The One Revenue Team

So I’m a big believer of, like, you do what’s right for the business in how you structure your teams. There is no right or wrong. Like, I am so tired of hearing everybody say, like, No. This person should own it, and this it’s not black or white. This is revenue makers. The podcast by six cents, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Simon, are you ready for today’s episode? I sure am. Why didn’t you tell everyone who we’re talking to? I am happy to do the honors. So today, we’ve got Christie Feltor Russo who’s the chief customer officer at client success. And really an expert, a leader, a Sherpa, if you will, in the world of customer success and revenue strategy. Yeah. I mean, we’re challenging the age old idea that revenue is solely the job of sales and marketing teams. Christie’s got a fresh perspective, it’s all about how every single person in the organization plays a vital role in the moneymaking game. It’s not just about selling stuff. It’s about following a smart plan that leads to long term success. And we can guarantee you that by the end of this episode, you’re gonna see things differently. And really understand how to keep the revenue rolling in quarter after quarter. You wanna dive in? Let’s do it. So, Simon, we’re here. The first episode. It’s happening. It’s happening. But I think we’ve got there’s no other guest that could have been first. This killer killer first guest. Killer. We’re talking about revenue teams. So we’re gonna start with CS, but we’re not just gonna start with CS. We’re gonna start with just an amazing amazing guest. So Christie fell through. So thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. I am so honored that I could be the first guest, which means I’m gonna set the tone here. Right? We’re gonna make this fun. We’re gonna get informative. I wanna make this such that every other guest will have to aspire. To making, like, their conversation as fun and informative as this is gonna be. They’re gonna have to give up. I mean, we might actually lose We might only have one episode. This is it. Listen. One and done. If you nail it, then you don’t need one. Right? Well, just do a director’s cut. It’ll make it longer. We’ll make it, like, four hours long. I think we can do But just for the folks listening, I just wanted to talk a little bit about you and your background. So chief customer officer client success, which is kind of meta because you’re running customer success at a customer success software company. Oh my god. It is is the most meta thing ever. So I’ll do a quick little intro, and then I wanna dig into that for, like, a second because I get a lot of questions and comments about that. So, yes, Christie fell Russo. I’m currently the chief customer officer at client success. We are a customer success management solution, so we help our customers manage from new to renew. That entire post initial sales life cycle. Right? I know it’s catchy. That’s cool. And so I’ve been in customer success for nearly twelve years building scaling and transform customer success teams. That’s kinda like my little shtick. Prior to that, I did ten years in marketing, but nobody’s ever interested in hearing about my marketing background. But I will say Marketing is the most solid foundation for customer success, especially as we think about scale and all the future of where customer success is going. But, yes, so long time in customer success, long time in marketing, first time here. So very excited. Kind of make a comment on the client success meta customer success for customer success. Everyone thinks that that must be the most rewarding and fun job. Oh my gosh. You get to just talk about customer success all day I literally live my life under a microscope. Everyone watches every single thing we do for better and for worse. And they just all have such high expectations. They assume that we will do customer success the way they do it for their customers. So if they’re not getting the same experience they would deliver, they feel like I’m failing them. And I’m like, well, customer success is not a one size fits all. It’s not even a one size fits most. Which means our experience that we’re trying to design is gonna look different because of our size, our market, our customers, our product. Right? Like, cut me a break. Sounds really tough. About being in marketing is six cents, Simon. I think you could probably I know. So as somebody runs marketing for six cents, we have to be the best customer. We have to be the best user of our platform, we have to be pushing folks and almost guiding the industry on all of the possibilities. And so I empathize, but I also think it’s a great opportunity. It’s a huge opportunity. And I always say, like, listen, I have to highlight some of the tough things about it because I think people thinks it’s just all glamorous, but the opportunities that I do have are tremendous. And the work that I do get to do with a lot of our customers, it really is a huge privilege, and that’s not something that I look at lightly. Our customers really do rely on us and kind of guiding them to their North Stars and really helping them design their customer success infrastructure, obviously operationalizing around technology, but I get to have all those fun conversations too. So There is some sunshine from time to time. Carol Dimoglib. Alright. Well, so the theme of our earlier theme of our entire series is about one team. Right? One revenue team, which, I mean, everyone that’s a cliche term, maybe. I I don’t know. I think it’s powerful, but just to jump into, like, some q and a here, like, what does one revenue team mean to