Numbers and Narratives
Numbers and Narratives bridges the gap between the marketing/customer experience and data - come listen to marketing and CX experts talk about how to use data to better engage with your customers and provide a great experience.
Numbers and Narratives
How to Build The Best Customer Facing Culture - With David Karp, CCO @ DISQO
Hey everyone! This week on Numbers and Narratives, we had an insightful conversation with David Karp, an experienced leader in customer success and post-sales operations. David shared valuable perspectives on building strong customer relationships, team management, and fostering a positive company culture.
Key highlights from our chat with David include:
- The importance of understanding customers as people with their own goals and challenges
- Strategies for balancing workload and creating space for deeper customer connections
- The crucial interplay between customer success and product teams
- Building a culture of open feedback and psychological safety
- The challenges of leading teams in the current tech industry climate
David emphasized the value of authenticity in customer interactions, the need for harmonious collaboration across departments, and the importance of recognizing team members for living out company values. He also shared a powerful analogy about life being like a roller coaster ride, highlighting the importance of supporting one another through challenges.
This episode is packed with practical advice for customer success professionals, team leaders, and anyone interested in building stronger, more empathetic business relationships. Don't miss out on David's wealth of experience and insights!
David Karp: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidalankarp/
Disco: https://www.disqo.com
I'm Amy Syed, I'm Sean Collins and this is Numbers and Narratives. All right, david, thanks so much for coming on. How would you summarize what we talked about today?
Speaker 2:One of my favorite movies ever is a movie called Parenthood and there's a scene in that movie and Steve Martin if you know Steve Martin he's a dad and he finds out he's getting ready to have another kid and he's panicking. He's panicking like what am I going to do? I can't control the situation. And the grandmother comes walking in the room and she says I remember being a little kid and going to the amusement. I was amazed at this roller coaster. I'm getting the words not completely right, but I go on the roller coaster and I couldn't believe that a ride that could make me so terrified and scared could also bring so much joy and excitement. She was. I love the roller coaster.
Speaker 2:Some people went on the merry-go-round, but that just goes around. I like the roller and the reason why I share that story is when you're doing work for customers, with people, it's a roller coaster ride. You just have to be somebody who's willing to ride the roller coaster. There's other jobs that are more of a merry-go-round. You got to realize it's a roller coaster ride and what I've shared with the leaders on my team is this amazing picture. It's two women on a roller coaster and one, her head's kicked back, she is laughing, having the time of her life. The woman next to her could look more terrified. It's like this perfect picture. But here's the key to the whole picture If you look at the bottom of the picture, you know what those two women are doing. They're holding hands, and so my message to people is we're all riding the rollercoaster and you got to figure out.
Speaker 2:If you're the person who's having a great time, go figure out who needs their handheld to get them through the experience. If you're the person who's like in this terrified moment, be willing to let somebody else hold your hand. And if we're all doing that, recognizing that man, we're unstoppable. Like we will get through every situation. We'll help customers thrive. We're all on this roller coaster. Let's just do it holding hands. I don't mean that to be touchy feely. That's just the mindset that I want us to have, because when we're doing that together and we're recognizing the reality of what it's like to have to work in this tough environment with customers you're going to have, you're going to get through it. You're going to have the time of your life. You're never going a privilege to get to work in this kind of profession with a team like we have here.
Speaker 1:One of the things that we often talk about is the things that people choose, what people choose to do with their time, and that was like that was like that's kind of the thing that strikes me every time I go back. Like a lot of my friends like I'm 27, a lot of my friends that I grew up with, you know, married, having their first kid, you know just bought their first house, kind of thing, and I was like, oh, it's like I threw away my job to like try to start a company. Like the sort of types of things that people want to do are very different, and every time my college East Coast friends meet my Nebraska friends, it's always like, wow, their priorities, the way they choose to live their lives, is super, super different. I mean, yeah, but it's fine. Those people are arguably happy with what they've chosen to do, and I left because that's not what I wanted to do and yeah, it's just, I don't know. There's a lot of. It's really really interesting looking at the dynamics. No-transcript.
Speaker 2:You know it's funny, I was, uh, I agree, Like it's if you have a common set of values, and that's where I think we've been struggling. If you have a common set of values, then no-transcript was leading a strategic accounts team and part of our part of the team was struggling. So we hired this guy who had very little applicable experience. You could tell his character and his approach was just going to crush it. He now runs all of North America. This is a big global firm.
