Growth for B2B companies is hard.

It used to be that you could accelerate growth mainly through customer acquisition. Ramp up sales. Ramp up marketing. Fill the funnel. Close more deals.

But that is not enough to sustain growth anymore.

The best companies are learning how to grow through customer success.

That is why I interviewed Kia Puhm, CEO at DesiredPath, about how companies can transform the customer success journey and drive revenue from existing customer relationships.

Kia brings a practical and deeply customer-centered perspective on how companies can help customers adopt software, get value faster, build loyalty, and grow over time.

We talk about disruption, customer-centric thinking, journey mapping, customer empathy, moments of truth, and why customer success is not just about making customers happy. It is about operationalizing a better experience so customers can succeed, stay, and grow.

Kia Puhm is CEO at DesiredPath. She has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry and has built post-sales functions across rapidly growing software companies.

Her work focuses on helping organizations improve customer success, customer experience, adoption, retention, and revenue growth through more customer-centric operating models.

00:00 Introduction to Kia Puhm and customer success

You improve customer success by helping customers adopt your product, get value from it, and experience less friction along the way.

That requires more than onboarding checklists or support tickets. It requires understanding the customer’s journey from their point of view, identifying emotional moments of truth, and aligning your organization around helping the customer succeed.

“Customers stay loyal when they’re having good experiences and the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going to deliver.” — Kia Puhm

“We put the onus on them to understand how to operationalize, how to take that software and put it within their environment.” — Kia Puhm

“We make it easier. We make it feel easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that software into their organization.” — Kia Puhm

“How can you understand someone’s point of view if you’re not thinking from their perspective?” — Kia Puhm

“You don’t have to have it absolutely right and perfect at the beginning.” — Kia Puhm

If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.

Automated: This call is being recorded.

Brian: Hi everyone. I’d like to welcome you to today’s B2B Lead Roundtable Podcast. This is Brian Carroll, and I’m really excited to have Kia Puhm with us today.

She is going to be our guest, and we’re going to be talking specifically around the areas of customer success.

Kia is an entrepreneur. She’s an executive. She’s held a number of positions at companies, from Oracle Eloqua, Day Software, and now Adobe.

What she’s done over the past years is launch an advisory firm helping customers accelerate growth through innovation in the area of customer experience.

I’m wanting to bring Kia here to talk with all of you because as you think about how you develop your business and your revenue, Kia’s got an amazing perspective on how we accelerate and grow our existing customer relationships, which is something that many companies don’t focus on nearly enough.

Kia, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

Kia: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. Sure, absolutely.

I come from an educational background in computer engineering and from a practical experience background of 22 years in the industry, working at rapidly growing, very dynamic software companies.

I guess I’ve built every post-sales function, and always the common denominator has been: how do the organizations I lead get customers to adopt software so that they are using it and getting value out of it?

That then translates into loyal customers, which can translate into additional revenue at some point in time.

I had to do that with a finite, limited amount of budget and resources, so I always tried to figure out how to drive that adoption equation while doing what I could with what I had available to me and using that in the most efficient manner possible.

Brian: Right now, as you look at the work and the type of things you’re doing, what’s the most significant trend that’s affecting your work today?

Kia: Great question. I’m going to have to say disruption.

With all the changes happening out there to businesses, with technology and data and information we have, and artificial intelligence, and just the way the world is changing, it’s changing how we operate.

So the biggest trend in the work that I do with my customers, and helping them understand their customers and how to support that, is how do you do that in a continually disruptive environment where things are always changing?

Brian: Right now, as you see this disruption happening, how are companies responding?

I’ve read your work. We’ve had conversations about this. It seems that in this time of disruption, companies are still pretty vendor-centric.

How can they move from this vendor-centric approach or product-focused approach to being more customer-centric?

Kia: Absolutely. I think that is the key in terms of disruption-proofing an organization.

There have been a lot of studies done and a lot of research that shows companies that are operating from a customer-centric viewpoint and really deliver amazing customer experience far outperform their competitors that aren’t customer-centric.

So I do think that is where companies are moving toward, and that is how we adapt to all these changes that are continually happening.

The reason I think that’s important is not only the obvious — customers stay loyal when they’re having good experiences and the product is delivering on the promises that it says it’s going to deliver — but also as our customers keep evolving and changing, so too are the ways that we operationalize that and support those customers.

If you are customer-centric, it means you are observing that evolution that’s happening to your customer base, and you’re able to be very agile and nimble in responding to that as a business.

