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Nobody’s prepared to grow a billion-dollar business from square one. So we’re learning from revenue leaders who have already done it.
Join host Alex Kracov, former VP of Marketing at Lattice and now Founder and CEO of Dock, as he has candid conversations with successful revenue leaders about their business growth stories.
We’ll talk to sales, marketing, and customer success leaders about their growing pains. We’ll interview founders who have built companies from the ground-up. And we’ll talk to agencies and consulting firms who do the behind-the-scenes work for the fastest-growing companies in the world.
If you want the true, challenging stories of what it takes to grow revenue—not generic, high-level advice—then this show is for you.
(preview)
Brittany Soinski: Nothing is better than going into a first call with a customer where they're like, "I've heard about this tool from somebody. Our admin made us come to this training," and they don't really see the value. But when you - a couple minutes into that call, halfway through the call - get to this aha moment, and you see this lightbulb go off and this excitement in their eyes, that's what I live for CS.
(intro)
Brittany Soinski is the Manager of Customer Success Programs at Loom. I met Brittany while building Dock, and I've been super impressed with her knowledge of building customer success and onboarding programs. She's our guest in today's episode of Grow & Tell, the show where we tell the growth stories of the revenue leaders behind successful companies. I'm your host Alex Kracov.
Brittany has spent the last four years building customer success programs for major tech companies. She was an enablement manager at Wrike, a senior customer success architect at MURAL, and today she is the manager of customer success programs at Loom. In her year plus of the company, she has completely re-architected their customer onboarding program. Today Brittany shares what it's like to work in success enablement, how to build a successful onboarding program, and how to measure onboarding success. Stick around till the end to hear Brittany's number one tip for sending Looms. I hope you'll enjoy today's show.
(interview)
Alex Kracov: Let's start the conversation with your time at Wrike, which was a project management software. I think while you're at Wrike, you managed the book of business dealing with a number of different customer segments. I'd love to know what that experience was like being a customer success manager.
Brittany Soinski: You know, I always say that maybe I should have paid Wrike for my time there, because it was truly like going to a SaaS university. I learned the foundation for everything I know today from my time at Wrike. Something that was really special and unique about Wrike is the way that we supported our customers. And in customer success, we really got to focus on the adoption and activation keys. But even though I was focusing on that specifically, I got to learn a ton from our other teams. We had a team that specialized in onboarding; that was our professional services team. We had account managers who focused on upselling. We had a renewal team who focused on renewing the account. So it was this really unique opportunity to focus on what does the CSM need to do in order to inspire an account to actually adopt this new way of working.
Alex Kracov: What did you have to do to do that? Like as a CSM, there's so much change in management. There's this new way of working. How do you actually inspire that engagement in getting them do your desired outcome within the software product?
Brittany Soinski: That's a good question. I'm so thankful that I had the time while I was at Wrike to explore that. Having seen the company go from about 50 employees when I started to about 1000 employees when I left, I can tell you that it wasn't necessarily like, "Do this, and you'll see adoption." It was a very trial-and-error-type system in order to figure out what worked. I would say, what ultimately we found worked with the customers was helping teams to see the vision for what a future state could look like for them.
Alex Kracov: While you were at Wrike, you transitioned into an enablement role where you supported the success and services teams. And so I'd love to know what that transition was like. What's the biggest difference between being in customer enablement role versus in customer success role?
Brittany Soinski: I'll tell you just really candidly and humanly how that came about in my career path. I was a CSM for several years at Wrike. I was traveling a lot. I was starting to take on more enterprise customers and accounts. I was going abroad. And I had my first son Cody. We were still back in the office during this time, so I was commuting every day. I had a little little guy at home. It just honestly got to be too much for me. I got to the point where I was actually going to leave the organization. I went to my leadership and told them what was going on. They said, "We see this really unique talent you have to inspire and motivate others and do this training and enablement." They actually built this special role for me as our very first customer success enablement manager.
Alex Kracov: Awesome. So I I'd love to know more about the differences between enablement and customer success. When you're in enablement, are you leading trainings, creating collateral, buying software? What does it usually look like?
