Women in Customer Success Podcast

134 - How Psychology led me into Customer Success - Emma Lampert

• Marija Skobe-Pilley • Episode 134

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How can a background in psychology and neuroscience shape a career in customer success?

I had the pleasure of speaking with Emma Lampert, a customer success leader and yoga enthusiast. We talked about Emma's background in psychology and neuroscience, where she initially aspired to be a research scientist focused on abnormal brain development. 

Emma is a fractional leader for SaaS start-ups, focused on helping businesses grow through smart customer acquisition and retention strategies. She works with founders to create go-to-market plans that close big deals and build strong relationships with customers.

Emma shared some of the most important lessons she has learned throughout her career, particularly the value of embracing failure as a part of growth.

In this episode:

  • The impact of neuroplasticity
  • Practicing yoga
  • Transitioning from science to customer success
  • The concept of the Growth Rebel
  • Challenging traditional customer success views
  • Post-sales strategies
  • Recommendations for effective segmentation
  • Identifying key customer milestones
  • Embracing failure as a leader


Some journeys remind us how powerful change can be, and Emma's story is one of them. This is an episode worth hearing, so don’t miss out - tune in now.

Follow Emma!

Emma’s website.

This episode was brought to you by Deployflow.

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Host Marija Skobe-Pilley


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Speaker 1:

Hello, hello. It's great to be with you today. Again, I'm super excited about the conversation I'm talking with, emma Lampert, the Growth Rebel. It's kind of weird really, really weird, I guess because we start nerding about neuroplasticity, psychology and then the benefits of yoga just to go into super interesting conversation about commercial customer success, segmenting your customers right and how to nurture customers in the best way. You'll definitely hear a lot of really smart and brilliant insights from Emma and I can't wait for you to meet her. So let's get into the conversation.

Speaker 1:

Hi everyone, this is Maria Scobepile and you're listening to Women in Customer Success podcast, the first women-only podcast where remarkable ladies of customer success share their stories and practical tools to help you succeed and make an impact. If you want to learn more about customer success, get career advice and be inspired, you're in the right place, so let's tune in. Hello, hello and welcome to the new episode of the Women in Customer Success podcast. Today we are recording, as always, online from frozen London and I'm really super excited to introduce you to my guest today. She's a growth rebel. She's a yoga enthusiast and coach and teacher, having her own community You'll hear about it more and she is customer success leader and consultant. Emma Lampert, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for having me. It's lovely to be here and you're right, it is cold. I'm freezing.

Speaker 1:

That's how I love starting the episodes with trying to put us geographically in a place. So I believe that we both are somewhere around London. Where exactly are you calling from? I'm in Wandsworth, so I'm southwest. Southwest, that's cool. I'm in Berkshire, a little bit outside anyway. So, yeah, london seems to be frozen and it's exciting. It's probably giving us a little bit of headache for going out, having nice walks or runs or whatever we just managed to do so far in the beautiful autumn that we had. Emma, what is the thing that you wish the audience will take out from this conversation today?

Speaker 2:

oh, deep, deep to start, um, I hope, something different to think about. I think, with customer success in general, all of us have lots of different opinions about similar things. Um, but it's always nice to have a different perspective, I guess, and and hear from from somebody with a different opinion, so hopefully someone will hear a different opinion.

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's interesting. I wonder how different is that different? I'm actually really looking forward to that. But to start with now tell me, when you're looking at your life a few years ago, would a 16-year-old Emma be surprised to see you in this current role or being in this career?

Speaker 2:

yes, um, when I was 16, I wanted to be a research scientist. Well, that is cool. My 16 year old me would be quite shocked that I've I've landed in tech which science was that?

Speaker 1:

what was your favorite one?

Speaker 2:

so I um, I did psychology and neuroscience at uni and I wanted to study abnormal brain development and when I left university I just had, I think I was just tired of reading. It was so much reading. Anyone who's done a degree knows that it's just all reading. So I took a break and I got a job and and that was that and it was a bit of a left turn. But, yeah, I wanted to go into abnormal, abnormal brain development a bit abnormal brain development.