you? And how does that work into your life every day at at client success? So I don’t know that I think about it as like one team because then it’s like, you know, I always say if nobody owns it, then nobody owns it. Right? So it’s like, everyone’s gotta be accountable for things and different people that do different work. It’s less focused on, like, the one team and more as, like, the one metric. Right. And having some kind of north star that we’re all collectively working towards, but everyone is accountable for. And I feel like that is really the the key part of this is accountability. And I feel like this is where things come into play. Right? Funny things like quota and targets and who owns this and who owns that? That’s what really drives accountability and accountability is what’s gonna help So I think if there is one one metric, there can be one team. Yeah. So just on that for a second, one team with different, you know, levels of accountability. To me, that goes back to having really clear rules of engagement. Yep. Having really clear metrics and plan, almost for each of those individual teams. So can you talk a little bit about how you make sure that that clarity is there and there aren’t There is a confusion on who steps in where and where that hand off might be. So I wish that there was just a simplified way for me to respond to that because every company, every team looks different. Every product is different. Right? Now if I’m using client success, we are like the simplest form of clear rules of accountability and ownership because we don’t sell an enterprise solution. I don’t sell something that has an Adobe Oracle. I’m not, like, there’s not thirty different products in my suite where things get really hairy. For us, it’s, you know, my team generally own a solution. We sell more licenses. We manage the renewal. We manage the growth. It’s pretty simple. So rules of engagement there are easy in the sense that we have a new logos team. That is responsible for net new revenue that is coming from new logos. And then we have our organization and specific people who are responsible for retention. So renewal specifically as well as upsell and expansion. Like I said, for us, it’s pretty basic in the sense that we’re selling more licenses, and we have, like, maybe a couple, like, product add ons. But when you get into organizations where there are deep levels of complexity, that changes, and I wanna say that it’s easy to define things, but it’s not. There’s always going to be these kinda outlier situations. So I try to define for the eighty percent of, like, okay. How can we get close enough to addressing all of the use cases there? And I’ll say this is where it’s like you have to have total ownership. And when I think about total ownership, it’s like everyone has to own something and be clear about what that is. Now, obviously, there’s going to be these situations that will require us to all bend and move and do what’s right hopefully for the business and the customer. I think the rigidness of certain processes doesn’t serve all well, but I think that ton of total ownership will help address that. And I think if you can nail that who owns what, defining what roles and responsibilities, engagements, who to go to for what sequencing and all that starts to kinda take shape in a in a better way. Yeah. Yeah. So thinking about, like and again, this is probably the I don’t wanna say the easiest thing for you to do, but you live sitting in your role, like, you’re about the customer. Right? And I would imagine you start talking about sales quotas, not imagine. I know you start talking about sales quotas and numbers and so forth, and people start to forget about the customer a little bit. And they’re like, oh, it’s numbers. So, like, in your world, like, how do you keep that? Keep the customer at the core with all this kind of other noise going on and make sure focusing on their needs and you’re focusing on them and not just how you’re doing business or how you’re hitting your number. So I was then actually in a really uncomfortable panel recently where I was basically attacked for how I felt about certain things. Oh, no. And listen, they brought the, you know, it’s I think you will try to make me uncomfortable to see if I, like, I’ll fall under pressure. And I did. I completely fell apart emotionally because I was like, well, maybe you’re right. But basically, the whole concept, the stamps that they took is that everyone should have a quota. Everyone in the company should have a quota. Right. Now when I think of quota, I’m thinking revenue. Right? And my head goes to dollars right away. So I’m like, how can everyone have a quota? And if you’re a customer success professional or customer professional, whatever your title is, How can you do the right thing if you’re incentivized to do things that might feel inorganic for the customer? Right? Like, pushing somebody to do something they’re not ready to do because you have to hit a target to me does not feel like the right thing. But when I was able to wrap my head around and going back to, like, ownership and accountability, quotas don’t have to be tied to revenue. You could have a quota tied to metrics that are the leading indicators tied to revenue. And so if you do this, this will come. Right? So if I have my team focus on a quota around a leading indicator, could be metrics, any KPIs, whatever I feel like is appropriate there, set the quota there, create targets on the lagging indicators, like retention or growth or whatever. If this, then that. So I think it’s how we think about breaking those things down. But I don’t like I don’t like revenue