Shawn Livermore is startup founder, entrepreneur, and tech consultant. With 21 years of consulting for over 34 clients, his body of work includes large-scale enterprise-level custom software implementations and high-volume web-based, cloud-based architectures & implementations. 

I talked to Shawn about his new book, Average joe: Be the silicon valley tech genius and his Slow create framework, which anyone can use to become a genius in their field.

More about Shawn:

* The Book: Average Joe

* The Slow Create Framework

* On Twitter: @shawnypants

Kristen Hayer is the founder and CEO of The Success League and a board member of the Customer Success Leadership Network. Kristen and I argued about customer success budgets, plans, forecasts. And since it’s planning season, we thought we’d help you put your forecasts together and go get them approved. 

More about Kristen:

* Her website: The Success League

* On Linkedin

* One of Kristen’s podcasts: Strike Deck Radio

* Kristen’s other podcast: Reading for Success

Mark Donnigan designs and executes marketing playbooks that produce real business results for early and growth stage technology startup companies. We talked about go-to-market engineering (what’s that?), anchoring customers to you as a category king, Christopher Lochhead (my favorite marketing podcast), how to spend that money you just raised, and we almost got to the “self-organizing buyer," but ran out of time.

More about Mark:

* His website: Growthstage.marketing

* On Linkedin

Irene Lefton returns to talk about her latest article, Five Steps a VP of Customer Success Needs to Get Started. As a customer success influencer and advisor, Irene is asked regularly to help startups design action plans for a new head of customer success. After building numerous plans, Irene noticed patterns. So, she built a framework. 

The first and biggest and hardest step in her framework is called, “Listen and Learn.” 

It’s the first step because you’d be a fool to start making customer success decisions before you understand the lay of the land. 

It’s the biggest step because it requires a lot of time and energy to meet with all the right people (fellow employees and customers). 

It's the hardest step because a motivated, type A, hard-charging, action-oriented customer success leader wants to make things happen right NOW, not sit around listening to people for 90 days. 

But, as Irene suggests, by slowing down in the short term, you can speed up in the long term and save yourself a ton of time. Not to mention avoid mistakes. 

When starting anything new, don’t leap into action. Leap into listening and learning. 

More about Irene:

* On Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irenelefton/

* Five Steps a VP of CS Needs to Get Started: https://customersuccessnetwork.com/five-steps-a-vp-of-cs-needs-to-get-started/

* Customer Success Leadership Network: http://customersuccessnetwork.com/

The last time I talked to Nils Vinje, it was on Episode 197, and we talked about his new great leadership book,“The 30 Day Leadership Playbook: Your Guide to Becoming the Leader You Have Always Wanted to Be.” In it, Nils talks about four pillars of leadership. The third pillar is leading with communications, and this one got to me. 

In particular, the part of leading with communications called “the power of frameworks.” I spend a lot of time asking Nils about framework-thinking on the last episode. So much so that Nils suggested we do another episode in which he would help me with one of my frameworks. 

So that’s what we did. 

A live coaching session. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had been working on a framework to describe how we would grow one of our business units at ServiceRocket. I wasn’t calling it a framework, but I was using it as a mechanism for communicating our strategy, progress towards our goals, and to give the exec team a one slide description of how we would achieve our goals. 

I kept coming back to it. Using the language in it. Referencing it. Showing it on every slide presentation I gave for months. 

I showed it to Nils and he critiqued it. Asked me uncomfortable questions. And helped me think through how to use to more effectively too communicate.

That’s what this episode is: Nils helping me improve my leadership communication skills with framework-thinking.

When you listen to our conversation, you will think to yourself, “I need to do this. I have been struggling with how I can improve my communication skills, especially with my leadership team. This is it. I gotta learn this framework thinking. I gotta buy Nils’ book.” 

I am sold on this framework thinking idea. And I think you will be too. 

More a about Nils

* Nils Vinje is the founder and CEO of 30DayLeadership.com.

* Link to the 30 Day Leadership Quiz that Nils talked about: https://30dayleadership.com/quiz

* To order a copy of Nils’ book, please visit: 30dayleadership.com.

You are not getting the most out of your people team to deliver the best service you can to your customers. And Colleen Blake, VP of People at Dremio, is here to help. 

Most leaders of customer teams are putting together hiring requests because their teams are overwhelmed. “My team is going to burn out if we don’t hire more people. Then we’ll lose them. And our customers.” 

That’s how most of us hire. 