Brittany Soinski: It's interesting. The skills between the two are actually very transferable. The big difference is: your stakeholders, your audience that you are serving and trying to bring success about for, it moved from working with customers and having external calls all of a sudden by stakeholders. And my audience were our internal customer success managers. I had kind of two audiences here. I had incoming customer success managers. This was the easier part of my job - onboarding new team members and teaching them how to use Wrike, how to sell Wrike, how to support our customers. Then the more challenging part of my job but what I really loved was getting to work with our existing CSMs, and helping them to adopt new ways of working or rolling out new softwares, doing procurement, helping with soft skills, and ultimately helping them to level up in order to better support our customers.
Alex Kracov: What does that actually look like? Are you interviewing CSMs and being like, "How can I help your job," or, "What are the software?" Is it like a weekly meeting cadence? What does that collaboration internally look like?
Brittany Soinski: I would sit in on GTM leadership meetings as the liaison for customer success. My job was to just kind of listen out for what are some things that need to change in our org, what are some processes we want to roll out. I would meet with different functional leaders, different team leaders, professional services, customer success, and try to understand how are things going today. What is the day in the life look like for a CSM today, and what are some things that we want to try to do differently? It was my job to come in and unlock those functional leaders and take the heavy lifting of creating really thorough documentation and training, taking their vision and bringing it to light in a very organized way, translating that to our customer, the CSM, in a way that they were really easily able to understand and grasp.
Alex Kracov: And so, after Wrike, you went to work at MURAL, which is a really cool digital whiteboard company. The product is very collaborative by nature. I imagine it led to some pretty interesting ways to work with customers during a meeting. Can you talk a little bit about facilitation and how it's such an important skill for customer success folks?
Brittany Soinski: Yeah, I honestly wouldn't have thought that facilitation was such an important skill. But having worked at MURAL for a year and learning about how to speak to audiences and how to storyboard, I think it is such an essential skill that every customer success manager should learn about. Even when thinking about putting together an onboarding or a training session for a customer, the very first thing I learned how to do at MURAL was to storyboard and think about this idea of - it's called Bloom's taxonomy. Have you heard of Bloom's taxonomy before?
Alex Kracov: No, I haven't. Tell me about it.
Brittany Soinski: Okay. Bloom's taxonomy is essentially, what do you want an audience member to do after they digest this content? Do you want them to just understand it, just to hear it and understand it? Do you want them to remember it, or do you want them to apply it, analyze it? So it starts with, what do we want our audience to do after this session? Then you back into the training pieces with that in mind.
If you just want somebody to understand something, you're going to design a training that's very straightforward dissemination of information. If you want somebody to be able to apply something, you actually have to build that into your training, and give people the opportunity and the ability to try it. So it really changed the way that I designed programs, whether it be for customers or for internal CS enablement purposes, very outcome-based design. Specifically, my favorite methodology to route program development in now is human-centered design. Are you familiar with human-centered design?
Alex Kracov: I know about it a little bit. IDEO is a big agency that sort of popularized that concept. But yeah, why is that such an important skill for customer success folks?
Brittany Soinski: I think it's really important in general in customer success to route everything you're doing in some kind of methodology. In CS, we can wear a lot of different hats. Our roles can go in a lot of different directions. But by working with any framework or a method, you can really help to become a lot more organized. Other methods you might be familiar with are the agile framework or the lean methodology.
Why I really like human-centered design, there's kind of three key principles here. It starts with ideation and this idea that no idea is a bad idea. So generate and brainstorm as many ideas as possible. You make sure to route those in empathy for the people that you are working with. That's where the human-centered design comes in. Then the last piece and my favorite part is experimentation. So there's this nature built into it of 'fail fast and learn.' It's okay to have a lot of ideas. Prioritize them; try them. And when they fail, to learn from them. That's why it's my favorite methodology. Because having this, a space for yourself to experiment and learn, has been really effective in helping to level up any of the programs that I'm building for our customers.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I mean, so much about startups and the business we're in is trying things, failing, iterating it, making it better. And so I can see why human-centered design just makes that - I don't know. It adds a structure and a framework to manage all that chaos. It also helps you really build an effective program that actually moves a customer to take the action that eventually you want them to do.
