The Secret to Customer Success (isn't so secret) with Nikki Bishop

There's nothing pre-canned about customer success. Like, you can have some standard practices, you can have some playbooks, you can put together some frameworks, but at the end of the day you have to be the type of person who says, "I know where we're going and I'm going to help you get there."

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. We have with us today a very special guest. We have Nikki Bishop, who is the Vice President of Marketing and Customer Experience for Life Sciences at Emerson. She not only runs marketing and customer experience but is a true guru in automation, controls, data analytics, and customer success, which I believe is the most underrated part of the go-to-market motion, which we can certainly spend some time talking about. However, her favorite role is being a two-time boy mom. We were talking about this before the show—college boys playing sports. We'll get into that a little bit as well. And her favorite part of her role is actually getting to be a real life saver, so we'll dig into that also.

Nikki, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

Nikki, thanks for joining the show. So you've been in all parts of the go-to-market. We talked a little bit about your love for customer success. You're in marketing right now. Talk to us about your role in customer success. What's your favorite and why?

That's a tough one. I would say customer success. I've always said I've been doing customer success before customer success was cool, which tends to be the flavor of my life. I do the things before they're cool and then they may not be cool anymore once I do them. But all jokes aside, I've always been in that technical role. I've been an engineer, you know, working with customers solving hard problems. I love nothing more than to have a customer say, "I don't think we can do this, or it's never been done before." I just jump in there and figure it out, right? That technical side. And so moving into more business-focused roles, revenue-focused roles, I think I still approach them like an engineer would, right? Like, let's figure out the problem, let's sort all the options, and put the pieces together. And to me, when I found customer success, where you get to do that for a customer—they bought a thing, they're expecting an outcome on, and you get to be the engineer to help them figure out how they're going to get the thing that they bought, your software, hardware, project, whatever it is—for me, I love that space.

I love people, right? Very much a people person. I love being what I say the customer's person, right? The person that they go to within the organization and they know you're going to have their back, you know where to lead them, and you can sometimes be a bit of a sounding board when maybe things aren't going well and help them get on the other side of it.

So yeah, I'm in marketing now. Marketing is a little bit different at Emerson than probably what maybe is your traditional elsewhere. It also includes product marketing and portfolio strategy and all of the marketing and communications. And I love that piece of it. So it also includes customer success for us.

Awesome, awesome. Yeah, you and I have commented on the engineering side. It's like how you engineer stuff, how you write code, or how you build something. If you translate that into the go-to-market, like, it becomes very systematic, like almost ones and zeros to the process.

Absolutely. So I had no idea you were an engineer. I think that's super cool. I am not a product person. I'm—which is funny, I'm so process-oriented that I would probably be a good engineer. But I, Dale's like, "No, no, you don't think so." You are very process-oriented, but the thinking through the ones and zeros on the engineering side is like a design thinking thing, which is totally different than being organized. So this is probably why you're very good at mind mapping, and I have no tolerance for that stuff. Like, give me a spreadsheet. But like, to start playing with a Lucidchart or a mind map, that doesn't work for me. And I think that's probably why my favorite book is The Sales Acceleration Formula from Mark Roberge, right? He was an engineer, and that whole book is all about ones and zeros and how to document all the data elements from ones and zeros. It's an engineering mindset.

Interesting. I've always said we're just taught how to think. People say, "You know, what do you do as an engineer?" Well, it depends, right? What do you want to do with it? But we're just taught how to think and solve problems and come up with a solution.

One hundred percent. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

So one of the things that I think a lot of our listeners struggle with, and certainly a lot of our clients, is how do you deeply align that customer journey, right? From the very beginning—like, we have a lead, to now it's an opportunity, now it's a closed deal, and holy crap, now it's a customer. What do we do now? And how do we make sure that that customer journey and that buyer's journey is fully aligned and integrated? Talk to me about your approach to building that complete customer-slash-buyer's journey.

Yeah, I'd say I mean, it goes back to really like you look at my title. It's marketing and customer experience. And it's the experience, right? The experience that a customer or prospect or anyone looking at your company has is everything. From how did they feel about you when they saw your name on a sign, to what did they read about you on LinkedIn or whatever is out there? There's that emotional component of you just found out about this company. How do you experience that? But it's also how do you experience your salesperson or your account manager? How easy was it for you to actually place your order and get your order? How do you manage your license, right? And then there's all the things that you expect in a customer journey from onboarding and adoption and training and those more tactical things. But for me it starts from how you show up every day in every interaction with your customer, because that's what they remember.

