seems like across the industry, there's a prevalence towards or at least, like a rising up of the role of Chief Customer Officer. Sort of separate from the role of Chief Revenue Officer. So the organizations all become like sisters. I don't know if you have a take on that. Is that a good thing? Or like, oh, actually, we're kind of solving some different problems but creating other ones?
Bradley
So the last thing you said is pretty interesting. You're solving a problem, but you may in turn create a new one. What I've noticed happening in Customer Success is, there's a lot of this segmentation. So you'll have directors who might oversee your Operations CSMs. They might reach over your Customer Engagement Managers or your Renewal Managers. Whatever the case may be. But they're all under one umbrella of one director. Some people will have the opinion that Customer Success may be this one size fits all approach. I vastly disagree with that. I think that there actually should be some varying degrees of separation when it comes to CS. I would not have one director over all segmentations of Customer Success. I would have a Director of CS. I would have an Operations Customer, you know, Success Manager. I would have an Operations Customer Engagement Manager. I would have them all segmented out. Then the VP would be over all those separate directors. That's how I would do it.
Masha
Yeah, that's super interesting. I kind of jumped into questions right away. But like, if we step back a little bit, what is Customer Success to you? And how do you know that it's working?
Bradley
Yeah. So that's a good question. Customer Success is basically just embracing customer challenges. Then engaging in those expectations and providing solutions in a proactive manner. Customer Success is all about a proactive approach. There is nothing reactive, in my opinion, about Customer Success, that's important. You'll know it's working for sure, when your customers are not only coming back to you. Instead, they're coming back with increased business. Or they're happier than when they first reached out to you. You can gauge that happiness through a lot of different metrics and conversations.
Masha
Cool. Yeah. I love that. Thank you for sharing. I guess, from a higher level perspective.. how've you seen both the role and the function of Customer Success evolve over the last, let's say, two years?
Bradley
Yeah. You know, I don't think there's one industry on this planet right now that hasn't evolved in the past few years. , Due to COVID. The last two years have been the next 10, in my opinion. Things were expedited. So you're seeing changes to the funnel of adoption, retention, expansion. Even the ways that we advocate for our customer base.. all that has changed. The traditional methods of engaging with our customers is gone. Everything is technology now. Shaking hands has almost become a thing of the past. Taking 100 flights to secure one deal is almost a thing of the past. It's Zoom meetings, it's Google Hangouts, it's technology, it's AI. That's how we've evolved. I wouldn't have expected we'd be there in 2021. That's a 2033 mindset. [Laughs] Obviously we've evolved.
Masha
Yeah, I'd love to hear more on that. I guess the shaking hands part. How do you see the transition between that, and as you mentioned.. like, everything is technology? How much of it really is technology? And how much of it is still the human touch just delivered through different means?
Bradley
Sure. I like to view it in the same way where as when people say, "robots are gonna take our jobs." But someone had to build the robot, someone had to power that robot, someone has to maintain that robot. So, one job goes, another one comes, you know? We're moving to a world where predictive analytics are going to play a part. Statistics, for example. The different ways we use AI to try to foresee a customer being unhappy before they have to pick up the phone. Before, you know, the shaking hands approach, as I call it.. there was a lot of.. you didn't know that until you reached out to them and shook their hand. Now, we're creating more ways than ever to get to that point without needing that handshake.
Masha
Hmm, very interesting. So what early signals are you seeing? How do you see it continuing to change over the next five years?
Bradley
One way I would look at it is there was a time when your Customer Success departments were set up to run your reporting. You would do your calls throughout the day, you would engage in leadership in an office setting basis. But now we're not there anymore. The million dollar deals are being done behind computer screens now. You're not flying off with a briefcase anymore. You're still taking your clients out to dinner. But now before that dinner are three Zoom meetings. When using these analytics.. we didn't expect our customers to be sitting at home for eight hours of their workday. Now their attitudes are different. Their moods are different. That human touch will never go away because humans weren't made to stay at home all day. But now we're forced to. If you don't think that's going to bleed into the business aspect, you're vastly mistaken. Now you need to adapt to the way you analyze your customers by that human touch. It's kind of ironic, it has become more of a human touch.. because we're all going through the same issue. I think that's an interesting problem that not many people are really talking about right now.
Masha
Yeah, that's totally fair. It's kind of leveling the playing field. In the sense that the vendors and the customers are going through the same crap, right?
Bradley
Absolutely. 100%.
Masha
Yeah. Actually, I want to jump back to something you said. Something that sparked me at the time and then I forgot. You mentioned that even the way that you advocate for your customers has changed. Can you expand on that a little?
Bradley
Yep. One thing Customer Success always needs, if you ask me, is empathy. It's the number one quality of Customer Success. I don't care how smart you are. If you can't empathize with the person you're talking to, they're not going to listen. Your intelligence, it's gone.