Speaker 2:He is now like the guy, and so we were catching up the other day and we're both in different phases in our lives. He's still got young kids. I'm an empty nester. He's still climbing the ladder. I'm trying to help probably other people climb the ladder. He does that too. But at the same time we were talking about we're both very active.
Speaker 2:Like my thing is running, distance running. He's a mountain climber and as we were talking, we see you know what like the great equalizer is for everybody, for every single person. It takes the exact same amount of time for the earth to rotate one time. Everybody gets 24 hours. Like that is an equalizer for all of us, because we all live on the planet and that's how long it takes, and it's just a question what do you do with those 24 hours? And back to your point, that's you know, people grew up with a different expectation of what you do with those 24 hours, and so maybe that's why an East coast versus a, you know, center of the country is a little different. But that's it, let's just be. Let's just, let's just be clear. That's an equal line.
Speaker 2:Now I will tell you. You can cut this out or not. I'm a person of faith and so I always tell people like that's how God designed. It Takes this long for the earth to revolve around the sun that's a year. It takes this long for us to turn one time on our axis that's a day. That's how it's designed. Don't ask for more time because you're not getting it. That's how it's designed.
Speaker 2:Figure out what to do with the time you have. Yeah, it's like. But here's my problem. If I know, if I had more time, I'd probably mess it up. I'm not convinced more time would be more value, more productivity. You just got to decide. It's really interesting. We're going through the help promote fitness and some fun and little competition. We're doing a global step challenge. I've done this before at the company and we're broken up into teams and people are like how do people get this number of steps? How do you do it? So, number one, I'm an empty nester, I've got more discretionary time. But number two, you just decide what am I going to spend my time on today, and if that's something you're going to prioritize, you'll probably do that. Instead of spending an hour going through TikTok, I'll go for a walk.
Speaker 1:We actually had him on the podcast last week. We haven't released the episode yet released the episode yet but his name is Aiden Parisian. Also, he was the chief customer officer at a company called Fast Path, which is like you know. It's a big world out there, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you've heard of it or not. I don't think so. It's possible. I don't think so.
Speaker 1:I think you guys would have a really good conversation. But he told us about this book last week called 4,000 Hours, which is that like, which is like that, like the idea of the great equalizer that you just brought up, and what do you choose to do with that time? Right, cause it's like the actual, that's the actual finite resource, right, like that's the, that's the only thing, like you can obviously like extend things like your health and your mental wellbeing and that kind of things to give you a little bit more juice. But fundamentally, what it comes down to is everyone has the same amount of time. I don't know, I haven't read the book yet, but it's on my list of things to check out.
Speaker 2:I haven't gotten there yet either, but I'm familiar with it. I don't think it's weeks or days, because I'd be dead, I think a while ago, it's weeks, it's 76 years 76 years. Yeah, yeah, there you go. So is it 40,000 or 4,000?
Speaker 1:4,000 weeks, yeah. So I guess 52 weeks times 70 years. There you go, thank you, the average yeah.
Speaker 2:So I'll take that. But look, the other thing I've shared with people and there's other ways in which people share a similar concept. I tell everybody. I remember the first time I took my oldest son trick-or-treating. I can tell you what he was wearing, I know his first costume, I can tell you what the weather was like and I can tell you what he said to me. The third house we went to, he wasn't quite three years old, he was this little construction man and it was kind of misty out. And he comes away from this third house with candy, he looks and he goes. I love Halloween. It was just really cool, right. But you know what I I don't remember the last time I took all my kids trick or treating together. And you know why I don't remember it? Because I didn't know it was going to be the last time, right?
Speaker 2:And so, just like you've got finite amount of time and we just choose every day, what am I going to do and what opportunities I want to take advantage of? What do I want to? You know, wait for and, and then you know if I think about you know we've we've had this conversation, I think, when we talked before, when you're doing a job that you have. You're serving customers and you start to. You just lock yourself into the mindset.
Speaker 2:They are just like I am. They're going through the same kind of things, they've got the same constraints on time. They're trying to make the same decisions in their life. What are they going to try to get done today? And so if we could just recognize we're all living in the same world, with the same constraints, the same pressures, the same decisions we're trying to make, man, it just locks you in on a way to engage with people a little different. You guys can be doing a lot of other things right now. Weather looks great, apartment looks awesome, right. But for whatever reason, you said you're going to talk to me for a little while. I appreciate that, right, truly.