And no one really wants to talk about feelings, it's a feeling, right? It is a feeling. It is an emotion. It is that buy-in of how your customers feel about you, and it determines do they want to continue buying from you, do they want to renew, right? And do they want to grow with you? Because I want customers who want to grow with us. We do a lot of things that have never been done before. We do some really crazy, hard, innovative things, particularly in the pharmaceutical space. And I want customers who want to work with us, put our heads together, and do the things that have been impossible. And it's super hard, right? Because I think when a lot of times you're right—the customer experience starts from the beginning of the first interaction with an organization, and any step along the way you can actually fail in that execution. Or you, like, if you get some goodwill, you may end up in a bad place at some point in time. But how do you as an organization create an end-to-end—and as you were saying, you want people to build with you. And so defining the ideal customer is so important from the beginning process all the way through the customer experience, because you may have someone that you believe is an ideal customer, but at the end of it they end up churning. People blame customer success a lot. You and I have talked about this in the past. When the reality is it could have started in marketing. It could have been the wrong person getting brought in. Talk to me a little bit about how organizations can really measure properly. Do they have the right ideal customer and buying persona coming through that cycle?

I think if you start with the customer lens and customer value first, and you make all your decisions from that point on based on what's best for your customer, I know that sounds like duh, motherhood and apple pie, but so many times you put together a business case and say, "If we sell 50 of these, we can make X," right? Or we can grow into this market and we can capture this market share. That's all great, and you obviously need that data and you need those analytics. But if you start looking at it—so what's in it for my customer, right? Why would they buy? Why would they buy from you? And why do they buy now? Like, what's in it for them from the very, very start? You start to shape what is the ideal customer profile. You also start to see what is your not ideal customer profile, because we've all been in those cases where you're just spinning your wheels and trying to position something that's not fitting. But we don't want to let go, right? Because we put the business case together, we said we're going to sell X number of these, and it worked out in the spreadsheet. But you don't have the right human persona to that.

So I always like to say, what's in it for the customer? What are those value drivers? And how do we align everything that we're doing to how we deliver that?

How do you find those value drivers? Because I feel like we have that conversation with founders almost daily, right? And I actually—I've said this before—I have a Post-It on my monitor, and I ask customers all the time, "What's the number one problem your product solved for your prospects or customers in 20 seconds or less?" And it's—

So hard because what you get, as you know, is this seven-minute dissertation about everything that we could do and how it's amazing. How do you work with people to condense that down and what really defines that value driver?

I mean, for us, I don't want to say it's easy because it's not. But we get life-saving therapies to patients faster, and there is nothing more exciting than that for me. Right? We, if you read any of the news right now about any of the cell gene therapy and his Astellas Med medicines and the latest great cancer treatments, we have a hand in getting those therapies to patients faster. And that's something we're all aligned on. I mean, if you meet anybody in life sciences or pharmaceuticals or any of the pharmaceutical manufacturers, we're all fired up to literally change patient lives. And that helps, right? It helps.

But I think no matter what business, there's a human purpose piece. If you tap into that, it's really easy to summarize and that message is super crisp and clear. Like you say it and it's like, okay, that totally makes sense to me. And you can say that at any point in time to any human being, and that would resonate with them because I think that's one of the hardest things, as Adam was alluding to—we're talking feature functionality, we're talking about us. But when you're talking about the other person and saving lives, it's super simple. And then your sales team or your marketing team can bite onto that right away.

Yeah, we call ourselves Lifesavers, right? And it can sound a little hokey when you put this team together. I have a cheesy Lifesavers coffee mug and we went all in, right? I go all in on a good theme. But I think you have to, at first, really get people to buy in. And sometimes you get some going, "Okay, that's a little cheesy." But when you can break it down and say, "You know what, we really do do these things. This really is why we exist," you start to get more and more of that buy-in. So I'm happy that we're the routine Lifesavers with my cheesy coffee mugs and all.

Do you send Lifesavers to your customers?

No, but I have bowls of Lifesavers in my office in Austin everywhere I go. So I've found that people prefer the gummy Lifesavers over the hard candy Lifesavers. That is an interesting dynamic I found.

