Ep # 163: The “Appropriate Experience” Test for AI in CS ft. Lincoln Murphy (VP of Customer Experience, ListKit)

Lincoln Murphy 00:02 The companies that are really thriving are the ones that have figured out how to leverage that technology and AI and automations and, and product led to connect better to those people that they sell to. That's the big transformation. Taylor Kennerson 00:12 Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearth the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 00:34 Hey, greeting everyone, This is Adil and we have been doing this podcast for quite some time, and you know, I know this Hyperengage podcast has been mostly the same with all these GTM Leaders, success, post sales, mostly, customer success, account management. This has been the same for, for many of the, many years now. And we try to explore like how it has changed while we do it. So, uh, today we are going to, um, explore this, uh, one of our own Lincoln Murphy. I know a lot of these folks know him for all different reasons. And I know that success has changed since he started speaking about it early in 2010, 2008, 2009. So, it has been like a big time coming from Lincoln. You know, Lincoln coming on to our podcast and Lincoln coming for our audience to know more about the new year of customer success and how it has evolved. Thank you very much, Lincoln, for taking the time. Lincoln Murphy 01:28 Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Adil Saleh 01:31 Love it. So, just a quick background on Lincoln. He is currently a VP of Success at ListKit. He is kind of a  kind of a first, like a kind of AI native outreach platform helping marketers enrich data and get their emails and contacts verified for mass-level email marketing and outreach. Prior to that, he has been a part of different ventures for good 15, 16 years. He has been part of Sixteen Ventures. That's kind of a unique name, but it has a huge mark on the ecosystem here in the Valley for good 15, 16 years. So, we'll talk a little bit about that, too. So, Lincoln, talking about overall, I would say in a startup ecosystem in the past five to seven years, it has been a huge impact, the biggest shift that I've seen in my lifetime. I'm sure you have, too. So, how do you see it, definitely, and how is it impacting the post-sale GTM? Lincoln Murphy 02:30 I mean, so, yeah, the last five, seven years, I mean, really, COVID kind of just was a forcing function for a lot of change, for better or worse, but we had to evolve, we had to adapt. And I think we learned that you can do a lot more with, I don't want to say with less, but I think we could just do a lot more in different ways. Because, I mean, again, the reality is, some companies were absolutely thriving in COVID. So, it wasn't like bad times for everybody. So, it wasn't like, let's do, we have to try to figure out how to survive here. But it was about how can we, first of all, just the whole idea of moving to everything being done online. Okay, so now anything that we were doing in person, that wasn't going to happen. Well, that just forced a lot of changes just to the way that we operate. And so, here we are several years past that, and that's just sort of, I think, so I think the evolution there was like, it was a forcing function to, I guess, it was all about the digital transformation was the term at the time. And, but it wasn't just that, it was like, how do we take, because a lot, we were already operating in a digital way. So, like, how do we take that and just make it more efficient? How do we take that and make it more, well, more efficient, obviously, is how you scale. But I think here's the thing that I've seen, is how do we take that digital transformation? Because we made that shift. And at the time, in COVID, it was like, it didn't really matter how, how well we connected with like the humans. It was like, we just have to make this work. The shift that I've seen, to think really where we are today, is that we took all of that efficiency that we gained, we took all of that digital transformation. And some companies, and I would say the companies that are winning, the companies that are thriving, they took all of that, and they figured out how to connect better with their customers, connect to the humanity of their customers, using that new leverage that we have from that digital transformation. The companies that are struggling, the companies that didn't survive, the companies that are fine, but aren't necessarily thriving, they kind of stuck with just, all we're doing is being more efficient. All we're doing is improving our ability to connect at a technical or functional level, but they didn't take it further and really try to use that leverage to connect better with the humans that they sell to. And so, that's the shift that I've seen. It's like, how can we connect to the humanity of our customers at scale? And so, whether that's GTM, whether that's your sales motions, your marketing motions, whether that's your post-sale customer success motions, the companies that are really thriving are the ones that have figured out how to leverage that technology and AI and automations and product-led to connect better to those people that they sell to. That's the big transformation. Adil Saleh 05:48 Yeah, and that connection has shaped in different ways. Like now, think of people perceiving value out of your product three years back versus now. Number one, they want it really fast because they want to do things really fast, like let's say you're a post-sale or GTM team of 15 or 20 three years back, and now you're trying to do it the same with five or six and you want to do it as good or even more efficient. The mindset on the consumer side has also changed. So, what's your viewpoint on how people are consuming products and platforms three years back to now and how they're able to perceive value or their level of expectation at all? Lincoln Murphy 06:35 I mean, okay, so it's going to vary depending upon who your audience is, but I think if we could generalize, I mean, I'll just tell you from my perspective, what, two years ago, maybe three years ago now, I don't know how I operated without ChatGPT. I don't know how I did anything. How did I write an article? Honestly, my workflow and therefore my team's workflow and everybody that I work with, everything is completely different now. It doesn't mean that it's, I mean, is it better or worse? I think it's