Success League Radio
Success League Radio
From Individual Contributor to Strategic Leader: Julie Fox's Journey
Discover the future of Customer Success with Julie Fox, Global Director of Customer Success at Cin7, as she shares her journey into her transformative new role. Julie is driving her team towards a proactive, predictive model while also enhancing upsell and cross-sell strategies. Learn how Julie is navigating the dynamic environment of Cin7, an inventory management solution, and addressing the unique challenges and rewards of her role.
Julie highlights the significance of community networking, and how leveraging personal and professional connections can provide substantial support during a job search. Engaging in thorough research and actively participating in dialogues are key strategies she emphasizes for meaningful, two-sided engagement in job searches, especially for leadership roles.
Listen as host Kristen Hayer discusses with Julie transitioning from an individual contributor to a senior leader, the importance of mentorship and feedback, and the transformative journey towards confident, strategic leadership.
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 today I'm joined by Julie Fox, who is the Global Director of Customer Success for Cin7. That said, her current role is fairly new and she recently went through a major job hunt after a restructuring at her prior company, and so today we're going to be talking about her job search process, how that's changed over the years and her path from individual contributor to director. Julie, welcome to the podcast and thank you so much for sharing your story today.
Julie Fox:Thank you so much, Kristen. I'm very excited to be here.
Kristen Hayer:So normally I'd start by asking you about your career path, but we're going to spend this whole episode talking about your career path, so instead I'll start with your current role. You're at Cin7 now. Can you share a little about your role there as the Global Director of Customer Success?
Julie Fox:Yeah, absolutely so Cin7 is an inventory management solution. Actually, it's much more than that. Cin7 is connected inventory performance. We work with over 8,500 customers and automatically provide a real-time picture of everything that they make and sell. In fact, right before I started, the couple days before I started with them, we just acquired an AI solution called Inventoro. So with that that's kind of had me deep into the weeds we were talking right before we started the recording of kind of how things are going and it's chaotic and crazy, but I'm having the time of my life.
Julie Fox:I joined as the global director of Customer Success. The team is relatively pretty small for the number of customers that we have, which means that we really have to be utilizing our systems. The pace at Cin7 is absolutely unreal. Things move super, super fast and so with that, when you're moving fast and you're doing everything at scale, communication is super important and it's imperative that you're all moving in the same direction. I just joined the team to really help take the CS team to the next level, so so many CS teams get so bogged down in the reactive support or risk mitigation. My specialty is really helping teams to unlock their customers' potential and value by really creating a more proactive and predictive model and CS team and while I'm doing that, but I'm also helping build out a more robust upsell and cross-sell motion with the team.
Kristen Hayer:You round all that off like it's easy. That's a lot. You have a lot going on.
Julie Fox:I do. But it's fun and I've been in those positions before where you started a new company and you're spending days and weeks and you're going to bog down with all the HR and IT setup stuff and literally my first day, within the first couple hours at Cin7, I was putting together project plans and I mean I was like in the thick of it and it was just so much fun, literally my first day. I remember talking to my husband afterwards and being like this is it? I'm so happy I'm here, made the right choice.
Kristen Hayer:That's so great. That's the kind of stuff that I love that we get to do at The Success League too. It is really fun, so I'm glad you're getting to have that experience. We're going to talk about career paths. Why do you think it's so important to talk about that?
Julie Fox:So I think, especially in Customer Success, it's important, because Customer Success as a dedicated position and team is still relatively new. What that means, though, is that everything is constantly evolving. CS is also very different depending on the size and stage of companies or, I guess, how technical the product is, the industry. There's so many different factors, and I'm sure you've heard a million times on the podcast or with working with different leaders, the phrase it depends, and that's because so so much depends on what's right for that specific customer success manager or team or leader, but what that means from a career pathing standpoint is that it isn't one size fits all. There's no perfect career path or box that you have to fit in where it's like okay, if I take these courses, if I do these things, if I get this education, I can go on this career path and have my whole future spelled out for me. It's not that way.