Brittany Soinski: I want to share with you, while we're on this topic of failing and learning. When I worked at Wrike, one of my favorite things that I've carried with me throughout my career were, we had some mantras in CS. They were: fail gloriously. No egos. And best ideas win. Now, you would think fail gloriously like- you know, at first, when I heard that, I was like, I don't want to fail gloriously. But we actually really broke down the stigma around this. We would have our monthly customer success meeting. Every meeting, somebody was nominated as the winner for each of these categories. So if you really took a big swing and it didn't pan out, you'd be nominated for the 'fail gloriously award' for that month. It just made it fun and funny. And we really saw the results of people taking bigger bets, experimenting with things within this framework of it's okay. Let's all learn from it, and try something else. That's startup life for you.
Alex Kracov: That's such an amazing story to showcase how you build an effective culture too. Because you can just put values on the wall. Then people believe in them or ignore them. But then, having that feedback loop and actually celebrating bad things or just celebrating your values in general and incorporating that into the team culture is just so important. So yeah, I love that story. The other day, me and you were talking. You had mentioned this concept of utilization rates and health scores. Can you talk about what this process looks like, and explain why it's such a valuable concept for customer success folks to understand?
Brittany Soinski: Yes, I wish everybody would use this method of health scoring for their customers. I think we can get really complex and complicated when we are measuring what success looks like. This is a method that I learned when I was working at MURAL. As a CSM, I have never seen more clarity into my book of business where everything stands on a day-to-day basis and exactly how each activity I'm doing is moving the needle in terms of adoption and success.
Essentially, what you do is you identify your two Northstar metrics. Typically, in customer success, these are going to be something like license allocation. So how many licenses has the customer allocated out of the number that they are contracted for? If they purchased 100, they've allocated 73. They have 73% of their licenses allocated. Then the next thing that we look at is activation of those licenses. So you're using 73 of them. How many of those licenses are logging into the tool taking an action month over month, day over day. That's, of course, your activation number.
Those numbers to start with, of course, are a good thing to look at. But when they really tell you a story and help you to come up with a success plan and understand where you need to step in as the CSM is when you compare those against a point in time. We call this utilization rate. It's hard to explain without showing you a spreadsheet, but it's actually a very, very simple calculation. If you have 73% of your licenses allocated, and you're only one month into your contract - let's say, you're about 10% into your contract- that is awesome. If you have 73% of your licenses allocated but you are a year into your contract, that's not great. We want you to be at 100%, 120% so we can upsell you.
It's a simple calculation where you take percent allocation, and you divide it by the percent through time. It comes up with a number for you. Let's call it .8. And if you could set at your organization what good looks like, you draw a line in the sand. Anyone above this utilization rate is pacing ahead. They're looking good for expansion, upsell, renewal. Anyone pacing below this or pacing low, they may churn or contract. By being able to just look at a single number - it changes day to day as the contract length goes on - this has been the most helpful thing for me in CS to understand my book. Does that make sense?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, totally. Maybe in the show notes or something, we can link to an example spreadsheet, or we can share on the screen so people can get a sense of it. But yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It sounds like a practice I need to be putting into place at Dock. I think what I love about it is you're really getting ahead of renewals, and you're making sure that people are actually getting value and using the tool way ahead of that renewal conversation. So it makes a ton of sense.
Brittany Soinski: I think another thing is, if you are somebody who likes gamified success, which I personally do as a very competitive individual, when you're looking at your book and you're seeing, okay, who is pacing, who's under pacing - it's almost like a little race - it's very motivating. And you can really see why it's so important to front load your accounts with success in onboarding in the beginning. If you can get your customer pacing and their benchmark score, their utilization scores up to a four at the beginning, I know I can let off the gas a little during the activation period. That number is going to go down. But by really front-loading an account, it saves me a lot of headache and calm renewal time trying to get that utilization up.
Alex Kracov: I also imagine it's just a great way to manage your customer success team, and get insight into how well everybody is doing in terms of the customer success team impacting the customer's adoption of the product. So yeah, I love it.
