The One Question That Predicts Every Renewal

Customers or prospects don't actually buy for your product and service. They could actually really care less about your product and service. What they actually care about is their business growing, and they're hoping that your product and service serves them in some way.

Most of these green metrics that we have reports on, which again are still wonderful, are how we think our product should be used based on an activity level rather than the outcome or the success metric that measures success within our customers' business at the end of the day.

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All right, Ana, on GTM Uncensored, we always like to start with a scenario that I want to throw you into. So Kombucha Cloud, in the spirit of all those folks who like Kombucha, it's an $18 million ARR vertical SaaS company, up from 16 million last year, and they're doing something right. Every account gets a health score in their CS platform. This quarter, 90% of their enterprise accounts are flagged green. That's amazing, right? But they just lost seven of those green accounts—2.1 million in ARR walked out the door with a perfect score attached. What does their VP of success do? Of course, they pull the exit interviews, and every single one says some version of the same thing: "Nobody told us what success looked like. We just got a check-in call every quarter. The dashboard says green. The customer leaves." What the heck does the dashboard actually measure?

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Okay, well, I do love a good dashboard. I do love a good health score, but I do think they are misleading as well right now in the current SaaS environment that we work and live through every single day. And you kind of alluded to it where you were like, "Oh, it's everything looks great, but at the same time, there is no outcomes being driven." They're having basically a check-in call, like you said, probably about the product, probably about the usage of that product, probably about the number of people inside or out of that product, et cetera. It's all about them and not about the customer per se. And what I mean by that is connecting all of that usage, all that wonderful green metrics that are happening inside of that customer success health score back to their business outcomes. Because I'm sure you've talked about it on this show and I'm sure a lot of people listening know that customers or prospects don't actually buy for your product and service. They can actually really care less about your product and service. What they actually care about is their business growing, and they're hoping that your product and service serves them in some way.

You mean I didn't just buy it because I liked you and the product's cool. It actually has to do something for me to grow my business.

Maybe you're super likable. Maybe that's been working for you. Dale will tell you I'm not buying this big hairy problem that they're trying to solve, right? And most of the check-in calls and also most of these green metrics that we have reports on, which are again are still wonderful, are how we think our product should be used based on an activity level rather than the outcome or the success metric that measures success within our customers' business at the end of the day.

So, like you said, all that that VP did, those churn reports, and they basically looked at all the data and all their customers were saying, "Hey, I don't know how this connects back to our business growth." At the end of the day, they just know how to use your product. And I think that is what I'm going to take from that opening scenario—they're probably talking more about their product and the usage of the product rather than the outcome or the deliverable that that product is supposed to do within their customer's organization.

So I have a quick question wrapped around this: Who owns the initial? So let's say we have a brand new deal, new customer coming in. Who owns deriving what success looks like as it's being transitioned over into the CS world?

I think the senior executive leadership team does.

On the client side or on your side?

Sorry, on your product. So like the SaaS company that you're working at or the tech company you're working at, it is up to your senior executive leadership team, meaning your product team leader, your sales team leader, your marketing team leader, everyone to consecutively decide like this is the outcome that we serve for our customers. Like we build a product and we sell this product and we market this product to solve this problem for our customers. So I would say it's defined by your executive leadership team and then your sales, marketing, CSMs, whoever it is.

I was going to say that it ties to sales, right?

But it ties to everything.

Exactly. But you know, we talk about this a lot where a client churns, right, and the first thing sales wants to do is, you know, Ana, it's your fault. It's the CS team's fault. You guys didn't activate them. You didn't do good, right? And then CS is blaming sales. Sales is blaming marketing. You brought me the lead. If we could coalesce from the beginning about what the hell the product does and the problem we're trying to solve, then who's the ICP, who's the buying persona, you solved this problem because you're all charging for the same end goal right now.

Exactly what you said—there's not enough of like, what do we do other than, "Oh, we're a cool product that does this." Well, so what? Like, who cares? You do this because you can't be something to everyone. Maybe in the very early days, right? But then if you truly are trying to grow up, let's say as a SaaS company, and you're trying to move to a specific market or an enterprise segment or whatever, you cannot be something to everyone because then, first of all, you're going to build a product that's going to be left, right, not knowing which way it's going. But also, your sales people are going to do exactly what they do, which is like, "We sell to everyone. We solve everyone's problem." And then CS is going to be wondering, "Okay, how do I help this customer?" And then it's going to churn, right?