Speaker 1:

It sounds absolutely, abnormally awesome. Tell me what, for those main things that completely fascinated you, or what were you fascinated about brain that that was such a big drive? Uh, because, as you said, it takes a lot of effort and reading and everything else that needs to come with it for you to still be motivated and wanted to do it 100%.

Speaker 2:

I've always been fascinated by human behavior, but I suppose with brain structure, specifically because I was a real nerd. It was the way that the brain repairs itself and plasticity and how you can be born with half a brain, for instance, or you can have the connective tissue that connects your two brain hemisphere feathered or you can have like a really traumatic brain injury and your brain will for the most part, cope and it will just put you back to relative normality and just how it manages to do that and in which situations it does and doesn't do things like that and how it works. Um, and specifically for people that are born with really really random brain conditions where they can only be everything out of their left eye but their brain can perceive the whole field of vision, it's just fascinating when you get into stuff like that and how that impact everything and, yeah, specifically how people recover from traumatic brain injuries, that one's always fascinating.

Speaker 1:

Oh gosh, I don't even know if shall I go deeper into that sentence how people recover from traumatic experiences. But one thing I have noticed. I'm not a scientist. I was always interested in psychology and behavior and probably in the last few maybe two to three years, I have noticed that there is so much talk on mainstream podcasts at least some of my favorite ones about neuroplasticity and how brain can repair itself. What are the mindsets and the behaviors and the habits that you could instill in your life every single day to help your neuroplasticity right? So, although that is not our topic today, if there is one thing that you could share with the listeners about how they could help their brain and their neuroplasticity to work better for them, what do you think? What is either the habit or the behavior that would be helpful for them to implement?

Speaker 2:

Oh, it's definitely routines. It's definitely routines. So if you're trying to learn or change something about the way that you work, it's about lipping the new thing that you want to do into something you already do. So I can't remember what the actual term for this is, but in terms of neuroplasticity it's really hard, particularly as you get older, because all of the schemas that you have are kind of set and your brain just likes to work on autopilot and it likes to move you through the same patterns as you go through. So if you are looking to pick up a new hobby, pick up a new habit, do something different, you have to try and wedge it in between two things that you do automatically and it makes life.

Speaker 2:

It's not. It's still not easy to learn new habits and to put new practices into place, but it does make it easier when you interrupt the triggers, and your brain will learn much more quickly when you interrupt it in the middle of a flow that it wants to go to, rather than trying to kind of tack it on the end of an existing routine. I know a lot of people that talk about their morning routine, so they want to kind of change things up and maybe do some exercise or whatever and you're like okay, so why don't you go for a walk in between coffee and breakfast rather than try and put it after breakfast? Because you know you'll get distracted. So if you interrupt your brain in the middle of a link, a string of activities, that doing it, it's much easier to or sometimes can be easier to make sure that those new habits stick wonderful.

Speaker 1:

Oh gosh, there are some. So much. We can talk about new habits, etc. But now I'm interested between neuroplasticity, your scientific degree, today's career in customer success and yoga. How did it all come together, or will you tell me more? When did you start practicing yoga and when did that become part of your routine?

Speaker 2:

I've been practicing yoga for probably 15, 20 years like a really long time and I just I always liked it. I have quite a noisy brain and the one thing that I really enjoy about yoga is that it gives you something to focus on and it gives you a sense of presence and a sense of mindfulness which I don't find in many places in my life. I'll be honest, and I kind of picked it up because I think most people who were drawn to yoga as a type of exercise tend to be on the flexible, bendy side of the spectrum, and that's certainly me. I've always been quite bendy, so I thought yoga would be quite fun to add to my routine and I just really enjoyed the exercise challenge part of it and the, the kind of strength building and the calisthenics almost. But it wasn't actually until I started to explore the the it's kind of I don't know how you phrase it but all of the other parts of yoga, because asana, or physical practice, is just one of eight limbs of yoga, and when you start to get into how it impacts your life and how it impacts the decisions you make and the choices that you kind of bring into your space and how you manage your energy and how you manage how you interact with other people. Um, it just really spoke to me and it gave me it's given me a lot in terms of perspective and gratitude and mindfulness and space.

