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Proof is what GTM leaders need to make fast and furious decisions that keep their businesses alive and thriving.
The Proof Point hosts conversations anchored in the reality of day-to-day life as a revenue leader. No algorithm-hacking, talk-track headlining buzz statements around here. We’re hosting conversations between GTM leaders so we can gather the facts and provide you with the tactics and tools you need to bulletproof your strategy.
Join host Mark Huber every other week as he invites the best GTM leaders into the conversation.
Mark Huber [00:00:00]:
And then the nurse or somebody asks him, you know, do you concur? And he's like, yeah, I concur. And he's like, what do you mean? There's nothing to concur about. The kid broke his arm.
Sy Pendergast [00:00:09]:
Obviously it's broken.
Myles Bradwell [00:00:11]:
Yeah, that's my move in board meeting. Just like I can curve.
Mark Huber [00:00:16]:
Yeah, sorry, I'm gonna steal that from you. Here's what go to market teams are missing proof. Thats what I think of every morning when I fire up LinkedIn and scroll through boring manifestos and endless lukewarm takes. Opinions are cheap and proof is gold. Im Mark Huber and this is the proof point, a show from user evidence that helps go to market teams find ideas, get frameworks, and swap tactics. Each episode includes an unfiltered discussion with the biggest names in B two B SaaS to help find the proof points that Im in search of youll learn from sales, marketing and customer success leaders in the trenches where I asked them, seriously, what actually works for you? One of our guests actually told me this, felt like we were having drinks at a bar and talking about work without all the b's. And that pretty much sums it up on why I'm so excited for this new show. Join us every other week for new episodes.
Mark Huber [00:01:10]:
Hot takes, always welcome. So I'm really excited about today's episode of the proofpoint because I haven't seen another podcast episode in the b two B marketing world on this topic. We're getting into churn and retention and why both of those things are not just a customer success problem. First up we have Sy Pendergast. She's the director of enterprise and mid market customer experience at Goldcast. And she's somebody that I got to work with very closely at my last company. She is so funny, so knowledgeable, and you'll see that shine through on today's episode. Next up we have Lauren Alt Kishpaugh.
Mark Huber [00:01:46]:
She's a senior director of demandgen at Pendo. She's somebody that I knew, or at least was introduced to by way of our third guest. He spoke very highly of her. And let me tell you, I wish I could have her back again. She was so funny and dropped some serious knowledge throughout the episode. And last but definitely not least, he's somebody that I'm lucky enough to get to work with very closely every single week because he's our vp of customer success at user evidence, Miles Bradwell. This episode was a blast to record, and I can't wait for you to listen. All right, so Lauren, get us started here.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:02:20]:
Why are marketers not closely aligned to cs? I have a few theories and please, you can interrupt me, you can kick me out the soapbox anytime. But I have a few theories that I've been thinking about and this is coming from a marketer's perspective. So we have two cs people in the room. You guys can disagree, you can agree. And I am also guilty of some of these things, or maybe all of these things, actually. But here's my thing. No one in the history of ever has said, like, it's not important for marketing to be aligned to cs. We're not over here.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:02:45]:
Like, no, we shouldn't hang out with Miles inside. Like, we shouldn't be aligned. But I think that we're not set up for success. And I think that it stems from a couple things. One, leadership, CEO's leadership in general aren't yet convinced that marketing can help CS retain customers or activate customer base and or marketers don't know how to help. And I say this because from experience, a CEO has said to me, I'm not convinced that marketing activities can help with retention and make a big impact here. A boss has said that to me. I don't know if marketing activities can make a measurable impact on retention.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:03:22]:
And on the flip side, I think marketers, when they think that they're prioritizing it, they think that they're making like customer retention and activation a priority. I think that they, what do we do? We hire people. So we hire product marketers. We hire customer marketers and we hire the wrong skill set. Product marketers position, they package and they build like this nice blueprint for sales and cs. I need to stop doing air quotes. I don't know why I keep doing that. But they build like a blueprint and then like who's going to build the house? We hire customer marketers.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:03:50]:
They typically, in my experience, they build communities, they build case studies. They don't have the technical skill set. There's a gap in technical skill set to actually understand how to activate the base. And I think that, like, we're not held accountable for that activation metric. So like, we're held accountable for pipeline, we're held accountable for revenue, we might be held accountable for NRR, which is easier to make an impact if we can drive some pipeline on expansion. But who is responsible for activation? So I think there's a lack of like ownership on understanding who, convincing leadership that we can make an impact, understanding how we can make an impact and then like being held accountable for those leading indicators of success. Second thing, marketers haven't figured out how to get credit. I need to put my hands away.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:04:32]:
Marketers don't know how to get credit for retention and expansion. And I think like part of that, the reason why CEO's haven't been convinced yet that we can make an impact is because we haven't successfully told our story of how we can do that or how we are doing that or how we should be doing that. And like marketers literally will sell their firstborn child to get credit for like a new business deal, but they're not to figure out how to measure the impact of them retaining customers and like, I guess .2 b on this is like, it's not sexy or like salacious to talk about why your boyfriend didn't leave you. You're like cool customer didn't leave. That's very exciting. It's not as fun or sexy to talk about that than it is to talk about marketing, taking credit for a new business deal for expansion or whatever it is. So when I think about alignment with CS, I really think about activation and retention and I'm not sure that our KPI's are lying to that. I don't think like we are also making a top three priority because again, back to the original point, marketers are never like we shouldn't care about cs, we should not talk to them.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:05:29]:
They are the bad guys. It's just if we think about the top three priorities when we're building a team or building a function or when things get really hard and we have things to cut, guess what they get cut. The resourcing towards that, the community building towards all that is usually the first thing to go in my experience. And it's not top three. It's not top three. It's not going to happen.
Mark Huber [00:05:49]:
So Tsai, I'm not going to exclude you from this story, but I kind of am because Miles and Lauren actually know each other pretty well. Miles, would you mind telling the story and kind of what this means and why I'm showing this on my screen?
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:06:06]:
Oh, no.