So I do think it starts from the top, but I also know that that's very tricky to do while you're growing. So it's still something that companies have to figure out as they grow.

I'll double-click on this a little bit. Where we are seeing this move through the process, because in the past it's always been sales sells something, they kind of flip it over to CS, and we get into that finger-pointing. What we've been working on with our clients is sales and the customer own what success looks like. There's a reason why they're buying you for some problem they're trying to solve. And what we've seen with GRR, churn, or GR numbers going down is if the customer doesn't buy into the value that we all agreed to on day one—like we can say internally our product or service should deliver X, and the client may agree or disagree with it, but if they don't buy into it before they sign the contract, that GRR will always be in risk because they have not defined it themselves on what success looks like.

And then we as an organization need to figure out: Do we believe that what they're asking for success will look like we could deliver? And I think that goes all the way up to the executive team. And so if we need to get away from what we believe success looks like, it will change over time super quickly. We're seeing go-to-market change in three months, two months—like it's changing so fast because new competitors are coming into the market, things are happening to the process, you're getting blindsided. People are putting downward pressure on pricing, yet you have a CS team that needs to deliver.

So really, it does depend in that space. But I think as we progress forward in a go-to-market strategy from marketing to sales to success, we need to drive home—and this is a big problem, by the way, because our customers don't always know what success looks like. Like they know they have to fix a problem and they don't understand what baseline is. Like what does good look like? And how do I baseline it? I find that the other big problem, but I digress a little bit.

I would agree 100%. But I think it has to be defined from us. Of course, a customer has their views. Of course, they have what they're hoping and expecting to happen. But they are in this world where we can code anything almost at this point. Like your customer is coming to basically buy your product that is already built to solve a problem, but they're not coding it. You've coded it. They're expecting you to guide them to success because they know that it solves for a certain problem. So they know the problem. They're now expecting you to translate that into business outcomes. Translate that into what does this actually look like? To your point, what does baseline even look like? What does good look like? Because they have a number, but is that good? Is that average? They don't even know because, again, you have that information being the vendor that works with hundreds if not thousands of other companies that are solving the same exact problem at the end of the day.

So I think it comes back to, again, a mix of senior leadership clearly defining what it is we're solving for but then making sure, as you said, the full stream of go-to-market understands what that looks like and how do we reinforce it as our customer goes through whatever stage they're at with us.

Yeah, we do have to be the subject matter experts for sure. Like there is a path that they have to understand that as well. That is a really good point. I'm sure you built a lot of great dashboards and we just...

We kind of talked about dashboards, but tell me about a time where you believe you've had the perfect dashboard and you've had the perfect data, but customers turned anyway. Like, what did you miss in that dashboard build that you had?

I'm giggling because I don't think I ever had a perfect dashboard or perfect data.

Okay.

I'm like, that sounds like a great company. Are they hiring?

Right, because truly, I would never. I feel like every single time I've stepped into any seat as a CS operator, it's never been perfect. More times than not, I think the one thing I'll say that I wish I did sooner in my dashboards rather than always doing after the fact is I think CS is very retro-driven. Meaning we look at churn, we look at the past a lot, and it's almost natural to come in when you are a leader and just look at what's happened and focus so much on fixing what might have happened a few quarters or a few years before you arrived, and you're dealing with cleaning up that mess. I think one thing I would wish I put into dashboards and data sooner is more forecasting and forward-looking because I think most sales, marketing, and product teams are always forecasting and looking forward, like, "Hey, this is what our pipeline is, this is how much we're going to close, this is how many leads we're going to bring in." Versus, I think looking back, I just feel like I always had, maybe not the most perfect data, but my data always showed backward-looking information. I always built dashboards first on what was the past rather than forecasting as much. I did forecast eventually, but if I could look back and change something, I think I'd want to build in more forecasting rather than just looking back. I think that's what I would say.

Yeah, I think we talk so much about forecasting on the sales side, right? Like it's all about forecasting. What's your best case? What's your commit? What's that?