Speaker 2:

As I mentioned, um, and I started teaching probably, I want to say, three or four years ago. I was in the middle of a bit of a career transition and I needed, I needed something else to focus on, and yoga definitely was that for a few months for me. So that's how I started kind of bringing it into my professional life. I would say.

Speaker 1:

So where are you currently with teaching yoga and yoga community and like everything yoga related, probably in relation to your work or your career? How are you planning all of it together, Because now you have kind of multiple careers as?

Speaker 2:

well, okay, go, keep it fresh. I would say that the most obvious way that it shows up is as a leader, you know, as a people leader, and certainly within my coaching, I tend to bring in a lot of those practices of reflection and certainly breathwork is quite a useful thing to do. Some of my team in a previous role really enjoyed breathwork practices for our team meetings. So I would say that it kind of permeates through my personality and it definitely shows up in how I lead and how I coach um.

Speaker 2:

In terms of building a community, I do actively teach yoga, kind of one-to-one with with a couple of clients that I work with um and I have I am still working on trying to build a community um, it's, it's on the to-do list, it's coming together. I've got all these ideas in my head about ways in which I like to practice yoga, which is quite different from what some people would potentially experience if you just went to a yoga studio. So I'm hoping to be able to offer that to more people, maybe beginning of next year. I need to put a deadline on it or I'll just never do it. I'm such a procrastinator.

Speaker 1:

So, for all of you listening, go to Emma's website and her LinkedIn profile right now and you can subscribe, hopefully, to whatever she's doing, and then you will get some new notifications and information when the community will be live, because Emma is going to do it. Why am I? Absolutely? Maybe it's just the beginning of the new year as a perfect time for it. So watch that space. That's amazing, emma from you being a nerd to you being a customer success leader not saying you're not nerd anymore, it's just a little bit of different type of work. How did that happen? What was about a transition? You already mentioned a little bit about you. You know you wanted to stop constantly reading and you wanted to find a job. So how did all of that led you to where you are today?

Speaker 2:

oh, good question. So I left when I got my job, I started um, kind of graduate training at John Lewis who, uh, the big department store and I did a couple of different. I was immediately a team leader and I was like 20 21 and I was I've never been responsible, I've never led a team. So I used quite a lot of my psychology as part of that, which was quite fun, and I realized that I really like working with people and talking to people. I'm an extrovert, so I just really like being surrounded by lots of people.

Speaker 2:

And I worked for a couple of different years. Part of their training scheme that you bounce around all of the different stores for journalists that something like 40 in the UK and you do lots of different things and you work on lots of different operations. And as part of that, after about two and a half years of working in stores and primarily I was an operations manager, so my role was looking after the team that brought all the stock in, pull the stock away, all of those sort of fun things. And I ended up in the head office and I ended up doing software implementation or digital transformation. So I worked for a team. I worked with a team called Omnichannel Customer Transformation and it sounded really cool, but basically what it meant was that customers who shop online and in-store spend three or four times more per year than a customer who only shops online or who only shops in-store. We used to do lots of projects to implement technology into branches, to kind of encourage customers who were bricks and mortar customers to shop online. So I ended up working with lots of cool technology companies and from there I did like a big sales course implementation and a big kind of we called it mobile point of sale, which is basically letting people buy things on iPads, and from there I ended up being part of the team. John Lewis used to run a technology incubation program called JLab and I ended up doing a lot of implementation of those things and working with the startups that would come in and pitch us all these cool new things that we could try in our stores, and from there I took a bit of a break from tech.

Speaker 2:

I stayed with John Linus, but I went to build a distribution center in Milton Keynes just because it sounded like it would be fun at the time, was it? It actually really was. The commute to Milton Keynes was not fun. It's quite far Well, not that far, but it's a bit of a slog from certainly the side of London I live on, but it actually was very fun. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 2:

And then after that I thought you know, I've been at Jumping Earth a while, it's time to change significantly. And one of the startups that I had worked with as part of the incubator offered me a job. They needed somebody to come in and look after their customer post-sale and they needed someone to come in and implement eventually. So that's what I did I jumped and it was terrifying, but it was really good fun. And that's how I got into kind of tech proper, I would say and into working with startups. And I discovered what customer success was when I had finished the project with the customer and there was no one to give the customer to, so they just stayed with me. And that's how I got into customer success completely.