Speaker 1:You guys also have the long distance running thing. I think Sean just completed his first Ironman right last year.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I did an Ironman last year, his first Ironman right Last year.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I did an Ironman last year. That's so impressive and so, first of all, truly appreciate your service. Like to make a, make a decision, to make that kind of commitment is just, it's meaningful, and we all have the option to do that in this country, but very few people decide. This is how I'm going to go. You know, live a portion of my life. So I just want to tell you I appreciate that and honor it.
Speaker 2:And the first marathon I ever ran, I was trying to choose. I'm old, I'm in my late fifties and I was a runner as a, as a young person. And then, um, you know, kind of my knees went and everything was bad. And last year I started getting really, really healthy and I said, look, there's things in my life that I promised myself I would do that I hadn't done. And last year was the year I started doing some of those things, because I said, why wait? Because again, you just don't know when you'll get the chance. And so I started running again and, lo and behold, I could do it.
Speaker 2:And I had told myself I always wanted to run a marathon and I happened to find one that was on my dad's birthday and everybody said it was like a great marathon to run. And my dad got me into running. He's been gone about four years and so I thought what a great way to kind of do it. It was the Marine Corps marathon and to have a Marine put a medal around your neck and you're looking like what did I do? I did nothing, right, I did nothing but, but you know, but survive for four hours and it was really a meaningful, like really, really meaningful experience to do that. So, but I've, I've always like I can't even fathom running after I had biked for 112 miles, let alone not drown for swimming for over two. So that's crazy Good on you, man. That's really, really awesome and is a wild.
Speaker 1:Every single time. I like listen to the stats. I'm like that isn't insane, but you can do that I love it.
Speaker 2:Man, look, I've got, uh, I've got solar panels on my roof and uh, I've got, uh, we just got our first, uh, full EV. We just got our first full EV. So we're driving, we're loving that, so we're right there with you. I also know how hard nonprofits can be. I was on the board of one for three years. It was focused on teens that were in families that were kind of chasing destructive behaviors around them and just, you know, that's a lot of you gotta have a lot of passion and commitment because that's hard, that's just hard. So I appreciate it Like I'm a, I think I'm, I'm a pretty simple person.
Speaker 2:Um, it's the most, the most important things. I mentioned my faith, which matters a lot to me, and I respect everybody in their own decisions in that area. Second thing about me that's important I've been married 35 years to. I don't know how my wife's put up with me. During the pandemic, I tell people cause I travel a lot. And, um, I tell people when, during, when the pandemic hit and I was traveling less, I was convinced I was going to get like these, start getting these weird abdominal pains, cause I I was convinced my wife was going to have to start trying to poison me, cause she was stuck with me now. So she'll just tell me now, don't like it, don't get too confident. It could just be slow acting poison. But but I've got, uh, raised a number of kids. They're adults, they're out of the house, awesome, amazing. I got two amazing sons, and those are the things that I think matter the most about me.
Speaker 2:I been really fortunate. I've had, uh, for me, a really meaningful career. I've worked for companies that had 350,000 people. I worked for IBM. That's what moved me to the Midwest. I'm a tech nerd. I got to work on a project in college decades ago. There was a police officer in New York City who was shot and paralyzed from the neck down and we built a system where he could look at his computer screen and control his environment, turn off and on lights, type messages to his kids, change channels on the TV. It was really like a meaningful, hey, technology can really help people live better lives, kind of thing, and so it just fueled me into that kind of career.
Speaker 2:And so I worked for huge companies like IBM and learned a ton about culture, values. It's just a great environment. And at the same time I've worked for a number of smaller companies that were 350 people. So in a lot of different roles I was a consultant for a number of years, but probably for the last 25 years it's been B2B somewhat the concept of B2B, saas but really more importantly, helping large organizations get value from technology, from insights, from data. So I've done that. A lot of it's been with marketing and insights, people and really for probably the past eight years or so, again, it's been post-sales work for about 20 years, but more in what we now would call customer success or post sales customer value, since I guess really around 2017. So it's kind of my I guess a bit of my career arc, career journey. There's still probably lines of code that I wrote a long time ago that are still floating around some corporate system, which is a little terrifying.