And they can't even do that, right? But I digress. But no one really talks about how to forecast on the CS side. And I think anything that's forward-looking is really important. And you hit the nail on the head a few minutes ago. Like we can vibe code—I don't want to say 99%, but like 80% of anything right now, right? Unless it's this really super complex, deep integration, and even that, if you have enough time, you could probably do it. What is the reason that I'm going to buy something from you first? And how are you gonna make sure that I'm gonna get really quick time to value? And how are you gonna make sure that I shouldn't just go do this myself? And if you can't forecast what that looks like, when I'm going to see success, why I should see success, where my hiccups might be, you're going to be at a major disadvantage.

I was just going to say, and again, AI doesn't help us at all at this point because before, let's say you had a kickoff call with a customer, you'd say, "Okay, in the next 60, 90 days, or six months, this is what we're going to build and expect and do together," and like build out this perfect timeline of where you're going to hit these certain milestones. But again, like you just said, thanks to vibe code, thanks to building things on my own—I'm sorry, I need that next week, not in 30, 60, or 90 days. And it's just the timeline has accelerated tremendously because of that. And it's like not only do you have to show time to value, it's becoming faster. As a known vendor, rather than just saying, "Okay, I'd rather just go do my own little CRM, vibe code dashboard between my emails and my CRM anyways, because I think that's more useful."

You're spot on. I mean, when I look at time to value, when I look at feature sets, the ability to even build for your customer faster than you ever have is so important. Like, when I look at what we've turned off as just an organization in the past three or four months—like we've turned off ClickUp, we've turned off QuickBooks, we've turned off Framer and WordPress for website management. Like there's so many things that we just said, "You know what, you do 60% of what we need. It's not enough anymore," because I could build what's going to do 95% of what I need, and I'm going to get time to value in two days versus waiting six months for you. I happen to love the shift, but I think it's going to require certainly CS teams to be a lot more in tune with their customers and what success looks like, and then getting that information back to product, who should be building and shipping 10x faster than they ever have before using the AI tools available to them.

I'm going to go off script a little bit because you just said something really important about product. We talked about product, and I think there's too many times that product isn't ever considered in go-to-market, especially on the back side of it. Do you see product being brought into customer calls more? Do you see product being ingrained a little bit more? At least somebody in that organization being targeted, like, "Hey, we need product support," because, once again, as Adam was saying earlier, when a customer turns, it could be from marketing—like we could be marketing to the wrong people. It could be from sales—we could be selling things that we don't have. It could be from CS—like we didn't really do the things we were supposed to do on the CS side—or it could be like product was built 85% and they just don't see the value in it. Do you see a motion where more product manager people are being included in CS conversations?

Well, yes. I mean, I think it should have always been the way, but I think if you're, let's say, but yes, like 100% yes, because, again, coming back to us, I know we're talking so much about AI and BI coding, but like think about it. There is now customers who probably can build something better than when you ship it. And if you're unhappy—I literally was just talking to a customer success leader on my podcast just a few weeks ago, and he was so unhappy with how HubSpot reporting looks like that he decided to vibe code his own reports that visually hit a better marker than what the traditional reports in a major enterprise tool offers, right?

I'm curious then. I'm a huge HubSpot fan, and I agree with you, their reporting is a little wonky. So are they still using HubSpot? But I'm guessing he's using like Claude and the MCP to take that and just transform it into...

Taking everything out of HubSpot visually that actually helps articulate to his team where they need to focus and what they need to drive and do at the end of the day. So...

It's a great example. It's something you couldn't historically do, right? Unless you had a really expensive data lake, and you take it all and you put it into Looker or Tableau. Now, you're right. With Claude's artifacts or codecs or whatever, you take all the information and just say, "This is exactly what I want my report to look at instead of these constraints with these stupid Miami Dolphin colors." Sorry, I live in Florida. I could say it. I love that.

And by the way, he just picked up "data lake" from last week's conversation. So he didn't know what a data lake was before we had a customer meeting about data.

I was like, "Whoa, Adam, did you work in business intelligence too?" Because I did. And I was like, "Whoa."

I did not. But despite what Dale says, I do know what a data lake is. I have built out things in Looker before. Like I'm familiar with this little small company called Snowflake.

No, but I think coming back to the whole like why product managers need to be involved and also just be a part of the conversation—customer expectations are higher than ever because we can do these wonderful things that we had to wait weeks, months, if not years for our teams to build for us, right? And now the power is within, you know, a few strokes of a keyboard. Or again, if you're just talking to Claude, you could also just voice out what you want at this point, too. But I think also in general, it's just the customer is having higher and higher expectations when it comes to what they're hoping their outcome is with your product. And if there's one little piece that they're not getting or there's not enough value tied into what they are getting when they're using you, they will start to diverge and they start to use other tools. But eventually that could lead to churn down the line, like you just said—you guys consolidated tools because you realized, "Actually, there's probably something better over here, or we can build it ourselves, or whatever."

