Why Green Health Scores Still Churn

Ninety percent of this company's enterprise accounts were flagged green. They still lost seven of them, and two million dollars in ARR with them.

Anika Zubair, founder of The Customer Success Pro, has led and built CS organizations at Karbon, inSided, and Griffin. This week she sits down with Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski on the question most health scores never answer: are you measuring what your customer is doing with your product, or what it's actually doing for their business? 

Anika breaks down why NPS is a vanity metric, how AI and vibe coding are compressing how long customers will wait for value, and the exact renewal she lost early in her career by being too nice instead of too commercial.

We discuss:

• Why green health scores measure usage instead of outcome
• What "value amnesia" is and why it has to be fought every conversation
• Why AI and vibe coding are shrinking customer patience for time to value
• The renewal Anika lost by focusing on being liked instead of being useful
• Why NPS doesn't tell you anything about revenue risk
  
  

Chapters:
(00:00) Why customers don't actually buy your product
(00:33) The Kombucha Cloud scenario: 90% green, still lost $2.1M in ARR
(03:26) Who owns defining customer success from day one
(05:46) Why GRR risk starts before the contract is signed
(09:11) The dashboard blind spot: CS is built to look backward
(11:44) How vibe coding shrank customer patience for time to value
(14:20) Why product managers need a seat in CS conversations
(19:37) The renewal Anika lost by being "too nice"
(24:03) Fixing "value amnesia": how often is often enough
(33:27) Monday Morning Move: audit your green-to-churn accounts
(37:26) Uncensored Questions: NPS, firing a CS team, the future of the title

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Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Jay

Co-founder & Managing Partner of Revenue Reimagined

Host

Dale Zwizinski

Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Revenue Reimagined

What is GTM Uncensored™?

Most GTM content covers the same ground. GTM Uncensored finds the operators actually in the seat and digs into what's true in today's GTM, not what sounds good.

Every guest is currently building a company, leading a revenue team, or running a GTM function inside a real business. During the show, Adam and Dale push the envelope until the real story comes out.

The show goes where most content won't: The motions that determine whether a company stays in business, or goes under.

GTM Uncensored is built for B2B revenue leaders at $5M–$100M ARR who are accountable to a number and need a real-world playbook, not philosophy.

Every episode ends with a Monday Morning Move. One specific action you can take this week, and a series of Uncensored Questions where listeners get unfiltered answers from people who've actually been there.

What we cover: Pipeline & GTM motion, post-sale architecture, CS & retention, NRR/GRR mechanics, RevOps, AI in the revenue org, executive branding, and more.

Your hosts: Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski are co-founders of Revenue Reimagined. They didn't build a consulting firm. They flipped the fractional CRO model because strategy without execution doesn't move the needle. The questions they ask on air are the same ones they're solving inside real companies right now.

GTM Uncensored is the GTM conversations nobody else is having.

Anika Zubair (00:00):
Customers or prospects don't actually buy for your product and service. They can actually really care less about your product and service. What they actually care about is their business growing and they're hoping that your product and service serves them in some way. Most of these green metrics that we have reports on, which again are still wonderful, are how we think our product should be used based on an activity level rather than the outcome or the success metric that measures success within our customer's business at the end of the day.

Adam Jay (00:33):
All right, Anika, on GTM Uncensored, we always like to start with a scenario that I want to throw you into. So Kombucha Cloud, in the spirit of all those folks who like Kombucha, it's an $18 million ARR vertical SaaS company, up from 16 million last year, and they're doing something right. Every account gets a health score in their CS platform. This quarter, 90% of their enterprise accounts are flagged green. That's amazing, right? But they just lost seven of those green accounts. 2.1 million in ARRs walked out the door with a perfect score attached. What does their VP of success do? Of course, they pull the exit interviews and every single one says some version of the same thing. Nobody told us what success looked like. We just got a check-in call every quarter. The dashboard says green, the customer leaves. What the heck is the dashboard actually measuring?

Anika Zubair (01:26):
Okay. Well, I do love a good dashboard. I do love a good health score, but I do think they are misleading as well right now in the current SaaS environment that we work and live through every single day. And you kind of alluded to it where you were like, oh, everything looks great, but at the same time, there is no outcomes being driven. They're having basically a check-in call, like you said, probably about the product, probably about the usage of that product, probably about the number of people inside or out of that product, et cetera. It's all about them and not about the customer per se. And what I mean by that is connecting all of that usage, all that wonderful green metrics that are happening inside of that customer success health score back to their business outcomes. Because I'm sure you've talked about it on this show and I'm sure a lot of people listening know that customers or prospects don't actually buy for your product and service.

(02:14):
They can actually really care less about your product and service. What they actually care about is their business growing and they're hoping that your product and service serves them in some which way to help their business grow. You mean I didn't

Adam Jay (02:25):
Buy it because I liked you in the product school? It actually has to do

Anika Zubair (02:28):
Something

Adam Jay (02:28):
For me to

Anika Zubair (02:28):
Grow my business? Maybe you're super likable. Maybe. Maybe that's been working for you. I'm not.