quotas for customer facing roles. Yeah. I thought I wanna go back to this whole, like, uncomfortable panel where it sounds like they were Oh my god. It was the worst. Nice S panel or something. I didn’t know. Didn’t I I honestly, like, they did not prep me. I thought it was going to be, like, a q and a. And, like, it was gonna be cute and fun. I was like, yay. And then it wasn’t, and it felt like an attack. I was under siege. I was not prepared. Well, so There’s no attacks here today. I mean, I mean, we can maybe I’m prepared now. Now I have a stance. Don’t attack me, please. Be nice. Okay. So so jumping into it. So you talked about Right? And I agree metrics can be revenue based or they can be leading indicators. And that’s a great way to align the teams around a common goal or north star. What other strategies or approaches have you found that are just effective in getting those teams aligned around a north star? The metrics are one. Anything else you do? I think it’s the culture of how you run the organization, to be honest with you. But, like, bringing teams together, one tactical approach that I’ve actually really loved. And again, it will work in some companies, but not all. In another organization where I led, we actually built out pods, and that the pods were a really great infrastructure that allowed us to have designated roles and responsibilities in each of the customers that lived within that pod. Right? Like, so all the customers that we supported It was very clear who did what in that relationship. But why this worked is because there was such strong collaboration and alignment between those folks that were working together they had one unified outcome. It was to make that customer successful and make the business successful. And so how we got there If the customer was successful, the business would be successful. So the business was the ultimate North Star because we wouldn’t be able to get there if we didn’t do all the things to support it. So Having a very clear business metric, we then worked backwards and said, here’s all the things that will enable us to get there. And here’s who’s going to do what and how we’re gonna get there. Having that really clear defined plan that said, if ultimately the customer gets everything that they need. They have a great experience. They’re reaching all their goals. We do all the things to get there. The business goal can be the north star and it’s not inorganic because that is to say we’ve did everything right for the customer. Yep. But that infrastructure really helped support that level of collaboration and align towards those metrics. Yeah. And I’m hearing one other thing, which is so key is, you know, to have the plan and the rules of engagement and the sure, but then the communication and enablement of that across the org so that there is no ambiguity so that there is, you know, You almost have to reinforce it again and again to just check-in and make sure that everyone is still, again, rowing in the same direction. Listen Pack, you just talked about, like, the enablement there. The big challenge that I see here, especially as we think about customer facing teams, managing commercials. Right? I don’t care if it’s upsells expansion, cross sells call, whatever you want, rent renewals. They’re not properly enabled to do this. Look at the big wave and the influx of professionals that are breaking into customer success. You know what the big wave has been lately? Teachers. Wow. I mean, I don’t know any teachers who have managed revenue. In their role, they’re not charging students every day. They should, probably. Charge parents. But so you got these people who don’t have any experience managing revenue. They don’t have experience necessarily, like, direct experience. Right? They have transferable skills, but, like, direct experience, managing revenue, managing business conversations negotiating. But yet, we take these people and we say, here, you’re gonna own this bag. You have to own this money. This is your target. But we don’t teach them how to do it. We don’t enable them. We’re not coaching them. We have these expectations that just because they’re engaging with the customer, they should be able to do these things. And so I do think that a big part of it does come down to that enablement too. If you want your teams to do certain things, you have to teach them how to do them. So you’re talking about, you know, teaching them and so forth. And again, in a larger organization, should they even be doing it? Should you be completely stripping away? From CS, have them focusing pure on that. You have an account management team that does all the financials, which I’ve worked at orgs that have done that and have done it to great success or to just total failure. And, again, I I think it’s every company different. Obviously, you’re not you’re not set up that way now, but, like, what’s your view on that? Is that something that does work or can work depending on the org? Or So I’m a big believer of, like, you do what’s right for the business in how you structure your teams. There is no right or wrong. Like, I am so tired of hearing everybody say, like, No. This person should own it. And this it’s not black or white. And to be very honest with you, I am in the process right now. I was actually just in a meeting right before we got on to your the to record. I’m breaking out my team into specialty roles. I no longer will have a generalist. My CSMs, guess what? They are no longer owning retention. They’re not going to own upsells. They’re not gonna own any expansions. I’m moving it away because I need them to focus on different things. I need specialty