And I think the only other thing I'll say, which I hope a lot of people are realizing, is maintaining all of this "build yourself" because it's great to build a lot of stuff yourselves because that's another conversation happening, which is the whole "build versus buy" conversation. But I think the issue is that a lot of people aren't forward thinking about how much maintenance a "build yourself" is going to get you down the line. Like it could be a little stopgap, but the longer term operational lift, the longer term of the team and how they're feeding data into whatever you've just built, but also, are you going to maintain it? You can build it, great, but are you going to actually maintain it? Which comes back to the point of actually buying a tool or software rather than building it. But you've got to make sure your customer team...

# Transcript

Is articulating value because I think that's what's really missing these days. We talk about product. We talk about the usage. We talk about the support of it, the adoption. It's all about me, me or us, us or the product, but it's like, what value does this derive for your business? Does it help you make some money? Does it help you save some time? Is it reducing some risk within your organization? What is it actually doing for your organization so that you continue to stay and use it?

You said a couple things that I want to drill down on. Number one, does it save time? I've seen recent studies that have said AI is supposed to save you all this time and allow you to do more with your customers. It doesn't, because now you're spending all the time building and maintaining.

All you're doing is talking with AI instead of your customers.

To your point of, you know, you can build it, but can you maintain it? I think that's a great point. Like, it's very different when we're an agency of three people or we're working with an early stage startup that has, you know, 15 people. Relatively easy to maintain. I can maintain our client portal and this, that and the other. And website I wouldn't even put there because that's easy. But like, when you're building a quasi enterprise platform, very different. When you're scaling from 5 to 10 to 50 to 100 to maintain it and deal with every problem and every bug—and like, listen, I love me some vibe coding. I've built some cool stuff. But like, I spend probably at least 30 minutes every day tweaking, monitor, etc. Like, that still requires work. So I think you hit the nail on the head on that one.

I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about a framework that you've built: Stop being friendly and start being commercial. And you've talked about, you know, that we need to get CSM to stop being friendly and start being strategic. I want a very specific scenario. If you could, and you could leave the company name out, but like, when did being too friendly—maybe early in your career or maybe someone you were managing—like, actually cost you that renewal or expansion that you should have closed that you could look back and be like, we were just too damn nice?

Perfect. Yeah, I have an example. I was a customer success manager early on in my career, and I very much thought being an amazing CSM meant my customer loved me—meaning they would get on a call, they would smile, they would reply to my email really quickly because they wanted to talk to me. But again, early in my career, had a customer that was green—coming back to the whole dashboard, perfectly green, perfectly healthy—was in my forecast. I'm going to renew this customer, no problem. And come the renewal conversation, they were like, "Sorry, Ana, we've actually identified a competitor that is going to be a better partner for us."

And I was so offended when they said those words. I still remember the words. We didn't communicate about it until that call because I was always so focused on being the nice person, the one that wanted to help them, the one that wanted to be like, "Oh, is there anything else I can help you with today? Is there any feature that I can continue to, you know, help you understand or this integration?" Like, I was so focused on getting them embedded into our product that I didn't ask them simple questions of like, how is this being received? How are you guys embedding this within your organization? How is the team adopting this across the board?

And at the end of the day, I should have asked earlier, like, are you actually getting the value or the success metrics that you are hoping to achieve while using our product? I was just more excited by being liked than I was actually asking commercial questions about, is this driving value for your business or is this product actually driving ROI based on how much you're paying and what you're hoping to get from us?

And I think early on, I learned that being friendly is fine. Like, don't be rude to your customers, but you shouldn't, at the end of the day, rely on a strong relationship to guarantee a renewal. And I had a great relationship. And I asked my customer, I said, "Hey, what is going on? I thought that this was going to happen for another year. I thought we're going to continue to work together." And she directly told me, "Anika, you are a wonderful customer success manager, but I was unable to articulate to my wider executive team the value your product gives to our organization. And because of that, my other leaders wanted us to move on to a competitor, essentially."

I know Dale has so much to say because he talks about this all the time.