Adam Jay (02:33):
Dale will tell you I'm not. People

Anika Zubair (02:34):
Buy because they like me.But mostly there's this big, hairy problem that they're trying to solve. And most of the check-in calls and also most of these green metrics that we have reports on, which again are still wonderful, are how we think our product should be used based on an activity level rather than the outcome or the success metric that measures success within our customer's business at the end of the day. So like you said, that VP did those churn reports and they basically looked at all the data and all their customers were saying, Hey, I don't know how this connects back to our business growth at the end of the day. They just know how to use your product. And I think that is what I'm going to take from that opening cold scenario of they're probably talking more about their product and the usage of the product rather than the outcome or the deliverable that that product is supposed to do within their customer's organization.

Dale Zwizinski (03:26):
So I have a quick question wrapped around this. Who owns the initial? So let's say we have a brand new deal, new customer coming in. Who owns deriving what success looks like as it's being transitioned over into the CS world?

Anika Zubair (03:41):
I think the senior executive leadership team does. I think -

Dale Zwizinski (03:45):
On the client side or on

Anika Zubair (03:47):
The company side? Sorry, on your product. So the SaaS company that you're working at or the tech company you're working at, it is up to your senior executive leadership team, meaning your product team leader, your sales team leader, your marketing team leader, everyone to consecutively decide this is the outcome that we serve for our customers. We build a product and we sell this product and we market this product to solve this problem for our customer. So I would say it's defined by your executive leadership team and then your sales, marketing, CSMs, whoever it is help you do that. I

Adam Jay (04:18):
Was going

Anika Zubair (04:18):
To say

Adam Jay (04:18):
That has to tie back to sales, right?

Anika Zubair (04:21):
It does, but it ties I think to everything.

Adam Jay (04:23):
A hundred percent. But we talk about this a lot where a client furns and the first thing sales wants to do is Anika, it's your fault. It's the CS team's fault. You guys didn't activate them, you didn't do good right. And then CS is blaming sales. You sold a shitty customer. Sales is blaming marketing. You brought me the lead. If we could coalesce from the beginning about what the hell the product does and the problem we're trying to solve, then who's the ICP? Who's the buying persona? You solved this problem because you're all charging for the same end goal. Right now I feel exactly what you said, there's not enough of what do we do other than, oh, we're a cool product that does this. Well, SFTW, who cares? You do

Anika Zubair (05:06):
This, but what's the business out? You can't be something to everyone, maybe in the very early days. But then if you truly are trying to grow up, let's say as a SaaS company and you're trying to move to a specific market or an enterprise segment or whatever, you cannot be something to everyone because then first of all, you're going to build a product that's going to be left, right, not knowing which way it's going, but also your salespeople are going to do exactly what they do, which is like we sell to everyone, we solve everyone's problem. And then CS is going to be wondering, okay, how do I help this customer? And then it's going to churn. So I do think it starts from the top, but I also know that that's very tricky to do while you're growing. So it's still something that companies have to figure out as they grow.

Dale Zwizinski (05:46):
I'll double click on this a little bit where we are seeing this move to through the process, because in the past it's always been sales sells something, they kind of flip it over to CS and we get into that finger pointing. What we've been working on with our clients is sales and the customer own what success look like. There's a reason why they're buying you for some problem they're trying to solve. And what we've seen with GRR churn or GRR numbers going down is if the customer doesn't buy into the value that we all agreed to on day one, we can say internally our product or service should deliver X. And the client may agree or disagree with it, but if they don't buy into it before they sign the contract, that GRR will always be in risk because they have not defined it themselves on what success looks like.

(06:36):
And then we as an organization need to figure out, do we believe that what they're asking for success to look like we could deliver? And I think that goes all the way up to the executive team. And so if we need to get away from what we believe success looks like, and it will change over time so we're quickly. We're seeing go-to-market change three months, two months. It's changing so fast because new competitors are coming in the market, things are happening through the process, you're getting blindsided, people are putting downward pressure on pricing, yet you have a CS team that needs to deliver. So really it does depend in that space. But I think as we progress forward in a go-to-market strategy from marketing to sales to success, we need to drive home. And this is a big problem by the way, because our customers don't always know what success looks like.

(07:29):
They know they have to fix a problem and they don't understand what baseline is. What does good look like and how do I baseline it? I find that the other big problem, but I digress a little bit.

Anika Zubair (07:41):
I would agree 100%, but I think it has to be defined from us. Of course, a customer has their views. Of course they have what they're hoping and expecting to happen, but they are in this world where we can vibe code anything almost at this point. Your customer is coming to basically buy your product that is already built to solve a problem, but they're not vibe coding it. You've coded it. They're expecting you to guide them to success because they know that it solves for a certain problem. So they know the problem. They're now expecting you to translate that into business outcomes, translate that into what does this actually look like? To your point, what does baseline even look like? What does good look like? Because they have a number, but is that good? Is that average? They don't even know because again, you have that information being the vendor that works with hundreds if not thousands of other companies that are solving the same exact problem at the end of the day.

(08:31):
So I think it comes back to, again, a mix of senior leadership clearly defining what it is we're solving for, but then making sure, as you said, the full stream of go-to market understands what that looks like and how do we reinforce it as our customer goes through whatever stage they're at with us.

