The Randal Osché Podcast: Season 1 | Episode 19
In this episode of The Randall Osché Podcast, I sit down with Customer Success expert Lara Barnes to discuss the essential role of Customer Success and the value of “human-first” leadership in business. Lara shares her experiences in scaling customer success teams, developing customer-centric strategies, and building strong renewal processes. With a focus on supporting team growth and aligning company goals with customer needs, Lara offers valuable insights for leaders in any industry.
What You'll Learn:
Human-First Leadership: Discover Lara’s leadership style and her emphasis on supporting team growth for a positive impact on customers.
Creating Customer-Centric Cultures: How aligning every department with customer success enhances the customer experience and drives results.
Successful Renewal Strategies: The role of renewal teams in extending customer lifecycles and increasing company retention rates.
Building Seamless Customer Journeys: Lara’s approach to minimizing friction points in customer journeys for smooth and effective experiences.
Don’t miss this episode for an inside look at the elements of successful customer-focused business operations. Tune in to learn how these principles can transform your business.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Youtube, Podcast Index, Podcasts Addict, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
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Highlights
Customer-Centric Alignment: Successful customer teams require alignment across all business functions focused on delivering positive customer outcomes, especially in the SaaS industry.
Team Culture and Leadership: Strong leaders foster a collaborative culture with clear goals, which boosts both team productivity and retention. Supporting individual growth builds loyal, high-performing teams.
Customer Retention Over Acquisition: Retaining existing customers often takes fewer resources than gaining new ones. Selling products that align with customer needs enhances satisfaction and loyalty.
AI for Customer Experience: Leveraging AI can help businesses identify key customer touchpoints, prevent drop-offs, and improve customer outcomes in real time, especially important in a cost-conscious environment.
SHOW NOTES
Questions this conversation has Randall Pondering
"What can leaders do to create cultures where their teams feel empowered to grow and contribute meaningfully?"
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments!
And that's it for today's conversation here on the Randall Osché podcast. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope that you've enjoyed listening as much as we've enjoyed recording it.
Many many thanks to our guests today for sharing their knowledge, their experience and their life lessons. If you found today's conversation insightful, interesting, inspiring, please join our growing community by subscribing. Randall Osché podcast on your favorite podcast platform, and never ever miss another episode.
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The Randall Osché Podcast - Lara Barnes (Episode 20)
[00:00:00]
Lara: My leadership style is very open, honest what I say I do. I have those people for a period of time, and I need to do the best thing by those individuals to help them get to their next job, and that's the rewarding piece of being a leader, because you're there to actually help those individuals grow. And along the journey, you're building something together, and everyone gets something out of it, and everyone has the opportunity to tell that story when they go for their next interview.
AI: Hello, and welcome to the Randall Osché podcast, where we create a safe space for meaningful and thought provoking conversations. We have long form interviews with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, artists, and change makers in order to deconstruct their journeys and to pass out valuable life lessons and life changing perspectives for listeners like yourself.
So that you can, as Randall says, learn their lessons without their scars. So, whether you're tuning in on your daily
[00:01:00] commute, or during a workout, or cooking dinner, we are happy to have you join us. So, take a seat, relax, grab a cup of tea, and join the conversation. Now, let's dive into this week's episode.
You made it
Randall: Laura Barnes, welcome to the show. For those of my listeners who don't know you yet, why don't you go ahead and take a brief moment and introduce yourself.
Lara: Thanks. Now, I appreciate being here. So I have run customer success teams and built renewal teams in my previous role. I set up a whole organization from scratch and built it over seven years, running 460,003,000 customers. We ended up having 90 people in the end. So I've scaled
[00:02:00] something to a point where I know I can go do it again.
And I had a lot of fun on the way and we built an incredible team with an amazing culture. So how a customer success team aligns with the rest of the business is really important, but it's really about how the company think about. the customer and how they align their business unit in order to deliver those customer outcomes.