If you keep using that information, that observation of a customer, either passively or through active engagement with them to find out that information, you can feed that into your organization and continually change and respond to that to continue to drive value for customers and the loyalty that you need to keep growing your own business.

Brian: As I was listening to you, this is something I spend a lot of time helping companies on the front side with: acquiring customer relationships.

Bringing this operationalizing approach, or as you talked about, this evolution, is something I think you’ve been working a lot around with customer journeys to help companies understand that.

Tell us about how you use customer journeys to help improve how companies grow customer relationships and improve customer success.

Kia: Absolutely.

I know you and I have had conversations at other times and are completely aligned in terms of the approach that we look at.

I use customer journeys to facilitate customer-centric thinking to make sure that an organization understands empathizing with and understanding what customers are trying to accomplish when they purchase your products.

When you understand it from the customer viewpoint, specifically as it relates to software, how you support and deliver the various services that you need to in order to help that customer adopt that software fully and continue to drive ongoing value from that software can dramatically change when you look at it from the customer’s standpoint.

What I see all too often, and it’s so natural for us to do this as vendors, is we define the value proposition that our product is meeting in the market, and we organize ourselves for how we’re going to deliver on that value proposition, and then we tell customers all about that.

It’s a very vendor-centric approach.

While we don’t walk in their shoes, we’re trying to push the product in an environment that we’re not necessarily familiar with.

I think problems with retention and why customers have difficulties adopting software are not because they don’t necessarily understand the value or can’t learn the software or understand it.

It’s because we put the onus on them to understand how to operationalize it, how to take that software and put it within their environment.

If we start to employ a customer-centric approach and if we understand why, in general, our customers buy our products, what their environments typically look like, what some of the common trends and challenges are within their work environment, and how that software could seamlessly or best fit into that, we now take a lot of that burden off that customer.

We make it easier. We make it feel easier. We make it more enjoyable to bring that software into their organization.

The faster we do that, the more we make it feel seamless and easier and have a better experience with that, the better they’re going to adopt it.

Then they’re going to recognize the value because it felt easy, and it’s going to meet the objectives that they set out to achieve when they purchased the product, which then translates into loyalty.

When you build that loyalty through trusted-advisor-type relationships, that’s where you can start to talk to them about doing more, which is that ultimate nirvana of expansion and driving more revenue out of that install base.

I use those journeys as the beginning step of understanding, walking in the customer’s shoes, seeing what that looks like, so that then we can figure out how to align organizationally to that journey and translate that into something that makes sense from their perspective because it’s coming from their perspective in the first place.

Brian: I really like your thinking there.

For our regular listeners and readers, you just heard the episode with Brent Adamson from CEB, now Gartner. Brent said that as difficult as selling B2B is today, for our customers, buying is even harder.

I wanted to ask you, from your perspective, how are companies developing journeys, and how does empathy help organizations develop journeys that are really aligned and really helpful?

Kia: Great question.

I think we’re still in the infancy of journey mapping. There are definitely people and companies that are quite advanced in it, and there’s a lot of information out there on how to conduct journey mapping and do that effectively.

When I talk about the infancy, I think we map out the customer’s journey, but we still do it from our perspective.

Brian: Right.

Kia: In the work that I do, I actually haven’t seen it yet.

I’m waiting for the day somebody shows me a journey map that they’ve done that reflects the customer’s viewpoint and their perspective versus a vendor-centric approach.

To answer your question about how they’re going about doing it, I think the process of creating a journey map has a lot of information available.

Where it becomes interesting, and this is the work that I do with my clients, and where it starts to create this agile business model, is when you look at it from that customer’s perspective, as I mentioned previously, and then you start to align the operations.

I refer to this concept of an agile business model.

If you’ve got that journey, then you start to add on what is in place. What is that methodology?

Not just processes, but the role alignment and systems alignment and technology that need to be in place to support that customer journey.

Now you’ve got this business model.

And if you’ve got this closed-loop feedback, where you’re getting input from customers and feeding it back in, this is where the agile comes in.

You can respond to that and continually improve your operations as you’re getting that feedback from customers, as they’re evolving, so that you’ve got this agile, optimized business model.

That’s where I think journey mapping is not just the mapping per se. It’s how do you operationalize all that and create that agile business model, which I think is the next stage in evolution.

To your point about empathy, it’s just common sense. How can you understand someone’s point of view if you’re not thinking from their perspective?

I think that takes the skill set of empathy to be able to understand that.