roles in order to support our scale. We cannot scale by saying one person does everything and expect that to work. My model is breaking every single day. We bring on more customers I can’t support it because we’re also not in a place right now. Like, many companies right now, we’re struggling in this economy. I can’t hire more people. And the only way that model works is by hiring more people. So I don’t believe that there is a one size fits all or one size fits most customer success model where any one person should do this. I’m breaking it out, and I’ve done it where I’ve had teams where CS owned all of it. I’ve had teams where I’ve had account managers who owned renewals. I’ve had and the CSMs owned expansions and upsells. I’ve had AE has come in and own cross sells. So where you’re selling into a new business unit in a large organization where there’s a new buyer, a new use case, new budget. Like, I’ve seen it done a million different ways. There is no right way to do it. There’s no one way to do it. There is a right way. There there is not one way. So I think it really does just come down to, you know, it depends. What does your business need? I love that and I agree because, you know, again, not the same thing won’t work necessarily for everyone, but you’re in an interesting position. Right? You spoke about having something in place and now adjusting it because you need to scale. So could we get specific on what you are gonna have the CSMs own moving forward in your new model and who will own the rest because I think it would be really valuable for listeners to even just hear. Yeah. So I’m breaking apart the whole org. So again, historically, my team, they managed new to renew. So, again, keeping them with our little slogan here at client success, They did everything from the hand off from sales. They managed onboarding. They did the partnership kickoff. We did the transition into that long term and, you know, period of time that happened in that customer journey. Managed through renewals, growth, anything. They did it all. So what I’ve decided to do is double down to four areas where I spent a lot time during the past couple months is analyzing all of our historical data. Why do customers stay? Why do they churn? What do they need? I’ve gone through it all. Right? Customers who have agreed it now. Oh, man. Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s hard to it’s hard to make a decision and justify and get other executives paid attention if you’re not using data. So you’re not comfortable data and you’re listening to this, go get your data chops all lined up. Yeah. Go get go go learn. So dug through everything. And what I realized is that, like, listen, our customers, even if we onboard them well, things fall off. This is because of a multitude of reasons. Right? There’s not enough buy in organization like the person who purchased doesn’t know how to drive change management. That’s actually probably the bigger thing. Ongoing prioritization of these things shifts change their use cases change, executive stakeholders change. Right? There’s a multitude of things that happen throughout the life cycle. So what I wanted to do is actually spend more time upfront we’re building out a specialty role for onboarding enablement. So one of the things that’s interesting is when I did my SWAT, I thought about kind of like what our competitive landscape looks like. Nobody in our space really has nailed onboarding. To the extent where I am trying to take it, where it’s an experience. It is not only that. It is going to be the fastest, most accelerated, most thorough, personalized experience that we could provide for our customers. That’s not something anybody else in our space is really focused on to the extent that we are about to take it. So we’re going to have resources allocated to onboarding with a ton of KPIs and metrics that are tied to that that are looking at things like integrations, adoption, usage, change management, things, sentiment from customers, like, sentiment from executive buyers. Right? And then they don’t get to stop their data and KPIs once onboarding is over. We actually track that over a period of time because the work that they did up here, again, lagging indicators I’m gonna see that trickle down. If they were properly onboarded, we should see things move up. If they weren’t, things will likely move down. So only looking at it in a vacuum isn’t the best way to look at that. So onboarding is one thing that we’re breaking out onboarding enablement. The other thing that we’re doing is we are specializing CSMs across different segments. We’ve had kind of each CSM manage a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. It’s really hard to keep switching hats. With some customers, you need to be so strategic with other customers you’re triaging, with some customers you’re just trying to get them engaged. It is very difficult. So we’ve resegmented the book. We will have customer success leaders or managers who are gonna be over each specific segment and only manage within that segment. We have designed a new scaled and community person. This person will manage the lower tranche of customers that we have who probably just need a different level of support. And, honestly, if we are just mapping towards economics. Right? Like, what we can actually provide for them. They’ll get a lot, but it will be through scaled mechanisms and channels. This person will also manage our community. So we haven’t really had anybody focused on that. And I will tell you if you’re thinking about community, you need to have somebody accountable for for that. It doesn’t just succeed on the