The way we interact with our customers comes from this place of.. I understand what you're going through. It's not just that you're calling me because the product is failing. You're calling me because your patience with a product failing has decreased because you're stuck at home. Now I need to change the way that I'm conversing with you. I like to think about conversations. You know, I've listened to Jeff Bezos talk. And for all the people, as polarizing as he is, the one thing he always says is, the customer's always right. He's one of the few billionaires who still says that.
If you listen to a lot of his meetings with his customer agents, it's always "I don't care what anyone feels about what you think the answer is, what does your customer think the answer is?" Go with that. They're right, just go with that. They're going through more than we could possibly imagine these past two years, go with it. And there was a time where we didn't think that. It was "No, I think I know what's best for you." But now, no one knows what's best for anyone, because we're in this atmosphere that's totally foreign. That was a high level way of putting it. When your environment changes around you, that changes the way you have to approach and advocate for your customers.
Masha
Yeah, absolutely. That makes a ton of sense to me. What would you say is the most controversial opinion that you hold about Customer Success? One that you wish that other folks, like organizations, would just hurry up and catch up to already?
Bradley
Sure. This one’s a fun question. I think that when it comes to controversial opinions, I have a few I could think of. [Laughs]
Masha
Hit me, Bradley! Hit me with all of them! [Laughs] I wanna know!
Bradley
Working remotely is more optimal. Team Leads should have more responsibility or really checking in with your customers is not the way you should run your department.
But the number one thing I would say is that Customer Success is not about saving your customers. That is not what Customer Success is. If you're spending too much time with a fire extinguisher in your hand, you're not studying the building before it catches on fire in the first place. You're too busy waiting for the fire and not inspecting why a fire could break out.
That's why so many people get so lost in mitigating churn. Churn, churn, retention, churn. But if you're only worried about churn.. you're not having a conversation about why the customer got there in the first place. So the very first thing I would tell my team is—don't worry about it. That's not your job. Don't worry about mitigating churn. That's it. Because if you're worried about churn all the time, then you're only looking for issues. You're not looking to solve problems. You're looking to solve it when it happens. But that shouldn't be your attitude. So that's my controversial opinion.
Masha
Wow! So you're echoing something you said before.. which is Customer Success should never be reactive. It's all about being proactive. Right? So okay, tell me more. I need to know more. I mean, that's pretty friggin.. I don't know, does that feel brave to you? To say to your team to not worry about churn? Because retention is a huge revenue driver. Right? So like, how do you do it Bradley? [Laughs]
Bradley
Well see, I think that—so I had a manager once that—I forget, I'm gonna misquote her.
Masha
No, no worries.
Bradley
The Tl;dr of it was.. if I'm doing my job properly, if the app is selling itself, then why are you worrying about churn?
Your conversation should be, how are they going to get more money from this app you know they love? You already know they love it. So why are you waiting for the other shoe to drop? Let's worry about getting them a nicer shoe. And I thought that that was interesting. I really love that. This is something I heard seven years ago, eight years ago.
What's controversial about this is I've been in situations where that opinion is not met well. And my feedback for that was always well, if we never needed to change, we wouldn't change anything. That's a very interesting sentence. If there was nothing to change, we wouldn't change anything. And that's something I always tell myself.
So all feedback is valid. All controversial opinions are valid, because someone said it. I'm sure, you know, Bill Gates had a controversial opinion at one point. So I think that you tell your team you're not here to solve a problem that hasn't happened yet. You're here to make sure no problems exist in the first place. They're kind of two sides of the same coin. But sometimes we focus more on that one side and we need to go back to focusing on the other side.
Masha
Totally. So okay, when you say to your team, don't worry about churn as much, like, don't worry about that, how do you direct them? What do you direct them to focus on? What are the top three things that you say? If you're asking these kinds of questions where do you direct them to go?
Bradley
Sure. I think that the first thing I do is I actually empower the team. That's the first thing that they need to do. You know your customers more than I do, it's your job to know them more than me. If you pick up the phone, you should already almost know what they had for breakfast. That's how close I want you to get with your customer.
One, you should already know what their biggest pain points are. Focus on the pain points. If you can't solve those pain points, they're going to churn. But don't worry about that, you're already solving it, they're already trusting you. So one, focus on their pain points.
Two, what is the most efficient way you would want to have those pain points solved if you were on the other end? I'm very big on remembering what it's like to be on the other side. So if you had their pain points, what would you want?
Would you only want a PDF report sent to you every week? Or would you actually want something tangible to sink your teeth into?
Then three, and this an interesting one. It's trust the feedback that they're giving you. The reason why that one is hard is because of the world we're in right now. Where it's kind of changed from "the customer is always right" to "I know what's best for the customer."