better, but it's just very, very different. So, just in the last couple of years, AI has really, and let's be clear, generative AI at the user level has completely upended everything. And I think, like I said, in a really good way. But, of course, that can also bring efficiencies and brings a lot of really good things, but it can also bring some bad things and AI slop and all of that. And so, we have to figure out, it's just a tool, we have to figure out how to use that. But, I think what you're seeing, again, there's companies that have figured this out that are doing it well and there's companies that are struggling. And I think one of the things that we saw sort of early on with ChatGPT, and we always try to say, oh, with these new chatbots, let's be clear, we're talking about ChatGPT, is companies going, hmm, you know, we tried a chatbot before for our support or something, and it didn't really work that well. But now, ChatGPT is here, so let's try it again. And let's just put a chatbot and it really works well, so we can actually replace maybe our frontline CSRs with just a chatbot. Or even, I've seen some companies, again, we're starting to see things sort of come back around and we're figuring out what worked and what didn't. And certainly right at the beginning of ChatGPT being something that was viable is this idea that I'm going to not just replace customer service reps, but maybe I'll even, maybe I could replace some customer success managers or onboarding specialists or something, try to replace them with a chatbot. And the problem with that is a couple years ago, that was still very, very new. Like the idea that ChatGPT was, well, it was brand new. But for the tech companies and for the, it was mostly tech companies, but for the people running customer success organizations or whatever, or the executive leadership, they were like, this is so awesome, like we could definitely, you know, cut some headcount, we could replace some people with this. And they started putting these things in customer facing roles, if you will, putting like an AI agent in a customer facing role. And the problem with that is a lot of customers, especially at that time, were not ready for that. That was not the appropriate experience for at least some subset of the customers. Maybe some were ready for it, but others weren't. And so the problem becomes when you take these new tools, whatever they are, and you say, I think this can give us scale. I think this can make us more efficient. And you try to like force that experience on your customers when that's not the customer's appropriate experience. They're not ready for that. So we saw a lot of missteps there. And so companies had to sort of pull back and like, okay, the chatbot worked fine, but our customers hated it. It's like, what's, why, how does that work? It worked fine. It was our best one ever, right? We tried it before, it didn't work. We tried this, it worked well, but our customers didn't like it. Well, it's because the customers didn't like it. It doesn't mean it didn't work. It's just, that's not the experience. They wanted to talk to a person. So anytime a new technology comes out, there's always going to be those early adopter companies that are like, let's put that in front of the customers. We kind of fast forward a couple of years and ChatGPT is used, I don't remember what, they just said their numbers are like 900 million weekly active users or something. So pretty good, pretty good user base and pretty good subsection of, I don't know, humanity is using it. And so there's probably some, you know, the expectations and what is an appropriate experience have sort of shifted. And so now if you tried to put a chatbot or other AI agent in front of your customers, probably more customers are going to see that as an appropriate experience. But you always have to be careful that you don't try to force something on your customers just because you think it's cool, just because you think it's going to make things more efficient if the customers aren't ready for it. But that doesn't mean behind the scenes, you can't leverage all these tools and that's really the thing. So AI, like I said, it's completely changed our workflow. It's made, you know, in ListKit and the company that I'm at, our workflow is incredibly efficient. Our team is doing probably honestly like three times the amount of work, at least that we could have done a few years ago because of AI and our different workflows. But a lot of that stuff is not customer facing, at least on our done-for-you side, because there are customers that come in for that. Their appropriate experience is that higher touch engagement. They want to talk to people. They want to feel seen, heard, and validated. And that's what we need to make sure that they feel that. But behind the scenes, we're leveraging AI across the entire customer lifecycle. On the GTM side, which is our self-service side, that is powered by mostly customer facing AI. So it's just interesting. I mean, we have to figure out where these tools and everything fit in, but the evolution has been super fast just in the last couple of years. I think COVID and all of the stuff that came out of that, the digital transformation stuff we were talking about earlier, led to people being more open to adopting these things quickly, especially in customer facing situations. But now it's like, how do we take these technologies and connect to the humanity, the people? Like I said, in our company, for one side of our business, we know that our customers on that side, they need to talk to us. They need to talk to people. And if we tried to just say, no, you're only going to talk to a chatbot, it's not going to work. And so you have to know that, you have to understand that. And you have to keep tabs on that because it will evolve, it will change. At some point, maybe everybody will be super comfortable just talking to some sort of app. But right now, don't know that we're there. Again, you have to know your customers. You may be in an industry where you could totally offload everything to the AI. Adil Saleh 14:06 And I have a lot of this tier one and tier two support as well. Talking about ListKit, I know that they've also been there for quite some time. You're just getting your second quarter done. So as a leap of success, how do you, when you jumped in, how do you see it more data-driven? Or is it more hybrid or digital? Or is it more