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That day literally made me realize that yes, I can be liked, but I need to ask the harder questions. I need to make sure I know early and often, are they actually receiving value from our product or service?

Yeah, I think it's the often part, and it changes over time, right? So year two—what we were talking about earlier is year one. Like, you sign a contract, you go from pre-sale to post-sale. My feeling is that a lot of the responsibility is on the sales team and the client to articulate what impact or value—like, whatever we're going to call it. Then the CS team has to validate that during onboarding conversations. Like, hey, I heard this from the sales team. Is this really true? And then what you hear a lot is like, the people that actually have to use the product are like, no, that's not what our real problem is. But I notice, our executives mean—that's a whole mess. But if we stay out of that, year two, when you get to renewal, it's now like, okay, you hopefully have derived value for the client over that year, and now they're renewing with you. But their value in year two could be completely different or modify or change from year one. Now it's on the CS team to make sure we're understanding that.

We like to call them QIRs—Quarterly Impact Reviews—versus like Quarterly Business Reviews. And what does that modify and change look like? And I think if we do that early and often, I think the second part of what you were saying is often isn't done enough in your opinion. What does often feel like? Like, how often should we be trying to figure this out?

Every single time you talk to a customer.

Love that. But really, like, honestly, I give lots of keynotes. I do lots of workshops. Like, everyone has value amnesia, as I like to say. Truly, you could tell an executive 15 times how much money my product has saved you, but by the next call, they're going to be like, "Uh, wait. But how much did this actually save us?" And I would have already told them 15 times. But because why? Because they're not obsessed with your product the way you're obsessed with their product. They're obsessed with their job, with growing their business. But they need to be reminded of your value. So often for me is every chance you get. I know it's not going to naturally fit into every conversation, but try to, at least, as much as possible.

And what we don't realize as sellers or whoever the partner, vet, like however we describe ourselves—back to what you were just saying—we live it every day. Like, we breathe it every day. Like, we think we're the best thing, and like, in the overall scheme of things, like, we are one part of their overall world. Even though we want to believe we are their entire world. And so, like, what are the things that we need to make sure that we're executing on? So I love that.

So if we shift off a little bit, in one of your blogs, you said AI won't replace CSMs. Like, and we were talking a lot about AI. It'll replace teams that never learn how to use it. So tell me a bit about that and tell me a bit about a CSM on one of your teams who got exposed through an AI process, if it's happened. It could be new, but I'm just curious.

Well, I work with a lot of different teams. And I think, mainly, the shift I'm starting to see is that AI does cost time upfront, but once you have processes built within AI—whether it's a workflow, whether it's like checking your CRM for any at-risk accounts and flagging them early or anything like that—what it does allow customer success managers to do is to actually sit back and think, what do I actually have to do in this account? Or what is the next conversation I have to have with this customer?

And I think the problem I keep seeing that everyone's like, "Oh, it's just, we're going to build autonomous agents and then these agents are going to be deployed and they're going to talk to our customers and they're going to do all these things and I'm not going to have a job." But I still wholeheartedly believe like people buy from people. It's why sales will always be sales, right? But I also think people, at some degree, want support and help and understanding and success.

Metrics from another human being as well. But they don't want someone to just be like, "Oh, turn on this integration." Those are things that they're hoping to get from some sort of AI or some sort of either at least again help bot that's going to direct them. But what they want is strategic guidance. And I think understanding how to prompt AI, understanding how to build out certain workflows in AI where your CSMs or a CS person in general is just really utilizing it to do the I would call busy work or reactive work in customer success. I know those are bad ways of saying it, but like again for sales people it's probably updating CRM, but the same thing goes for CS. It's like checking your accounts of which accounts you need to focus on this week. That's not something that you should be spending two, three hours a week on anymore. I'm hoping you're building something out with AI that then tells you right Ana of your 50 accounts these are the five this week that absolutely need your attention and you need to do XYZ with these accounts, right? So it's being AI literate and really understanding how to be strategic with your time rather than again CS has always been known to be reactive and reacting as customers come forward with things but I'm hoping as AI continues to be part of our workflows and how we work every day I hope that it allows the time for CSMs to truly be strategic cuz to your point earlier, customers want us to guide them to what is next. But if we're constantly just wondering which customers to speak to, we're always going to be on the back foot rather than being told, okay, these are the real customers with a problem this week that I need to speak to.