Dale Zwizinski (08:48):
Yeah, we do have to be the subject matter experts for sure. There is a path that they have to understand that as well. That's a really good point. I'm sure you built a lot of great dashboards and we just kind of talked about dashboards, but tell me about a time where you believe you've had the perfect dashboard and you've had the perfect data, but it churned anyway, customers are churning anyways. What did you miss in that dashboard build that you had?

Anika Zubair (09:11):
I'm giggling because I don't think I ever had perfect dashboard or perfect data. Okay. Never perfect data. Wow, that sounds like a great company. Are they hiring? Because truly I would never, I feel like every single time I've stepped into any seat as a CS operator, it's never been perfect. More times than not, I think the one thing I'll say that I wish I did sooner in my dashboards rather than I always did after the fact is I think CS is very retro driven, meaning we look at churn, we look at the past a lot, and it's almost natural to come in when you are a leader and just look at what's happened and focus so much on fixing what might've happened a few quarters or a few years before you arrived and you're dealing with cleaning up that mess. I think one thing I would wish I put into dashboards and data sooner is more of forecasting and forward looking because I think, again, most sales, marketing, product teams are always forecasting and looking forward of like, "Hey, this is what our pipeline is.

(10:16):
This how much we're going to close. This is how many leads we're going to bring in." Versus I think the one thing looking back, I just feel like I always had, again, maybe not the most perfect data, but my data always showed backward looking information. I always built dashboards first on what was the past rather than forecasting as much. I did forecast eventually, but if I could look back and change something, I think I'd want to build in more forecasting rather than just looking back. I think that's what I would say.

Adam Jay (10:45):
Yeah, I think we talk so much about forecasting on the sales side. It's all about forecasting.What's

Anika Zubair (10:52):
Your best case? What's your commitment? All sales does is forecast everything.

Adam Jay (10:55):
And they can't even do that right, but I digress. But no one really talks about how to forecast on the CS side. And I think to anything that forward looking is really important. And you hit the nail on the head a few minutes ago. We can vibe code, I don't want to say 99%, but 80% of anything right now, unless it's this really super complex, deep integration, and even that, if you have enough time, you could probably do. What is the reason that I'm going to buy something from you first and how are you going to make sure that I'm going to get really quick time to value? And how are you going to make sure that I shouldn't just go do this my damn self? And if you can't forecast what that looks like, when I'm going to see success, why I should see success, where my hiccups might be, you're going to be at a major, major disadvantage.

Anika Zubair (11:44):
I was just going to say, and again, AI doesn't help us at all at this point because before, let's say you had a kickoff call with a customer, you'd say, okay, in the next 60, 90 days or six months, this is what we're going to build and expect and do together and build out this perfect timeline of where you're going to hit these certain milestones. But again, like you just said, thanks to Vibecode, thanks to building things on my own. I'm sorry, I need that next week, not in 30 days, 60 days or 90 days. And it's just the timeline has accelerated tremendously because of that. And it's like not only do you have to show time to value, it's becoming faster as a known vendor rather than just saying, okay, I'd rather just go do my own little CRM vibe code dashboard between my emails and my CRM anyways, because I think that's more useful.

Adam Jay (12:32):
You're spot on. I mean, when I look at time to value, when I look at feature sets, the ability to even build for your customer faster than you ever have is so important. When I look at what we've turned off of just as an organization in the past, what Dale, three or four months, we've turned off ClickUp, we've turned off QuickBooks, we've turned off of Framer and WordPress for website man. There's so many things that we just said, you know what? You do 60% of what we need, it's not enough anymore because I could build what's going to do 95% of what I need and I'm going to get time to value in two days versus waiting six months for you. I happen to love this shift, but I think it's going to require certainly CS teams to be a lot more in tune with their customers and what success looks like, and then getting that information back to product who should be building and shipping 10X faster than they ever have before using the AI tools available to

Dale Zwizinski (13:26):
Them. I'm going to go off script a little bit because you just said something really important about product. We've talked about product and I think there's too many times that product isn't ever considered in go-to-market, especially on the backside of it. Do you see product being brought into customer calls more? Do you see product being ingrained a little bit more, at least somebody in that organization being targeted like, "Hey, we need product support." Because once again, as Adam was saying earlier, when a customer turns, it could be from marketing, we could be marketing around people, it could be from sales, we could be selling things that we don't have. It could be from CS that we didn't really do the things we were supposed to do in the CS side, or it could be product was built 85% and they just don't see the value in it.

(14:14):
Do you see a motion where more product manager people are being included in CS conversations?

Anika Zubair (14:20):
Well, yes. I mean, I think it should have always been the way, but I think if you're, let's say, but yes, 100% yes, because again, coming back to us, I know we're talking so much about AI and vibe coding, but think about it. There is now customers who probably can build something better than when you ship it. And if you're unhappy, I literally was just talking to a customer success leader on my podcast just a few weeks ago, and he was so unhappy with how HubSpot reporting looks like that he decided to vibe code his own reports that visually hit a better marker than what the traditional reports in a major enterprise tool offers.