So I started my career in healthcare, right? Everything you're saying truly, truly resonates with me. I started in pharmaceutical very briefly and then went into women's health. And I remember when I was interviewing, one of the things I was told is if you're looking to sell like a cool little widget, like a laser or something, like probably not the right place for you. But if you really want to make a difference in someone's lives, if you really want to contribute to outcomes that could improve the quality of lives of thousands and thousands of women, like this might be a place that you want to work.

So I think it's super cool you're bringing me back to my early days of, like, not that we don't have a purpose, but like we can't compare our purpose with, like, life-saving cancer medications. Like I don't think you can put the two in the same breath. We're not a closed group, so welcome to team Lifesavers. You've just been inducted in.

I love it. Question: when you're building customer success in healthcare, how do you think that's different than building customer success in the B2B sexy tech world that we're all aware of? What are some of the similarities and differences in your mind?

I don't think there are any differences, right? I think customer success is customer success. You have a success plan, you're driving towards an outcome, and you figure out whatever it is that needs to happen to achieve that outcome. And that also sounds pretty hokey and easy, but there's nothing there's nothing pre-planned about customer success. Like you can have some standard practices, you can have some playbooks, you can put together some frameworks, but at the end of the day, you have to be the type of person who says, "I know where we're going, and I'm going to help you get there." Right? And you have to be that customer's champion within the organization to make sure it happens. But there's no paint-by-numbers for customer success in any industry, regardless of how simple it may seem.

My super interesting question: now you're working on the marketing side. How can customer success in general help drive better marketing messaging? Like, how can we close that loop?

I think many go-to-market processes just become very linear in nature. I always argue that it's got to be circular in nature where we're getting on the customer success side and coming back into sales and marketing, but I haven't done it. I haven't seen it done really well. How are you guys doing it?

I mean, your best voice of the customer within your company are your customer success managers, right? Because in a lot of ways, your customer success managers become somewhat your customer therapists. So when something's not going well, they're going to tell you about it. And on the flip side, if you've got a bug fix that's going to be delayed and you've got to tell the customer that "okay, you thought you were getting that this month and it's going to be three months from now," the one on the hook for giving that information is the customer success manager. And so they know their customer very well. They know what's going on within their organization. They know who's coming and who's going and what's landing. And so I get super frustrated by companies that have these robust customer success organizations and they're not feeding that rich data about their customers back into the whole experience, right—ideal customer profile and messaging and what's landing and what's not. But that is a treasure trove of insights for your overall business.

One hundred percent. How often should an ideal customer profile be refined and updated in your mind?

I think you should look at it at least quarterly. It should be a question of like, "Is this landing?" I would say daily, but that's a bit much. But at least quarterly, when you—I mean I'm a big proponent of OKRs, and OKRs are best looked at quarterly. Objectives and key results. So identifying, checking, doing a bit of a pulse check on your ideal customer profile, I think at least quarterly is super important. It's hard though because you get going down a path and you just barely get going in that direction in a quarter, right? Going the wrong way. So sometimes it's hard to stop, but at least having that checkpoint to say, "Okay, is this landing? Do we need to pivot?" is a good question.

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It blows my mind how many people forget doing it quarterly but like don't even do it annually. Like it's, "We have set our ICP and this is our ICP forever," and you wonder why you're not growing. I just don't understand.

Yeah, if you listen to your customers, they will tell you whether it fits or not, right? If you listen, you'll hear it.

Nikki, there's a lot being said about AI right now. How can AI help in the CS world and enable us to even do a better job at our customer success and helping our customers?

I think there's a lot of the activities around customer success—like data mining and looking at NPS surveys—there's a ton of minutia of data that AI is prime for. There are so many platforms, services, solutions, software packages out there that can help a customer success manager be more human. I know people get a little scared, right, that AI is going to take over and they're going to replace some of their customer success managers or some of their functions. But I say that's not true, right? If you can get AI to do some of those more rote tasks or give you some of those analytics so that you can be more human—call your customer up. Like when's the last time you actually called a customer? That never happens, right? It's an email, it's a text, it's something. But to give you more time to be human, I think that's the big impact. Think about those things that you specifically, uniquely can do as a person-to-person contact and do more of that.