line. And then we’ve got the renewal specialist. So for the CSMs, their real focus there is that ongoing adoption enablement engagement relationship development Ultimately, their goal is to make sure that all of our customers become advocates. And so there’s gonna be a lot more scrutiny around that. When we think about advocacy, it’s not just things oh, how many referenceable customers do you have? We wanna see things, like, that are tangible and tied back to revenue. Like, how many of these customers actually translated to customer referrals that generated new pipeline and did the pipeline close. Of these customers, how many of them are second order revenue? Did they leave, go to another organization, come back, rebuy again? So if you’re a CSM and your customer leaves or your champion leaves, that’s so I don’t say that’s okay. But if they come back, you likely had a big part of influencing that. Right? They had a great experience. They got what they needed from the partnership and the product. So much so that they’re coming back. So We’re dialing in different metrics for our CS team. You will never hear me talk about things like NPS or things like that. NPS to me is a company metric and It’s a data point. It is not something that people should be compensated against or measured against because there’s so much that goes into it. But it’s really gonna be focusing on the business impact that they’re gonna be able to have. Retention will be a lagging indicator for them. No. You said you said we talk about data. Right? So let’s and then Simon wants to ask this question if I’m gonna ask. So sorry. Go for it, Adam. So looking at your dashboard or looking at what you’re constantly looking at, I have a dashboard. I’m as a dashboard. I click refresh on human amounts of time to the point where Salesforce gives me an error, there’s somebody sitting at their data center going, this guy is whacked in the screen. I might need to know what’s on your dashboard so much so that you’re hitting fresh. It’s a great day. Yeah. And you do have a really good day. I mean, we got the master of data here, but, like, does it change every five minutes? No. But it it actually changes throughout the day. But anyway, but my mental problems aside. Like, what is your one view or one pane of glass, or maybe it’s not one pane of that, like, what are you looking at on a more often, like, more often base more often basis more regular basis that kind of tracks how the business is doing on a short term, medium term, long term type of thing. If I’m thinking I’ve got revenue metrics, which I think are different than some of, like, my team’s KPIs. And so I do have to break those out, I think, just to, like Definitely. Make sense of my my brain how it works. So from a revenue standpoint, things that I’m paying close attention to really is our forecast. I would say that’s probably the biggest thing and how that changes because I know that we’ve we’ve all had this situation where everyone’s like, yeah, yeah, your forecast looks strong, pipeline is strong. We’re great. We’re gonna crush it this quarter, and then you get to the end of the quarter. You’re like, so what happened? We’re just crunched. Right? Like, every everything everything slipped. It pushed. It’s down. I think I pay very, very close attention to our forecasting, and I look at that four to six months out. And so my team manages renewals. We manage renewals formally with customers on a a hundred and twenty days out. So it’s four months before their renewal, but we actually start managing the forecasting and risk management and all that six months. So we’ve got six months of data. It starts at that six month mark. So you can imagine I have a lot of data that I can actually start paying attention to from a revenue standpoint. So we’re looking at that. Now I don’t look at that in a silo. All of those forecasted metrics, while there are numbers and then percentages and probabilities there, I also have that in line with all of our customer health and adoption and usage and engagement metrics because no one metric is enough Yeah. So I always have, like, this is the primary metric I’m looking at in any given dashboard, but then I have to have the supporting metric that allows me to dig in deeper to say, like, okay. Does this feel accurate? Or can I poke holes in this? Or does this look like it might slip? So forecasting data, that is big for us and, like, probabilities and all things tied to what will end up being revenue growth, so n r r g r r logo retention, all of those things. And, obviously, we’ll break that down. So I’m looking at it across CSMs, across segments, across regions, any which way I can slice and dice that data, it is cut up a billion different ways, probabilities, pipeline management, like, a you got it industry. It’s all there. On the customer side, when we’re looking at data there, it starts with all of our onboarding metrics. So for onboarding, and I’m not gonna give you guys my total dashboards here. But, things that we look like, you know what? That would be an entire new owed. Okay. So on the onboarding stuff, things that we’re paying attention to is engagement, because, obviously, we need our customers to be highly engaged, but not just Are they showing up? We also look for roles of engagement. For us, we need admins who are gonna be engaged. We also need the leaders engaged. The leader is who drives this strategy. For customer success, you can’t pass that off to somebody. Right? This isn’t about just creating playbooks and creating a health score. This system isn’t your strategy. It is what powers your strategy. You need to be involved in the design of