Myles Bradwell [00:06:07]:
Well, Mark asked me, Lauren, for like an embarrassing fun story and I was like, there's too many, but like just to be on the nose, obviously. The, the most embarrassing thing I think is when we were asked or I wasn't, we were asked. I think the sales team was just asked like, hey, what would you guys want? As like a stretch goal, right? We had done pizza parties, whatever else, and someone threw out that they wanted Lauren to dress up like a clown. I believe is how it started. And then in solidarity for my friend, I didn't want her to be alone, I said, all right, well, if the CS team hits this number, then I will also dress up as a clown. And you think that would be the embarrassing part, but we, as we were doing the clowning around, this is actually in Mexico for the company kickoff, we found out that a member of our team had, like, a very severe clown phobia and was. I don't want to say Lauren, I don't know if you would call it a panic attack, but she was laughing and trying to be, like, a good sport about it, but she was clearly very much uncomfortable. And so just one of many HR no nos that Lauren and I committed.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:07:04]:
In our few styles, and HR didn't. I don't think HR ever found out about that, so.
Myles Bradwell [00:07:08]:
But now that's good, you know?
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:07:09]:
Sorry, Felicia.
Myles Bradwell [00:07:11]:
Yeah, now it's on record. It's out there.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:07:14]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:07:14]:
So, Lauren, when we were going back and forth on LinkedIn about preparing for this episode, I gave you a cliffhanger. Did you at all think that was gonna be the story that Miles was telling, or did you have a hunchback?
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:07:24]:
If I said yes, I would be lying, because Miles and I probably have a dozen embarrassing stories involving one another, and the rest probably don't belong on the Internet.
Sy Pendergast [00:07:33]:
So, yeah, that wasn't the worst one, at least. So maybe we're all happy it was that one. And I'm not being pulled into a situation.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:07:42]:
There's no documentation of the rest, so you're scot free.
Myles Bradwell [00:07:46]:
We wiped the drive for anything related. The other one, this was the one we still had proof of.
Mark Huber [00:07:52]:
Now we've got the clown story out of the way. We've got Lauren back off of her soapbox. Although you're encouraged to get back on your soapbox, all three of you, whenever you want. Let's just get into it. So what I wanted to do is just kind of figure out how we got to this point. Why have so many marketing teams and really go to market? Teams always looked at churn and retention as a customer success problem.
Sy Pendergast [00:08:14]:
Start off with an easy question. Right, Mark?
Myles Bradwell [00:08:19]:
Yeah, I'm happy to take a little bit of a stab at it. I think it's the nature of. And Lauren talked about this a little bit. Like, the previous world you're in was, like, growth at all costs. Right? And so really, a lot of the go to market function was just focused on new business acquisition. Like, there was always some element of, like, sales involvement in post sales or customer marketing and some of those things. But the message from the top down and like the stats that we showed on slides every week is like, how many new logos we got? What was our revenue growth, right? And when you're in that, that mindset of like, let's ten x this every quarter, the majority of that team is going to be focusing on how do we get the majority of that growth to happen? And I was like, hey, cs, you just take care of everything that we've already got over here, right? And so I think that just became the nature of is we're going to develop products that can sell, we're going to develop marketing materials that help tell those stories of these new products that sell to new people. But obviously the world's changed a little bit, right? And so I think that the message, and I think it really starts at the c level, right, has been like, hey, you guys need to be profitable.
Myles Bradwell [00:09:17]:
You need to be efficient with your revenue. And when you start thinking about efficiency, the most efficient place to grow your business or the most efficient place to sell into is the people that already buy your stuff, right? So it's like there's been this shift back to all of a sudden the C level CEO and down is asking the question like, where is this turn coming from? How do we expand our current customer base? And when you start to look at that, you realize no one business unit can do that. You can't just do something that probably is going to make that happen alone. You can't just hire the greatest csms to make that happen, that we have to market to them. We have to develop products that make sense and really meet them where their needs are. And then again, all these resources start to shift and I think focus back on the customer base. So I think it's less of a light bulb or an aha moment, more of like a forcing function of like, oh, shit, the board has asked us to do this. How do we do that? Let's go talk to customer success and these other people that have been trying to do that for the last few years.
Sy Pendergast [00:10:10]:
Yeah, Miles, I concur so much with a lot of what you said. And I think that there's now a deeper understanding too. Like I've been a part of a high growth startup for about three years now. I've been very blessed to, from the beginning, know that any customer churn was a whole company problem. So from the beginning we were working to save every single customer from a product perspective, a marketing perspective, a CS perspective. But it's been very interesting to watch to the understanding from other organizations, customer success as a whole, that relationships don't save customers. Always too. Like there was this belief that no matter how much you like someone, how great of a relationship you have, how much you're talking about value, hosting, qbrs, driving, product usage, that relationship can't be the savior in many situations.
Sy Pendergast [00:10:55]:
And I think that now that there is a little bit of an understanding around that, it's lighten the load from customer success across organizations to say, how can other departments be a part of the solution too?
Mark Huber [00:11:06]:
This is totally unscripted, but si, it was something that you said. You're gonna wonder why I'm asking you three this question. Have you ever seen catch me if you can the movie?
Sy Pendergast [00:11:15]:
Is that the one with Leonardo DiCaprio? And he's like pretending to be a pilot? Is that the right one?
Mark Huber [00:11:20]:
Yes. Okay.
Sy Pendergast [00:11:21]:
Yes, I got it.
Mark Huber [00:11:22]:
Lauren Miles, have you seen it?
Myles Bradwell [00:11:24]:
Yes, I believe I have. Anything with Leonardo Capra.
Mark Huber [00:11:27]:
We'll see if you remember this, but sigh, you said concurrently. Do you remember the scene in the movie when the concur moment comes up?
Sy Pendergast [00:11:34]:
No. Is it like a major moment?
Mark Huber [00:11:37]:
No, no, no. It's like, I'm a weirdo for even remembering this, but one of the times where he's faking that he's an actual doctor and he knows absolutely nothing about being a doctor or like going to med school or anything like that. Cause he's a fraud.
Sy Pendergast [00:11:50]:
Yes.
Myles Bradwell [00:11:50]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:11:50]:
And he's in the, I think it's like an emergency room or a hospital room or something. And he was watching, I think he was watching like medical movies and whatnot to try and look the part. And this kid breaks his arm and then the nurse or somebody asks him, you know, do you concur? And he's like, yeah, I concur. And he's like, what do you mean? There's nothing to concur about. The kid broke his arm.
Sy Pendergast [00:12:14]:
Obviously it's broken.
Myles Bradwell [00:12:15]:
Yeah, that's my move in board meeting. It's just like, I concur. Yes.
Mark Huber [00:12:22]:
Sorry, I'm going to steal that from you. So let's get real about what actually causes churn. And I promise this whole episode is not going to focus on the negative. We're going to talk about what we can do and take some actionable things away to work together from marketing to cs and retaining and expanding customers. But what actually causes churn in your eyes?