I think you just brought up something that's near and dear to my heart, and this isn't just customer success. This is sales, this is marketing, this is product. No one wants to get on the phone. It's always send an email or send a Slack. And what you said is exactly true. Like, I love me some Slack, but stuff gets lost in translation. And it's very different, even in your personal life, right? Like when you get someone on the phone, I will tell you like some of Dale and I's biggest disagreements over the past months have been over text message where we just get on the phone, it's like, "Oh, that's what you were trying to say." The same thing applies with customers. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a disagreement or something, but like when you're trying to deeply understand...

# Transcript

That voice of the customer and deeply understand what's working or what's not. Conversely, pick up the phone. I love it. I love it. Even crazier idea: when's the last time you actually handwrote a note? Right? Handwrite a note to send it to a person.

Oh, that kind of note? Yeah, I love that too. The easy things have now become so rare and novel that there's high impact, right? Get a fifty-cent postcard and write a note and send it. It's so—

I cannot do that for you.

No, it's funny. You're... I used to do that all the time. I actually have notes in my drawer, but to your question, like, when was the last time you did it? I can't even remember. I am going to make it a point by the end of today to send out at least one to someone.

It's a great reminder. Send one to Nikki. Joining the podcast—writing it's not the hard part. Getting stamps, right? Like, when's the last time you bought stamps? Like, how do you actually send the thing? That's the hard part.

Do I have... I have stamps. Yeah, I have two stamps in my drawer. It's funny, actually. I was just having a conversation last night with Dale Dupri who does a lot of outreach via physical mail. And funny kind of conversations because I was talking with about a potential client to do some of that work. And I think the element of surprise and delight is something that we've lost in the go-to-market function. Everything: automate, automate, automate. I think the first company that swings back the other way and actually spends the time—I used to do it all the time when I used to work at Oracle. I used to order all stuff off the company website, and like, you would package stuff up and send it to people. And I actually did one time with... I'm going to forget who it was, but I sent like a big postcard to like an executive at Florida Blue. And they got me a meeting. We got a deal out of it. Stu Hanen. Um, and wrote like—he does all individual letters. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah, it makes a difference. It's the personalized touch. Like, we talk about how in sales you need to personalize your messages and you need to deeply understand your prospect's needs and tell me more and like really get deep, but there's nothing more personal than getting a physical something that you can touch and put your hands on. That to me is the biggest reminder and biggest takeaway of the show.

I think it's something. My work here is done now. My mic dropped. No mic mess-ups. Mic drop. Your work is done.

So we often times talk about how sales and success, or sales and customer success, need to connect, right? You have to have that super good handoff from sales to success, and they talk about the buyer journey and connecting the two. Talk to me a little bit about marketing and success and how those two need to connect. And let's take sales out of it for a moment. Where do marketing and success need to really jive?

Yeah. I mean, that for us, marketing is a bit of a different animal than probably what you're thinking of for marketing. It does include marketing communications and messaging and brand development and demand gen and all of that, but it also includes for us product marketing, portfolio strategy—right, what's in, what's out—and customer success and product engineering. So it's a pretty comprehensive end-to-end structure. But between marketing and customer success, it's that storytelling, right? Customer success is on the hook for delivering the story that marketing sold them, that marketing is telling internally in the organization of here's what we want to develop, here's what's going to be in our portfolio, here's what the future looks like—internally, but also talking to our customers and prospects of here's what's in our portfolio, here's what's coming, here's what that means for you. And customer success has to receive that story and take it and make it real.

So I am thrilled to have customer success as part of the marketing organization as a whole because I think that collaboration—to your point—gets missed so much, right? They get missed. You talk about sales and CS and the handover and how do you do a proper handover, but they have to live up to the stories that we're creating. And they can't do that if you don't bring them into the story. Sales and marketing are easy—we're just promising to deliver value. Then CS actually has to deliver the value.

So I'm going to go a bit of a different direction here, Nikki. We talked about that front end and funnel, but a lot of times what's happening—and it may not be so much at where you work today, but in software, a lot the product doesn't live up to what it's been pumped up, or what we're saying. What's the best way for customer success and product to work together so that we can start bringing product into go-to-market motion?