Julie Fox:In Customer Success. What I have found with people that I've managed and mentored, and with teams that I've been on, is just the importance of really understanding individual people's strengths understanding what they like, what drives them, what excites them. Strengths, understanding what they like, what drives them, what excites them, and there's so many different ways that you can grow in customer success because you get so much exposure to different teams. You're exposed to sales and marketing and product and support and implementation and all these different things for the person, whether you're in leadership or whether you're an individual contributor, what that means is that the world is your oyster by getting into Customer Success. You really have an ability to grow into many different ways, and so it means that it's really really important to understand yourself and understand your team so that you're kind of growing in that right direction, getting the exposure to the right things.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, and I think it is really wonderful the amount of options that you have when you're in Customer Success. It's not just you're in Customer Success and now you're locked into that field and that's all you get to do for the rest of your career. You really can go off into other teams I've seen CS professionals go into marketing, into product, into sales, you know and there's a lot of different angles that you can take and I think it's nice because it gives you more options than just going into leadership, which is not for everybody and it shouldn't be for everybody. Not everybody has strengths that lend themselves to being a great leader.
Julie Fox:But that doesn't mean that you should be limited in your growth and I think that you know there was a point in my career I've gone the leadership path, but I recognize it's not for everybody.
Julie Fox:It's really hard and I think that's something that there was a point in my career that I thought that I had to become a leader. I had to become a people manager in order to grow, and I love that about customer success Some of the most impressive people that I've worked with are different types of leaders. Customer Success has some of the most impressive people that I've worked with are different types of leaders. They may not be a people manager, but maybe they're a very strategic leader, and I think that's where that definition of leadership has evolved over time to where people are really seeing now, especially in Customer Success, that you have the ability to have such a big impact because you can have such an impact on the whole company and business and your customer base, and so through that it doesn't have to be the traditional sense of people management or leadership. You can do that in a lot of different ways, which has been really cool to see people that I've worked with that have grown in their careers in non-traditional ways.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, I know it's exciting. Well, let's dive into your experience. So tell us about your recent job search. What was that experience like for you this time around?
Julie Fox:Yeah, it was a bit different. I've been in Customer Success and tech for a handful of years, but since I have found this industry I haven't gone through a big job search. I've transitioned to different companies and roles, but it was usually through knowing somebody or having somebody reach out to me and then I pursued that opportunity, where this was different in the sense that I was laid off and this is me putting my positive spin on it but it really gave me an opportunity to go out to the market publicly and do a full search of really trying to figure out what do I want to do, what is the right fit for me from a size and stage and product standpoint, but also from a role standpoint. I had kind of two paths in front of me that I could go. One was to stay on my traditional leadership path that I was on, where I was super happy, super fulfilled. The other was, I guess in the last couple of years I've become super passionate around digital CS and helping companies and teams scale their customer experience, and so I was talking to different companies about both types of opportunities because I really wanted to use this chance to find the right fit for me, the right fit for me right now. I don't pretend to think that I need to be at somewhere for the rest of my career, but I do want it to be the right fit for me and, in kind of this progression for myself path that I'm on and a role that I feel really excited about and comfortably uncomfortable. I guess I'll say that there's definitely some new challenges as well as things that I feel really excited about because I feel confident about them. I feel like it's stuff that I've done before but, at Cin 7, everything's at scale because we have so many customers, and so it was a really good ability to do both and to get that exposure.
Julie Fox:But I guess, to answer your question, the job search, it was pretty different. I did most of it publicly. I shared my experience throughout through LinkedIn. I was very I guess very open with my community around what I was looking for for the situation and everything, which I've never done that in my life before. I actually had been laid off previously and I felt such um, I was so ashamed, I was so embarrassed that I had been laid off in the past and it was like that. That was something that I was hiding from people, let alone going out publicly and saying, hey, I'm in the market, but this is what I'm looking for. And so I think it was just such a different experience where I think that's a little bit of a silver lining of what's been going on in the economy is that there's been so many layoffs, there's been so many great people out in the market that it really has changed some of the perception around layoffs and gave me that freedom and confidence to feel a little bit more comfortable going out to the market more publicly. It was a very Gosh. I can't even find the words to explain the experience. So I was gonna say it was a very social experience, but I guess let me explain that what I mean by that is I didn't do it alone.