high-tech for enterprise customers? Is it more in a formation of CSMs versus AMs? Or more implementation managers, solution architects? How do you see that post-ZTM there? And of course, we'll get to the product, the value and all of that. Lincoln Murphy 14:48 So we have basically two sides to the business, which is a done-for-you side, which is where we basically spin up their entire cold email sending infrastructure for our customer. And then we will help them with sort of their targeting, building their lists and write their campaigns for them. And that's on the done-for-you side. And then we have our, which was our do-it-yourself side, but now we call it our GTM side because we're really leaning into the GTM aspect of the data that we have. It's not just for cold email. You can do lots of different things with it. And so on that side, it's very much self-service with sort of a sales assist motion. And so we have some cold email experts that are available to help our customers get up and running. But it's more of a lighter touch and a lot of our customers just opt to not even engage. And that's fine because they have the experience and the expertise and they know what they're doing and they can come in and just get what they need and go. But we're there if they need us. On the DFY side, the done-for-you side, our customers definitely want us to do most of the heavy lifting. And so you have to understand that those are two very different customer segments and the way that you approach them are very different. So again, on the GTM side, more of a lighter weight crew, but very much cold email experts and the ability to, we're the GTM experts to sort of help the customers figure out what they want to do with this data. On the DFY side, we have it broken down by lifecycle stage, essentially. We have onboarding specialists and account managers. We call them account managers, but they essentially function as customer success managers. But for some reason, I think that we were already calling them that and that was just what they, we just kept the name. But essentially, the customer comes in, goes through the onboarding process with an onboarding specialist. And we broke those out for scale. So a lot of times people will ask, why should you have an onboarding specialist versus just having a CSM or an AM do everything? Generally speaking, it's almost always going to be because of capacity and scale. So if I have a lot of new customers coming in and I have my customer success managers doing onboarding, I might get to a point where my CSM or my AM, they're only doing onboarding. They're not being able to work with existing customers. So you get to a point where your CSM is doing onboarding. You don't want to get past 20-25% onboarding calls because then that means 75-80% of their time only that is dedicated to existing customers and you have usually a lot more existing customers than you have new customers coming in. And the reason I say that, you don't want to get past 20-25% because once you notice this, before you can sort of break out an onboarding specialist from your CSM, your CSM is going to be at 30% or more of their time spent on onboarding. So you want to kind of do this earlier. Like you start seeing your customer success manager or your AM doing, I would say, once you start seeing like 10-15% of their time being spent on onboarding, you want to start thinking about breaking out a dedicated onboarding specialist or two. And then, so from a scale standpoint, you do that and now the AM or the CSM can really just focus on existing customers. What we do at ListKit is you will go through the onboarding process with your onboarding specialist and then you will, like I said, build out your cold email sending infrastructure, which is actually very complex. There's a lot of interesting stuff that goes into that process. I mean, I thought I knew until I got there and I'm like, wow. Adil Saleh 19:01 Yes, it has changed since the time you knew it. It has changed a lot over time. You talk about like worming down the email. That's a big case because it cracked down your domain, entire domain in less than three days, if you don't do it. So, instantly I started doing it at really big scale a few years back but now it is still a challenge. So, tell us more about how you're internally doing it during the onboarding and making sure all these, your customers are pretty safe on the domain security and safety side and their emails are pretty much just landing right on inbox. So, that's a big use case too, tell us more. Lincoln Murphy 19:40 Yeah. So, basically a DFY done-for-you customer comes in and we learn a lot about them. So, one of the things I said, we connect to the humanity. We try to spend a good amount of time with the customer just understanding what they're trying to do, understanding their business, you know, understanding who they're trying to sell to, who they're trying to get the attention of, what their offer is. You know, if the offer that they're trying or wanting to use, if they have any experience with it, you know, has it had success in the past? Is it brand new? Really try to get to get to know them. We also try to, we do this process that I talk about a lot in customer success in general is goal discovery, which is pretty self-explanatory except there's more nuance to it, in the way that I approach it, so this is kind of an interesting thing, I think. We talk about goals all the time, right? Everybody talks about goals, but you ever think about what a goal actually is? And this is one of those things where am I really going to define a word that we all know? Yes, I am. A goal is an objective plus a timeframe. You have to have both of those things. If you just have an objective, so a customer says I want to get 10 new customers. Okay? We all want 10 new customers. Any particular timing of that? You know, like so if you don't have a timeframe, you just have that objective. I want 10 new customers. I need to get 10 new customers. It's like it's a wish. It's a hope. It has no, there's no timeframe associated with it. So we can't invoke time scarcity. We can't we can't create a sense of urgency around that. There's just no parameters put on that objective. It's just this thing that they want. So we always say you have to figure out not only the objective plus but you also have to understand their timeframe. That's a goal. Goal is both of those things. But there's also