**Who builds that? Is it the CSM individually who's building something to figure out where to focus or is that the responsibility of leadership to implement the AI? And I've seen it go both ways in different orgs where it's like, hey, build whatever the hell you want and go have fun or like we're locking this down. Where's the balance, Leica?**

I mean, I think it's awesome when CSMs are AI curious or whatever you want to call it because I think like some really cool stuff is being built within organizations and then but once you have something that's really cool that's worked really well which I was just catching up with Cassie who was at monday.com and she's now at Clay and she had a CSM that was building wonderful things and I was telling her I was like wow that's so cool. She's like, "Yeah, we've now turned what he's done into a teamwide thing." Meaning like he's duplicated and shared it with other CSMs within the organization to make sure that everyone there's a uniform thing. Because the one thing I'll say is it's cool to build all these wonderful things that maybe your CSMs are building, but you want to have some level of the team doing similarish things rather than everyone building something different. But I also know most CS tooling these days do exactly what we're talking about or building that. So it's probably something that's coming down where the teams are using a tool already and it's built in already as well.

**I love me a 30 to 60 minute block. So we occasionally will manage teams as part of engagements but a 30 to 60 minute block of like go build with AI and then let's come back and talk about what we built and see what we could implement. I block out time every week to do it. Dale usually has built what I built first and he's like, "You just wasted lots of hours on this." I think it's so important to let people experiment because you're going to have a different idea than I'm going to have. But we do need some type of governance. And what we don't want is your agent does one thing, mine does one thing. Like there's got to be some simplicity.**

Yeah. I mean, it's why we have like playbooks, right, at the end of the day. We build something initially like you go talk to a customer or a prospect and you figure out what they want. But then eventually as you hire let's say five more people or 10 more people, you're not expecting those five or 10 people just to go out and randomly have calls. There is a playbook that you kind of go through onboarding. You go through a QBR. There is something that you follow. And I think I know AI is new, but I think it's the same it's the same principle that applies there, right? Like yes, build something cool and new and that's fun, but eventually you do have to build some sort of governance or consistency around how you're using it.

I just want to say a couple things on this whole day. I think one is I don't think there's ever a waste of time. Like I think we always need to be learning through process. And I think one of the things that I want to make sure anyone that's listening is just because someone's building something within your organization doesn't mean you can't collaborate and build the same thing. I built a lot of stuff that is completely throwaway and spent many hours that like I probably should have been doing other things but I did get a learning of it like what's good what's bad because I've been doing it now for about 18 months. The evolution of the technology and the products that are being able to be developed are like unbelievably better than they were even four months ago.

Again six months ago we wouldn't even be having this conversation like be plugged into things like we wouldn't even have this conversation.

100%. And like so it excites me and scares me like what the future looks like. And the problem one of the things that you were talking about I didn't want to get into it very deeply but like the maintenance side of this thing. What we tell a lot of our clients is like let's build an architecture and like a road map or a charter before you start doing anything like you could just go build and spend a bunch of time and effort and money doing a build on something that is irrelevant and it may be a good learning experience. So I don't say don't do it, but if you are going to evolve to maintenance, owning the product, owning these things, like that's something that you're not thinking about on the back side. I do want people to really realize like build a plan, understand all the costs. It's not as simplistic as people feel like they're saying. And then I think the other part is just go try this stuff. Go build something. Even if it's super simple, get your hands wrapped around it. Because before all the AI stuff, sales team would always allow them to go write content. It's the same thing like go write something, post something, what kind of blog, like it's not just for marketing. And I think now in this evolution of like GRR being so important, especially as it relates to valuations of companies like ARR is important, but GRR is like one B. And like we need to figure out that one B super quickly because if you're bringing ARR into the top of the funnel, you're not getting GRR in the bottom of the funnel. Like that's a whole evolution of like content that could be being written, things that are happening on this CS side that they can start writing and being experts at that no one else is doing right now and there's just a huge gap in that space.

For sure. I think you have to be AI curious but also like I said, you can learn a lot but don't dwell on it. I would say don't sit and be like, "Oh, it needs to be perfect or I need another iteration of it." But I think being AI curious is very important these days.

And don't spend all your API credits.

Oh, that too. Yeah. Claude has like such a chokehold on my credit card. It's crazy.