Speaker 1:One of our customers is a company I used to work for and the other day they referenced a piece of technology. They referenced a piece of logic from five years ago and I was like, where did they get it? I was the one that inputted that. Why are you still using it? So that's pretty funny. That's pretty funny, david.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is really really excited to have you on the podcast here. I'm going to one sec but something that's interesting is you and I had a conversation before this and we were chatting a bit before we started recording the podcast. One of the things I really really, really enjoyed about our last conversation is you come with this mindset of every single person that you'll experience. Every single person that you talk to that's one of your customers is a person that has goals and things that they want to do, just like you, and you talked a lot about how important it is to make sure your team understands that and to try to build your company culture around that. A random question that I want to start with is just around team building. How do you make sure that you run a massive team? You have a lot of folks that are on the post sales org. How do you make sure that team understands how to get those customers to achieve their goals and what benefits fall out of it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I appreciate the question and so number one I just want to acknowledge that's just getting to that place is a journey, right Like I'll share some of the things that we try to do to help people with that. Whether or not we get there, I think we'll get better every time. I think a couple things matter. Number one is you have to make sure that people on the team are passionate about customers getting success as people and as businesses and that sounds trite. I think most people that are in some kind of post-sales capacity. Of course I want to help people. That's kind of their, you know their default way of thinking.
Speaker 2:But you really have to be passionate about customers and outcomes for them, and you gotta you're gonna do that with a mindset of I'm part of this company because I want to help this company be successful. I want to help us grow, but it's going to happen because we are great at helping our customers be successful as companies and as professionals. And so it all starts with who's on the team. You know, back to the classic getting the right people on the bus, trying to convince people that that's just not how they're wired, to be wired that way. You're going to invest a lot of time trying to convince somebody to be inauthentic, and it's got to start from a place of authenticity. I have to be. You want people that are curious about what matters to, people that want to help people be successful. So I think you have to start there and so you have to hire for it, recruit for it, I think that's really the first place.
Speaker 1:You guys set the bar just like for hiring super super high.
Speaker 2:You set the bar. You need the right leaders on the team. Like that always comes first. You rise and fall with who you surround yourself with.
Speaker 2:Like I remember when I first got here, what the team had been asked to do before I got to Disco was a little different. And I remember I was watching an email interaction between someone on the team and a client and you could just feel the stress for the client. We were late on giving something to them. It was creating an issue for them. You could like feel the stress in the email and watch our team email them back. And my advice was pick up the phone and call the person and have a conversation. And I remember thinking, if I had given that person a choice in that moment to call the client or jump into a cauldron of fire they would have picked the cauldron of fire. They just wanted somebody who wanted to have a conversation to help that individual and at least let that individual know that they mattered. I was like okay, great person for what they were asked to do before. That's not what we're asking them to do going forward.
Speaker 2:So we had to rethink our hiring profile and just who we were going to get onto the team, then we, then you have to. Then there's two other things to me that really matter. You have to set an expectation that this is how we're going to operate. We are going to start from a place of understanding the objectives for that customer. Ideally that comes from the very moment that the sale happens, that someone becomes a customer, that you're understanding kind of what matters to them. That may or may not happen, just given the way you know the pressure on sales and getting things over the line. So one of the things we start to create for the team and we've created for the team is an expectation that when we start working with a customer, we are going to do our best to confirm and discover what matters to them, what matters to their business, what's success going to look like? And then how do you then also start to build kind of an understanding for people of how do you then also understand the personal motives and goals and drives for that person?
Speaker 2:And so we've created some enabling materials for people. We've taken them through a bunch of scenarios. We just created a whole framework called CARES, which is how do you overcome challenges with people? By understanding that they're people and really digging in and getting underneath maybe words they're saying to understand what really matters. What's the real issue? How do you help them? So we've done a lot to try to enable that. Some of that's data-driven, some of it's interpersonal skills, but the other thing and I think probably the hardest thing is you've got to create space for people to do that kind of work. It's really easy for me to say, hey, everybody, we've got to be focused on customers, getting value and getting to know them and understanding what matters. But I'm going to load you up so much you don't have time. And that's probably my biggest concern as a leader is have I create an environment where I'm asking people to do something and not saying I'm up to do it?
Speaker 1:I was just going to say I was part of a company a while back where, like, we grew pretty, pretty quickly and what happened was the priorities kept getting stacked, but the time again, those 24 hours that we talked about, they stayed the same. So it's like, well, if you want me to do this, if you want us to change direction, if you want us to be able to invest in new things, it was like, oh, invest in learning and development, invest in improving this process. And it's like, well, 13, 14 hours a day, like where do you expect me to find time to be able to do this? And I think that's a, that's a. That's a super, super, super interesting thing.