the why. The why behind it. So it's, you want 10 new new customers by when? Let's say by the end of the quarter. Okay. That's fair. That's probably a realistic goal depending, of course maybe if they're giant enterprise customers maybe that's not. But that sounds like a realistic goal. Okay, cool. What happens if you achieve that goal? Well, I never thought about that. Maybe-well, actually, I have thought about it. If we achieve that goal, see, we're going through a new funding round at the end of the quarter, and if we get those 10 new customers at an average value of $5,000, that adds $50,000 in MRR. And, you know, now we're looking at blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, and then we could get, you know, another 3 million dollars in company valuation. It's like wow, okay. That's very different than 10 new customers, right? Now you're talking about getting you know bumping your valuation of your company by 3 million dollars because you added, you kind of, you exceeded a certain threshold for MRR. That's awesome. Right? And that's that's what we try to get to. It's like what's the why behind the goal? This is nothing new, right? The why, that's an age-old concept but it's something that I encourage everybody in customer success and any, really regardless of what you do if you understand the why behind your customers whether you're trying to sell them, trying to market to them or trying to help them succeed, that's your motivator. Right? That's the thing that gets your customers through, you know, sometimes what we call in onboarding, it's the functional value of sadness because like, nobody signs up to go through onboarding. Right? Like in sales, you know they get you pumped up, they get you hyped, and you come out of sales and you're excited. And then you go to onboarding and it's like alright, let's do this functional, technical, and administrative stuff, and they're like oh, this isn't what I signed up for. So you want to understand their goal. You go through that discovery process, you understand the why, you get them hyped again about that, keep their eyes on the prize so they can go through this onboarding process. And for us, I think our onboarding process is actually kind of cool because that's where we're talking about your goal, we're talking about the why, then we're connecting that with your offer, we're talking about your customers, we're talking about your targeting. That is actually, to me, that's really interesting. And it can be fun and it's positive, and it's not too functional and technical. And for the DFY side, we do most of the heavy lifting. The only thing we really have to do from the customer side is they need to buy their own domains. And this goes back to the interesting stuff that comes from the setup of a cold email sending infrastructure. We need to have those alternate domains that are similar to your primary domain but different, so that should anything happen in the process of sending cold email, you don't burn your primary domain. And so that process is interesting, and pretty much the only thing our customers have to do, and we do that with them, is just buy those domains. And that's a place where we use AI. It's like, hey, generate these domains that are similar to this company's brand. Boom. Get the list, go buy it, get the API keys, and plug it in. And once that's good to go, the infrastructure starts being set up behind the scenes and warmed and all of that. It takes about seven days. In that time we build the list with them, write their campaigns, and then they launch with their account manager. And the reason we do it like that, is they go through the onboarding process, everything is good to go, and they review everything for launch with their account manager because that account manager is who’s gonna work with them for the rest of their time with us. So we decided they should launch with them. It's like, hey, I want to launch with you, so I'm here for the whole time. And that's working really well. And then from there, we continue to do performance reviews and look at their campaigns. And we do a lot more of what we call async work. One of the ways I’ve found you can get some scale, is to look at everything. One of the things I always say to my team is that meetings, one on one meetings with your customers, that can’t be our primary value metric. I don’t want one on one meetings to be the thing we all default to or that our customers look at as the thing that’s valuable in this relationship. I want a one on one meeting to be just another means to an end, as much as a Loom video is, as much as a self service training could be, or anything else. It is all just stuff they can either consume or be a part of, that moves them toward their goal. So sometimes we have to get on a one-on-one call with them. Like there's just stuff you can't do any other way. And, and that's what we need to look at with one-on-one meetings is those meetings should be only for stuff that you can't do through other meetings. So one of the things we do and that we, this is one of the ways we got scale is, and this is so simple, but we used to just do basically a performance review where we look at their campaigns, and we figure out what's working, what's not, what we need to change. We used to do that with them live on the call. Well, that just is kind of unnecessary because it's just us presenting that. So what could take 3 minutes takes 30 minutes because there's a lot of back and forth and it's not that it's unnecessary, but it's just not the most efficient way to do it. So what we do now is, every customer gets a performance review and it's done asynchronously. We do it on loom and send that out. And a lot of customers will be like, thank you so much. All right, I got, I know what to do now. I got the directive. You can take this and run with it. Other customers will say, that's awesome. Can you help me? Absolutely. So we get on a call, and so now the call, isn't about going over that stuff. It's about how do we execute, right? What do we need to do to implement the recommendations that we made? So now with a three minute loom and a 15 minute or 20 minute call. We can get stuff done, whereas maybe it took a 30 or a 45 minute call or maybe even an hour call before, to kind of go over that, answer questions in line and, and work through it, and finally get to a point where we can take action. So it's just about eking out those efficiencies, but doing so in a way that still makes the customer feel, again - seen, heard and validated. I'm sending them a video where I'm going over their account, giving them a performance review. This is not a prerecorded video every customer gets, this is very much specific to them, right?