And that's what's missing across many of the SAS businesses. And that's where I think a lot of them are struggling. And that's what I'd love to sit and talk about with you.
Randall: Well, I would love to hear about it. So thank you for being on. Couple things I want to define. What is customer success?
Lara: Yeah, so I have been working within a business that sells technology to customers and we run the customer relationship and help that customer to with their implementation, adoption, and usage of that product over the lifetime of that
[00:03:00] customer.
And customer success has been born out of, you know, past 15 years of building these customer success teams. They used to be called account managers in the old world, where sales individuals would go and sell technology and then pass over to an account manager that would manage that existing business.
But now most account managers and account execs sales individuals are out there selling to those customers. And there is a team called customer success that helps manage those relationships and works very closely with professional services and support and all those other post sales functions.
Randall: And you also said renewals as well.
You said something about building a customer success team and renewals. So tell me, define that part.
Lara: So I sat under the chief revenue officer with the sales team and I was running customer success, but we built out the renewals team as well. So there are many companies that
[00:04:00] the account exec actually runs the renewal.
And the opportunity to cross sell and upsell, but I had the opportunity to build out the renewables team from scratch because we hadn't. actually had a function within the business that was actively managing those renewals when they were coming up. So customers were either buying a 12 month or three year agreement and it was a billing process that we used.
So we had, you know, a lot of revenue just being invoiced rather than We're not talking to our customers. We're not upselling them. We weren't focused on extending their time from 12 months to three years. We were just sending them another invoice. There's also other opportunities within those contracts to uplift those contracts yearly and negotiate with that customer if you stayed with us more than 12 months, or you extend your contract to three years.
You know, will uplift you by 5 percent a year, but if you extended it to [00:05:00] five years, that percentage could be negotiable. So it's about how you work with that customer to get a longer lifetime value out of that customer.
Randall: So in the positions that you've had in building out the customer success team and the renewals team previously in your career I would say that's a leadership position, correct?
You're an influential member of the organization, putting your thumbprint on the organization. I was going to say this question sort of to the end, but I figured now is a good opportunity as any. What does leadership mean to you and maybe what's your leadership style?
Lara: Well, I love leadership. I love leading people and I've, I've built teams and mentored, coached and managed people from very, very early on in my career.
So my leadership style is very open, honest what I say I do. So you need to be very much structured in that way. And I am doing a presentation in November at a big conference. And it's [00:06:00] about human first leadership and what does that really mean and how does it help in delivering the customer promise?
My focus on leadership is about, I have those people for a period of time, and I need to do the best thing by those individuals to help them get to their next job, and that's the rewarding piece of being a leader, because you're there to actually help those individuals grow. And along the journey, you're building something together, and everyone gets something out of it, and everyone has the opportunity to tell that story when they go for their next interview.
But a lot of the people that worked for me stayed with me for years, because we had such an incredible culture, because we were very supportive and collaborative, but we had very clear plans of what we were going to do year over year. And we smashed them. That's, what's the most exciting thing about doing something together with a team of people.
And people saw what we were doing was having an impact on the organization, but also they were getting a lot out of it themselves. And we had very clear ideas as to [00:07:00] how we worked with those individuals to help grow them with competency and behavior frameworks for their roles, so they knew where they were and what they needed to do next, as well as having personal development plans.
So those are the things that are most important when leading people is to ensure that you're doing the best by them, but also the best by the company in the frameworks that you're working within.
Randall: Yeah, excellent. I'll keep my piece short, but that resonates a lot with me. I always as being a leader of people myself in my first leadership position and where I was in charge of people, I didn't know what my leadership style was.
And I would hear different people say different things, but I would distill it down to, you're responsible for coaching, managing, leading, and influencing the people that you're in charge of. And each one of those things is different, right? Some people have the misconception that, being a manager is being a leader.
And it's the same thing. It's not the same thing. So I'm glad to hear you define [00:08:00] it the way that you did. The other thing I'd like to add is I think it's a I mean, I'm sure many people have said this, but I'm pretty sure there's a Richard Branson quote out there is something to the effect of take care of your people and your people will take care of your customers.