that. So we look at engagement metrics there for onboarding. We do track towards a timeline. So we do very much wanna make sure that we’re keeping pace on onboarding. It is very easy for our projects and initiatives to become deprioritized. So making sure that we’re keeping on our timeline there, also look at tracking towards our first results. Now it’s not a first win. It is the first thing that would say we are on track to see a win. If my customer is telling me, I need to understand where there is risk in my book. That is a very common ask that our customers will have coming into the partnership. Great. There’s a multitude of ways that we can do that, but one thing that we will configure and look at is creating their health score with them with data inputs that they’re configuring. Once we get that set up, I haven’t solved their risk problems. I haven’t solved their churn problems, but I now have a metric that they can use so we can get there. So to me, that is a first result. So we try to track one, did we get a first result for them that directly correlates back to their goals, which we track also maniacally? And did we get validation for them that this that they have confirmed that this is a early result to what they want to see. So we pay a lot of attention to that integrations is big for us. The more integrated our systems are into their ecosystem, the stickier we are. So where are we plugged in and what are we plugged in to and is data either coming in or going out. Now data going out is cool. That’s fine. That probably means we’re gonna get broader reach, but data coming in means that the richness and the value for our technology is gonna be greater. So we pay attention to what’s being pushed, what’s being pulled, And then what systems is being pushed and pulled from? Because all of those metrics actually mean a lot of different things to us. It’s not generic enough to say, oh, we’re integrated. Right? That doesn’t help me anything yet. So onboarding, again, not gonna unpack this too too much. We look at engagement, ongoing engagement for customers usage and adoption, is huge for us. It’s not are you logging in? I don’t care if you log in. I don’t care if you log in once a month. Are you using the platform in a way that align with what you’ve told us your goals are. We have goal tracking and client success. So we also are tracking that. How are we pacing towards their goals, their ability to realize value from the partnership, other things that I’m paying attention to. Pulse. We have a product called Pulse in our software, which is basically our sentiment on the partnership. Right. So we have a health score, which is, I always say, like, this is how your customers are behaving. And then we have the pulse which is, like, the state of the business. Like, if a customer’s data and their health score could be, like, bright green. Right? This customer is doing great. They’re getting all the value. We’re super engaged. All the things. They just got acquired. Guess what? Their pulse is gonna be like bright orange for us. It’s like, high risk, high risk. Because we know that if a customer in our book gets acquired, likelihood they’re acquired, they’re not doing the acquiring, and likely that there’s gonna be tool consolidation. That’s, like, almost an inevitable outcome for us. So We pay attention to the pulse. Those are a lot of different metrics that we’re looking at. Again, I have a laundry list of things that I’m paying attention to. Adam, kinda like you. I got like a wealth data. But this is the benefit of actually working for a customer success platform is that I have all of my customer success data readily available. The time. In your customer success platform. In my platform that I use all day. So it’s because, like, you guys, I have to be what we say is customer one, Meaning, my team is the first customer. Right? We use our platform all day every day. I don’t even use the CRM. Like, we don’t use Salesforce or HubSpot or anything that we manage all of our renewal through our platform. Yeah. That’s great. I love that you have such a breadth of metrics. You’re looking at qualitative, quantitative. A little bit of a departure, but Are you leveraging customer marketing programs to help the CSMs along that journey? That looks like There’s a big sign there. I know because I love customer marketing. In fact, like, I’ve always owned customer marketing. We are not place right now where we are large enough that customer marketing sadly is is would be deemed a luxury for us. So I don’t have designated resources for that. I think part of what we’re thinking with our scaled programs and some of the new reprioritization of our team will allow us to focus on those in small pockets But no, sadly, my answer is no. We’re not. We’re not doing a good job today. If you had one powerball on Wednesday and had money for customer well, I would imagine if you wanna start I was gonna say if I won the powerball and then coming back to work. Well, you’d be like, I’m not coming back to work, but here’s some money for customer marketing. What would you do? What what how would you think about it? Okay. If I get a big chunk of money right now, do I have to use it in my org? No. I mean, I you don’t also don’t have to use the entire one point seven billion. I mean, feel free to just feel bad. You’re right. I’m gonna, like, go shopping a little bit. I’m really big into shoes and bags. Choose. Yeah. Shoes bags jewelry. Because it doesn’t matter how much you weigh or what your body is doing that day or month, those things will always fit. Choose bags jewelry. Anyway, I’m not gonna start about shoes. My I have a fourteen