Speaker 3:When you kind of assign the book of business to any, anyone on your support you know your success team. How do you kind of right size that and make sure that they're going to have a enough accounts to be fully occupied and fully contributing but be enough time and space to?
Speaker 2:to be able to do that deeper work and make that deeper connection. It's, number one, understanding what the work is that we're really asking people to do, sean, so we're aware of that. And number two, being smart enough about what customers really need so we can do a little bit of work to even segment customers, because the job that we ask people to do we've got a number of different roles on the team. It is different based on customer type, and so we really have to understand some of that. Enough level of depth. And so the other, the other thing I'll say I'm also understanding and this has been something we've, I think, really started to understand more over the last 18 months our business and the work that people do is somewhat seasonal, and here's what I mean by that. So we've got the way, the way we work with customers.
Speaker 2:The first half of a quarter has a very different workload than the second half of the quarter. The first half we're launching a number of new projects and we're reporting out on a number of completed projects. The workload for people goes way up. The second half of the quarter it gets. It's still busy, but the rhythm of the business is a little different. So, number one. It's understanding that that is. That is reality and as a responsible business leader, I'm not going to staff the team for the peak right Cause then then we've really you know, miss, miss, size, the team and and what we have to accomplish for the business. So how do you understand what a peak season is going to be for people, where they're going to have tension and pressure, when I give them a portfolio, a business, and then can I create circumstances so when they get into that situation where workload is going to increase, I've created some ways to take some of that pressure off. So it's understanding who's the book of customers and their needs and how does that equate to effort for people. And then how do I build a portfolio for someone that is going to work in a peak season and in a down season types of customers, and then within that there's different kind of engagement models for each of those customer types, based on some use cases, jobs to be done, and that helps us balance the allocation of work. The other side of it, then, and that's just looking at our team working with our team, understanding customers To me the real fun and the real challenge is keeping all that harmonized with product right.
Speaker 2:So how much are we communicating with product and understanding what they're building? Whether they're focused on creating more TAM for the overall organization, are they creating more efficiencies for us? Are we stack ranking, prioritizing things the right way? That is a critical partnership. So keeping that active and going is, I think, kind of how we make some of those decisions.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you one thing, if I can.
Speaker 2:I apologize because I babble too much, but, sean, the thing, the place where I think we've gotten ourselves into trouble and trouble is maybe too strong of a word is, in some respects we've overreacted to whatever was happening in sales and tried to like we'll use that as a sense of hey, here's our growth objective.
Speaker 2:Are we staying in line with that? We planned out the team and workload and growth in the team and product enhancements that give us productivity. But, like, sales is going to be a lot less predictable in general than what I can build in a product or how I can enable a team. Those are things that I can somewhat control and I don't want to create a situation where what our sales team is able to do because they're a really great team is going to be the determinant of how our team is staffed, we have to plan for it. We've done a number of things to create some flexibility in our staffing, but it's really about how we work in harmony with product and how we understand what our customers are going to need. That's how we build out those portfolios and adjust workload for people over time. Long answer, apologize.
Speaker 1:That's actually really interesting, the workload around product. I'd be curious to get more of your take on that one. You said the interplay between customer success and product is super, super important and it's something that you can break. Can you talk a little bit more about that? How do you guys, how do you think about? You know you're kind of the. You know you're the quarterback of the of the customer, effectively right, like all of the incoming requests mainly come through you. There are certain things that you can control when it comes to fixing those issues. How does, how do you sort of play with the product org and how do you talk about, how do you maintain that workflow? How do you, how do you sort of take what you can control and push it to an organization that might actually be able to solve your problems or help solve your problems?