So maybe that's part of like the human first leadership style.
Lara: I think a lot of it stems around kindness, right? If you have the right values as a leader and and they see those qualities in you, those individuals are going to be inspired to get up and work for you every day, as well as do their job, which is to manage those customers and a lot of it is very difficult.
Because, and we'll talk about it in terms of how companies are structured and what hinders them in order for the customer to achieve what they need to achieve. And it is hard. The people that work for me had a really hard job and you need to be very empathetic to what they were doing every day because they're at the forefront of those [00:09:00] customers dealing with all the problems all the time.
With, you know, the product or the systems you're working in or anything that can go wrong. It's how you end up helping those customers to achieve what they need to achieve within the parameters that you're working in. And that is hard in some organizations. That was something that, you know, we did, it was difficult, but we all had fun along the way and we laughed about how hard it was.
I also wrote that down from the beginning of the circle back to is how important is having fun along the way. I mean, I go to work every day like everybody else does. There needs to be a reason why you get out of bed in the morning. And you need to be inspired by that reason.
Otherwise, You know, you go down a black hole and you think, what, what am I doing here? There was very few people that left my team over those seven years. And we all did it for each other as well. There was such a great sense of camaraderie and team [00:10:00] ethos around what we were doing. It was just, it was a lot of fun.
And I think it was fun because when you look back, you saw how much we actually achieved and we were running pretty fast for thelast three years. So it was pretty tiring. But I have a very open way of managing and I used to talk to people quite openly and tell them what was happening and why it was happening and how we needed to move through that situation.
But we were all doing it together. I think that's the difference. You don't feel like you're on an island on your own. Sometimes leadership's pretty lonely, but when you know that you're doing it with a team of people that want to do it with you. You have a belief behind you as a leader that it can happen.
Randall: I think this would be important to define a few more things before we get into the rest of what we wanted to cover today. I think part of that revolves around this term that a lot of people say, which is near and dear to my heart, of course, but value. So what's your definition of value or how do you think of value when [00:11:00] it comes to say SAS sales?
Lara: In the most simplistic way is a customer buys something because they see that it solves the user case for them and a problem within their business. The value is delivering that and making it happen. in the way that you've sold it to them. Now that user case may change along the way too, and those businesses need to pivot, but that is also important in order to help that customer achieve what they can achieve with what they've bought within those parameters, to get the value.
If you don't get the value, that customer's not going to renew.
Randall: I've thought about this a lot and I try to make complex things simple in my mind to make sense to me. But I would say, I'd like to get your opinion on this, but It's the benefits and outcomes that the thing delivers and not how the thing delivers it, right?
The thing would be software or it could be a service or it could be a widget you buy on Amazon. But it's what it [00:12:00] provides you and not how it does it. What do you think about that?
Lara: I agree. And to get to that outcome can be pretty difficult. Right. And it's how you also help that person who's bought that product get there because they could buy a product.
I've seen it many times. They could buy a product. It doesn't meet their whole user case. They thought. Because perhaps the salesperson has elevated what it can do. And now you're in a position with that customer to help them get what they need out of it during that period of time. Now that journey you go on with that customer to help them is as important as delivering that outcome.
Because they're the ones that are going through it. They're next on the line as a customer. And they need to prove out. That they have bought this platform in order for them to deliver something and you helping them and making it as easy as possible by plugging into the right people within the company is as important as the outcome.
In fact, those [00:13:00] relationships become far deeper, the longer you go with those customers, because they can see that you're really there helping them.
Randall: Talk to me a little bit about the customer journey and how you would define that.
Lara: So the customer journey is probably the most important thing a company should be doing in defining out where all those different touch points are for that customer, those moments that matter, as well as all of those pitfalls that that customer can fall into, and where all the gaps are. I did this at my previous company in in outlining where all those gaps were across our flagship product, and then went back and worked with all of those teams in order to fill in all of those gaps so that those customers can actually really move through in a smoother way so that those customers don't even experience it.
