Have you grappled with the complexities of customer success programs, especially in a year fraught with industry shifts and layoffs? Join our host Kristen Hayer and our esteemed guest, Parul Bhandari, founder of South Asian Success, as we tackle the evolution of Customer Success and the imperative of retention focus in today's businesses. They discuss the controversial role of CS teams in managing renewals, drawing on our own initial stumbles to highlight the essential preparation and skill-building necessary for triumph in this domain.
Parul and Kristen don't shy away from the contentious debate on revenue stewardship after the first sale, pondering the reconfiguration of compensation structures and how it can challenge CSMs to promote customer value and revenue growth simultaneously. Plus, we dissect the strategic placement of Customer Success within organizational hierarchies and how it reflects on their pivotal role in maintaining revenue streams.
They also share personal accounts of how machine learning and generative AI are revolutionizing the way we analyze data, communicate with customers, and streamline strategic planning. Tune in and arm yourself with the insights to propel your customer success initiatives into the future.
Have you grappled with the complexities of customer success programs, especially in a year fraught with industry shifts and layoffs? Join our host Kristen Hayer and our esteemed guest, Parul Bhandari, founder of South Asian Success, as we tackle the evolution of Customer Success and the imperative of retention focus in today's businesses. They discuss the controversial role of CS teams in managing renewals, drawing on our own initial stumbles to highlight the essential preparation and skill-building necessary for triumph in this domain.
Parul and Kristen don't shy away from the contentious debate on revenue stewardship after the first sale, pondering the reconfiguration of compensation structures and how it can challenge CSMs to promote customer value and revenue growth simultaneously. Plus, we dissect the strategic placement of Customer Success within organizational hierarchies and how it reflects on their pivotal role in maintaining revenue streams.
They also share personal accounts of how machine learning and generative AI are revolutionizing the way we analyze data, communicate with customers, and streamline strategic planning. Tune in and arm yourself with the insights to propel your customer success initiatives into the future.
Welcome to Innovations in Leadership, a Success League Radio production. This is a podcast focused on Customer Success and the leaders who are designing and implementing best practices in our field. This podcast is brought to you by The Success League, a consulting and training firm focused on developing customer success programs that drive revenue. My name is Kristen Hayer and I'm the host of Innovations in Leadership and the founder and CEO of The Success League and Parul Bhandari is the founder of South Asian Success.
Parul:I'm so happy to be back. It's been an interesting year, right? What's to talk about?
Kristen:It has. Before we get started. I know you shared this last time, but we probably have new listeners now, so can you share how you ended up in the field of customer success?
Parul:Yes, absolutely so. I've spent most of my career being customer-facing, started out in ergonomics consulting and it turned out that the company I was working at turned into a SaaS startup, so my first CS role was actually building a CS team for that ergonomics SaaS startup. Since then, I've just enjoyed working with startups, working with mid-size tech companies and helping to build and grow CSMs and CS teams.
Kristen:That's great. I know a lot has changed since last year when we talked. It wasn't a great year for a lot of companies. I think there were a bunch of layoffs across tech and specifically in Customer Success. Last year we tackled this topic because those layoffs were starting. I guess I am curious why do you think this continues to be an important topic now that our field is probably a little smaller, but why do you think it still needs to mature?
Parul:That's a great question. I think we talked about this also in the context of probably our points that we're going to cover here. But I think as a CS organization, we all know this. As a department, we are not that old. We are only probably started officially in the early 2000. I think what that does for us is that gives us that uncertainty and that immaturity, but unfortunately, businesses suffered in 2023.
Parul:It doesn't help to have an immature and, if you want to call us like a toddler at the table amongst other teams that are well established, that have their metrics together, that know what they're going to do and that set out to do it. We saw, to be frank, sales teams fail last year. Here were our goals in January. Ope didn't meet that and they were probably put under tough scrutiny, but they probably had quick game plans to change that. I think in CS, we're all scrambling. We were scrambling or maybe even still are. You hear about this focus on retention, which I know we're going to talk about, but I think about that and people are like this is new, this is new. It's really not new. It doesn't have to be new. I think we have to just recognize that we, as CS teams do too many different things and we need to really probably start to bring a little maturity, like let's get into adolescence by now, because I think it'll help us.