Julie Fox:So when I first posted about that, I had been laid off and what I was looking for, I definitely had an immediate wave of comments and people reaching out to me, texting me, calling me, saying, hey, how can I help or who can I introduce you to. But I also, throughout the process, really intentionally I almost viewed it as my own little sales funnel where I was like, okay, I need different opportunities at different stages. And all of that because I didn't want to be all in on one opportunity and then have something fall through and just be completely devastated. So throughout the process, I dedicated a certain amount of time each week to having conversations with people that I knew they weren't hiring. I knew they didn't have anything, but I wanted to use this opportunity where I had a little bit more time on my hands to nurture those relationships as well as continue to invest in the community by kind of through me, sharing, by joining on podcasts, joining on different things and giving back to people as much as I was also asking people to help me out. So definitely it was a mixture of how I was spending my time, but the consistent thing was that I really didn't do it alone. I reached out to people to help me. I had coaches through the process and mentors and different people and people checking in on me, but that was something that really helps throughout the process.
Julie Fox:One caveat that I will share and this is not to say that this is everybody's experience, this was my experience was that a lot of the leadership opportunities were not posted publicly and so because I had taken this approach of letting a lot of people know that I was out in the market and being very intentional with who I was reaching out to and how I was reaching out to them, and really spent a lot more time on that than I did applying to jobs that I didn't know anybody or I didn't have a connection.
Julie Fox:Because I spent time on that first half, it really helped me because I was made aware of quite a few opportunities where people were just starting to have the conversations, and so, while it's a bit of a longer process, it ended up being a really cool process for me because, for example, the company that I ended up with, I had had probably five or six conversations with them before they even posted the role, and so, at the point that they posted the role, that it was like, okay, now we can fast track things and I had the ability to meet other leaders on the team.
Julie Fox:But what that, I think, means for a lot of people is that when they see a job, a role that's posted, they may already have people in mind that they've been talking to, and so I think it makes it more important than ever to really lean on your community, to lean on not just referrals where you're saying, hey, can you introduce me to so-and-so, but especially in a leadership role where you're reaching out directly to people that would be the hiring manager, where you're reaching out to the chief customer officer, the chief revenue officer and saying, hey, do you anticipate having any group on your team? I'm currently looking and kind of taking more ownership of the experience versus just waiting for that perfect opportunity to be posted. And maybe it's real, maybe it's not, but that was just kind of my experience that surprised me.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, Well, what are some of the other things that were different from you know what happened when you were looking for jobs in the past, or what are some of the things that were sort of hallmarks of job searches you've done in the past that weren't there this time around?
Julie Fox:I feel like so. In the past, I'd say most of my job searches had been a little bit more of the kind of traditional model where you apply to a job, they respond to you. You go through kind of the four or traditional model where you apply to a job, they respond to you. You go through kind of the four or five, six steps, whatever it is, but it's something where they could tell you from the beginning here's what this process is going to look like and we're going to walk you through this process. That was good because it gives you different exposure to different teams. You know exactly what to expect. You know kind of early on if you're going to continue on the process or not. But it allows you to also lean in, do really good research because you know who you're going to be meeting with next and you kind of know what that experience looks like. It also allows you to follow up, send thank you notes all of that kind of the traditional stuff throughout the process.
Julie Fox:In my experience this time around, in some ways it was a little bit more casual, where maybe I talked to a company more times throughout the process, but there were a lot less buttoned up conversations where it was a little bit more like hey, let's talk, let's understand. You know, it was almost like a couple of people just kind of brainstorming or geeking out talking about CST. You know, this wasn't just my experience with one company, this was probably 10 different companies that I talked to where I had these very casual conversations. And then it's like from that point they, I think, whether I knew I was being interviewed or not, that I was, because it's like it started off with them being like oh, you know, I don't really know if I have anything, but let's talk anyways. And so I always said yes to those. It's like if somebody said, hey, I'd love to talk to you, or hey, maybe I know somebody, I always said yes because, to the point earlier, this was my opportunity to go out to the market.