What it should be is it should be a fluid process. Where that customer doesn't even see you moving from the account exec to the [00:14:00] customer success person to the product person or the engineering person that's sorting out something in support for them to professional services and helping them build out something, you know, there shouldn't be any ability for that customer to fall through any cracks or have a disjointed experience.
Randall: So customer journey and customer life cycle, we're using those interchangeably, or would you define those?
Lara: Yeah, it's the same thing.
Randall: What would be a good example of a frictionless customer journey or customer life cycle look like?
Lara: The customer has a point of contact. They know that that point of contact could be their customer success manager.
They have got to a point where they signed the contract and the systems internally are managing all of the different processes that customer would need to go through. It is fluid and they're using, they could be using Salesforce, they could be using Gainsight. They could be using ServiceNow to interchangeably work and [00:15:00] track through a workflow to understand all of those different moments so that you can understand how that customer is engaging with the product or the development cycle they're in, or the adoption phase that they're in, what they're not doing, what they need to do.
Where that customer could be stuck. You can track all of those different things end to end and have a clear understanding to put flags in risk flags. opportunity flags, you know, there could be contractual flags, there could be lots of different calls to action that could be put in place in order to ensure that customer is going through.
When you're managing at scale, you need that, you need that full understanding and fluidity. Across the data, the processes and the systems, but when you start to elevate, you go up in how that company should be operating. Every team should be having a true focus or KPI on [00:16:00] something customer as a customer metric.
And that could be tracking customer lifetime value. So an AE brings in a customer. But they're not quite the ideal customer profile. So they should be deducted a 20 percent off of their commission, because it doesn't fit the ideal customer profile. Because if it did fit the ideal customer profile, that customer is going to fluidly go through.
And without any bumps or ability for customization in the platform, it's an easier process. It's more profitable as a customer to actually manage, but you know, it depends on how that company wants to run. So, but my, the ideal way is that you start at the top with all of the KPIs and the C suite have across every team.
A metric that is measured around the customer outcomes so that you can really understand how you're doing when customers go from one department to another through the systems. Those KPIs set the precedent for how those teams [00:17:00] interact and work. A lot of it should be like workflow systems and a lot of it should be data alignment across the whole business, as well as utilization of AI in there in order to flag up when things are going wrong with certain customers.
So you can jump on those. At the moment, there's just so many disconnected and fragmented pieces across that whole life cycle journey, because everyone is measured differently. They're all measured by their own departmental KPIs. Nothing is really aligned to the customer and what these businesses are really seeing is that customers over the past couple of years have a higher expectation of what they want out of the technology.
They're under a lot of pressure internally from their own CFO to get the value out of that technology. Everyone's tech stack has been reviewed because can we get rid of any more cost? Everything's about margin and delivering value. [00:18:00] so those customers need to really deliver what they need to deliver from the technology they purchase, otherwise they'll just chop you in because they can.
It's easy to unplug a SAS product and plug in another one when your competitors are knocking on their door saying, come over for 50 percent less.
Randall: Just to circle back for the listeners KPIs, key performance indicators, I don't want anybody to have to Google search anything. No worries.
AI: Let's take a quick break from today's episode. If you're enjoying the conversation, please take a moment to look us up. You can find Randall on Instagram at Randall Osché, that's spelled at R A N D A L L O S C H E.
And you can catch the show notes and other resources at randallosche.com and now back to the episode
Randall: so one of the things that I you touched on this a little bit and we can expand on the thought, [00:19:00] but through a lot of organizations, like you said, there's different departments handling different aspects of the customer journey and because they have different responsibilities, their key performance indicators are different.
Their requirements are different and therefore they're tracked differently. Right? So they have their own silo, if you will. Then space that they play in and everybody, you know, say there's five groups, every group plays in their own silo, but they're all working with the same customer. But unless you do something to bring those silos together and you're all working from the same page, playing from the same playbook it can be disjointed and fragmented and not provide the smoothest customer journey.