Kristen:Yeah, I think back to when I started The Success League, which now, believe it or not, it's been eight and a half years. I was having this conversation with people eight and a half years ago and it's shocking to me that I'm getting into my next question. I wanted to ask you, but it's shocking to me, that teams are still not owning renewals. I guess I would love your thoughts on the topic of CS teams owning renewals. I feel like this is one area where there's just a massive gap in our field. Tell me what you think about that.
Parul:I mean, owning renewals is the natural progression of things. But I'll be honest and tell you that my first CS team we didn't own renewals. We tried and we stumbled. It wasn't a great delivery, so it got taken back up by a renewals person like a standalone individual. I look back at that experience and I remember going like, oh, maybe renewals isn't right for CS. But what I think we missed is that we didn't train anybody. We just handed them these renewals and we said like go and figure it out. But just like anything in CS where we have to train on how to do a good EBR or train on how to run a playbook or just train on how we engage with our customers, we probably need to take more time and do more training and set our team up for success. But I think it's just the natural progression in the customer's journey.
Parul:By separating out the customer when it comes to the financial discussion, you're doing two things.
Parul:One, you're segmenting out your CSM, you're not giving them the hard skills.
Parul:So then they really don't understand that world and I think that's where a lot of people have been, unfortunately is just like kind of happy, go lucky, I don't need to know this, so I don't worry about it because it's not my responsibility, but number two, at the end of the day, you're that partner of that customer. So who better to help drive what they should be renewing on or what they should be possibly expanding on in the future and actually bridging the gap between what the customer wants and needs and what you can deliver as a company? I think the CSM is the best person. I think we're still going to see a lot of disparity in the size of organizations, like I think there are going to be large organizations that are still going to segment out renewals and have separate retention teams that are going to do their thing, but more and more the CSM, at least, should be a part of that conversation, right, at least part of understanding that, and have metrics tied to their compensation based on it, which I know you're also like a fan of right.
Kristen:Oh, yeah, well, yeah, and I guess how I think of it is if your CS team in my mind, a customer success team's primary objective is to make sure that customers see value from the solution that they bought, they should be getting a return on their investment. If they haven't completely recouped their investment in a year, it should at the very least be on the near-term horizon. And that is the job of a customer success person is to demonstrate in concrete financial terms that return on investment. And if you're doing that and you're good at it, renewal should be just an outcome of that. The objective should not be renew them and get money. The objective should be prove value so that renewal is a no-brainer at the end of a year or the end of three years or whatever, like it should be so simple and I think it should be at the end of a year or two. That is a customer success objective. That is also a whole company objective, because it can't just fall on the CS team, because it's not a sale. It's not like a new sale. It has more inputs than a new sale. I think when you have a team like a renewal team, you're treating it like you would treat a new sale and you're discounting all of the inputs that lead up to it. That would make a customer want to renew. I think that's a mistake. The CS team should be focused on it and it should just be a fairly easy task because of all the work they've put in in the year or two years or three years leading up to that renewal. I totally agree with you. I think it needs to be something that CS teams are accountable for, just like they're accountable for proving that ROI.
Kristen:A lot of leaders are very nervous about this. It leads to my next question too, which is who owns revenue? I facilitated a panel discussion this week where the topic of revenue was really front and center. We had an investor on the panel, we had a CFO on the panel, we had this TCO on the panel, then I'm a CEO. It was interesting because all three of the panelists thought that CS should own at a minimum the renewal revenue, if not all the revenue of the company after that initial sale. But everyone on the panel also agreed that it isn't happening in general practice today. I guess why do you think that is and what can be done about it?
Parul:Well, I think one is like comp plans. It's a lot of work to change your comp plan. I think there's also people don't want CS teams to have a quota because it changes. I don't know, there's probably a bunch of reasons. But I'm really glad to hear your panelists all say that because I think it is not as common to hear that. But maybe it wasn't as common to hear that even last year. I'd say I think there's still confusion based on comp models, based on a CFO actually having to go make a lot of change to comp models. It's more work for them. In the short term what you gain is amazing.