Sy Pendergast [00:12:43]:
There's tons of philosophies around this and different things can drive churn. So there's no one great answer. But I always look to how I purchase products myself, whether it's professionally or personally. And for me, and I think a lot of organizations out there, right product, right price, right time. If one of those buckets is missing, I think that at any point in time, especially you look at the economy right now. Right? Right price is kind of the dominating factor. I see customers right now choosing price over product fit, especially when procurement and budget times are tight. But that's just my opinion.
Sy Pendergast [00:13:19]:
So Miles, Lauren, do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you have other philosophies there?
Mark Huber [00:13:23]:
Do you concur?
Myles Bradwell [00:13:24]:
Yeah, I guess those are like the components that lead up to my point. So I slightly concur, but maybe very slightly.
Mark Huber [00:13:31]:
I feel bad. Sigh. I'm not making fun of you, I promise. It's just the only other time that I've heard concur was that movie and I was so thrown off.
Sy Pendergast [00:13:37]:
Maybe it's like I'm gonna say it ten more times in episodes, gonna be like a nervous twitch.
Myles Bradwell [00:13:40]:
Now there's podcast episode names. This one will be obviously called I.
Sy Pendergast [00:13:45]:
Love to work with her.
Myles Bradwell [00:13:49]:
So, yeah, like Price, for me it's all value. Right. I think obviously if Price was the only thing like Salesforce would have like a huge problem because they charge people more than anything. But obviously we're so scared of what would happen if we, if we all didn't use Salesforce or HubSpot or something like that. So I think the job of the CSM historically has been like, again, we like to deliver that value. And I think we were just talking about they can't really deliver value alone. Right. But I think really more, the way I would think about it now is less of like, it's our job to understand how the customer measures value and it's our job to understand what the measurement points are that they're going to measure against for that.
Myles Bradwell [00:14:25]:
Like what are their success criteria? And then be the listening piece and the microphone back to the company that like, hey, we're not delivering that value. Are we not delivering it because I think this will go into a lot of the things we'll talk about. We're not delivering it because they're just, they have a different use case than what we do. Are we not delivering it because like we don't have the features that they need to be successful? Are we not delivering it because of the CSM? Maybe because we're just like unable to communicate that value or give them best practices. There's all these different elements that will lead to that churn. But like, at the end of the day, it comes down to based on how they define success and based on their defined value, have we given them the tools or the experience that can support that? And if not, what are those gaps and how do we as a business, hopefully, hopefully attack that?
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:15:08]:
The only thing that I'll add, that I, that I'll like semi disagree with, Miles, is like, you can create, like, you can create a business plan with value, you know, upon purchasing the software, and you can deliver on that and you can do all the things you can do as a account manager on the account. But if that value is not enough to be the conversation in the room when your customer goes to talk to their boss to explain to them why they're doing great work, you're not even on top of mind. If you're not top five, top ten things in that room, it doesn't matter how much value you're providing. You're not providing enough in comparison to other things in their, in their life or the pains that they're. You can do everything. You can solve 100% of the pain for a really. I'm trying to bring this back to the Leo movie with the medical thing. Like, you can put a bandit over a splinter, but like, you know, the other people are fixing the broken arm, you know, yeah, it's on the pain you're solving for.
Myles Bradwell [00:15:57]:
You know, Lauren, the reason, when Mark asked me who should we bring on, I brought you on here. So you just agree with all my points. So my feelings are slightly hurt. But I think the other thing, and kind of going back to what you were saying, and it supports what size saying is like, yeah, if you drive value, but your competitor can also probably deliver a pretty similar value for half the cost. I think right now that will matter in a way that in the past it was like as long as the value you delivered outweighed the cost, they were probably going to renew. Whereas now they're going to look at that and say, yeah, they're delivering more than we're paying, but this other tool will do that for cheaper. And I think we'll do 95% or 85%. That's enough for us right now when we're trying to cut costs.
Myles Bradwell [00:16:32]:
So we'll take that. So I think like the old value equation, that used to be like, yeah, that's fine, we'll pay this stupid amount of money because it delivers some outcome. I think that we're in a different, very different world than we were years ago in terms of being able to rest on that.
Sy Pendergast [00:16:45]:
I think we also have different leaders in different organizations too, weighing in on renewals, on product decisions, on tool decisions, in a different way too. Procurement teams or CFO's or financial teams. That to your point, I think Lauren and Miles, you both made it together, right? That if they don't clearly understand the perceived value, the desired value, they do a quick Google search or a quick product comparison, they say, oh, well, this looks like an 80% match. You guys are good. Move over there. It's fine. And it's hard sometimes to convince a mind of that. If it's already been made up or if you're the one using a tool, it can be tough.
Mark Huber [00:17:22]:
So that was totally unplanned. And that's the best part about this show, is because you all can steer the conversation wherever we take it. So is that something that you're seeing happen? This is more for miles and sighs is that something that you're seeing happen more and more recently? It's kind of hard to plan for that.
Sy Pendergast [00:17:38]:
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm seeing it at least. I think that we're in a unique position, too. We host virtual events at my organization that we get to talk to marketing teams a lot in general. So, Lauren, kind of, I guess, have a segue here for you that I think that a lot of teams are seeing it, right? It's not just one specific organization or one specific industry. I think I'm seeing, and I'm actually working really closely with my marketing people right now, my organization, to talk about competitive intel and competitive information. And how can we enable our teams, not only in cs, but marketing and sales and across the organization to better understand what's that value outside of our tool? And how can we be ready to speak to that as an organization? Because that's when the churn number comes down, hopefully. So, Lauren, maybe you have a little bit of an opinion there, too.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:18:28]:
No, I know. I absolutely agree with you. I disagree with miles only exclusively in this podcast. So I actually look into this deal.
Sy Pendergast [00:18:37]:
Thank you so much.
Mark Huber [00:18:40]:
One of the things that I've heard a couple times is this word value. And I've seen, and I've been guilty of this before, especially at my last company, of promising and unfortunately, sometimes over promising and the value that you are trying to deliver to your customers using your product. And then once they become a customer, then they get upset that, hey, they bought something that is working differently and not as well as what they thought they were signing up for. So, Lauren, have you run into that before, because I feel like we, us marketers are kind of to blame for that.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:19:13]:
You mean sales is overselling? No way.
Mark Huber [00:19:16]:
No, we're actually going to roast sales. But that's another episode that I'll have you three back on.