Speaker 2:Yeah, look so. So number one, it's make sure all the workflow doesn't come through. So I think the quarter, the quarterbacking that we are doing is making sure that as an organization, I always think that we have the privilege. I always think that we have the privilege. If you're in a customer facing job, you have such a privilege. Your entire company is essentially saying we trust you to represent all of us. There's 300 people here and it's like the entire company has said hey, we trust you as a person to take all of our hard work and make sure it's represented well. To a customer that is like an incredible privilege. But the responsibility that comes back with that is making sure that we are helping the company work as a harmonized unit, because the customer doesn't. They don't care if you're in customer success or sales or product, they don't care. They just want to get their job done. And so they've signed up for something from you a service, a product and they just wanted to help them. That's it. They've signed up for something from you a service, a product and they just wanted to help them. That's it. So how we help the organization be more harmonized in solving client challenges and unlocking value for clients, that, to me, is the real key. So sometimes that means we've got to get our product team out in front. We have to create space for them to talk to the right clients. We've got to let them hear directly from customers. We just did our first ever customer advisory board. It was new for us and it was really co-sponsored right by me and our CTO who also runs product, because that's what we want our customers to know. Like we're doing this together, we're one team for you, and then it's really making sure that we are helping translate what value is to customer and what effort is to our team back to our product team on a very regular basis. So, whether that's weekly, we work very and when we're doing pulsing on roadmap, we try to look ahead. We'll lock in the next quarter, but the quarter after do we need to rethink things on the roadmap? We are places where the customer success team can do things manually for a while, so product can go build something that's going to unlock more value and more growth with customers, and we can. We can handle this for the next six months.
Speaker 2:You don't have to build that efficiency feature in, because let's prioritize solving a customer problem, even if it's more work and just being in a very regular communication. It's really really hard. I think you always have to start with the mindset that everybody else's job is harder than you think Product management is. You are trying to resolve all these competing priorities with a limited set of resources, limited engineering resources. So getting that right really matters. And we can help our product partners get that right If we communicate well, if we're willing to work with them like it really matters. We've got to help harmonize all that with sales.
Speaker 2:So it's really having that mentality of setting them up to be successful. So sometimes that means, hey, our jobs are just going to be tough for the next six months because we really need them to build this admin feature. It would help so much, but it's not the number one priority. If I step back and look at what customers really need, and they need this other thing instead well, we have to be okay with that part of the job and I think having that mentality that it's not about you, it's about us, it's about them. The thing we're building on our team. We talk to our product team all the time. The head of the success team on our highest growth product, the head of the product team. I don't know how often they speak, how often their leaders speak. It's multiple times a week. Some of it's in a very structured review setting, but some of it is just hey, what are you hearing? What's happening?
Speaker 3:That is we rise and fall together. There are still companies out there that I dislike because I had a bad CSM or I had a bad AE or whatever you know. And so how do you keep kind of that mentality living strong in people constantly and not let that sort of become like a platitude that is just said, you know, but it's actually embodied by your?
Speaker 2:team had those experiences, sean, where we've been let down by somebody. It's hard. It's hard to let that go. So I think you number one is you got to recognize it when it happens. Right, you got to call people out when they. I'm not not so much for heroics. I'm always worried when we call people out for some heroic thing they did that we're celebrating. That's the way you win is you're a hero.
Speaker 2:It's figured out how to call people out just by doing their job really, really well. And part of that job one of our, one of our core values at Disco is is team, the one I like the most. Because I say team isn't just a good idea, it's a core value. The first team that you're part of is Disco as a company. Second is whatever product you're representing that gets value to a customer. Then your third one could be hey, I'm in customer success, great, because again, the customer doesn't care. So calling people out when they've lived that out really well, where they've helped a colleague be more successful, they've helped a customer get a win just by doing their job incredibly well. I'd say I missed that opportunity a lot. Thankfully I've got leaders on the team that don't they're really good at that.
Speaker 2:We just went through an enabling process for the team. We asked them to learn new things. We've moved some of the responsibilities around. We knew we were asking them to take on a different kind of work, so we put a whole Olympics theme to it. So we let them compete, we're giving them medals, we're giving them awards for accomplishing things.
Speaker 2:So it's just recognizing those little things matter and calling people out for just creating, you know, just being really good at living out what you're asking them to do, and we do a lot at Disco to try to do that anyway. But I think for these jobs, recognizing their heart and just acknowledging that for people, I think, is really, really what matters. And the harder part is, when people fall short of that bar is giving them that feedback too. That's hard sometimes, right, but if you don't, the rest of the team tends to know, and I always think that you get what you accept, and so if I accept something that's below that bar, that's what I'm going to get. So you got to keep the bar high. You got to call people out when you see it Um, and you also have to call them out when they're coming up short and help them step up their level.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we we used to have, uh, back in the army we had a thing called an AR after action review and you did it after every single mission, every single training event and the the only units that was successful with and valuable was the ones who were able to have those conversations where it was. I'm going to call you out. I'm not like saying you're bad or I'm not yelling at you, but I'm just pointing out that you, you made a bad decision or I wasn't expecting the way you handled that, and I think there's a really interesting line with how teams handle kind of that interaction of of being called out for making a mistake or doing something weird or not bringing your A game and not taking that personally and also feeling comfortable enough to say that to your team.