Julie Fox:I don't wish upon myself or anyone to go through this experience many times in my life, and so I really wanted to take this opportunity to meet a lot of people and hopefully impress a lot of people, so that maybe throughout my career I've built that foundation of getting to know people, that maybe it makes it a little bit easier next time around. So I always said yes, but I always took those very seriously. I really wanted to wow people. I wanted to engage in thoughtful conversations and I was asking them as many questions as they were asking me and really trying to understand their thought process or how they were currently set up, what their challenges were, where they believed the most opportunities were. And so I feel like it felt a lot more casual but also a lot more two-sided, where I had the opportunity to get to know them as much as they were getting to know me, and the cool thing about that was then, as they did, come back and say, hey, I do have a position for you, I do have something in mind.
Julie Fox:It's like I'm not just reading this job description and saying, okay, do I check these boxes?
Julie Fox:Is this the right fit for me?
Julie Fox:It was like I've now already gotten to know the person and the team a little bit more to really be able to assess is this something that I would be the right fit for?
Julie Fox:Am I excited? And I had quite a few that I was like heck, yeah, let's do it, let's talk. But I also had some where I was like you know what, based on what we talked about, I don't think I'm the right fit for this and that's okay. It was something where I feel like that actually was a little bit freeing to get where I better understood where my sweet spot was of kind of what type of size and stage of company I was looking for that I felt a lot more comfortable this go around not just saying yes, let's go through a full interview process with every opportunity, but really trying to early on assess is this the right fit for me? And then pouring my heart and soul and energy into the ones that I really felt like would be the right fit, but also kind of early on letting people know if I didn't think it was the right fit.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, it feels like a little bit of a luxury, doesn't it?
Julie Fox:I've never really quite experienced this, and I think that maybe it's because these were leadership roles that I was discussing with people, and so it's something that I'm sure, as you work with leaders, you kind of understand how it's not just the philosophies of a leader, it's not just their experiences, their personality, it's a lot of things, it's the whole person, and I think that's where those leadership hires are so pivotal on a team. It really can help motivate, inspire, take a team to the next level, keep a team stagnant. It can make them go backwards. It's like a leader has an ability to have such an impact on a team and so I think, especially in this job market, a lot of companies see that and they really, from my experience, we're spending a lot more time investing and getting to know the human side of not just taking you through here's my 20 questions but tell me about what drives you, tell me about some exam and like I feel like we just we went much, much deeper in the interview processes. That's fantastic.
Kristen Hayer:I love that. I know you mentioned this a few minutes ago, but I want to come back to it. You know community has been a big part of your job search this time around, and I want to understand a little bit more about how you leveraged your community and what that brought to you both personally and professionally.
Julie Fox:Okay. So community is such like it can mean so many things. So I guess I'll start off by defining a little bit what I mean by this. So in the last year and a half, two years, I've started to really lean into the customer success community. I've started posting more, I've started sharing more. I do a lot of both in-person events as I have them. I'm in Indiana, so there's maybe not as many in-person events as I would have if I was in the Bay Area or New York or one of the bigger tech hubs, but I do join local meetups, but I do a lot of virtual ones. There's so many different opportunities and communities out there so I don't do everything because I can't.
Julie Fox:I don't know if anybody can do everything, but I have spent a decent amount of time investing in the CS community and that, like both, it's helped me from a professional development standpoint, where I'm now learning from other leaders. I'm able to collaborate, talk through ideas and thoughts, but I'm also doing the same. I'm sharing, I'm giving back to the community, and so I wanted to preface that because I think so often when it comes to a job search, you will hear advice around, kind of you know, lean into your community, do these things. You will hear advice around kind of you know lean into your community, do these things. I don't know if I would have had such success had I not spent the year to really invest in the community. Prior to my job search, I had spent a lot of time giving to the community, mentoring, coaching complete strangers for free, before I really went out publicly and said, hey, I need help, and so I did want to mention that. But what I'll say is kind of my experience with the community was it's truly one of those things where you get by giving and you kind of get back what you put in. So I had poured a lot into the community and when it was kind of my time to ask for help, they poured back into me and so I really appreciated that. I had a lot of people that either didn't have any job postings or anything, but again they took the time to connect with me and talk to me and see if they could introduce me to people. I had people offering to help with resumes. That's something that now I take very seriously. But as I have messages from people, I try my best to answer them in a timely manner and say yes, as much as I can to helping other people, because that's what other people did for me. I'll peel back that a little bit.