Sy Pendergast [00:19:21]:
Oh, anytime.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:19:23]:
Of course, this happens a lot, right? Sales is like, we're doing everything we can to keep our close rates up, to hit our quota, to make our number, to do all the things we need to do, and then we just lob it over the fence. Like, this is a problem. That's the sale is oldest time. I think, like, what, what we're getting to with the same efficiency, you know, priorities, is how do we hold the pre sale team accountable for the success of the account as a whole? And I think, like, getting to a more enterprise approach and figuring out what that means if you're not an enterprise company. When you think about account teams and thinking about AE's responsible for business host, the initial first sale is really the future of eliminating this pain. That's the only way is accountability. We've talked about it a few times today, but, like, just accountability for the success post sale because it's not good for the customer, it's not good for the business, because what it ultimately results in is churn, is we're not selling to the right ICP and or we're overselling a product and the value that we can bring.
Myles Bradwell [00:20:25]:
Yeah, I think there's, like, different levels of overselling, right? Like, marketing is always going to, like, take what the product actually looks like and, like, make it look prettier on slides like that. That is just part of the game, right? It's like storytelling of, like, what it could do, what the ideal looks like. And then there's, like, on the sales side, there's sometimes where it's like a customer asks like, hey, can you do this? Right? You need to be really honest and factual about, here's where the product currently is, right. We can or can't support that use case. And I think to Lauren's point, that starts at sales leadership. Like, how do they speak to the sales team when they have rfps or when they're having those conversations? Is sales willing to be open and honest about, like, what are the sales use cases we actually can nail? Which ones can't we nail? And being transparent about that, because that's really when customers get pissed, is when they blatantly asked you straight up, but this was a part of our process. You said you could do that. That's churn, right? Like, oh, it looks prettier on the slides.
Myles Bradwell [00:21:14]:
No one's going to churn because of that. As long as you can still deliver what you said you're going to deliver. So I think there's varying degrees of that. But clearly, as the go to market teams become focused on retention, they're going to do a better job of that. And I think the coolest version of this is when you see part of sales number being the retention of those clients or the expansion of those clients. You can tell people sales job is to they're going to do what they need to do. But if their number is actually based on, hey, if they expand, you're going to get paid on it. If they churn, you're going to get clawed back.
Myles Bradwell [00:21:44]:
If they leave in the first three months, you're going to lose that commission. Right. Those are some of the things that I know Laura and I have partnered on at pastors to implement that because that's what's going to drive behavior. How you comp people, how you reward people, how you incentivize people. That's the behavior you're going to get.
Sy Pendergast [00:21:58]:
I could not agree more to that. I actually come from a sales background, so maybe that makes you guys all like me a little bit less. I didn't know that on the other side of the house. Now, I make that joke very lightheartedly. Cause I believe in my core that there's nothing worse as a salesperson than completing a sale. And then a year later that same customer that you poured your heart and soul into walks away. You just like, for what did I spend all that time on? So I think that I very much am a believer in that, like positive reward driving behavior. Miles, that you spoke about, that if in some way incentivized either on expansions later or the retention of that customer, or even like positive referral communication from your customer success team.
Sy Pendergast [00:22:41]:
There's lots of ways to incentivize those customers staying, but I've worked with very few salespeople that. Not that they don't exist, but I don't think that there's anyone out there misleading, especially in today's environment. I think a lot of it, though, you do talk about complex products where you're trying to make learn from your perspective. Probably a statement as a marketing team, we fixed this problem. We have this use case, and then you get those customers that come on that have a little bit of a different viewpoint of that or heard what they wanted to hear during the sales process, and that just becomes that product marketing and sales motion, I guess, of trying to fulfill what they heard and can be that ultimate time suck, too.
Myles Bradwell [00:23:18]:
I think that kind of supports, too, is like, the really good salespeople do really good discovery, not just like, hey, we can solve that problem. You want to sign today and just, like, close it? I think both Mark and Lauren, I work with both you from the market side, you guys do a really good job of this partnering with sales and what is our go to market motion. How do we define that? And I think good quality sales folks that do good quality discovery will actually try to find out if this is that good use case, not like, hopefully avoid that thing that they know might be the gotcha later. They're gonna be like, hey, is this what you're saying when you say this? Are you really trying to do this? Okay, just to be transparent. That's more of a this tool than what we're talking about. Here's the thing we do. Is that still a pain for you? Right. And so, again, I think I've been lucky to have really strong sales leadership and sales counterparts that drive that.
Myles Bradwell [00:24:03]:
And then I think this will kind of lead to one of the other points that you wanted to hit on Mark, which is just like, there's a lot of stuff we can do by partnering with sales and marketing. Like a sales gets or CS gets to feel the pain of that a lot more. It's like, there needs to be this continuous feedback loop between those teams of, like, you may not even be aware of what you said or what you thought you sold them and how that ended up impacting them. So it's our job as the CS side to really, like, bring that full circle back to leadership and say, hey, here's these trends we're seeing. Here's what they thought they saw, or here's the non ideal customers, whatever those things are, that are ultimately leading to that misalignment or that mis expectation.
Sy Pendergast [00:24:37]:
And there's so much positive content and, like, resources that marketing can get from customer success and sales. Like, Lauren, I'd love to hear your opinion, too, that I feel like so often we're like, ugh, this wasn't the right use case. Customer has this problem. Like, there's so many good success stories that come out of sales and customer success, and I feel like marketing kind of gets beat up a little bit sometimes, right, because we're constantly asking for all the bad things. But what's your take on that? Like, Lauren, are you doing things as a marketer to improve, churn in a positive way? Use cases like, what are you doing?
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:25:10]:
I made a point at the beginning when I was on the soapbox. I think I'm still on the soapbox, but about customers.
Sy Pendergast [00:25:15]:
You're back on marketers?
Myles Bradwell [00:25:16]:
Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:25:16]:
Get on there. You're good.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:25:17]:
I'm taller. I'm now five. Three. Okay. I think the way that marketers look at making meaningful, measurable impact to this part of the business is a little bit flawed historically, where again, we like hire customer marketers and they build use cases or case studies and a lot of these things, like Miles made this point. It's trying to drive and close new business. It's not necessarily focusing on current activation of our customer base. And what I've seen is these customer marketers don't have the technical skill set.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:25:48]:
Sometimes product marketing does, or product management does, has the product technical understanding to be able to create the activities, to create the programs, to create the strategics that actually can make day to day impact for your users. Not just like your decision makers, your buyers, your CFO's, like your c levels that never even get into your product marketing is trying to talk to marketing always has a really core understanding. Unless we're building communities where we're giving out socks and stuff, where they're, wait.