double wide shoe. I can’t get anything to work with. You can’t even buy shoes. You have them custom I have to order them from, like, weird place. And they look like I have the football. It sounds it sounds like they probably look weird too. It’s it’s an ongoing. Okay. Adam, in this little box in this podcast, looks like a little Adam is so tall. Oh, I got when he said his shoe size, A hundred percent. I guess that though, what nobody was nobody who is my husband’s type. My husband’s five eight. Nobody who’s five eight is walking around with a fourteen and a half foot. So how tall are you, Adam? It’s six three. I mean, it’s is that I don’t I I I had That’s not freakishly tall. No. But if I had work You’re tall. The company yeah. For months. And, like, we all kinda finally met. We had our for customer commerce last year, hadn’t met anyone in person. I walk into, like, what? That’s so I’m, like, I mean, yeah. Like, I’m tall. I mean, I do have a lot of people in my company too. It is it listen. I think once you cross over six foot, you’re, like, in a different you’re in different echelon of tall. Yeah. It’s Also, when you just see someone in a little box for six months, like, you really don’t know what to expect. And so we weren’t expecting that, Adam. You expect the unexpected. That’s all I can say. Yes. Okay. Alright. Well, I had to spend all this money you guys just gave me. Can I be honest? So if I’m at client success, I’m hitting powerball, actually gonna hire us a bunch of, like, engineers, product managers, product designers, like, I mean, just I’m go all my money. I’m going all in on product. And it’s just because the space that we’re in is changing so rapidly, especially with AI, l m, like, everything right now, just to accelerate the pace of innovation, for my customers. I feel like that is an investment for my customers. Also, if I could have a product that was easier, stickier, better, probably need less of us. Then we go into, like, that could it be a PLC thing. Anyway, so product. Product is getting all my money. I’m sure my SVP product would be thrilled to hear me say that. He left you right now. I know. Yeah. I think we love it. We’ll just share that one snippet on LinkedIn over and over again. Product. Yes. Product gets all the money. Product gets all the money. Product There you go. There you go. Alright. So you love your product team. How do you maintain alignment with the CMO and the CRO. Like, I think of going into a board meeting, right, at the end of each quarter. How do you make sure that you’re looking at all the metrics, but frankly, they’re the same metrics and the right metrics, and you guys are all aligned and telling the same story. How do we get there? How do you get their leaders? I mean, we should have have a strong relationship. As leaders, the company, like, we are operating to company metrics, not our own individual metrics. I think once once you’re in the we it’s no longer about what is your team’s metrics. It’s are we contributing to these greater metrics? And I’ll tell you, like, the best way that I’ve driven alignment is always talking to my counterparts about how my team is helping them achieve their contribution to those bigger goals. Right? Like, if we’re saying Revenue is the goal? Well, I’m not talking to product and saying like, listen, product you have to innovate and you have to design. We need new products so we can sell it. But here’s how I can help you do that better and faster, giving them access to our customers. Again, product feedback product roadmaps helping them ex like, organize and prioritize things that are gonna have direct impact on revenue. I think product teams who are working in a vacuum where they’re not really in touch what their customers need or want, they’re not gonna design things that are gonna sell things that will be sticky that will be adopted. Right? And so you have all this, like, vaporware that’s existing. So for me, it’s a lot of, like, how do I speak to the things that are going to support each of them for my sales team? Great. Listen. We have actually curated ten new case studies this month that we can help put on the website. We’re happy all these customers. They’ve actually volunteered to do video testimonials, and they’ve all opted in to be references. So if you’ve got any customers that need it, these top ten, not only do we have their stories, but we have these. Let’s make sure that you your top twenty customers in your pipeline right now, let’s get them on calls with these ten folks. Right? Like, Let’s map them together. I feel like the best thing I can do is always work to make sure that the work that I’m doing helps support all of their priorities because ultimately if we do that and we operate that way, we’re gonna hit those north star metrics. And they do the same for us. Right? Like, my sales team, I love when they tell me, listen. We obviously have a very clear ICP. In an ideal world, we would only sell to our ICP. But guess what? That doesn’t always happen. But they do a great job of one educating the well in advance of a deal closing if something is not an ICP, what that customer needs to be successful, how we can work together to do that. They do a great job on sales, handoffs to customer success, facilitating partnership building us up, setting proper expectations. Those all sound like small things, but, like, those have real big impact on my team’s ability to be successful. With a customer. So I think that’s been the real strength in how I have been able to work in organizations where we’ve been able to be successful and hit metrics and drive the business forward is that strong alignment, but then also