That’s the interesting work that I quite enjoy doing with clients. It’s getting those aha moments where they say, “Oh. Wait. I thought I was doing it from the customer’s perspective, but now I see I’m not thinking from their perspective.”

Then it’s just that training to keep thinking from the customer’s perspective, and then things start to click. It’s honing those empathy skills.

Brian: I appreciate what you said.

The challenge we have is companies are really good at our company-level value proposition, department level, and maybe even at a persona level.

But what I’m hearing from you is that to really understand how people think, we need to understand how they are thinking about their business now and also understand the emotions.

What are they feeling at various points of their journey? Am I understanding correctly?

Kia: Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely a component.

In the industry, people often refer to the concept of moments of truth.

Moments of truth can be make-or-break interactions that customers have with your company as a brand that could be deciding factors of whether they continue to be your customer or not.

They also tend to be highly emotionally charged at those moments of truth.

Then there are other times in the journey that might not be critical moments of truth, and they’re less emotionally charged.

I think there are emotional elements there that help you understand that customer perspective.

You need that emotional component and understanding because what needs to be accomplished at a certain step in the journey can be delivered in multiple different ways.

If you know what the feeling of that customer might be, if they’re feeling angst about using the software, if they’re feeling really excited about it, if they’re feeling bored about it, you might approach the discussion with the customer differently.

You might approach how you’re instructing them differently or how you’re working together with them.

Those things all have an impact.

When you have that visibility, you can be much more targeted and effective with how you are moving that customer through that journey.

Brian: As I was thinking while you’re talking about it, our listeners are probably saying, “This sounds really good,” but how would they go about doing this?

What types of actionable advice or practical advice do you have for those who want to improve customer success or improve how they’re currently building their customer journeys right now?

Kia: That’s a great question.

Sometimes it can feel overwhelming or abstract. People often confuse customer success or customer experience with just making somebody happy or feel good.

I actually look at it very much as a disciplined way of operationalizing how you’re going to engineer an amazing experience for customers, not only in the business outcomes they get but also in that emotional experience, so it can become a very consistent, repeatable methodology and approach.

It can feel overwhelming, like, “Where do I get started?”

The advice there is definitely journey map and understand what that would look like from the customer’s perspective.

Then start to see how your organization is aligned in each stage of the journey to support that journey and those emotional points in that journey or those critical moments of truth.

That makes it feel more organic and not like this huge monolithic initiative that needs to be done where you can’t get started until you’re absolutely sure it’s perfect before you launch it.

This is where this concept of agility is so empowering and why I employ it with my customers and why I think it’s so powerful.

Mapping these things out, maybe you don’t get it right, but if you start to have this concept of closed-loop feedback, where you’re reading and understanding the customer more and more, then you can start to make continuous improvement and really create that agile business model that keeps getting honed and refined as you learn more about it.

You don’t have to have it absolutely right and perfect at the beginning.

In fact, you might have it completely wrong.

But if you map something out and you start to observe it and validate whether things are right or wrong, and start to use customer feedback to inform how you should tweak operations or what you’ve got in place to provide a better customer experience, that’s where you’re going to continually optimize that approach.

It should continually be dynamic forever.

None of us have static customers. They’re just as dynamic as we are in our business operations.

So let’s make sure that we’re continuing to observe them and see how they’re improving or what they need help with and build that into our model.

So the actionable advice is: journey map. Build some initial model, observe it, and then keep honing it.

It’s not just a one-time effort.

Brian: That is terrific.

I think a lot of people, often, as they do their journey map, it’s like, “Ha. I’m done.”

I think, as you’re sharing, it’s ongoing. We’re going to continually learn as we dialogue with our customers, as we interact, and as we evolve and so do they.

I really appreciate all the thoughts and ideas you shared with us today.

What’s the best way for our readers and listeners to get in touch with you?

Kia: Absolutely. The best way is through my LinkedIn account. It’s Kia Puhm, P-U-H-M, and Kia, K-I-A.

Or contact me directly. I’m also on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you want to reach out to me directly via email, it’s [email protected].

Happy to answer questions or connect with folks who are looking to learn more, or just peers who are passionate about this space and want to talk about it as much as I do. I would love to connect.

Brian: Well, thank you again for joining us, sharing your ideas and your experience, and I look forward to us continuing to talk more.

I know our listeners got a lot of value. We’ll also share some links from Kia for our listeners and readers that you can visit at the B2B Lead Blog.

Kia: Thanks, Brian.