Julie Fox:So a couple things that I did throughout this process was I needed to refine my search. I'm sure you've heard this from other job seekers where when you're just looking for anything or something too broad, it's actually a lot harder for people to help you, and so it feels counterintuitive because you're like I just need a job, I was just laid off, I need something, and so it's like it doesn't feel like it's the time to be picky or to go too narrow, but it actually is, because there are a lot of opportunities, there's thousands of companies. You don't want to go down a path that isn't the right fit for you professionally. But also I just found that by the more that I invested in time and really trying to figure out what I wanted, the more that it allowed people to help me. Because when I was first talking, my first couple conversations with people, and I was like I don't know, look at director roles, but I could also look at manager. I could also look at VP I could also do this. It roles, but I could also look at manager. I could also look at VP. I could also do this. It was almost overwhelming to them where they're like cool, once you figure it out, let me know and I can see if I can help you.
Julie Fox:Whereas, as I started to better refine what I was looking for and I could say, okay, I'm looking for, between this stage and this stage, this size and this size, and had that sweet spot that I was looking for, that's when really the recommendations started coming in, where people started saying, okay, I know this person at this company, I know this person at this company, and so I feel like that really opened up the floodgates for me, because I went a little bit narrower, and then part of that was also because we talked about this at the beginning. But customer success can mean so many different things at different companies. I've worked at earlier stage companies where customer success was everything post-sales, so it's support, implementation. It starts out very reactive, very tactical and technical, and then, as the company matured, it became more revenue-focused, more value-focused for the customer and more proactive, and so that's something that I wanted to make sure of.
Julie Fox:What is my sweet spot? What is it that I'm looking for? Something that I wanted to make sure of you know what is my sweet spot, what is it that I'm looking for? And that that allowed me to lean more meaning, in a more meaningful way, into the community of saying, okay, now, this is more specifically what I'm looking for. And I did that through certain meetups, but I also did a lot of that through just messaging individual people and and starting conversations with them.
Kristen Hayer:That's great. I love our community. I think you make an excellent point that what you put in is what you get out of it, and I think we have an excellent community with a lot of contributors and a lot of people who are willing to help, which I think is fantastic. I want to spend a little more time talking about your career progression from being an individual contributor earlier in your career to now moving into a role as a senior leader in a director role. What do you see as the biggest things that changed in your perspectives between when you were an individual contributor and now that you're in your director role, and how did that shift as you went through your career?
Julie Fox:So when I first made the change into tech, I started out as an individual contributor. My first role in tech was as a CSM. It was interesting because I had managed multiple teams prior to that. I had actually been a VP and a director prior to making that career change into tech. And I'm so grateful that I started out as a CSM because I feel like not only does it make me such a better manager but it also gave me just such a different perspective of understanding the business and the customers and how the CSM impacts the customers in the company. But with that I started out as a CSM and I'd say that the biggest shift for me was that it wasn't immediately, it wasn't in my first couple months in a role.
Julie Fox:I'd say I did spend some serious time really trying to hone and refine my own skills and get better and better at the job first before I really started shifting this mentality. But it started slowly. I started in Slack. I would start sharing with my team of what was working or what wasn't working. So if there was something that I was being challenged with I would share. I would say, hey, I'm working with this with a customer, does anybody have any experience? Or what has worked for you guys. And so it wasn't necessarily just putting my name in lights in a positive way, but being a little bit more vulnerable and opening up those doors and providing that opening to be more coachable and to take input and ideas from other people. And then, similarly, when things did work, if there was something new that I tried or an email template that I got a lot of feedback from or responses from, I would share that with my team and say, hey, I tried this. Not sure if it'll work for you, but I wanted to share that. And so I think, just shifting that mentality from being just about my own results and how I was being measured to the overall success of the team and the overall success of our customers. So I started thinking less about like okay, what's the process, what do I need to do? Check this box, do this and becoming less like output focused to becoming more outcome focused. So I think that that, to me, was probably the biggest transformation is like switching that mindset from my own actions and outputs to the outcomes and how that impacted the customers, how that impacted the business and the team.