So just elaborate a little bit about that. Maybe your thoughts on how that happens, your thoughts on how to correct it. And the thing that I would love to hear is how and why do companies get this wrong?
Lara: [00:20:00] I think over the past 10 years, it's the chief customer officer. At that C suite level has been a role that has really started to be more prevalent and come in and work alongside the Chief Revenue Officer.
Usually it would have been the Chief Revenue Officer that would have run everything, would have run new business, existing business, renewals have cross sell upsell to those existing customers. But that Chief Customer Officer's come in to look at how the post sales organization operates. That was a great change because then there was a real distinction between the sales team and then the post sales team and how you manage those existing customers.
There's different flavors of that. Some of those post sales teams might run renewals, some of them might not, but post sales usually is customer success, professional services, support. Maybe knowledge and learning. So those customer success teams [00:21:00] usually are measured on managing those existing businesses and the existing customer set running driving advocacy.
So references focusing in on getting that customer to adopt and consume and helping them through that renewal. So it's a a non event. It just goes through because the customer's happy. Obviously the happiness scale could be CSAT could be NPS. There's the types of responsibilities that that customer success team have.
But I think over a period of time, things have changed and moved so quickly since COVID, you know, we had huge growth and then, you know, a huge lull and we're still trying to come out of that. In terms of companies, not looking at technology as much they've embedded down to a few rather than having many and paying for many, because they needed to cut the cost.
Margin has become a lot, and much more of a focus for many of these businesses. And so therefore, you know, we've seen cost cutting happening, not [00:22:00] just from a technology perspective, but from the people perspective too. So over that period of time as new business hasn't been coming in as fast, the net retention of those customers as well in them wanting to stay, but also growing that existing business has also fallen.
And that's a position we're in. It's because we're not growing those companies because they're either not getting what they need out of the technology and getting those outcomes so that they, you know, go to a competitor, they decide to leave, or they start to take things more in house.
So that they can reduce the cost overall. So over a period of time, it's really started to affect many of these SAS businesses. And I said earlier, companies just don't need to stay with those companies anymore, those vendors. So they can leave. It's much easier now being in the cloud to unplug in one, in one vendor and plug into another.
So, because that is so easy, you [00:23:00] really do need to focus in on retention of your customer base and how you align the whole organization to the customer and understanding that customer journey is so important. So you can make the journey far simpler and smoother. To take out all of those bumps.
Randall: Yeah, I would agree.I transitioned industries. I previously worked in, banking, finance and wealth management. And the thing I realized in wealth management that translate also to this business is it requires far fewer resources. To keep an existing customer than to land a new customer.
Randall: To me, most companies the landing new customers is overweighted versus on maintaining the ones that you have. I'm still trying to figure out that. I'm sure there's a reason for it, but I don't, I don't know what it is, but just from a, you know, an observation standpoint, if you're talking about.
You have to have business development people. You have to have account executives that have to [00:24:00] invest a ton of time, energy, and effort to find somebody to talk to. So you're paying their salaries. You got to pay, you know commissions once they land a sale. All of this time, energy, and effort, all of these resources and money go into getting a new customer.
And then it always seems that customer success. And the retaining of that customer is sort of an afterthought. Yeah, but it's much easier to keep them and keep them happy. I shouldn't say it's easier. It requires far fewer resources to retain them than trying to go out and replace them.
Lara: Definitely. And if the right types of customers are sold, that technology and they can achieve their outcomes. Those are the customers that are the happiest because you've gone in and sold a product that meets a user case. That ideal customer profile should be, you know, bonused that AE should get a further 20 percent on
their commission in order to bring [00:25:00] in that customer because the longevity and the possibility of longevity of that customer is far greater than one that doesn't fit that ideal customer profile. So it's how you set up your whole go to market around driving the right outcomes for your customers, whether it be the, how you're measuring those teams towards customer as to how you're commissioning and bonusing your salespeople, how, and what's most important around, you know, the marketing to those customers too, as well as the stickiness of selling them professional services to make sure that they achieve what they need to achieve, or they have a great partner.