Mark Huber [00:26:17]:
A second, is that what communities are for? Just like giving out socks, you're getting.
Sy Pendergast [00:26:21]:
Socks from your communities? I'm not.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:26:24]:
I haven't. No, but socks, you know, I'll push socks all day because like one size fits all. With socks, you don't need different sizes.
Myles Bradwell [00:26:31]:
That's a good point. Good point. She clearly has a gifting background.
Mark Huber [00:26:34]:
She knows that's somebody who's bought a bunch of merch before and not given away any of it and wanted to play it safe the second time around because I've done that.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:26:45]:
Hey, check out postal warehouse.
Myles Bradwell [00:26:48]:
That's right.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:26:49]:
Okay.
Sy Pendergast [00:26:50]:
Free.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:26:50]:
On a long winded way of saying, I think we can do better. And I think the future is thinking more about user day to day. And miles and I have worked on stuff past where, how do we encourage our customers that we would consider crawlers to be walkers and walkers to be flyers? And those are users. Those are not necessarily like our buyers. And I think marketing oftentimes is more comfortable in the former space and not so comfortable in the latter space. And so we need to get closer to being a CSM, being support, understanding product, understanding technical side and hiring for those as well. I've made the mistake of hiring incorrectly there when I think, oh, I'll throw some resources at this and kind of making the mistake of like, this isn't moving the needle on activation on weekly active users. I know we're going to probably talk about KPI's at some point, but like, who's accountable for those types of metrics if not if CS alone?
Myles Bradwell [00:27:39]:
Yeah, I think it's like you just said, like we were talking about sales. It's like, all right, if you don't get this, it gets clawed back. Marketing doesn't, to your point, Lauren doesn't have like kind of the positive measurable and no one's asking them like, there will be this push of like, hey, Miles has asked you to create a new slide deck, so you have to do it. But you're not actually measured on like, what did that do? Right. What did that asset actually do when you created that case study that Miles was asking for? Did, was it used? Was it downloaded? Did it drive any sort of retention increases? And I think as long as marketing and sales goal is only on that new logo, that will be the stuff that we do. Right? Whereas if we start to have like product and engineering should have measurables against how they're driving usage, right. Marketing should have that. Sales should have that in the same way that, you know, Cs is focused on them.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:28:23]:
And when you're talking incentives, like transparency, you and I worked together, Miles. Like, I worked on your stuff or prioritized your stuff. I like you. It's the right thing to do. It's best for the business. But guess what, it's not actually part of my comp package. Oftentimes, totally new business, new pipeline is marketers have, I think shifted to be more on NRR overall, you know, customer health. And that will help.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:28:46]:
That will definitely help. But before it was like, yeah, we should do this.
Myles Bradwell [00:28:49]:
Yeah, before I was having, I'm not.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:28:52]:
Getting paid on it.
Sy Pendergast [00:28:53]:
It's a little bit of a hot topic that no one kind of talks about. Right. Like whether it's remote work or in person workplaces, personal relationships do impact the priorities and goals that you are able to maybe slide a little something in for miles. You maybe weren't comped on it, but your friends and I feel like that is a little bit of a conversation. Maybe it's a hot topic conversation, but it's true. And the better your relationship is in the workplace with others, a little more leeway each way too.
Myles Bradwell [00:29:23]:
Yeah, but I think it comes down.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:29:25]:
Not to piss off your peers. Don't make people hate you.
Myles Bradwell [00:29:30]:
I just, whenever Lauren's in town, I'm always like, hey, want to grab a coffee? Want to grab a drink? Because I know I'm going to actually end up having to ask her for that favor later on. So I think Lauren said this, too, right? It's all about, like, what is her boss's boss. Asking them to do like, that, regardless of measures, too, is like, as a CS leader, and I think this is something that is a, it's a hard skill to learn. Like, I think a lot of Cs people are like, all right, I'm going to get in there. I'm going to focus on my customers. Like, but how you level up and how you tell that story to your CEO of why this matters and, like, not only for my team and why I should get budget and why I should get people right. Like, that's obviously priority number one. But also, like, why you need to have Lauren care about this, why you need to have these other people care about that, right? And ultimately, no one ends up listening to me.
Myles Bradwell [00:30:13]:
It's just because the board tells them they need to focus it. And then all of a sudden, like, Miles, you were right.
Sy Pendergast [00:30:16]:
Did they say those words? Miles, are you sure?
Myles Bradwell [00:30:18]:
No, they never, they never do. But I daydream that that's what they're saying some, somewhere else. But, yeah. So again, that's where it comes down to.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:30:30]:
Right.
Myles Bradwell [00:30:30]:
It's like if the CEO cares about it, every department is going to care about it. And so for me, that was a big part of my career search. And why I think Mark and I are lucky is we have a CEO that really thinks about that, right. That is as worried about the current customer as they are about the net new business. And they're actually okay growing slower to make sure that that foundation is there. And I think my hope of this shift that we're seeing of net retention being a focus is that even when we go back to ridiculous growth mode, which we will do as soon as more funding, that is just exactly. You can't ten x from your current customer base that it's impossible. So the second we go back to that, I hope we go back.
Myles Bradwell [00:31:07]:
But everyone, like the leaders now that will be doing that will have grown up in a time where they thought about net retention, whereas, like, a lot of the sales leaders now are focusing on their retention for the first time. So it's like a new thing. Everyone's like, what is NRR like? They're, you know, they would know what it is. So I think the good thing that'll come out of this is like, we're all going to be hyper focused on profitability for a few years, we'll be hyper focused on net retention, and then all of a sudden it's going to be like, hey, we got, the board is telling us now that we need to invest and we need to grow ridiculously fast again. But I think there will be this mindset of let's do that. But let's make sure we keep the foundation as kind of like the launch pad of which we'll hopefully grow from, versus just let's do it at all costs and just spend millions of dollars on events and dinners and weird things like that.
Mark Huber [00:31:48]:
So I'm going to out myself a little bit, but I would also have to imagine that this is going to apply to many people who are listening. I had never heard of or really knew what NRR meant until about halfway through my time at my last company, and that was right around like March, April of 2022. And I didn't really know that that was something that truly mattered at the end of the day. Everything that you said, myles, especially for me right now and my role, this is the first time where I've really been consciously thinking about it and asking you about it. We were just in a meeting before I was late to my podcast. We were talking about that, and I think a lot of first time marketing leaders, the same probably applies to them, too.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:32:30]:
Not me. No, my first word is actually nr.