Julie Fox:I started mentoring people, I started building out a lot of processes, and so I was with this scrappy startup company that was in that growth stage and things were wild, and so I started just building things. I started taking stuff that I was challenged with and fixing it and building out a process and doing things that were a little bit more repeatable for the team and my leadership definitely noticed. So I think that was one thing. The other was we mentioned we were talking about community my story of leaning more into the community. That was pretty monumental in my mindset as a leader.
Julie Fox:I went from this person that felt like I have to figure everything out the hard way, and the first half of my career I feel like I learned most things just by Googling it and saying yes to everything. Now I really lean on other people. I figure I don't have to learn things the hard way, I don't have to learn this by failing first or whatever. Let me go out to the community and ask these questions, and one example is I did a pooled or a team's model at a previous company and I reached out to a group of leaders. As I was himhawing about all this and figuring out the structure and how you do this, I figured you know what Tons of people have done this. Let me just go out and ask them.
Julie Fox:And so I probably interviewed 20 different leaders that had done it previously, some that had great success, some that said, hey, we tried it and it failed.
Julie Fox:But I talked to all different people to say, how did you do this? What would you do differently? And I really, at the point that I presented something to my team of, hey, here's what we're going to do or here's what I'm thinking, it was so much more buttoned up because I had taken the input from all these different people, and so I think that was one thing, that it was kind of this shifting of mindset. I went from this person that felt like a lot of imposter syndrome as kind of an early leader of you know, I've got to try to figure this out and I don't want people to find me out that I don't know what I'm doing to actually feeling a lot more comfortable to say, hey, this is new, I don't know what I'm doing to actually feeling a lot more comfortable to say, hey, this is new, I don't know what I'm doing. Does anybody have any experience? Or you know, what are your opinions or thoughts here? And taking a much more collaborative, more strategic approach to leadership.
Kristen Hayer:I love that. I think that's so, so helpful and so important. What are some of the skills that you've developed that you feel have been most helpful in moving toward the director role?
Julie Fox:A lot of it is, I would say, for me, the things that have helped me grow as a leader I've really been. Some of this has just been kind of coming into my own, taking more of like a Julie style approach to this, versus feeling like I have to be the type of leader that maybe I had previously or that I you know that I had to fit into this perfect little box. Feeling more comfortable, being vulnerable and being candid and using more of that radical candor as a leader has had a huge impact on me and on my teams, because I think the more that I've leaned into being vulnerable, being really communicative as a leader, maybe even too early I was having a conversation last week with somebody on my team and I was like I'm going to be candid. I don't have all the information, but I want to start having this conversation with you now and peel back the curtain and bring you into the conversation, because I think sometimes as leaders, we wait too long. We wait until everything's perfectly figured out and then it feels like this bomb that we're dropping on our team or our customers or company, and so I think that's something that I've really figured out is the skill of bringing the right people in earlier and collaborating with the team, leveraging skill sets.
Julie Fox:I'd say that's one of my strongest things as a leader is understanding and getting to know my team and what their strengths and skill sets are.
Julie Fox:I can't do anything that I do by myself. I would fail. There's absolutely no way and so it's like the way I quickly get to know my team and understand what they're good at, what motivates them and excites them, and then being able to give them opportunities to shine, giving them the autonomy and ownership and projects that excite them. That not only alleviates me and helps our team and customers, but it also gives them an ability to grow, and I think that's something that's been really, really important to me is, as a leader, it's not just about my skill sets and what I can do, but it's the skill sets of my team, what we collectively can do, and how I can help them grow and kind of unlock that potential for them in their careers, not just in this one role and in this one team, but really getting to know them and what their career paths are, what their journey is longer term and seeing how I can best set them up for success so that when those opportunities are there. They're an operator, they're already there, they're already doing the job.
Kristen Hayer:Well, that kind of leads me to my next question, which is really about taking ownership of your own career, and I think, as a leader, it's something that we can encourage our teams to do. You and I have talked about this before, so I kind of know what you're going to say right now but I want to know what ownership of taking ownership means to you and why you think that's such an important part of career building.
Julie Fox:Yeah, I love that question. This is something I mean. I could talk for hours just about this specific topic. I think it is incredibly important to take ownership of your own career for a couple different reasons, and I guess, before I go into the reasons, I'll explain a couple different ways that you can do that. You can find mentors.