Adam Jay (15:00):
I'm curious then, I'm a huge HubSpot fan and I agree with you, their reporting is a little wonky. So are they still using HubSpot, but I'm guessing he's using Claude and the MCP to take that

Anika Zubair (15:08):
And just transform it into his own words taking everything of HubSpot and building something visually that actually helps articulate to his team where they need to focus and what they need to drive and do at the end of the day.

Adam Jay (15:19):
It's a great example. It's something you couldn't historically do, unless you had a really expensive data lake and you take it all and you put it into Looker or Tableau, but now you're right, with Claude's artifacts or Codex or whatever, you take all the information and just say, "This is exactly what I want my report to look at instead of these constraints with these stupid Miami Dolphin colors." Sorry, I live in Florida. I could say it. I love that example.

Dale Zwizinski (15:39):
And by the way, he just picked up Data Lake from last week's conversation, so he didn't know what a data lake was before we had a customer meeting about Data

Anika Zubair (15:47):
Lake last week. I was like, "Whoa, Adam, did you work in business intelligence too?" Because I did. And I was like, "Whoa, taking it back."

Adam Jay (15:52):
But despite what Dale says, "I do know what a data lake is. I have built out things in Looker before. I'm familiar with this little small company called Snowflake."

Anika Zubair (16:02):
No, but I think coming back to the whole why product managers need to be involved and also just be a part of the conversation is customer expectations are higher than ever because we can do these wonderful things that we had to wait weeks, months, if not years for our teams to build for us. And now the power is within a few strokes of a keyboard. Or again, if you're just talking to Claude, you could also just voice out what you want at this point too. But I think also in general, it's just the customer is having higher and higher expectations when it comes to what they're hoping their outcome is with your product. And if there's one little piece that they're not getting or there's not enough value tied into what they are getting when they're using you, they will start to diverge and they start to use other tools.

(16:45):
But eventually that could lead to churn down the line. Like you just said, you guys consolidated tools because you realized actually there's probably something better over here or we can build it ourselves or whatever. And I think the only other thing I'll say, which I hope a lot of people are realizing, is maintaining all of this build yourself, because it's great to build a lot of stuff yourselves because that's another conversation happening, which is the whole build versus buy conversation. But I think the issue is that a lot of people aren't forward thinking of how much maintenance a build yourself is going to get you down the line. It could be a little stop gap, but the longer term of the operational lift, the longer term of the team and how they're feeding data into whatever you've just built. But also, again, are you going to maintain it?

(17:30):
You can build it, great, but are you going to actually maintain it? Which comes back to the point of actually buying a tool or software rather than building it, but that you've got to make sure your customer team is articulating value because I think that's what's really missing these days is we talk about product, we talk about the usage, we talk about the support of it, the adoption. It's all about me, me, me or us, us, us or the product, but it's like what value does this derive for your business? Does it help you make some money? Does it help you save some time? Is it reducing some risk within your organization? What is it actually doing for your organization so that you continue to stay outside of, again, using it?

Adam Jay (18:06):
You said a couple things that I want to drill down on. Number one, does it save time? I've seen recent studies that have said that AI is supposed to save you all this time and allow you to do more with your customers. It doesn't because now you're spending all the time building and maintaining.

Anika Zubair (18:20):
All you're doing is talking with AI instead of your customers.

Adam Jay (18:23):
To your point of you can build it, but can you maintain it? I think that's a great point. It's very different when we're an agency of three people or we're working with an early stage startup that has 15 people. Relatively easy to maintain. I can maintain our client portal and this, that, and the other. And website, I wouldn't even put there because that's easy. But when you're building a quasi-enterprise platform, very different when you're scaling from five to 10 to 50 to a hundred to maintain it and deal with every problem and every bug. And listen, I love me some vibe coding. I've built some cool stuff, but I spend probably at least 30 minutes every day tweaking monitor, et cetera.That still requires work. So I think you hit the nail on the head on that one. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about a framework that you've built.

(19:09):
So stop being friendly and start being commercial. And you've talked about that we need to get CSMs to stop being friendly and start being strategic. I want a very specific scenario if you could, and you could leave the company name out, but when did being too friendly, maybe early in your career or maybe someone you were managing actually cost you that renewal or expansion that you should have closed that you could look back and be like, "We were just too damn nice."

Anika Zubair (19:37):
Perfect. Yeah, I have an example. I was a customer success manager early on in my career, and I very much thought being a amazing CSM meant my customer loved me, meaning they would get on a call, they would smile, they would reply to my email really quickly because they wanted to talk to me. But again, early in my career, had a customer that was green, coming back to the whole dashboard, perfectly green, perfectly healthy, was in my forecast of I'm going to renew this customer, no problem. And come the renewal conversation, they were like, "Sorry, Anika, we've actually identified a competitor that is going to be a better partner for us." And I was so offended when they said those words. I still remember the words. We didn't communicate about it until that call because I was always so focused on being the nice person, the one that wanted to help them, the one that wanted to be like, "Oh, is there anything else I can help you with today?