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They feel, oh, this is awesome. This is just for me. So it's not like they're missing out on anything by not being on a call. You know, if you try to get rid of your one-on-one engagements with a customer, if that's part of their appropriate experience, if you just get rid of that entirely and you, you know, try to give them just things that are sort of one-to-many or, you know, like that's going to violate their appropriate experience. But if you can sort of understand what they're really trying to get from you. And again, seen, heard, and validated is the thing that I always say about our customers for sure, but I think it applies to everybody because humans are humans, right? So if we can just make sure that they're feeling that, then whatever we do is probably going to work. As soon as you do something where they're not going to feel that, and again, that could be, well, you know, I'm not going to do an actual performance review. I'm going to just tell you to go do your own performance review. And then here's what you would, you know, if these are your results, here's what you would do. And if these are your results, here's what you would do. And you have to go do your own, and I just send you like a document on how to do it. Like that's not going to work. So it's just really interesting. If you understand your customers, you can find these ways to eke out those efficiencies. And then you use AI and you use other tools to sort of help scale that process. And now all of a sudden you're able to work with a lot more customers, but still make those customers feel, again, feel seen, heard, and validated. And that's what it's all about. Adil Saleh 30:38 Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, and this is one thing that has remained same all these years for, you know, both sales and especially customer success to helping customer perceive value and evolve with their goals with the product. And I mean, that's this next question, which is more around lifetime value. I know, like you're so big about it. Now thinking and enabling the team, building systems or processes around it to ensure the, and of course measure, ensure the lifetime value of the customer. I know that you guys have like different plans that goes from the starter tiers to like scale tiers and all, like, I know that it's not just about packaging and just about shifting them or, you know, expanding them across different plans, but it's always about, you know, helping them adopt to the platform in a way that they perceive value and they want to use that product at scale and consume it, so that you're able to increase the lifetime already. So what kind of system and processes are you building around it as a VP of success? I know this is too early, like six, seven months down, but you know, what's your vision around this, thinking of this game? Lincoln Murphy 31:51 So, I mean, I think it's a really good, really good point. Like, you know, customer success, let's be really clear. It's not altruistic, not running, you know, not trying to do something that's purely, this isn't charity work. This is, you know, we're running a business and we're trying to make money. And so, you know, one of the things that we, I'm a big, like if anybody's ever read anything I wrote or listened to me, I mean, customer success is a growth function. So this is all about driving, like you said, lifetime value. So I like to, I want to maximize customer lifetime value. How do I do that? Well, basically customer success has kind of three reasons why we do this. One is to get the customer to stay longer. So in the GTM space, and this is historically, this is just the way it is, customers are rather, what's the right word, fickle, or they, you know, they'll go from one provider to another. And so our job is to stop that. Our job is to make sure that they stick with us and that they're getting what they need from us. And they're not seeing, they're not feeling the need to have to go to a different provider for their data. And so, you know, that's one thing. So I want to keep our customers around longer. And on our DFY side, that means also not just the data, but, you know, making sure that they're getting the results that they need, or at least the things are starting to perform in a way that they can see that they're on the right path to getting the results of the cold email. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time to, you know, sort of tweak it and get it right. And so it doesn't, you know, instant gratification is not always there with cold email, but it starts to compound and it becomes very, for a lot of our customers, it becomes a very powerful channel, but maybe it didn't look like that at first, right? We had to learn and iterate and build on that. And so, essentially if I can get my customer to stay longer, like I think that's the main goal again, because we're taking into consideration that this industry, that hasn't always historically been the thing. So if we can, if we can get the customers to stay longer, that's huge. But then the second part is we get our customers to stay longer, but then we want them to buy more over that extended lifetime. And that's what I call the Ascension Path. Okay. So I want to think about like when a customer comes in, and this could be whether they're coming in on the GTM side through, just through our app or they come in on the DFY side through, you know, more of a higher touch sales process and whatever. I have an idea in my mind, and we have it mapped out, that when a customer comes in this way with this use case or whatever, like here's their next step. And I know if my customer makes progress through these milestones, that at some point they're going to hit a milestone that has an associated expansion opportunity with it. I've mapped that out and I mapped that out pretty early. You know, like that's one of the first things I do when I work with a company or in this case, when I joined the company that, like, we figure that out. So we don't have a lot of guesswork or a bunch of just, let's hope that our customers buy more. Let's try to