Julie Fox:That's something that I've done throughout my career. I always, at any moment, have both internal and external mentors, so I have people that I have never worked with. I have people that I've worked with at previous companies that are still mentors of mine. But even at a brand new company, I find people. I tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, will you mentor me? Because I think it's a really cool way. It changes the relationship for me, just being somebody that has one-on-ones or is getting to know each other professionally, it takes you out of the tactical day-to-day of the work and broadens that relationship to be more professional development focused and more coaching focused.
Julie Fox:I think when people know that you're wanting to grow and wanting help, they take a little bit more time to tell you the why behind things or provide more feedback. So that's one thing. Seeking feedback is a huge thing. That's something that has unlocked so much potential for me, but also on my teams is building a culture around giving and receiving feedback, leaning into different professional development opportunities. There's so many opportunities through LinkedIn, learning, through all these customer success organizations. There's trainings, there's courses, there's paid and freed things, there's individual coaches. There's so many opportunities and I think so many people really just kind of they wait around, they wait for their company to tell them what to do before they do something, versus taking the initiative and saying, okay, I want more, I'm going to invest in myself and I'm going to invest in my career, and then going back to your manager and saying, hey, here's the things that I'm doing because I want to get here.
Julie Fox:Let's have a conversation around what else it will take or what I need to do. So I think there's tons of different ways that you can invest in yourself. I didn't even name them all. There's a million, but the importance of that is that, first of all, I a million, but the importance of that is that, first of all, I just think very few people have the experience of a leader that truly pushes them in their career to the next level.
Julie Fox:And, candidly, if you're only looking at your manager, your direct manager, as the person that's going to pave that path and success for you. You're going to have a very slow growth career because you are now looking at, your growth is in the hands of somebody else, but it's also in the hands of your own company's growth trajectory. And maybe you want to be a leader and you're blocked because your leader isn't going anywhere. There aren't any other opportunities, and so I think that's where, by having those conversations, both internally and with your leader, with your manager, but also taking it upon yourself to find mentors, to find different coaches, and to spend that time investing in yourself, allows you to kind of have the upper hand there and, you know, become a little bit more articulate around what you want and what you need in your career path and be able to honestly get invited to meetings, get invited to be a part of different projects and opportunities.
Julie Fox:I think when you take control, it's less linear, it's less of I'm going to do this and then move on to this next path, this, and take those stair steps. That's where I've really started to see people. Just take the elevator, I guess You're all of a sudden you're skipping floors and you're going from one step to a whole different thing, because you are getting experience that outweighs sometimes even the experience that you get just in your one role, and so I think that's where I've seen a lot of careers be made is through people that take that initiative and take that ownership of their own career path.
Kristen Hayer:Yeah, and I think it can feel, especially when you're in a you know, more junior role and maybe you're newer in your career path. It can feel really scary to go even to your boss and to say tell me, you know, like help me, you know, tell me what I don't know and to be vulnerable enough to say that to somebody. And yet I have never run into a person when I have done that that has ever said no to me or I can't help you, like people really want to help you.
Julie Fox:And sometimes it comes through tough love. I mean, it's not always an immediate yes, or you immediate guess, or it's not, like you just say something and speak it into existence. Sometimes you get really good feedback of saying, okay, here's how you're going to get there, here's the level that you need to be at, here's the work that you need to put in. But, oh my gosh, to get that clarity and understanding of what you need to do and be able to spend your time in the right ways, I think is just so profound and I agree, I've had that experience as well and I think that's something that I'm now very aware of. So when I meet new teams, for example, I have something that I lead them through at the very beginning. So I just did this recently with my new team. I take a 60 or 90-minute one-on-one with each individual and I have this format where I'm asking them questions, one with each individual and I have this format where I'm asking them questions Tell me what motivates you, how do you like to receive feedback, how do you communicate best? Some of those basics gets into asking about their short and long-term goals. I always give the caveat that short-term, ideally, is here, but long-term it doesn't have to be here. I have no expectation that you're going to retire here. Tell me about what your bigger dreams are. What do you want to do after this? Are there things that really excite you? But I think the more that I understand from the beginning what their strengths and skill sets are, about the role, but more than that, where I understand what excites them, what energizes them, what doesn't, what drains them.