(20:29):
Is there any feature that I can continue to help you understand or this integration?" I was so focused on getting them embedded into our product that I didn't ask them simple questions of how is this being received? How are you guys embedding this within your organization? How is the team adopting this across the board? And at the end of the day, I should have asked earlier, are you actually getting the value or the success metrics that you are hoping to achieve while using our product? I was just more excited by being liked than I was actually asking commercial questions about, is this driving value for your business or is this product actually driving ROI based on how much you're paying and what you're hoping to get from us? And I think early on I learned that being friendly is fine, don't be rude to your customers, but you shouldn't, at the end of the day, rely on a strong relationship to guarantee a renewal.

(21:23):
And I had a great relationship and I asked my customer, I said, "Hey, what is going on? I thought that this was going to happen for another year. I though we're going to continue to work together." And she directly told me, "Anika, you were a wonderful customer success manager, but I was unable to articulate to my wider executive team the value your product gives to our organization. And because of that, my other leaders wanted us to move onto a competitor essentially."

Adam Jay (21:52):
I know Dale has so much to say because he talks about this all the time. Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with. Generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at turning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps, it's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgethegap.

Anika Zubair (22:34):
That day literally made me realize that yes, I can be liked, but I need to ask the harder questions. I need to make sure I know early and often, are they actually receiving value from our product or service?

Dale Zwizinski (22:45):
Yeah, I think it's the often part, and it changes over time. So year two, what we were talking about earlier is year one, when you sign a contract, you go from pre-sale to post-sale. My feeling is that a lot of the responsibility is on the sales team and the client to articulate what impact or value, whatever we're going to call it. Then the CS team has to validate that during onboarding conversations like, "Hey, I heard this from the sales team. Is this really true?" And then what you hear a lot is the people actually have to use the product are like, "No, that's not what our real problem is, but I know that's what our executives mean." That's a whole mess. But if we stay out of that, year two, when you get to renewal, it's now like, okay, you hopefully have derived value for the client over that year and now they're renewing with you, but their value in year two could be completely different or modify or change from year one.

(23:40):
Now it's on the CS team to make sure we're understanding that. We like to call them QIRs, quarterly impact reviews versus quarterly business reviews. And what does that modify and change look like? And I think if we do that early and often, I think the second part of what you were saying is often isn't done enough. In your opinion, what does often feel like? How often should we be trying to figure this out?

Anika Zubair (24:03):
Every single time you talk to a customer.

Dale Zwizinski (24:05):
Love that. Love that.

Anika Zubair (24:06):
But really, honestly, I give lots of keynotes. I do lots of workshops. Everyone has value amnesia, as I like to say. Truly, you could tell an executive 15 times how much money my product has saved you, but by the next call they're going to be like, Anika, but wait, how much did this actually save us? And I would've already told them 15 times. But because why? Because they're not obsessed with your product the way you're obsessed with their product. They're obsessed with their job, with their growing their business, but they need to be reminded of your value. So often for me is every chance you get. I know it's not going to naturally fit into every conversation, but try to at least.

Dale Zwizinski (24:42):
As much as possible. And what we don't realize as sellers or whoever the partner, however we describe ourselves, back to what you were just saying, we live it every day. We breathe it every day. We think we're the best thing. And in the overall scheme of things, we are one part of their overall world, even though we want to believe we are their entire world. And so what are the things that we need to make sure that we're executing on? So I love that. So if we shift off a little bit, in one of your blogs, you said AI won't replace CSMs, and we were talking a lot about AI. It'll replace teams that never learn how to use it. So tell me a bit about that and tell me a bit about a CSM on one of your teams who got exposed through AI process, if it's happened.

(25:28):
It could be new, but I'm just curious.

Anika Zubair (25:30):
Well, I work with a lot of different teams, and I think mainly the shift I'm starting to see is that AI does cost time upfront, but once you have processes built within AI, whether it's a workflow, whether it's checking your CRM for any at-risk accounts and flagging them early or anything like that, what it does allow customer success managers to do is to actually sit back and think, "What do I actually have to do in this account? Or what is the next conversation I have to have with this customer?" And I think the problem I keep seeing that everyone's like, "Oh, it's just we're going to build autonomous agents and then these agents are going to be deployed and they're going to talk to our customers and they're going to do all these things and I'm not going to have a job." But I still wholeheartedly believe people buy from people.

(26:16):
It's why sales will always be sales. But I also think people at some degree want support and help and understanding and success metrics from another human being as well, but they don't want someone to just be like, "Oh, turn on this integration." Those are things that they're hoping to get from some sort of AI or some sort of either, at least again, help bot that's going to direct them. But what they want is a strategic guidance. And I think understanding how to prompt AI, understanding how to build out certain workflows in AI where your CSMs or a CS person in general is just really utilizing it to do the, I would call busy work or reactive work in customer success. I know those are bad ways of saying it, but again, for salespeople it's probably updating CRM, but the same thing goes for CS. It's like checking your accounts of which accounts you need to focus on this week.

(27:06):
That's not something that you should be spending two, three hours a week on anymore. I'm hoping you're building something out with AI that then tells you, right, Anika, of your 50 accounts, these are the five this week that absolutely need your attention and you need to do X, Y, Z with these accounts. And so it's being AI literate and really understanding how to be strategic with your time rather than, again, CS has always been known to be reactive and reacting as customers come forward with things. But I'm hoping as AI continues to be part of our workflows and how we work every day, I hope that it allows the time for CSMs to truly be strategic. Because to your point earlier, customers want us to guide them to what is next. But if we're constantly just wondering which customers to speak to, we're always going to be on the back foot rather than being told, okay, these are the real customers with a problem this week that I need to speak to.