Speaker 1:

By accident, customers just stayed with me, um, and that's how I got into customer success completely by accident, customers just stayed with you, right, 100%, they just stayed with me and I had to do something about them. So I was like, okay, cool, wow, what a journey I. I saw that you were connected with John Lewis I didn't know to what extent which seems so weird and so, so amazing and so fun because for us it as a family we sometimes joke about that that's like our fridge. Like you open the fridge and see what's not there, okay, yeah, waitrose is just, like you know, literally two minutes away and that's always no matter what we have to buy for kids or order, like it's okay, what John Lewis has, because it's the next day pickup from Waitrose. Like I can't deal with all of those other deliveries and returns Like this is the easiest ever. So this is very, very interesting to see. You've been there and you had your fingers also in that type of transformation and products that we are using.

Speaker 2:

I had a lot to do with Cook Collect at Waitrose, a lot of the system, but yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, obviously this is not an advertisement, but it's just the best thing out there, like the most convenient thing for my family. Anyway, moving sort of from John Lewis, so you discovered customer success when you started taking care of that customers and fast forward to today. What are some of the highlights of your career and what is it that you are actually doing today?

Speaker 2:

oh, career highlights. Um I think it's hard to pick particular career highlight out. I think there's a couple of like data points that I would say. There's a few customers, that we've doubled the revenue of um, post-sale and then um. Within a previous role, the team that I was leading and I managed to get churn down from something like 20 to just under eight in just over a year, which I think was pretty amazing. And I think all of my career highlights have revolved around the teams I've led, because I've managed to build some really cool team of really interesting people and together we've achieved great things. I would say that all of my highlights are to be with the teams I've built. I've been particularly proud of bringing those people together and kind of getting them to do their best work.

Speaker 2:

So currently I'm working with a company called Formstack. I'm leading Europe and international, actually my friends down in Australia and New Zealand. Formstack is an American software company that focuses on helping small to medium-sized companies automate their business processes and automate their data collection and activation journeys, and they're very well established in the US and there's not anything really here to support our European customers or expand our European operations. So at the moment I am leading the charge in terms of establishing a presence here in Europe and building out a go-to-market motion via partners and business. So at the moment it's kind of a bit of a mixed bag it's customer success, it's sales and it's partnership development as well.

Speaker 1:

Beautiful. I can presume that that's your contracting gig, However, that doesn't matter. But what I love about you and your brand is actually your brand and you call yourself the growth rebel and I really love it. I love how your brand it's so quirky, so like relatable down to earth, not boring, but it's all about like the growth and customer success and how huge customer success should play part in it. So, going back to the beginning of our conversation about difference of opinions etc. What do you think is really perhaps different in your approach to customer success than what many companies, including CEOs and perhaps some of the other leaders, especially go-to-market leaders, would think of customer success? Was that main rebel part?

Speaker 2:

I think the rebel thing. I really resonated with it when I thought of it originally, for two reasons One, because I think, as a person and as a leader, I don't think you have to do things the way they've always been done, particularly around people, leadership, particularly around team augmentation, and I think this is potentially specifically to do with my leadership style and being a woman. I'm just not. I tried for years to do that whole professional thing and be that really professional person, and it just never jived with me. I was really rubbish at it, um. But I don't think you have to be really hard-nosed and corporate in order to make an impact, um. But that's the first bit of reveling. The second bit is that I think a lot of companies and a lot of tech companies certainly the ones I've talked to at the moment they set themselves up in a way that is very rigid and very siloed and very short-sighted when it comes to how customers actually want to interact with the business, and I'm a commercial cs weaver, so I have no problem with quotas.