Myles Bradwell [00:32:33]:
Out of the way.
Sy Pendergast [00:32:34]:
Yeah, Lauren, that's so funny.
Mark Huber [00:32:37]:
It should be like a LinkedIn made up kid Monday post whenever people are talking about like, some just absolutely outrageous conversation that happened with them and their five year old. That never remotely happened at all. So, Lauren, I'm expecting you to post about that sometime in the future.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:32:52]:
About me when I was born. Also my child. Yeah, she's super versed in unit economics and all the financial. She just actually opened her first backdoor roth.
Myles Bradwell [00:33:03]:
Nice.
Mark Huber [00:33:06]:
All right, so we've talked a lot about how we've gotten to this point and what's broken in many ways. So let's kind of spin this in the positive and side. Maybe you can kick us off here. What are some of the things that you are doing right now with your marketing team to, you know, not just fix the churn problem, but also retain and expand customers?
Sy Pendergast [00:33:26]:
Yeah. Wow. What are we not doing? Startup life, obviously, we're always trying new things, which is fun. It's like what keeps things interesting, for lack of a better word. A big thing that I think we're focused on is looking at both the positive and the negative. So I guess it's a good theme, not only having meetings around close lost opportunities or churn or voice of the customer in terms of requests and issues, but also focusing on what's working, who's a really good customer that's thriving with our product, that we can incentivize with a case study or at an event or, you know, use for both sales and cs for expansion. If Lauren was my marketer, I come to her with those types of people and say, okay, this is the bad. How can we fix it? Right? But here's the good.
Sy Pendergast [00:34:11]:
Because oftentimes the good almost moves the needle more than. Than all of these small rock issues, right. That most likely we're gonna solve one or two of those, but we can show others that either aren't customers yet or might be on the cusp of not being a customer, that there are people having success, there are things going right, and there's content that can be created out of that. I'm not a marketer. Right. But I admire you so much, Lauren. Case studies, decks, events. Like, there's just tons of things that I think we sometimes focus too much on.
Sy Pendergast [00:34:42]:
The negative, to your point, Mark. So was that an answer even? I don't know, but there's a lot meetings, and I think it does start with everyone being in the same room and talking, whether it's virtually or in person, to say what's working, what's not, and let's all collaborate on it.
Mark Huber [00:34:57]:
Truly, Miles, how does that stack up to either what you and I are doing right now at user evidence or what you've done before with Lauren at either outreach or at postal?
Myles Bradwell [00:35:08]:
Yeah, I think there's always, like that negative analysis. I think where we are, like, we're so early, there's actually not enough of the negative data yet. We're still so early. When I joined it, it was like eight renewals in one quarter. We're now getting to the place. We have these larger quarters, and so there's more churn data and they'll become a bigger part of what we do. On the marketing side, I think similar to what Cy was just saying is we're really focused, Mark. Like you, me, and Alex, right? It's like, CS is an amazing guinea pig for what we're going to go and do in new business, right? Like when we talked about, like, revenue efficiency and stuff, it's like marketers are always worried, like, who is our ICP? How do we sell more than whatever? I'm like, hey, I have an amazing group of people that you might want to chat with that, like buying stuff from us that they're called our customers.
Myles Bradwell [00:35:49]:
Right. And so I think there's a lot of, like, interviewing them, understanding what's working for them, like, you know, anecdotally but also from a data perspective. But I think, like, with our new research content offering as an example, Mark, right, where like, CS is kind of the first wave of selling that. And we luckily have a good group of people that have that skillset, but we're getting trained first. We're kind of exposing our customers to that first, getting that anecdotal feedback as well as hopefully closing some opportunities on that. And it's really just an amazing proof of concept before we go to market. And so we can tweak the approach, be like, oh, this didn't land. This did land.
Myles Bradwell [00:36:22]:
Here's the stakeholders that it's working with. So I think, again, kind of being that tip of the spear of the go to market motion, starting with our own current customer base, finding and seeing how those things land, whether it's new features or upsell opportunities, and then taking those things to market, I think has been something that, again, the closer cs can move themselves to revenue or the more that we can be involved in those revenue conversations, like, at the end of the day, that's what everyone's going to care about. So I think that's really my focus in these early days is like, we clearly want to have healthy customers, we want to take care of them. But what can cs be doing right now to protect the base, grow the base, and then ultimately help the new business side as well? If we do those three things well, the CS team is going to be in a good spot. And I think, again, hopefully the company's gonna be in a good spot.
Sy Pendergast [00:37:06]:
How do you get those learnings to marketing miles? Like, how do you get them to Lauren? How does Lauren come to you asking, or do you facilitate those over automation async? Like, what are you guys doing?
Myles Bradwell [00:37:16]:
Yeah, it's a great question. Well, again, Lauren and I would just have excuses to hang out, mostly to drink or do whatever it is that we were doing. But during those, we would sometimes talk about business. And I think, like, a big thing is like, we're not doing things in cs. And like, oh, let me get that back to marketing. And I think, Mark, we're doing a good job of this now because we look at OKRS, Mark is involved in those before I even start that project, or Alex, our new customer marketing owner. So when I say, hey, we need to work on that retention we're doing a great job of protecting the base, but we need more product lines that we can add on to expand our customer base. And I work with Mark and I'm like, okay, we could do this research content thing that's working well for us.
Myles Bradwell [00:37:55]:
What do you need from us? We're partnering. From day one on, they're going to own the content creation. I'm going to own the training of my team and the distribution of that content. And then as that gets rolled out again, we're meeting on this bi weekly basis and we're giving that feedback like, hey, this worked great. We had a new slide. We actually need something. We're finding that our stakeholders, not the right person for this. They actually need a whole different set of pitch materials for marketing leadership or cmos.
Myles Bradwell [00:38:19]:
Can you work on that? It just becomes this kind of iterative process. More than, oh, let's give a feedback. It's like they're involved from day one and throughout that process, hopefully.
Mark Huber [00:38:28]:
So one of the things that stood out to me when you were first talking about this, Miles, was something that came up in the last board meeting that you and I were at in Jackson. So that would have been what? Like a little less than two months ago. So. Sorry. I mean, like, Lauren can relate to this. I'm peak event season right now. I don't know where I am. I've been traveling, like, every week for the last seven weeks, so time is irrelevant at this point.