Adam Jay (27:59):
Who builds that? Is it the CSM individually who's building something to figure out where to focus or is that the responsibility of leadership to implement the AI? And I've seen it go both ways in different works where it's like, Hey, build whatever the hell you want and go have fun, or we're locking this shit down. Where's the balance, Anika?

Anika Zubair (28:15):
I mean, I think it's awesome when CSMs are AI curious or whatever you want to call it, because I think some really cool stuff is being built within organizations, but once you have something that's really cool that's worked really well, which I was just catching up with Cassie who was at monday.com and she's now at Clay, and she had a CSM that was building wonderful things. And I was telling her, I was like, "Wow, that's so cool." She's like, "Yeah, we've now turned what he's done into a team-wide thing, meaning he's duplicated and shared it with other CSMs within the organization to make sure that everyone, there's a uniform thing." Because the one thing I'll say is it's cool to build all these wonderful things that maybe your CSMs are building, but you want to have some level of the team doing similar-ish things rather than everyone building something different.

(29:01):
But I also know most CS tooling these days do exactly what we're talking about or building that. So it's probably something that's coming down where the teams are using a tool already and it's built in already as well.

Adam Jay (29:14):
I love me a 30 to 60-minute block. So we occasionally will manage teams as part of engagements, but a 30 to 60-minute block of go build shit with AI and then let's come back and talk about what we built and see what we could implement. I block out time every week to do it. Dale usually has built what I built first, then he's like, "You just wasted lots of hours on this." I think it's so important to let people experiment because you're going to have a different idea than I'm going to have, but we do need some type of governance. And what we don't want is your agent does one thing, mine does one thing. There's got to be some simplicity.

Anika Zubair (29:46):
Yeah. I mean, it's why we have playbooks at the end of the day. We build something initially, like you go talk to a customer or prospect and you figure out what they want, but then eventually as you hire, let's say five more people or 10 more people, you're not expecting those five or 10 people To go out and randomly have calls, there is a playbook that you go through onboarding, you go through a QBR, there is something that you follow. And I know AI is new, but I think it's the same principle that applies there. Yes, build something cool and new and that's fun, but eventually you do have to build some sort of, again, governance or consistency around how you're using it.

Dale Zwizinski (30:23):
I just want to say a couple things on this whole AI thing. One is I don't think there's ever a waste of time. I think we always need to be learning through process. And I think one of the things that I want to make sure anyone that's listening is just because someone's building something within your organization doesn't mean you can't collaborate and build the same thing. I built a lot of stuff that is completely thrown away and spent many hours that I probably should have been doing other things, but I did get a learning of it, like what's good, what's bad, because I've been doing it now for about 18 months. The evolution of the technology and the products that are being able to be developed are unbelievably better than they were even four months ago. But

Anika Zubair (30:59):
Again, six months ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. He wouldn't

Dale Zwizinski (31:03):
Be

Anika Zubair (31:03):
Plugged into things. We wouldn't even have this conversation.

Dale Zwizinski (31:06):
100%. And so it excites me and scares me what the future looks like. And the problem, one of the things that you were talking about, I didn't want to get into it very deeply, but the maintenance side of this thing, what we tell a lot of our clients is let's build an architecture and a roadmap or a charter before you start doing anything. You could just go build and spend a bunch of time and effort and money doing a build on something that is irrelevant. And it may be a good learning experience, so I don't say don't do it, but if you are going to evolve to maintenance, owning the product, owning these things, that's something that you're not thinking about on the backside. I do want people to really realize build a plan, understand all the costs. It's not as simplistic as people feel like they're saying.

(31:50):
And then I think the other part is just go try this stuff, go build something. Even if it's super simple, get your hand wrapped around it. Because before all the AI stuff, sales team would always allow them to go write content. It's the same thing. Go write something, post something, what kind of blog? It's not just for marketing. And I think now in this evolution of GRR being so important, especially as it relates to valuations of companies, ARR is important, but GRR is 1B. And we need to figure out that 1B super quickly because if you're bringing AR onto the top of the funnel, you're not getting GRR in the bottom of the funnel. That's a whole evolution of content that could be being written, things that are happening on the CS side that they can start writing and being experts at that no one else is doing right now.

(32:41):
And there's just a huge gap in that space.

Anika Zubair (32:43):
For sure. I think you have to be AI curious, but also, like I said, you can learn a lot, but don't dwell on it, I would say. Don't sit and be like, oh, it needs to be perfect or I need another iteration of it. But I think being AI curious is very important these days. And

Adam Jay (32:56):
Don't spend all your API credits.

Anika Zubair (32:57):
Oh, that too. Yeah. Claude has such a choke hold on my credit card. It's crazy.