In the market, helping them do that. And you've actually trained that partner in the right way to achieve. You've put across your best practices to that partner so they can achieve those goals for that customer. It's multifaceted. But it needs to be all hinging on how you drive those customer outcomes and all those teams need to be in a [00:26:00] flow.
With the data and the processes and the systems in order to track all of those moments where you can flag up what could be happening or a risk or an opportunity to go in and sell more. If that customer is doing great and looks like other customers that are also achieving their outcomes, that's also an advocate as a customer that can help you stand on stage or, you know, do a prospecting call for you too.
I truly believe if you're aligning the whole organization towards delivering to the customer, the rest of it comes, I think so many of these companies are so revenue focused in their own KPIs that they're trying to achieve. That they forget about their whole purpose of what they're there for.
And in my role, it's been amazing because I feel like I sit in the middle of this whole process and I see it, you know, end to end from how we go to market and we do our marketing and we build product all the way through to how
[00:27:00] we, you know, go sell it and deliver it. And then work with the customer through support and professional services to renewal.
And I see everything end to end. There's so many moments where customers can fall down certain cracks going from team to team. You can really start to iron out those if you're tracking all of those and measuring it. Then you can put flags in, in order to help those teams know where they should be focused rather than, I think at the moment, it's just chaotic in, in some systems and companies that I have seen where you just don't have that underlying cadence and flow of how the business should be operating.
It's very, you know, there's so much friction between different teams and, it stops and it. There needs to be a different way of operating.
Randall: I would agree. I think for various reasons I think people in organizations focus on the things they can wrap their [00:28:00] mind around the easiest and those things aren't necessarily the most important things.
They're just the, easiest. I think another potential reason is that say, if you have like seven different departments, you have seven different leaders of those departments and everybody's managing to their own KPIs, their own bonuses and their own best interests. Not to say that they shouldn't do that, and that that's not important,
but
Randall: there has to be, those have to be aligned to where the organization wants to go and how you best want to serve your customer while also being able to, build your career and, you know, build your resume, but you should be aligned to how you're best serving the customers that paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or pounds to get this piece of software from your organization.
Yeah.
Randall: I think that we've touched on a few of these points as we've had the conversation so far, but maybe just a few quick bullet points of why are customers not getting the value from their SAS vendors and [00:29:00] yeah, what are a few of those bullet points that you say are why your customer is not getting the value from their SAS vendors?
Lara: I think. It starts with setting the right expectations as to what you can achieve with what you're buying and when is one. Also, I think these companies aren't set up to deliver value to all of those customers because of the way they're operating and they're structured. I also believe that it depends on the user case that you're trying to achieve.
Some companies, buy technology and actually their user cases change, or they don't do the right due diligence on the product. And it actually, it can't deliver what they need it to deliver. And then there are others that want to do highly customizable. Platforms, which, you know, it's very heavy, but the expectation in time and how long that takes and who can help deliver that is also, a hindrance as well as I think some of these vendors don't.
help their partners enough by telling them what the best practices as to how [00:30:00] to implement and get the best out of the technology for the customer to actually achieve. There are so many pitfalls for customers. That's why having customer success teams and professional services teams in that post sales organization and the support team are critical to help those customers get to where they need to be.
They try their best. Most definitely to help those customers and put in so many hours to assist them. I think a lot of it is so many things that can go wrong when implementing technology. I think in order to make it much smoother for those customers to achieve. You know, and for the company to achieve a high level of customer outcome, it's about how they're structuring their internal processes in order to help in their operational cadence to ensure that they help that customer to a point where they achieve what they need to achieve.
The revenue comes from that because if you've got a happy customer, they have achieved value. They're going to buy more from you. They're going to [00:31:00] recommend you. Yeah. When you lose a customer, you've lost so much. You've lost the opportunity cost of upselling them more technology. Your competitor has just got that customer off of you.