upsell customers because we need to hit some sort of quota. Like that stuff doesn't work. We need to understand what real progress looks like for our customers. And along that progression, there's going to be places, those milestones, where it just makes sense for a customer to buy something more. So an example, we have an AI response handler, sort of works your inbox for you. So one of the things our customers have to do on the DFY side, one of the only things our customers have to do on the DFY side is basically work their inbox. So, you know, if we're sending emails and people start responding and saying, I'm interested, right? Well, one of the things you have to do is, and you should do this relatively quickly, because these people that have raised their hand and said, I'm interested in the thing that you just emailed me about, they go from very hot leads to very cold leads pretty quickly. So you need to respond quickly. And so if we're working with, let's say, an owner-operator of a smaller business who's getting leads but who is out on job sites all day and can't work their inbox, those leads are not going to be as effective as they otherwise would be. So what we would do is say, this is an example, listen, you know, in this case, I would actually, if this person said, I'm not going to be able to check my inbox, you know, more than once a day, or maybe twice, I can check it in the morning and I can check it in the evening, but that's it. It's like, okay, that's probably not going to work. So I'm going to go ahead right now and suggest that we put in this AI response handler, even though you're not going to have a large volume of leads right out of the gate, the fact that you're not going to be able to respond quickly is a problem. And this will respond instantly to those leads. But other situations might be, well, I can respond quickly, I can work my inbox, but, so it's like, okay, for now you don't need the AI response handler. But once you start getting a lot of leads and you're not able to respond quickly enough, then we'll talk about adding that to your account, but you don't need it right now, if you're going to be able to be in your inbox, the volume's not that high, you don't need it right now. What I've done there is I've orchestrated that at some point you might need this thing. You don't need it right now, so I'm not going to try to sell it to you because you don't need it. But at some point, and what I want to do is get really, really clear on what that some point is. So I might say to them, you know, once you start getting out, just I would say a number, like once you start getting X number of responses overall, not just positive responses, but any responses. Once you start getting that number, it's going to be harder to sift through everything and respond quickly enough. That's when we'll talk about adding the AI response handler to your account, but you're not there yet. So just do it manually. Once you get to that point, or if you feel overwhelmed before that, let me know. But once you get to that point, I'll reach out to you and we can talk about adding that to your account. Is that fair? And that's the most fair thing anybody's going to hear all day, because I just told you, I have something I could try to sell you, but I'm not going to, because you're not ready for it. You don't need it right now. But I planted the seed and I've told you when, or at least based on progress, when we'll talk about adding that to your account. I could go a step further and say, based on my experience or based on your trajectory or, you know, however you want to apply this to your situation, but you could say, you know, based on the progress I'm seeing, you're probably a month or two away from needing that. So just kind of keep that in mind from a budgeting standpoint. But like I said, you don't need it right now. That changes everything. That's a way to add a lot of additional revenue without being salesy. I'm just telling you, we have this thing that you'll need at some point, but you don't need it right now. And so that's what I'm thinking. Like, how do I, you know, what are the points along the way where there's a logical expansion opportunity, logical from the customer's standpoint, not just from my standpoint, but something that makes total sense to the customer. They're like, of course I'm going to need that. I don't need it right now, but it makes total sense that I would need it at some point. So we think about that. So, you know, there's add-ons, there's additional products and services, there's additional capacity, credits, whatever. And so I tell everybody, you know, map out what all the stuff is that you have to sell, and then figure out where along the trajectory of the customer's progress, where it makes sense for those things for the customer to buy, and then operationalize that and do the orchestration. And like that, that's how expansion becomes just a part of your operation. And you get to a point where customer success or customer experience or whatever your org is called, becomes literally a growth driver and a revenue-generating part of the business. Like that's where we want to get to. So, and that's what we’re working and always striving to do at ListKit. Adil Saleh 41:03 Interesting. Because, you know, a lot of these email marketing and lead gen platforms, they are basically kind of like usage-based expansion models, like, you know, you grow with the customers. Let's say they're sending three thousand emails a week, you know, if they get good response, they'll double, triple it down. And that's how you, you know, drive your expansion value. So how do you see, like, I know that, you know, churn has always been the biggest problem and has like huge indicators, like you should know your customer quitting on you way before you know it, you know, use data, all of those metrics that you're tracking. So is there, what kind of systems that you guys have to, you know, indicate churn risk, you know, all these risks and forecast it well before time to have, you know, take the right course of action? Lincoln Murphy 41:51 Right. So, we have pretty clear understanding of why our customers churn and we look for the signals. So, I mean, you know, if somebody's not getting results, that's a pretty good indicator that they're probably not going to stick around. The problem with that, like I said earlier, is with cold email, like your first campaign might not