Adam Jay (33:02):
We went through that this weekend. Let's shift gears. We're going to go triple M, Monday morning move. So this is a practical takeaway that listeners can test this week on Monday. What I would like you to do is tell me what you would add, change, push back on, or just say, Adam, you nailed it. That very rarely happens, but I'm trying. I'm still trying.

Dale Zwizinski (33:20):
Will not happen. Will not

Adam Jay (33:21):
Happen.

Dale Zwizinski (33:21):
Please find a lot wrong with this.

Anika Zubair (33:23):
I was just asking, who says nailed it? Maybe that person who wants to stop talking.

Adam Jay (33:27):
Yeah, maybe. All right. So this week, pull the list of every account your CS platform marked as healthy last quarter. Identify the ones that have churned and/or downgraded. Go into the CRM, read the last three notes that were logged on each account before the loss. Look for whether anyone wrote down what the customer was actually trying to achieve, not just the ticket they filed, but what were they actually trying to achieve? Better yet, ask yourself why this information isn't being automatically extracted from your CI tool, but that's a different conversation. Sit in on your CSM's next renewal call yourself as a review. Just listen for how they're managing the relationship, what questions they're asking, how they're trying to drive a specific outcome. And then all I want you to do afterwards is ask the CSM in plain language, "What does this account actually get out of paying us?" If they can't answer that in a sentence, neither can your account.

(34:19):
This isn't a dashboard problem. It's a problem of whether your CS team actually knows what the hell the customer's trying to achieve or not.

Anika Zubair (34:27):
I actually really like it, Adam. I thought it was actually really good.

Adam Jay (34:31):
Twice in the

Anika Zubair (34:31):
Week, Dale. The only thing I would add very, very fall by the way, but it's so good. I was like, "Ooh, nodding." I was like, "Yeah, I bet you they're just going to put budget or they're going to put not enough features or something." I was balling through every step of what you were saying. I was like, "Yeah, I can see where it's headed." The only thing I would add is once the CSM has been told, you've gone and coached them to say this is why they buy and this is in one sentence or less, I would start training your wider team on that and making sure that that value articulation happens early and often. But that's just me and my brain, and I know we talked about it earlier, but I think - But that's

Adam Jay (35:10):
A great point because how often are

Anika Zubair (35:11):
We - The struggle is that we don't practice it. I know in sales, that's the thing is I used to work in sales ages ago, but we are told to do it again and again and again until we get better at CSU back to the

Adam Jay (35:23):
Value

Anika Zubair (35:23):
Prop over and over and over. And the problem with CSMs I see is that we don't try it again. We just nod at our leadership and say, "Okay, I hear you. Next time I'll say this," but then they don't. I very rarely see them get more comfortable at doing it again and again. So I'd say that's my only, it's very small, but getting the team to learn that one sentence and then saying it back to customers again. I love it.

Dale Zwizinski (35:47):
I love that. I'm curious, this just brought up another thought process for me. Do you do role playing with your CS team? I know there's role playing in the sales role, but do you have CS people do role playing?

Anika Zubair (35:58):
I've personally done it in my organizations and the workshops and corporate training I do. We do role playing. I think it's very important because the problem is that CSMs tend to just jump from call to call. They don't take the time to really set themselves up and mainly because it's just there's too many. On average, CSMs have 40, 50, 60 accounts that they're trying to jump through every month or quarter. So I think role playing is super important, but I also think hearing how other people are saying things much like you do in sales and you hear a good closing line or you hear a good opening to a demo or a good way to grab stakeholders' attention, a lot of that stuff isn't captured. It's very much just them figuring it out and them kind of talking to value to what they understand. So that's what I loved when Adam was saying like, "Oh, okay, now you need to articulate value back to me in a way that makes sense for your customers." But then the team needs to practice that because a lot of times they're not going to go back and actually practice and understand how to say value to a CFO versus to a product manager because that value articulation is going to be very different to each stakeholder that you speak to.

Dale Zwizinski (37:04):
100%. Awesome. As we wrap up, we do this thing called uncensored questions. So a bit of rapid fire, but let's get into some of the meat of some of it, but just some questions that we are considering as we go through the process to help others out in the space. Tell us about your worst health score is green surprise that you see blow up a renewal call.

Anika Zubair (37:26):
Worst health score is green. Well, I kind of spoke to that customer. That's one that I'll always remember, but I think for me it was forecasting renewals and forecasting what's coming up based on a health score and then basically saying, "Oh, we're going to be at my number of 105% NRR and about 98% GRR." But it blew those numbers out because again, my forecast and my health score just measuring our metrics gave me an inflated score. At the end of the year, it made me realize I need to be measuring customer outcomes and not just product usage at the end of the day. So for me, that was my biggest surprise in my career where I was just measuring activity rather than outcomes.

Adam Jay (38:10):
If the listeners don't take anything else away from this entire conversation, outcomes over product usage. Listen, I love me some DAR and WAR and let's track all this weekly logins and monthly logins and usage. That's great. Just because I'm logging in doesn't mean shit. I log into ClickUp all the time before we got rid of it. Was I getting value or outcomes out of it? No, I was logging in to see what I needed to replicate and what I didn't. But man, it showed them that I was in it 10 times a day. I love that. Huge, huge one. Anika, name a CS metric that everyone reports on that you think is just a bullshit vanity number.What do we just need to. Yeah, this comes off the damn dashboard. Bye-bye.