Speaker 2:

I like growth, I like numbers, I like retention goals and the way in which I think it comes down to whether or not a ceo or a ceo specifically has a defined opinion of what customer success should be and where they've been in the past. But I think a lot of people come into businesses, stamp their opinion of what a particular organization should do on the business without really considering the customer, the user, the product type, and that leads to a lot of friction and I see it a lot, you know, particularly with the. I've noticed a lot of people at the moment are talking about do you need account management when you have the? Yeah, or can you manage with one or the other? And I think a lot of people get very tribal. You know I am a CS leader, therefore a CS should always win. I don't think it should and I think the structure of your post sales organization should be determined by what makes most sense for your business and your customers, primarily your customers, because if you don't have customers, your business will suffer, particularly your growth.

Speaker 1:

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Speaker 1:

So have you seen any shift in post-sales motions in the last few years, given all the market changes? And particularly why? I'm asking it? Because I think that I have seen, but I don't have data. It's more of anecdotal when you're realizing that it's not sustainable anymore to have like three different teams doing 60% of the same job and then like 20, 30% of something different, and they all call themselves different names. We are account managers, we are CSMs, but in essence you're just doubling up the work and then there is just very, very little of differentiations between those teams and obviously companies can keep them all in a sustainable way. That's why many layoffs happened. What is the shift that you have seen and what would be some of your recommendations? Where should companies start looking into? Either diversifying the teams or putting them all under the same umbrella, or, as you said, whatever works for them? Where do you start in that process?

Speaker 2:

I have seen a shift and I think we're becoming really polarized. You speak to anybody who's led a CS team and there's an element of customer success where you become like a parking lot for all of the jobs that need doing, that are vaguely related to your customer, but they don't have a home and the product team can't build something to kind of cover that gap. And I think those teams scaled exponentially because they were kind of CS support, account management and they were real mixed bag. And I think this shift that I've seen is some CS leaders are kind of scrabbling towards give me revenue numbers, because if you don't have a number, if you're not accountable for a number, you're a cost center. Right, and no one wants to be a cost center. And I think that's why a lot of CS teams have been impacted, certainly over the last two or three years, with all of the redundancies and the shrinkage we've seen, simply because if you don't define your value to your business, if you don't define your value to your business, that you're in a risky position. But on the other hand, I think there's the polar shift is either you've gone commercial or you've lent into being technical, because there's no two ways about it.

Speaker 2:

Customers will need technical support and ultimately, I think the point of customer success and post sales in general is to take all of those promises that we made to our customers when they were prospects and actually deliver them and quantify what that value is. And in order to do that, whether or not you like it, you will have to do some level of lifting to get your customer to use that product, and a lot of that tends to be quite technical. And I think if I was advising a company that was in a bit of a mishmash of different things in their sales organization, I would encourage them to think about the key milestones that customers have to go through in order to achieve value and what that value is. Because often and certainly I've been in this position as a CFO and I've seen it so many times we can sell our products to everyone. It fixes so many different things. I'm like cool. But if you don't have two or three really defined value points that your customers on the whole are all trying to achieve, you're going to have a really hard time, because everything will need to be custom. So I think it comes down to who are you selling to? Who can be successful with your product Because, yes, you can sell everything to everybody, but it creates these kind of really unwieldy post-sales organizations where you need things like professional services, you need your implementation teams, you need customer success managers and account managers.

Speaker 2:

It's just really hard to manage and I think that most of the time, it's because leaders scale operation based on what they're currently doing now, rather than taking a step back and going okay, what do I want the customer to actually have, what are we trying to deliver them and how do we want to get from a to b? And and give it a bit more thought, rather than just going. Actually, our support ticket queue is too long. More support agent. Yeah, why is your support ticket queue too long? I think it. It's kind of chicken and egg and not enough companies spend enough time, in my opinion, periodically going. Is our business structure and is our team structure set up to enable our customers to achieve value with our product?

Speaker 1:

So if you were advising a company and you would want them to take those few steps back, where would you start in trying to understand what are the main milestones for customers? How many basic ones you would want to have to start without again re-engineering and complicating. Can we even put all the customers in a box of these? Are three things, or three milestones that every single customer should achieve within a year or so, or it's way too simplified. Every single customer should achieve within a year or so, or its way to simply simplified.