Parul:When it comes to a CS team owning revenue, I had a CS team that slowly crept into the ownership of the expansion revenue. We had the renewals. We just slowly kept going in. What it did was two things that were really great that I think we have to take the fear out for the sales teams, the AEs or the AMs. They're worried about their loss of revenue. I think that a lot of sales teams and sales leadership will actually push back on CS owning expansion because that's like a piece of the pie that they're not going to necessarily get. But number one is, if you're not doing expansion, you can focus on your real job, which is generating new business, and hopefully that new business is pretty big. Number two you aren't distracted away from your core work as a salesperson, but you meanwhile, you have a partner that can really do it and do it well.
Parul:I think if you're going to take on all the revenue after renewal and beyond, there is a bit of training that comes with that, because I've seen two things go wrong. One is a CS team that became fully focused on quotas. They got quotas and then they shifted their focus. They weren't actually able to deliver value any longer. They were always looking for and listening in a conversation for like is there a sale to be made in this? You have to strike that balance of what is the right comp model for them so that they are not fully incentivized by being a seller, that they're incentivized by delivering value.
Parul:Then I feel like the second piece is training. We talked about this and I think you're passionate about this too. It's like we need to not only teach our teams what it means when they add this revenue, but what it means to retain and how we can benefit them in the long term too. But I think the hardest skills that CS teams struggle with. I think people are non-confrontational at times. They don't want to negotiate hard, they want to deliver what's the easiest thing that the customer will say yes to. You have to go back and do negotiations one-on-one. I talked about that somewhere else recently where I did a class in business school and negotiations is like the best class. Everybody learned something from that class because it's something that we take for granted. So I think if we do it, we have to make sure and give the organization assurances that we're training the team and that we're equipping our teams with the right tools to still keep customer value happening.
Kristen:Yeah, I agree. I think for some people that may mean that they may be in CS now and they maybe don't want to be in CS in the future. I think that's okay because I think the field is changing and the field isn't going to change around you, the individual. The field is going to change around the business needs. So there may be people who decide that what they really like best about CS is providing service to customers and so maybe they move into more of like a service team, and then there's going to be people who like the more tactical, support, reactive type roles and they're going to move into support, and I think that's okay. I think the people who stay in CS as a function are going to need to have new and different skill sets and I'm going to skip ahead because I was going to ask you about this, but we're already on this topic, so let's talk about it.
Kristen:So a topic that came through on that panel discussion, as well as the financial piece, was that CSMs don't always have the right skill set for the way the field has changed over the past few years, so skills that seem to be missing that sort of surfaced in our discussion, were things like technical expertise, especially in a heavily tech-focused company or business, or consulting expertise, which was sort of an across-the-board need. What do you see as other skills that you think are needed and how can we build those skills in our current teams? Or do you think we just need to recruit differently, or is it a little bit of both?
Parul:I think it's a little bit about. As I mentioned, I started out in an ergonomics consulting firm. I was just sharing the story with someone like Back then there were no csm's people with prior csm's experience. There were very few ergonomists that were looking to be csm's at that time, right, so we couldn't hire people with the domain expertise. But what we had Was availability of awesome training resources on occupational ergonomics. That was something the company had invested a lot of good effort and time, and when you have good training available, I think you can actually train people to do jobs that are seemingly challenging, right, or, you know, require some sort of domain expertise. I think it was games at university at the time. We use that those like the only thing out there so to train people on customer success, and then we use our own ergonomic tools To train people on the technical stuff. But if you don't have the good onboarding Available on your industry or your platform, you have to find that. So I think that's like, at a minimum, a lot of startups, I think at this, wrong, because they will hire people on and just kind of toss them in and, like customers will speak about using these acronyms. They have no idea what they are. That is scary to me. Right? You want your team to be set up for success, to meet that customer where they want to be met.