Speaker 2:Like I think, part of what's that's such a great, great example, I think, part of what's difficult. What can be difficult right now is, we know, the last you know, 18 months or so in the tech space have been really rough, right, like you know, 18 months or so in the tech space have been really rough, right, like you know rifts and people having a hard time finding a job. People are kind of walking a little bit on eggshells, to use that phrase. So finding a way to help people feel safe, like what matters is that we are living up to that privilege we have and that responsibility we have, and that it's okay to fail. You have to create an environment where people feel the cycle, I guess the psychological safety and the safety just in general, that that's okay.
Speaker 2:I uh, I hadn't experienced what I was before, uh, when I first got into the role of leading customer success at the last company I was at and um, we had a churn problem and um. So we said, look, here's what we want to do. We want to take the challenges we're seeing with customers and elevate them to the highest level and make sure that as a leadership team, we're working together to solve those problems, because typically the problem started with some misalignment at a leadership level and we were asking people throughout the organization to solve for that misalignment. That's usually what's going wrong. So we have to get aligned. So I convinced the CEO hey, we're going to have a weekly meeting with head of sales, ceo, head of product and we're going to go through our biggest risk, biggest challenges with customers. Everybody was in. I'm like this is it? We got it. It took me four tries to get anybody on the team to be willing to surface an issue, because they were convinced if I surface an issue I'm going to get blamed, I'm going to be punished. It was so eye-opening for me we had created such an environment for people and I've always like for me we were.
Speaker 2:We had a leadership meeting soon after that and we were talking about what's one thing that we could do, that leaders could do across the organization to help us be better. And my little cheeky comment was cut off everybody's index finger. Nobody should be allowed to point at somebody else and say you're the problem, like just no, none of that. Let's just recognize the problem. Sometimes start with us. They start somewhere else. It's not somebody's fault. You have to create that environment.
Speaker 2:You know that you were describing I in the army about. You can have an act after action review, you know kind of smack somebody, punch somebody, whatever, whatever phrase you want to use, you can call them out. But you're calling them out in the context of I care about you, I believe in you and we want to be more successful together and I care about you so much. I in you and we want to be more successful together and I care about you so much. I'm willing to give you the hard, but it's really hard. We have to be, we have to be. We have to recognize that there's a lot of situations where people are just waiting for that next piece of bad news because they don't feel safe because of what's happened in tech. And so how do you help people be comfortable? When I give you tough feedback, it's not a precursor, some other shoe about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think like there's a you always have. You also have to like understand that you hold a lot of power in in what you end up doing. There's a couple random tidbits. I promise this is going somewhere, but you know those. I don't know if you've ever gotten one of those, but someone on my team got one of those phishing messages, so it was like a message from.
Speaker 1:I'm a CEO of a company, so she got a text message from me saying hey, this is AB. I need you to do something for me right now. It's quite urgent. And it was like hey, go down the street and go get a Visa gift card because I need to give it to a client. She's like, okay, I'll go do it. She Visa gift card because I need to give it to a client. She's like, okay, I'll go do it. And she's like I promise I'll pay you back later kind of deal. And it's not for me. She has my phone number.
Speaker 1:But it was one of those things where there's so much sort of fear in not doing what's asked of you or the expectation from someone who's like a superior that honestly, I looked at the message and I was like how could you think this is for me.
Speaker 1:And she was like, well, you think this is for me, like I, I and she was like, well, I haven't been in this job that long and you know, I, I kind of felt that maybe this is the kind of person that you are and say similar thing my fiance works in the, she's a, she's in medical school, uh, and she was working in the NICU and usually she, you know, calls the parents, you know, around the same time every single day, and she called, like a mom, like two hours earlier than she was supposed to.