Mark Huber [00:38:52]:
But to get it back on the rails, Miles, you presented a couple slides, and you were basically looking at the renewals using a couple different company attributes. And that was one of those times where the light bulb went off for me, which was, hey, some of these smaller companies that we've had as customers love the pitch, but then once we get them as customers, they're not actually the right fit for us. And that was a really big light bulb moment for me. And then once we were talking about that in the board meeting, I then realized, all right, we got to refine our ICP a little bit more and make sure that we're marketing to the right customers. So I don't know what you have to think about that.
Myles Bradwell [00:39:31]:
Yeah, Lauren and I actually did the same exact thing, which is like, we were seeing churn happen at a rate that we weren't comfortable with. Right? And I was like, all right, how do we. How do we fix this? And I'm like, here's what the data is telling us, right? So I think this goes like, I was talking about this like, I think a really good motion for cs, and I think this should be a company motion is a quarterly churn analysis. Right. And like, and growth analysis. Right. Like, what are the trends we're seeing? Like, what is the commonalities across companies that churn? What's the commonalities across companies that are renewing early stages is always fun because you don't always have the data to, like, tell that story. You know, like, whether it's number of renewals or just like, I have three things in HubSpot, it's like company size and whatever else, right? But like, as you get more sophisticated, you're like, hey, we are with a CMO or higher, we're, you know, we're in more than two business units, but you try to find those patterns.
Myles Bradwell [00:40:16]:
And I think, Lauren, we called it Project Narwhal or something stupid, but I would like to name it after some sort of mythical animal or something.
Mark Huber [00:40:23]:
Wait, why don't I get that here?
Myles Bradwell [00:40:25]:
It didn't, it clearly didn't work out.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:40:27]:
For me very well because nobody can relate the name of the project back to what the initiative was.
Myles Bradwell [00:40:35]:
Lauren specifically was against Narwhal. To be fair, she did not want to call it nothing to do with what we were talking about, but Project Narwhal was really about that exact thing of, like, what can marketing, sales and cs do? And so that was my job was to, as you were talking about, Marcus, to, like, one, you're going to get a ton of, like, anecdotal stuff in conversation that tip me off. Like, I get the sense that when we're with small companies, this is happening, and then I need to go find the data that backs up my feelings. Right? So the first thing for a CS leader, I think, is, like, just sitting in on calls, listening to those calls, being a part of those renewal and churn conversations. And like, ooh, when I see this, this tends to be good. When I see this, this tends to be bad. Then I went and found the data, and I think in both cases, some of the stuff we found is like, company demographic information tends to be a really good place to start. Right? And I think for us, Mark, it was more like, hey, when someone's a certain size, like, we really can't help them have scale because they're just not ready to scale.
Myles Bradwell [00:41:25]:
And that's what our product helps with. Whereas I think for us, Lauren, it was more of, like, industries, right? It's like Joe's pest control company in Santa Maria. Like, no matter what we do for them, they're just, they don't have the problem that we're solving. It's like an industry issue, right. We need to be focusing on B two B SaaS. And we looked at things like what's in their tech stack, you know, like these other things that like were really strong indicators for us. And so over time, just looking at that data quarter over quarter, some paths became clear. And then we worked with Lauren to focus our marketing effort around those companies we work with sales to.
Myles Bradwell [00:41:58]:
Again, what are the discovery questions you can ask? What's the type of company you should be going after? And then that sets cs up for success. Obviously you have to wait a year to figure out if you were right on those things. And that's why you need to like constantly, constantly, hopefully attack that for the.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:42:11]:
Marketers in the room. Here's take that. And then what? The challenging part for the mark and the Laurens of the world is, okay. Miles and Cy are like, stop sending me shit customers, okay? Like, stop sending me the sprinkler. Companies like, we don't need these. They're terrible. And then us, we say, okay, but they're, this is like what we don't say out loud, we say in our head, but they're cheap, they're easy to source, they're fast to close, they hit, they get us to our number, they're like 70% of like whatever our lead volume is. And now if we turn off this motion that's driving them, I have to explain to my CEO, to my boss, have that, that we're going to maybe see a temporary drop.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:42:51]:
We won't have that. And then that's the internal campaigning of like, we're going to see a drop, but it's good for us overall long term. And then this has not happened once. This happened many times in my career where finance and CEO and board says, yeah, turn it off. Like, yeah, that doesn't make any sense for the company. Turn it off. Those are shit customers. Turn it off.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:43:08]:
Tank. Right? And then they're like, turn it back on. You're like, no, we talked about this, it's okay. Like, it'll be okay. Like we gotta, we gotta ride the storm a little bit. We've gotta move up market. We've gotta like focus on ICP and like, it'll all shake out because even if we're driving leads in this non ICP, like just know they're gonna turn in twelve months. So think about future you and I think that that internal campaign, that internal communication, that internal managing up is so important when you're trying to create alignment to the miles and the size of the world.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:43:36]:
Just as important it is to go, you know, across because of that. And so the marketers have to do the like, dancing orchestration, you know, satisfy every need here. So is it just me or does that happen to you?
Mark Huber [00:43:46]:
Mark, you said dancing and like, nobody needs to see me dancing right now. So no, I'm not dancing, but yes, I'm doing some of the stuff that you talked about.
Myles Bradwell [00:43:54]:
Mark's more of a magician, a statistics magician. He does like and then show customer growth.
Sy Pendergast [00:44:01]:
Lauren, how do the size and the miles for, I guess the people listening, like how did the customer success, the account management sides of the business, like how do we help you then, right? We're bringing you a lot of requests. I know I'm constantly asking of marketing, what would you say to those of us listening on how we can partner and how we can help, like solve the problem?
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:44:21]:
Be more like a salesperson. Like salespeople are the loudest. Generally speaking, not everybody is the loudest, but they're squeakiest. They can be the squeaky. So when they have a shit lead, you know about it. I probably know every, every shit lead that came in the last twelve months. But do I know every terrible customer that came in? Yeah, we talk about churn report. We have these like formal meetings, we talk about it, but I think early providing that feedback without a solution.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:44:50]:
I think Miles is very solution oriented and I think Cs as an organization generally is because that's the function you're in is helping. So you want to come to the table with solutions. You're like, and I need a deck or I need a white paper or I need a case study because like I have this issue and I want a solution for it. Sales doesn't do that as often. They just like talk about the issue and the problems. And so I think flagging things early, flagging things often just involving us in conversations. When you see good or bad customer signals helpful and then marketing, we can come to solutions together.