Speaker 2:

I don't think you can put every. I think this is where segmentation comes in, because we can't put everyone in the same box, sadly. Wouldn't that be easy? I'd love that. So it's um magic, can you imagine? I think you've got essentially and it really confirmed the type of customer you're selling to right.

Speaker 2:

So, having working at the moment with a lot of small to medium enterprise companies, the buying cycle for new business tends to be shorter because they tend to be more agile. There are problems they need to solve, but they need to experience value much more quickly because they don't have the runway, I would say, to be investing lots of money in new software solutions and then not seeing a value from it. So in that sense, onboarding becomes the most important part of their journey. I think it's the most important part of everyone's customer journey, but certainly for smaller companies, especially if they're having to do a lot of that together, that's the most important part and that's where you kind of need to augment your post-sales organization, I would say, around helping those customers establish and then achieve success quite quickly For more enterprise-able customers, because the sales cycle is so much longer, they're more invested in potentially it taking somewhat longer to onboard and for them to realize value. But then you've got all the different stakeholders, you've got various different project milestones that you might want to put into that.

Speaker 2:

So I think onboarding is definitely one of the big three. You want it to be not too short, that it seemed like it too easy, but you don't want it to be too long because you need to get somebody to value. It needs to hit all the mark. And I think that where segmentation comes down and into it, and where this information has to go back into your sales cycle, is that you need to be really clear about the value point that your customer is buying your product for, so that you can actually augment their onboarding towards that particular thing. And then that's something you can achieve.

Speaker 2:

And then I think there's a real lull in most customer journey between you know onboarding done, pick, then we're going to ignore you for nine months and then we'll come back when your renewal's coming up. And I think that's where segmentation and I was talking to someone about this the other day I love segmentation. It's got to be cool, it's got to make sense and it's also got to be relevant to that customer. And I think most of us and I would put myself in this box as well have had to segment our customers based on what they can and can't have, and it has to be a really pragmatic kind of cost of doing business decision rather than flipping it and segmenting it based on a way that's beneficial to customers, and I think that trying and you more?

Speaker 1:

can you elaborate on that more? Like, what is it that what they can and can't have based on, like the service that you would provide? Right, so you can have a designated cso. Now you can't, because your arr is lower exactly.

Speaker 2:

So it's all about. Okay, this is our cost of doing business, but here's the cutoff if you don't give us this much money, you're on your own. You've got the help desk, you've got um, the, you know the documentation, but you can't talk to anyone. And and we've we've all been there, right, we, we've only got so many hours in the day and you've only got a team that they're big. But the way that I like to think about segmentation now actually is okay. If I was taking all of my customers, regardless of ar, why wouldn't I lump them? Lump them, that's a really good way of putting it. Why wouldn't I segment them in a way that kind of speaks to the programming language that they're using, what they're trying to achieve as a value driver? Because I noticed this when I worked in the testing space.

Speaker 2:

Actually, it doesn't matter whether you're paying me $3,000 a year to do your testing or whether you're paying me $500,000 a year to do your testing on our platform. If you're using Nightwatch as a framework, for instance and I'm not going to pretend I'm technical, it's just a word I remember you have similar challenges. You're using the same strategy, you've got the same structures, so actually you want to try and create communities of customers and talk to your customers about shared challenges and newness in that space, with that particular structure and framework that keeps you relevant and interesting, and it doesn't really matter how much they pay you and, yes, customers who are paying you less are probably going to get a more light touch digital motion versus, you know, your enterprise customers, who get a lot more attention and support. But if you start thinking about, okay, how do we engage our customers about things that they care about? Because I think that's the other challenge in CF, is that we just like talking to them but we've got nothing interesting to say um, how do we engage them in things that are interesting, that move the needles, that might challenge their strategy or challenge their thinking or educate them in some interesting way across all of our different segments?