the mutual benefit of all the work that we’re doing. Nobody is responsible for just their work or their metric, we all have to partner together, but have specific KPIs or metrics or activities that you’re all very clear on of, like, what is that mutual benefit? That actually sounds like one team. Okay. Going back to your one team We totally just I we totally tricked you. We tricked you into sitting there. Turn it. So we’re gonna so again, you’re the first. So this is gonna be an attempt at what we’re gonna call a repeatable or the section of this, we’re gonna always ask the same question to kinda finish things off. Oh, interesting. So it’s gonna be fun or it’s gonna be not fun or it’s gonna be stupid. I think it’s gonna be Well, ask three questions, edit out the ones you don’t like, and then keep the one that you can do. You only got one. Yeah. I think it’s it’s pretty basic. It’s pretty We believe strongly in our one quest. We do. We’re like we’ve really so I like it. Conviction. What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever been asked to do? Either positively or negative states. Something like, well, that was the most the stupidest thing I’ve ever had to do, or go stop, or that is the genius idea that’s ridiculous. And did it work? Okay. So this is actually a negative one. I was working for a company that was sun setting a product. And we did not have strong internal communication and alignment around the sun setting of this product. And so product had been doing all these things behind the scenes, and nobody had been really communicating things with the customer organization, which I was heading up, only for me to go into our leadership meeting one day, and then them to tell me You have to let all of your customers know that this product will no longer be available effective on Monday. This was a Wednesday. The following Monday, this product would no longer be available. If they want to keep it, it is going to be an extra cost. And we did not have a plan if we shut it off. I’m like, where’s the data go? What happens? What are they using? Do we have a new pro There was zero plan. And so they asked to me was, can you communicate to your customers that effectively in, what, two, three business, two businesses, they were going to lose access to a product that they were all using, or they could pay more for an old product. And we weren’t going to be enhancing it. So it was gonna live there until it dies. That was that was what I was asked to do. A question. When the like you said, you just set the standard for ridiculous. I think I think so. Well, I mean, there wasn’t a standard. So now I’m the standard. Right? Well, I mean, we we don’t wanna walk away and be like Christie equals standard for ridiculous, but The question, you set the standard for the answer. So now now that that question works. It worked. It’s a good question. I think it worked. So what happened, by the way? Did you do it? We did not do it because I will not be bullied into doing ridiculous things. And honestly, like, it it’s cool. If they would have told me that I that’s when I would have handed in my resignation. Because, like, at that point, it’s like, what are we doing here? Right? Like, I don’t wanna be a part of an organization that is so disconnected from our customers. And, like, I’m leading the customer function. Right? Like, that just kinda means, like, yeah, I I have no support. So I asked a billion question because that’s my way of being passive aggressive is asking questions. Do you wanna I let I let I let I lead with passive aggressive And then I was like, listen, here’s the reality. I’m not doing this. And here’s why. Right? We didn’t have good answers to any of these things. My team is not set up to succeed. We need an extended timeline here. So I’m glad to hear that you guys from a product standpoint have a lot of things in the back end figured out. Clearly, we all need to figure things out on the front end. I need another thirty before. We can even come back to say, this is the date. And with a lot of resistance, and I’m sure that I was no one’s favorite person, This project did get dragged out for another sixty days because it took us thirty days to even start to figure things out. And then I did require I’m like, we need thirty days to give customers a heads up that this will be happening. You can’t tell people they have a day. So sixty days later, we did the thing. We did it better it was not seamless. It was still icky, but it was less icky than it would have been if I was a yes gal, and I just did what I was told. Wow. Love it. Well, that was I mean, again, you set the ridiculous standard. I think we’re gonna We could talk all day. I mean, I I’ve I’ve learned I’ve learned more than I think I’ve learned about CS in one session. So thank you. Oh, well, that’s great. Super. Super super interesting. I think a really great start for us to talk about just the revenue teams as a whole. Simon anything you wanna Thanks for the time. It was great. I As somebody who runs marketing but also runs analytics, I love how data driven your org is. I love how you are using the data to align things. And, frankly, you’re just awesome. So thanks for coming on our podcast. Wow. What a way to end my Friday? You guys are so good for my soul. This was great. Also, just super flattered and humbled to be, it asked to be the first guest. And I can’t wait to hear how this turns out, but then also to follow your journey. Thank you. Really appreciate it. You’ve been listening to revenue makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue. We might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite pod step.