We went through that this weekend. Let's shift gears. We're going to go triple M Monday morning move. So this is a practical takeaway that listeners can test this week on Monday. What I would like you to do is tell me what you would add, change, push back on, or just say, "Adam, you nailed it." That very rarely happens, but I'm trying. I'm still trying.

Will not happen. Will not happen. Please find a lot wrong with this.

I was just asking who says, "Nailed it." Maybe that person who wants to stop talking.

Yeah, maybe.

All right. So this week, pull the list of every account your CS platform marked as healthy last quarter. Identify the ones that have turned and or downgraded. Go into the CRM, read the last three notes that were logged on each account before the loss. Look for whether anyone wrote down what the customer was actually trying to achieve. Not just the ticket they filed, but what were they actually trying to achieve. Better yet, ask yourself why this information isn't being automatically extracted from your CRM tool. But that's a different conversation. Sit in on your CSM's next renewal call yourself as a review. Just listen for how they're managing the relationship, what questions they're asking, how they're trying to drive a specific outcome. And then all I want you to do afterwards is ask the CSM in plain language, what does this account actually get out of paying us? If they can't answer that in a sentence, neither can your account. This isn't a dashboard problem. It's a problem of whether your CS team actually knows what the hell the customer is trying to achieve or not.

I actually really like it, Adam. I thought it was actually really good.

Twice in the week. Only the only thing I would add very very small by the way but it's so good I was like nodding I was like yeah I bet you they're just going to put budget or they're going to

# Transcript

Put like, not enough features or something. Like, I was following through every step of what you were saying, I was like, "Yeah, I can see why where it's headed." The only thing I would add is once the CSM has been told, like you've gone and coached them to say "This is why they buy and this is like in one sentence or less," I would start training your wider team on that and making sure that value articulation happens early and often. But that's just me and my brain, and I know we talked about it earlier.

**Well, that's a great point.**

The struggle is that we don't practice it. Like, I know in sales that's the thing—I used to work in sales ages ago, but we are told to do it again and again and again until we get better at your closing. Back to the value prop. The problem with CSM I see is that we don't try it again. We just nod at our leadership and say, "Okay, I hear you. Next time I'll say this." But then they don't. I very rarely see them get more comfortable doing it again and again. So I would say that's my only thing. It's very small, but getting the team to learn that one sentence and then saying it back to customers again.

**I love it. I love that. I'm curious—this just brought up another thought process for me. Do you do role playing with your CS team? I know there's role playing in sales, but do you have CS people do role playing?**

I've personally done it in my organizations and the workshops and corporate training I do. We do role playing. I think it's very important because the problem is that CSMs tend to just jump from call to call. They don't take the time to really set themselves up, and mainly because there's just too many, right? On average, CSMs have like 40, 50, 60 accounts that they're trying to jump through every month or quarter. So I think role playing is super important. But I also think hearing how other people are saying things—much like you do in sales, you hear a good closing line or you hear a good opening to a demo or a good way to grab stakeholders' attention. A lot of that stuff isn't captured. It's very much just them figuring it out and them kind of talking to value based on what they understand. So that's what I loved when Adam was saying, "Okay, we now need you to articulate value back to me in a way that makes sense for your customers." But then the team needs to practice that because a lot of times they're not going to go back and actually practice and understand how to say value to a CFO versus to a product manager, because that value articulation is going to be very different to each stakeholder that you speak to.

**100%.**

**Awesome. As we wrap up, we do this thing called "Uncensored Questions." So a bit of rapid fire, but let's get into some of the meat of it. Some questions that we are considering as we go through the process to help others out in the space. Tell us about your worst health score is green surprise that you see blow up a renewal call.**

Worst health score is green. Well, I kind of spoke to a customer that's one I'll always remember. But I think for me it was forecasting renewals and forecasting what's coming up based on a health score, and then basically saying, "Oh, we're going to be at 105% NRR and about 98% GRR." But it blew those numbers out because my forecast and my health score—just measuring our metrics—gave me an inflated score at the end of the year. It made me realize I need to be measuring customer outcomes and not just product usage at the end of the day. So for me, that was my biggest surprise in my career where I was just measuring activity rather than outcomes. If the listeners don't take anything else away from this entire conversation: outcomes over product usage. Like, listen, I love me some data and let's track all this—you know, weekly login and monthly login and usage. That's great. Just because I'm logging in doesn't mean I log into ClickUp all the time. Before we got rid of it, was I getting value or outcomes out of it? No. I was logging in to see what I could replicate and what I didn't. Man, it showed them that I was in it 10 times a day. I love that. Huge, huge one.