Speaker 2:

And I think that, instead of just slicing our, our books based on ARR or based on product mix or however we choose to do it operationally, if you start to think about it as more of a matrix model and you go, okay, well, this group of customers pay us lots of money and care about this particular thing, this group of customers also care about that thing, so they get the same content but it's just delivered in a different way and potentially on a different cadence. And I think it's the engagement. So I so I would say major milestones would be onboarding, obviously a renewal, and then there's a few kind of triggers for, hopefully, expansion within a customer account or potentially RIC identification, no-transcript time that matches their buying signals, that talks about the things they care about. We should be doing that in CS more consistently than I think we or I think a lot of people are at the moment.

Speaker 1:

Depending on the product. But very often I found myself thinking how customer success is, and should be, just mostly marketing. Really. When everything is fine, right, customers don't want to talk to anyone. They just have their job to do. There is no reason to pick up the phone. So they will always need support and they will always need those little nudges of wisdom and nurture and best practices and things that can really help them on their own time, when not in a way that they need to stop what they're doing, pick up the phone, etc. So definitely, marketing is a huge part of future of customer success.

Speaker 1:

But I love so much your thoughts about segmentation and thinking about all the previous companies where I work with or what I'm doing at the moment and how people segment. It's always based on number one, arr, right, because it is the first point of data that you have in the system after the deal is closed. So what you're talking about is amazing. But if we speak to CS leaders at the moment and they want to advocate different types of segmentation, what is the most important data to collect from customers and have them in the system so that could allow us to segment differently, because very often we want to do it in a different ways, but then allow us to segment differently, because very often we want to do it in a different ways, but then again you end up with just some data, such as ARR, that you are almost stuck and you can't segment those customers if you don't know enough about what are their pain points and what is it that they are looking to achieve.

Speaker 2:

That's, yeah, good point. So, within kind of your mid to enterprise customers ones you talk to more often I would always encourage my team of CSMs to be asking them questions about okay, what are you trying to do? What are your strategy? What product mix are you using? I think product mix, if you're looking for pure data, is a really good way of doing it, because if you've got more than one product line, you can kind of make some really clever assumptions, or at least useful assumptions, based on the things that they're using together, and you can look at things like usage and say, oh, if they're using this feature more than this feature, it's a good chance that they're doing this thing. And I think having all of the right data flags, particularly around feature utilization, because usage doesn't always equal value, but it's a fairly solid indicator, I would say. In most places I've worked, but it's more about nudging people up in something they may be not using as much or trying to understand why they are using it. And I think that collecting data it's always going to be easier when you're trying to collect verbatim or anecdotal data.

Speaker 2:

I think that for far too long, the concept of digital cs, or certainly low tier or low ARR. So all of the customers that get in the bucket, you know you don't pay enough, you can't speak to anybody. It's been about how do we engage with them purely digitally. You know what can we send them? Just like news at it, and just in time, and it's. I've tried to always encourage people to take that away and go. That's all really cool, but all of that content that you create for your digital segment, useful for all of your customers, for one you can reuse it, but two, what you really want out of a tech touch or a digital or a low touch or a low tier CFM is someone who gets the data flags from your product nice and early so that they can intervene and talk to customers on an ad hoc basis. It's not about removing the CSM, it's about putting them in just in time.

Speaker 2:

And I think the data flags that I would be looking for if I was tuning to segment would be things like utilization by product feature or product mix. In particular, it would be things like what are they actually engaging with? And it depends what sort of platforms and data that you have available, but for one of the companies that I've worked with, they had lots of interesting data that came out of their Pendo about things they were clicking on and things they were interacting with and all of those sorts of things. And again we come back to marketing and this is kind of data German, like if you're clicking on a link, you're clearly interested in something. I would encourage people to look that way and I think that it is really easy. Well, it's not, maybe easy is the wrong word.

Speaker 2:

But segmentation by ar I don't think will go anywhere because we all have a cost of doing business. There's a cost of delivering a server, but it depends what data you have. And I would always encourage product mix and product usage and feature utilization as a first step, because it tends to tell you really interesting things and then you can pick, like which customer should we talk to? Um to actually work out what they're trying to do? And then I've always done cohort assumption. So customers who are banks that spend this much money, they're all going to be interested in these things they all love, you know, security and stability and stuff like that. So you can make assumptions. I think just be kind of agile with it and try and work out what works for you, and it does depend on your customers and your product.