Myles Bradwell [00:45:26]:
So I'm hearing like do the opposite of what your therapist would recommend and just complain about your problems. Think about what you need. Just be loud. Just be loud and complain.
Mark Huber [00:45:37]:
So I've got one last question for us, and it's a pretty meaty one, but the podcast is called the proof point. So we got to talk about, you know, actually finding proof points that you're on the right track. So Miles, you've said before on this, you know, you can't wait twelve months and see if it works. I mean, you could, but that's probably not the best strategy. So what are you looking at on a more regular basis? To see that some of the changes that you're making are either working or getting you down the right path.
Myles Bradwell [00:46:05]:
I don't know if this is a buzzword, but the old leading lagging indicators thing is really important. Right. So it's like at the end of buzzwords.
Mark Huber [00:46:11]:
That is not. Neither of those are buzzwords. Those are. Yes, we are good.
Myles Bradwell [00:46:14]:
Yes, I'm good.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:46:15]:
They're on my bingo card for sure.
Myles Bradwell [00:46:17]:
Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. Because I use them way too much. But anyways, at the end of the day, I'm going to get judged on net retention. Even if I tell a great story to my CEO about how we're working on thing, we're going to churn these back. Like they don't care. Like net retention, gross retention are going to be.
Myles Bradwell [00:46:31]:
You have to keep an eye on those. And so sometimes you're going to have to do some dancing or some magician tactics to make the numbers look good, quarter over quarter. At least keep them at a reasonable level. But when you make those changes, you make those like those adaptations to your ICP or whatever else, and you focus on things, the things that you want to measure to really see what's going to happen a year from now is like those leading indicators. Right. And I think at each business that's different. And so typically what it looks like for me at an early stage company is I'm going to make an educated guess to start. It's going to be something like we want to see weak active users or in user evidence case, we want to see assets produced.
Myles Bradwell [00:47:04]:
We'll make some educated guess of what we're going to look at and we're going to tie that to CSM activities. We're going to have this type of conversation or we're going to bring it up on these types of calls. I'm looking at what's the behavior, what's the thing I can measure to see if as that behavior goes up, that measure goes up. Then in six months to a year, I'll keep looking at churn to see. Is that actually impacting that? If it's not, then my hypothesis was off and I need to look back at that data. So like we were just talking about with that churn analysis, every court, I need to go in there and look and see. Last quarter I said it was that small companies weren't great for us. Is that still proving true? Cool and then I need to look at, I said I wanted csms to do more of this and I thought it would impact this thing, which is like assets produced or weak active users.
Myles Bradwell [00:47:47]:
Are those going up? And if not, then I need a coach to that. Right. So it's starting with the lagging, making a guess on the leading and then thinking about what's the CSM? How can I adjust our customer journey, how can I adjust our customer communications, how can I adjust our customer marketing efforts along with my partners to try to drive up that leading indicator that I've set for myself and then know that I'll be wrong and be ready to reevaluate and change that in three months time when our, and again, it's early stage, right. It's like what we, our product might be different three months. So it's like just be ready to pivot every quarter when you're inevitably wrong or have to adjust to the new world.
Mark Huber [00:48:22]:
Si, how does that stack up for what you're doing right now?
Sy Pendergast [00:48:24]:
Yeah, I mean, almost the same thing. We also, our product has evolved rapidly. So I agree, Miles. It's been a lot of words. Did the things, I guess, on the data I'm analyzing. Does it track? If it doesn't, is it because there was this other change or was it truly that I measured the wrong thing or I made the wrong guess and I, not just me, like a lot of people, obviously. I think the other thing too, and it sounds silly, but, like, right now for us, when we're focused on things like expansion and retention, like, does my pipeline look healthier than it did a month ago, two months ago? Or am I downtrending? Is my health score across our book of business, which health score? Like, yeah, you're close, right? It's never going to be perfect. You're constantly changing it.
Sy Pendergast [00:49:03]:
But, like, is it more green than it was a month ago, a quarter ago? Or is it less green? Things like that where it's like if everything's trending in the right direction, hopefully you get that positive result, you're at least feeling good about it. If you don't get that positive result, then okay, were my indicators wrong? Were my health score items wrong? Was my pipeline wrong? And it's kind of like learning by mistake. I hate to say it, don't tell my company that, but it's true. Like, it's human, right? You got to take some risks and try some things at some points.
Myles Bradwell [00:49:30]:
Talk about a hot button issue. We could do a whole episode just on health scores and how people feel. About those. And that would get the CS community.
Sy Pendergast [00:49:38]:
Invite me back and I'll never be able to talk.
Myles Bradwell [00:49:39]:
Yeah, Mark and Lauren would be asleep, but we would just be just having a grand old time and I can just chat.
Sy Pendergast [00:49:45]:
It's okay.
Mark Huber [00:49:46]:
All right, Lauren, you're going to go on your soapbox one last time to close this out. You can say anything that you want. What do you got for us?
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:49:53]:
Anything that I want.
Mark Huber [00:49:55]:
The soapbox is yours.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:49:57]:
This whole thing has got me thinking about how leadership, how boards are looking at marketers. And my thing lately is when marketing is not publishing fancy blogs and webinars and website updates and external facing things, we start turning to things like programmatic customer email or, you know, things that are not as what I call jazz handsy to my former bosses. We kind of get the label that we're not doing anything, despite what the numbers say. And marketers are also guilty of, like, making up made up attribution models that, like, only they understand and nobody else has any idea what they're talking about. But I think, like, this is that, which is we really need to do the hard, sticky, not as sexy, flashy things to work on creating healthy customer bases, and then we need to figure out how to tell the story. We love stories. We're marketers. Tell the story of why we're doing that and why that means we're not doing fancy dinners and parties and websites, whatever.
Lauren Alt Kishpaugh [00:51:03]:
All the things that I call jazz hands marketing. Yeah.
Mark Huber [00:51:07]:
Well, awesome. This was honestly one of the more fun episodes that we've recorded so far. And I promise I do not say that every time. You can check me on that if you listen to all the episodes. You really schooled me on this. Yes, please do. And I appreciate all three of you coming on. And for two people who made their podcast debuts, you guys were pros.
Myles Bradwell [00:51:28]:
We concur. This is one of the best episodes.
Mark Huber [00:51:32]:
Now that you talk all awesome. Well, thanks, everybody, and thanks for listening.