There is value in someone who's been in an industry. Your client could have been in the industry for 20 years. They know something, even though they're coming to you with a problem. There's still knowledge and value there to actually engage in a conversation. There's nothing better than talking to someone in an industry that they're in.. giving positive acceptance to it. "I love what you're talking about. I would love putting your feedback into this app."
You can't make it seem like that feedback is ridiculous, you have to make it seem like that feedback is valuable. Let's see if I can put that in this app. It's all about remembering what it's like and making their pain point your own. When you're focused on that, then you're not worried about them churning on you, because they have faith in you. Why would they churn if they have faith in you? So instill faith.
Masha
Right. I love that. That's great. Um, a couple more questions. Then I'd love to leave a little bit of time for you to ask me questions as well if you want to. One thing that we talked about is Account Management and Customer Success more generally. You mentioned that it's kind of a child of the sales side and the relationship and retention side, right? If I say a word like value, we talk a lot about delivering value. You mentioned figuring out solving the pain points for the customer. Does that mean the same thing as revenue to you? Or are they kind of different concepts?
Bradley
No, they're extremely different. Revenue in general.. well this is gonna be a fun opinion. Revenue is subjective. And that's a reason why the enterprise segment exists in the first place. You know, I worked in an industry, the vacation rental industry. When I helped the property owner making $200 on a property, it made his day. He was excited for $200.
Now, I can make that same $200 for someone who owns five mansions. They're wondering why they didn't make $20,000. So revenue is subjective, it doesn't matter. What matters is, did this client that you are employed to help, see value? If they saw value, great. Because value is not one size fits all. If they got value out of it, that is a win. That is Customer Success. Value is not equality, it's equity. That's what it is. That's what value is, it's equity.
Masha
That's super interesting. Thank you for sharing that, Bradley. Okay, I've got only a couple more questions. Is there one story that you want to tell about Customer Success life, that embodies it? It could be a gold medal shining moment where you felt Customer Success really came through. Where it kind of showed what it's all about. Or it could be here's a terrible example, a counter example, don't do that, right? Or, a story that resonated with you as you went through your Customer Success journey.
Bradley
One I can say. It's kind of a kind of a mixed bag, and I'll try to keep it to a minute. Again, I worked in the vacation rental industry. I worked more with property managers and property owners than I did with travellers.
So imagine your Airbnb or your Expedia. There was a traveller who wanted to book a honeymoon trip. Which again, that's one of the things that make Customer Success great. We get to help them make these experiences better.
But he wanted so many different things to go right. He wanted the house to showcase this, he wanted the beach to be here. He wanted to be able to only have to go two miles to do a helicopter ride, and all these things. So I sat with him for two to three hours.
In retrospect, it probably wasn't a good use of my time. But afterwards, it became an amazing use of my time because I travelled all the way up to the CEO.
I worked with different property owners as well as one property management company. I got all these property owners who all lived together, and we sat there. It was the most Scooby Doo thing you had ever seen in your life. It was like "You're here, you're here and draw here, and X marks the spot here." And we were moving all around.
So we took this plan. Someone took a picture that looked like it was taken on a Nokia phone.. we emailed it to the traveller and said, does this work for you? Do all these spots and all these hotspots and all these destinations, like does it work? He was ecstatic.
He sent us all flowers a week later, and said his wife had the best time ever. And it was so fun. It was so stressful. And it was a big deal. This traveler, you know, he spent a good bit of money. So we had to make sure it was right. It was the best time ever after the fact, once it was all said and done. That was in the bag. And he had a great time, his family loved it. So that's one of my favourite stories to tell, because it embodies what Customer Success is. It's not only typing on a computer all day and running reports. You're really changing certain people's lives. This is a big deal. Some people don't quite understand what we do behind the scenes sometimes.
Masha
Oh, man, that is so heartening. I love this story. This is the perfect story for like, a week going into Christmas too. [Laughs] Thank you! You're basically Santa Claus for me right now. Okay, last question before I flip the table on you, or whatever it's called. I'm not gonna flip the table on you. So we've heard.. I'm really curious about your answer to this, because we've heard that—it's a fun one. But we've heard that Customer Success folks either love being superheroes themselves and saving the day for their customers, or love making their customers feel like superheroes. If you had a Customer Success related superpower, what would yours be?
Bradley
That's a good one. That's a fun question. It would definitely be knowing what the customer wanted before they even picked up the phone. Almost like time-travel and mind-reading wrapped into one. If I could do that, just knowing how to better engage and connect with them ahead of time, that would be a game changer. That would change everything. You'd be the best person human being ever.
Masha
Yeah, we've heard this one before. The whole like, mind reading and seeing the future.
Bradley
I'd rather just take the guesswork out of this. Like, I'll fix it for you. [Laughs]
Masha
That would be great. Yeah.
Those are all the questions that I have. Let me let you go. This was really, really fun. Thank you for taking the time Bradley and I'm glad we finally got to connect.