Speaker 1:

I would say and I really love how you are putting it in the context of a leader perhaps CS leaders, digital leaders, cs ops how to operationalize those segmentation and how to look at those different data points and then kind of bucket them together.

Speaker 1:

But what you're also implying and I really love it is that you're basically giving an agency to CSMs to segment their customers the more they know them, especially mid-market and enterprise customers. If you're having 10 accounts perfect, you can approach them all in very different ways and you can put them into cohorts and just arrange different types of messaging and different types of activities. That would be valuable for them, right. So I just love applying that kind of scale concept into the high touch because it's so much more interesting and you can do so much more. Plus, I believe customers are again more interested in talking to others and just learning as a collective rather than only speaking with their CSM. As much as CSM can be awesome, right, but there is so much more value for everybody and such a bigger win-win when you are a bit more creative in picking and choosing whom to connect together, sure, sure, and they want to talk to each other.

Speaker 2:

I've always found that about building communities your customers don't really care. They don't care if they're a bank or a broadcaster or a retailer. If they're all trying to do the same thing with the same framework, they want to talk to each other. They're actually trying to build those communities as well, whether you have the opportunity to do that as like a customer advisory thing, or whether you actually have an active community, connecting your customers is never, never, a bad thing, because they they will talk to each other and that provides them an additional value far and you know beyond what your product can do. If they know that they can go and find somebody to talk to about particular interesting technical thing, it gives you that element of stickiness, I would say, because you're actively fostering the idea of community.

Speaker 1:

And it's almost equally important as just providing the software, the service, which is incredibly important for customers. Emma, this is so, so interesting. I think we can speak forever about the strategy and segmentation and all of that putting it in a nice and cool package, which I really love. But as we are wrapping up, I would love listeners to hear from you what has been some of the most important lessons that you have learned in your career so far.

Speaker 2:

How to fail. I was very hard on myself as a child naturally, I think a lot of people were, because I tended to get good grades at school. So that was like always I can just do these things, high achievement, kind of that kind of story. And I think when I got into the world of work I realized very quickly that I didn't know what I was doing and it was only through experimentation which I would be came to play earlier in my life that you realize what you're up to. That there's an element of particularly some of the bigger companies that I've worked for.

Speaker 2:

You can't fail publicly because it makes you look weak or wrong or stupid or any of those things, and I think that it's about how you frame it and it's about how you deal with it from a mindset perspective, but also how you communicate it and the PR you put on yourself when you're going through things.

Speaker 2:

And the more teams I've built and the more people that I've advised, I'm like if you don't have one, if you can't demonstrate failure as a leader, I think you're never going to build the psychological safety in your team for your team to do cool things.

Speaker 2:

And two, if you can't control how you fail and if you and I suppose it comes down to bravery if you're not prepared to fail, you're not going to be pushing the, pushing the, the way you're saying it you're not going to be doing anything new and interesting.

Speaker 2:

But if you don't model failure at a leadership level, you will never have your team doing things like that, and I think all of the the thing that the biggest thing I've learned in my career is that leaders don't know everything. You're not expected to know everything, and half the time the easiest thing to do is hire someone who's better than you at your job almost immediately and get out of their way. But actually I've learned so much from all of the people that I work with just through giving them the space to try new cool things, and I had a really hard time with failure the first time, the first, many times I failed actually, and I think over the years I've learned that if you're not failing, you're not really doing anything brave, and it's that kind of mindset shift that's led me to do some of the coolest things in my career that I've managed to achieve.

Speaker 1:

This is fascinating and definitely related to you being a rebel. I just love that approach and this mindset and everybody should hear it. Just allow yourself to fail, Emma. This was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed it. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening. Next week new episode, Subscribe to the podcast and connect with me on LinkedIn so you're up to date with all the new episodes and the content I'm curating for you. Have a great day and talk to you soon.