**Ana, name a CS metric that everyone reports on that you think is just a vanity number. Like, what do we just need to get off the dashboard?**

Please, let's stop NPS.

**Tell me more.**

I don't know. It's been around forever. I get why it exists. I personally think it's always been a vanity metric. It's a metric that makes us feel good and that does not tell us any sort of revenue forecasting. It doesn't actually articulate value customers are receiving from our product. It's literally a point in time where we ask, "Of my last interaction, hey, are you going to recommend our product to someone?" Do they actually go do it? Let's say I'd love to even look at the data of like, everyone that's given you a 10, have they actually recommended your product to someone? Probably not.

**I love that. I would love to see that. I'm going to guess less than 10% did.**

I bet it's even less than that, actually.

**Adam, I would love to do those stats too. I think that's super interesting because I think NPS and C-SAT are like, the people that love your product the most are going to rate it, and the people that hate your product the most are going to rate it, but the 80% in the middle, you're never going to get the data from.**

Yeah. And also, like, is it actually helping you forecast growth or forecast churn? In my opinion, probably not. It's just making you feel good about the customers that love you or feel crappy about the ones that don't.

**So I'm super curious, because we've been in this position a bit. Have you ever told a CEO that their whole sales team, their whole CS team needs to be fired and built from the ground up? And how'd that go?**

I've never told them that their whole team. I'll be very clear. There was a few people that I said, "No, they're good. They can be trained." 80% is still a big deal. I have come into an organization as a fractional leader that was hired to be a consultant for a short period to revamp their entire customer success organization, and I very much told the CEO you have the wrong people in this seat of this organization. I told them to move them into other parts of the organization and then basically reorganize, and he did eventually, but he didn't like hearing it at first from me at all—that basically he had the wrong skill set in customer success. I feel like we have this conversation so often in sales, not as often in success, and I feel like it should be had, which ties into our second to last question.

**Is customer success as a job title going to exist in 3 to 5 years, or does it just become growth or revenue with a softer name, and do we start treating it as the revenue function that it really is, was, and always should be?**

Yeah, this is such a good question.

**Three in a day, Dale. Three in a day. I'm good. I'm out. I got so excited because here's the thing. My very first role before CSM title was account manager, but I was doing what a CSM was doing. Then the customer success manager title came around, so I had that title and then eventually grew from there. I see a lot of debate of like CSMs now becoming account managers. It's basically a game of tennis where we're going back and forth on the title. But I do think the title will evolve. I don't know what it's going to be. Will it be account manager? Will it be like "forward deployed growth engineer" because the titles are getting crazier every day? But I do think it's going to evolve because I think the title has been "I'm here to make customers happy," but that's not what we're here to do. We're here to drive growth for your business and eventually growth for our business because you end up loving our product. And I think, to your point, it might be like "growth success manager" or something like that. I don't know. But I do think it will evolve. I don't think it'll stay "customer success manager" because I think there's just too much connotation of making customers happy. But it's like, let's actually drive growth from these accounts. So I think that's where it's headed.**

**All right, Dale. I know you can't let a show go by without asking. Dream vacation destination.**

So many. Oh my gosh, so many. Like Bali, Fiji, everything that's very beachy. I haven't been in the Caribbean yet. Anywhere in the Caribbean sells. I want to go so many places that are basically like the Instagram dream, like where you're seeing the blue water, the white sand, anything like that. All of those are dream vacation locations.

**Because you're in London, right?**

I am in London, yes. It is warm. It's sunny. It is actually summertime. It is London, but at the same time, I'd rather be on a beach.

**Have you always been in London?**

I haven't. I've been in London for 11 years. I was in Germany four years prior to that, and then California before that.

**That's awesome. So you've managed to go across the pond.**

I have, but the accent's never going to go away. So everyone definitely thinks I'm still stateside.

Fair. Fair enough. Ana, thank you so much for joining GTM Uncensored. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about all that you're up to?

Yeah, LinkedIn's usually the easiest. So Anika Zubar on LinkedIn or our website, thecustomersuccesspro.com.

Awesome. Thanks so much for joining the show.

Thank you.