Speaker 1:And the immediate the immediate because there's such a different from the norm the immediate thing is oh my God, something's wrong, right, like there's a. Whenever you bring up sort of pieces of feedback like that, you have to do it in a way where one you've built the culture up to, where it's expected that from time to time you'll get, you'll get things that are, you know, a little bit better, a little bit worse than you usually do. But also, you know, you don't, you can't, if you put somebody on the defensive immediately, they're, they're less likely to kind of take that feedback in a in sort of a positive way. So I think, making sure you build up that culture is really important. It sounds like that's something that you guys just really do fostering that environment that allows for open and honest dialogue.
Speaker 2:I think we try. I think that's really well said. Look, if, for any anybody who's a leader just you you look at yourself in the mirror and you just see yourself. I'm just the same person. I've always been. Well, now I'm in a certain role. People are going to look at you differently and having some self-awareness that you are right. People are going to look at you differently than maybe you look at yourself and being being aware of that, so you can help people as much as possible, be comfortable and be themselves, you know like it's. It's interesting Our, our CEO.
Speaker 2:He's amazing guy, incredibly busy, but I, I can't. I I think a lot when he calls somebody. He, he's very connected with the company. When he calls somebody, almost always you stop whatever you're doing, and he answered the phone. That's not the normal experience. If you call somebody and they're busy, they're not answering the phone, but that's the word he lives in. And just being aware that, hey, if I'm calling somebody and I'll get that sometimes if I call a leader on my team, quite often they'll answer the phone and I've had to remind myself, hey, is it now an okay time? Because they'll pick up the phone Whether or not they're doing something else that really, really matters. I have to be aware that I don't want to project that to them, that you have to answer the phone when I call, and I'm just always good at that, but it's something I've been thinking about. It's all those little things that, if you're aware of it, creating space for people to be okay, focusing on what matters most, doing their best.
Speaker 2:When they get it wrong, let us know because we're all responsible for fixing it and letting people know that quite often when something goes wrong, it's because somewhere else in the organization we thought we created alignment, we thought we had processes working, but I always think the every bit of inefficiency in the company leaks towards the customer. It just that's just where it goes, and so cause there's no place to go. After that, the customer rises or falls, and so when something breaks, don't ever start with the person got it wrong. Where do we have gaps? Where do we have inefficiencies? Did we not enable the person? Back to your question, sean. Did we give them too much work to do? Did we potentially have a disconnect where we had two parts of the organization that thought they were aligned and they were not?
Speaker 2:Start there in solving problems At the end of the day, sometimes the people aren't the right people and you have to go solve that. But that's why I'm like cut off your index finger, don't start with blaming a person. Start with yourself and where else something may be wrong, and being vocal about that with people so they know that's what we're going to do. We're not going to expect, we're not going to blame you, and that's, I think, the number one thing that people are afraid of and I couldn't believe.
Speaker 2:Back to that other example took me four times to get people to surface issues that we were going to solve, because they didn't believe we were going to solve them and they didn't believe that they weren't going to be blamed. I will tell you, in three months we saved two and a half million dollars of churn doing that simple little process. But to get people to trust us was so hard, right, and so if you know people, it's it's hard to build that trust. We know it's easier to lose it, and so people just need to see that constant. They have to have that constant belief that that's going to be your way of engaging with them, that help them be willing to share back data, insights, things that are happening, so we can solve it together versus blaming them.
Speaker 1:Do you have anything to put like where, where, where can our listeners read more of what you have to say? Where can they find Disco? Where can they find you, anything that you want to, anything that you want to push out at the end here?
Speaker 2:So, first of all, thanks for the conversation. I enjoyed it. Time went fast. I'd love to have more to keep connecting with y'all. I love what you're sharing with me is helping me think and learn pretty active on LinkedIn, so I connect with anybody there. Uh, I try to, you know, share thoughts out on LinkedIn If it's helpful for people. I love getting feedback. I'd say that's the best place If you want to connect with me. Linkedin is kind of kind of my, my place and truly I'll connect with anybody. I just I learned so much from people and I'm a product of what people have helped me with, so if I can help somebody else, I'm all for it.
Speaker 2:Discocom is disco with a Q D-I-S-Q-O, I think, because what we do is focus on insights around people and what people are thinking, what they're doing, man. We put a lot of content out that's pretty interesting. You know we're mostly focused on a lot of measuring of advertising and advertising effectiveness, but inside of that is a lot of interesting things around. You know kind of human behavior and how people are responding to different situations. So there's always some pretty cool content. You can find it on Disco. We're on LinkedIn and all the social networks and you know, and Discocom Best way to find us, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much, and everyone enjoy the episode.