Parul:But on the note of like CS training, like, what are some course skills? Like I already pointed out, I think negotiations is a course skill that everyone could learn, right. I think, understanding that consultative approach that you kind of mentioned right, taking on like hey, how do I not just quickly try to solve problems? Right, and how do I actually understand what their? I think you could even do trainings on like how to run a great goals meeting and do a good success plan, because I don't think everybody does that very well either. In the middle, on the answer of like, do you need to hire somebody with the exact skills that I sense that we're changing? Like CS is changing, right, we've now had Enough tenure that you can find people with customer success experience. People want that. That doesn't mean that you can't be trained into it, right? I think there are highly skilled people from other industries that are willing to learn and can be trained into it. So I'm definitely in the middle.
Kristen:Yeah, I think you know I will say this because we have a training program for CS professionals and I'll share in a minute kind of what we are training people on. But I do think people can Be trained on a lot of things maybe not their perspective though, and so you know when I think about this. You know if there's a person out there who's on a CS team and what they really love is, they really love it when customers call them and they can fix their problems, that is great, and that is technical support, and it's okay to love that and it's okay to have that be what you're passionate about. I think sometimes we look down on support teams and I think that is Unfair, because that is a team that is equal to customer success in terms of its importance in a business. However, it is a very different role than a consulting type of a role, which is what customer success is proactive, it's consultative, it needs to be that way, and I think it's really hard for somebody who loves reactive work to sort of shift gears and suddenly become proactive, and so I think if there's a mindset block there, that might prevent somebody from learning, even if you do provide a whole lot of training on the topics. That said, if you have someone with the right proactive mindset, all of these skills can be trained. You can learn technology.
Kristen:Nobody just popped out of their mother's womb knowing all this stuff and or being good at it like salespeople even you know. Everyone thinks, oh, there's such a good salesperson, they're so personable. Those are all learned skills. Salespeople who are really good at selling are not always the most personable ones. They're the ones that actually use the skills that they've learned in sales training, and so those are all skills that can be taught, and I strongly believe that you can teach people how to make sure they're delivering value, how to communicate effectively, how to work in an organization and weave your way through multiple levels of Contacts and create lots of contacts. Those are all skills, and I'm very passionate about this because we teach classes on this stuff. So if anybody's listening, you're like how would I learn that? You can go to our website for starters and take a look at that. But there's classes that we teach on communication. We teach classes on selling skills. We teach classes on how to prove value and how to be that trusted advisor for your customers.
Kristen:We teach classes for leaders on things like how to understand financial reports, how to lead a team of people who are doing selling activities, how to lead a team of other leaders. So if you're moving into a director role, how do you take on other leaders? So there is training out there and shameless plug, go check out our training offerings. But I believe strongly in in people's trainability if they're open to learning. There's a lot of resources out there and there's formal programs like ours. There's also a lot of free resources and blogs. I feel like there are endless, endless podcasts and blog posts and stuff in our field. So there's lots and lots of ways that people can learn. They just have to be willing to go look for those things.
Kristen:So, yeah, ok, I want to jump back to the question that we kind of skipped, so we talked, as we were prepping for this call, about reporting structure. Where do you think that CS should report to? You know, if you're thinking like a senior CS leader, do they report? Should they be a CCO, or should they report to another C level person? Should they report to the CEO? What are your thoughts?
Parul:I know I think last year I said something different, but I think one I'm team CCO all the way right. So like or team CX or whatever you want to call it, but call it something and I think, have the ownership at the top for the customer facing teams, because I firmly believe it's an unfair representation if you don't but many people don't, and I think we're finding people are still using operations. I think I may have said I'm team operations over sales last year. I think I'm changing my story this year because I actually feel like if I had to choose between an existing team, I'd almost want to be on the revenue team, because what you are as a CSM and I think this is what people miss is like I want to be the relationship person, I want to do this.