hit the way you want it to. So we do a lot of education around what cold email is and how, and we're talking about scaled cold, you know, so this is tens of thousands of messages. And this is different than just picking ten people and emailing them that you don't have an existing relationship, but you like hyper-targeted them and stalked them until you figured out what's going to work. This is different. And so, you know, we know, we have a lot of signals that we can look at that tell us whether or not a customer is getting value. So here's the way that I look at it: churn, this is going to sound funny until I explain it, but churn isn't the issue. Even when you have a lot of churn, churn is not the issue. Churn is a symptom of another issue. So churn is just the thing that tells us something isn't working. Now, there are indicators or there are things like, like I said, maybe, you know, the type of product you have, the market that you sell to, like all of these things are going to basically give you sort of the churn floor, that like, you know, no matter what, just because of what you do and who you sell to, like you're never going to get below that churn level probably. But even when you know that, or even if you could know that, most companies are still way above any sort of actual floor when it comes to churn. So then, you know, sort of the difference between the floor and your actual churn, that's probably stuff that's controllable. And we always, in our company, we talk about controlling the controllables. So I'm not going to worry about churn reasons that exist just in the market. I'm going to figure out, like, what can I do with my customers specifically to keep churn from being an issue. And that's the thing. If you just focus on churn, you're always going to have churn because you're probably spending your time at the end of life. You're trying to save them, you're trying to chase them down, you're just wasting a lot of time and effort and energy on what I call low percentage activities. If a customer has got one foot out the door, I'm not saying don't try to save them, but I mean, that's not where you should have been putting your time and effort. And I see a lot of companies spending a lot of time and effort and energy and urgency at the end of life. If you took all of that time and effort and energy and urgency and put it into the beginning of the customer's lifecycle, into onboarding, into adoption, breadth and depth adoption, and then into that ongoing engagement, which is where so many companies are, it's almost like a customer graduates from onboarding and adoption and then we're like, okay, good, they're on their own. It's like, what? The majority of their time with us is in that ongoing engagement. That's where we should be making sure that they have coverage, that we are constantly syncing on their goals. We're understanding what they need to do and we're helping them do the things that they need to do. The problem is, from a business standpoint, that's usually where our customers start doing things that are unique to the customer, right? Their usage patterns are very unique to them, versus onboarding, which is very normalized. Like we could almost say, you know, every customer is going to go through a pretty similar onboarding process, right? It's normalized and systematized. It's also mostly about us, not so much about the customer. I mean, we try to, for us at ListKit, we try to make it about the customer, but, you know, the process is for them to get up and running with us. And so we know everything that has to happen in order for that to occur. But once you start moving out of these relatively normalized lifecycle stages and you move into, I mean, even when you go to, so breadth adoption is when you get everybody onto the platform and they start using it in relatively basic ways. And then you get to depth adoption, which is where they start using it in ways that are more aligned with their use case. And so we call it depth because they start using more of the features and functionality. That's where you start using the sticky features and things like that. And then once you move out of those, you start really, just like, all the different users are kind of doing things in their own way. For us as the vendor, it's harder to know exactly what the customer should do, because they're all doing different things. I mean, all within the confines of what our product does, but, you know, there's just different ways of using it. And of course, the more, we would say, the more horizontal your product is, the more completely different use cases people could have, the harder that is. But that's also the opportunity. It's like, the more you can understand about how your customers are going to use your product, the more you can guide them and engage with them in that part of the lifecycle. That is really where our customers are going to spend most of their time. That's that ongoing engagement. So, you know, we know all of this stuff. If we only spend our time and energy, effort, and urgency when a customer is crashing out, then we're only ever going to be dealing with customers that are crashing out. We're not putting that energy into getting them up and running, getting them engaged, keeping them engaged, staying engaged during that ongoing engagement. So, the main thing I would say, if you have a lot of churn and you're focused on churn, ask yourself, am I so focused on churn that I'm actually keeping churn as an issue? And should I rather be focused on the customer's success and the overall experience? And that's something like, it's so simple to say that, in practice it's harder, because what's the thing that's making the noise and keeping our attention? It's the churn. And so we go there. And it's like, I'm not saying ignore that, but in some ways I am kind of saying like, at least take a step back and be like, okay, what's the cause of that churn? Adil Saleh 48:50 Absolutely. Yeah. Lincoln Murphy 48:52 What can I do to fix that? It's just, it's a really interesting, again, we all know that. It's like, that's not anything new. But I think we need to hear it more. It's like, okay, oh, you're right. I need to not focus only on churn, but I need to figure out what the root cause is and fix that or focus on that. Adil Saleh 49:10 Yeah. How we can prevent it for the future. So, interesting. Like, you know, Lincoln, I know that you've been there, you're a long