So you're building your competitor's market share. And also you spent a lot of money acquiring that customer that you paid out to the AEs and in commissions. And, you know, you've just literally, you've lost that opportunity. Opportunity to manage that customer longterm and achieve their results with them.
Randall: Yeah. So you mentioned that one of the pitfalls is that the teams of an organization that's selling the software, they're not aligned end to end to cover the full life cycle of that customer journey. So how would you mitigate or avoid some of those pitfalls of an organization where teams aren't aligned end to end?
How would you go about aligning teams so they're all working to get to the same outcome?
Lara: They try, they try their hardest with the fragmented leadership, the [00:32:00] fragmented data, the misalignment of the systems in order to do that, but they're just not winning. And I think there's better ways of doing it.
So they spend a lot, these companies spend a lot of money on, you know, big technology like Salesforce and ServiceNow and, you know, customer success platforms out there in the marketplace. And there are multiple different technologies that these companies are using, but really only they're using 20 to 30 percent of them.
If they really opened and unlocked the capability of those platforms that they're using to help run their businesses internally, And then they aligned all of those teams to specific, you know, customer goals, metrics, then they aligned all of their KPIs, but also the systems in how they're tracking the customer journey across all of those teams, but also those systems.
So everything is fluid and operates as one to help that customer [00:33:00] through. That's how I think it should operate. And I believe AI can really help us cut through some of the, I was going to say noise, but it's more identification of some of the, you know, moments in those journeys where we're not seeing it fast enough that the customer isn't achieving what they need to achieve or they're stuck.
And I believe that. You know, we should be utilizing AI in a better way, but our data needs to be aligned. And when you go into any company, there are so many misconceptions. Everyone talks about how data should be, you know, a flowing capability end to end, but so many companies still haven't cracked that nut.
And I think it's how you're structuring the team to operate and how you're driving their metrics to what they need to achieve with the alignment of the [00:34:00] operational capability of the company with those sales forces and game sites and service nows and how all also NetSuite and all of the finance systems.
How they all operate as one customer life cycle.
Randall: Yeah, excellent. With that said, who should be responsible for managing the customer experience across the C suite?
Lara: Great question. I believe it starts at CEO and the CEO giving the mandate to Somebody internally to work across all of those teams to align it.
So it should sit with the chief customer officer as if there is one, or it should sit with the chief revenue officer if customer sits within that org. So there needs to be a mandate, a team that is usually there's a sales operations team. But that sales operations team, they could be in a marketing operations team as well that doesn't report into that team.
There could be a product operations team, they might be a customer success operations team. All of those operations [00:35:00] teams need to be working together, needs to be one across the whole business to help align all of that flow with all of the different data that comes out from those systems on your customers.
So that you can identify. Where and how your customer is moving through that life cycle and where the risks and opportunities are on that customer.
Randall: Excellent. Before we wrap up today, I want to thank you for your time and your passion for your field. But where can if any of the listeners want to find you or find out more information about you or reach out to you?
Where can they find you at or contact you at?
Lara: Yeah, I mean you can find me on LinkedIn. I have an active profile on LinkedIn. It's linkedin. com slash Lara Kelly. I'm under my maiden name, but it's Lara Barnes and you can link in with me, send me a message. I come up as 2024 winner for outstanding women in customer [00:36:00] success.
So you'll see that on my banner and that's me.
Randall: So tell me a little bit about that award. I saw that earlier.
Lara: Yeah, that was, that was pretty special. Actually. I went in for that award and it was a global award. I really wasn't expecting to be a spotlight winner.
And there was three of us and I was one of them and I was very happy and pleased about it. There were people pinging me that the post had gone out on LinkedIn and I was on holiday and people were actually sending me messages. I didn't know them. And I was like, I don't know, I didn't understand.
You know, why you're sending me this message, and I forgot I'd even applied to go in for this, and it was a a script that one of my team had written for me on the success of what we'd done over the past seven years, and he, you know, he wrote this piece, About me. It was pretty great to have somebody else write something about you.