Parul:No, no, what you are is you are owning all of the sales, all of the revenue that has come so far, and therefore you are the protector of this revenue. And so, therefore, if you're going to be on a team and you have to be on one that exists, I would actually Think I would choose like the revenue team, because I think you can actually learn from your peers, like you can learn from sellers, you can actually gain Practical skillset and you can educate back right. I had a really great relationship with our CRO a couple companies ago and I feel like we would like drive your customer call, you know, and we just be chatting in the car and I learned so much from him. But I feel like he also learned from us because he would ask us questions in that session like what's easier to implement this or that, or you know what's easier to support after? Is it this or that? He would ask these and that dialogue exists, I think, if you can be a part of those Teams. But yeah, my preference is CCO.
Kristen:Yeah, I agree, I think having somebody who's looking at the entire customer experience at a CCO level, where it's going cross-functionally into what is marketing doing, what is product doing, what is customer success doing, support doing, services doing that broad perspective creates just a better customer experience overall. I think companies that can't afford to have another C-level person it's not cheap, I get that. Not every early-stage company could maybe afford a CCO and that's why they're not as prevalent as some of these other roles. I agree with you, though, barrying, that I would rather CCS in a revenue department than an operations department, because I think that's where it really ultimately belongs.
Kristen:If there is no CCO, I think when it goes into an operations department it is automatically categorized as a cost. I think then that puts the team at a higher risk. It makes it harder to recruit for that team because you really have to push a lot harder and have a lot stronger business case to recruit headcount for your team. Sometimes you'll be categorized as a cost center anyway. We were talking about this when we were talking about financial reporting the other night. Sometimes you just are in cost of goods sold. That means that part of what you have to do is constantly be making your operation more efficient. Efficiency in CCS is directly related to headcount, because that is the biggest cost. Usually in a CST you can't hire as much. It means you have to do more with less. If you're in operating expenses, that's just considered what it takes to run the company. That makes it a little easier for you to justify the cost of headcount. But you're also not totally safe per se because you still are an expense.
Kristen:Either way, you have to be very good at demonstrating your value. I guess I would lean toward what you said and put people on the revenue side too. Given that this leads into the question that I had for you on key metrics what do you think has shifted in that area?
Parul:I don't know that we've changed the metrics. I think we are changing what we're focused on a little bit. I think, for example, gross revenue retention In 2023, I think people are just like, wow, we took hits. An NRR may not have even been a value that you're proud to share, because you're just looking at the trenches. I think that focus back on the financial metrics that matter and to understand trends and what is happening. And where is my turn coming from? I know we're going to talk about this later, but I think also, this is where people are investing in machine learning. They're trying to get better pulse scores. I think we saw a lot of people down on NPS and other customer metrics, customer survey metrics. I'm still not down on it because I think not having it is worse than having it. I think it's good to know what your customer is hearing, even if it's a pulse. I think a lot of what's shifted is focus on revenue.
Parul:I don't know if you feel this way, but when I was a CS leader, I was doing this massive metric sheet every month. Nobody was looking at it. I was doing it. Then came the board meeting and I had to present and it was always there and ready because I spent my time doing it, but that was really an important exercise that we should all be doing as CS leaders every month. I was doing it by CSM.
Parul:What's our green-red ratios by CSM? What's our retention ratios? It puts people under pressure as a team, but I think it's really important to understand am I setting my teams up for success? Why am I seeing a lot of churn in this area or this sector or with this particular person? To me, it feels like a lot of the same metrics that I've always been around, but it's a shift in focus and how we maybe think about those metrics and what we're presenting to our teams. This is not really a metric but I think, going back to what you were saying about being an operating expense, I've also noticed a little bit of a shift of SaaS companies wanting to do less services because it's not recurring revenue. I think it's also the type of revenue that people are looking at differently Is it ARR or is it just cash, because sometimes they want to stick to the ARR.
Kristen:I agree with you. I think that it is really important to consider the higher-level metrics as well as the tactical metrics, but it is the job of the CS leaders to be always looking at their metrics, because I think investors and senior leaders in most companies now are looking at things like NRR and cost reduction measures. In order for you, as the leader of the CS organization, to be able to go to your board, present numbers and then have reasons for why things are the way they are, you need to know why things are the way they are. You need to have been doing what you were doing your homework this whole time so that as you lead up to a board meeting or lead up to a senior executive off-site or something like that, you've got the reasons that sit behind the numbers, because otherwise you're just showing numbers, and boards of directors and investors hate surprises If you're suddenly springing on them that your forecast for your renewals is going down. They need to know what's up. If you, as a leader, don't know what's up, that's a problem.