That’s the wrong way to hire. 

First of all, it is reactive. We should want to be proactive. I mean, the first of the seven habits of highly effective people is “Be proactive” for Pete’s sake. It’s the first one. 

Second, hiring people because our current team is busy exposes that we have a complete lack of understanding for how our business works. How can we run a business, if we don’t know how it works? 

We can’t.

So, Colleen Blake is here to help. 

She offers two ideas for how to partner with our respective people teams to become more proactive, understand our businesses better, and deliver better service to our customers. 

Idea #1: If your team is overwhelmed, it might not be a staffing problem

Colleen suggests you might want to question whether your team is working on the right things. You, as a leader, might need to simply give your team permission to prioritize some work and say ’no’ to other work.

Yes, manager.

That’s on you.

Your sales team might be busy bringing in customers, but are they bringing in the right customers? Your customer success team might be working hard helping customers use your product, but are they helping customers use the right parts of the product? 

Really examine company priorities and ruthlessly make sure your team is working only on things that progress toward company priorities. 

Idea #2: Develop a staffing model

The worst thing we can do is hire people because we are busy. If we don’t have a model for determining why we need to hire, when we need to hire, and who we need to hire, then we wake up one morning with too much headcount, wonder what happened, and have to lay people off. 

Colleen suggests starting with the customer and work backwards until you know how many people you have in your talent pipeline.

That looks something like this:

* Understand what it takes to get a customer up and running.

* Look at your team’s capacity. How many customers can one person deal with successfully?

* Look at current sales pipeline to see how many new customers might sign up and when and how people people you will need on your team and when.

* Look at how long it takes to get a new employee up and running. 

* Look at your talent pipeline to know how many possible people you could hire and when. 

Take answers from each of the above, do a little math, and “voila” you have a staffing model. One that will impress your executive team, and one that will help you partner with your people team better to get you the team you need to help your customers. 

Start with the customer and work backwards from there.

More about Colleen:

* On Linkedin

* Her podcast (with Eric Quick): Bathtime 2 Boardroom

* Dremio

Rav Dhaliwal is an investor and venture partner at Crane Venture Partners, and he wrote an article recently called, There’s no such thing as post sales. You might be thinking, as I was thinking, “Wait a minute, of course there’s post sales. We have pre-sales (marketing and sales), which is everything that happens before the sales is made. And then there is post sales (customer success, professional services, support), which is everything that happens after the sale.”

Every software company has this.

We need both to be successful, don’t we?

We do. Dhaliwal says so in his article...

To truly have any chance of becoming a company that can grow to millions in (sustainable) recurring revenue, you not only need a great product that you can market and sell effectively, you really have to figure out (and invest early in) how you are going to keep and grow those customers forever.

Go to market is half the battle. Customer success is the other half.

See.

We need both.

But here’s where Dhaliwal’s article, and our conversation, gets interesting.

Customer lifetime value (LTV) is a critical number to know for each customer. It guides how much we invest in sales and marketing to find new customers, and how much we invest to retain and grow existing customers. In some sense, LTV is the ultimate team measure of success because it is a barometer for all of the following:

* Did we sell to the right customers?

* Did the implementation satisfy both the buyer and the user?

* Did the customer achieve first value in a reasonable time frame?

* Is the customer achieving the milestones in the success plan?

* Is the customer showing signs of using the produce more, using more of it, and using it more often?

Positive answers to all of these questions generally leads to a strong and growing relationship with customers.

LTV goes up.

Positive answers to the questions above only happen when pre-sales teams and post-sales teams work like one team.

A tight alignment between sales and customer success is really the main point Dhaliwal is making. Customer success should be attending sales calls and pipeline review meetings. Sales teams should be attending QBRs and renewal calls.

Just two example of how a software company might bring sales and customer success together around the customer.

After talking with Rav, I am down with saying “there's no such thing as post sales. Just the next sale.”

More about Dhaliwal:

* Crane Venture Partners

* His Medium post: There’s no such thing as post sales

* On Linkedin

In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to.  Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/

In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to.  Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/

In Helping Sells Radio episodes 204 to 207, we are introducing a new podcast called, Connecting the Dots, a podcast about building a SaaS business in Learndot. In these four episodes, we share with you the first four episodes of Connecting the Dots in the hopes you will find it valuable enough to subscribe to.  Which you can do on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or on my favorite podcast app, Overcast. Visit Connecting the Dots to subscribe today: https://connectingdots.buzzsprout.com/