Julie Fox:I think some of those types of conversations are really good to have early on and I have an example actually I have many examples of this throughout my career where I've done these interviews and sometimes you see an outlier. Sometimes you talk to somebody and it's like wow, their answers are so different than everybody else's. And it's like through that I actually found that somebody was in the wrong role. They were in a CSM role and they really needed to be in a more of like an enablement focused role where it was more of an internal role and just shifting. Just seeing that and shifting their path completely unlocked them. And it took somebody that was doing okay, but not phenomenal, to somebody that was just absolutely brilliant and one of having just such a huge impact.
Julie Fox:But I think that's some of my favorite stuff is like I understand that people may not feel super comfortable talking, especially early on, to a new leader about their career path or about stuff that frustrates them or stuff and all of that. So let me feel awkward, let me ask the question, so that then they don't have to feel awkward and it gives them an opportunity to have those conversations. I think that's something that I really encourage other leaders to do. I started it because I realized that when I was interviewing new people for roles, that I actually was getting to know my new hires better than I knew some of my people I'd worked with for years, because I had never asked them the questions. We had so many annual reviews where we just talked about the role, we just talked about their performance, but we never really talked about them, and so that's something that I really now try to spend some time and really invest in each person.
Kristen Hayer:It's fantastic. So, Julie, last question, and this is something that we ask all of our guests what do you see as the biggest trend in Customer Success right now and why?
Julie Fox:I like this and I like the way that you phrased this question.
Julie Fox:It's been building, so I'm not going to surprise you with this answer, but there has been such a trend around digital CS, scaling, AI, all of that over the years.
Julie Fox:What I think is going to shift here that may seem subtle, but I think it's going to have a profound impact is that for so long, we were talking about digital CS and scaling as something that is for our lower ARR customers. It was more of a business decision than doing it because it's the right thing for the customers. I think we're starting to see how these different resources and creative approaches, how much they are impacting our customers, and so what I'm starting to see is more companies really investing heavily into customer marketing, into some of these different ways. That allows the customer experience to be much broader than the CSM, and I think that's where I see that being for everybody, not just lower ARR customers. I think it's extremely important, especially for enterprise level accounts that maybe have a thousand users in your system You're not talking with a whole thousand, so how do you reach them, how are you setting them up for success, and so I think that is a big trend that will be happening and is already starting to happen.
Kristen Hayer:I've seen some really interesting things that are actually geared for more enterprise level customers. I think one of the most impressive was one of our students was doing some homework and we had assigned to kind of build a custom success plan for one of your enterprise customers and, you know, share it with a group, and he was clever and used AI for that and had probably the best, most custom, most strategic plan of anybody in the whole group we were training and I thought it was fantastic and I thought it was an excellent example of how AI can be leveraged for the bigger customers and be leveraged in a way that's really strategic but still relies on, you know, the Customer Success Manager to do the delivery and to help the customer understand that product that that AI produced, you know, and to help guide the customer through it. And so I think there's just some really exciting things you know to your point, that are happening with AI and with digital at the higher levels, and it's really interesting to see.
Julie Fox:Yeah, I think it's a really exciting time to be in Customer Success. So many of our customers are. Their expectations are changing. They're the way that they want to interact and work with us is changing, and so I think that's really cool where, all of a sudden, for so long B2B I feel like the change rate and everything was a little bit more incremental and all of a sudden we're just seeing this kind of rocket ship of creativity and growth. Some of that stems from customers wanting different things, but also just the resources that we have available today. Compared to five years ago, it's wildly different and it's really really exciting it is Well.
Kristen Hayer:Julie, thanks so much for joining me today to share your career path, to talk about the importance of owning your own career path, and I know our audience is really going to dig all of your practical ideas that you've shared today. If someone wanted to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out? That you've shared today?
Julie Fox:If someone wanted to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out? Linkedin is the best way. I'm active, I do respond to messages and so definitely feel free to engage with me there.
Kristen Hayer:Well, Julie. Thanks again, and I also want to thank our producer, Russell Bourne, and our audio experts at RFM 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. You can subscribe to Success League Radio on Apple, Google, Amazon or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and we hope you'll join us next time.