With all the successes that we'd achieved over those seven years and the growth of the team and what we'd done year over year. And I, yeah, I won it and [00:37:00] I was just so proud. It was a great mark in my career to kind of say, wow, you know, I've achieved something pretty special and been recognized for it.
Randall: Good. Congratulations.Any final thoughts, Laura?
Lara: What do you do it for? What do you do your podcast for?
Randall: Well it's, I mean, mostly as like a hobby, so. I had an executive coach, he was actually on the podcast a few episodes ago, Don Asher, and in reading one of Don Asher's books, it was, you get jobs by talking to people. And I read that years ago and like it was mind blown of like here, here I am thinking that hard work, dedication, competency gets people jobs, but you get jobs by talking to people just like we were talking about, the SSI score and social media presence, like that's putting yourself in touch with opportunities that's not making yourself the most competent, hardest working people.
It's just getting yourself in the right environment, so to speak,
Lara: Yeah,
Randall: online. So I do this to network [00:38:00] with people. I'm still trying to figure this out and refine how I do things, but the general podcast, I'll call it.
Is about talking to ordinary people who in my opinion are doing extraordinary things. You know, I interviewed a boutique hotel owner from Lisbon, Portugal.Fascinating story. Him and his wife left their corporate jobs, went backpacking across the world for a year.
Had the epiphany like, we want to do more of this and less corporate work. So our deadline is I'm going to turn 50. And we're not going to be in this corporate world anymore. We need to come up with a business that we can do that allows us to have the lifestyle that we want to have. And they figured it out.
So it's just, you know, fascinating story, I guess from fascinating people. But those are the types of conversations I like to engage in. And along the way I'm meeting a ton of great people that are now part of my network. It's been really, it's been really good.
I'm not only learning how the podcast along the way, but I [00:39:00] guess from these conversations, I get to parse out the lessons they learned. So I learned from them as well, as well as like my listeners learn from them as also starting to see some similarities and commonalities between the people that havereached a level of what I would consider success.
And how they've gotten there and a few things I've noticed is everybody's had support along the way. And everybody's put in their 10, 000 hours to get to where they're at.Nobody's been an overnight success. They all have had support. Nobody's done it on their own. And they've all grinded it out to some extent at some point in time in their journey.
So. That's why I do it. And Then from a business standpoint, like, I think you saw me on like episodes I did with Chris Taplin. Those are business bites, like business centric, which is a little bit different from the standard podcast. And then I'm working on starting. A new series of like business value consulting for the same reasons that you said it's important to have your social presence [00:40:00] of, you know, this person is a thought leader in the space.
Yeah. No, cool. I mean, it's exactly it, like I said, about the social presence thing. I think I have to carry on doing it. Not because I want to be a consultant later. I think, I don't know what I want to do with it, to be honest with you, but I just know it's important now and you have to keep going.
Yeah. I think had that somebody on the pod and he did an interview last week. I think he has like a saying that's a philosophy, like givers gain. This is like self serving for me because I enjoy it, but I also like that the guest sees this as a value add to them.
And that through these efforts that they think that I'm providing value to them by having them on the podcast, sharing it, producing some clips, whatever it is. And you know, networks are good, but being an active member who reciprocates. And your network is even better, so I hope to be the person that's reciprocating.
Lara: Yeah. There's a great book called The Go Giver. Have you read that one? It's only a little book, but it's quite [00:41:00] easy to read. That's a cool little bit. Yeah, and that's similar to that about giving back.
Randall: Yeah.
Lara: We've had a great chat and I really appreciate the opportunity to come and have this discussion. So thank you.
Randall: I appreciate you being here.
We'll include all of Laura's information in the show notes, so you'll have an opportunity to click, like, follow, connect with her on LinkedIn. But really appreciate you spending the time with me today and educating me and my listeners on customer success.
Lara: Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.
Randall: And that's it for today's conversation here on the Randall Osché podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.
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