Kristen:I do think there's a lot more scrutiny and intensity and I don't think it's just yes, it's across the board, it's every team. Because of the economy, they're looking at costs, they're looking at reasons behind the people that are on the team and how they're performing. They're looking at what is going on in terms of those key metrics and they're going to ask questions, and so I think being prepared for that is critical. One line in my mind is if you're a leader or a frontline CS person and you got into this field because you thought it was a field where it was a happiness field and your job was going to just be to sit around and make customers happy and there was no accountability beyond that, those days have passed. You need to get very real about that and start getting very clear about your numbers.
Parul:I forgot about this. I had a founder who is really awesome at taking the numbers that we would present and also amplifying. I thought it was really cool. But once you take on things like retention and expansion, you can also show how you've increased the average ARR across your base. You can show metrics that are really actually not metrics that I think have shown up in traditional CS meetings. We would show not only our NRR and our expansion but we'd show hey, overall, we have customers that are renewing and we've had three year renewals with all of them. Our average renewal restriction periods have increased or whatever. There's actually more. You can do with that data. When you own it, you can actually get really creative and I really loved that. I learned that from one of my founders. I just wanted to share that.
Kristen:That's great. I want to shift gears to the last topic we were going to cover today, which was artificial intelligence. I think that we've really just scratched the surface on how AI can benefit CS. Tell me how you're thinking about AI these days and how enthusiastically we should either embrace it or run from it. I hear both. Yeah.
Parul:I'm going to be honest, my personality is a little bit risk-averse, but in actuality, if you aren't pursuing AI in your workplace, you're behind. I'll even say, in your personal life. I've seen so many people applying it in unique ways. I came from companies that all had AI-based products. I think for me, the journey has been faster. But one thing I noted and I did a talk at Customer Success Festival last year and I told people when we launched the first day of product it wasn't even that long ago like 2018, nobody wanted to call it artificial intelligence. Everybody was like call it machine learning, because it's a nicer way to say that and people won't be as scared of it. The fear of not using it, I think, is going to be there for many people. But in sitting and talking with different Customer Success applications, the benefits it can provide are great. I think.
Parul:Having simple things, obviously generative AI, I think you can write all your narratives and things that you want. But I personally love the data analysis side. I think that's where CSMs don't have as much hard skillset often and it can be such a great enabler If you do have access to tools that are actually looking across your customer to help data, maybe giving you analysis, giving you hey, this customer didn't show up for meetings five times, like what's going on and giving you little hints and tricks. I love seeing the data-focused tools that come into play and I love that we're, in CS, able to use it for health scoring and beyond. I'm definitely pro the use of AI to our field because I think it's only going to enable people to get things done a little bit more efficiently.
Parul:As we all know, we're adding more things to your plate. This is the time to if you're going to try to gain efficiencies, I think this can be a help to gain efficiencies. I'm going to add one little note. We had a CS platform a couple of companies ago. They had an AI component built in and it was like you can write a quick summary email or whatever you can say. I don't think anyone used it. I hope now, looking forward, that people are going hey, I'm going to poke around in there. Give it a little try, because it can just maybe make you a little bit more efficient in your day and get you faster to where you need to be spending your time.
Kristen:Yeah, I really like it for communication in its current form, especially for people who are great verbally but maybe not as good in writing. There's a lot of people who just that's not their strength is writing. I think AI is great at coming up with things that are written relatively professionally, especially if you give it the right prompts. I think it can really help people that way. In a little more advanced way, one of the coolest things I've seen and I think I've shared this story on this podcast before, but I'll share it again is helping CSMs think about what the goals for a client should be and what the success plan should look like.