timer, like been there for, you know, almost 15 years in success. Like, how do you see it, like in terms of a category? Like we see as like CRM, Salesforce, HubSpot, ATO coming in, like Pipedrive, getting big and having a big share in the SMB market. So how do you see like, it's almost 15 years and, you know, this category is not like growing at a pace. Like all these new, I would say new gen startups, they don't think of having a customer success platform. They think of more having a CRM, but integrated with product analytics or, you know, a lot of this customer support and all, but they don't think of having a dedicated customer success platform or platform that is more for post sales. You know, they might look for like some attribution or analytical platform that works in conjunction with the CRM, but they're not thinking of it. So, and that's one of the reasons that we don't see like more than a few billion dollar companies in that category, you know, Gainsight being one, and, you know, there's others that came for a good time and then they kind of got merged or even shut down. So how do you see this category from that spectrum, you know, based on the recent records and, you know, we're also taking up, like, I know this, you know, been to this event, a couple of VPACs and a lot of these CS platforms that have got like huge fundings in the range of 15, 20, 30, even 50 million bucks. But again, they're trying to, you know, beat everybody. They're trying to, you know, be within CRM, within product analytics, within customer support and chat, within like all GTM tooling. They're trying to cover all the CS and use cases, trying to go multi-product and all of that. So a lot has gone all this. So how do you like overall see this category, the customer success in your viewpoint? Lincoln Murphy 51:12 Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. I don't pay a lot of attention to it. So I don't want to come off as like, you know, I'm not trying to pretend like I'm some sort of analyst and have all the insights into the customer success product category. I mean, I was heavily involved in it for a little while and then I'm just not. But one of the reasons why I, kind of, am not so much is because of, what you said. I mean, there's, here's the thing. I think if we looked at customer success as a valuable business function and we created a tool set around just purely optimizing that business function and the key metrics around that, I think it would be okay. I think it would be more products and I think it would be more successful products. But I think,here's the thing with customer success, and this has been happening for 15 years, it's like an identity crisis. And it still exists. Like, what are we? You know, are we here to just bust churn? Are we here to drive growth? Are we here to make customers happy, to like them? Are we here to actually make the customer successful? There's still this sort of, there's at least two different sides to customer success. Some people think it's just about making their customers happy and they don't really want to be commercial at all. And then there's the people that think about it the right way, me. And, you know, like, I'm just joking, but, you know, I think for it to be taken seriously as a business function, we should think of it as a commercial operation. You know, it's like customer success is a growth mechanism. Okay. But right there, it's like, what even is customer success? So we still have that sort of identity crisis. And then I think you have the vendors who are trying to create products for this category who themselves are having identity crises. And, look, I think they also see that there's not a lot of money in customer success, but there's money in sales, in marketing, in GTM. And so it's like, hmm, I could be a pure play customer success offering, or I could try to straddle multiple categories and, you know, secretly, like I'm bringing together all of these things for my customer success team to get value from. But positionally, I want to try to get some of that sales money, try to get some of that GTM money, try to get some of that marketing money. And then you just end up diluting the whole thing and nobody knows what you are and nobody takes you seriously. So I agree. I mean, I'm kind of surprised that there's not, I mean, I should say I'm not surprised because I understand how these things, how the industry operates, but I'm not surprised. I don't know what I am. I'm disappointed, maybe, that there's not more. Like, 15 years on, this product category should be just insane. And there should have been several really big exit events and really big companies and all this stuff. And you just see that not happening. So I don't know what the problem is there. But that said, I mean, there's some interesting things going on now. You see companies doing more agentic, you know, AI-based customer success. You see some of these companies pivoting from sort of traditional customer success management products to, well, whatever this, you know, agentic AI is, from whatever they believe it to be. So I think, you know, we're seeing little agents actually doing a lot of the work and sort of helping, you know, assisting the CSMs in more truly proactive ways, actually being able to do some of the work. So there's interesting things going on. I just don't know what the deal is with the product category, except the things that I just said, which, if those are true, then we totally understand what's going on with the product category. I just kind of, I'm with you. I mean, like, there should have been more. It's kind of weird. Adil Saleh 55:35 Yeah, love it. You know, so Lincoln, it was a great time having conversation with you. And, you know, you're putting on these insights that are extremely powerful and practical and impactful. I don't know if that comes from a background that you always had. I mean, you know, we wish you best with all that you're doing as a VP at ListKit and, you know, I will keep in touch. Lincoln Murphy 55:55 Awesome. Thanks so much. Adil Saleh 55:56 Appreciate your time. Bye bye. Adil Saleh 56:06 Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please share your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io. We definitely need it. We will see you next time with another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower engagements by building some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.