I mean, it goes back to that voice of the customer—like, building those insights. But I love for my customer success managers to bring in the product people. Like, what a treat for a customer if you say, "You know what, six months in we're going to do a use case review, and we're going to bring in the product manager. And you're going to get a chance to tell them what you like, ask questions. Maybe they'll teach you a few tips and tricks." But give your customer access to your product managers. I know that's not always possible. Sometimes they're super busy or they're out doing things, but give them access to somebody within the product organization. And I think it's also really important for the product organization to talk to a customer, right? They are writing code. They are developing product. It is great for them to know what it is that they're developing.

So for me, from a you-know, team Lifesavers perspective, I include all of our software developers. I want them to know that that line of code that they wrote is contributing in the same way as the people who sell and the people implementing. So driving that collaboration between customer success and product—to me, it is a no-brainer, and it absolutely has to happen.

Yeah. I've run a couple of customer success motions, and that was like the number one thing because the problem that customer success has—they're almost stuck in the middle. Like, sales beats them up because if customers are churning, and then product's beating them up because they're asking for new pieces of product or functionality that the customer is asking for. I used to always say, "Don't listen to me about it. Don't listen to the customer success team. You come on the call. Listen to the customer. Hear what the customer has to say so that you can actually deliver what they're asking for." And when they turn around and say, "I could just listen to the attention call," the answer is no. Because yes, you certainly can, but then you don't get to ask your questions because there are going to be things the customers say that are going to prompt you—because you're going to think differently than I'm going to think as a sales leader, right? The questions you're going to want to ask are very different. Join the calls. Block the time to join the calls.

Yeah. And it's an advantage for your customers to get to meet them.

Yeah, right. I mean, they love their customer success manager, but they might want to meet a product manager or somebody who actually wrote that code at some point.

Couldn't agree more. I... it's funny. So without that product background, like, I don't think like a product manager. I'll be the first to admit that. But I've never thought about having success and product join calls together. And when I think about it, like, what better way to do a QBR? Um, I hate that term. Than than to bring someone from product on. Like, what says better "we care about you and we care about how you feel about the product and the future of it" versus "I'm going to bring someone from product on." To your point, can you do it every time? No. But maybe as a quarterly initiative—you know what, someone from product is going to join every single QBR with our top customers.

You just have to be tricky. You have to be cognizant of the squeaky wheel—like, people just barking. Like, there's got to be a trend happening. And that's up to the customer success team to make sure they're tracking the trends and we can articulate why. Once again, I think the CS team actually has to do a lot of selling internally, just like the sales team. You have to sell internally. Like, this is the product, this is the feature that's doing the best, this is how we see it working, customer XYZ likes it. You know?

So I like the idea of in a business review bringing the product manager in as well. And I grew up in the project space where a QBR was Quantified Business Results. And so when I got into more of a revenue sales business development role, and I was like, "QBRs—that's Quantified Business Results, right?" No, no, Quarterly Business Review.

So I still think Quantified Business Result when I hear QBR. Maybe you can change that connotation for yourself, Adam. Maybe you.

# Transcript

I won't dislike it anymore. I'm 100% in.

What do you say we do some rapid fire before we close this out?

Let's go. My head's all right.

Early bird or night owl?

Early bird. How early?

Six-ish, seven-ish. Depends how functional you want me to be—up quietly by myself with a cup of coffee.

6:37. You and me both. If you, Dale's up way before that.

If you weren't in tech, what other thing would you do? What trade would you do?

Probably nonprofit.

Yeah, yeah. Nikki, where do you start first—marketing or sales?

Marketing. Yeah, drive demand.

What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning?

Outlook. I shouldn't say that, but Outlook. At least your team knows not to email you versus Teams you or Slack you.

Yeah, yeah.

Two more. What is your favorite guilty pleasure snack?

Oh, gosh, that's a hard one. I'm gonna go with Cheetos extra toasty. Extra toasty. I think you and my kiddo would get along great.

I thought you're going to say Life Savers.

Okay, last one. Dream vacation destination?

Oh man, it's gotta be a beach somewhere, but I don't know which one. I'm gonna go with St. John.

Ah, nice. Very nice. I love it. St. John's beautiful.

Nikki, thank you so much for joining the show—for sharing all your thoughts about not just marketing and success, but product engineering and how to cohesively tie them all together. Where can people find you? How can they find you?

Find me on LinkedIn. Nikki W Bishop on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect.

Awesome. Nikki, thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for having me.