Brittany Soinski: It's also helpful, Alex, if you're thinking of different teams do things differently. Some teams look at individual books of business dedicated to each CSM. Other teams look at things on a team goal or a group basis. The whole team wants to move their customers to this success metric. I've found it's very helpful for culture, in CS specifically, if you guys are working towards a group utilization rate. Each person, of course, still manages their own accounts and works them. But when we can look day over day at where we're moving as a team for our whole book, it's super helpful for that initiative, too.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that's awesome. I can't wait to use it at Dock. Another concept you mentioned to me was this idea of a team impact discovery. Can you elaborate on that a little bit, and explain to the audience what you mean by that?
Brittany Soinski: So this is something that I learned at MURAL, and it is my secret weapon in customer success. I tell every CSM I know about this. This is the most effective way that I have found to grow an account multithread and introduce new teams to your tool. We're just starting to use it a lot here at Loom. I'm seeing quite a bit of success with it.
The idea behind team impact discovery is - I think what's really key to growing an account is relationships with functional leaders. This is going to be a team lead, a manager, a director of a specific business and function. Let's say, we're working with VP of sales. First thing we want to do is just to have a casual discovery chat with the VP of sales. We don't want to talk about our tool at all. Our goal on this call is just to get him talking as much as possible, and do some discovery so that we have all this ammo later to be like, "Oh, yeah, here's where our tool comes in." It starts with just asking, "What's a day in the life look like for somebody on your team?" This is a really good opening question. It gets this individual talking. Okay. We're in sales. Of course, our job is to get prospects, to show up for demos so that we can convert them into a paying customer. They tell us about that.
Then we ask, "Wave a magic wand. What would look different?" They say, "Well, we'd get a lot fewer no-show rates to the demos that we're scheduling. That would help us close more deals." Then we say, "Well, that sounds awesome. Why can't you do that? Where's that magic wand? Why aren't you waving it? What are the blockers?" This is when we get a lot of really helpful information, and we learn a lot of the pain points that that customer is uniquely experiencing. We keep these in the back of our brains so we can throw these in later when we position our tool as the magic wand that they're looking for. So they share their pain points.
This is when we can say, "If you're thinking about purchasing our tool, or maybe you've already purchased our tool but your team is thinking about adopting it," we ask the question, "If we were to fast forward six months a year from now, what would allow you to say, 'Wow, using your tool made us super successful and got us to convert more of our prospects into customers'?" This is where we come up with what I call our Northstar measure or our success statement. After they share that with us, that's all I need to know in CS. And I say, "Great. I'm the person who's going to help you guys get there. I'm the person who's going to help you accomplish that." Every time I then run a training for that team, I make sure to position our tool specifically in the light of how it's going to accomplish that particular success metric. That's really the secret to customer success. That's it.
Alex Kracov: I love what you're talking about. Because in some ways, it sounds like sales. You're asking qualifying questions trying to understand why the buyer wants to buy something, and then sort of shining it back to them and using that as a way to get them to buy. But what's really cool about what you're doing is you're actually using that as a way to actually help them achieve their goals, not just to sign that contract. And so you're just constantly reminding them. A lot of ways you're describing is like being a consultant, right? Consultants come in. Ask a bunch of questions trying to understand what the problem is, and then obviously help you get there. Then obviously remind you, once you help them achieve the goal, how they helped you.
Brittany Soinski: Yeah, we don't let them forget. We're like, can we create a case study with you?
Alex Kracov: Totally. Yeah, and that's how you have a really smooth renewal process. I'd love to switch gears a little bit. You work at Loom now. You spent, I think, the last year or so redesigning Loom's onboarding practices. Can you talk through what it's been like building an onboarding program?
Brittany Soinski: Oh, yes, this is my favorite topic. I'm glad we're getting to this. So when I started at Loom, there actually wasn't even a role here for onboarding manager. I had formed a relationship with one of the leaders here and had a really good just discovery chat. Through this conversation, I identified in myself also, oh, yeah, I really love onboarding. That's where I want to take my career next. So I was very excited for the opportunity to come and do this at Loom. I started here as our onboarding lead. I spent the first six months redesigning our onboarding program.