Anika Zubair (38:52):
Please would stop NPS.

Adam Jay (38:55):
Tell me more.

Anika Zubair (38:57):
I don't know. It's been around forever. I get why it exists. I personally think it's always been a vanity metric. It's a metric that makes us feel good and that does not tell us any sort of revenue forecasting. It doesn't actually articulate value customers are receiving from our product. It's literally a point in time where we ask our customer like - Let me see bias of my last interaction with you. Hey, are you going to recommend our product to someone? Do they actually go do it? Let's say I'd love to even look at the data of everyone that's given you a 10. Have they actually recommended your product to someone? Probably not. I love that.

Adam Jay (39:26):
I would love to see that.

Anika Zubair (39:27):
I'm going to guess a vanity metric. Less than 10%

Adam Jay (39:29):
Did.

Anika Zubair (39:31):
I bet it's even less than that actually, Adam.

Dale Zwizinski (39:34):
I would love to see those stats too. I think that's super interesting because I think MBS and CSAT are like the people that love your product the most are going to rate it and the people that hate your product the most are going to rate it. But the 80% in the middle, you're never going to get the data from.

Anika Zubair (39:48):
Yeah. And also again, is it actually helping you forecast growth or forecast churn in my opinion? Probably not. It's just making you feel good about the customers that love you or feel crappy about the ones that don't.

Dale Zwizinski (40:01):
So I'm super curious because we've been in this position a bit. Have you ever told a CEO that their whole CS team needs to be fired and built from the ground up? And how'd that go?

Anika Zubair (40:15):
I've never told them that their whole team. I'll be very clear. There was a few people that I said, "No, they're good. They can be trained." Okay,

Dale Zwizinski (40:26):
80% is still a big

Anika Zubair (40:28):
Number. I have come into an organization as a fractional leader that was hired to be a consultant for a short period to revamp their entire customer success organization. And I very much told the CEO, "You have the wrong people in this seat of this organization." And I told them to move them into other parts of the organization and then basically reorg. And he did eventually, but he didn't like hearing it at first from me at all, that basically he had the wrong skillset in customer success. I

Adam Jay (40:55):
Feel like we have this conversation so often in sales, not as often in success, and I feel like it should be had, which ties into our second to last question. Is customer success as a job title going to exist in three to five years or does it just become growth or revenue with a softer name? And do we start treating it as the revenue function that it really is, was and always should be?

Anika Zubair (41:19):
Yeah, this is such a good question.

Adam Jay (41:21):
Three in a day,

Anika Zubair (41:22):
Dale.

Adam Jay (41:22):
Three in a day.

Anika Zubair (41:23):
I'm good.

Adam Jay (41:24):
I'm out for the week. I

Anika Zubair (41:24):
Got so excited because here's the thing. My very first role before CSM title was account manager, but I was doing what a CSM was doing and then customer success manager title came around. So I had that title and then eventually grew from there. I see a lot of debate of CSMs now becoming account managers. It's basically a game of tennis where we're going back and forth on the title, but I do think the title will evolve. I don't know what it's going to be, so I don't know will it be account manager? Will it be forward deployed growth engineer because the titles are getting crazier every day? But I do think it's going to evolve because I think the title has been, I'm here to make customers happy, but that's not what we're here to do. We're here to drive growth for your business and eventually growth for our business because you end up loving our product.

(42:13):
And I think to your point, it might be growth success manager or something like that. I don't know, but I do think it will evolve. I don't think it'll say customer success manager because I think there's just too much connotation of making customers happy, but it's like let's actually drive growth from these accounts. So I think that's where it's headed. All

Adam Jay (42:33):
Right, Dale. I know you can't let a show go by without asking.

Dale Zwizinski (42:36):
Dream vacation destination.

Anika Zubair (42:39):
So many. Oh my gosh, so many. Bali, Fiji, everything that's very beachy. I haven't been in the Caribbean yet, anywhere in the Caribbean, Seychelles. I want to go so many places that are basically like the Instagram dream, where you're seeing the blue water, the white sand, anything like that. All of those are dream vacation locations.

Adam Jay (43:00):
Because you're in London, right?

Anika Zubair (43:02):
I am in London, yes. It is warm. It's sunny. It is actually summertime. It is London, but at the same time, I'd rather be on a beach.

Adam Jay (43:09):
Have you always been in London?

Anika Zubair (43:10):
I haven't. I've been in London for 11 years. I was in Germany four years prior to that, and then California before that.

Adam Jay (43:17):
That's awesome. So you've managed to go across the pond. I

Anika Zubair (43:22):
Have, I have, but the accent's never going to go away. So everyone definitely thinks I'm still stateside.

Adam Jay (43:27):
Fair enough. Anika, thank you so much for joining GTM Uncentered. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about all that you're up to?

Anika Zubair (43:35):
Yeah, LinkedIn's usually the easiest. So Anika Zubair on LinkedIn or our website, thecustomersuccesspro.com.

Adam Jay (43:42):
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining the show.

Anika Zubair (43:43):
Thank you.