Kristen:I was teaching a class for a client on how to build a success plan. One of the assignments I gave them as homework was to go build a success plan for a client. One of the guys grabbed my format and grabbed a transcript of a recent strategy call he had had with a customer of his and had chat GPT do a mashup of those things and he, with very few edits, came up with a three-goal success plan that was very strategic and very well-written for a client, based on the conversation that he had had, first of all of the whole class and the ones that I looked at, his was the best by far. It was the most strategic and most thorough. It was very tied to the transcript of the conversation that he had had with the client, and so it was coming from what they had told him.
Kristen:It was fantastic. So, of course, the CSM would have to have the conversation in order to provide that input, but they wouldn't have to spend all the time thinking, okay, so from that conversation, what would be a smart goal that would make sense for this client? You could actually plug it in and have it come up with something that was great and then spend your time having a conversation with the client about how to dial it in. That's the kind of thing that I think AI can do to help CS teams be more focused on the strategy and the consulting and less focused on the little details that are time consuming. I think that was one of my favorite things I've seen recently in AI for CS.
Parul:So can we put out a feature request, because I mean everybody's recording their meetings these days. This is a broad feature request. Everybody's recording meetings these days. I think meeting recording tools have been really heavily skewed towards what did a seller need? But even a seller is hearing the first goals that a customer shares is usually in the sales process. So let's just get that completed, get that documented, because I feel like then everyone will be happy to do less administrative work.
Kristen:Yeah, and then the measuring of it becomes more to the customer, to kind of oh okay, I said that this is what I wanted and this is how we're measuring it. I need to be looking at it because most of the time, things that you want to measure as a CSM or that really are meaningful to the client, don't sit on your platform. They sit in the customer's ecosystem somewhere and either you have to get that data or your customer has to get that data for you. I think this could maybe make that a lot easier, so, all right. Last question this is like did I miss anything on my set of questions for all? What is the biggest trend in customer success right now and why?
Parul:It's like a weird trend.
Parul:I think everyone's scrambling to prove their worth, right, I feel like all leaders and teams are scrambling to prove their worth.
Parul:What I feel like is a trend in the industry is to, you know, for us to help our peers get better educated, using formal training programs, otherwise, but also help our companies and founders understand the value, because what they shouldn't do is strip down you know, these CS teams just because they're not necessarily doing certain things, but figure out ways to train them and get them to be a part of that profit machine right that you need them to be.
Parul:So I feel like for CS, it's proving our worth I say this like I don't know how what's the right word, but I want to be cautious too is like CSM's shifting with the revenue focus shouldn't make you scramble for revenue. Get your comp plans done right Like. Everyone should understand what their expectations are. So you're not like, oh, I'm just going to try to like expand and expand and expand and grow, because this is what my comp is going to be based on now, right, like, I think it's really. It should still be like deliver value and ensure that your comp plan matches what your expectations are as a team right.
Kristen:Well, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast today. I'm so glad we looped back around and got to talk about these trends again. I think hopefully we could do it again next year and just keep this conversation going and try to push our field further up. It's a huge risk right now because of the way the economy is, but I think it's also a huge opportunity for leaders to really prove themselves and rise in the field, and so it's exciting to talk about. I hope you feel that way too. Oh yeah.
Parul:I feel like we're in a unique place as compared to last year, where change is actually happening. I think this is where our community is the best, because we can like support each other through that change right. So let's gain some maturity, because I feel like it's time. It will help us be more ingrained in the business and be a long lasting organization. So, yeah, I'm also very excited and thank you for having me again. It was a great conversation.
Kristen:Oh, this is great. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out?
Parul:I think LinkedIn is probably easiest right now for me as I'm working through kind of new contact information and things like that. But yeah, definitely find me on LinkedIn.
Kristen:Okay, sounds good. Well, thank you again, and I also want to thank our producer, Russell Bourne, and our audio experts at AuraFarm Audio. This podcast is a production of Success League Radio. To learn more about The Success League's consulting and training offerings, please visit our website, TheSuccessLeague. io. For more great customer success content. Follow The Success League on LinkedIn or sign up for our newsletter, and you can subscribe to Success League Radio on Apple, Google, Amazon, anywhere else you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.