I was fresh from MURAL where I had just learned how to facilitate and consult. I spent my first couple of months running a lot of workshops for my team to try to just really understand the state of things. My first week here, I ran something called a Lightning Decision Jam in a mural board. It was a really fun session where we got to just - the idea of human-centered design is bubble up a bunch of ideas. So I just had the team share. I had hundreds of sticky notes to the mural board about what's going well on onboarding. What are we missing? What are ideas you have? Just no idea is a bad idea. I gathered a ton of information. We took those sticky notes, and then we prioritized them onto a matrix of what's low-hanging fruit, what can we do that's going to make the highest impact, that's going to be the lowest lift? From that one session, it really helped me formulate our roadmap for the next six months and building out onboarding.
Most of the things that we identified were, they were both processes we needed to put in place like improving our AE to CS handoff - or partnership, as I prefer to call it, rather than a handoff. All the different process pieces that go into onboarding, that's kind of the baseline that I needed to work on. And then plugging in different programs that were aimed at hitting specific measures during the onboarding cycle. I'll give you a couple examples if that will be helpful.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, that'd be awesome.
Brittany Soinski: The first thing I saw was we don't have a webinar program here at Loom. Everyone was like, do we need one? I said, yes, we need to have a repeatable weekly webinar, where we can invite any of our customers to it to teach them about the tool. This is one of the things I'm most proud of here at Loom. Now it's a robust program. We got a lot of attendees. We've actually been able to show that: people who attend the webinar get started recording and are ultimately more successful in the tool. So that's been a really exciting one.
After about six months of building a ton of content, a ton of processes, a ton of programs, everything was baked and ready to go, the team was enabled on how to use all of this, I felt like I really just hit a blocker. I said, well, I don't know the best way to host all of this. What's the best way to translate all this content to a customer? Because we have to be very cognizant of not just throwing a bunch of stuff in an email. And we at Loom are an async tool. So how can we not just do this in a bunch of meetings? How can we make this async? I truly felt very stuck at that point. I had a wonderful colleague appear here, and he said, "Hey, have you heard of this tool called Dock?" He actually told me about it a couple months before that. I was like, "I don't have time to think about a tool right now." He said, "No, please just look at this tool." When I saw it, a big lightbulb went off. I said, "Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I have been looking for." It's this really easy-to-use, user-friendly, straightforward joint workspace that we can use asynchronously with our customers. You integrate it with Loom. So I was able to seamlessly pop in all of our programs, all of our materials.
I think the biggest thing, I needed it to be repeatable so that I could measure if what we were doing was actually moving our utilization. What I loved about Dock was the ability to create onboarding templates. We all started doing the same thing. We started onboarding our customers in the same way over and over and over again. This has served as an awesome foundation for now being able to build new programs, run new experiments, and see very clearly whether or not they are working.
Alex Kracov: Thank you for sharing that story. It's so fun to hear the behind the scenes, like what went into the Dock decision purchase. Because we only hear - I remember meeting you. You'd already built out a workspace, and you'd already got it going. It's so cool to hear how you used human-centered design at the beginning to surface all these ideas. You experimented with a lot of stuff. A lot of work went into the actual output, which was this Dock onboarding program. It's really fun to hear you talk about that. I'm curious, why did you focus on onboarding? Why is that such an important stage in the customer journey? And why when you started at Loom was that your first priority?
Brittany Soinski: As I mentioned, in CS, we wear a lot of different hats. At some orgs, it's more isolated. When I worked at Wrike, I was really only focused on the middle portion of the journey. When I went back to MURAL, that's when I actually got to onboard my own customers. At Wrike, I wasn't onboarding customers. We had our professional services team doing that, and doing that really well. I loved onboarding the customers. Nothing is better than going into a first call with a customer where they're like, "I've heard about this tool from somebody. Our admin made us come to this training," and they don't really see the value. But when you - a couple minutes into that call, halfway through the call - get to this aha moment, I call it, where your customer realizes, "Oh. Now I don't just understand how to use this tool. I can see how I'm going to use this in my role to hit my actual goals," and you see this light bulb go off and this excitement in their eyes, that's what I live for in CS.
Alex Kracov: What is the aha moment for Loom? I'm curious. I use Loom every day, and I totally get the value of the tool. But if someone has never used it before, what's the aha moment?
Brittany Soinski: Interestingly, our aha moment is not just when you record your first Loom. It's when you record a Loom, share a Loom, and somebody watches it. That's when the light bulb goes off and people realize either, "Oh, this saved me a meeting with that person. I was able to say and convey and relay in five minutes what would have taken me 30 minutes in trying to schedule back and forth." So it's not just doing it and actually looming Loom. Actually, Loom itself is a really easy tool to use. It's when you share it and get a view on it that you really realize the value of communicating asynchronously in a much better way than sending a long-form text email.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out the exact aha moment for Dock. But I think it's actually somewhat similar. It's like when you first create a workspace and share it with someone and then you see that the client checked it out, or they completed a task and you had that good feedback loop, then that's sort of the aha moment, I think, especially on the sales side. But yeah, we're still forming our hypothesis around it. I think that's what it is.
I love to talk more about this sales and success relationship. Because there's this infamous handoff at every company sales and success. It always seems to get messed up. There's challenges and competing priorities and stuff. I'm sure there's maybe some sales folks listening to this call. What's the best way for the sales team to support the customer success team? Is it just like having really good notes in the CRM? How do you think about that?
Brittany Soinski: This is something that I tried to reframe here at Loom. It was less of an idea around a handoff and more of an idea around a partnership. I knew we wanted to ask our AEs for a little bit more when an account was coming over for us. Like, we want you to fill in these specific fields in Salesforce and use cases and contact. Yes, there's a lot of things we would love to ask for in CS. But we knew, if we were going to be asking for those pieces, it needed to be a give and take. And we also wanted to be providing value to them.
So when I rebuilt out this process, I put together a bunch of resources from the CS side that sales could leverage presale, such as, "Here's some pre-recorded Looms talking about the value of customer success. Use these to help close your deals. We have a workflow in Slack. If you want to request a CS resource to come join you on a presale call to talk about onboarding, to talk about success, just introduce ourselves to be a subject matter expert. We have a process for that." So I think it's really important to have a partnership rather than a handoff. It's got to be bi-directional.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. With some SaaS and subscription-based businesses, it's not just about closing a deal and saying goodbye to the customer, right? You really need to build these long-term relationships with your customers, prove out that value. It starts in the sales process. But then, the success team really brings that home and makes sure that they reach that Northstar metric, whatever they're going after.
Loom is a product-led company, right? You can just sign up and start using Loom. I imagine there's a lot of like bottoms-up adoption that gets worked through in the sales process. But I'm curious. From your point of view, are there any unique challenges for onboarding or just customer success in general on a product-led company?
Brittany Soinski: Yes, I would say, definitely, there are. Something that's unique about Loom to other places that I've worked before is, in other softwares I've worked at, there's a heavy technical implementation, and there's a heavy learning curve to the tool. So in CS, we're spending most of our time on just training how to use the tool. At Loom, on the flip side, it's so easy to use. It's so intuitive. It's so flexible. You can use it for so many things. And even the admin setup is very easy to do. You would think it's, "Yes, that would make our job easier." But it actually means we need to conduct a lot more change management. Because you don't just see the aha moment from learning how to use it; it's when you learn how to use it for your particular role.
With this kind of bottoms-up approach and this product-led growth, what we typically see the typical path for a Loom customer is somebody at an organization - well, usually a lot of people, hundreds of people, thousands of people at an organization hear about Loom. They go to loom.com. They click 'get started for free.' They create their own workspace. Now, all of a sudden, we've got 500 workspaces that exist at an organization because multiple people with that email domain created their own workspace. Now IT hears about this, and they're like, "Hey, we'd like to turn on SSL. We want to be able to control provisioning and de-provisioning, access to the tool, privacy settings, security settings, and things of that nature." So they end up purchasing a Loom enterprise agreement. This is the most typical path we see for our customers. That is why the very first part of our onboarding that we do with our customers, working with our admins, is working with them to consolidate workspaces. So we're often focusing on very tactical pieces in the beginning, back-end things, before we are able to launch into success planning and use cases.
Alex Kracov: It's so interesting to hear you think about this or hear you talk about this. Because yeah, I mean, Loom is so integral into my day-to-day life in terms of working with my product team, working with customers. It's just such a new way of working. I imagine that it definitely is a really interesting behavior change that you have to adopt, instill across the company. So yeah, I could see the challenges there. It's cool. The admin is like your partner in crime to help push that change management across the company.
Brittany Soinski: It's funny. Actually, I use my husband here as kind of the guinea pig for Loom change management. Because we are very different personality types. I'm more extroverted, really comfortable facilitating hosting. He is much more introverted and would much rather send an email. He recently started his own law firm, and he gets a lot of inbound lead calls. Of course, I'll run in the room, and I'll be like, "Follow up with a Loom. Send them a Loom." I got him to do it once. But he'll always say to me after, like, "I don't want to put on the camera right now and record a Loom. I'd rather send an email." This is where we talk about that aha moment. Because, yes, it's easy to say, "That's not my personality. I'd rather just send an email instead." But if you record a Loom after you get a prospect to call you, you show your face, you smile and wave, and you send that as your follow up, it's going to stand out amongst competitors. When your prospect watches that video for the first time, that's what we call the aha moment full circle.
Alex Kracov: I think I like - I don't know. I don't know how much time Loom has saved me. But it's so much because I respond to customer support with it. And yeah, oftentimes, I don't turn on the camera because I was still in my pajamas or whatever to respond to support. But it's still so useful just to be able to show something instead of just having to type out a really long email around something.
Brittany Soinski: We're using Loom right now in our re-onboarding experiment, which you might find interesting. I, of course, know if my customers go through our Dock onboarding and through all the steps, they're going to get on that utilization and adoption curve. I have no problem renewing a year from now. But since we just started this new process about four or five months ago, now we're going through and we're saying, okay, well, how can we get all of our existing customers who didn't go through this onboarding flow to go through it now?
We're going through this re-onboarding experiment. This has definitely been a fail fast and learn. I first just reached out to all the admins and be like, "We want to re onboard you." Crickets. No responses. Everyone's like, "No, we don't want to do that." So what I've started doing is recording a Loom over a Dock that has their name in it. I'm linking the Dock in the call-to-action button in the Loom and showing them, this is the value of this re-onboarding. Here's why we want to do this with you. We've been getting some replies to that. So it's still an experiment. But empowering the two together has been the most effective way to do that, so far.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's very cool. It's like we're in this new world of asynchronous working, and there are so many new tools at our disposal. Dock and Loom are two of those. Maybe a fun way to end the conversation is like, do you have any good Loom tips or tricks you recommend? I always see you doing fun things in your Loom like the border, or I feel like fireworks are going off. I don't know. Anything you recommend for folks?
Brittany Soinski: Oh, sure. I would say, my top Loom tip for people - this is counterintuitive - is to leave your errors in your Loom. If we think about the fact that most of us are remote or in distributed workforces, and we don't have the ability to really see each other face-to-face like we used to, if you're recording your Looms and aiming it to be polished and perfect, restarting your Loom every time you 'um' and you 'uh,' you're not really showing your authentic self. So my top tip for people is to use this as a way to authentically communicate. I always find, if I stumble in my Loom or say something funny, I laugh about it. I'll get a laughing emoji out of it. It kind of accomplishes. It kills two birds with one stone. Now I'm sharing myself and my personality and my flaws. And I'm also communicating effectively. So that's just one little tip for you.
Alex Kracov: I love it. Well, thank you so much, Brittany, for a wonderful conversation. If people want to reach out and ask any follow-up questions, where's the best place to find you?
Brittany Soinski: On LinkedIn, or send me a loom. Send me a Loom on LinkedIn.
Alex Kracov: Perfect. Send Brittany a Loom on LinkedIn. Well, thank you so much. It was awesome.
Brittany Soinski: Thanks, Alex. Thanks for having me.
(outro)
That's a wrap on another episode of Grow & Tell. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe to us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, or find every episode at growandtellshow.com. I'm your host Alex Kracov. Thank you for listening.